PART THREE
RECOVERY AND TRIUMPH

Chapter Twenty-eight
Starting Over

When fall term opened at Johns Hopkins in September 1955, Lattimore was once more an active member of the faculty and teaching classes. But it was a close thing. One faction of the board of trustees had wanted to fire him from the time of the first McCarthy attack. Francis White, a State Department officer who once served in Peking, was adamant about Lattimore.^[1] To White and fellow trustees John Nelson, Thomas Nichols, and Jacob France, probably the only adequate exoneration of Lattimore would have been a unanimous vote of "not guilty" after a jury trial; indeed, even that might not have sufficed. They were concerned not just about his heresy but about his disrespectful attitude toward the McCarran committee.

A majority of the board, with the apparent agreement of chairman Carlyle Barton, was less concerned about Lattimore's sins and more devoted to academic freedom. Lattimore had been given tenure by Isaiah Bowman. There was no longer a Page School for him to head, and trustee opposition was too great to give him an equivalent position elsewhere, so they made him a lecturer. The anti-Lattimore trustees went along with this treatment only because they believed, as Nelson said, that Lattimore was really unpopular with the faculty, which would finally "eliminate" him.^[2]

Lattimore's situation at Johns Hopkins was therefore quite different from what it had been in the 1940s. There was no prestige appointment, no school for him to direct, no Mongol program, no department of Chinese studies. Geography, an area in which Lattimore was well qualified, was at first closed to him: George Carter was head of that department. Fortunately Sidney Painter, the very conservative chairman of the history de-

partment, was also a strong civil libertarian and appalled by the Senate attack on Lattimore; Lattimore could lecture in his department. And in 1958 Lattimore was again welcome in geography, as M. Gordon Wolman replaced Carter as head.

Lattimore was a popular lecturer, drawing such large crowds that Painter had to provide teaching assistants to help grade papers. This popularity was encouraging, but the absence of a graduate program under Lattimore's control, and the dispersal of his Mongols, canceled the satisfaction of an undergraduate following. Also, the university excluded him from several across-the-board salary increases.^[3] Despite the strong support most of the faculty gave Lattimore, the bitter hostility of Carter, William F. Albright, Carl Swisher, and a few others made life unpleasant.

Even the few public lectures that now began to come his way brought problems. When the Hartford, Connecticut, chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union asked him to speak on December 16, 1955, they arranged use of the Phoenix Fire Insurance Company auditorium. Word got to Hartford veterans' groups and other unidentified organizations; some of them threatened to picket the lecture and protested to Phoenix. Phoenix got cold feet and on December 6 withdrew permission to use the hall. The ACLU looked for other places and received a willing response from the First Methodist Church, whose parish hall was available. Lattimore's talk came off as scheduled at the Methodist Church.^[4]

The New York Times reported six hundred people in attendance, braving the hostility of five women standing outside the church distributing anti-Communist literature. The women declined to identify themselves to the Times reporter. Lattimore, in opening his speech, remarked that he was disappointed in not being able to speak at the Phoenix: he was a stockholder in the company.^[5]

Lattimore's Hartford address was a repeat of one he had given the night before, sponsored by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in Manhattan, which had received less publicity. His title was "Freedoms and Foreign Policy."^[6] His major focus was the effect of the inquisition on the accuracy of foreign reporting. He began by analyzing the Soviet fiasco in Finland in 1939. The Soviet military had vastly underestimated the will and the capacity of the Finns to resist. Why? Because Soviet agents reporting from Finland told their bosses what the bosses wanted to hear, namely, the Communist line. "The Finns were supposed to be groaning under Fascist tyranny, and the loyal party line was to assume that great numbers of them would swing over to the Communists, who were de-

picted as the true popular vanguard." Soviet intelligence was thus distorted; the Soviets endured some stunning defeats and had to quadruple their original force to crush the Finns.

The rigid ideology of the United States at midcentury, said Lattimore, similarly distorted what we heard about China. Only one line was tolerated: Chiang and his forces on Formosa were still China's true rulers, bound to regain the mainland once the Chinese learned the horrors of communism. Thus, American foreign service officers had to report what was "politically acceptable, not simply to the Republican party, but to the extreme right wing, the Formosa-first wing of that party." Those who did not were fired. John Paton Davies was the latest case; he lost his job for telling the truth. "As a result, we now have, I make bold to say, the weakest foreign service of any great country in dealing with problems of Asia, and especially China." Lattimore agreed with Walter Lippmann that Knowland, Dulles, and Henry Cabot Lodge were ruining the foreign service with their insistence that everyone tell the same false story about China.

There was scant reference to Lattimore's own experience in this speech, but at the end he acknowledged the cost to him of his long immobilization. "If the study of international relations is to be productive, it has to be a continuous process of self-education, and over the past five years my self-education has been subjected to a certain amount of interruption. . . . ny opinions I may now express are not as well informed as they were before 1950. I am having to start all over again."

Lattimore had already started one new line of inquiry during his leave from Johns Hopkins: figuring out how the stock market worked. His wife told him, when he became restless at the absence of his normal activities, "You need something to do. Look at our investments and see if you can do something with them."^[7] By 1945 Lattimore had saved a tidy sum, most of it in war bonds. He was forced to cash in many of these bonds between 1950 and 1952 to meet the expenses of his bouts with Tydings and SISS (the FBI faithfully recorded every bond he redeemed). The defense fund started by Boas in 1953 provided enough money to meet out-of-pocket expenses during the indictment period, and Lattimore still held some low-yield government bonds.

Lattimore approached the stock market just as he had approached the frontier area of Central Asia, studying it systematically and consulting people who had been there, then taking the plunge himself. Of the investment newsletters he consulted, one stood out as the best: the Value Line , published by Arnold Bernhard. In October 1955 Lattimore wrote

Bernhard to express his satisfaction with Value Line , which provided "a most realistic underpinning to my interest in international affairs; I had largely been without this realistic kind of contact since, many years ago, I worked for one of the great trading firms in China."^[8] Bernhard responded cordially, inviting Lattimore to lunch and to visit with Value Line's statisticians and analysts.

In January 1956 Lattimore was in New York and lunched with Bernhard. The two hit it off immediately and began a professional and personal association that lasted three decades. For Lattimore, writing to Bernhard replaced the Overseas News Agency (now defunct) as an outlet for his thoughts about world affairs. Bernhard valued Lattimore's communications enough to put him on a substantial retainer as a consultant.^[9] Occasionally Value Line carried an article over Lattimore's byline; more often Bernhard simply incorporated Lattimore's ideas without attribution.

Value Line's advice proved lucrative for Lattimore: Xerox, Syntex, Phoenix Insurance, General Motors, IBM, and Santa Fe Industries all performed well. For the rest of his life he read Value Line eagerly; it was the periodical he took up first when it came in the mail.

Bernhard also got his money's worth, if only in pithy observations about the world's statesmen, such as John Foster Dulles. In a long letter of March 1, 1956, Lattimore responded to a Value Line story about the dangers of U.S. flirtation with Arab princes; Lattimore agreed, unwilling to believe that "patronized Sheikhs are pliant and reliable instruments of policy." As to Dulles:

Lack of ordinary professional competence in high places is horribly illustrated by the story of Dulles' press interview in yesterday's Baltimore Sun. It seems that on the subject of Saudi Arabia Dulles airily and offhandedly "attributed to the Arabs a centuries-old hatred of Jews and explained that it derived from a Moslem belief that Mohammed had been assassinated by Jews. But when an aide more conversant with Islamic scripture, which says Mohammed died in a wife's arms and of natural causes, whispered something admonitory to Dulles, the latter tempered his explanation to the extent of asking leave to amend the hearing record if he found he had erred."

Where does a Secretary of State pick up such Protocols of Zion poison? What company is he keeping? And what is indicated by a disposition to use such stuff in serious "enlightenment" of public opinion on matters of state in which the difference between War and peace is involved?^[10]

After a trip to Finland, Lattimore wrote Bernhard an extensive commentary on that feisty nation. He admired the Finns tremendously and thought private investment in Finland would be worthwhile. One anecdote from his letter had unusual poignancy: "As for the Finnish attitude toward Russians, it can be illustrated by the wry reaction of a Finn when I asked him what Finns thought of the Russian policy of downgrading Stalin. He thought it was perhaps going a little bit too far. As far as the Finns were concerned, they had found that Stalin was a man with whom it was possible to negotiate, even in very tough circumstances; and when he made an agreement with the Finns, he kept it. 'Also,' he said, 'we cannot forget that Stalin killed far more Communists than we Finns ever did.'"^[11]

As in his ONA articles, Lattimore wrote about a wide range of subjects and ventured risky predictions, many of which panned out. In a letter of December 29, 1956, he predicted that the main danger to Chiang Kai-shek was neither an invasion of Taiwan by Communist forces nor a revolt of the indigenous Taiwanese but rather a "colonel's putsch" by under-employed senior officials who wanted to return to their mainland homes and were impressed by the good jobs given by Mao to former anti-Communist warlords. This revolt did not happen. In the same letter, however, he foresaw Japan edging out the United States in international commerce.^[12]

On June 25,1957, Lattimore wrote Bernhard that competition in giving development aid was good because "countries that keep us on our toes by making us compete against German, Japanese, French, Italian, British investors are likely to be more stable than countries in which the US economic interest is lopsidedly dominant. . . and competition is the essential hormone of both economic and political freedom."^[13]

Throughout the 1956-59 period Lattimore provided Bernhard with provocative running commentary on the state of the world. He had plenty of time for it. The lecture circuit remained largely closed to him, though some brave organizations such as the Community Church of Boston, the Baltimore chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, and Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts, invited him.

Most summers during the rest of his tenure at Johns Hopkins he and Eleanor went to Europe, continuing to enjoy the prestige and welcome they had in 1955. In 1956 Lattimore received another invitation from India to teach the next year at the University of New Delhi. This offer was even more attractive than lecturing in Europe, since Indian scholars were in contact with the Mongolian People's Republic and had acquired

what was described to Lattimore as "a very fine collection of source materials" not available in the West. Furthermore, Mongolian diplomats in New Delhi were eager for contact with Western scholars. Lattimore evaluated this opportunity in a letter to the Barretts.

Eleanor and I could learn in New Delhi more about what is actually going on in Central Asia (and in China too) than by any other means short of actually going to those countries. These opportunities, however, might have certain liabilities attached to them. Our own intelligence services must obviously keep tabs on any contacts that Americans in India have with those dreadful Mongols and Chinese, and so on our return to America we might once more find ourselves listed, not as people who have been able to learn something about Central Asia and China but as people who have actually talked politely with Communists without spitting in their faces. So the gamble involved is: In a couple of years will the general situation between America and the Communist countries be more hostile than ever, or will there be any degree of relaxation ?^[14]

Lattimore decided that he would take his chances with possible "contamination" in India and applied to Johns Hopkins for a leave of absence.

The Lattimores were invited to the annual Arnold, Fortas, and Porter office party in December 1956. This was a gala occasion, since Thurman Arnold's arguments in the Lattimore case, accepted by Youngdahl and narrowly affirmed by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, had now been unanimously affirmed in the O'Connor case. Lattimore reported to the Barretts, "Thurman Arnold was feeling very good—levitating several inches above the ground, in fact—and proclaiming that in a long career I was the only innocent man he had ever defended, and never would he defend an innocent man again. With a guilty man, you know just what you are defending, and how to go about it, and besides, you earn a good living. Whereas with an innocent man you never quite know what you are defending, it's a hell of a lot of work, and besides it costs you money."^[15]

Euphoria at AFP was not duplicated at Johns Hopkins. Milton Eisenhower, now president of Hopkins, turned down Lattimore's leave request in an insulting letter: "Your career at Johns Hopkins is dependent on your demonstrating your desire and intention to devote yourself henceforth to scholarly work in this university in harmony with Hopkins' tradition. . . . Your primary concern for the advancement of scholarship at Johns Hopkins is yet to be persuasively demonstrated, and the work in India would, as I understand it, be primarily in the field of administration,

organization, and policy, rather than in personal research, scholarship, and teaching."^[16]

Lattimore was outraged. He had several long, frustrating conferences with Eisenhower, who retracted some of his more fatuous statements but did not yield on the leave of absence. The whole episode was traumatic; Lattimore was depressed for months. Eleanor summed up their reaction in a letter to the Barretts March 17, 1957: "Of course we are tempted to say 'to hell with you' and go off mad, but that wouldn't have hurt anybody but ourselves, since we don't really have a better place to go—yet. When we find a better one, or even one that can be made to appear better, we're all set to hop off to it, and no little pension will hold us."^[17]

Milton Eisenhower had an effective veto over Lattimore getting a full year's leave, but European academic schedules were different from American schedules and enabled Lattimore to lecture at the Sorbonne during the spring terms of 1958 and 1959 without permission from Johns Hopkins. He had enough time while at the Sorbonne to finish preparing his collected papers, Studies in Frontier History , published by Oxford University Press in 1962.

Despite Lattimore's belief that the Maoists were giving China a new sense of dignity and improving the lot of the peasants, he knew that revolutions devour their children and that the course of the People's Republic would not be one of uninterrupted progress and enlightenment. He voiced his reservations in Pacific Affairs of December 1958. "China's old Confucianism was, whenever it had the power to be, dogmatic and authoritarian; for the true Confucian, if the book said one thing and the facts another, it was always the book that was right. Confucian rule has been shattered by Marxist rule, but if, at the same time, the dogmatic tendencies in Marxism fuse with the authoritarian heritage of Confucianism, the worst excesses of Byzantium, Moscow, and the Empress Dowager could be exceeded."^[18] It was a startlingly prophetic analysis.

One piece of unfinished business concerned Lattimore during the late 1950s. The Institute of Pacific Relations was still under fire. From its founding in 1927 the IPR had enjoyed tax-exempt status as an educational institution. In 1954 McCarran wrote T. Coleman Andrews, Eisenhower's commissioner of internal revenue, asking Andrews to withdraw IPR's tax-exempt status. Andrews was as willing as McCarran was to view IPR as subversive; in 1955 he revoked the tax exemption and in 1956 assessed IPR $568.62 for the previous year, plus penalties and interest. IPR paid this sum and filed a claim for a refund. Internal Revenue did not respond. In July 1957 IPR filed suit. The sum was trivial, but the principle was

important. Commissioner Andrews had cited the SISS report as basis for revoking IPR's exemption.^[19]

Charles L. Kades of New York represented the IPR, and Arnold, Fortas, and Porter cooperated in preparing for trial. William Holland was to be the chief IPR witness; because of Lattimore's notoriety, he was not to be called unless needed for rebuttal. Bill Rogers wrote Lattimore October 22, 1959, telling him of Kades's strategy and saying that APP was "standing by and raring to go."^[20]

The case came to trial in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge David Edelstein presiding, on March 31, 1960. Although the tax year at issue was 1955, the government's case was based exclusively on the findings of McCarran's SISS in 1952. Kades easily showed that the SISS hearings were biased and malicious and the report untruthful. Edelstein was scathing in his denunciation of the government's case:

There is not in this case the shadow of a scintilla of evidence to meet the plaintiff's case. . .. Moreover, it is in this case that the plaintiff has for the first time had its "day in court" on those charges. . .. The plaintiff utilized its "day in court" to make its record in the way in which it thought it ought to be made, as any plaintiff in any lawsuit is allowed to do. The legislative report [SISS Report] was based upon hearings in which the plaintiff was not free to present its own case in its own way. In choosing to rely exclusively on the latter, the Government has not only not truly joined issue, but it appears to invite the court's adverse decision.

The plaintiff is entitled to judgment against the defendant.^[21]

Lattimore's testimony was not needed. Judge Edelstein's decision reads as if the SISS hearings were so poisonous that the IPR need not have presented any witnesses at all.

For all of Edelstein's eloquence, winning the tax case did not rehabilitate the IPR. The American IPR folded, and the International Council of the IPR moved to Vancouver in December 1960. Having a judicial finding that McCarran had loaded the dice against the IPR was no more than a moral victory. James O. Eastland was now chairman of Senate Judiciary, Jay Sourwine was one of his lieutenants, and the Committee of One Million against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations was in full operation. Not until the miraculous conversion of Richard Nixon in 1972 did the China lobby lose its power.

Eastland and the FBI maintained their interest in Lattimore all through the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA joined them. Perhaps CIA interest was sparked, or maintained, by James Jesus Angleton, the controversial head

of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton for years denied that the apparent split between the Soviet Union and China was anything more than an act of deception. Lattimore's doctrines would have caused a high degree of suspicion on Angleton's part. In any case, had it not been for the CIA's intercept program, we would know less about Lattimore's relations with foreign scholars and his trips abroad. In 1986, nine years after Lattimore's Freedom of Information request, the CIA finally released some of his letters abroad.

Periodically, the credulous Sourwine would refer some wild rumor about Lattimore to the FBI; predictably, the FBI would shoot it down. Every public lecture that Lattimore gave and every story about him anywhere in the country wound up in FBI and CIA files and in the private collection of J. B. Matthews.

By 1959, in the last years of the Eisenhower presidency, Lattimore assumed that the new willingness of the U.S. government to talk to the Russians offered a chance for him to again visit the Soviet Union. He was in contact with Soviet Asian scholars whom he met at various academic congresses in Western Europe. He wrote one of them, Professor S. L. Tikhvinskii of Moscow, in September 1959. He understood that there was to be a gathering of orientalists in Leningrad the next summer. Could he get an invitation? He would be happy to give a paper on Marco Polo.^[22]

Hostilities were easing on the Soviet side also. The "learned lackey of imperialism" was no longer persona non gram. Lattimore was invited to the Leningrad Congress and got his visa at the Soviet embassy in Washington April 11, 1960. It was something he had long wanted; Russian scholarship on Mongolia was still worth absorbing. Lattimore and his wife left for a long tour of Europe June 3, with three weeks in Russia.

The opportunity to talk to his Russian counterparts was all he expected of it. But a related opportunity was even more valuable: he made friends among scholars from the Mongolian People's Republic participating at Leningrad. They knew who he was. They had read his books and felt that his descriptions of life in Inner Mongolia in the 1930s rang true. One of them told him, "Your Mongols are real Mongols." ^[23] He met Natsagdorj, a member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, one of whose books Lattimore had translated into English; Bira, a prominent Tibetanist; and a young historian named Dalai. The Mongols invited him to visit.

If there was a scholarly summum bonum for Lattimore, it was the opportunity to study and travel in the MPR. He knew a lot about it from reading everything available in non-Mongol languages, from the few Mongol publications available in the West, and from endless conversation

with the Dilowa, John Hangin, Urgunge Onon, and other Mongol expatriates. But the kind of on-the-spot experience he had had of Inner Mongolia was lacking. The three days he had spent in Ulan Bator with Wallace in 1944 had merely piqued his curiosity. Since that trip was "official" and Wallace was in the charge of Russians, Lattimore was not free to explore on his own. Now, at last, he would have a chance to see for himself.

Lattimore got back to Baltimore in September 1960 to find the presidential election under way. Nixon versus Kennedy: obviously he could not support Nixon, who had done so much to fan anti-Peking hysteria and who still maintaned an allegiance to the Nationalists on Formosa. Kennedy seemed more reasonable about Asian policy, believing that the Nationalists should evacuate Quemoy and Matsu islands. But it was a mere fifteen years since Kennedy, campaigning in Massachusetts, had charged Lattimore and John King Fairbank with losing China to the Communists. And Kennedy's belligerent rhetoric about the nonexistent "missile gap" was disturbing. Lattimore did not have high hopes for a Kennedy presidency.

In March 1961, however, when Lattimore asked the State Department if his passport could be validated for travel to Mongolia, they readily agreed.^[24] And there were rumors afloat that the United States was considering exchanging diplomatic missions with the MPR. Lattimore could hardly believe this news. It was precisely the suggestion for which he had been castigated by William Bullitt and the China lobby. But on April 21 the New York Times carried a page-one story with the apparent blessing of the government: "Ties with Mongolia Are Planned by U.S." The reasons given for the action were nonsensical: "to determine whether Outer Mongolia is in fact an independent state." But Lattimore was impressed. The Kennedy administration might be more progressive than he had anticipated.

The Lattimores left for Europe in early June 1961, visiting Czechoslovakia for two weeks then taking the train through Russia to Mongolia. He knew the trip was a gamble. However friendly the Mongol intellectuals he had met in Leningrad, he was well aware that the political bosses back home might not be enchanted with a visitor fluent in the language prying into all kinds of affairs. As he puts it in Nomads and Commissars , "The auspices were good, but in Communist-ruled countries the opportunities allowed to foreign scholars can be cut off abruptly."^[25]

The Lattimores arrived in Ulan Bator July 9 in the middle of celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of Mongolia's Declaration of In-

dependence (from China). As he wrote his father, there were "parades, vast drills of athletic organizations, and the traditional Mongol horse-racing, archery, and wrestling. These traditional sports, as we used to see them in Inner Mongolia, had become rather broken-down. Here, they are now restored with all the details of costume and heraldry. The people are passionately interested. After one horse race, the herald presenting the third horse and chanting its praises in alliterative verse got more applause than the herald presenting the winning horse, because his poetry was better!" ^[26]

The major celebration was on July 11. A colorful crowd of fifty thousand paraded for two hours before a reviewing stand, with MPR President Sambuu, Soviet Party Secretary Suslov, and Polish leader Gomulka taking the salutes. It seemed as if the whole of Mongolia's 950,000 people had turned out for the festivities. Lattimore wrote his father:

The old costumes abound, and the tiers of seats at the great stadium are a mosaic of colors. Mongol girls and women dress better, and in better taste, with a faultless eye for color and line, than the women of any other country of the Soviet bloc that we have seen. Checking with a French and an Italian and a British correspondent, I find them a little in despair because, they say, if they report simply their straightforward observations, everyone will say they have been "taken in by communist propaganda." As a matter of fact, it is impossible to work up an honest opinion that Mongolia is being run by anybody but the Mongols—and they are enjoying themselves hugely doing it.^[27]

After the ceremonies Lattimore was introduced to the treasures of the National Library and conferred with scholars "full of the zest and exhilaration of discovery. Dialects, folklore, shaman chants—all are being tape recorded."^[28] The head of the one big surviving Lama Buddhist monastery turned out to be a former disciple of the Dilowa and gave Lattimore extraordinary attention. Lattimore was inundated with historical materials. He found no oppressive Marxist doctrine dampening scholarly conversations in Mongolia, as it so often did with the Soviets.

From July 24 to August 4 the Lattimores were taken on a tour of the country, visiting five collective farms. As he wrote in a letter to Justice William O. Douglas, they were in "the original heartland of the history of the Huns, the Turks, and later the Mongols themselves. . . . Marvellous country, marvellous people. We also saw a lot of the new, collectivized pastoral economy. I was impressed by the intelligent way it builds on old traditions of cooperation (I put my yaks with your yaks, you put

your sheep with my sheep, we'll both put our horses with that other fellow's horses) and so is more readily understood and accepted. The present degree of prosperity is too general, and we have travelled too widely, for there to be any question of specially-dressed-up show-places for foreigners." ^[29]

It was in this heartland of the Huns and Mongols that Lattimore was introduced to the "richest paleological find" that the great Russian archaeologist, Okladnikov, had ever seen. Artifacts half a million years old were found at the site, and Okladnikov told Lattimore how he had known to dig there. The Orkhon River made a bend, leaving a terrace suitable for a fishing camp. Near this terrace a small stream entered the Orkhon, and fluttering white rags were tied to bushes on the shores of the stream. "Right there under those bushes," Okladnikov said, "there is a mineral spring. Until quite recently, the local Mongols regarded it as magical and used its water to cure sickness. Probably it has been revered continually since the time of paleolithic man, because we know from other sites that men in the Old Stone Age were as aware as we are of the difference between mineral springs and ordinary springs. So when we found a mineral spring and a natural fishing camp within 50 yards of each other, we knew we had only to dig."^[30] The chance to tour archaeological sites with Okladnikov was worth as much to Lattimore as anything on the trip.

