In 1943 Davies and seventeen other American officials and journalists (among them Eric Sevareid) were forced to parachute from the plane during a flight from ...
\ scribnerT —ENCYCLOPEDIA O F
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VOLUME FIVE NQUikAmermns Who Died Between
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The SCRIBNER ENCYCLOPEDIA of
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DAVIES
and in 1986 published her autobiography, Choura: Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova. She died of unpublished causes at age ninety-four. As a performer, and especially in the particular roles she made her own, Danilova, small, impeccably groomed, and filled with what the dance writer John Gruen called an “intoxicating joie de vivre,” was considered unrivaled. In 1977 Anthony Fay wrote in Dance magazine, “Danilova was a personality among personalities, a singular stylist, a blithe spirit, a great lady of the theatre.” At a posthumous reception in September 1997 in her honor, the choreogra pher Donald Saddler added, “Wit, technical skill, and con summate artistry have united to make Alexandra Danilova one of the greatest ballerinas of all time.” Danilova was also, through her long dance and later teaching careers, a remarkable single thread from the ap ogee of Russian ballet to dance at the end of the twentieth century. She studied directly with Vaganova, Nicholas Legat, and Enrico Cecchetti; she knew many of the century’s leading choreographers, including Michel Fokine, Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, Balanchine, and Agnes de Mille; she danced with most leading dancers of the age; and, as a teacher, she worked with Gelsey Kirkland, Suzanne Farrell, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Fay concluded his article with this observation, “She has probably made more contribu tions to ballet in America . . . than any other ballerina . . . [and] her fans will always regard her as Alexandra the
Davies was the elder of two sons born to Baptist mission aries John Paton Davies, Sr., an American, and his Cana dian-born wife, Helen MacNeill, a former singer and church soloist. Davies was born and raised in China, where as a teenager he attended the Shanghai American School, a missionary institution. He then spent two undergraduate years at the University ofWisconsin Experimental College, followed by successive years at Yenching University, Bei jing, and Columbia University, which granted him a B.S. degree in 1931. Davies joined the Foreign Service the fol lowing year, then returned to China in 1933, where he served successively in Kunming, Beijing, Shenyang, and Hankou, before returning to Beijing. On 24 August 1942 Davies married Patricia Louise Grady, a Washington Post correspondent and the daughter of Henry F. Grady, the first American ambassador to India. The couple had seven children. Immediately after the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Davies became diplomatic aide and political adviser to U.S. General Joseph W. Stilwell, the new commander of the China-IndiaBurma theater. Until Stilwell’s 1944 recall, Davies accom panied him through the Allied forces’ initial defeat in Burma and subsequent retreat to China’s temporary Na tionalist capital, Chongqing. Thereafter, until 1945 Davies advised Patrick J. Hurley, presidential envoy and United States ambassador to China.
Great.”
★ Although Danilova’s class notebooks, personal correspon dence, and other documents were given to the Library of Congress by her stepdaughter Kim Kokitch, the most complete information about her is in her autobiography, Choura: Memoirs ofAlexandra Danilova (1986). Details about her early life can also be found in Eileen (“Pigeon”) Crowle, “Alexandra Danilova; Her Early Years,” Dance (Mar. 1956); Allyn Moss, “Alexandra Danilova,” Dance (Mar. 1961); and John Gruen, The Private World of Ballet (1975). Her work with the various Ballets Russes companies is well described in Anthony Fay, “The Belle of the Ballets Russes; Alexandra Danilova,” Dance (Oct. 1977); as a dancer with Bal anchine in Robert Tracy, Balanchine’s Ballerinas (1983); and as a teacher at his School of American Ballet in Jennifer Dunning, But First a School (1985). An obituary is in the New Yor\ Times (15 July 1997). The testimonials from her memorial service are in “Remembering Alexandra Danilova,” Ballet Review (spring 1998). Sandra Shaffer VanDoren
(b. 6 April 1908 in Kiating, Sichuan Province, China; d. 23 December 1999 in Asheville, North Carolina), career U.S. foreign service officer and China expert who became a prominent victim of McCarthyism. DAVIES, John Paton, Jr.
