Chapter Twenty-One
McCarran

In December 1950 crusty old Patrick A. McCarran of Nevada, nominally a Democrat but bitterly at odds with Roosevelt and Truman most of the time, decided to upstage HUAC and establish a Senate mechanism to root out Communists. After eighteen years in the Senate, McCarran was sixth in seniority and arguably first in power as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which handled 40 percent of Senate bills and all judicial appointments. As Alfred Steinberg said in a November 1950 Harper's article, McCarran "emerged as a greater threat to his party's program than the combined forces of the Dixiecrats and the Republicans. . .. He need play ball on no team but his own."^[1] Where McCarthy was impulsive and disorganized, McCarran was methodical and a master of Senate procedures.

Long before McCarthy discovered the anti-Communist issue, McCarran had made it his ideological anchor. Like Freda Utley, whom he later hired, he believed as early as 1941 that the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany, was the greatest threat to Western civilization. When the State Department ordered the closing of all German consulates in the summer of 1941, McCarran denounced the action and "argued that Roosevelt should have broken all ties with the Soviet Union instead." In the middle of the war (April 19, 1943) he wrote his friend Pete Peterson, "I am convinced that there is a group in full control of this administration that proposes to turn our government over to anything but a democratic form." The party to which he belonged called itself Democrat, but McCarran said that his colleagues "in reality are nothing but communists to the very core." ^[2]

By 1945 Roosevelt wanted very much to get McCarran out of the Senate and offered him a federal judgeship. McCarran considered it seriously,

as Von Pittman discovered, but decided that the threat of domestic communism, especially in the person of Vice President Wallace, compelled him to continue to serve in the Senate.^[3]

In foreign policy McCarran's anticommunism led him to strong support of Francisco Franco in Spain; some called him the "Senator from Madrid." He won most of his battles for increased acceptance of the Spanish dictator.

The other arena that drew his concern was China. McCarran was a latecomer to this cause, not speaking out on China policy until September 1948, but he quickly gathered momentum and by 1949 was sponsoring a bill to give a billion and a half dollars to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. The China lobby forces in Washington welcomed him to their ranks. V. K. Wellington Koo, Chinese ambassador to the United States in 1949, gave confidential papers outlining Nationalist defense plans for Taiwan to four Americans: John Foster Dulles, Representative Walter Judd, Senator William Knowland, and McCarran. McCarran accepted the entire corpus of China lobby beliefs, including the most risible: "Everyone knows that captured Chinese Red generals have admitted that their orders came from the Kremlin," McCarran told the New York Times in January 1949.^[4]

The intensity of McCarran's anticommunism was matched by his devotion to its conspiracy corollary. The "loss of China" did not just happen. His close friend Norman Biltz, a Nevada businessman, recalled McCarran's conspiracy beliefs in an oral history:

Senator McCarran believed completely that there was one being in the United States who directed the operation of the Communist Party. He was completely convinced of this, and so was McCarthy. Patsy told me many, many times, he said, "Norm, I can't get through the cloud. I can't find that person. But I feel his influence all over Washington." And he said, "If I throw up a hundred false balloons, if I make a hundred efforts that fail, if I make a hundred mistakes, and do eventually find that one man, I will have served my country well." And he died believing it. I wouldn't dare tell you some of the people he suspected. (Italics in original)^[5]

We know some of the people he suspected. Roosevelt was one, but he died in 1945. Wallace was another, but his disappearance from national politics after the election of 1948 took him out of the running. By 1950, when McCarthy identified Lattimore as the top Soviet spy, McCarran was thinking the same thing.

Thus, it was entirely fitting that McCarran should establish in Decem-

ber 1950 a Judiciary subcommittee charged with investigating the administration of the new Internal Security Act, appoint himself chairman of this Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and look for the Communist mastermind. Senate Resolution 366, passed December 21, 1950, was his authorization.

This subcommittee was to have seven members. Its composition was no accident. McCarran was not about to tolerate on his board of inquisitors any senator who would dissent from what he knew to be true: treason had lost China, Lattimore was the mastermind behind it, and the Institute of Pacific Relations was the vehicle Lattimore had used to accomplish Communist ends.

McCarran needed three Democrats and three Republicans for SISS. The choice was easy. Of the six Democrats available on Judiciary, three were certifiable liberals, scoring high on the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scorecard for the 1950 session of Congress: Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, Warren Magnuson of Washington, and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.^[6] Of the three Democrats remaining, James Eastland of Mississippi was most in tune with McCarran; he had applauded McCarran unstintingly in a speech to the Senate on July 14, 1950, and was in complete sympathy with McCarran's views on foreign policy and internal security. McCarran delegated Eastland to introduce the resolution creating SISS on November 30 since McCarran himself was away from Washington at that time.

Only one other Democrat, Herbert O'Conor of Maryland, was a member of Judiciary in 1950; although he was less vociferous in his anticommunism, he was on record against Lattimore and against admission of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations. O'Conor would do. Recently elected Willis Smith of North Carolina had been appointed to Judiciary; he had a certifiable record in his 1950 election campaign, defeating the liberal Frank Graham by red-baiting and pandering to the segregationists. Smith was not a strong supporter of McCarthy, as were the others, but he bought the China lobby position without exception. ^[7]

The selection of Republicans presented no problem either. Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin was far too liberal, William Langer of North Dakota was ideologically unreliable, and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey was soft on foreign policy. The other three Republicans were perfect for McCarran's purposes. Homer Ferguson of Michigan, William Jenner of Indiana, and Arthur Watkins of Utah were ultraconservative. In three years of voting, they accumulated between them 13 votes aligned with ADA positions, 102 against. All were China lobby supporters, two were

on record against Lattimore, and the third (Watkins) could not abide any supporter of Roosevelt. Watkins later deserted McCarthy's cause, but he remained a fervent McCarranite.

On the salient issues of foreign policy and internal security, McCarran had an investigating group without a single deviant opinion.

Joe McCarthy was not a member of Judiciary, but he saw that SISS would be a wonderful vehicle for furthering his interests. The Tydings subcommittee had not been to his liking: the Democrats were hostile, Lodge was lukewarm, and the minority counsel, Robert Morris, was powerless; only Hickenlooper came to his support. SISS was something else entirely; he could not have asked for a more sympathetic crew. He set about to attach himself, and his most loyal staff, to SISS.

Surine was the first to see action. He stayed on McCarthy's payroll but was soon spending most of his time working for McCarran. In a conversation with Thomas Reeves on April 7, 1977, Surine claimed to have played a major role in SISS activities; he said he had attended all the hearings, procured the most incisive evidence, and helped write the major committee report, which, according to Surine, was "the best source on American foreign relations from 1925-52."^[8] These claims are exaggerated, but Surine did play a role in a cloak-and-dagger escapade that started SISS on its way.

