John Stewart Service used to describe himself as 'the first victim of the American cultural revolution'. The debonair United States diplomat, harried and purged with relentless fury in the hateful era of McCarthyism, was one of the Americans blamed by fanatical anti-communists as one of the band who 'lost China'.
A decade ago, I spent several hours with this delightful and resilient man in his retirement home in Oakland, over the Bay from San Francisco. Service had by then long retired from a career as an academic. He died last week in California, aged 89.
He looked back on the furious and ceaseless smears on his patriotism and his motives with a remarkable lack of rancour. He was a bigger character by far than his attackers and detractors.
Service was an extraordinary man who did remarkable things in astonishing times. Just a chapter of his career is worthy of a book; he was one of the Chinese affairs experts who made the hazardous 1944 journey to Yanan where Mao Zedong and his communist army were taking the war to the Japanese.
That wartime endeavour, which history knows as The Dixie Mission, was the first official look the US had of the communists. It could have changed history. Service was under no illusion; he believed Mao would win the civil war which he saw as inevitable. His opinions, which he expounded openly and honestly and which circulated freely, were the basis for his later persecution.
Born in China where his parents were American missionaries running a YMCA in Chengdu, he grew up speaking Chinese with a Sichuan accent. His childhood years were spent as China went through turmoil; he was aged two when the 1911 revolution ended the Qing Dynasty and his time at high school in Shanghai was the era of the warlords.