John Paton Davies, 1969. APAViDE WORLD PHOTOS
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DAVIES
But Davies was much more than a desk-bound diplo mat. In 1943 Davies and seventeen other American officials and journalists (among them Eric Sevareid) were forced to parachute from the plane during a flight from China to India when an engine failed. Once on the ground, Davies led the group to safety on a harrowing month-long trek through the jungle. He received the Medal of Freedom in 1948 for this heroic effort. The U.S. government dispatched the Dixie Mission to Chinese Communist headquarters at Yan’an in 1944, due partly to Davies’s insistence. Its purpose was to encourage Chinese Communist efforts to repel the Japanese invasion, but it also sought to evaluate Communist strength. Im pressed by Communist discipline, austerity, and popular support, several of the Dixie Mission’s members came to believe Mao Zedong would probably ultimately overthrow the Nationalist government, and Davies urged the United States, without abandoning Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), to cultivate the Chinese Communists. Davies visited several times, fruitlessly relaying relatively cooperative messages from the Communist leader Mao Tsetung to top American officials. In late 1944 Davies as sisted Ambassador Hurley’s efforts to negotiate a truce and forge a coalition government that would include both Chi nese Nationalists and Communists. Davies characterized China’s civil war as a conflict incomprehensible to foreign ers, from which the United States should remain aloof When this became impossible, he recommended continu ing American aid to the ruling Nationalist Kuomintang regime under Chiang Kai-shek, but also suggested that if, as he anticipated, the Communists eventually took power, the United States should cooperate with them to preclude a Sino-Soviet alliance. Davies realized only later that he had underestimated the Communists’ pro-Soviet leanings and that he had con fused their popularity with a commitment to democracy. This led Hurley to suspect Davies of harboring proCommunist sympathies. From 1945 onward Davies and other China specialists were denounced by the “China Lobby,” a powerful group of industrialists and politicians that supported the Nationalist forces in Taiwan. After China fell to the Communists, Davies and his fellow China specialists also drew the ire of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Republican junior senator who from the late 1940s to mid-1950s spearheaded an extremist campaign against those who were suspected of being pro-Communist. Despite the cloud of suspicion that was beginning to surround him, Davies became first secretary at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1945. Two years later he was ap pointed deputy director of the policy planning staff. In con trast to the China Lobby’s fears, his advice and analyses tended to be relatively hardline. Although he favored U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China, he repeat
U8
edly condemned its pro-Soviet attitude, and in 1950 even suggested the United States exploit its nuclear superiority to force a showdown with the Soviet Union. In July 1950, shortly after the Korean War began, Davies warned of the increasing probability that China might in tervene in the conflict. He recommended that the United States inform the Chinese government that, should this occur, the United States would retaliate with a major bombing campaign against Chinese territory. In spring 1951, following the massive Chinese military intervention of November 1950, Davies helped arrange an unofficial Soviet-American dialogue that eventually helped bring about peace talks. Davies underwent eight separate security investigations by the civil service loyalty review board between 1950 and 1953. Although each investigation cleared him, they failed to satisfy the China Lobby. McCarthyites insisted that Davies’s proposal to recruit double agents from Americans friendly with the Chinese Communists proved that he was out to subvert his country’s intelligence network. Davies joined the United States High Commission in Germany in 1951 as director of political affairs. In 1953 the new Eisen hower administration, apprehensive of McCarthyism but unable to force the senator’s resignation, exiled Davies to diplomatic obscurity in Peru. A ninth security investigation in 1954, based partly upon testimony from Hurley, char acterized Davies as disloyal, whereupon Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dismissed him, stating Davies had “demonstrated a lack of judgment, discretion, and reli ability.” Davies, virtually unemployable in the prevailing politi cal climate, established a furniture design and manufac turing business called Estilo in Lima, Peru, and wrote a weekly newspaper column. Returning to Washington in 1964, he published Foreign and Other Affairs (1964), a col lection of his newspaper articles criticizing U.S. Latin American policy as insufficiently supportive of strong gov ernments. It wasn’t until 1969 that was he rehabilitated and his pension rights reinstated. Davies and other old China hands, their reputations greatly restored by the impact of the Vietnam War and the new opening to China, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. In that same year Davies moved to Malaga, Spain, where he continued to write his newspaper columns. He also produced an autobiographical account of U.S. China policy, analyzing its persistent in ability to influence China. Later in the 1970s Davies settled in Asheville, North Carolina, where he died of multiple organ failure in 1999. After a private funeral service, his remains were cremated. Davies was the most intellectual of the U.S. State Department China experts, whose postWorld War II purging severely crippled the country’s ca pacity to develop prudent and rational policies toward Asia.