Edward Carter, former IPR secretary, had stored old IPR files in a barn on his farm near Lee, Massachusetts. Hundreds of letters to and from Lattimore were in the files. The FBI New York office had studied these files at Carter's suggestion, finding that only five of them were at all pertinent to the investigation of Lattimore and that "none relate[d] to pro-Soviet or pro-Communist sentiments or espionage." The SISS crew did not know the FBI had seen the files. When McCarthy got a telephone call December 21, 1950, from Thomas Stotler, the son (FBI version) or nephew (Jack Anderson version) of the caretaker at Carter's farm, McCarthy imagined that a great evidential treasure might be surfacing. Surine was detailed to follow up this call. In early January 1951 Surine arranged with Stotler to liberate the treasure; together they secretly carried the IPR files to 1. B. Matthews's office in the Hearst Building in New York. A report to the FBI said that Hearst had purchased the IPR documents; this seems unlikely.^[9]

As Jack Anderson tells the story, by February 3, 1951, the Matthews operation had made copies of eighteen hundred documents. The security of Matthews's operation was not good; news of it spread to HUAC, Senators Ferguson and Mundt, and Hearst columnists Sokolsky and West-

brook Pegler. When a HUAC agent came poking around the Hearst offices, Surine and Matthews got cold feet. The documents were smuggled back to Carter's barn.^[10]

To Matthews, Surine, and other Hearst associates, the label "Institute of Pacific Relations" meant conspiracy and subversion. This collection of documents had to be retrieved. McCarthy arranged for SISS to issue a subpoena for all the "letters, papers, and documents" in Carter's barn. Surine was then sent back to Massachusetts with Frank Schroeder, a McCarran employee, and on February 8 Schroeder served the subpoena on the legally incompetent caretaker (it should have been served on Carter). Surine and Schroeder loaded the files in a truck and drove them through a blinding snowstorm to New York, where McCarran had arranged an armed Treasury escort for the rest of the journey to Washington. The files were stored in Judiciary Committee offices, locks on the door were changed, and guards provided. As the New York Times reported February 11, 1951, "Senators assigned to investigate subversive activities said today they expected 'sensational' results from a seizure of voluminous files of the Institute of Pacific Relations."^[11] The Times account was relatively low-key, buried on page fifty-four of a Sunday edition. Hearst, Scripps Howard, and McCormick Patterson papers carried headlines screaming "Secret 'Lattimore' Files" and calling the operation a "Daring Raid."

McCarran kept up the tempo. He told the United Press on February 11 that his committee "would investigate 'fully' all matters involved in the records." By February 20 this initial enthusiasm had apparently died down. An FBI informant told the bureau that "the Senate Subcommittee and Senator McCarthy feel that nothing of any real importance is contained in these documents" and that "the primary aim of the Senate Subcommittee is to reopen the 'Amerasia' case."^[12] This turned out to be a bad tip. The IPR was the primary fixation of SISS for a long run.

One of the reasons McCarran stuck with the IPR investigation was that Robert Morris, who had moved to McCarthy's payroll after the Tydings committee disbanded, now went to work for McCarran. Morris, a former naval intelligence officer, believed that Lattimore really was the evil genius behind American failures in Asia. In the October 30, 1950, Freeman , Morris published "Counsel for the Minority: A Report on the Tydings Investigation." Tydings had been a whitewash, and the Democrats had been solely concerned with scuttling McCarthy. "But the most serious delinquency of the Subcommittee was its steadfast refusal to look into the nature of the Institute of Pacific Relations. It was serious because Budenz

had testified (and others were prepared to do so) that this very influential organization during a particularly strategic period had been controlled by the Communists."^[13] Morris gloried in possession of the IPR files; along with Judiciary Counsel Julian G. (Jay) Sourwine and SISS Director of Research Benjamin Mandel, Morris set out to study the IPR records systematically. The study lasted for a year. Not until February 1952 was Morris ready to confront Lattimore in public.

McCarthy was ready with a new challenge to Lattimore much sooner. Under Kohlberg's influence McCarthy set out to obtain evidence from the Chinese Nationalists that Lattimore had contributed to their downfall. One potential source was a foreigner in the United States for whom McCarthy had helped obtain a visa extension. This person had spent about twenty years, including the war years, in China. The FBI was still protecting him in 1981, and we know only that he was informant T-7 in the relevant documents. In early 1950 Surine approached T-7 and asked him to obtain information about Lattimore and others from Chiang's flies on Taiwan. T-7 was reluctant; he did not want to become involved in American politics. Nevertheless, Surine persuaded him that "securing such information would be of assistance to the United States Government and would be a blow struck in the war against Communism."^[14]

T-7 therefore contacted his friends in Taiwan and procured for McCarthy a seven-page report entitled "A Copied Document." It was a mishmash of rumor and invention. Its opening salvo claimed that when Henry Wallace was in Chungking in 1944 he had a "secret conference with Stilwell, Lattimore, Davies, Service, Vincent, and Ray Ludden, the purpose of which was to plot the downfall of the Nationalist regime." Such a meeting could not have taken place, as neither Stilwell nor Ludden was in Chungking at the time. Davies did not attend any of the meetings with Wallace, and Lattimore was still plotting the survival of the Nationalist regime.^[15]

The document attacked two of Lattimore's books but offered only minor additional gossip: "When Lattimore was in Chungking he had frequent associations with the bandit [Communist] representatives, Chiao Mu [Hu Ch'iao-mu] and Kung P'eng, and secretly passed on important intelligency [sic ] relating to our side to be carried back to Yenan."^[16] The first part of this is true; Chiang did instruct Lattimore to confer with the Communist representatives in Chungking. The latter part was wholly malicious and, as the FBI decided, an invention of the 1950s.

Other documents from Taiwan surfaced during the SISS hearings. An unusual one began its journey in January 1951. General Charles Wil-

loughby of the Far East Command in Tokyo, an intelligence aide to MacArthur, was trying to obtain information for his book about Sorge; he sent Lieutenant Thomas Malim to Taiwan to obtain anything in Chinese Nationalist flies that might relate to the Sorge spy ring. Malim spent about three unsuccessful weeks in Taipei; "although the Chinese authorities appeared anxious to be helpful, they were able to turn up very little of what he was looking for."^[17] Malim prepared to return to Tokyo empty-handed, but at the airport about an hour before his scheduled departure a courier came up to him with a document in Chinese. Malim was "unable to question Chinese officials about the documentation or sources of the allegations" contained in this document because of the shortness of time.^[18] The document appears to have been entitled "International Red Conspiracy Undermines China," and while the cast of characters was somewhat different from that of "A Copied Document," it represented the same genre of postfacto inventiveness.