Lattimore's forty-two days in Mongolia sped by mercilessly. Toward the end, he was asked to address the Academy of Sciences. It was a fitting climax. He was complimentary to his hosts, telling them to be proud of their nomad past as well as their startling leap into modernity. Justice Douglas, for whom Lattimore arranged a visit to Mongolia in September 1961, says, "A member of the Academy of Sciences in that country told me that Lattimore addressed them for an hour in Ulan Bator, speaking Mongolian. He paid Lattimore the highest compliment possible: 'If I had closed my eyes and listened, I would have sworn the speaker was Mongolian.'"^[31]

On August 19 the Lattimores flew to Irkutsk, Moscow, and Copenhagen, where Owen was to give a series of lectures. The Monglian customs officials did not even open their baggage.^[32]

The American initiative to open diplomatic relations with the MPR stirred up the China lobby while Lattimore was gone. Marvin Liebman, secretary of the Committee of One Million, raised hell. Recognition of Mongolia, he told the New York Times and a dozen or so prominent members of the China bloc in Congress, was just the opening wedge in an attempt to push

through recognition of the People's Republic of China. On June 29, 1961, the State Department announced that negotiations with Mongolia were progressing; Chester Bowles, undersecretary of State, and Roger Hilsman, director of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, were pushing this initiative.^[33]

The effort was premature. Had there been no other obstacles, word of Lattimore's presence in Ulan Bator that summer would have killed it. The Washington Post story of July 12 called the attention of official Washington to the fact that Lattimore and his wife were attending the Mongolian fortieth anniversary celebrations, and that news set off a new round of China lobby outrage. On July 13 the National Republican Congressional Committee "accused the Kennedy Administration of 30 actions that the committee said were withdrawals from the policies of the Eisenhower Administration in dealings with the Communists." Among them was the fact that the State Department had "granted a visa to Owen Lattimore for a 'study trip' to Outer Mongolia, although Lattimore has been named by a Senate subcommittee as a 'conscious, articulate instrument of the Communist party.'" Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative Charles Halleck, Republican leaders, denounced the reported proposal to recognize Mongolia.^[34]

Unique among the ultraconservative fulminations was the July 16 ABC radio broadcast of George Sokolsky, the text of which was printed in the Brooklyn Tablet . Sokolsky was alarmed at Lattimore's trip: "How he got there, I don't know. What kind of passport he's using, I don't know. We have no regulations with Mongolia; our passport doesn't hold there, but he's gone there." Sokolsky reviewed the "great power of Ghengis [sic ] Khan, which in the 13th Century conquered China and conquered much of Europe, east of Germany. It held Russia for a prolonged period. It held India and the Mongol Empire in India. It is Mongolia which is being revived as a power in this attempt to force upon the world the United Nations. This is a peril which is really greater than one imagines because, to us, the name Mongolia hardly means anything anymore and yet, out of that desert land has come this great power which at one time dominated much of the world and which can do it again if armed and given the direction and guidance that could lead to that. This, then, is our peril at the time." ^[35]

It is hard to excuse such crass ignorance. Sokolsky should have known that Mongolia was a sparsely populated country of fewer than one million and that it was totally surrounded by Russia and China, who would hardly give the Mongols the arms, direction, and guidance to conquer the Eur-

asian continent. Sokolsky did not name his candidate for a modern Genghis Khan.

David Nelson Rowe, at Yale, was also alarmed at Lattimore's travels. On August 9, 1961, he cabled Senator Eastland: "STRONGLY RECOMMEND INVESTIGATION OF PART PLAYED BY OWEN LATTIMORE IN OUTER MONGOLIA RECENTLY AND POSSIBLE COOPERATION WITH LATTIMORE BY DEPT OF STATE INABLING HIS PRESENCE THERE AND CURRENT SUGGESTION UNITED STATES ENTER INTO DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH SOVIET PUPPET OF OUTER MONGOLIA ." Eastland politely declined, telling Rowe that unless "information could be obtained that would furnish a sound basis for such a hearing" it would be a mere fishing expedition.^[36]

The entire right-wing press jumped on the issue. Pressure was too great for Bowles to continue. On August 11 President Kennedy ordered plans for the exchange of diplomats with the MPR dropped.^[37]

Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut didn't believe it was all over. On August 22 he told the Senate that it was no accident that Lattimore was in Mongolia "at the very moment when there was a big drive on" to recognize that country. Dodd threatened to call Lattimore before SISS "to establish all of the facts about his visit."^[38] The threat was never carried out.

Justice William O. Douglas came back from two weeks in Mongolia in late September, calling for recognition of the MPR since it was independent of both China and Russia.^[39] He was too late: the issue was dead.

The United Nations presented a different situation. A package deal, in which admission of Mongolia and Mauritania (wanted by the French African bloc) were linked, passed the Security Council October 25, 1961. The Mongolian People's Republic became a member of the community of nations.

Lattimore returned to Johns Hopkins October 1 with a treasure trove of historical materials, notes from manuscripts, records of interviews, and photographs. He now had the raw materials to flesh out an account of Outer Monglia to match his 1934 Mongols of Manchuria . He set about producing a contemporary description of the MPR with enough background to explain how things came to be the way he found them in the summer of 1961.

Nomads and Commissars , published by Oxford University Press in June 1962, was the result. It is still a valuable exposition of the development of Outer Mongolia in the modern period, beginning with the Mongol revolution against Manchu rule in 1911. This revolution established an auton-

omous state lasting about ten years. During this period czarist Russia began to take an interest in Mongolia. It was a barren time; Mongol leadership was weak, and the dominance of the Buddhist monasteries was suffocating. Lattimore refers to this period as the "years of frustration."

Modern Mongolia began to take shape with the Partisan Rebellion of Sukebator in 1921; this was the revolution celebrated by the MPR when Lattimore first came in the summer of 1961. There was much controversy about the extent to which Marxist practices were imposed on the Mongols by the Bolsheviks and about responsibility for the confiscation of private property and the purges of 1929-32, known as the Left Deviation. Though sympathetic to the Mongols, Lattimore concludes that left-wing Mongols rather than Soviet agents were responsible for the terror. It was, in fact, under Comintern guidance that the policy of forced collectivization was reversed.^[40] Western assumptions about Soviet tyranny in Mongolia, Lattimore asserts, are mistaken. The Soviet Union could easily have annexed Mongolia but did not, and Soviet protection of Mongolia from Japanese encroachment in the 1930s saved the Mongols from the brutalization Japan inflicted on Manchuria.

It was of great significance to Lattimore that Mongolia had no capitalist past yet moved rapidly from feudalism to the modernity of 1961 with Soviet aid. He saw it as a model for other developing countries. The progress of Mongolia as he observed it did not decrease the enthusiasm for free enterprise capitalism in developing countries, which he had touted in Solution and Situation ; he recognized that Mongolia was a special case. Other developing countries had at least a modest bourgeois capitalist class on which to build.

Nomads and Commissars remained Lattimore's primary volume on the subject of Outer Mongolia. In 1987, when he wrote "Mongolia as a Leading State" for the Journal of the Mongolia Society , he conformed closely to the conclusions he had reached in 1962.

After the stimulus of the trip to Ulan Bator in 1961, life at Johns Hopkins seemed tame. The Lattimores again went to Europe in 1962, visiting England, France, and Switzerland during June. They were barely settled back in Baltimore when a wholly unexpected invitation came.

Leeds University decided in 1962 to establish a department of Chinese studies, concentrating on contemporary China with language, literature, history, geography, economics, and sociology all represented. There would be classes for undergraduates, but also a strong research and graduate program. No such department existed in Great Britain; there were few anywhere. In August 1962 Leeds got in touch with Lattimore. Would he

be interested in heading this department? He was, and in September the Lattimores again went to England to explore Leeds's plans. The Leeds vice-chancellor and his search committee decided Lattimore was the right man.

For Lattimore, the decision was easy to make. He was sixty-two, eligible for retirement at Johns Hopkins. His opportunities in the United States were still restricted by the fallout from the McCarthy-McCarran period. United States universities were rigidly compartmentalized, and Lattimore tended to disregard jurisdictional boundaries. U.S. foreign policies, still cretinous in regard to China, apoplectic about Cuba, and already beginning the long perverse involvement in Vietnam, caused him great anguish; yet he had no effective forum in which to oppose them. His close friend, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, had died of a stroke August 26, 1962.^[41] Most of all, the Hopkins situation was stultifying: no graduate students, no research seminar on a topic dear to him, and a campus still bitterly divided over his presence. The announcement of his appointment to Leeds was made November 12.^[42] He flew to Leeds again in January 1963 to make housing and other arrangements.

The opportunity to build a department from the ground up was itself attractive, but there was a bonus. As Lattimore bragged to Academician B. I. Pankratov at Leningrad, he would be able to add Mongol studies and to take Urgunge Onon with him.^[43] Britain was far more open to unconventional views. The British had no McCarran-Walter Act. He could bring visiting scholars from the MPR to Leeds.

The main handicap Lattimore faced in developing Chinese and Mongol studies at Leeds was the absence of a good library collection. This problem was taken up by Mortimer Graves, a long-time Lattimore supporter recently retired from the post of administrative secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies. Graves wrote several hundred Asian scholars and bibliophiles, explaining the need for books at Leeds and asking them to cull their libraries for relevant items they no longer needed. Graves then arranged with the International Exchange Service of the Smithsonian Institution to assemble and ship the books to Leeds.^[44]

Cutting a twenty-five-year tie with Johns Hopkins was easy. At a farewell party given by the history department, Lattimore said that the department had been good to him, but the university had not.^[45] Chester Wickwire, Hopkins chaplain, says that Lattimore told him "getting out of here is like getting out of prison." His farewell lecture was packed. As David Harvey put it, "Everyone expected him to talk about Mc-

Carthyism. He talked about society and culture in Mongolia. I suspect that is where his heart was all along."^[46]

As Lattimore was packing to leave Hopkins, a group of history junior faculty and graduate students stopped by his office to wish him well. Waldo Heinrichs, later a prominent diplomatic historian at Temple University, was among them. They noticed a half-dozen boxes in a corner with what appeared to be correspondence tossed inside. Heinrichs asked Lattimore what he intended to do with the boxes. He replied, "Throw them out." The visitors protested; could they take the boxes over to the library? Lattimore did not mind.^[47] Sixteen years later this discarded correspondence was in the Hamburger Archives at Johns Hopkins, providing one of the few contemporary records of Lattimore's activities as director of the Walter Hines Page School and of his scholarly enterprises during the years 1946 to 1952.

Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ascendancy at Leeds

The Lattimores arrived in Leeds early June 1963, with the first challenge house hunting. Owen had done a lot of this in January but hadn't settled on anything. Now Eleanor took over, with an assist from Dorothy Borg, who spent a week with them. By mid-June they had settled on a place in Linton, near Wetherby, some distance from Leeds but with room for Owen's books, his father, and guests. The house was officially called "Old Rose Cottage." Eleanor thought this name "icky" and wanted to change it; Owen thought it corny enough to be funny and insisted they keep it.^[1]

Starting a new department involved Owen in unending conferences and paperwork. Bureaucratic chores were not his favorite occupations, but the excitement of building a program to his own specifications compensated for the drudgery. In addition, there was none of the opprobrium his heretical views had brought him in the United States. He was welcomed into the social and intellectual life of Yorkshire, with much broader contacts than either Johns Hopkins or the reactionary Baltimore suburbs had provided. On June 25 Eleanor wrote Evelyn Stefansson that "Owen hasn't been so happy in years."^[2]

Only one bit of bad news distracted from the euphoria of those first days at Leeds: the Dilowa had fallen ill with cancer. When the Page School folded, the Dilowa made his primary residence with the exile Mongol community in New Jersey, but he traveled frequently to universities where his linguistic skills were in demand. One of the places he visited often was New Haven; Lattimore's son David was a graduate student at Yale. Wesley Needham, curator of the Tibetan collection at Yale, hosted the Dilowa frequently for work on Yale's extensive collection of Buddhist texts. It

was during an August 1963 visit to New Haven that the Dilowa fell ill and was hospitalized.

The Dilowa did not want news of his illness to reach Lattimore, but the New York Times published the story of his hospitalization, and David sent a copy to his father.^[3] At Grace New Haven Community Hospital, high-voltage radiation treatment seemed to stabilize the Dilowa's condition, and David wrote that he seemed to be in no immediate danger. The Dilowa was eighty; Lattimore knew complete recovery was impossible.

At Leeds the British tradition of public inaugural lectures for prestige appointments was strong. Lattimore's was scheduled for October 21, 1963. Lattimore was determined to distill for a general audience the most important influences in making China what she then was. Titled "From China, Looking Outward," the lecture presents the core of what he intended to develop as his magnum opus, a rendition of the theme "China in World History" showing both the impact of "barbarian" invasion on China and China's impact on Western cultures.

The lecture hall at Leeds that night was packed, and the address was carried on BBC television. Reaction in Britain was uniformly laudatory. Strangely, those in America who might have been expected to monitor Lattimore's latest heresies seemed to miss it. Several of his judgments could have been distorted to imply that he welcomed the triumph of communism in China, but none of his detractors commented on the lecture. The core of his analysis endures as a sound rendition of China's route to communism:

Only from China, looking outward, can it be clearly seen that a Communist revolution would have been impossible without the century of Western and Japanese domination that began in 1840-2 when in the name of law, order and security for business (opium was not mentioned in the Treaty of Nanking) the Treaty Port system was created, and subsequently elaborated into a system of indirect controls and sanctions. It was this system of herding, coercing, coaxing, and at the same time frustrating the Chinese, so different from direct colonial rule, that fostered the growth in China of new economic interests, new social classes, new antagonisms, new alliances, and, because of a sovereignty that was impaired but not, as under colonial rule, destroyed, an increasingly impatient search by the Chinese for methods, however radical, by which to fuse all the discordant forces at work into a mighty national effort to break out of the net. . . .

It was not an upheaval from within, but Japanese invasion, that ruptured the net. Upheavals which had been premature, like the Taiping

Rebellion, or too primitive to know what direction to take, like the Boxer Rising, could now be followed by a much more intricate process of detonation and fusion, at great speed: open class conflict, accompanied by new class alliances, with the explosion confined, and its energy concentrated, by the pressure of a foreign invasion. When the enclosing Japanese pressure collapsed, the energy released within China went into a second stage of expansion in which . . . Chiang Kai-shek's regime was consumed. It was destroyed not only because it was corrupt, but because so much of its corruption was rooted in its function of being the end-product, the last and most hated phenomenon, of relying on foreign support in order to keep the upper hand in China.^[4]

Two weeks after his inaugural lecture Lattimore was contacted by the British foreign office. The adventure to which this call led brought glee to his voice when he described it twenty years later:

Very soon after I got to England, the Mongols and the British recognized each other, and the Mongols appointed their first Ambassador to Britain. One morning, I'd just got to the office at the University, and the phone rang. The voice said, "My name is—whatever [Dugald Malcolm]—at the foreign office. In a few days, the new Mongolian ambassador will present his letters to the queen. Would you consent to be the interpreter?" I said, "Well, that would be a great honor, but I'm not qualified. In the first instance, I'm not even a British subject." And the voice said, "Oh yes, we know all that, but you're the man we want." So I did that function. The man who was in attendance on the queen during the ceremony [Sir Harold Caccia], the queen, and I and the Mongol Ambassador were the only people in the room. The queen's attendant was a man I had met first in Peking when he was secretary at the embassy. . .. That whole ceremony shows how skillfully the British handle that kind of thing. The Mongol had, of course, his own English-speaking aide with him. But the British thought that for British prestige, they must have the interpreter on the British side, not on the visitor's side. To prepare for it—gain very British—they sent the ambassador up to Leeds, to see me. They put him in that famous resort hotel, and sent me over there to dine with him so we could get acquainted. We had a good talk. He was a crafty ambassador, too. He said, "I suppose there will be some small talk, and they will ask me how I like England. What should I talk about?" I said, "There's one sure thing. All the royal family are crazy about horses. So say something about horses." When we got there, the queen sure enough asked him if he'd had a good time so far in England. He said "Yes, I went to Yorkshire, and since we Mongols are crazy about horses, we know there are two great breeds in the world, the Arab horse, and the English

thoroughbred. So while I was in Yorkshire I went to several stables and saw your English thoroughbreds." "Oh," said the queen very interested. "And you have horseracing in Mongolia?" "Yes, at the big festival every summer we have the great national horse race. Only our horseracing is a little bit different from yours. You see, for us the race is a test of the horse, and not of the jockey. So we don't put a strong rider on the horse. We put a young rider on it. The race is about twenty-five kilometers and it has to be a horse that is willing to run that on his own, without being driven by his jockey. Our jockeys are retired for age when they are twelve years old." And that's the first and only time I have seen British royalty do a double-take.

The ceremony at Buckingham Palace took place November 14. Ten days later Lattimore got another call from London. This time it was the BBC: John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Would Lattimore explain to British listeners what this terible act of violence meant?

Lattimore hesitated to accept this invitation also. He had had his own exposure to the dark places of the American mind, but he did not feel prepared to deal with a presidential assassination and declined. Later BBC invitations called for commentary that would draw more directly on his own background, and he became less reticent about appearing. By the time he retired from Leeds in 1970, he was a frequent BBC commentator.

Lattimore heard in early November 1963 that a memorial service was to be held in London for Chi Ch'ao-ting, the Chinese economist whose articles he had published in Pacific Affairs . Chi had died in Peking August 9. Joseph Needham, fellow of the Royal Society and president of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, organized the service and asked Lattimore to speak about Chi's career. Joan Robinson, Cambridge economist, and John Keswick, prominent British businessman, were also to speak. Lattimore accepted but was unable to attend because his father fell ill. He sent remarks to Needham to read for him.

The service was held December 5. In his eulogy Lattimore did not have to explain why he had not known Chi was a Communist; he was free to describe the man he had known in Chungking in 1941. Chi was then confidential private secretary to H. H. K'ung, Chiang's minister of finance. As Lattimore and the sponsors of the memorial service had known him, Chi was a statesman and scholar no matter whether he was serving the Kuomintang or the Communists. Lattimore's was a moving tribute, one of those beautifully crafted encomia that deserve a place in the enduring literature of human achievement. Lattimore could never have given it in the United States. To speak of a Communist leader who was "hu-

mane to the marrow of his bones" would have again brought down the wrath of the Peking haters.^[5]

During his last years at Johns Hopkins and his first year at Leeds Lattimore kept up his correspondence with Arnold Bernhard of Value Line . The letters these two exchanged offer a fascinating commentary on world events during the last half of the Eisenhower administration and the two years of Kennedy. On December 15, 1963, when Lattimore had six months' experience living in England, he described his reactions for Bernhard. Lattimore found himself "a little to my surprise, more intrigued by economic than by political questions."

As soon as I got here I started reading all I could find that is readily available to the ordinary investor, and I was—and still am—aghast. In Britain, the classical country of the industrial revolution and of the forms of saving and investment that accompanied and followed the industrial revolution, it is exceedingly difficult, if you are native born and not a foreigner bringing with you your own sources of information, to get hold of basic data and plan your investments. Not only is there no hard-headed advisory service remotely comparable to the Value Line; there is no equivalent of the Wall Street Journal or—very significant— of Merrill Lynch. On the native heath of modern capitalism, there just isn't any "people's capitalism." In America, I thought that a rather corny slogan. Here—because of its absence—I see what it means.^[6]

Two days before Christmas 1963, Lattimore's father was operated on for colon cancer in the Leeds hospital. The operation only postponed the inevitable. David Lattimore died March 3, 1964, at the age of ninety.

Periodically, reporters from American papers would appear in Leeds to survey the new career of the onetime flagship heretic. Clyde Farnsworth of the New York Times was one of the earliest, visiting in February 1964. He found Lattimore ecstatic about the program's success in teaching spoken Chinese: "By the end of the first term, we had students taking simple dictation in Chinese characters." Farnsworth mentioned the "brain drain" of many British scholars leaving for the United States because of higher pay. Lattimore was a "brain drain" in reverse. Why had he come there? "Some people are interested in going where the money is, others where the brains are. That's why I am in Britain. In my field there is more original thinking here than in the United States." ^[7]

Lattimore put it more colorfully in a letter to Bernhard: "As soon as possible, you and Janet must come over. Eleanor and I are happier than we've been in years. So many interesting things going on, so many inter-

esting people. It's as if, in a weird way, Baltimore were the sleepy English village where nothing ever happened, and Leeds the driving, creative American city, with people thinking and doing all the time."^[8]

In May an Associated Press story probed Lattimore's reactions to the McCarthy years. " "I was angry at the time,' Prof. Lattimore said in an interview, 'as anyone would be had they been falsely accused. But it is no use sitting around nursing rancor.' "Lattimore had kind words for Charles de Gaulle, who had just recognized the People's Republic of China. This was a much-needed breakthrough. China was a great power, and her quarrel with the Soviet Union was a danger to the rest of the world; while recognition "will not make the Chinese all sweet and reasonable, at least then we would have some way of dealing with them." ^[9]

Lattimore was encouraged, in March 1964, to think that even he might have a way of dealing with the Chinese. Edgar Snow had met Chou Enlai in Africa and wrote Lattimore that Chou had expressed interest in the Department of Chinese Studies at Leeds.^[10] Lattimore decided to write Chou. Even though his own connection with the Mongols might make him persona non grata in Peking (Mongol-Chinese relations at the time were bitter), he desperately wanted other members of his staff to have access to China. The PRC chargé d'affaires in London was not responsive to inquiries from Leeds. Chou, at the time, was no better.

During August 1964 Lattimore went back to Mongolia. Eleanor was not able to go, so Lattimore's son David accompanied him. He described his trip in a letter to Mortimer Graves: "We did about 2,500 miles in a jeep-like vehicle, then came back to Ulan Bator and I saw a lot of my scholar friends. They did just about everything except make me a member of the University and the Academy, and we came back loaded with loot. In addition, we are getting eight students to come here [Leeds] this month for an intensive six-months' English course. A real scoop, first ever west of the Iron Curtain."^[11] David remembers that more than anything else on their trip, his father enjoyed talking with Okladnikov, whom the elder Lattimore regarded as the most impressive scholar-adventurer he ever knew.

The Lattimore house in the fall of 1964 was like a hotel. The rector of the Mongolian National University was just one of hundreds of guests who made the Lattimore residence a visitor's center. Americans, Mongols, British, French, Swedes—very conceivable nationality sent somebody to visit Lattimore. Reading Eleanor Lattimore's letters, one wonders

how her husband ever had time for scholarly activity. The long Christmas vacation was a blessing. Lattimore took seven days of it for a trip to Rome and Paris but spent the rest in his study.

In March 1965, at the end of the Leeds winter term, the Lattimores went to the United States, visiting David and family, Joe and Betty Barnes, Evelyn Stefansson and her new husband John Nef, Bill and Suki Rogers, and friends in California. While they were attending the Association for Asian Studies conference in San Francisco in early April, word came from David that the Dilowa, then in a New York hospital, was rapidly losing strength. Lattimore flew immediately to New York: "I found him very weak, but not in pain. I sat by his bed, holding his hand. He could only say a few words at a time, but wanted to be assured that all was well with me and my wife. At last I left, to go up to New Haven to see my son, saying that I would be back the next day: but he died in the night."^[12] The date was April 7, 1965; the Dilowa was eighty-one.

Of all the fascinating Mongols Lattimore knew, the Dilowa was the closest to him and the greatest influence on his life. They differed on many things, especially religion. As Lattimore explained it, the Dilowa "told me in a tolerant, friendly way that I had no vocation for religion and it was no use trying to explain Buddhism to me."^[13] But Lattimore did not disparage the old man's religion, and when he finally published the Dilowa's autobiography in 1982, his introduction gave a most sympathetic account of his friend's religious beliefs.

