Absent-Minded Professor?

The hue & cry over Owen Lattimore, the professor and publicist who played an influential role* in the shaping of U.S. Far Eastern policy, is part of a greater clamor of alarm: What U.S. mistakes led to the Communist conquest of China and the assault in Korea? Who is responsible for the mistakes?

Last week, as Lattimore testified in his own behalf before a panel of inquiring Senators, the U.S. learned a good deal more about the professor and a little bit more about the how & why of mistakes in the Far East.

Witnesses Against. The public examination of Lattimore's record goes back to 1950. After Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy charged that Lattimore was a "top Soviet espionage agent," the Senate Tydings committee held hearings and gave the professor a ringing clearance. But not everyone was convinced that the last word had been said. Since last July, a Senate subcommittee on Internal Security, headed by Nevada's Pat McCarran, had been going over the ground again. Main points in testimony:

P: Only one witness, ex-Communist Louis Budenz, definitely called Lattimore a Communist.

P: Another witness, former Red Army Intelligence Officer Alexander Barmine, said that his Russian superiors referred to Lattimore as one of "our men."

P: Documents were produced from the files of the Institute of Pacific Relations to show pro-Communist influence on Pacific Affairs, I.P.R. magazine edited by Lattimore (1934-41).

P: Presidential Aspirant Harold Stassen, Ex-Diplomat Eugene Dooman, Professors William McGovern, Kenneth Colegrove and Karl Wittfogel variously testified that Lattimore, Far East specialist and Director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins, followed a line favorable to the Communists, and that his ideas had powerful backing in the State Department.

The Defense. To rebut this testimony, Lattimore came last week before the McCarran subcommittee with a 50-page statement that bristled with some of the angriest denunciation ever directed by a witness to a congressional inquiry. Lattimore's statement (released to the press before he took the stand) categorically denied that he had ever been a Communist or proCommunist. It minimized his influence on U.S. policymaking and said that actually he stood for containment of Communism, Point Four and peace. It berated the McCarran inquiry as "stacked" against him, accused it of launching "a reign of terror" against U.S. diplomats. Not since the late Harold Ickes had any polemicist turned on more derisive invective.

Lattimore called McCarthy the "Wisconsin whimperer ... a graduate witch-burner." He raked Budenz as perjured and immoral, Stassen as "irresponsible," the Nationalist Chinese as "driftwood on the beaches of Formosa." He even flailed away at people who had not appeared before the committee; for California's Senator William Knowland, who believes the Nationalists should get more U.S. support, Lattimore picked up a Communist-favored sneer, "The Senator from Formosa."

When the professor started to read his statement before the Senators, he found the going rough. At every sentence he was interrupted by indignant questions. Gruff Pat McCarran said the professor's tactics of "intemperate and provocative expressions" were also Communist tactics.

Maryland's Herbert R. O'Conor asked: "What steps were taken by you to prevent Communists from having a voice in the Institute of Pacific Relations?" Lattimore answered: "I was not responsible for employment." Pressed further, the professor, long cited as an American authority on Soviet Asia, said he was really an innocent on ideologies: "I was not an expert on Communism . . ." Had any mistakes been made in U.S. China policy? Sidestepped Lattimore: "I make a distinction between mistakes and lack of success."

Cross-Examination. It took three days for Lattimore to finish reading his statement. Then, in a more subdued atmosphere, his cross-examination began. Again the professor fell back on his self-claimed naivete about Communism and Communists.

Some 20 contributors to Pacific Affairs had been previously identified before the subcommittee as Communists or proCommunists. Lattimore swore, "I don't believe I ever knew or was told" they were Communists. The Senators then confronted the professor with I.P.R. documents, and he began to retreat a little.

Before the Tydings committee Lattimore had said he did not know Frederick Vanderbilt Field, an active I.P.R. official,* as a Communist until "1940-41," when Lattimore's term as Pacific Affairs editor was ending. A letter from the I.P.R. file persuaded him to change his mind. He must have known Field's ideology as early as 1939. "My memory was in error by about two years," he admitted. One I.P.R. memo, from Field to Lattimore, read like an order: discussing a certain article, it cautioned Editor Lattimore that "the analysis is a straight Marxist one and . . . should not be altered."

"Answer Yes or No." Subcommittee Counsel Robert Morris produced an I.P.R. report of a meeting in Moscow (1936) at which Lattimore conferred with top representatives of the I.P.R.'s Russian council. The Russians, Geographer V. E. Motylev and Comintern Veteran G. N. Voitinsky, discussed Pacific Affairs. Motylev asked for a "more definite line" in articles. According to the I.P.R. report: "[Lattimore] said he would like to meet the Soviet suggestion as far as possible ... If the Soviet group would start on such a line, he would be able to make [other councils] cooperate more fully . . ."

Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson: "That line was the Communist Party line, wasn't it?"

Lattimore: "In my opinion, no."

Ferguson: "What line was it ... if it wasn't the Communist Party line?"

Lattimore: "The line of the Soviet Council of the I.P.R. . . Nothing Communist about it . . ."

Chairman McCarran (banging gavel): "Answer yes or no."

Lattimore: "I believe the Russians have at various times followed lines . . . that had nothing Communist about them . . ."

Lattimore had told the Tydings committee that he didn't have a desk in the State Department; he had also told an executive session of the McCarran inquiry that he never took care of the mail of Lauchlin Currie, then an assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt. Under crossexamination, he confessed to being absentminded. He did, after all, remember having a room in Currie's offices in the old State Department building; he used it frequently. Furthermore, it was true that during Currie's absence, he read Currie's mail.

This week the Senators continued their probe of the professor's faulty memory. They were not proving Lattimore a Communist; but they were exposing what looked like a powerful Communist web of propaganda and persuasion, around him, the I.P.R. and, ultimately, around U.S. policymaking.

* Among Lattimore's governmental assignments: President Franklin Roosevelt's personal emissary to Chiang Kai-shek (1941-42), head of the OWI Pacific operations (1942-44), traveler with Vice President Henry Wallace in Soviet Siberia and China (1944), co-writer of the Pauley Mission Report on Japan (1946), participant in State's conference on China policy (1949).

* Last week Field was freed from federal prison at Ashland, Ky. He had been sentenced last July for contempt of court, i.e., for refusing to answer questions concerning Communist bail funds.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.