This time the headings within the document coupled the name of the enemy American with the name of a Communist Chinese "bandit." Section one dealt with "Owen Lattimore and Madame Sun Yat-sen"; others were headed "John S. Service and Kung P'eng," "Alger Hiss and Chang Han-fu," "John K. Fairbank and Liu Tsung-chi."^[19]

Despite Hoover's many requests to Tokyo for information about Lattimore, and though this document appears to be precisely what Hoover had been requesting, Far East Command did not send a copy to the FBI. The bureau appears not to have found out about it until June 25, 1951, six months after Tokyo got it. Hoover then wrote Army Intelligence (G-2) in Washington asking for a copy of the materials given to Malim. This request was passed on to Willoughby, who sent a copy of the document to G-2 in Washington on July 7. G-2 notified the bureau that the copy was en route and "would be made available to the Bureau as soon as received." But there is no trace of the document in bureau files for five months, and G-2 did not actually get it to the FBI until December 21, 1951, almost eleven months after Malim received it.^[20]

The section of "International Red Conspiracy" dealing with Lattimore contains little about his activities in China other than what was by then available from the Tydings hearings and from Lattimore's books. He is charged with having "eulogized" the Chinese Communists throughout the world as "mere agrarian reformers" after his trip to Yenan in 1937. During his service with Chiang he allegedly pushed Mao's views as expressed in a booklet The New Epoch . During his trip with Wallace he took Wallace to see Madame Sun Yat-sen, giving the Communists "consider-

able encouragement." A long section on his activities in OWI all derives from sources in Washington and in no sense represents Chinese "intelligence." Army described the whole document as of questionable value.^[21]

This document too came to SISS and along with the T-7 document provided questions when Lattimore was called before McCarran.

There was much stir in Baltimore the second week of March 1951. Lattimore was asked to speak to the United Nations Youth Council at Baltimore City College on March 7. Acting at the request of the local American Legion, Baltimore City Council voted 13-6 to ask the school board to cancel the speech. The rationale was that the IPR was being investigated; Lattimore had been an officer of IPR; therefore Lattimore was subversive. The school board, however, declined. Lattimore spoke on schedule. There were no incidents, and all but about fifty of the two thousand students attended his lecture. His subversive message, according to the New York Times , was that the United States should have a "foreign policy that would work equally well in Asia and Europe."^[22]

But other news dominated the headlines that spring. On March 29 a jury convicted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of atomic espionage; this case joined the Hiss conviction in the pantheon of right-wing causes. A mere two weeks later Truman fired MacArthur, and the resulting furor lasted several months. MacArthur came back from Japan as a conquering hero, and Truman endured obloquy such as few presidents ever have. When MacArthur addressed a joint session of Congress April 19, Missouri Congressman Dewey Short, with no apparent damage to the presumption of his sanity, declared, "We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh, and we heard the voice of God."^[23] Then there were the headline-making MacArthur hearings, commonly known as the MSFE hearings, jointly held by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. The official title was "Inquiry into the Military Situation in the Far East and the Facts Surrounding the Relief of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur from His Assignment in That Area."^[24] From May 3 to June 25, 1951, the public was treated to a daily display of the Asia-first doctrines associated with Republican conservatives. McCarran and his followers were on the sidelines cheering.

The MSFE report agrees on thirty conclusions. Most of them deal with military matters, but some are political. Among the political conclusions: the identity of our real enemy was not North Korea but international communism; Soviet domination of the People's Republic of China was clear; and the United States should support the Republic of China on Taiwan, keeping the People's Republic out of the United Nations.^[25]

A final section of the MSFE report dissects an official War Department publication entitled Our Ally China , which indoctrinated American soldiers during World War II with various subversive beliefs. Our Ally China emphasized the complexities of Chinese politics and always put the label "Communists" in quotes, implying that they weren't Communists at all. The MSFE report concludes: "American soldiers desiring to obtain more facts in regard to the problem of our Chinese ally were given a reference for further reading. That reference was The Making of Modern China by Owen Lattimore."^[26] So Lattimore stood impaled by yet another group of senators.

One minor vindication of Lattimore appeared in FBI Files during the spring of 1951. McCarthy, FBI agent Cornelius in Albany, and various informants had sniped at the Dilowa as a Communist agent in disguise. The FBI investigated the matter through army channels. Hoover requested Brigadier General John Weckerling, chief of Army Intelligence, to find out what he could about the Dilowa. Weckerling's contact in Taipei then went to his Nationalist counterpart for information. It came in a quite different shape from the T-7 and Malim documents: "The Dilowa Hutukhtu is thoroughly reliable and has a long record of anti-communist activity. He is also reported to be highly thought of by members of the Legislative Yuan of which he was at one time a member. I [Nationalist G-2] have known of the Dilowa Hutukhtu's activities over a period of about ten years and met him twice in Peiping in 1947 and 1948. From all I know of him I believe he would have no part of communism, particularly as the advent of communism into [Inner] Mongolia could have nothing but bad effects for him and his disciples."^[27]

Reader's Digest reentered the ranks of Lattimore accusers in 1951. The June issue carried an article by Elinor Lipper (alias Elinor Catala, according to the FBI) entitled "Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps." This was a condensation and translation of Lipper's book of the same title, published in Germany in 1950.^[28] In the German edition Lipper ridicules Henry Wallace for his naïveté in believing everything the Soviets told him during his 1944 visit to Magadan. Lattimore is not mentioned.

In April 1951 an English edition of Lipper's book was published by Henry Regnery. It contains a new section, headed "Owen Lattimore's Report," excoriating Lattimore even more than Wallace, since Lattimore had an "opportunity offered to an American scholar [that] was unique: no free foreigner had set foot in this NKVD country before, and no one has done so since." Lattimore's sin was that he, more than Wallace, should have known that what they saw at Magadan was all show put on by the

Russians; Lipper then quotes seven passages from Lattimore's National Geographic Magazine article, castigating his exuberant account of Magadan and of the Russians who entertained him. Lipper told friends that the attack on Lattimore was inserted in the Regnery edition without her knowledge.^[29]

It is hard to believe that Regnery behaved so crudely. However this insertion in the American edition came about, it was incorporated in Lipper's Reader's Digest article, and Lattimore was again deluged with hostile mail. He answered many of these letters at length, acknowledging that what he and Wallace saw and described were Potemkin villages but also pointing out assumptions and errors of Lipper's that vitiated her polemic. But his response did not get a circulation in the millions.

Lipper came to the United States on a lecture tour in 1951, and the FBI interviewed her in October. She acknowledged knowing nothing about Lattimore, not even being aware in 1944 that he had accompanied Wallace.^[30] That may be why SISS, which had invited her to testify on Lattimore, did not carry through with the invitation—at least publicly. When Wallace testified before SISS, he admitted that Lipper probably gave an accurate picture of the Magadan slave-labor camp—except for the hog farm, which he thought she knew nothing about.