Sentiment among Lattimore's friends in the United States about the Vietnam War was rising. Particularly while he was in California, leaders of the antiwar movement urged him to speak out about American policy. He agreed and chose the medium of a long letter published in the New York Times April 9, 1965. The CIA recorded a remarkably accurate summary of his arguments.^[14] The summary did not, however, display the flavor of his impassioned prose. His last three paragraphs do that well:

Is the next Pearl Harbor to be an American bombing of China? Is that the meaning of the smooth, cold, authoritative, hypnotically evasive voices of McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and the imperfectly civilianized Gen. Maxwell Taylor?

One difference between Japan then and America now is that we are more free to protest. We must use that freedom. Between here and the Pacific Coast I have heard and read enough to know that many have been ahead of me in raising their voices and many of them are more influential than I.

But unless we all unite in a great outcry of horror, repudiating this

obsessed policy of doom, we shall not waken from the nightmare in time. ^[15]

Predictably, Lattimore's blast called forth equally fervent defenses of American policy. The Times carried one on April 20. Bruno Shaw, a former AP correspondent in China, interpreted our Vietnam adventure quite differently. We were, said Shaw, trying to "help save the free nations of South Asia and the Western Pacific from onslaught and domination by Red China's puppet armies," which, if allowed to conquer Vietnam, would set off World War III and dim the outlook for freedom all over the world. The paradigm had now shifted: Ho Chi Minh was the puppet of China, just as Mao had been the puppet of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the most obscurantist response to Lattimore's letter was that of his old enemy Robert Morris. His paradigm had not shifted at all. Red China and Red Russia were still "firm allies in war against us and have always said so." Lattimore, said Morris, was once again trying to guide us to disaster. Lattimore compounded his offense as soon as he got back to England. He joined in the formation of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, described by UPI as a "breakaway from the Britain-China Friendship Association, which always has been tied to the Moscow-aligned British Communist Party."^[16]

Lattimore did not participate in any of the British protests against U.S. policy in Vietnam. In June 1965 he told Norman Moss of the North American Newspaper Alliance, "I think it is more proper to confine my protests to my own country." On the larger world scene he was quite willing to comment, giving Moss an extensive analysis of the Sino-Soviet split. This split "is the kind that great powers have regardless of ideology. But don't count on it lasting forever. In international affairs, neither friends nor enemies are forever." As to relations between China and Vietnam, his sight was 20/20: if the Chinese tried to move into Vietnam, "they'd have insurrection on their hands. And they wouldn't be able to handle it any more than we can."^[17]

The summer of 1965 was one of Lattimore's best. In May he gave the Chichele Lectures at Oxford; on June 4 he received, finally, a university degree, Glasgow's D. Litt.; and in July he hosted at Leeds 170 participants in the International Congress of Chinese Studies. To keep up to speed he and Eleanor toured the continent again in August with granddaughter Maria (age eleven), taking in a history congress in Vienna along with Alpine scenery and Parisian dining.^[18]

Fall term at Leeds in 1965 brought heavy work and dank weather. The

Lattimores were determined to make up for the frustrations and tragedies of the previous Christmas and arranged to spend Christmas this time in sunny Israel. Letters to their friends were glowing; Eleanor took painting lessons, Owen lectured and consulted with Israeli scholars. The kibbutzim, he felt, were solidly established; Oriental and Occidental Jews, some Marxist and some not, got along because rugged pioneer conditions dampened "theoretical differences of ideology." But the economy of Israel was overwhelmingly capitalist, and if the socialized kibbutzim were "to start growing rapidly, the capitalist interest, backed by America, would very rapidly call them to order." ^[19]

In March 1966 Lattimore was back in the United States for an Asian studies meeting in New York, several lectures, and parties in Washington given by John and Evelyn Nef. Two of Lattimore's lectures can be documented: at Harvard March 26 and at Brown on the twenty-eighth. He was on American soil, free again to criticize American policy— Asian policy. Our policy in Europe had been a great success, but in Asia an increasingly disastrous failure. We had not learned to cut our losses and get out of a hopeless mess. He likened the situation to an American investor telling his broker one week that a stock the broker recommended at $100 was too high, then asking the broker to buy the stock a week later at $125.^[20]

The FBI followed Lattimore's lecture tour fitfully. They knew he lectured at Brown but were apparently unaware of the Harvard speech.

Lattimore had not written Arnold Bernhard for almost a year, blaming the hiatus on his obsession with the "Vietnam tragedy." He called on Bernhard when he was in New York April 5, 1966, and Bernhard encouraged him to write a signed article on the war for Value Line . This article appeared in the June edition, saying all the negative things about America's counterproductive approach to stopping communism that Lattimore had been telling audiences for several years. Value Line got some static because of the Lattimore article; William F. Buckley, Jr., and other columnists who still had an investment in the inquisition attacked the piece strongly. Bernhard did not regret carrying it. On June 23 he sent Lattimore a check for $1,000 and said that while Value Line had received a few cancelations because of the Lattimore article, he was glad and proud to have been able to print it.^[21]

While Lattimore was in Washington during April 1966, he used a private channel to further his objective of ending the Vietnam War. He believed that the power of the president to obtain public support for a change of policy was great enough that "it ought to be possible to adopt either a

'hard' or a 'soft' policy, or to switch from one to the other, and have the decision or the switch hailed as a stroke of genius." Thus President Johnson could successfully reverse course in Vietnam. Lattimore discussed this matter with Walter Lippmann and James Reston; both agreed. Reston, to support the idea, noted "that at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis Kennedy had the option of acting in several ways other than the way he finally adopted, and could have counted on a strong public support whichever way he acted."^[22]

Thus encouraged, Lattimore sought the best channel to LBJ. No public proposal stood a chance of adoption by the president; Johnson was gun-shy of having an idea "sold" to him or "planted" on him by someone else. The best channel was Lattimore's old friend and now Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, a presidential confidant. Lattimore went to Fortas with his idea. "My suggestion was that LBJ should make a startling, unexpected switch in policy. He should get away from the sterile insistence that all the trouble in South Vietnam was invented by Hanoi, and the Vietcong are mere puppets and instruments of Hanoi. In dropping this line he would get away from the endless blind alley argument about whether Hanoi should be allowed to bring some Vietcong representatives along with them to a negotiation. Instead, he should say boldly, we intend to negotiate with the people against whom we are fighting, the Vietcong. If the Vietcong want to bring along with them some delegates from Hanoi, that is up to them. This move, I believe, would act as a catalyst on the whole situation."^[23]

The meeting with Fortas was quite different from any of his other discussions of Vietnam. "With Abe, there was obviously no question of a 'conversation.' He . . . would never even talk to an old friend in a way that might indicate how far he is privy to LBJ's thinking. So all I could do was to talk to Abe as persuasively as I could, and this I did."^[24] Shortly after Lattimore saw Fortas, Senator J. William Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power , which proposed ideas similar to Lattimore's. Johnson's choler at Senator "Half bright" knew no bounds. The war continued.

Lattimore wanted to take David to Mongolia again the summer of 1966, but David was working hard on his dissertation and decided he shouldn't go. Eleanor preferred another visit to the United States, so Lattimore went to Mongolia with Urgunge Onon. He had a glorious month, recording songs and legends and visiting for the first time Gurban Nor, the alleged birthplace of Genghis Khan. He had all of July in the MPR, then met Eleanor in Copenhagen for a week before returning to Leeds.^[25]

Lattimore was now sixty-six, and retirement was creeping up. Leeds gave him a special dispensation to stay on active duty until he was seventy, but he and Eleanor began to plan their life after he had to give up his post at Leeds. Eleanor wanted to return to the United States, where friends and family were clustered in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. Owen was more inclined to stay in England, where the intellectual rewards were greater and the continent a mere train ride away. Apparently the deciding factor was a warning from Bill Rogers that were either of the Lattimores to die in England, the inheritance taxes would be colossal. American rates were much more modest. Rogers urged the Lattimores to buy land near them in Virginia.^[26]

Grappling with the retirement problem caused Lattimore to reflect on his attitudes toward the United States and Britain. In a letter to Bill Rogers October 10, 1966, he wrote, "I will be perfectly frank in saying that I am depressed at the prospect of having to return to live in America. England has its drawbacks, and the British support for American imperialism, almost unquestioning, is a scandal, but nevertheless university life is very much more stimulating than in America. I suppose that in England my views could be classed as more radical Tory than Left. Certainly I have no sympathy for the bogus socialism of people like Harold Wilson and George Brown, but I do find many points of sympathy for the views of a conservative like Enoch Powell."^[27]

During the Lattimores' years at Leeds, entertaining was so heavy that they moved to a larger house near the university. Lattimore wrote in 1975, "We lived successively in two houses, each made beautiful by Eleanor's genius for knowing both what to do to a house and how to live in it."^[28] Part of their entertaining was of potential donors to the Chinese and Mongol programs. Lattimore spent much time with Stanley Burton, an internationally minded businessman in Leeds who contributed both ideas and funds to advance the study of Asia. On March 18, 1968, the British Royal Society of Arts held one of its periodic celebrations; Lattimore was featured, delivering a lecture titled "China Today: Some Social Aspects." Then he flew to the United States for a lecture tour and came back into CIA cognizance; that organization clipped a report in the Boston Herald Traveler of his lecture at the Community Church of Boston head-lined "Lattimore Says U.S. Fails on Intelligence."^[29]

The cost of this constant activity—and of constant traveling—was reduced scholarship. Books that he was committed to review piled up on his desk. Letters from scholar-friends around the world, asking for advice or information, were answered months after arrival, if at all. The major work he intended on Chinese history was untouched. He wanted to edit and

publish the Dilowa's memoirs and started Eleanor working on it, but it made little progress.

A constant stream of scholars from all over the globe came to the grimy Midlands industrial town because Lattimore was there. One of these visitors was S. L. Tikhvinskii, Asian expert and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, whom Lattimore had known for a long time. Lattimore's colleagues at Leeds were a bit uneasy at this visit: Tikhvinskii was believed to be a KGB general.^[30] Lattimore didn't care. He wasn't doing anything classified, and he claimed to have learned more from Tikhvinskii than Tikhvinskii had learned from him. (When Soviet and American historians held their first joint conference on post-World War H relations in Moscow June 16-18, 1987, Tikhvinskii headed the Soviet historians; George F. Kennan headed the American delegation.)^[31]

Lattimore heard rumors during the mid-1960s that he had been proposed as a full member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences but that Party authorities had vetoed the proposal. In 1967, though, it finally happened. He was notified that he had been voted in as the only foreign member. Investiture was to take place the summer of 1969.

Lattimore thought, in the first months of 1968, that it might now be time to revisit China. Accordingly he wrote Madame Sun, thinking her more likely to be able to answer his letters than Mao or Chou. He was right; she did answer, on February 13. But the answer was hardly comforting. She was pleased to hear of his Chinese curriculum at Leeds, welcomed his interest in events in China, and thought the "great changes" of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" should be studied by Westerners—but "Relations between China and the United States being what they are due to the hostile attitude and actions of the United States government, there is little hope for an invitation."^[32] She sent best wishes to him and his family.

Unable to visit China, the Lattimores decided to attend the European Congress of Chinese Studies to be held in Prague. Many of their Czech friends had visited them in Leeds and had promised reciprocal hospitality during the congress. Two days before the Lattimores were to leave, the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, and the congress was canceled. This was a catastrophe of major dimensions to the entire European intellectual community. Lattimore worried over the Czech invasion for months. His final evaluation was expressed in a letter to Arnold Bernhard December 9, 1968:

Was the Soviet action "red imperialism?" No. It was a colossal blunder, a misreading of the situation, an unneeded security measure. Czechoslovakia was not trying to play the West, especially West Germany,

against Russia. The Russians were guilty of thick-skinned, "big brother" insensitivity to a small nation's justifiable confidence in its own intelligence and competence to manage its own affairs. The Russians are prone to the great power attitude. "We are in the big time. We deal with the U.S., atomic problems, and all that. You little fellows are only bush-league players. Your politics, and your understanding of world problems, are parochial." That is the Russian Big Power insensitivity.^[33]

There followed a five-page analysis going beyond the immediate Czech crisis to long-term prospects for the Soviet Union. Lattimore foresaw, in the distance, perestroika.

The final years of his Leeds professorship were the best years of Lattimore's life. Even though the administrative and teaching burden was oppressive, the rewards made it worthwhile. His department had more than fifty undergraduate majors, several graduate students on their own, two Leverhulme Trust Sino-Soviet fellows, and "the recent British ambassador to Mongolia who is with us as a research fellow on a year of sabbatical leave from the Foreign Office."^[34] There were even students from the U.S. Department of State specializing in Mongol studies. Lattimore had seven faculty members directly under him and three "lecturers planted as infiltrators in other departments." When he wrote Joe Barnes in November 1966, he was negotiating for three more faculty appointments and spending several hours a week with three students from Mongolia. He and Eleanor were their "godparents" while they were at Leeds.

The program of Mongol studies was the capstone of Lattimore's academic achievements. Having Urgunge Onon with him made it academically possible; Lattimore's stature in the global intellectual community made it financially possible. No university funds were available for Mongol studies; Lattimore financed them by tapping private donors, a rarity in Britain. His was the only program in the English-speaking world actively serving visiting Mongols and dealing with contemporary Mongol culture and politics.

Christmas 1968 the Lattimores again spent in the United States, primarily arranging architects and builders for the retirement home they were to build on the land in Southdown estates near Great Falls, Virginia, adjoining the new home of Bill and Suki Rogers. In addition to visiting in the East, they went to California to see the Robert LeMoyne Barretts. Barrett was now ninety-seven, living in a mountain retreat near Los Angeles. He was hard of hearing and almost blind but still "fantastically healthy," according to Eleanor, and still supportive of Lattimore's travels

and heresies.^[35] On March 5, 1969, two months after they visited him, Barrett died. Since Barrett admired Lattimore's fortitude in opposing the senatorial inquisition, a substantial part of Barrett's estate was left to Owen Lattimore and went to further Mongol studies. Joe McCarthy and Pat McCarran never knew how they had thus strengthened academic study of the MPR.

The summer of 1969 was special for Lattimore. He was to retire from Leeds after the next school year and return to the United States. Before making this move, he and Eleanor had a major tour to make.

They began with a week of frustration in Paris, where Lattimore had to deal with Soviet consular officials for a visit to Moscow and a transit visa to Ulan Bator. Lattimore's respect for most of the Soviet scholars he knew was high, but the bureaucracy drew his unmitigated contempt. His language describing the 1969 hassle was scathing. Soviet consuls were, among other things, "constipated."^[36]

Then to a happy week in Italy, attending the European Congress of Chinese Studies and visiting old friends. On to Moscow: Intourist fouled up again, and no one met them at the airport. But Lattimore had that valuable possession, a Moscow telephone number (for the Soviet Academy of Sciences). The Academy came to their rescue and put them up in the VIP scholars' hotel. As Lattimore described events in a letter to his son on October 12, 1969, there began a week of

long talks with individuals and small discussion groups on China, Mongolia, the history of Central Asian nomadism—all very professional, and real discussion possible. This is the fifth time I have been in Moscow since 1960, and never have I found people so relaxed and open. Not a single sign of the war-with-China scares that we have had all summer in the Western press. . . . On China, the Cultural Revolution, Mao himself the Russians are very , very tough, but they have shifted gears. Instead of vulgar abuse, a serious attempt to analyze Chinese history and society. . . .

We saw a lot of dear old Zlatkin, the chap who did that ponderous critique of my life and works in 1960. I become fonder and fonder of him as the years go by. He is undoubtedly the most flat-looted, unimaginative, do-it-by-the-book-and-by-the-rules Marxist I have ever encountered; but at the same time he is decent, honest, likeable. He is now engaged on an enormous steam-roller exercise in flattening out Arnold Toynbee's theory of nomadic history. He asked me to read this and criticise it (which I did). I also told him that I would see to it that Toynbee gets a translation of the critique when published, and said that Toynbee would not take offense at strong but honest criticism. (As a

matter of fact he will chuckle at Zlatkin's ponderousness.) Zlatkin knows my critique of Toynbee, published some years ago, but when he found that we are very good friends of the Toynbees he wanted to know all kinds of personal details. Finally he asked me solemnly to assure Toynbee that his criticism is in no way a personal attack, and not meant to be offensive; that he hopes Toynbee will live many more years and write many more books. (Arnold will be delighted.)^[37]

The Lattimores arrived in Ulan Bator in mid-September 1969 to what he described as a homecoming. The MPR was liberally sprinkled with former students from Leeds who competed with each other in providing both Owen and Eleanor hospitality to repay what the students had experienced in England. On hand to welcome him were not only former students but also friends like Dalai, the young historian whom Lattimore had met in Moscow years before and had as a companion during his travels in Mongolia in 1961. Dalai had just served a tour in the MPR embassy in Peking, where hostility between the two countries was, if anything, worse than that between China and Russia. Dalai was glad to be back in Ulan Bator; the isolation of Mongols in Peking he described as "deadening."

Lattimore found that he was now extended an unofficial honor in some ways more significant than membership in the Academy of Sciences; he was "La Bagsh." This title, which came from Manchu days, simply meant "teacher." Only three Mongol professors were addressed this way before the summer of 1969, and Lattimore became the fourth by consensus of the academic community. Even the president of the Academy was not so addressed.

Lattimore wrote David a long description of his investiture at the Academy. The president of the Academy, Shirendyb, began with a welcoming speech. Then two academicians presented him with a traditional scarf (Lattimore described it as magnificent) and a colorful gown. Eleanor was also honored with a "gorgeous Manchu-style sleeveless jacket." There followed a reading of Lattimore's biography by academician Lobsanvandan, and Lattimore then spoke.

Urgunge Onon had warned Lattimore to prepare his speech in English and get someone to help translate it into Mongol, but the press of socializing had been so great there hadn't been time for this preparation. Lattimore "just thought about it the night before and memorised the general outline. The only thing I carefully composed and memorised was a closing invocation to world peace, which I did in the traditional alliterative rhapsodic style—a five-line stanza. As I had opened with some very common-language, vernacular passages (they like changes of pace and the mixing

of style), this was a great success." Lattimore, who had never earned a college degree, took academic ceremonies lightly, except for his induction into the Mongolian Academy. Compared with the top scientific bodies in major-power states it may have been insignificant, but to him the Mongolian Academy epitomized all the glamour and glory of the ancient Central Asian kingdoms. He wore his Mongol gown from then on when he took part in academic ceremonies throughout the Western world.

Shortly after the investiture ceremony the Lattimores were invited to an official audience with Tsedenbal, first secretary of the Mongolian Communist party and premier of the government. Tsedenbal remembered Lattimore from the trip with Wallace in 1944 and produced a photograph of the two of them with Marshal Choibalsan. Surprisingly, Tsedenbal seemed indifferent to this opportunity to "prime" Lattimore with the Mongol version of the raging battles within the Communist bloc. Lattimore wrote David, "In fact, I was the one who tried a political demarche. Tsedenbal asked about our years in China, and my starting to learn Mongol there. I told him, and then said that some of the things happening in China recently must remind Mongols of their own period of 'leftist excesses,' about 1928-32. 'Yes, but the Chinese have been much more extreme,' he said, and went on to other things."

Owen and Eleanor were taken on a tour of the countryside, but extreme weather conditions (early snow squalls and heavy rain) kept them from enjoying it as much as usual. Mongol hospitality was greater than ever, however; Lattimore was now introduced with a whole new set of superlatives in villages they visited. He recalled David's explanation of why he got on so well with the Mongols: he was "culturally interesting, but no longer politically dangerous." At one village sending-off party someone asked him how many children he had: "I replied in the old set phrases, one single, solitary son, but from him six grandchildren, four mere girls and two girdled youths. An intellectual man spoke up: Nowadays, you know, we just say four females, two males. Yes, I said, but you can see that I am in my declining years, and for me the old way of speaking is better; I am, after all, just a feudal remnant, a relic of the bad old times. They nearly fell apart laughing."^[38]

In October 1969 the Lattimores returned to Leeds for their last year. It flew by unmercifully. The endless rounds of entertaining, the streams of visitors from abroad, the preparations for turning the department over to his successor, all kept Lattimore from digesting and writing up the huge amount of Mongolian material he had gathered. But these necessities did

not keep him from dictating long letters to Arnold Bernhard and to the recipient of his most reflective writing: Joe Barnes. He was, he wrote Barnes October 20, increasingly glad he was not a Marxist. He thought there had been a lot of devotion to blind ideology when the Russians panicked over Prague Spring and invaded that backsliding country. As for himself: "England, I love you. How sad that our principal reason for our Christmas visit this year [to the United States] will be not to observe the quaint manners and customs of the natives, but to get on with building our place of exile among the bien-pensants of Virginia."^[39]

Lattimore had now become fond of John Nef, Evelyn Stefansson's new husband, and had some philosophical reflections for him too in November. Lattimore was working on a lecture titled "Peking Seen from Moscow and Ulan Bator." As he wrote Nef, he got along well with both Russians and Chinese, but they were hard to argue with; there was a lot of "big nation" arrogance, similar to that of Americans. But the Mongols were different: "Perhaps the reason I get on best of all with the Mongols is that they are a powerless people. If they were a big nation, throwing its weight about in the world, I would probably have reservations about them."^[40]

Eleanor, for all her grace as a hostess, was weary by the end of their time at Leeds. The last year had been particularly trying, largely because of an important Mongol visitor and his wife, neither of whom spoke English. Eleanor bore the brunt of accommodating their needs, and her letters to Evelyn Nef in early 1970 showed her quite ready to give up the job of department chairman's wife and get on with her dream house in Southdown. The Lattimores were saddened by Joe Barnes's death from cancer on February 28; Owen had vowed to spend long hours with Joe when they returned to the United States, catching up on the mood of the country and tapping in to Barnes's fabulous journalistic pipeline. Owen was more hesitant to leave Leeds than Eleanor was, but even he welcomed the leisure that retirement would bring, enabling him to get back to writing. And the Library of Congress would be available.

On Saturday, March 21, 1970, he and Eleanor boarded a plane for Washington to inspect progress on the Southdown house, after which they would return to Leeds to close out the house and make their last farewells.

Chapter Thirty
After Leeds

As the plane carrying the Lattimores landed at John F. Kennedy Airport on March 21, 1970, Eleanor suffered a massive, fatal pulmonary embolism. Owen described it as "a crowning mercy. She never knew what happened. No pain, no fear, no premonition. But that was the end of what one of her friends called 'a honeymoon of forty-four years.'"^[1] Eleanor was seventy-five, five years older than her husband.

Eleanor had not exactly been in the background during her husband's years of prominence; she was more a partner than an assistant. In those thousands of routine tasks on which any enterprise depends, she was the stalwart: arranging, organizing, encouraging, substituting if need be. She shared the limelight and dominated the shadows. Owen was adrift without her.

Without exception, Owen's friends were also Eleanor's friends, and the ties between the Lattimores and the many people they knew and loved were nurtured primarily by Eleanor. She was by all accounts an extraordinary personality, with a warmth that offset her husband's sometimes abrasive manner. Evelyn Stefansson Nef organized and published a beautiful memorial booklet for Eleanor, with Brian Hook's London Times obituary and tributes by Etienne Balazs, George Boas, Pearl Buck, Bill Rogers, and others.

Lattimore was taken in by Bill and Suki Rogers at their Southdown home in Great Falls, Virginia, in the first days of his bereavement. The Lattimore house at Southdown, planned by Eleanor, was not yet ready for occupancy. Owen could not have moved in so soon in any case; it was really her house. After short stays with the Rogers and a visit with his son David he returned to Leeds for the closing days of the school year.

Lattimore had traded barbs with the fiercest of Senate inquisitors and faced down malevolent Asian camel drivers in the middle of the Gobi, but the loss of his wife was almost more than he could bear. A letter to Evelyn Nef from Leeds May 15, 1970, displays the depth of his anguish and the slowness of his recovery.

Your letter was very sweet and much needed, coming at a time when I was badly demoralized—as you foresaw. Things are not so bad now. I've been away from home a couple of times and back again. I don't know what primitive psychology it is that makes each coming back diminish the hauntedness a bit. But I still break down—I did in Cambridge a couple of days ago—when I meet for the first time people of whom Eleanor was especially fond.