DAVIS i
★
Davies’s personal papers are held by the Harry S. Truman
If reports Presidential Library at Independence, Missouri. His and other official papers, including records ondiplomatic his invesi tigation and eventual dismissal, are among Department of State ! records in National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Many I documents written by Davies are included in the relevant volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, published by the U.S. Department of State, and Anna Kasten Nelson, ed.. The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers^ 3 vols. (1983). Da^ vies himself published Foreign and Other Affairs (1964), the mem oir Dragon by the Tail'. American, British, Japanese, and Russian Encounters with China and One Another (1972), and reflected fur ther in Paul Gordon Lauren, ed.. The China Hands Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy (1987). Eric Sevareid, in Not So Wild a Dream (1946), details Davies wartime heroism, and Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (1997), describes Davies’s wartime dealings with the Chinese Communists. Davies s truncated for eign service career is discussed in David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972); George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1950-1963 (1972); Ely Jacques Kahn, The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (1975); and James Fetzer, “The Case of John Paton Davies, Jr.,’’ Foreign Service Journal 54 (1976); 15-22, 31-32. Informative sketches ofDavies’s role in suc cessive presidential administrations are given in Eleanora W. Schoenebaum, ed., Political Profiles: The Truman Years (1978), and Political Profiles: The Eisenhower Years (1980). Obituaries are in the Washington Post, New Yor\ Times, and Chicago Sun-Times (all 24 Dec. 1999). Davies recorded several television interviews
Martin S. Davis, 1991. Nick Ut/Associated Press AP
Davis, an extremely private person when it came to dis cussing his background and family, was the son of a Polish immigrant father who worked as a real estate broker. When Davis left high school in 1943, two years short of gradua tion, to join the army, he lied about his age, only to be discharged when his deception was discovered. After com pleting high school in 1945, he reenlisted at age eighteen, just as the war was coming to an end. After returning to civilian life in 1946, Davis attended college, but a few semesters at City College of New York and New York Uni versity convinced him he could succeed in business without
the Samuel Goldwyn Company s New York City office in 1946. Although he initially had no special interest in the movie industry, and saw this first job as nothing more than a paycheck, his attitude changed when, within two years, he was promoted to the assistant national director of ad vertising and publicity. Having mastered the art of publi cizing movies, Davis left Goldwyn in 1955 to become the eastern publicity head at Allied Artists. Three years later he joined Paramount Pictures, the studio where he spent most of his career. Again, his rise was rapid, from the director of sales and marketing (1958-1961) to the head of publicity (1960-1965), and finally to positions as the executive vice president and chief operating officer (1965). In 1965 Ernest Martin, a Broadway producer, and Her bert Siegel, the president of the talent agency General Art ists Corporation, attempted to gain control of Paramount, charging that the studio had become such a gerontocracy, it could only survive with young (or relatively young) blood, which they intended to supply. Paramount’s president, George Weltner, knew his studio could not remain free standing for long, given its dismal grosses and mediocre films. But he was so alienated by the insurgents’ contempt for seniority that he asked Davis to find an alternative buyer
a degree. Davis began working in the public relations division of
for Paramount. The buyer was already on the Paramount board:
on U.S. China policy in the 1990s. Priscilla Roberts
DAVIS, Martin S. (b. 5 February 1927 in New York City; d. 4 October 1999 in New York City), film executive respon sible for transforming the diversified Gulf 4-Western Indus tries into the media conglomerate Paramount Communica tions.
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