Morris, Sourwine, and Mandel used the spring months of 1951 to prepare their case against the IPR and Lattimore. They had literally thousands of IPR documents to organize. And organize they did. The Tydings hearings had been haphazard and unpredictable, influenced by the tug-of-war between McCarthy and Hickenlooper on one side and the Democrats on the other. The pro-McCarthy witnesses had not been thoroughly prepared. Even Louis Budenz, by 1950 the most practiced professional witness in the country, bobbled the ball. When Tydings counsel Edward P. Morgan asked him why, if Lattimore were a Communist, the Worker had panned Situation in Asia , Budenz could only say, "Sir, I can explain to you that we had the policy in protecting people who are out beyond the party proper, to criticize them with faint praise—that is to say, to damn them with faint praise—rather, to praise them with faint damns, is the way I want to put it. Now I can give to this committee examples of that, but I just will have to have time."^[31]

There was nothing haphazard or unprepared about SISS. Seven senators and three top staffers were of one mind: the IPR and Lattimore were to be pilloried with precision. This precision was accomplished (1) by extensive staff work in order that the interrogating counsel would know

exactly what the IPR documents said and (2) by preparing anti-Lattimore witnesses. All the anti-Lattimore witnesses went through one-on-one staff interviews as well as executive session rehearsals. These rehearsals were designed to prepare them to make the best case and to screen out questions that might yield embarrassing answers. Thus, in one instance, the secret session with Nathaniel Weyl revealed that he was familiar with the IPR and was prepared to identify Fred Field as a Communist but that he would not similarly classify Lattimore. When Weyl came before SISS in public session on February 19, 1952, he was led through an elaborate identification of Field; no question was asked about Lattimore.^[32]

McCarran's justification of executive session rehearsals did not acknowledge their real purpose. McCarran wanted to avoid being tagged with McCarthyism; hence, he wanted to limit public exposure of some witnesses. He controlled leaks from executive session testimony and bragged, "Our policy of taking a witness into executive session and finding out what he knows and what he is going to testify works as a safety valve so that innocent people will not be harmed."^[33]

McCarran's public agenda was also carefully designed to load the dice against the Baltimore heretic. Only after seventeen anti-Lattimore witnesses had appeared in public session, with their accusations spread throughout the media, did McCarran consent to give Lattimore a rebuttal. McCarran's witnesses fell into two categories: the damned (IPR people) and their accusers. Only one of the approximately 170 prominent scholars who endorsed Lattimore's loyalty was called to testify; that was John King Fairbank, who "qualified" as a witness because he was associated with the IPR and was himself a target of McCarthy. The FBI had interviewed many former Communists on their roster of regular informants who said Lattimore was unknown to them; only four of them were called by McCarran, and they were not asked about Lattimore. It was a stacked deck.

Between April and July 1951, SISS in executive sessions laid the foundation for its public hearings. At least a dozen anti-IPR witnesses were prepared for the public show. Joseph Zack Kornfeder was typical. Kornfeder had been a Communist party member from 1919 to 1934. He attended the Lenin School in Moscow from 1927 to 1930 and held prominent posts with the Comintern in South America and with the American Party in New York and Detroit. In 1934 he broke with the Party but couldn't bring himself to testify against it until after World War IL In 1947 he was extensively interrogated by the FBI and went on to testify before many state and federal bodies, including HUAC. By the 1950s the

bureau had classified him as "A PROFESSIONAL WITNESS WITH NO EMPLOYMENT OTHER THAN HIS ACTIVITY IN CONNECTION WITH COMMUNIST AFFAIRS ."^[34]

Even after McCarthy began his crusade, Kornfeder knew nothing about Lattimore; the bureau asked him about Lattimore on April 14, 1950, and he "could furnish no information." Then Kornfeder offered his services to McCarthy, went on McCarthy's payroll to do research, and suddenly knew a lot about Lattimore. A thirty-eight-page speech Kornfeder wrote for McCarthy to deliver to the Senate is in Lattimore's FBI file; it was so bad McCarthy never used it.^[35]

Kornfeder was called by SISS in executive session June 8, 1951. The text of what he said about Lattimore is heavily censored, but it includes the claim that "Lattimore was, in the early 1930s, a secret member of the Communist Party." The bureau got transcripts of SISS executive sessions and analyzed what Kornfeder had said. On August 2 Belmont wrote Ladd that Kornfeder was "prone to put too much faith in hearsay evidence and conclusions"; in his Lattimore testimony, "Kornfeder makes numerous allegations which are apparently accepted by the committee at their face value with no attempts made to ascertain Kornfeder's basis for these charges; hence, it is difficult to estimate his reliability as far as this testimony is concerned, and his reliability in this regard must be considered unknown."^[36]

When SISS interrogated Kornfeder in a public session September 20, 1951, they simply refrained from asking him about Lattimore. Instead, they asked him about Comintern activities in Latin America in the 1920s, about which he knew something, and about Comintern China policy, about which he knew very little. Robert Morris did ask him about an IPR pamphlet, China Yesterday and Today , written by Eleanor Lattimore in 1946. Morris quoted this pamphlet as saying, "For not until China achieves a government in which the Chinese people are adequately represented and which brings about agricultural reforms designed to give her farmers enough to live on will the underlying causes of communism be removed." That, observed Kornfeder, was following the Communist party line. It was not an edifying performance. Nor was Kornfeder a credible witness in general; he had admitted perjury about his place of birth a year before, and shortly after the SISS appearance he admitted to Conrad Snow of the State Department Loyalty Security Board that he had lied about John Carter Vincent being a Party member. But witnesses like Kornfeder were necessary to SISS.^[37]

Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter testified in SISS executive session July 3.

A censored version of her testimony was released by the National Archives in 1987. She explained to the committee how IPR had worked to get the United States into war with Japan, thus strengthening the Chinese Communists.^[38] As to Lattimore, she interpreted a letter from the IPR files as showing that he sought the triumph of the Chinese Communists, but other charges against Lattimore were deleted by FBI censors. SISS did not call Schumpeter for public testimony. This is surprising, as she told them what they wanted to hear.

SISS heard at least nineteen witnesses between April and July, most of whom were anti-IPR. On July 10 McCarran announced that Fred Field would appear in executive session two days later and that Lattimore would follow him. McCarran had nothing to say about what questions would be asked or what the committee expected to learn.^[39]

Field faced the committee for two hours on July 12; Willis Smith and William Jenner conducted the hearing in New York. William L. Holland, executive vice-chairman of the IPR, presented himself and asked permission m sit in; he got no reply, waited for an hour, and left. Smith and Jenner were silent when reporters confronted them afterward, refusing m say whether Field was cooperative. Field and his lawyer were ordered not to discuss the hearing with reporters.^[40]

Before Lattimore's six-hour executive session on July 13, Senator Ferguson told reporters that the questioning of Lattimore would be based on "fresh material" and that the committee "was interested in finding out if there were any 'Communist influences' in IPR, adding that he did not mean to imply that there were."^[41] That may have been the last neutral statement to come from a committee member.

Lattimore's private heating was relatively free of acrimony, but it was not based on "fresh material." Morris, Mandel, and Sourwine had digested hundreds of IPR documents in which Lattimore figured and absorbed all the latrine rumors that had come m McCarthy and Surine. Their purpose was to get Lattimore on record on all this information. He was not shown any of the relevant IPR documents, nor was he informed as to who accused him of what. He sensed that Mandel was sitting in front of him with definitive answers to the questions they were asking, all relating to events ten or more years old. When he asked to be shown documents that would help him refresh his memory, his request was denied. Eight months later, when he underwent his marathon twelve days of public testimony, he realized that he had been set up: the SISS method of questioning gave him "somewhat the feeling of a blind man running a gauntlet."^[42]

But it could have been worse. There was no hectoring or badgering in executive session. McCarran did seem more restrained and moderate than did McCarthy. No headlines resulted from his executive session. Lattimore told his wife that it hadn't been so bad.