I think I told you of my idea of a possible long stay in Mongolia, but wondered if the Mongols would agree. I needn't have worried. By the time I got back to England there was a message waiting for me—come to Mongolia, we'll make you Dean of all our Far Eastern studies. You can do as much or as little work as you like, but we'll look after you for always. Of course I couldn't do quite that—it would be a kind of running away—but I was so touched that I cried and cried.^[2]

On June 24 students and faculty of the Leeds Center for Chinese and Mongolian Studies gave Lattimore a farewell dinner, with the Mongolian Ambassador to the Court of St. James in attendance. It was a subdued occasion. Every person present had been Eleanor's guest.

Equally painful was the prospect of returning to Asia without Eleanor. Lattimore was due to go back the summer of 1970 to attend a congress of Mongolists in Ulan Bator and to visit, for the first time as a scholar, the libraries and archaeological sites in the Soviet areas bordering on China and Mongolia. He had visited some of these with Wallace but had had no opportunity to do research. The Soviet initiative for this invitation came from Okladnikov. All the scholarly riches of Central Asia were opening up for Lattimore, and he would be exploring them alone. On March 27, 1970, he wrote a sad note to Okladnikov, telling of Eleanor's death and recalling times when they had all been together at scholarly meetings: "it warmed my heart to see how, when you met [Eleanor], each appreciated the other so quickly and so rightly. . . . So that is the end of a marriage of 44 years that was perfect from beginning to end—thanks to her. What more can I say? I turn to you, and the comradeship of those who . . ." Here the CIA photocopy machine malfunctioned, and the conclusion of the letter to Okladnikov is not readable.^[3]

Edgar Snow, living in Switzerland, was unaware of Eleanor's death when he addressed a letter to both Owen and Eleanor May 20. Snow had heard of Joe Barnes's death and wrote, "I know what a loss it has been to you both." But most of Snow's letter was comment springing from Lattimore's introduction to the 1970 reprinting of Jack Belden's China Shakes the World .^[4] Lattimore had written this brief introduction in January 1970 at Leeds; he admired Belden's book and put it in context by comparing it with two other classic descriptions of the rise of the Chinese Communists: Snow's Red Star over China and William Hintoh's Fanshen .

In his introduction to Belden's book, Lattimore comments, "I remember talking to a Communist about Snow, years ago, at a time when adherents of Chiang Kai-shek were denouncing him [Snow] as nothing but a mouthpiece for Communist propaganda. The Communist shook his head. No, he said, they respected Snow as a completely honest man. His reporting of facts could be relied on. But his interpretations did not entitle him to rank as a 'spokesman,' because he did not really understand Marxism."^[5] Lattimore then notes that Belden's book was even more important in 1970 than it had been in 1949 when it was first published: "Page after page is a reminder that the stupid, obvious, unnecessary mistakes made by the American political and military establishments in China have been made over again, and are still being made, in Vietnam." The United States had in the late 1940s, and still had, a "bewitched belief that the incantation of words like 'freedom' and 'democracy' (accompanied by the spending of lots of money) could somehow conjure up an Ohio-like or New England-like regime capable of reversing a revolution already in being." America was still a "society blinded by imperialistic preconceptions."^[6]

Snow, in his letter to Lattimore, agreed.

I noticed that you quote some Chinese as saying that Snow is an honest man but doesn't understand Marxism. That I could never have been a Chinese Communist "spokesman" ought not to have done me any harm in the councils of our great ones at home—but few of them ever heard that. (Besides, it was OL speaking.) In fact I have (though not very recently) spent a vast amount of time reading Marx and Engels and, even more, their various disciples, from orthodox to revisionist. After living in Russia several years (and away from realities in Washington) my early tendency to subscribe to the "exceptionalism" notion about the U.S. was strongly reinforced. It was not even entirely shattered by McCarthyism; I thought the inner structure was still sound and that the good in the American democratic process was still viable and would

prevail to overcome a banal fulfillment of the role of imperialism. It was not until Kennedy fell in step with the Pentagon and CIA and deceived himself and us in Vietnam that I saw the "exceptionalism" truly was and had to have been a mirage, a subjective thing with me—which was understandable because I, like you, had been taken in by the Establishment, tolerated for a while as an "exception" myself, a kind of house nigger. Yes, Virginia, there is an American imperialism—the most vicious and dangerous kind yet seen, and all the more so because people, thinking themselves free, could not imagine carrying anything but freedom elsewhere.^[7]

Lattimore noted on Snow's letter "Answered 19 June 70." His answer does not survive. It would have been interesting. He did not agree with Snow that American imperialism was the "most vicious kind": he thought the Fascists worse.

Closing up the Leeds house was more than Lattimore could handle alone. He prevailed on Charlotte Riznik, with whom he and Eleanor had been friends ever since Riznik had been his office manager at OWl in San Francisco, to help him dismantle and ship his possessions. Riznik arrived at Leeds in early June, and by June 14 Lattimore could report to the Nefs that Charlotte had taken over and things were beginning to work: "I have been crippled by hesitation, inability to make decisions. She sorts things out up to a certain point, then comes to me and says 'I want a decision.' Good for my morale, because it gives me the illusion of being the boss, while gently disguising the fact that I am being managed, which of course is what I still can't do without."^[8] He was so pleased with Riznik's help that he offered her a job as "manager secretary," but she would promise no more than helping him get settled in Virginia.

Charlotte Riznik must indeed have been good for his morale. When he wrote Academician Y. V. Peive, chief scientific secretary of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, on June 26, 1970, suggesting dates for his trip to Soviet Central Asia, he was brimming with confidence about his future scholarly endeavors. He outlined on two single-spaced pages the historical-ethnographic studies he intended to accomplish for the next ten yeas—emphasizing that while he hoped his knowledge would be of use to Russian and Mongolian colleagues, "I have much more to learn . . . than I can teach." Peive must have been impressed. The travel schedule came off exactly as Lattimore suggested. And when he wrote the Nefs July 1, he was manic; that coming winter, he would be "finishing up 'China in History' and planning long-term research on Mongolia." He was looking forward to the winter of 1970-71 in the Southdown house; "I've suffered

a shattering defeat, but the retreat is ending and an advance into new terrain is in sight. Thank God for friends."^[9]

On July 16 he and Riznik flew to the United States, she to California to work in a political campaign until Lattimore was back from his summer in Asia, he to Washington, where he stayed with the Rogers, inspected progress on his almost-completed house, and made arrangements for unpacking his furniture when it arrived from Leeds. After a few days in New York with Gerard and Eleanor Piel and a visit to David in Providence, he was off to the Soviet Union. He arrived in Moscow August 17, 1970.

During his 1970 Asian trip Lattimore took pains to report more fully than he ever had to friends in the United States. These reports, or diary-letters, went to Bill Rogers at Arnold and Porter (Fortas had dropped out of the firm when he went to the Supreme Court), who photocopied them for a half-dozen relatives and friends. On this trip he had no companion, which no doubt impelled him to more comprehensive letter writing.

He wrote Rogers from Ulan Bator on August 22, reporting events on the plane from Moscow.

Yesterday I was badly shaken. I met some Mongols. All strangers, but as soon as they got my name they said, with a mixture of grave courtesy and personal tenderness, how sorry they were about Eleanor. . . .The Mongols always gave my work a kind of professional respect, but were very impatient of my political misguidedness, wrongheadedness, even stupidity. I think for years they really did think I was some kind of imperialist ideologue. Then, in 1960, we met their delegation to the Orientalist Congress, were invited to Mongolia for six weeks in 1961, and did a long trip into the Aru Khangai. In 1964 I came to Mongolia with David, and they saw what kind of son she and I had brought up. In the Leeds years, all the Mongols who came to England met her. Finally there was last year, and you've seen the account of that. The truth is that the Mongols decided that if I'd been happily married for so many years to a woman like Eleanor, I just couldn't be a wrong _' un. I might be politically askew (but not maliciously) and in any showdown involving human decency I could be trusted to come down on the right side.^[10]

However much he missed Eleanor, and possibly because of it, Lattimore plunged wholeheartedly into his duties for the congress. There were papers to be translated into the official languages (Mongol, Russian, English, French), his own remarks to polish, a book on English for Mongol schools to be edited, courtesy calls on various Academy figures he knew. On August 24, when he was leaving his hotel, several American tourists accosted

him. He reported to Rogers sarcastically that such incidents had happened before and that the tourists asked him to talk to their group "and explain to them what country they've been in." Most tourists, he found, had read nothing about Mongolia before coming and at most had heard of Genghis Khan and the Gobi Desert. Then they fell in love with the country and were "pathetically delighted to have bits of things explained." Big-game hunters from Texas were especially prone to captivation by their Mongol guides: the hunters were "marvellously confused between their truly Texan detestation of communism" and the fact that their guides "more than qualified by Texas he-man standards."^[11]

Lattimore and Urgunge Onon spent August 26, 1970, with Shirendyb, president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. They drove out to Shirendyb's country place in the valley "where the Wallace safari was quartered in 1944." Lattimore was fascinated by the Shirendyb entourage, especially by a former Buddhist monk, well read in the Tibetan scriptures, who had been a chauffeur to Shirendyb and was now retired on pension. The ex-monk loved to cook, and Shirendyb kept him around for that purpose. After an elaborate lunch the party played dominoes; Lattimore wrote, "The ex-monk kibitzed over my shoulder, so I came out on the winning side. Note: must remember to tell my clerical friends about the pleasures of being a pensioned ex-monk in an atheist country."^[12]

Shirendyb asked Lattimore about the history of a telescope given the Mongols by Peggy Braymer of the Questar Corporation at Lattimore's suggestion. Lattimore had wanted to "do something really different" for the Mongols to repay their hospitality. He saw an ad in Scientific American for a Questar telescope and asked Gerard Piel if it were a first-class job and if he might get a discount for a gift to the Mongols· Piel said it was indeed a terrific and expensive instrument, but no discounts were available. However, Piel knew the Braymers, and at his suggestion they gave a Questar to the Mongols. It was a tremendous hit and was used by the Mongols to establish accurately their far-flung borders by stellar observation and measurement. Peggy Braymer's letter of gift noted that Lattimore had worked for "better understanding" between the United States and the MPR. Lattimore wrote Rogers that this letter meant a great deal to the Mongols: "For them, 'peace and friendship' is not the malarky of international humbug. It's what they're hooked on. It means survival. . . . Driving home [from Shirendyb's] Urgunge said, 'There's one woman [Braymer] who's going to have no difficulty if she ever wants to visit Mongolia. And my bet is, she's going to get a hunk of dinosaur bone.'"

Dinosaur bone was the supreme present for someone hung with medals and vacuous honors.^[13]

The night of September 14, 1970, brought a welcome surprise to Lattimore. As he described it in a letter to Rogers:

After dinner I had gone to my room when, as I was reading, not being quite ready for bed, someone came in and asked me to come up to the top floor—and there was a surprise supper party, to honour my seventieth year. At least 30 people. It was overwhelming. Speeches and toasts in Mongol, Russian, German, French, Japanese. . . . Practically everybody referred to the McCarthy business, including the top Russian (I was sitting between him and Shirendyb, who was presiding), who said that in the Soviet Union, despite differences of politics, I am honoured for my defence of the human values and dignity of scholarship. After that, do I put two exclamation points, or three? But isn't it the irony of ironies that McCarthy should have opened the way for me to a whole new, international life of intellectual interest and activity! . . . When we were dispersing, old Damdinsuren said: "We have a lot of learned foreign friends here tonight, but among them all it is you who are a Mongol."^[14]

The rest of September, Lattimore worked at translating and editing the papers of the Congress of Mongolists and inspecting the new industrial city of Darkhan. He found Darkhan far more impressive than Dalstroi, and of course no one was hiding slave labor camps· After a round of farewell parties he was escorted on October 1 to Irkutsk and the beginning of his tour of Siberian archives and libraries·

It seems hardly possible that this tour could have been more profitable professionally than his deep immersion in Mongolia, yet his glowing descriptions of manuscripts and libraries almost warrant that conclusion. One conclusion is clearly warranted: had the historical and archaeological treasures of Central Asia been available to him in his early career, rather than in his seventieth year, his scholarly output would have been immensely increased. Age and the demoralization of losing Eleanor denied him opportunity to reflect on, analyze, and incorporate in his published work the riches that came to him in the 1970s.

His stay in Irkutsk was brief, two days for the library and museum· Ulan-Ude was next; it was the center of Buryat studies, and Lattimore stayed there a full week. The Buryats were at first stiff and formal, but he reported on October 9:

Things are livening up. It works the same way, over and over again. The locals are apt to begin by thinking that you've been wished off on them by some distant higher-up. They're polite and considerate, but they stand off a bit. Then, as they find you are not joy-riding but working really hard, and trying to learn, they warm up. Today there was an invitation—from the children themselves, not the teachers—to come to the intensive-English school and talk to the 10th and 9th year classes about American schools and education generally. . . . I was simple, but I tried to be honest. I talked about the differences between private and public schools, and between tax-supported schools in "good" residential districts where parents demand good teaching, and in slum districts and above all black districts. I explained why, in a country dominated by a bourgeois establishment, technological training is sound and scientific research and teaching are excellent, but in history, sociology, politics, economics you can get away with all kinds of slop, and in literature and poetry "individualism" justifies anything. . . . I'm telling you all this because of the payoff. It came back to me, over the grapevine, that one of the teachers had said, "We used to have two classics in Buryatia, but now we have three—Marx, Lenin, Lattimore.". . . Later in the afternoon I was pulled out of the library, and there was a deputation of kids with some nice little gifts.^[15]

From Ulan-Ude, Lattimore went to Novosibirsk. This visit brought back vivid memories:

This is the city where Eleanor left the Trans-Siberian in 1927 to take the then uncompleted Turk-Sib to Semipalatinsk, and on by sled to her Turkestan Reunion with me in Chuguchak. . . . I thought sadly, as I have thought so many times since her death, that I never did justice (and she never claimed credit for herself) to Eleanor's ingenuity and persistence, and above all incredible courage in making that journey. It was February, the cruellest month of winter, she didn't know more than a couple of words of Russian, and she had to struggle to get herself and more baggage than she could personally carry through a Siberia still wrecked by the revolution and civil war.^[16]

Novosibirsk was the home of Okladnikov, the master historian-archaeologist who had arranged Lattimore's trip. The scholarly riches there were greater than at any other stop. Lattimore found that librarians, archivists, even minor bureaucrats were willing, when they learned of his interests, to offer him out-of-print books to take back with him. For this largesse, he explained to Rogers, he would have to spend a small fortune buying books to send his Russian hosts after he got home—but it was worth it.

Lattimore wrote some thirty pages on his stay in Novosibirsk; his main theme was amazement. "This town is incredible. There are 5 million books in the library. And the Siberian Section, Academy of Sciences . . . they get all they want, for the most recondite researches" (ellipsis in original). Again Lattimore was struck with Soviet tolerance here of "Old Believers," most of them living in remote valleys and earning their living by sable hunting. They also "kept up the ancient tradition of illuminating MSS in the Byzantine and Old Slavonic styles, and the atheistic government, instead of persecuting them, subsidizes them."^[17]

Okladnikov arranged a side trip for Lattimore to archives in Biisk and Kyzyl. These were places he had known about only by name; he found them more than worth his time. On Biisk he remarked:

The people are terribly nice, and I am going to like them. . . . They are so full of interest—and it isn't drawing-room, curiosity interest. They were all professionals, and they wouldn't give up until they were able to "place" me professionally. Why had I come? What interest of mine could they help me with? . . . Why so short a visit? Could I learn enough? So I said, "You know your own Okladnikov. Other archeologists go over an area and say, No Paleolithic here. Then Okladnikov comes to the same area, walks straight to a point, says 'Dig here'—and there's a big Paleolithic find." They all laughed—everybody knows the Okladnikov stories.

Lattimore then explained his interest in nomadic peoples, Central Asian history, migrations, the relations of minorities to empires, geography, and so forth, to his audience:

As professionals, they were quite satisfied, but as individuals, they were more curious than ever. Where had I travelled? In what years? Under what conditions? The questions got more and more personal—right down to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tze-tung and Senator McCarthy and all. By the end, it was an unbelievable transvaluation of values . . . by the end of the evening these nice people had hypnotised themselves into thinking of me as a "romantic bourgeois." This is possible because in the Soviet Union today—and I say that instead of "Russia" because so many millions of peoples other than Russians make the Soviet Union what it is—only ancient characters like me can remember what the world was like before 1917.^[18]

The Biisk archaeologists took Lattimore on a long drive. The Altai Mountains into which they drove were much like the Heavenly Mountains of Lattimore's early travels. They showed him a Paleolithic site sim-

ilar to that of Peking Man, though they had found no comparable skull or bones. The final three days of his stay in Biisk were hectic and went unrecorded. He never got around to writing about them.

His next stop was Kyzyl in the Tuvinian republic. Lattimore, who at age seventy had seen most of the world and tasted of the richness of its cultures, here in the land of the Reindeer People found his Shangri-la.

Tuva has been the best yet. Of all the Soviet countries I have been in, it is the one that can be quite simply described as ravishing. It is bigger than Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Denmark combined, and they have a map to prove it. They are the Centre of Asia, and they have a monument, and obelisk, to prove that, too. They are enclosed by snow-capped mountains, but the internal valleys of the streams that are the headwaters of the lordly Yenesei are comparatively windless, and the winter is of a cheerful coldness. . . . They speak an ancient Turkish— very pure, few loan words. And the people are as ravishing as their country. They have a Gallic gaiety and lightness, combined with precision—and rather Gascon at that. Perhaps in the Soviet Union some of the small tribes of the Caucasus can match them for dash and elegance. They are mostly of middle height, and I never saw a fat one, man or woman. . . . I fell for them, hard (Mongols, look out—I may never come home), and thank goodness they took me to their hearts. The Director of the Pedagogical Institute and the Director of the Institute of History, Language, and Literature (he speaks good Mongol, though a bit literary) the two highest academic posts in the country, came each morning for breakfast and were with me until after dinner. . . .

We drove out southward toward the Tannu-tuva, the range dividing Tuva from Mongolia. Came to a place called Tuvakobalt, where there is a big cobalt mining and refining enterprise. Top engineer-manager a Russian (Ukrainian), but most of the technical posts were held by Tuvinians. This is the way the Russians work, with every minority nationality, they do not try to preserve "living museums" (Navahoes), but to develop "cadres" of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, engineers. At the same time, they encourage (not merely preserve) the local language and cultural traditions. Thus you get the local electronics-automation expert whose hobby is the poetic legends of his own people.^[19]

The remainder of his stay in Kyzyl is described in similarly glowing language. He didn't understand a thing about the cobalt works but knew he had to act impressed. When they asked him the usual Soviet questions, "Any criticisms? Any questions?" he responded, "What do you do about industrial waste?" They described an elaborate process of burying it in deep pits in a deposit of impermeable clay. When he left the cobalt works,

"They gave me a nicely-mounted set of test tubes of their product, in successive stages. I said, 'You'd better be careful. The American Customs might take this off me and turn it over to the CIA, and then I might be in for some questioning.' They all know 'CIA,' and they laughed, but I noticed that the test tubes never turned up in my luggage."^[20]

He spent only four days in Tuva, but it made the most lasting impression of his whole trip. The only article about the trip that he wrote for publication afterwards was an encomium of Tuva sent to the London Times on November 23, 1970.

Lattimore went back to Novosibirsk October 25 for a last few days with Okladnikov. He described these days as frenzied, with much time spent sorting books to take with him from books to be mailed and making lists of books to be bought in the West and sent to his Siberian hosts. Farewell parties occupied the rest of his time, with the "real farewell party" the afternoon of October 29: "Warm speeches. Everybody embraced everybody—big Russian bear-hugs. Okladnikov has really done all this for me out of the overflowing kindness of his Siberian heart. An unforgettable man."^[21]

On October 30 Lattimore was back in Moscow for a brief stop en route to Prague, Leeds, and home. There were the usual bureaucratic foul-ups. Given the friendliness of the academicians, it was hard for him to believe that Okladnikov and the Tuvians were part of the same country as the Moscow functionaries.

On November 20, 1970, Lattimore took possession of the house in Great Falls, Virginia, that he and Eleanor had expected to call home for the rest of their lives. This was probably more painful than anything he had ever experienced. His travels since her death in March postponed confronting the full domestic consequences of her absence. The warmth of his reception in Mongolia and Siberia had been therapeutic, but now he had to start up a household de novo, every decision reminding him of how much he had depended on her. Charlotte Riznik was there and as helpful as she had been in Leeds. Setting up a household, however, was more difficult than dismantling one. Riznik took over housekeeping; Lattimore was now absolutely dependent on her.

Books, manuscripts, correspondence, and other scholarly pursuits were another matter. He had a massive accumulation of scholarly materials, some from Leeds, more from his recent trip, with an avalanche of books yet to come: these were an insuperable challenge. Eleanor's control of the flow of paper, based on a lifetime of sharing Lattimore's professional ac-

tivities, could not be duplicated by anyone new. Now the paper was out of control, flooding the room Lattimore used for a study and several other rooms besides, boxed and unboxed, stacked, spread on tables, scattered almost without pattern. The unending requests to critique manuscripts, write articles, furnish recommendations, advise about academic programs—this avalanche of mail, which Eleanor had controlled and Owen had then turned over to secretaries, now got quite beyond him. In his despair he began drinking heavily. Despite the problems he did complete three articles that winter: one for a book edited by Toynbee, another for a book edited by Denis Sinor of Indiana University, and the "Mongols" entry for Encyclopaedia Brittanica . Gerry Piel's request for an article for Scientific American on ancient caravans had to be put off.^[22] And no work got done on "China in History" or the major Mongolian project.

Some relief came on January 25, 1971, when Fujiko Isono came to Great Falls. Fujiko had been a student of Lattimore at Leeds. She and her husband, Seiichi Isono, had been dissenters from Japan's aggressive policies in the 1930s and spent the war years studying in the Mongol areas of North China. Fujiko had been inspired to endure the hardships this entailed by reading Eleanor's Turkestan Reunion . When she read that the Lattimores were in England, she wrote and then visited them. During 1968-69 the Isonos both studied at Leeds.

Now she came to Great Falls to be of assistance to her former professor, bringing an offer from Japan's Asian Affairs Research Council and the Mainichi Newspapers (who would provide financing) to come to Tokyo the summer of 1971 to lecture. Lattimore accepted. Fujiko's knowledge of Lattimore's professional interests helped him deal with the mountain of paperwork, but Fujiko and Charlotte Riznik did not take to each other, and tension in the household did not improve Lattimore's morale.

In February 1971 Lattimore heard from Edgar Snow, just returned from China to his home in Switzerland. Snow again had interesting news. "Responsible persons" in Peking were asking whether Lattimore would accept an invitation to visit China. Snow told them he was sure Lattimore would want to come. But this was a period of poisonous relations between the Chinese and the Soviet Union; would Lattimore's ties with Ulan Bator and various Russian scholars make a visit to China awkward? The Chinese assured Snow that Lattimore's Soviet connections would be no obstacle. These things worked slowly, and Lattimore did not expect an invitation in time for a 1971 trip.^[23]

Lattimore stayed in Great Falls until May 1971, leaning heavily on Bill and Suki Rogers for friendship and moral support. He made little progres

on his backlog of paperwork but did manage to arrange visits to Mongolia and to friends in Bulgaria, East Berlin, and Denmark after his coming appearance in Japan. By May, when he left for Leeds en route to Tokyo, he was beginning to wonder if he could survive in a house where every feature bore Eleanor's imprint and every day's passage highlighted the need for her talents.

Lattimore had by now put behind him the trauma of the inquisition. His career since leaving Johns Hopkins had been so all-absorbing that there was no occasion to dwell on the ugly past. He was therefore startled when he went through the mail awaiting him at Leeds and found this letter:

8 Chemin des Roches
Fribourg, Switzerland
30 April 1971

Professor Owen Lattimore
University of Leeds
England

Sir:

This is written by a Russian witness against you during the Senate investigations in 1952 (Igor Bogolepov).

