User talk:Peter2212/Claude A. Buss

Hi, Peter,

Claude Buss is/was my mother's father. Although I am excited that you wish to prepare a page about him for Wikipedia, John Service, God rest his soul,is not the best model. After China, their careers were not similar in any way.

By some weird miracle, my grandfather found bureaucratic life unsatisfactory and left the State Department before the White Paper had advanced very far. His name, therefore, as you correctly note, was not on it. Its taint, however, remained. For us, it was only a taint, not an immovable wall, as it was for the tragic lives of the China Hands themselves. Grandpa was able to start and develop a marvelous and well-documented academic career. It began when he first returned to the United States and started teaching at USC in a minor role.

He was a prolific writer, and highly collegial in everything he did. Our family -- including Grandpa -- loved the Stanford paper's cartoon showing a professor standing before a blackboard loaded with highly specific outline material, and two students in back whispering, "I see Prof Buss is writing another book this semester."

In fact, his books grew in a different way. After his death we found a meticulous log of every public talk on Asia he had ever given, starting with women's groups at local churches in Los Angeles, and moving all the way up to his many US State Dept speaking tours. In 1982, when I was working in Singapore, I had a chance to experience one of these visits first-hand. Although he was already aging and needed a nap, he was guest of honor at a dinner of young academics who fawned over him as only Asians value wise elders. But the next day, he had an equally full slate of office visits where he went and picked THEIR brains just as hard! (These I did not attend, but I can guess because of what he told me about each scholar.) All the while, he was busy schooling me in my etiquette, and delighting our taxi driver with this fluent Chinese.

During World War II and its Occupation aftermath, Grandpa served our country generously. He accepted a State Dept contract to go to the Philippines embassy right before Pearl Harbor, and was the officer on hand to surrender it to the Japanese. His job description was apparently to get out every American who could tell them anything and then be the prisoner of war who could not be cracked. This latter role he fulfilled by asking for a Japanese dictionary and newspaper,no matter how censored, so he could learn the language while he sat it out. After two years of this, he was traded. We have always been thankful that he did not share the fate Japan inflicted on most of its prisoners of war. (The Philippines remained his favorite Asian country for just plain relaxing and having fun, but in 1968 he was honored by the State Dept for his nurture of Philippine-American relations.)

After his release by the Japanese, he became a wartime censorship officer for materials from the Pacific theater, and consultant on strategic bombing of Japan. At first he was stationed in Washington, then went to San Francisco. In 1946 he joined Stanford's history faculty, but took leave to serve on the Occupation staff headed by General MacArthur. He then returned to Palo Alto and a life which was, by any definition, and American success story. His always optimistic personality did not prevent him from expressing gratitude at what he enjoyed, and rededicating hismelf, again and again, to making it possible for the impoverished populatins of East Asia to partake of a similar rise.

I don't know when it began, but as long as I knew him, Grandpa played golf most weekends with Ambassador Philip Habib (both were apparently better at other things). He became part of the Hoover Institute international group. However, he did not choose to participate in partisan politics. He lived in Northern California and maintained a Republican voting registration in order to counter the more conservative Republican candidates from Orange County.

My mother's favorite memory from the Stanford years is that one day Vladimir Horowitz came to their house to practice on the famly Steinway before a concert, as his own piano there was not ready for him. This is a sign of my grandfather's very social presence at Stanford. The Faculty Club was a regular treat in the family's life.

But being social did not mean being careless. Grandpa was fully pragmatic about his work in foreign policy. He took part in commissioned papers, most especially the notorious paper on Vietnam that LBJ commissioned and then ignored. They did get a White House dinner invitation out of it. He preferred, however, to meet with the higher-ranking officers studying at the war colleges, so he could advance sound military policy through culturally-informed tactical military decisions. That is the real legacy in our lives of the White Paper: you can't just awe or terrorize people into political loyalty, but must somehow make their history into your ally.

Despite his extremely careful political work, Grandpa did occasionally have trouble with McCarthyism and its legacies. Most especially, and galling, the Nixon-Kissinger State Dept denied him early access to the People's Republic of China during the reopening phase, even though Chou En-Lai specifically mentioned Claude Buss as a scholar he would like to include. Many of his colleagues had opportunities he could only envy. I only know this because when I was looking at Asian Studies for a career, my mom told me to avoid China because I would never get a passport. At that time, we were facing Reagan's election and what we thought would be the return of Henry Kissinger. Happily, Reagan went with fellow-Californian George Schulz and the passport issue disappeared, especially for my grandfather.

Grandpa did not lose his compassion for the China Hands and the fate they suffered, but our family suppressed this information from us grandkids when we were growing up. Only when I started heading into the same career path did I start to add up enough stray facts to ask telling questions, and then it all came out. In the end, the fear turned out to have been significant, even though private. (My other grandfather, John Shelton Curtiss, a Russia-Soviet military scholar, had similiar problems, which is what we were more aware of growing up, and how I knew to look under that happy surface to Claude's career.)

My mother's first reference to the China Hands -- and the most personal one that I can remember -- was the completely offhand remark one day that she wondered sometimes what had become of her playmate Patsy Clubb. I recognized that name from the White Paper debacle, and am sure it bespoke much more compassion than the words conveyed.

The White Paper story had a happier ending for us, though. Grandpa was able to take my mother on a visit to the country where she had been born while both were still healthy enough to enjoy it. And we have all been able to grow up in the United States as respected members of our communities. There is not a day when I do not give thanks for the strange urge my grandfather had to pursue an academic life rather than the State Department work that would have made us exiles.

ERCurtiss (talk) 16:13, 15 August 2008 (UTC)