By July 30 this tinge of optimism had vanished. Carter and Field had been before the first public hearings of SISS, and Barmine was next. Lattimore wrote a Canadian friend on that date, "We are getting ready right now for another bout with the Sons of Belial."^[43] He was still dead center, with McCarran's forces deployed on every side.

Robert Morris was busy preparing witnesses and interrogations during July, but not too busy to seize on rumors and try to make something of them. On July 18 Freda Utley told Robert Morris about a rumor she had picked up at J. B. Matthews's place in New York. Lattimore was not an American as he claimed but "a Russian child adopted very young in China." Also, St. Bees, where he went to school "was a school for problem children." The St. Bees allegation did not seem fruitful to Morris, but the birthplace did. Lattimore had said under oath that he was born in Washington, D. C., though he had no birth certificate and no evidence of his birth other than what his parents had told him.^[44]

Here, to Morris, was a blockbuster with which to confront Lattimore later in public: Lattimore could not prove that he was an American, and witness X says he was born in Russia. Morris wrote Lou Nichols at the FBI, asking if this rumor were true. Nichols thought Morris was salivating prematurely; he sent an agent to the District of Columbia Bureau of Vital Statistics. When the agent returned with birth certificate number 105986, dated August 6, 1900, showing that Lattimore was born in Sibley Hospital July 29, 1900, Nichols sent a copy to Morris. No cover letter, no response. ^[45]

Despite putting a lid on publicity about SISS executive sessions, McCarran felt free to talk in public. On May 4 he told the Senate that Lattimore had started the ruckus that led to General MacArthur's dismissal.^[46] Lattimore had attacked the Zaibatsu, the Daily Worker had reported this attack, and therefore Lattimore had scuttled MacArthur. A chain of causality leading from a Daily Worker article to Truman's firing MacArthur was not beyond McCarran.

McCarran also killed a high-level commission headed by Admiral Chester Nimitz that Truman had appointed to review loyalty-security procedures. The commission members could not serve unless exempted from the conflict-of-interest statutes. McCarran, as chair of Judiciary, bottled up the bill to grant exemptions. As the New York Times editorialized on

May 28, "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Senator McCarran and his friends, who are planning an investigation of their own, don't want competition, especially from a non-political and non-partisan body of distinguished citizens."^[47] Nimitz and his commission promptly resigned, and Truman gave up the whole effort.

D day, for McCarran, was July 25, 1951. On that day his full subcommittee, plus the Mandel-Morris-Sourwine trio, the faithful Surine, and Joe McCarthy, were on hand for their first public hearing in room 424 of the Senate Office Building. So was Edward C. Carter. McCarran called the hearing to order at ten-thirty, regretting that the hearing room was too small to accommodate all who wanted to attend. After putting the resolutions authorizing the subcommittee into the record, McCarran set forth his operating assumptions and methods in a lengthy statement. It was a prospectus to reassure those who objected to McCarthy. This committee was making no charges: "We propose to let the evidence precede our conclusions." No hearings would be televised; the committee wanted "to make a record, not to make headlines." Witnesses could have counsel of their own choosing. No witness would be subjected to "undue publicity."^[48] The liberal community listened in astonishment and applauded. Edward C. Carter was sworn as the first witness.

The Edward C. Carter who now stepped into the spotlight was not the "handsome, supercharged man who had built the IPR into the preeminent Asian studies organization," as John N. Thomas puts it. He was past seventy, failing in memory, confronting without the aid of documents a committee staff steeped in those documents and determined to make a fool of him. When Carter asked committee counsel to provide relevant dates of Fred Field's activities, dates in the papers on Morris's desk, he was simply ignored.^[49] This tactic was used many times. Even worse, Carter's counsel, Edgar G. Crossman, was thoroughly browbeaten. Ten minutes into the hearings Crossman suggested to Carter that he go back to a question that he had not fully answered. The "fairness" of chairman McCarran was clearly revealed in the following colloquy:

Mr. Carter: My attorney, as you noted, reminded me to follow up and clarify a question that I thought at the time I was speaking was left hanging in the air.

Sen. McCarran: I do not propose to let you have anything hanging in the air. The Chair will see that you have an op-

portunity to clarify anything you wish to clarify. I wish to say to the attorney, if you violate the rule of this committee we will remove you to the audience, and we will do it very fast.

Mr. Crossman: May I have—

Sen. McCarran: That is all; I have said the last word and that is all there is to it.

Mr. Crossman: May I have an opportunity to discuss that question?

Sen. McCarran: No, sir. I said no and that settles it.^[50]

Several dozen times in the 5,712 pages of the IPR hearings one finds a similar caustic rebuke from McCarran, but only to IPR witnesses and their counsel. There are almost as many, and worse, from Eastland. This first day, the committee toyed with Carter like a cat with a mouse. But it was a surrogate mouse. The committee did not care about Carter, the superannuated, bumbling former IPR head. Their real target was Lattimore.

Most of the attack on Lattimore during the Carter hearing was directed against the "cagey" letter. In 1938 IPR was sponsoring a series of pamphlets on the issues of the Sino-Japanese War. Carter and Lattimore exchanged letters about the progress of this series. In a letter of July 10, 1938, Lattimore wrote Carter:

I think that you are pretty cagey in turning over so much of the China section of the inquiry to Asiaticus, Han-seng, and Chi. They will bring out the absolutely essential radical aspects, but can be depended on to do it with the right touch.

For the general purposes of this inquiry, it seems to me that the good scoring position for the IPR differs with different countries. For China, my hunch is that it will pay to keep behind the official Chinese Communist position [on land reform] far enough not to be covered by the same label, but enough ahead of the Chinese liberals to be noticeable. For Japan, on the other hand, hang back so as not to be inconveniently ahead of the Japanese liberals who cannot keep up whereas the Chinese liberals can. . . . For the USSR, back their international policy in general, but without using their slogans and, above all, without giving them or anybody else an impression of subservience.^[51]

This semifacetious epistle enabled SISS to bully Carter extensively. Here was a clear admission that the IPR, with Lattimore's approval, was backing Soviet policy and trying to conceal it. Of course, in that context Lat-

timore was backing Soviet policy, which was opposition to Japanese aggression. But it was Lattimore's policy too, and he didn't want the Russians to get sole credit for opposing aggression. He explained it seven months later when he had a chance:

This period, 1938, was the period of maximum Soviet cooperation with the United States, Britain, France, and the League of Nations. It was the stated policy of the U.S.S.R.—almost universally credited at the time as in good faith—to support international unity and to resist Japanese and also German and Italian aggression. Even by 1938, however, I had learned through my experience in dealing with Russians as editor of Pacific Affairs , that it is a standard Soviet maneuver to try to make every act of agreement between equals look as if it were acceptance of Soviet leadership. I did not believe in any such subservience to the Russians, and I did not want the Institute to make the mistake of allowing the Russians to claim, or anybody else to believe, that agreement as to international unity and against aggression was an act of subservience to Russian policy.^[52]

The fumbling Carter could offer no such justification of Lattimore's words. He did not even remember the letter. The effect of the SISS examination of Carter was fairly reflected in the Times headline over William S. White's page-one story July 26: "Senators Get Lattimore Note Backing Russian Policy in '38." One can understand how a headline writer, under the pressures of daily journalism, could get it so perverted. One can also understand the game plan of the committee. Two weeks earlier, when the committee had Lattimore in secret session, they could have asked him to explain the "cagey" letter but did not. There would have been no headlines then, no shock value, no beginning foundation for a future committee conclusion of "Guilty as charged."