I have written a manuscript dealing with memoirs about American and Western in general politics of the cold war against my country, the Soviet Union. In these memoirs I explain the background of my testimony. I believe I have finally to tell the truth: I have very little time left to live and must hurry as much as I can. All my previous efforts to find a publisher either in America or England or elsewhere were in vain; the material is very hot in other aspects, too.

Would you be interested in assisting me to tell the truth? But you must take into consideration that my writings are very critical of the US government and American way of life in general. I had been and still am a patriot of my Soviet country; as Machiavelli told, one can serve his country con gloria e con ignomia. You may understand that I cannot say more until I learn about your attitude.

The manuscript is in Russian.

Very truly yours

I. Nyman^[24]

Bogolepov! The surprise witness so valued by SISS that he got more space in the committee's final report than any other did. The double de-

rector from the Russians to the Nazis to the Americans. The witness who said Soviet propagandists flooded IPR publications with their writings. The witness who quoted Litvinov as saying Lattimore was the most appropriate agent for "mobilizing public sentiment" in the West.

Lattimore was astounded. Could Nyman/Bogolepov actually be defecting again, back to the Russians? Why would he contact Lattimore? Why assume Lattimore could find him a publisher if his own efforts had failed? Was this a setup engineered by the CIA, or James O. Eastland, or Robert Morris, or someone else attempting to implicate Lattimore in some treasonous activity? Or was Nyman simply a very disturbed, possibly pathological character?

There was no time to stew about it. Lattimore was due to leave for Japan. Only one safe course came to mind: send the letter to Bill Rogers, who would know how to deal with it. Rogers did; he wrote Nyman June 4, 1971, saying that Lattimore was in Asia, but Nyman could send the manuscript to Arnold and Porter, where Rogers would hold it for Lattimore's return.^[25] The manuscript did not come, but this was not the end of Nyman.

Lattimore arrived in Tokyo June 4, 1971. He was whisked through customs; the customs man had read some of his writings and wished him a happy visit.

Explanation of this recondite literacy of a Customs inspector, surely unmatched anywhere else in the world: At the end of the war "The Making of Modern China," which Eleanor and I had written during the war, was quickly translated into Japanese. It is a very one-syllable-word, primer-like book, as indicated by the fact that it was also reprinted in a huge paperback edition for the use of U.S. troops. Anyhow, lots of Japanese have told me that it gave them their first glimpse of a China different from the official Japanese views of the 1930's. As the MacArthur occupation evolved into the Cold War years, another generation of Japanese came to fall back on it as a non-Cold War American depiction of China.^[26]

He later learned that The Making of Modern China was in its thirty-second Japanese printing.

Lattimore had not been in Japan since 1945. To his delight he discovered that Saburo Matsukata, one of the prewar Japanese IPR stalwarts, was still alive and anxious to see him. They visited for several hours. And at a luncheon of "big brass" from Mainichi and the Japanese Research Council, he was amazed to hear some of those present claim that they had read his book and agreed with much of it even in the 1930s. "I seem to

have had, at the time, an influence that I never knew about, on Japanese who, while working within the Japanese military-industrial-academic-imperialistic complex, were sceptical about its aims, its conduct, and its eventual outcome. Of course it was an ineffectual influence. What it all amounted to was that it helped a few people to say 'I told you so' when the party was over and the broken glass and crockery were being swept up."^[27]

Lattimore discovered a strong interest among Japanese scholars and businessmen in Mongolia, some of this interest apparently coming from his writings. "I sensed that with every one of them it began with a romantic interest which then developed into political partisanship, though all of them had been in either the political or military service of Japanese imperialism. It is strange that the Japanese have a particular and not dissimilar sentimentality about the Mongols, who under Khubilai [Khan] tried and failed to conquer them, and the Americans, who did conquer them. Whatever (as the Irish say), it seems it was the Japanese I subverted with my nefarious doctrines, not the Americans. Tut-tut."^[28]

On June 7, 1971, Lattimore gave his major lecture, sponsored by the Research Council and Mainichi. He used a contemporary theme: the United States, in the person of Richard Nixon, was finally dealing with the People's Republic of China. The shift in policy was greater than met the eye; in previous years Nixon had made much of American determination to negotiate only from a position of strength. And what was Nixon doing now? Not only dealing with the People's Republic of China, but dealing with it precisely because America's position in Vietnam was weak. "Today, whatever the way the Americans might take to cover up their defeat, one thing is no longer possible—the escalation of the war. Public opinion in America would not stand for it."^[29] The Mainichi Daily News gave Lattimore's speech page-one treatment.

Lattimore's letters to Bill Rogers detail dozens of fascinating discoveries about Japanese intellectual and political currents. Not all of those he met were liberals disenchanted with Japan's previous expansionist policies; some still defended them as superior to the imperialist policies of Western governments. The bureaucrats of the foreign office were "smooth and condescending," content m be "wallowing in Washington's wake." They were as gullible as their American counterparts, ready to swallow the Hong Kong monitoring of Chinese press and radio, which was being done by refugees wanting m "get the hell out of Hongkong" and willing to select and translate the mainland press to please the prejudices of their American employers.^[30]

Mainichi staged an eight-day tour of the islands for Lattimore; it was a tourist's delight. He rode the bullet trains to Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagoya, saw the temples and monuments Fujiko recommended, and traded opinions about the world with civic leaders all over Japan. Mainichi seemed to think they got their money's worth; they asked him to report for them from China in 1972 if he made it there.

Fujiko was also delighted with Lattimore's visit. She and her husband, Seiichi Isono, conferred about her future career and decided that she should join Lattimore in Leeds or Virginia on a semipermanent basis to work with him on several specific projects and to assume his mantle when, as he put it, total senility set in. She was then fifty-three, with at least a decade of vigorous scholarship before her. Their first joint task: translating and annotating the memoirs of the Dilowa, which they would start the spring of 1972 when she finished a course she was giving at Tokyo University.^[31]

Lattimore enjoyed his VIP treatment in Japan and appreciated the Japanese intelligentsia with whom he mingled. But in his letters home he expressed less empathy for the affluent Japanese than he had earlier shown for the Mongols and Tuvinians. The ethos of the Central Asian caravan never really left him. He sailed from Yokohama June 16, 1971, for the Soviet Union and Mongolia.

Nakhodka, the Soviet port city for ships from Japan, plunged him again into the bloody-mindedness of Soviet officialdom. The two-page description of his encounter with Soviet customs at Nakhodka is hilarious. He was breaking all the rules: he had a tape recorder; he forgot to declare a broken camera in his luggage; he had a copy of a bitterly anti-Soviet article in Russian that he was carrying to Ulan Bator at the request of a Mongol scholar; and on examining his clothing, the custom officers found a pair of new trousers with stiffening in the waistband. Very suspicious. They were about to slit the waistband open, but Lattimore protested: "I was lucky my Russian was good enough to explain everything." Customs confiscated the anti-Soviet article but let him pass with the rest of his impedimenta in time to make his train to Khabarovsk.^[32]

He was traveling with Urgunge Onon and family. Since the group constituted a "party" by Intourist standards, they got a first-class guide in Khabarovsk. To no avail. There was no significant intellectual life, no friendly scholarly community, no first-rate museum here; Lattimore described it as "a pleasant provincial city, but that's about all." The rest of his journey through Siberia to Mongolia was touristy, comfortable, but somewhat strained. Lattimore and the Onons had no Mongolian visas,

not even a written invitation. Intourist was afraid they'd be stuck with these five careless travelers indefinitely. At the border stop the Intourist people "gaped when we telephoned, and the Mongolian consul, instead of telling us to come to the consulate, insisted on coming round to the hotel himself, with the visas all made out."^[33]

Despite extensive preparations going on to celebrate the MPR's fiftieth anniversary, Lattimore and his party were met at the Ulan Bator station by a delegation of his friends. One can sense the emotion as Lattimore greeted Dalai, who reported that a beautiful picture of Eleanor now hung in a "place of honour" with his family portraits; as he met again "the pretty waitress who cried last year when she learned of Eleanor's death" (she almost cried again); and as he ran into old friends in the street, including the lama who had known the Dilowa.^[34] It was old home week.

By now Lattimore had developed his diary-letters into an art form. The one of July 1, 1971, as usual to Bill Rogers, was exemplary, describing in fascinating detail his four-day stay in the Ulan Bator hospital.

Lattimore had a mild blood-pressure problem. When he called on Shirendyb, president of the Academy, for a "long, very pleasant and very profitable conversation" soon after his arrival in Ulan Bator, the subject of Lattimore's health came up. He mentioned the blood pressure. Shirendyb, not only concerned as a friend but also anxious to procure maximum editing and translating services while Lattimore was in Mongolia, suggested that he check into the hospital for rest and observation. "I thought, why not? What a marvellous opportunity to get an idea of Mongolian medicine and hospitals!"

Registration was simple and quick. He was in a semiprivate (two-bed) room with bath and washbasin, but the toilet was down the hall. Sanitation was superb. The heart specialist who examined him was "a hell of a nice guy." Before long Lattimore had learned most of the doctor's life history. Nurses were efficient and colorful. Nobody pulled rank in the hospital, neither doctors nor administrators nor the higher grades of nurses. The elderly cleaning lady noticed Lattimore's pouch of pipe tobacco and confessed that she too smoked a pipe; he offered her a fill if she brought her pipe the next day. Later that night she came back with a cigarette paper and asked if she could have enough tobacco to roll a cigarette. As she smoked, they "talked about what a pity it is that you can't get the old trade tobacco from China anymore." Lattimore had entered with a systolic blood-pressure reading of 175; by the time he left, it was 140. He was pronounced sound.^[35]

Lattimore always called on the British ambassador when in Mongolia.

In 1971 John Colvin was the new envoy. Lattimore's judgment: "He is the kind of High Tory I can like and respect." Colvin had previously served in North Vietnam and observed that when he was there, the Russians were always baffled because the Vietnamese wouldn't do things the Russian way. This description, wrote Lattimore to Bill Rogers, "touches on one of the great similarities between Russians and Americans. Both are so convinced of their own righteousness that they can only see the fact, never the 'why,' when disagreed with. This is bad for the conduct of foreign policy, for both nations, but the Russians have been winning, on balance, since there are more peoples wanting to pull down their rotten governments than there are who want to stand by while we prop them up."^[36]

Lattimore's stature with the Mongols, always high since he first visited there, reached a new level in 1971, partly because of the devotion and praise of Urgunge Onon: "He goes around propagandizing me like a PRO." Lattimore was flattered, but in his letter of July 8 he revealed that the pedestal on which he was placed had its disadvantages. He was depressed, despite the adulation. "I have been thinking that this winter it will be 40 years since I started to learn Mongol (45 years since the long journey through [Inner] Mongolia to Sinkiang, at a time when I spoke only Chinese). And what have I got to show for it? A damn sight less than ought to have been possible. I don't speak anything like perfect Mongol, in spite of what people say, and my knowledge of history, tribes, traditions, manners, customs, is all bits and patches, never properly coordinated into a rounded whole. The chief thing is that I was able to begin in Mongolia in the very years when the old order was falling apart, and new forces, emotions, instinctive strivings beginning to emerge. To put this all in order, I've got to train Fujiko as my successor. Urgunge too."^[37]

Depression, however, could not last in the excitement and ceremony of the Fiftieth anniversary celebration. Shirendyb gave a glorious picnic in a valley several miles from Ulan Bator. Lattimore said of the setting, "The scene was lovely beyond any words of mine." At the picnic, and at later parties in the city, he heard ancient tribal songs of haunting beauty. The formal celebrations on July 12 were boring, "listening for hours to speeches in different languages saying the same thing," but a parade of veterans of the 1921 revolution fascinated him. "My God, what warriors they look, even in old age (few are under 70)! A fierce crowd they must have been in their fighting years. . . Except for the rifles, the cavalry of Chingis Khan."^[38]

There was no Chinese delegation in the reviewing stand and more Rus-

sians than Lattimore had ever seen in Mongolia before. Kosygin had the position of greatest eminence and at the big official reception in the evening had "tough" things to say pointed at the Chinese.

A hiatus in Mongol festivities drew some typical Lattimorean sarcasm: "14 July. Bastille Day reception at the French Embassy. Someone less likely to have stormed the Bastille than the French Ambassador I defy anybody to imagine. But then, can any of you recall having met an American Ambassador, to any country, who looked as if he could have served at Valley Forge? Well, one exception: Averell Harriman."^[39]

Several days later Lattimore had lunch "with a chap who was in the Party Institute of History, and in that capacity had written a devastating criticism of my Nomads and Commissars. [This] year, by an intermediary, he asked if I would let him come to see me. I said, of course. When he turned up, he said: That review I wrote. Of course, we have to keep the orthodoxy orthodox. But personally, I think you're a very good guy, with a lot of bright ideas. I said, Naturally, we have to keep the record straight. I'm not a Marxist, and never likely to become one. No hard feelings. Since then, we have been very good friends."^[40]

Lattimore heard with wonderment the news that Nixon was going to Peking. His first comment on this phenomenon was in a letter of July 22, 1971. He had dined at the French embassy, with three other ambassadors and wives also present.

As the only non-diplomat, I thought I would be the naughty boy, so I raised the topic of Nixon going on bombing and burning and gassing the hell out of the Indo-Chinese, and Mao saying, "Never mind that, but do drop in for breakfast some day." Got no rise out of this (though all the diplomats here are passionate fishermen), but it did become clear that Nixon-Mao would be talking, in the opinion of everybody but me, principally about Taiwan. I was utterly surprised. I may be 100 degrees disoriented, from having been out of America for a while, but I pontificated to the obviously disbelieving diplomats as follows:

In America, Taiwan is a dead issue. People are bored—not fed up and outraged, as over Indochina. Just bored. There is no "military-industrial complex" committed to Taiwan anymore. . .. under the new deal (not New Deal!) with Japan, the cynical ditching of Taiwan is immaterial. Japan-Okinawa is a much more solid base, because the object now—and there is no material difference between the Rostow and Kissinger versions of amateur Machiavellianism—is no longer the roll-back of China, but setting China and Russia against each other, and for that Japan is better (so these poor dopes think). . .. No, in my opinion the emotional issue in America will no longer be Taiwan, but Indochina.^[41]

Lattimore cherished his role as a heretic, which extended even to his contacts with Soviet historians. One of them, Gol'man, had published an analysis of American writing on Mongolia. Lattimore thought Gol'man had been fair except on one dimension. Gol'man made much of the attempts of one "Duke" Larson, an adventurer who had tried to persuade American firms to invest in Mongolia during the pre-Soviet years, with, of course, due dividends for Larson himself. Gol'man called Larson "odious" and treated him as a paradigm capitalist exploiter.

When Gol'man comes in again I'm going to give it to him hot and strong. I'm going to say, "You accuse me of defending Larson. I wasn't defending him. I was trying to accuse you Russian Marxists, in a mild, polite way. You didn't get the point, so now just sit still while I attack you in a rough, Bolshevik way. You Russian Marxists are falling down on the job. You make a political accusation: The American imperalistcapitalists wanted to dominate the Mongolian market—and you produce one figure, old Franz Larson, who was ridiculous, rather than sinister. That's not good enough. There were American interests—and British, and other. A description of their operations and affiliations, plus a clear Marxist economic analysis, would be a valuable contribution to economic history and would interest a lot of people, me included. But you never deliver. Now why don't you get busy?"

Gol'man came in. I was in my bath, reading his book, and as an author he had to acknowledge that that was a compliment, I climbed out, wrapped a towel around myself, and went at it, hammer and tongs, with my criticisms. We had a fine time, and are better friends than ever. I told him about "capitalist-imperialist" business in Mongolia in the 1920's, drawing on personal experience, reminiscences, and remembered hearsay—the gossip of the trade in my time. He was fascinated. He knows about these things only from Marxist theory, and had never met anybody who had actually been engaged in such nefarious doings.^[42]

Lattimore's seventy-first birthday, on July 29, seemed to affect him more than his last. He described it as "weird and solitary," even though he had lunch with two of his best Mongol friends and took great interest in the family of Bira, a noted Tibetanist whose wife was originally a physician but became a scholar of Turkish after her children were born. Lattimore was always fascinated by the career choices, and changes, of people in a Communist system. Bira's son, a child prodigy painter, also captivated him. The rest of his birthday was hardly solitary; half a dozen friends called on him to offer many happy returns.

Nonetheless, he did not sleep that night. "It's a sorry business, turning

71, mourning the past and not quite daring to believe that the future can be as bright as its present promise· The Buddhists are right on one thing: it's a terrible fate to be a human being." Yet his fate was not terrible. He was as interested as ever in the peoples and cultures of Central Asia and was contemplating accepting Mongol offers to spend a year in some scenic valley, watching the full cycle of the herding year, recording the life experiences, the songs and legends, the reactions to communism of these formerly nomadic tribes. He confided to Bill Rogers, "It is so tempting·. . . [But it] would never end. My real problem is that I already have so much that may never get on paper, but I have this hunger for more and more knowledge."^[43]

He concluded that tempting as a long stay in Mongolia was, he had to first put in at least a year of "book and typewriter work." He would help Urgunge do his Mongolian Heroes of the Twentieth Century ; do a new edition of his own Nomads and Commissars ; complete several promised articles; work with Fujiko on the Dilowa memoirs; "go through untold quantities of my unfinished work, and see what I complete, what I turn over to Fujiko, and what we work on together. She's going to have plenty to do when I'm gone. . .. And there's always that China in History . And, oh God, my memoirs· Gives me writer's cramp to think of it all."^[44]

He got his mind off of it all July 31 when he and Dalai left Ulan Bator for his annual "field trip," this time two full weeks in Hövsgöl Province at the headwaters of the Selenge River. Here Lattimore was back again with herdsmen and hunters, Mongols (and Kazakhs and Reindeer People and other still-distinct tribes) whom he had learned to love and trust forty-five years earlier on the desert road to Turkestan.

Dalai was a master tour arranger. Lattimore observed that when Dalai introduced him to ordinary Mongols, his line was "This old chap is 71. Solid old bastard, isn't he?" But when Dalai went to the authorities in charge of housing, transportation, and the like, his line was "I've got a very frail old chap here. Very distinguished, of course, but very frail. Anything you can do to help me out? Wouldn't like to have anything happen to him while he's in my charge and in your territory."^[45] So they got the best of everything. The hotel in Hövsgö1 was better than the one in Ulan Bator, as was the food. Lattimore had a ball.

Thirty-nine pages of his diary-letter of July 31, 1971, describe the weeks in Hövsgöl. Seventy-one years to the contrary, living with these friendly, happy, curious people restored his morale, blotted out the pain of Eleanor's death, and eased the worry of coping with his massive scholarly projects when he returned to the West. At each settlement he and Dalai vis-

ited, after they learned the lore of the villagers, heard the ancient songs, visited the schools, herds, and cottage industries, they responded to questions: Dalai reciting his experiences as a Mongol diplomat in China, Lattimore describing how he happened to be there and what he was up to. It was a different apologia from the one he presented to Soviet scholars. At their first village,

about 80 people gathered in a triple ring on the greensward, and I stood in the middle and began: I have travelled a strange road through life to be among you here today, and went right on. There were no intellectuals there except the teacher, so I used very simple language. I told them about that first long Gobi journey when I didn't know any Mongol, about how I first started to learn Mongol and became interested in the politics of Inner Mongolia. I didn't disguise the fact that my friends of those days were regarded as shady and presumptively dangerous characters in Outer Mongolia, but that didn't matter. Their attitude would be: That's the way things were in those times, and that's where he was. And anyhow, he was interested in us Mongols. . .. I went on to tell about being in Ulan Bator in 1944 with Wallace—that always fascinates them, and then about my repeated visits here since 1961, with Eleanor, with David, and by myself, and wound up with due (and genuine) admiration of the progress I have seen in these 10 years. The young people were listening intently, a lot of the older people were wiping their eyes. The sentimentality of the Mongols is winningly simple. When they can tell that you really like them, everything they have is yours.^[46]

It would be hard to overstate the therapeutic effect of Lattimore's 1971 stay in Mongolia. When he left for Hungary August 19, his health was good and his spirits high. The rest of 1971 was all downhill.

After the Orientalists' Congress in Hungary, Lattimore spent a week each in Bulgaria and East Berlin and two weeks in Copenhagen; on September 28 he was back in Leeds, teaching the fall term despite his retirement. Among the letters waiting for him was a package from Evelyn Nef with copies of the memorial brochure for Eleanor. It pleased him immensely but brought on renewed anguish.

In early November he flew to the United States, hoping that another try at establishing residence in Virginia would work. It was a vain hope. Despite the help of the Rogers and Evelyn Nef, he could not bring himself to stay in the house that Eleanor planned. Nor could he manage the household routine. His drinking increased, and he wandered between Virginia, New York, and Providence, visiting the Piels, David, and other friends.

By 1971, twenty years had passed since McCarran and his Senate In-

ternal Security Subcommittee set out to pillory Lattimore. A few institutions (besides Harvard) were now overcoming their skittishness about asking the great heretic to lecture. Johns Hopkins was not one of them, but another Baltimore institution, Goucher College, brought him in for a lecture December 9.

At Goucher he was still derogating the conventional wisdom. All the talk of China "coming out of its isolation," he said, was nonsense. "China has diplomatic relations with all kinds of countries. In my opinion they have not been nearly as isolated as Washington." He also dismissed widespread speculation about a full-scale war between the Soviet Union and China. Of course there was great hostility, but the common bond of dedication to Marxist theory made war unlikely. "I think we should understand this, instead of simply sensationalizing frontier clashes."^[47]

Lattimore's visit to Goucher produced a long story in the Baltimore Sun .^[48] Interestingly, the headline was not about his views on world affairs but about his plans to visit China once again. New York Times columnist James Reston had been in Peking in August; Chou En-lai told Reston then that Lattimore would be welcome in the People's Republic. Lattimore told the Sun reporter that he would probably seek a visa for summer 1972.

Lattimore made his last appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations January 11, 1972. Gerard Piel was there: "His message was to assure his hearers that they were as wrong now about the possibility of successfully playing the China card against the U.S.S.R. as they had been when they fused both powers in a monolithic communist conspiratorial dictatorship. The border questions that divided them and their competition for the territory and loyalty of the frontier peoples, he said, were far outweighed by their shared antipathy to the hegemony of Western capitalism and their fear of the U.S.A." Piel says Lattimore's message was as unwelcome as ever.^[49]

By the end of January 1972 Lattimore had come to doubt the viability of establishing his main residence in the United States. With considerable relief he returned to Leeds in early February to spend six weeks on duties he still had as professor emeritus. His report to Bill Rogers on February 22 did not deal with the Leeds routine, however. It was all about his delicate negotiations with the Chinese. Two secretaries of the Chinese chargé d'affaires in London visited Leeds, nominally as guests of the local Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. They were presumably interested in the science and Chinese studies departments. Lattimore soon discovered they were more interested in finding out what he would expect were he now to visit the PRC.

He had several objectives: seeing Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Sin-

kiang, and Tibet and visiting old friends. And since he was "an old man, no longer able to totter about alone," he needed Fujiko along as a research associate-secretary. The Chinese thought that would be fine. Could Lattimore bring Fujiko along to the consulate in London soon? Yes, she would be in England February 14. He would bring her down to London the twenty-first.

So we went down. At King's Cross, no need for a taxi. At the ticket barrier, a secretary was waiting for us. Outside, an Embassy—excuse me, a Chargé d'Affaires—car. We're in, I said in Fujiko's ear; we're in. A superb lunch, at exactly the right spaced-out interval between "home cooking" and "fancy feast." Conversation easy, affable. You'd never think the humourless Cultural Revolution had ever occurred. They knew Nixon wanted Pandas, but what on earth were the musk oxen? I explained. If you can do that in Chinese, you needn't worry about future conversational traps. Yes, but why, they wanted to know. Well, you wouldn't expect the President of a capitalistic nation not to try a bit of dealing on the side, would you? I asked. This was well received.