The appearance of Fred Field the next day was guaranteed to give IPR a bad name. As a trustee of the bail bond fund guaranteeing the appearance of the top Communist party officials convicted under the Smith Act, Field had refused to answer questions about the fund. This refusal brought him a jail sentence for contempt of court.^[53] Thus, Field was let out of jail for the day and escorted to the SISS hearing room by federal marshals. There he refused to answer more questions. He did admit that he had served as U.S. representative of four organizations in the People's Republic of China, that he had sought a commission in intelligence during World War II, and that he had given sixty thousand dollars to the IPR.

This was all page-one in the Times again.

After humilitating two IPR witnesses, McCarran's public statements

became bolder. Contradicting the judicious "wait until the evidence is in" posture with which he began the hearings, on July 27 McCarran told reporters that "his subcommittee 'will show how certain individuals, working together, influenced Government policies out of which came the predicament we are in today.' The predicament he referred to, he told reporters, was the hold the Communists have obtained on China with the backing of Russia. 'You haven't seen anything yet,' Mr. McCarran said, adding that so far the subcommittee was just 'laying a foundation for matters I know are coming on.'"^[54]

One of the witnesses coming on was Alexander Barmine, who was to testify concerning the phony "affidavit" attributed to Barmine that McCarthy had waved before the Senate in March. Barmine appeared before SISS on July 31. As in the case of Budenz, the FBI did not caution SISS that Barmine's credibility was in doubt. The bureau had been caustic about Barmine's sudden "discovery" of Lattimore in 1948 and noted, "Interviews have been conducted with numerous individuals in an effort to corroborate this allegation with negative results."^[55] An FBI brief of January 16, 1951, said nothing about Barmine's absurd story of the Panchen Lama visiting Lattimore; this most damaging hallucination went down the bureau's memory hole.

So Barmine appeared before SISS untainted by the bureau's doubts, basking in McCarran's praise: "I want to express my gratitude to you for coming before the committee of the Senate and before the American people and giving us the facts as to the dangers that are here with us at home. . . . The committee is grateful to you, the country should be grateful to you."^[56]

Barmine repeated what he had told the FBI and his various journalist friends: in 1933 General Berzin informed him that Lattimore and Barnes were "their men," with military expertise available to advance Soviet plans for influencing and controlling Sinkiang. Then Barmine added a new wrinkle: in 1938 General Waiter Krivitsky, also a Soviet defector, told him in Paris that Lattimore and Barnes were still Soviet agents. Barmine had never told this to the FBI. (There is no other testimony that Krivitsky said anything like this, nor do his memoirs mention Lattimore, Barnes, or the IPR.) It took the bureau a while to react to this new story, but eventually the New York office was directed to "resolve the discrepancy in the testimony of ALEXANDER BARMINE before the Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security with information he previously furnished this office."^[57]

Barmine told SISS that he had previously advised the FBI of this charge,

but he hadn't. His only excuse now was that he "evidently became confused before the Senate Sub-Committee" and thought he had given the information to the bureau. This lame explanation was passed on to the attorney general without comment.^[58]

Lattimore had some comment. The day after Barmine's testimony he issued a statement: "Any suggestion that I was ever 'their man' is pure poppycock. In 1933 1 had no contact whatever with Russia, and had never been to Russia."^[59] Nor was he associated with the IPR at that time.

SISS was embarrassed by Barmine's 1933 date, which was obviously wrong even if Barmine were right about the rest of it. So in the final report on the IPR the committee said that in executive session Barmine had given a 1935 date for Berzin's statement. This claim cannot be verified, but in his statement to the FBI Barmine used 1933. Moreover, the text SISS issued containing his public testimony was not corrected; it still says 1933.^[60]

But it is Barmine's alleged relationship with Berzin that creates the most compelling doubt of his truthfulness. As noted before, Barmine names and identifies his Soviet coworkers ad nauseam in his memoirs—except for Berzin, who is never mentioned. Could Barmine actually have been close to the head of Soviet army intelligence? In his SISS testimony Bar-mine never mentions Berzin's full name. To reporters, however, he said his close collaborator and source of the charge against Lattimore was General Ian Antonovich Berzin. There was a Soviet general by that name. A Latvian, he had been with Lenin at the famous Zimmerwald conference and held various diplomatic positions until he died in prison April 12, 1941. This Berzin rates two and a half column inches in Who Was Who in the USSR .^[61]

There was a Berzin who from 1924 to 1937 headed Soviet army intelligence, with a year of that time as "senior adviser" to Loyalist forces fighting Franco in Spain. This was Ian Karlovich Berzin, who also rates two and a half inches in Who Was Who in the USSR . How could Barmine have made this elementary misidentification? Krivitsky, in his memoirs, gets the right Berzin. Deakin and Storry, in The Case of Richard Sorge , take pains to distinguish between the two Berzins. If Barmine "worked directly under" Berzin for fifteen years, "spent hours in long conferences" with him, and saw him "two or three times a week," is .it even possible that he could not have known the man's name and could have confused him with another Soviet general whose assignments were entirely different? To compound the whole improbable business, the SISS staff secured, from the Soviet Encyclopedia of 1927, the biography of the

wrong Berzin, had it translated at the Library of Congress, and inserted it in the IPR hearing record to prove there really was such a person. Even a casual reading shows that this Berzin could not have been Barmine's claimed boss.^[62]

Barmine was the first of the anti-IPR witnesses before SISS. As with those to come, he got kid-glove treatment. To use the legal term, he was "led" by questions well prepared to elicit only what the committee wanted to hear. Often Barmine had only to say yes to a leading question from counsel Morris: there is an instance of this leading on almost every other page of the report. The whole routine had been rehearsed in executive session. And of course, no one asked him, "Why did you claim that the Panchen Lama secretly visited Lattimore in 1949?"^[63]

Despite the extensive preparation and the mutual esteem of committee and witness, Barmine was less than perfect. Senator Ferguson asked him about other testimony he had given:

Sen. Ferguson: But the FBI did have that evidence that you have told here this morning about Mr. Barnes and Mr. Lattimore; is that right?

Mr. Barmine: Well, if you call it evidence—

Sen. Ferguson: Well, your statements that you gave here.

Mr. Barmine: Yes.

Sen. Ferguson: You mean to count that as evidence, do you not? It is what happened?

Mr. Barmine: I have to tell you that when I got this to the FBI, I just considered in the sense that I learned to understand the evidence, I was very reluctant that this thing should be used, because I think it is a very old story and since then many things could happen, and that was all that I knew, but it was after all not my direct knowledge from the workings.^[64]

For SISS, it did not have to be "direct knowledge from the workings" if it was anti-IPR. Hearsay was good enough for them.

Barmine's testimony got full play in the media. As usual, the Chicago Tribune carried the most lurid headlines: "Ex-Red Tells of Lattimore Aid to Russia. Called Agent for Secret Police."^[65] Other papers, including the Times and the Baltimore Sun , headlined a rebuttal issued by Lattimore.

The day after Barmine's testimony, Representative E. E. Cox (Democrat from Georgia) spoke to the House about the tendency of tax-exempt

foundations to give subversives lucrative grants. "'Owen Lattimore, who played such an important part in the betrayal of China and the delivery of that country into the hands of the Communists, is a past master in extracting money from the various foundations,' Mr. Cox said."^[66] Cox wanted this practice looked into and eventually formed a committee to do just that.

Hede Massing, former wife of Gerhart Eisler, testified before SISS August 2, 1951. This former Soviet spy named dozens of individuals who, she claimed, had been involved in espionage; Lattimore was not among them. She had met him, she said, only once, at a social affair.^[67]

Now SISS turned to Asian scholars for its witnesses. Thirty-seven prominent Asianists were on public record vouching for Lattimore's integrity, and according to a Justice Department document he could get support from 130 more.^[68] McCarran called exactly one of Lattimore's supporters, John King Fairbank. Six conservative, bitter anti-Lattimore professors were called, probably the entire such population.

Karl August Wittfogel was the first Asian scholar to testify against Lattimore. Wittfogel was a former German Communist who specialized in ponderous tomes explaining "Oriental despotism": how irrigation in China and other areas necessitated the development of centralized and authoritarian governments. Wittfogel and Lattimore had once been friends. By 1950 this had changed.

Wittfogel had served nine months in Hitler's concentration camps. John King Fairbank observed, "He had not liked the concentration camps he had been in in Germany and was determined to stay out of those he expected to begin operating here."^[69] There was one sure way to achieve this: join the crusade against Lattimore. This strategy proved one's patriotism.

Consequently, the scorn Wittfogel heaped on Lattimore for advocating a moderate stance toward Peking, in order not to "drive the Chinese Communists in[to] the arms of the Russians," was total. Wittfogel said, "In my opinion, this is one of the funniest remarks I have ever heard in my life. You don't have to drive them very hard. I think it is insulting the intelligence of this country to make that kind of remark. . . . To assume that Stalin will be so stupid to repeat the mistakes which he has made in Yugoslavia, to overplay his hand and to destroy all the enormous powers of attraction, is a marginal possibility. . . . Stalin will do everything not to overstrain relations and from Mao's point of view everything is to be gained by staying with Stalin."^[70]

Wittfogel ticked off the clues to Lattimore's communism. Lattimore

was friendly with Chi Ch'ao-ting, whom Lattimore knew to be a Communist. How did Lattimore know? Said Wittfogel, "I told him" (in 1935, in China). Also, Lattimore had listened with a smile when Wittfogel denied to Woodbridge Bingham that he had ever been a Communist; since Lattimore surely knew Wittfogel was lying and did not protest, Lattimore was covering up for Wittfogel. That made Lattimore a Communist. Wittfogel said Lattimore's trip to Yenan in 1937 proved him a Communist; Mao would "be very careful whom he would let in." Lattimore wanted Russia to take over Korea, which would be the "best solution." Lattimore adopted the Communist usage of "feudal," applying it to pre-Communist China. Wittfogel conducted a true vendetta against Lattimore; G. L. Ulmen, Wittfogel's authorized biographer, takes at least thirty-six pages to describe Wittfogel's Lattimore obsession.^[71]

The FBI was noncommittal about Wittfogel. They were disturbed when he told the Lattimore grand jury in 1952 something he had not told them, and Supervisor Branigan wrote Belmont a letter about it. What Wittfogel said is still secret. Wittfogel was a thoroughgoing ideologue, first as a Communist, then as an anti-Communist. He fit perfectly the pattern described by Herbert Packer in Ex-Communist Witnesses : "It seems generally true that former Communists experience a strong reaction against their old allegiance, and, in many cases, manifest an intense desire to do everything they can to abjure it. One also suspects that many former Communists abjure one set of absolutes in favor of another, that what formerly was the purest white becomes for them the deepest black, and that this tendency renders their account of the past suspect."^[72]

The witnesses following Wittfogel had little to say about Lattimore. Professor George Taylor, of the University of Washington, thought the IPR was infiltrated by Communists, of whom the most pernicious were Fred Field and Lawrence Rosinger. But Taylor thought the IPR could still be purged and serve a useful function. Morris pointedly did not ask Taylor about Lattimore.

General Charles A. Willoughby appeared next, and SISS conspicuously failed to ask him too if Lattimore were connected with the Sorge spy ring. They knew the answer would be no. The committee did, however, attempt to get from Willoughby a judgment on Lattimore's responsibility for the attack on Pearl Harbor because of the cable about the modus vivendi proposal; Willoughby did not rise to this bait.^[73]

On August 14 Elizabeth Bentley testified. She was one of the more prolific namers of concealed Communists, and during her SISS appearance

she lived up to expectations. The staff had prepared her well. All of the persons they asked her about were, she said, Communists, most of them also engaged in espionage. Clearly Robert Morris, who was in charge of the questioning, did not intend to raise Lattimore's name. But Senator Eastland blurted it out. "Do you," he asked, "know anything about Owen Lattimore?" Bentley replied that she did not. Eastland clarified, "You do not know whether he is a Communist or not?" Bentley responded, "No, I don't." Morris quickly changed the subject. Bentley's refusal to name Lattimore is curious. Lattimore was a prominent member of the IPR, and Bentley said her boss and lover, Jacob Golos, claimed the IPR was "red as a rose."^[74]

Whittaker Chambers came on August 16, though the committee did not demand much of him. He identified several spies, discoursed about the operations of the Communist underground, mentioned a number of Communists who had been connected in some way with the IPR, and was dismissed. There were no questions about Lattimore.^[75]

By mid-August 1951 SISS had established itself as a major actor in the hunt for subversives. Opinions of its probity varied widely. On August 19 an evaluation by Harold Hinton in the New York Times "News of the Week in Review" section saw McCarran's operation benignly; the headline read, "McCarran Shies Away from M'Carthy Label. His Committee Operates Like Court, Shields Witnesses from Publicity." Hinton quoted extensively from McCarran's remarks at the first public hearing, noting that SISS members "decline to number themselves among the 'scaremongers and hatemongers' whom President Truman castigated so roundly earlier in the week nor do they like to be told they are 'carrying McCarthy's load.' "Hinton did not comment on the way McCarran treated IPR witnesses and their lawyers.