Mind you, all this time—it's been going on for nearly two years now—I've never had a written or other direct invitation from China. (And I've never asked for a visa.) Everything has been relayed indirectly, through Ed Snow, a Reston news story, etc. At this lunch, the Chargé said openly, for the first time, that both the Chairman (Mao) and the Premier (Chou En-lai) had expressed a personal interest in my coming.^[50]

So the China trip was set. As anticipated, the Mainichi newspapers and Japan Television wanted Lattimore to report for them; Fujiko was to make these arrangements when, at the end of March, she returned to Japan and Lattimore to the United States.

Before Lattimore returned to the United States, an incident occurred that brought out his lingering sensitivity about the inquisition. Henry Steele Commager wrote a letter to the New York Times , carried by that paper March 6, 1972, under the heading "To Right a Wrong." Commager noted that the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had "destroyed the careers of two distinguished scholars and public servants, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and Prof. Owen Lattimore." Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had made apologies and restitution to Oppenheimer. Wasn't it time for Nixon, who had finally seen the merit of the formerly heretical policies advocated by Lattimore, to do the same for him?

Lattimore's answer was carried March 23: "Owen Lattimore Asks: 'To Right What Wrong?' "Lattimore acknowledged Commager's friendly in-

tent and his long service to the cause of academic freedom. But Commager had accepted too quickly the myth that Lattimore had been done in by the inquisition.

It is misleading to say that I "never recovered from the effects of official harassment and eventually removed to England, where (I) could carry on (my) China studies without interference." During the years in which I was under indictment my university in America did not suspend me, but put me on leave with full pay. It is true that in America, the articles and paid lectures on which I had always relied for supplementary income became few and far between.

On the other hand, my career internationally was definitely enhanced. I lectured for two half-years at the Sorbonne. I gave a course of lectures at the University of Copenhagen and lectured widely in England, Scotland, and Wales. My wife and I were invited to Mongolia, and this led to a revival of the Mongolian part of my career. The outrageous Department of Justice indictment became an international passport.

Finally, the invitation to come to the University of Leeds was anything but an offer of asylum to "carry on China studies without interference." It gave me seven years—the happiest and most productive of my academic career—in which to found a completely new Department of Chinese Studies, putting into operation my own ideas and unencumbered by the traditions and uncompleted programs that might have been problems if I had simply taken over a long-established department.^[51]

Lattimore then described the successes of his Leeds program, ending with a jab at Nixon. "My record from the McCarthy era to the present day does not need to be prettied up. President Nixon's record of the same period could do with, and is getting, a lavish application of the cosmetic art." There was truth in this.

Four days after his letter was carried in the Times , Lattimore was back in New York for the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. When the CIA finally condescended to disgorge a minor part of its holdings on Lattimore, it produced a heavily censored report by its China Political and Military Branch on this convention. In the one page released of an eight-page report, the CIA agent said kind things about Lattimore, approved his election as first president of the newly formed Mongolia Society, and even praised a Soviet-produced movie shown at the convention touting the achievements of the MPR since the revolution.^[52]

On April 27, 1972, the most prominent witness against Lattimore, Louis

Budenz, quietly departed this earth. His last years were marred by ill health and the increasingly shrill warnings he issued of the imminent triumph of the Soviet Union over the now-impotent United States. Budenz's last book, The Bolshevik Invasion of the West , is embarrassingly fanatical. It was published by the notorious Bookmailer and largely ignored. Margaret Budenz complained, "It never earned a cent of royalties."^[53] The Associated Press obituary noted that Budenz's major contributions to the American inquisition had been his accusations against Lattimore and Gerhart Eisler. The story concluded, "In most instances, his accusations were denied and never actually proven in court."^[54]

On June 14, 1972, twenty years and three months after SISS released him from its grasp, Lattimore again appeared before a committee of Congress. This time the auspices were friendly: he was appearing before Senators Proxmire, Fulbright, and Javits and Representative Boggs of the Joint Economic Committee. The JEC was holding hearings on economic developments in mainland China. Calling Lattimore as a witness was anomalous; he did not pretend to be an economist, he had not been in China for twenty-seven years, and he could be expected to come up with some abrasive remarks. But there he was, and the senators, even the Republican Javits, treated him with deference.

Proxmire apologized for the "indignities you suffered in the early 1950's" and implied that Lattimore had been "hounded" out of the country. Lattimore responded with the same lecture he had given Commager: he was not hounded out of the country: he went to a better job. Proxmire accepted the correction.

There was little talk of economics. Inevitably the conversation turned to geopolitics. What were the Chinese up to? The Russians? Was China a threat to the United States? Lattimore unburdened himself of his firm opposition to the Vietnam War but made it clear that he was still not promoting communism. "Any country has a sovereign right to do everything it can to limit or restrict the spread of Communism. That is not the real question. The real question is if you adopt methods intended to stop the spread of Communism and find those measures are creating Communists faster than you can kill them, then the sensible thing is to change the policy."^[55]

The committee seemed to accept that statement. They asked reasonable questions and got the full exposition of Lattimore's foreign policy views. These views were largely incompatible with the conventional wisdom, but this Congress was not on a heresy hunt.

Lattimore moved restlessly from place to place during the spring and summer of 1972. He could not stay in the United States. The Southdown house, without a compatible housekeeper, was impossible. Perhaps Fujiko could have made it work, but she was unwilling to reside steadily in the United States. Lattimore was still drinking heavily. David wanted him to enter a prominent Boston center for treatment of alcoholism and took him to see it, but he reacted negatively and did not check in. He decided he could go on the wagon by himself.^[56]

The trip to China was lining up nicely. Fujiko arranged an assignment from Japan Television to film Lattimore's return to China; this project was in addition to reporting for the Mainichi Newspapers. Chinese visas were in order. By the end of July Lattimore had given up on the house in Virginia and decided to rent it out. He would move to Paris. Fujiko could get an apartment near him and would not be tied down as she would have been in Virginia. Lattimore's French was still fluent. The intellectual life in Paris was superior to that of Washington. Paris was also closer to England and Scandinavia. By late August Lattimore was in Paris and had contracted to purchase an apartment there. That done, he and Fujiko were off to China.

On August 29, 1972, twenty-seven years after he was last in China on the Pauley mission, Lattimore returned to Peking. This time it was with VIP status. The New China News Agency reported a dinner given in his honor by the vice president of the Institute of Foreign Affairs.^[57] Since neither he nor Fujiko was capable of operating the camera provided by Japan Television, Lattimore asked the Chinese to allow his grandson Michael to accompany them as cameraman. This request was granted; Lattimore sent for Michael to come in a hurry, and he arrived just in time for their trip to Sinkiang.

Despite the ceremony and the nostalgia, Lattimore's reports from China are remarkably low-keyed. In Peking he saw the latest in archeological holdings and was taken on routine tours of factories, schools, and communes. He wrote Bill Rogers, "I don't mind; it helps me to get the feel and mood of people." He met Rewi Alley and George Hatem, both prominent Westerners who had stayed in China after the Communists took over in 1949, and through Hatem he got to see contemporary Chinese medicine close up. This subject he found fascinating. Doctors visiting Peking were, according to Lattimore, "the most unabashedly admiring visitors, and there are a lot of them." Chinese health was indeed vastly improved. One contrast with the old days elicited a bit of excitement from

Lattimore: "the healthy, active, clean children—not one of the majority we used to see with distended bellies, runny noses, inflamed eyes, scabby heads."^[58]

The China of 1972 was still not free of the Cultural Revolution. Chou En-lai was ascendant, with Mao's backing, and had managed the Nixon visit of February 1972.^[59] But China's quarrel with Russia was at fever heat, and not even Chou's friendship with Lattimore could entirely cancel out the taint of Lattimore's collaboration with Soviet scholars nor the fact that he had been "adopted" by the Mongolian People's Republic.

Furthermore, Lattimore kept asking embarrassing questions, as his grandson Michael remembers: "During the 1972 trip he often inquired, especially during the weeks in Peking, after individuals, mainly Chinese and mainly intellectuals only to be told 'Oh they're doing work in the countryside.' Thus, although I was completely unaware of it myself at the time, he was acutely aware of the ongoing Cultural Revolution, even though the Chinese tried hard to give the impression that the 'revolution' was essentially over. It's to his credit that he was not only not taken in but also not in the least bit hesitant to annoy our hosts with his inquisitiveness."^[60] And despite Lattimore's only slightly rusty Chinese, two full-time interpreters were assigned to his party, in addition to the usual politically unsophisticated tour guides.

One consequence of Lattimore's independent ways was that Mao refused to see him. (Chou was very friendly, as will be noted later, but the Great Helmsman remained aloof.) A second consequence was that Lattimore's itinerary was more restricted than he had expected. Michael believes that the restricted itinerary developed out of Lattimore's refusal to

be had or used. This is genuine. I'm sure we paid for this as we were not only denied Tibet, but also Kashgar, where Owen had been before, and where Joris Ivens was allowed to go while we were only treated to Urumchi and Turfan. Ivens was engaged in making his epic on the emergence of "socialist man" in China. I met him and had several conversations with him and his sound person . . . I was very impressed with them both. However on further reflection I have to hand it to my Grandfather for standing by his principles, especially since he'll never get the credit for doing so he really deserves. After all we could have come out of China with a vastly more salable product in terms of film, photos, and articles had he played the game and had we been able to go to those places.^[61]

But they did get to Sinkiang; Reuters noted Lattimore's departure from Peking on September 10, and the Washington Post picked up the story. In Urumchi, Kalja, Aksu, and Turfan they were seeing country that Owen and Eleanor had traveled through forty-five years earlier. It was almost unrecognizable. Stone River, a hundred miles west of Urumchi, had been just a marsh when Owen and Eleanor had been there. Now it was restored to its pre-1920s state, with "God knows how many thousand people; a rich agriculture, large herds of animals—and the factories are humming," as Lattimore wrote Bill Rogers. Urumchi, too, had been built up enormously, with Han laborers and management brought in to staff the factories. After two weeks in Sinkiang and Inner Mongolia, Lattimore observed, "Some things make me feel like a dinosaur returning to his ancient mud-bath and finding it's been taken over by a porcelain works." The major exception was Turfan. There the Uighurs were still dominant, the underground irrigation channels functioning as they had for generations, the vines and lattices shading the streets. Lattimore, Michael, and Fujiko feasted under the grape arbors in the nearby valley just as Lattimore and Eleanor had done on their honeymoon. Michael, a budding musician, was captivated by Uighur folk songs.^[62]

On October 5 they were back in Peking. Now there was "a pilgrimage to a shrine: the hospital where David was born; the labour room where he was delivered, after 27 hours of agony for Eleanor."^[63] To Lattimore's amazement, Dr. Katie Lim, the obstetrician who had attended Eleanor, was still at the hospital. She had survived Japanese occupation, war, Nationalist recovery, and Communist takeover. Now, at seventy years, she was a respected member of the People's Consultative Council and about to visit the United States with a medical group organized by Dr. E. Gray Dimond of the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Dr. Lim was delighted to meet Michael and to have word of the American child (David) she had delivered so many years earlier.

Also during this stay in Peking, Lattimore was taken to visit a "Committee of Housewives" who ran several cottage industries. This group supervised a lock factory, a knitted-wear workshop, and similar operations.

Of course, everybody was prepared for us, but still—instant rapport. Like an old lady from Shantung, 70, who had been a famine refugee in Manchuria. Story of hardship, still-born child, etc. When she heard Eleanor and I had been in Manchuria in those days, and knew something of the conditions, no stopping her. Fujiko and I have been getting

a little, let's say satiated, with all the paeans about the Chairman, but when old women like this express their liberation, their happiness after toil and hardship, their secure old age in a clean two-room apartment with clean bedding and "look, a closet all my own," in terms of what the Chairman did for them, we just about break down and cry. It's so different from the incantations of the intellectuals.^[64]

But the high point of their Peking stay was dinner with Chou. This event was not announced in advance. Late one afternoon Lattimore, who was writing in his hotel room, was suddenly told to get ready to dine with the premier. The atmosphere was friendly, and Chou greeted Lattimore and his party effusively; nonetheless, secretaries were present to take down every word. Chou spoke only through an interpreter, who had been a classmate of David Lattimore at Harvard. Of course Chou understood every word of English, but his official position had to be formal, and Lattimore did not break protocol except late in the evening, when he slipped occasionally into Chinese.

One of Chou's first comments was to the effect that "your grandson is very feminine looking [Michael had long hair] and if I didn't know otherwise I might think he was a woman." Michael recalls, "I don't think Owen knew quite how to reply to this, and he knew what had been said well before I did, but I jumped right in and gave my prepared answer, since I had been reading up on Chou, which was that long hair for us American youth was a political statement just as it had been a political statement for Chou at one time to cut off his long pig tail. Chou really appreciated this, whether for its cheekiness or because it showed him I knew a little bit more about him than he thought. Anyway he laughed, and after that we got along famously."^[65]

The serious conversation was dominated by Chou's long list of grievances against the Russians. Chou listed all the agreements with Russia, going back to the czars, that the Chinese had lived up to but the Russians. had not. Lattimore did not want to hear this diatribe but he listened sympathetically. There were lighter moments in the conversation. The diners were liberally supplied with mao-t'ai, and Michael asked Chou about the report that on the Long March the Communists had burned down all the distilleries. "'Yes,' Chou replied, 'it is true that I ordered the distilleries dosed down' (he wouldn't admit to actually burning them) 'but first we confiscated all the liquor.' He then went on to recount that the Red Army had been required to cross a river, so he had himself ensconced up on a cliff where he could watch the crossing, a process which took about eight hours. While this was going on, according to Chou he was enjoying some

of the confiscated product, 'but we weren't drinking it out of those puny little glasses like you're doing because all we had there were big tin cups.' This is a tall tale if I've ever heard one."^[66]

Pictures were taken at the dinner with Chou and appeared with an account of the event on the front pages of Peking newspapers.

After two weeks in Peking, Lattimore and his party toured Manchuria, Nanking, and Shanghai. Lattimore wrote little about these travels. All the Chinese officials with whom he talked expounded vigorously their grievances against the Soviet Union. In Dairen, Lattimore was taken down in the deep air-raid shelters; had there been no other convincing evidence that Chinese fear of the Russians was profound, these shelters would have established it. By the end of October, Lattimore was ready to leave China. He canceled visits to Hangchow and other places; he and Fujiko entrained for Mongolia October 27. Michael went to Tokyo with his film.

Lattimore's unease in China shows clearly in a letter to Bill Rogers: "When we were at last across the frontier and trundling along toward Ulan Bator, Fujiko and I looked at each other and it was a 'now we're home' look. I just don't know how to say it, but there's always that shade of difference between Chinese and Mongols. Everywhere in China people were wonderful to us, and it was genuine, not put on. But always, somehow, however faint, that touch of condescension—'how tolerant we are, we Chinese, to treat you as people, and not rub it in that you're barbarians.' The Russians have their own form of that, too. But with the Mongols, you're not being 'admitted'—you're there."^[67]

Two weeks in Ulan Bator were predictably glorious. There was "a marvellous dinner with Shirendyb," much book buying and seeing old friends, and a new collection of folk songs taped by a former professor who had been exiled by the Party but was now rehabilitated. Lattimore's letters as usual described the state of the agricultural econonmy and how the Mongols were preparing to compensate for a bad hay crop that year by utilizing old herdsman lore—whereas the Chinese were "relying on the Thought of Chairman Mao."^[68]

Lattimore wanted to introduce Fujiko to Okladnikov after their Mongolian stay. Unfortunately, Okladnikov was in Moscow and going after that to Hungary; his itinerary meant an unplanned trip to Moscow for Lattimore and Fujiko. Lattimore's report on their Moscow stay was ambivalent. The good news was that he could have a give-and-take, seminar-type discussion in Russia. Such discussion had not been possible in China. Counterbalancing this, Muscovite food and manners were atrocious. Seeing Okladnikov was worthwhile, but they were glad to leave for Tokyo. "Food

and manners much better on the Aeroflot flight to Japan. International competition. Something to be said for it."^[69]

In Tokyo on November 19, Lattimore began work on his stories for Mainichi. Mainichi decided to publish his commentaries in a special New Year's supplement and asked him to write a half-page introduction to "hook people's interest" and "show them I'd been around for a while."

So I began: "Freshly severed human heads were nailed to the telephone poles of Peking." That ought to hook them, I thought. Then, to show I've been around for a while, I went on: "That is one of my childhood memories, from Peking in the winter of 1911-12."

I proudly brought it in. Fujiko ascended to the ceiling in a puff of steam. You can't do that! Not in Japan, in a New Year's Special Issue! People would think it a bad omen, and simply throw the whole paper away! So . . . whole thing to do again. (Ellipsis in original.)^[70]

There was much entertainment by Mainichi and Japan Television, interminable and unsatisfactory editing of Michael's film, renewed discussions with Fujiko's intellectual friends. On December 11, 1972, Lattimore boarded a plane for Washington, to pack his belongings once again.

Chapter Thirty-One
Paris

Christmas 1972 was melancholy. John Carter Vincent had died just before Lattimore left Japan, and giving up the house in Virginia was traumatic. It was to have been his final residence. Everything he had taken to Leeds in 1963 and accumulated since then was now in Southdown; it all had to be reclassified: some furniture and books to Paris, other furniture and books into storage, some furniture to be left in the house. He sorted and packed during most of December, spent Christmas with David and family, then finished the packing.

In February 1973 Lattimore moved in to his flat on the rue Danton in Levallois Perret, a Paris suburb. The flat was sparsely furnished and had no telephone. Mornings he worked on scholarly materials until Fujiko came, then they discussed the day's agenda, had lunch, and wrote until dark. Afternoons he devoted largely to the "incredible number" of necessary letters. Evenings he spent reading in bed.^[1]

His furniture and books arrived from the United States in early April. All was then "pandemonium." It took weeks to get bookcases installed and filled and housewares unpacked. Getting his materials organized in such small space was agonizing.^[2]

During his first month in Paris Lattimore received another letter from Nyman/Bogolepov in Switzerland. This letter does not survive, nor does Lattimore's answer, which he said was noncommittal about Nyman's publishing ambition. Noncommittal Lattimore may have been, but Nyman took his answer as encouragement and wrote Lattimore again on April 10, 1973. This letter is still in Lattimore's files. (I have not tampered with Nyman's tortured English.)

Dear Professor:

It was a surprise of my life, I would say, to get your letter—and especially such a friendly one. I know that I had contributed to your ordeal by trial although this was far from being my intention or motive. Please believe me that I deeply regret this. Now when we both are not too far from leaving this world when cold war situation forces people to say and to act often in contradiction to their innermost feelings and intentions, I hope we may consider our relations in a more detached and philosophical mood and to try to repair what can be repaired. . . .

In my vain efforts to find a Western publisher for my critical evaluation of the Western policies toward my country—both before and after revolution, I met with several occasions when some dark hand intervened in order to prevent the publications of my memoirs in which, besides general critical attitude toward the Western politics and institutions, first of all of the CIA, I expose the crime committed in the West toward Soviet Russian exiles which otherwise than a genocide I cannot qualify. Only recently, one British publisher retracted from a written contract and met with a silence all my requests to give reasons. This may explain why I became so suspiceous toward vague offers. In my reply to your lawyer [Nyman had contacted Arnold and Porter, but the firm has no surviving record], while accepting with a grateful amazement your willingness to read my memoirs, I noted that I wish I could have a more formal promise to assist me with the publication—if the text would meet your endorsement.

I presume that whatever your own views, you would approach my critical attitude just as a human document that reflects the impressions of a modern Russian intellectual who—whatever the attitude of Soviet bureaucrats remains a loyal Soviet citizen.

The main question is however whether you might associate yourself somehow with my testimony about my "testimony" before the US Senate in which I had to say about you what the circumstances beyond my will forced me to say. You certainly noted that I refused to say what was demanded from me, namely that you were a Soviet agent—and I paid dearly for this refusal!

Briefly, I did this because there was no other way for me to intervene against the policies of the preventive war that was then in full preparation and of which the attitude toward the Maoist China had been a main component. In those times I was really scared and had no other choice in my plans to oppose the menace of a new war. As a former member of the CP and a high Soviet official I was barred from coming to the States as a DP [displaced person] immigrant. There was but one way to go to your country and to try to divert the furies of the war-mongering from the external adventure toward the home "traitors" from the liberal Establishment, to support the views of the Tarts and the Maccartys that enemy is not

outside but inside the USA; this was the more logical as the liberals of those days from the supporters of the Truman administration (Marschall and Acheson, Clark and Forrestal) were for an attack upon Soviet Russia, whereas Taft represented the views of isolationists with his idea of the Fortress America. Thus, it remained to me to follow the maxim of Machiavelli that one can serve his country con gloria e con ignomia. It was not easy for me to do. And also I was not a free man but a humble, defenceless DP already in the claws of the CIA, as all other Soviet prisoners of the West whom were hypocrticlally called as those who "choosed freedom.". . .

This forced my participation in the attack upon you, this attack, as I was told openly by my exploiters in Washington, being directed merely through Lattimore against Truman, Acheson, Marshall. Indeed, their motives were quite different from mines; they wanted to come to power to continue the preparation of the preventive war. But I believed that Taft as president would stick merely to his conception of the Fortress and thus make me their bed fellow.

I believe you might understand now better my reasons. What trouble me however is the fact that the Nixon administration retrurned to the conception of the alliance with Mao and against the USSR. This may look as a vindication of your views, and makes my explanations more difficult for I do not want to associate you with the sinister plans of the US warmongers who try again the carrot while keeping the big stick behind their backs. In the whole, it is the single point on which we have to reach some understanding. The rest of the manuscript—dealing with my struggle against the enslavement of the CIA and revelations of the criminal attitudes in the West against the Soviet exiles, as well as my views of American policies, press, Congress e,t.c. certainly, if not fully shared, might well be accepted by you as my personal impressions.
Sincerely, yours I. Nyman.^[3]

Incredible. Here was the confused but unconstrained confession of the witness who, judging by the SISS report, was regarded by McCarran as giving the most incriminating testimony against Lattimore. Nyman says nothing about having testified before the grand jury; we do not know whether he was called.

As Lattimore later recalled, he was by then convinced that Nyman was sincere and genuinely contrite, not fronting for anybody. But he was dearly a tortured soul. Lattimore did not respond to the letter immediately: "Sometime later I was going to Switzerland anyway, so I wrote him and said I was coming, would he make an appointment. The letter came back from the Swiss post office 'Addressee left for Sweden leaving no forwarding address,' which would very likely mean that he had gone to Sweden

on his—that he had got the Soviets to reaccept him." Perhaps. But we will never know.^[4]

Lattimore went to Ulan Bator in early May 1973 for a congress on the role of nomadism in Central Asia. At the same time Britain's Granada Television wanted to do a documentary on Mongolia and needed Lattimore as a consultant to smooth the way with Mongol authorities. He made a quick trip to London to consult with Granada before he left for Ulan Bator on May 4.

Arriving in Ulan Bator, Lattimore had three hours of rest before going to

a reception by Shirendyb, the President of the Academy . . . as the only foreign member of the Academy, I always get a place of honour at his left hand. The reception was copiously irrigated. I had thought I was going to be able to ride past on the wagon, because Shirendyb, an old drinking companion, has been on the wagon. No luck. A man in Germany sent him a new German concoction that has "cleaned out his old blood vessels and opened new ones," so that he no longer has high blood pressure. So he has jumped off the wagon. I have descended only cautiously, one foot at a time, and playing the old Russian tricks of pretending to drink "bottoms up" when you only take a sip.^[5]

The congress was delightful, with seventy participants from all over the world. Lattimore's paper, "Some Problems of Periodisation in Nomadic History," was well received. Two weeks of meetings, concerts, interviews, and visits to the countryside went by like a flash. On May 19, after a three-day stopover in Moscow, he was back in Paris.

His flat in Levallois Perret was now functional, and he again set to work on the mountain of letters and scholarly projects that had accumulated. But he could not settle down; that summer he went to England several times. He had things to do at Leeds and wanted to visit Rosemary Carruthers, the widow of British explorer Douglas Carruthers, who had helped Lattimore in 1929 when he came to England after his first book was written. Rosemary invited Lattimore to visit in Norfolk and look through her late husband's travel diaries and photographs. He and Rosemary got along well, and she invited him to return anytime he wanted to relax in the Norfolk countryside.

In November 1973 he flew to the United States. One of his missions was to establish a foundation to promote Mongol studies. With the Barrett bequest and money that had been left to Eleanor by a wealthy aunt, he now felt that he could establish a fund for scholarly purposes. Arnold

and Porter were still his attorneys, and over Thanksgiving he arranged the details with them.

Back to Paris in December for a month, then again to England. He now contemplated spending some time in Leeds and bought a small house there within walking distance of the university. He told Bill Rogers that it would be perfect should he or Fujiko want to spend a whole term there.^[6]

By January 1974 Granada Television was ready to send one of its producers, Brian Moser, and Lattimore to Mongolia to begin talks with Montsame, the Mongolian news agency that would control arrangements for the documentary. Lattimore and Moser flew to Ulan Bator January 23.

Lattimore found that in his new capacity, as adviser to a commercial organization in Mongolia on business, the rules had changed. When he was in Mongolia as a scholar, the Academy provided a car; Granada had to rent one. "Brian and I, to show that we are not capitalists who are that rich, walk to whatever we can reach on foot." Negotiations with Montsame went slowly. The Mongols wanted Granada to pay a flat fee for the privilege of filming; Moser said they had never paid such a fee and couldn't now. Montsame replied that Japan Television had paid such a fee. Moser wouldn't budge. Several times it seemed as if negotiations had broken down completely, but each side left a loophole somewhere, and talks would resume.^[8]

Lattimore vowed never to undertake another business engagement in Mongolia. Few of his academic friends came around to see him. He observed, "In these socialist countries your manner of earning a living—I suppose one could try to be witty and say your 'mode of production'—puts you in an identifiable compartment. From this there are channels up and down, to higher and lower compartments in the same hierarchy, but much less definite cross-channels.".^[8] On this trip Lattimore was in the television compartment of the Mongolian bureaucracy, and many of his academic friends were wary of intruding.

Granada wanted to film the daily life of at least two families in a rural village, preferably in the Altai Mountains. Moser was to do a reconnaissance of several villages and work out in detail what they would film. When the scenario was agreeable to the village authorities, to Montsame, and to Granada, a camera crew would come out from London. It took several weeks for Montsame to agree to the details of Moser's reconnaissance trip; finally on February 6, 1974, Moser, Lattimore, and two Montsame men flew to the Altai and took a truck to a village collective called Biger.

The chairman of the collective was not happy with Granada's proposal. Filming the daily routine of his families would be an invasion of their privacy. He was willing to allow Granada to film what Moser called "a string of picture post cards," for which a week would be enough. Moser thought his project would take three to four weeks. Lattimore, as the only person involved who knew Mongol folkways as well as British practices, mediated as best he could. After five days satisfactory arrangements were tentatively reached, and the Granada party flew back to Ulan Bator.^[9] Lattimore left in mid-February 1974 for Paris, Moser for London.

While Lattimore was in Mongolia, the Gang of Four in Peking, headed by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife, stepped up their attack on Lin Piao and Confucius. This conflict had started in 1973; now, as Joseph Lelyveld of the New York Times put it, they were addressing their "sharpest polemics" to foreigners visiting China since "ping-pong diplomacy" began. In a pamphlet denouncing Confucius, "The scholar Owen Lattimore is castigated as 'an American reactionary historian' and 'an international spy' on the basis of a bland allusion to the Sage in one of his books. Professor Lattimore was one of the first Americans invited to return to China in the summer of 1971 by Premier Chou En-lai when relations between the two countries started to warm."^[10]

Was Chou vulnerable as a "revisionist"? A dispatch from John Burns noted, "After several years of pragmatism and calm, China is returning to the more militant attitudes characteristic of the Cultural Revolution—and everyone from the elevator operator who is wearing his Mao badge again to the soldier outside the diplomatic compound who no longer returns a friendly smile is falling into step."^[11]

Lattimore was disturbed. His standing in China was now less important to him than his ties with the Mongolian People's Republic, but he still wanted to maintain access to China. Gradually word filtered out to him after discreet inquiries: the Gang of Four would not prevail, and no one in China really thought he was an "international spy." So far as he was able to tell, the incident blew over with no lasting effects.

After short visits to Paris and Leeds, Lattimore arrived in Boston April 1, 1974, for the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and a related session of the Mongolia Society. The CIA monitored this session, noting that Lattimore was failing in health, apparently unable to stand for more than a few minutes without support. The CIA also thought his popularity with Asian scholars had declined.^[12]

For the rest of April 1974 and all of May, Lattimore was in constant motion. To England, to inspect his Leeds house and arrange for someone

to take care of the furniture he was shipping from Virginia. To Paris, where he was preparing to move to a new flat with a telephone. All the while, he was waiting for a call from Granada announcing departure for Ulan Bator with the film crew.^[13]

From Paris, Lattimore made his first major probe for funds to extend the work of the Lattimore Institute of Mongolian Studies. This was a long letter on April 15 to Cyrus S. Eaton. Eaton had invited Lattimore to one of the Pugwash conferences, at which prominent Soviet bloc and Western scholars and businessmen discussed ways to moderate the cold war. Lattimore had then just started at Leeds and could not attend. Now Mongol studies were firmly established in the West; wouldn't Eaton like to underwrite them? Especially at Leeds, whose program the Mongols most admire? Eaton was not interested.^[14]

Not until June 6 did the call come from Granada; the MPR was ready for filming. This trip to Mongolia was disillusioning. Lattimore was now exposed to Montsame bureaucrats who had been trained in the propaganda tradition of the Soviet Union. Only the best new buildings and machinery could be filmed; people in factories, farms, and stores must have their best clothes on; no spontaneous targets of opportunity could be filmed. Lattimore described one irritating incident in a diary-letter of July 7:

We were allowed to photograph the inside of a bookstore. When we got there, the shop was jammed with specially recruited people in their best, brightest, neatest clothes. There were so many you couldn't swing a camera, and some had to be asked to leave. When the film crew left, the "extras" left too. I stayed behind to buy books. The manager and personnel were terribly pleased about this. They even took me to their store-rooms at the back to make sure I didn't miss anything I might want. I got some interesting stuff, including an Art Buchwald collection translated into Mongol. (I'll send it to him.) By the time I got back into the front of the shop, it had filled again, this time with genuine customers. As in any bookstore in Mongolia, most of them were in their working clothes, some a bit shabby. Now the truth about Mongolia is that it is nearly 100% literate, people have a hunger for books, and there is a steady supply of books to satisfy the hunger. Which picture would do the most for Mongolia, abroad: the true picture of the people who really buy books, or the faked picture of dressed-up people pretending to buy books?^[15]

Lattimore got a nice fee as consultant to the project, and more was to come during a winter filming session, but he swore he would never do it again.^[16]

Filming was over by the first of July, and Lattimore resumed his scholarly role. Now he saw many of his old friends, dined at the embassies, attended National Day celebrations, made plans for the future with Academy people and the rector of the university. After talking to a Chinese diplomat at one of the parties, he was moved to rare sarcasm about the personality cult of the Great Helmsman: "It sometimes seems to me that Maoists believe that to make cows produce milk, and hens lay eggs, all you have to do is read the Little Red Book."^[17]

After Mongolia, the rest of 1974 was constant movement: Denmark, London, Norfolk, Cambridge, Leeds, Paris, Languedoc, New York, Baltimore, Washington. By a considerable margin, Lattimore spent less time in Paris that year than elsewhere. The scholarly production of his partnership with Fujiko was hardly under way.^[18]

In early January 1975 Lattimore was in London conferring with Granada; he then spent a relaxing weekend with Rosemary Carruthers in Norfolk. Even there work went with him. As he told David, he wrote a long review of The Horse in Fifty Thousand Years of Civilisation for the Times Literary Supplement , noting that the book was interesting, but weak on the importance of cavalry in Asia.^[19]

After his visit with Rosemary, Lattimore and Brian Moser left for Mongolia, arriving January 22. Now he had to deal with Montsame again, and his adjectives this time were more colorful than those of the previous summer. He put some prime invective in a letter to David. By February 5 Montsame had cleared the winter shooting script and the Granada party was off to the Altai. At Biger, where the head man of the collective had previously been obstreperous, things were now friendly. Granada got the desired shots of schools, winter farm operations, family celebrations of the lunar new year, and a spectacular valley opening into the high mountains. The Granada expedition wound up with more cordiality than Lattimore had expected, and everybody got back to England by the end of February.^[20]

Lattimore made the rounds of London, Norfolk, and Leeds, staying in his new Leeds house until mid-April. There he claimed to catch up on the "urgent" mail, but he still felt snowed under by all his obligations. He was lecturing some at Leeds and went to London several times to see rushes of the Granada film. He was himself in much of the footage:

a chastening experience for me to see and hear. God never designed me to be a television star.

So Granada's got under its wing, tra-la,

A most unattractive old thing, tra-la,
With a caricature of a face.

So for television, let Kenneth Clark have it.^[21]

Lecturing was still his favorite activity. Fairbank had him at Harvard that spring. He worked into his presentation at the Harvard Faculty Club on May 28, 1975, many of the themes he had developed during his last five years of travel in Siberia and Mongolia but had not yet been able to turn into books. His title was "Asia from the Landward Side." The major thrust was that Western scholars had dealt with China almost exclusively by considering the interaction of Chinese and foreigners along the China coast. He sought to emphasize the significance to China of contact with people spreading eastward from the civilizations of the Middle East, bringing with them languages, trading practices, and agricultural systems that had strongly influenced China. Even Chinese historians tended to overlook the importance of cultural influences from the West; he found an "obsessive assumption" that all Central Asian cultures were heavily influenced by China, but not the other way around. He referred to the rich holdings of the library at Ulan-Ude, in the Buryat Soviet Socialist Republic, written by political exiles sent to Siberia by the czars but allowed to continue their intellectual life. Buryatia had irrigated agriculture very early, using methods derived from Turkic rather than Chinese models. Siberia was not a cultural desert, Central Asian peoples were not primitives, and Mongols were not marauding savages.^[22]

Inevitably, in the question period Lattimore was grilled about Mongolia:

Herbert Levin asked Mr. Lattimore for his comments on contemporary thinking in Mongolia about relations with other countries. Mr. Lattimore made three points. First, the Mongols attribute their survival as a nation to their alliance with the Soviet Union. They greatly resent the allegation that they are a Soviet satellite. When Mr. Lattimore used that word to refer to Mongolia in the 1930's, he intended no pejorative meaning. Later the term became pejorative, making the Mongols upset. Even today, the idea is popular that Mongolia is squeezed between two giants. Since the Mongols are on one side, however, they do not feel squeezed.

Secondly, the Mongols are proud of their national independence. They take part in the United Nations and UNESCO, and bitterly resent the State Department attitude that the Soviet Union controls Mongolia.

Recently the Mongols published a book on "Mao and the Maoists." It criticizes the Chinese minority policies, but is restrained in comparison with the Chinese language used to describe the Mongols as "the new serfs of the new Tsars."

Finally, the Mongols understand China better than China understands Mongolia. The weak understand the strong.^[23]

The rest of the summer of 1975 Lattimore spent visiting in the United States. Brown University awarded him an Ll.D. on June second, and in August he went to California, lecturing at Berkeley, where he had lunch with old friends Jack Service and Philip Lilienthal. He also attended the International Congress of the Historical Sciences in San Francisco. This was an important milestone: for the first time a delegation of Mongol scholars attended a conference in the United States. Feeling so deeply indebted for the hospitality shown him in Ulan Bator, Lattimore tried hard to see that the Mongols had an easy time of it. Bira and Natsagdorj, friends of his, and a younger historian, Isjants, made up the Mongol delegation. After the congress Lattimore accompanied the Mongols on a visit to Indiana University, Bloomington, the foremost center of Mongol studies in the United States. John Hangin, one of the two Mongols Lattimore had brought to Baltimore in 1948, was a professor at Indiana. Then the party went on to New York, where Lattimore put the Mongols in touch with various foundations he hoped would support cultural exchanges when the United States finally recognized the MPR.^[24]

In late 1975 Lattimore seemed to control his urge to travel. He spent several months in Leeds, mostly working with Urgunge Onon on translations. The first three months of 1976 he stayed put in Paris, working with Fujiko on the Dilowa's memoirs and tape-recording recollections of his earlier life in China and the United States. He actually passed up an opportunity to work for American Express, helping them "get started doing business in Mongolia."^[25]

Fujiko was working on the history of a Japanese adventurer-intelligence agent named Kodama, who had profited from contacts with high-ranking Mongols. As Lattimore heard about this kind of commerce, he reflected, "It makes me look back on my own life, crestfallen. I could have worked that racket. The timing would have been right, too. By the McCarthy era I would have been in the CIA and shielded as a target; by the time the investigations of the CIA came along, I would have been retired and living on a much fatter pension than I draw now."^[26] What Lattimore did not add to this bit of persiflage, but should have, was "And I would have been miserable."

Even when Lattimore managed to stay in one place long enough to settle into a work routine, fame stood in the way of scholarly accomplishment. He wrote Gerard Piel February 20, 1976: "In the afternoon post, a letter from a learned man in England who wants to know about trypanosomiasis in camels. By the way he writes, he's a nice chap, so I'll have to answer, but how many hours of work will it mean?... I could do a full 8-hour day, just on letters, because too often answering a letter doesn't deal with the matter—It starts a correspondence. I can't even dictate on tape and send out for typing: too much slow spelling out of foreign words. Trypanosomiasis is bad enough, but when you get to the Mongol vocabulary of the disease . . ." (ellipses in original).^[27]

Even when relatively stationary, Lattimore would put off working on his major projects because he was so incurably interested in everybody he met and spent much time drawing out their life histories. Asian caravan men, Chinese merchants and peasants, diplomats of all countries, fellow passengers on planes and trains, the concierge of his Paris apartment building, surgeons, nurses, and charwomen in a hospital—Lattimore "interviewed" them all. In the years after Eleanor's death, when he wrote his diary-letters to Bill Rogers or his son David, he filled more space with biographical vignettes than with all other subjects.

He attributed his acquaintance with so many languages to this curiosity about people: "My mother once—in my hearing—explained to a visitor: 'My husband and my son Richmond are both scholars. Owen isn't a scholar, but he travels a lot and wherever he goes he picks up a bit of the language, because he just can't bear not talking to people.'"^[28] In some ways this talk contributed to his understanding of the contemporary world and its citizens; it also meant he was not concentrating on his major projects. Had Eleanor lived longer, there would have been fewer miniature biographies and more scholarly projects.

One of the major items on Lattimore's agenda was a translation into English of a Mongol herdsman's manual by Sambuu, one of the founders of the Mongolian People's Republic who befriended Choibalsan and rose m a high rank in the MPR hierarchy. Sambuu's book developed out of lectures on herdsmanship. It was colloquial yet scientific; Lattimore said he wanted to preserve its color and practicality. He told Gerard Piel, "As a Mongol said to me, when you read Sambuu, you can smell the scent of a cowdung fire. I want to keep that."^[29] The publishing house affiliated with Piel's Scientific American was interested in the Sambuu translation. Lattimore worked at it for ten years, checking his translation with Mongol scholars, seeking the most authoritative version of each chapter from among

several editions of Sambuu, but ultimately bogging down in the attempt to get Linnaean names for the many flora mentioned in the book.

After congressional passage of the 1975 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, Lattimore began to consider requesting his government Files. Arnold and Porter advised him against this project: "Too expensive and you won't get the juicy stuff."^[30] Lattimore decided in April 1976 not to try.

Lattimore still spent time at Leeds, tutoring promising students in Mongol and consulting with the Department of Chinese Studies, for which he still felt some responsibility. And he began to spend vacation periods with Rosemary Carruthers in Norfolk, where he found cutting and splitting firewood beneficial for an ailing back. In 1976 he spent mid-April to mid-May in England. The rest of the year he was peripatetic: a month in Mongolia, a holiday in the south of France, a conference in Switzerland, another month in England, conferences in Bonn and Copenhagen.

January 14, 1977, was a big day. He wrote exultantly to Gerard Piel, enclosing the last chapters of the Sambuu translation: "Lift up your eyes unto the Lord with proper amazement."^[31] He and Fujiko had also completed the Dilowa's memoirs and mailed them to Harrassowitz, the publisher, in Wiesbaden. Transliteration of Mongol was now governed by new rules, and when this book finally came out in 1982, "Dilowa Hutukhtu" had become "Diluv Khutagt."

Michigan State University lured Lattimore back to the United States in February 1977 to give the concluding talk at a conference on Soviet frontiers in Asia. He spent six weeks in America and discovered that he was once again salable to academic audiences: Colgate, Michigan, Illinois, Chicago, Pittsburgh. One outcome of these visits was a change in his attitude toward applying for his government files. No one remembers exactly how this decision came about, but on June 22, 1977, Bill Rogers wrote the FBI and the CIA requesting Lattimore's files under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act. The CIA was the first to reply, on June 30: "We are processing your request and will provide you with the results under the Privacy Act as soon as possible."^[32] As soon as possible turned out to be exactly nine years later, July 21, 1986. The CIA never acknowledged Lattimore's claim under the Freedom of Information Act; they did recognize Privacy Act rights, but the restrictive provisions of that act enabled them to ignore the vast bulk of their Lattimore holdings. The FBI was much faster, and documents from the bureau began appearing within a year. Lattimore asked me to screen them for him, using what I needed

for articles about events in which he was involved and sending copies of salient items to him in Paris.

Lattimore did not get to Mongolia in 1977; it was the first year he had missed in a decade. He shuttled for the rest of the year between Paris, Leeds, Norfolk, and London, with side trips to Copenhagen, Oxford, and Switzerland. He wrote the Piels on April 11, "It's been hard to settle down. Travelling around and talking to people was easy; getting out books, references and typewriter is WORK."^[33] He bemoaned the lack of a secretary but never got around to hiring one, which would have cut into his travel funds. However, he did get several chapters of an autobiography written. Lattimore spent the Christmas season of 1977 in Switzerland and visited Lois Snow (Edgar Snow had died in 1972), who had delightful tales about her recent visit to China.

By April 22, 1978, Lattimore was back in Mongolia. He wrote David that his main purpose in being there was to check his translation of Sambuu, which of course he did; but visiting old friends occupied more of his time. In his twenty-eight page diary-letter beginning April 25 and running through May 6, most of his minibiographies are of sons and daughters of Mongol scholars he had known for years. Career choices always fascinated Lattimore. He was especially pleased that Dalai was having a book translated into Russian, for which Dalai would get the Russian equivalent of Ph.D.^[34]

From John Gibbens, the first Leeds student Lattimore had picked to study in Ulan Bator, Lattimore learned that the MPR was now troubled with juvenile delinquency. Gibbens said he "thinks it begins with preteen agers, coming home from school before either parent is home from work. Idle and bored, they get into gangs, vandalize, fight, steal." This was one of the dangers of rapid urbanization that Lattimore had not before considered. The Mongols were working hard to counter it; Gibbens was hoping to learn from them, since he felt that the Mongol methods were effective.^[35]

Much of Lattimore's 1978 letter was about the ethnohistory of the Mongols, a subject he pursued now with even more enthusiasm than he had shown for "China in History." He was absolutely convinced that the Mongol conquests were not just a product of "bloody-mindedness" but a reaction to oppression by conquerors from older centers of civilization. He and Dalai discussed this hypothesis endlessly.

Lattimore had a long interview with the Izvestia correspondent for Mongolia and North Korea; as usual, he learned as much about the cor-

respondent as the correspondent did about him. During this interview Lattimore came up with a new formulation to explain Chiang Kai-shek's fall: "he had one foot in the past and one in the present (the war-time present) and tripped over himself because he couldn't get either foot into the future." The Izvestia man had interesting stories about the alienation of children of Siberian minorities, such as the Eskimos and Yakuts, who were put into boarding schools where they learned Russian and forgot their parents' tongue.

On May 1 Lattimore watched the May Day parade. There were no military units. It was the first such celebration Lattimore had seen where there were few all-Russian units; Russians were "mingled in with the Mongols." He left Ulan Bator on May 4, carrying with him to Paris yet another cache of scholarly materials and another storehouse of poignant memories.

In Paris he found the first gleanings from his FBI file, the papers showing that the bureau had begun full-scale surveillance of him after Bar-mine's accusations in 1949. This discovery stimulated another effort on his autobiography, but he could not settle down to it for any length of time. And he had to finish a paper, "Marxism and Nationalism in Mongolia," for a December conference. He wrote Bill Rogers on August 21, 1978, "As you know, it was the McCarthy/McCarran accusations that principally aroused my interest in Marxism, but I have followed up the interest in only a desultory way, always with the feeling that it's too late in life to master all that . However, just a couple of days ago, having run out of elevated discourse in print like Time, Newsweek, New Statesman, Economist, I got off a shelf, for bedside reading, a volume of Marx-Engels correspondence that I must have acquired in the 1950s but had never read." Here Lattimore found a critique of Ricardo's theory of rent that fit very closely his own 1940 analysis of agricultural productivity in China. "Does that make me a marxiste gentilhomme?" he asked Rogers.

Several months in France and he was restless—so back to England. He spent most of his time with Rosemary Carruthers in Norfolk. By October 1978 he and Rosemary had decided to marry.^[36] Her house in Norfolk was small, so they looked for a larger place. He would sell the house in Leeds, but moving to England from France would be expensive. Rutgers University invited him to teach there winter term 1979 at a good salary. He accepted the offer, hoping that Rosemary would come with him. She was reluctant. He stayed with her through the Christmas holidays then went to New York to stay with the Piels. He commuted from there to Rutgers.

The undergraduates he faced at Rutgers and the University of Pitts-

burgh during Rutgers' spring break were a quite different breed from the Asian specialists he had taught at Leeds. Lattimore took them in stride. At seventy-nine he realized the dangers of living in the past and took special pains to relate the turmoil of ancient Central Asia to the contemporary Middle East, Cambodia, Chile, and other trouble spots. One of the liabilities he saw coming from the McCarthy period was fear of anyone who could be termed controversial; this fear caused the hiring of only "safe" and hence second-rate public servants. These second-raters were now in control at the State Department and elsewhere in the bureaucracy. No wonder they did not understand what was really going on in Iran, Southeast Asia, and so on.^[37] Undergraduates of 1979 could understand this criticism.

Shortly before Lattimore finished his tour in the United States, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, meeting in New York, invited him to attend a discussion of Asia. When it came his turn to speak, according to the UPI Reporter , "the meeting room became deathly still." He explained how he and others who knew the Chinese Communists were not tools of the Kremlin were vilified and persecuted in the 1950s. When someone asked him why no one would listen at the time, he replied, "Because it did not fit the conventional wisdom." The UPL Reporter noted that there was "the barest trace of bitterness in his words."^[38]

In June 1979, when he returned to England, Rosemary was having second thoughts about marriage. She was happy to have Lattimore's company, and he spent much of his time in Norfolk; but to leave her cozy house for a man with wanderlust seemed too much. Lattimore decided to settle in Cambridge, where he had easy access to Norfolk and could spend frequent weekends there. July saw him apartment hunting and selling his house in Leeds.

In August he returned to Mongolia again. He described it as a "successful trip," but no diary-letter survives.

The move to Cambridge in November was harder than the moves to Paris and Leeds had been: he had to fit more impedimenta, including an "Augean cloaca" of FBI papers, into less space. He was now, he said, "as tightly wedged in among books as if I were bound between book covers myself." As for the ambience, Cambridge was more stimulating intellectually than was Paris.^[39]

Chapter Thirty-Two
Cambridge and Pawtucket

Lattimore's years with Cambridge as his base (1979-85) were the happiest of any after Eleanor's death. He already had friends there. One of the closest was Caroline Humphrey, formerly his student at Leeds. She had become head of the Mongolian and Inner Asia Studies Unit established at Cambridge in 1986 when Leeds was unable to sustain its Mongol program. Others he knew well included Joseph Needham, authority on Chinese science, ex-president of Gonville and Caius College, and Fellow of the Royal Society; Joan Robinson, frequent visitor to China and a prominent economist who specialized in the Third World; David's wife's sister, married to a don at Selwyn College; Edmund Leach, provost of King's College, who had started his career in China as Lattimore did, with an export-import firm; Sir Moses Finley, master of Darwin College, a great economic historian of classical times who had been hounded out of the United States by the splenetic Karl Wittfogel; and E. H. Carr, prominent historian at Trinity College.

Lattimore was made a member of High Table at King's College and dined there several times a term; the conversation was brilliant and the food superb. He was also made an honorary member of University Centre, "an endowed, club-like organization for visiting professors and the like. Rather good for me: no fees, better than average food." And he was "fast making new friends: many of them, which is cheering at my age, very young and promising." London was within commuting distance. He went there frequently for meetings of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Central Asian Society.^[1]

He soon fell into a routine. Up at seven, when his "internal clock" always woke him. After breakfast he worked on his autobiography: "In

theory (and I must say, generally in practice), nothing else is done until several pages of that have been tapped out."^[2] After lunch, chores, shopping, and exercise—at least half an hour of walking or cycling. Afternoon was also for "secondary productive work"—book reviews, articles, anything that would get into print. But there were troubles:

Theoretically, again, evening is for correspondence, and theoretically the structure is right. I have two typewriters: one in my study for the "primary" and one on a table in my bedroom for the "secondary" work. But the performance isn't up to the theory. In the first place, my filing is at least a year behind. . . . In the second place, there's the occasional visitor, or going out to dinner. Thirdly, I've developed an addictive vice: I read too many papers and weeklies (lucky I don't have television). That's because I'm fascinated by the American election, Iran, Afghanistan, China, Kampuchea, and what-all. Finally, by evening I am often just plain tired. (After all, I've just had my 80th birthday.)^[3]

Almost as important as the sociability and structured routine of Cambridge was the "refuge with Rosemary" in Norfolk. She had a guest room with a typewriter, and he could take work with him if he felt like it. Rosemary was a fine cook, and his descriptions of special meals like Christmas dinner are glowing. The thing he mentioned most in his letters to friends, however, was his Norfolk exercise: splitting wood. When he started visiting Norfolk, Rosemary had a huge pile of sawed logs too wide for the fireplace. At first Lattimore worked on them with an axe. In April 1980 Gerry Piel sent him a splitting maul from L. L. Bean. It revolutionized his favorite sport. Most of his letters during 1980 and 1981 describe the glee with which he reduced Rosemary's woodpile to fireplace size. He bragged, "I've split two mountains of firewood."^[4]

Toward the end of 1980 there were rumblings on the grapevine from China:

The Chinese are making noises—very discreet noises—bout inviting me again next year. They are doing it just the way they did in 1972; not a thing in writing, but messages passed by word of mouth along a relay chain. It would be interesting, but I don't have to go. As things stand, it looks as though they want me more than I need them. I've heard that under the new dispensation in China (that blessed word, pragmatism) even invited guests have to pay their own hotel and travel expenses inside China. So I've passed the message back that (a) I can't afford that much, and they'll have to pay my expenses inside the country; and (b) I'm getting too old to go racketing about all on my own, so I must have David with me. He's legitimate. He's a solid expert on

medieval Chinese poetry, which is now once more a respectable pursuit. . . . Like last time, I have to make it dear (but not vulgarly dear) to the Chinese that they are not capturing me from my Soviet and Mongol friends—any more than those friends have captured me from the Chinese.^[5]

Nineteen eighty-one marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Mongolian revolution, and as the first foreign member of the Academy of Sciences Lattimore was to help the Mongols celebrate. He arranged his trip that year to provide a fortnight each in China, Mongolia, and the Soviet Union, leaving in late June. David was unable to accompany him, so Lattimore asked Maria, his twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter, to come along. She was a musician and published poet. Lattimore observed later, "It's interesting that in all three revolutionary countries qualities like that got her an instant, enthusiastic welcome. Also, in all three societies, the Soviet as well as the Chinese and Mongol, the idea of the faithful granddaughter accompanying and looking after the decrepit grandfather was cordially approved."^[6]

Lattimore and Maria arrived in Peking on June 22, 1981, after a nine-teen-hour flight from London. He found the atmosphere much more relaxed than in 1972 in one way: people felt more free to talk. But the talk was often anti-Soviet diatribe. Maria recalls that all of their guides in China "were feeding us the line that the U.S. should supply them with nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet threat."^[7] Lattimore and Maria argued against this position, but the Chinese were unyielding. Maria says, "No matter how many counter-arguments we offered, they simply reiterated their initial position: 'The U.S. must help China defend against Soviet hegemony.'" Lattimore and Maria speculated inconclusively as to Chinese motives for this stultifying rigidity.

Lattimore was quite clear that the Chinese expected him to report to his friends in the West that things had improved since the Cultural Revolution. Of course they had, and Lattimore was pleased at this. But it was a bittersweet pleasure. One of his old Peking friends, whom he had asked to see in 1972 but was told the man was "on vacation," was available in 1981. The man had been sent off to the country and tortured, yet Lattimore had not suspected this treatment in 1972. He was now disturbed by his earlier blindness to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and he told Maria it was a personal failure analogous to the "good Germans not knowing about the concentration camps." Here he was probably too hard on himself: Michael remembered that his grandfather had been distinctly aware of the repression in 1972.

Lattimore's Chinese itinerary had been arranged to accommodate David's interest in Tu Fu, the great eighth-century poet who had lived in Chengtu. This stop was still on his schedule. John Stewart Service had been born in Chengtu, and Lattimore sent him a postcard from there. He and Maria also visited Sian, one of the most fascinating areas for archaeologists in all China. At the Ch'in dynasty site near Sian, where a massive vault containing life-size terra-cotta armies had been excavated, Lattimore was delighted to discover that the six thousand buried warrior figures were of many races, not just Han Chinese. Even the horses and weapons of the buried armies showed great individual detail and tribal distinctions. At Sian's T'ang dynasty tombs he and Maria "happened" to meet one of China's chief archaeologists, also a victim of the Cultural Revolution, once again practicing his profession.

Back in Peking, Lattimore was interviewed by Bradley Martin of the Baltimore Sun . The lead of Martin's story captured the Lattimore ethos precisely: "He walks with a stoop now, and the wrinkles earned during a career that ranged from scholarly field work with nomads on China's borders to jousting with the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy are etched deeply as he squints through a cloud of smoke from Chinese Double Happiness brand cigarettes. But as he nears his 81st birthday, Owen Lattimore... retains the quick and effective way with words and the critical eye for American foreign policy that persuaded McCarthy wire-pullers that the professor was a dangerous man."^[8]

Lattimore told Martin that Chinese intellectuals were indeed more relaxed than they had been in 1972 and reported a conversation with an official of the Chinese Nationalities Institute. This official acknowledged that the Cultural Revolution had purged thousands of competent men and installed "second-raters" whose main virtue was that they were conformists, just as happened in the United States during the McCarthy purges. Still heretical, Lattimore went on to observe that Mao Tse-tung once said the Chinese converted to communism because they "had the best teachers in the world—Japanese imperialists and Chiang Kai-shek. 'What worries me,' Mr. Lattimore said, 'is: aren't we, in El Salvador and elsewhere, becoming the best teachers of Communism? I've always said the government of a capitalist country not only has the right, it has the duty , to stop the spread of Communism. . .. but for God's sake let's try to stop resorting to methods that will recruit more new Communists.'"^[9]

The Chinese spared no effort to make Lattimore's visit enjoyable, but at the end of two weeks he was ready for Mongolia. On July 4 he and Maria entrained for Ulan Bator. At the Sino-Mongolian border, where

the train carriages had to be refitted with Russian-gauge wheels, the passengers disembarked and went to the railyard restaurant for dinner. Maria describes it as "the Chinese equivalent of a truck stop; the food was superb." Here Lattimore was in his glory. At his table were a Frenchman, a Malay, and several other nationalities, none of whose Chinese was in working order. Lattimore translated the menu into five languages and ordered for all of them.

Lattimore was one of the highest-ranking guests as the MPR celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Tsedenbal, the premier, received him and Maria for a full hour. The polemics were now reversed: Tsedenbal was worried about an infiltration of Chinese spies, mostly men who married Mongol women and moved to the MPR to gather defense secrets and carry out sabotage. Maria gave Tsedenbal a poem she had composed celebrating the anniversary. The poem, Lattimore said, delighted him. It included a reference to the Mongol cosmonaut who had recently gone on a Soviet space flight; this Russian-Mongol venture was a symbol for the celebration.

Lattimore's formal part in the proceedings was a speech (in Mongol) at the Academy. Maria says he practiced on her during the train ride and then spoke without notes. His theme was the significance of China's Great Wall. He did not see it as merely a barrier to keep out barbarians. Construction of the wall would have required either large numbers of resident workers or incredibly long supply lines. The Chinese aim must have been at least partly to extend the area inhabited by ethnic Chinese. This was a theme the Mongols appreciated.

There were the usual reunions with friends and former students, picnics in the countryside, attendance at the festival games, visits to the library and bookstores. Possibly the high point of the trip for Lattimore occurred the day he made his call on the British embassy. He and Maria walked to and from their hotel. His back was hurting on the return trip, and he stopped to rest on one of the benches lining Ulan Bator streets. At this bench an elderly Mongol, dressed in traditional robe and boots with turned-up toes, noticed Lattimore's coral and silver ring of Mongol design. The old man whispered almost inaudibly, "Where did you get the ring?" He was not sure whether he should pry into the affairs of this foreigner, was not sure the foreigner spoke Mongol, and did not fully expect an answer. Lattimore heard and responded, starting a long conversation. The Mongol knew that this was someone special; Lattimore knew that he was "one of them."

Two weeks in Ulan Bator were again too short; on July 18, 1981, Lat-

timore and Maria were on the Trans-Siberian railway en route to Novosibirsk. His old friend Okladnikov was seriously ill, hospitalized with advanced diabetes. During the three days Lattimore was in Novosibirsk, Okladnikov persuaded his doctors to allow him out of the hospital so he could entertain Lattimore for a last nostalgic visit. Okladnikov took Lattimore to the museum to see the latest of the stone markers from Central Asian archaeological digs and gave a magnificent banquet for him. The respect of the Novosibirsk academic community for Lattimore was shown at a meeting with the rector of the university; Maria says they served "vodka, expresso, and chocolates all at one time, the first two in exquisite containers which were never allowed to be empty." Okladnikov died within the year.

In Moscow the Lattimores were guests of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was tired. A daylong journey to a monastery museum wore him out. His eighty-first birthday party on July 29, which the Academy gave at what Maria describes as a "very fashionable restaurant," revived his spirits, but anticipation of the work awaiting him in Cambridge soon bore down on him. He had planned to continue his journey by train, visiting several European cities where friends were expecting him, but decided to fly back instead. He and Maria caught a plane for England July 31.

Fujiko came over from Paris for a week soon after his return to Cambridge to work on the proofs of their book about the Dilowa. This work postponed his dealing with the "unbelievable mountain of correspondence" that had accumulated in his absence.^[10] Maria stayed in England until the end of November, visiting friends and helping Lattimore with shopping and housekeeping. When he caught up on his correspondence and started on his memoirs, he got a writing block at the point where he first met Eleanor in Peking. Maria was visiting and got him to talk to her about it; the next day he was able to put it on paper. When she left, he spent several weekends and the Christmas season with Rosemary in Norfolk.

He learned in February 1982 that Shirendyb had been deposed as president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Only the Chinese commented publicly on this event; the Chinese embassy in London sent Lattimore their "official news agency report on Shirendyb, which suggests that he was attacked for 'not being pro-Russian enough,' which doesn't convince me. I have known him for more than 20 years, and he always struck me as the most romantically, as well as politically, pro-Russian

(not just pro-Soviet) among my Mongol friends."^[11] Eventually he learned that Shirendyb fell because the MPR thought he lived too well, and enabled his relatives to live too well, on the perquisites of his position.

Lattimore was still working fitfully on his autobiography, but his major interest now seemed to be a "big" article for Scientific American on ancient long-distance caravans. He previewed it this way:

Everybody knows there was a Silk Road from China to the Mediterranean. (There wasn't; there was a network of alternative routes.) But who knows what was the day's march (in sand, over steppe, in hilly country); the weight carried by each camel; seasonal variations and so on. I do, and so do a number, a dwindling number, of old Mongol and Chinese caravan men (and their techniques were different in important ways). For all this, you don't get the real thing by reading the great travellers, the Aurel Steins or whoever; they hired their caravans, they didn't work their own animals as I did; or, when I travelled in company with Chinese trading caravans, sit around the camp fire and hobnob with the men.^[12]

Despite his travel weariness the previous summer, when the fire bell rang, he was off again. The last week of August 1982 it was to the Fourth International Congress of Mongolists in Ulan Bator. He was "head" of the three-person English-speaking delegation; he appeared on Mongol television, translated documents, solicited the life histories of delegates he had not previously met, and visited friends. Surprisingly, in the one surviving letter written from Ulan Bator, he does not comment on Shirendyb's fall or his successor.^[13]

In the fall of 1982 he was back in the United States to lecture and see David, the Piels, the Nefs, and the Rogers. Mark Spencer of the Kansas City Times , who caught up with Lattimore at the University of Kansas, noted that he was constantly smoking unfiltered Pall Malls. He told Spencer somewhat ruefully that he had been "knocking around loose" since he retired from Leeds. But he did not mind being out of the headlines now.^[14]

This lecture trip was the last major excursion. Old age was overcoming wanderlust. In a letter to the Piels April 5, 1983, he described his aching back, caused by his "spine shrinking down on thinned-out discs."^[15] Walking brought acute discomfort; cycling and swinging his splitting maul at Rosemary's seemed to loosen him up. And he had a serious infection of the inner ear, which took many months to heal.

By the time the ear was healed, he had reduced Rosemary's woodpile

"to a few gnarled chunks," and his favorite exercise was no longer available. It became a chore even to go to London. And he was again drinking heavily. Everything was slowing down, even the requests for information and advice that had previously descended in torrents. The mail was probably decreasing, he said, "because of my slowness in correspondence."^[16]

There was one bright spot in 1984; he went to Leeds for an honorary degree, his third, on May 11.

David began to get letters from his father's friends in 1985, saying that it was no longer safe to leave him alone in Cambridge and that no live-in housekeeper or practical nurse would suffice. He needed the frequent attention and authority of a member of the family. David flew to England in July 1985 and agreed; the old man could no longer make it on his own. David called in the movers and packed up his father to come live near him in Pawtucket. It was a wrenching move. According to Lattimore, "I had to give in, though it was agony to leave Cambridge, where I'd been blissful."^[17]

Two things had to be done in Pawtucket: find a house and get a complete physical examination. David's place was too small to add his father and his impedimenta. Within a month Lattimore found a beautiful eighteenth-century house three blocks from David, but modernization took almost a year. The medical exams went faster. He was basically sound, but teeth and eyes needed attention. The doctors forbade alcohol and caffeine and put him on a strict diet. Many of his teeth had to come out, and the dentures he got were agonizing: "The new teeth are an occupying army, and they never let me forget who's occupied and who's doing the occupying."^[18] When he moved into his house, he had a full-time practical nurse, and in 1987 his grandson Evan and fiancée moved in upstairs.

Despite age and poor eyesight Lattimore continued to work away at his remaining projects. Fujiko was still his collaborator on a part of his memoirs, to be handled separately from the full-length autobiography: this was the story of his service with Chiang. She came every year from Paris or Tokyo, where she had moved in 1986, to visit him. They mailed the manuscript back and forth between visits. John DeFrancis, still living in Hawaii, also got it through the mail for editing.

The Association of American Geographers, very conservative and long uneasy about Lattimore, finally awarded him its "highest honors" at its convention in May 1986. The citation reviewed his career approvingly, concluding, "In his 86th year we, the Association of American Geographers, humbly add our formal recognition to the wide range of accolades

he has received both in his homeland and abroad. He has reminded us again that formal academic credentials do not necessarily equate with scholarly achievement and excellence."^[19] In the summer of 1986 Lattimore learned that the State Museum in Ulan Bator had named a newly discovered dinosaur after him: Goyocethale lattimorei . The Mongolian embassy in London wished him a happy eighty-sixth birthday by telephone July 29.

Nothing could keep Lattimore from addressing the Mongolia Society's annual convention in New York November 8, 1986. His title, "Mongolia as a Leading State," reflected his long-held admiration and affection for the Mongols. Mongolia, he said, was a leader in industrial and social development, melding the new with the old in a fashion that was an example to others.^[20] The address was subsequently published in the society's bulletin.

Now that Lattimore was back in the United States, I was able to visit him regularly. He had much to say about the various publications I had written based primarily on his FBI file. One of the things he argued about was my contention that the FBI, despite its hostility toward him, had behaved better than had the senatorial inquisitors and the politicized Justice Department and had shown a basic professionalism in evaluating the so-called evidence that he was a Communist. For him the FBI was and would remain a scurrilous part of the midcentury witch-hunt, and incompetent to boot. He constantly admonished me to acknowledge his errors and not to "overjustify" him.^[21]

Nineteen eighty-seven brought good news. The United States government, after sixty-six years, had extended diplomatic recognition to the Mongolian People's Republic. Invigorated by this belated sanity in American behavior, Lattimore made plans to attend the International Congress of Mongolists in Ulan Bator in September. David and granddaughter Clare, a nurse, would go with him. His health was holding steady, perhaps even improving, and he wanted to give a paper on "a Manchu folk-history legend that I garnered in Kirin in 1929."^[22]

On June 2, 1987, Lattimore wrote the Piels bubbling over with plans for publishing.^[23] This was one of his last letters. On July 17 he suffered a stroke, with substantial loss of his ability to speak. The Mongol trip was canceled. Now it was necessary to bring in a full-time practical nurse. Lattimore's ability to walk, eat, read, and understand others was unimpaired. He could start a sentence orally, but his aphasia prevented its completion.

One can imagine the agony for a man who had always been quick with

a response. Now the "opium" (David's word) of reading endless newspapers and magazines and his interest in world affairs sustained his spirit. He was cut off from the world, but the world was not cut off from him.

The world missed much in the contributions Lattimore could have made had he not lost his indispensable wife and partner in 1970. "China in History" was never finished, nor were the major article on long-haul caravans, the autobiography, or the Sambuu translation. Only the fragment of a memoir, centering on his service with Chiang, was finished through the efforts of Fujiko Isono. Gerard Piel particularly regretted that Lattimore "never put together a comprehensive picture of his field." But as late as February 1987, commenting on my account of his service with Chiang, he was still sharp and articulate. He commented on the enormous enigma of Western relations with the Soviet Union:

Chiang did tell me, early on [1941] that after the war China's Communists would have to be dealt with militarily. No use trying to negotiate. 1 discounted this, knowing that powerful warlords like Chang Ch'un in Szechuan, Yen Hsi-shan in Shensi, the Ma family Muslims in Kansu would manoeuvre to prevent total power from falling into Chiang's hands. He told me also that he could trust Stalin and work with him. I discounted this, too, thinking that Stalin would walk in if there were a vacuum--yet Stalin never gave Mao a pistol or a cartridge during the war and after the war he delayed the Soviet withdrawal from Manchuria--at Chiang's request, because Chiang was afraid that Mao would get there ahead of him. It was only after Chiang's collapse, with the Communists already triumphant in the field, that Stalin moved info the "vacuum." Mao never forgot or forgave this. It is a very tricky, delicate problem of analysis to determine when the Soviets make decisions because they claim to be the senior communists of the world, and when they act as the rulers of a Great Power. They have a number of times acted in restraint of what they regard as "revolutionary excess" in neighboring countries. I have never been able to get a clear discussion of this with a Soviet (or any other) Marxist, because their briefcases are always stuffed with old slogans, cliches, and long-ago doctrinal rulings--and so, all too often, are ours. (Lattimore's italics)^[24]

One way to gauge a scholar's worth is to examine with hindsight the wisdom of that scholar's judgments. Lattimore's track record is remarkable. Of course, there was some bad advice from his pen. He said in 1940 that Japan was no danger to the United States. He was wrong about Stalin's purge trials. He thought too highly of Chiang's ability as a politician

and statesman. He thought the Czechs would be able to maintain their independence of the Soviet Union, as Finland had. James Cotton faults Lattimore's interpretation of the role of Buddhism in Mongolia.^[25] But in far more judgment calls, his heresies now look very good.

When the Japanese launched their major offensive against North China in 1937, Lattimore was all but alone in saying that Japan would not win, that the Chinese would stem the Japanese advance and hold their heartland. Going against the common opinion of journalists, he saw dearly that the Chinese Communist support of coalition with Chiang was only a tactical maneuver and that Mao was a dedicated Marxist. His prescriptions for the Chinese Nationalist government to recover the areas lost to Japan in such fashion as to win peasant allegiance and roll back Communist gains can now be seen as enlightened. His constant early warnings that colonialism was doomed in Asia were right on the mark, however offensive they were to conservatives and the European powers. He knew, and said, that the United States could not prop up the Nationalist government after it had lost the mandate of heaven, that foreign intervention would be the kiss of death, and that we should cut our losses and come to terms with Peking.

He was right about Marshall Plan aid being wasted in futile colonial wars in Southeast Asia; about Ho Chi Minh being strong in 1949, and about United States backing of Bao Dai being a mistake; and about the inapplicability of the domino theory in that area. He knew the ill-fated China White Paper would be counterproductive. He knew Chinese control of Tibet would be destructive and unpopular, and he tried to rescue the Tibetan monastery manuscripts. He foresaw the rigidity and excesses of the Chinese Communists and predicted a repression in China such as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He anticipated long in advance Japan edging out the United States in international commerce. He constantly warned of serious consequences of great power arrogance and hegemonism, both from the United States and from Russia. Russian arrogance, he held, would eventually alienate Soviet minorities. He knew, and said, that the Vietnamese were no more puppets of the Chinese than the Chinese were of the Russians.

As to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of 1950-54, he was right to hold it in contempt. As to the most visible inquisitor, McCarthy, Lattimore's judgment was ultimately upheld by that most conservative senator, Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, who said that McCarthy took the nation to "depths as dark and fetid as ever stirred on this continent."^[26]

Mongol text of poem read by Urgunge Onon at Lattimore's memorial service, 1989.

Even the State Department finally came around to recognizing the MPR in 1987; Lattimore had pushed recognition with Bullitt in 1936.

It is a record to admire.

We also owe to Lattimore clear proof that it is possible for a single individual to prevail against a powerful committee of the U.S. Senate, a committee that was accumulating perhaps the greatest mass of lies and perjuries ever assembled in the halls of Congress. We cannot know how much Lattimore's refusal to knuckle under, confess imagined sins, or run away stiffened the spines of others under attack; we do know that his courage was applauded throughout the world.

Owen Lattimore died of pneumonia May 31, 1989, in Providence, twenty-nine days short of his eighty-ninth birthday. At a memorial service on the Brown University campus three of his oldest friends, Evelyn Stefansson Nef, Urgunge Onon, and Gerard Piel, came to pay their respects. Were Lattimore to select a eulogy to grace his memory, it would undoubtedly be the poem written by Urgunge Onon and read by him at the memorial service.

When the spring wind blows in Khangqai,

When the summer mirage appears in the Gobi,
When the five kinds of livestock make sounds in the golden autumn,
When the joyful music sounds on the winter snow
La bagshi, rest peacefully on the sunlit side of Gurban Saikhan Khangqai.

Thinking and gazing from afar,
You have given your love to the Mongols
Who have all become your brothers.
The blue sky is now your quilt,
The green grass your blanket;
As long as Gurban Saikhan Khangqai stands,
The Mongols will remember you.