An opposing view appeared in the Reporter of August 21, written by Alan Barth of the Washington Post . The Reporter headline was "McCarran's Monopoly: The Nevada Senator Has Become Judge, Prosecutor, and Hangman on Loyalty Cases." Barth noted, "The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee has, over the last six months, managed to establish himself as Grand Inquisitor and Lord High Executioner in charge of the extirpation of heresy. He has done this through his chairmanship of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security, known more familiarly as the McCarran subcommittee; with his surveillance of the Subversive Activities Control Board created under the McCarran Act; and with his frustration of the Nimitz Commission on Internal Security and Individual Rights." For Barth, what McCarran was doing was more important

than what McCarran had said SISS was going to do. "There are," said Barth, "literally no boundaries to its jurisdiction, and no check upon its power to punish."^[76]

The day after Barth's article appeared, McCarran turned his heaviest artillery against Lattimore: Louis Budenz. Budenz came before SISS on August 22 and 23, confident that this time, in contrast to Tydings, he need not fear hostile cross-examination. He was right; there was none. Instead, a carefully orchestrated mutual admiration society held forth for two days. Many of the holes in Budenz's testimony before Tydings were plugged. The hearsay nature of what Budenz had to say was carefully justified by the committee; both McCarran and Ferguson took pains to validate the acceptance of hearsay in "proving" a conspiracy.

Budenz's claims about the truthfulness of Communists when talking to each other, and about editorial omniscience, came through loud and clear. Ferguson led on the first point: "And [what you were told by Party bosses] had to be accurate for you to carry on; is that correct?" Budenz replied: "Communist information among themselves is absolutely accurate. It must be. It is the foundation of their work."^[77]

Morris set up the claim of editorial omniscience:

Mr. Morris: At the outset, Mr. Budenz, were you in a position in the Communist Party where you would have access to more secrets, to the identity of more people, than the ordinary Communist?

Mr. Budenz: Most decidedly. Indeed, more than the normal members of the national committee.

Mr. Morris: Why is that, Mr. Budenz?

Mr. Budenz: As managing editor of the Daily Worker, it was essential that I know the various delicate turns and twists of the line; not only of the line but of the emphasis of the line in the particular period of time.^[78]

The "line" on Lattimore had expanded somewhat since Tydings. There was still the claim that in 1937 Lattimore was ordered to carry out a campaign to paint the Chinese Communists as "North Dakota non-partisan leaguers"; there was still no single instance of where Lattimore had done this. In 1943, according to Budenz, Lattimore had gotten "information coming to him from the international Communist apparatus where he was located . . . that there was to be a change of line very sharply on Chiang Kai-shek." Here Budenz, apparently feeling the absence of anything specific implicating Lattimore, did a side step: "The Politburo sug-

gested that someone, and the name T. A. Bisson was mentioned in this connection, be enlisted to write an article in connection with the Institute of Pacific Relations publication on this matter." But Lattimore still got the blame, even if Bisson did it.^[79]

Then there was the Wallace trip, where "a great deal of dependence was placed on Owen Lattimore, whom I was told by Mr. Stachel at that time to consider a Communist"; and in the Amerasia case, Lattimore "had been of great assistance to the defendants." A new charge, which Budenz picked up from the Japanophiles and MacArthur supporters, was that in 1945 Lattimore had attacked the Zaibatsu, calling for a hard peace in Japan. The Party spread Lattimore's opinion "throughout the country." But Budenz did not claim that Lattimore was responsible for the firing of MacArthur.^[80]

Forty-one pages of the printed transcript show Budenz dealing exclusively with Lattimore. Budenz had done considerable homework since his last testimony about the IPR. The rest of the hearing presented, in assembly-line fashion, the sins of other Communists associated with the IPR. The routine was simple. Morris would ask, "Do you know X as a Communist?" Budenz would respond, "Yes, by official reports . . ." Then Mandel would introduce letters from the IPR flies to show how active X had been, or what IPR publications X had written. The case of Lattimore's friend Vilhjalmur Stefansson was typical.

Mr. Morris: Mr. Budenz, do you know Vilhjalmur Stefansson?

Mr. Budenz: I know from official reports that he is a Communist.

Mr. Morris: Do you know he was a member of many Communistfront organizations?

Mr. Budenz: That is where much of the discussion around him centers. He was a member of so many, I think the word countless can be used without exaggeration. . . .

Mr. Morris: Is it your testimony that in addition to being a member of many Communist front organizations, he was also a member of the Communist Party?

Mr. Budenz: That is correct. . . .

Mr. Morris: Mr. Mandel, will you put into the record letters that will indicate Mr. Stefansson's association with the Institute of Pacific Relations?

Mr. Mandel: I have here a letter dated January 26, 1939. . . .^[81]

Forty-three persons were subject to this routine.

Reporters and editors did not make much of Budenz's testimony this

time; the Times story on his August 22 appearance was subordinated to that of General Willoughby, then appearing before HUAC. The FBI was more attentive: agent L. L. Laughlin was assigned to analyze what Budenz said and was disturbed. As he reported to Ladd on September 25, "The reliability of Budenz in instant testimony must be classed as unknown. In this testimony there are at least seven instances in which Budenz either furnished information differing from that furnished previously either to the Bureau or before the Tydings Committee, or relative to certain occurrences gives testimony which he has never made known before."^[82]

Laughlin found that Budenz had reclassified the IPR from an organization "infiltrated" by Communists to a "captive" organization. The Wallace mission was upgraded from one that the Party "followed with great interest" to one in which Lattimore represented the Party. Lattimore's Yenan trip of 1937 was now a "Communist project"; Budenz had never said this before. John Carter Vincent was now "under Communist Party discipline"; this was new. Budenz's date for considering Joe Barnes a Communist was shifted back four years to 1936. Budenz for the first time located Fred Field on the onionskin copies of official reports; and he now named two new Party members, Max Granich and Kumar Goshal. Each one of these discrepancies was written up to be presented to Budenz for an explanation.^[83]

Budenz, however, was not as high a priority for the bureau as he had been in 1950. It took a month for New York to send a report to headquarters with Budenz's answers. A cable of October 20, 1951, summarized his explanations: "IN GENERAL, BUDENZ STATED THE FOLLOWING CONCERNING ANY DIFFERENCES IN HIS TESTIMONY BEFORE THE COMMITTEE AS COMPARED WITH THAT FURNISHED THE BUREAU: WHEN TESTIFYING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE, BUDENZ STATED THAT HE FURNISHES INFO WHICH HE KNOWS TO BE A FACT. HOWEVER, WHEN FURNISHING INFO TO THE BUREAU, HE FURNISHES ONLY THAT INFO WHICH IN HIS OPINION HE CAN PROVE TO BE A FACT. BUDENZ STATED THAT FOR THIS REASON, THE INFO WHICH HE FURNISHES THE BUREAU IS FREQUENTLY MORE CONSERVATIVE THAN INFO FURNISHED TO A COMMITTEE ." ^[84] No bureau comments on this explanation have been released.

Two weeks after Budenz testified to SISS, his credibility took a beating from Special Agent M. A. Jones, assigned by the bureau to analyze the 545-page perjury summary compiled by the Baltimore office eight months earlier. Jones's fifteen-page analysis, which never became public, was submitted to Lou Nichols on September 6, 1951.^[85] It was devastating. Point

by point Jones set forth the instances of possible perjury and knocked all but one of them down. Hardest hit were the instances based on testimony of Louis Budenz.

Item one was "POSSIBLE PERJURY IN DENYING COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBERSHIP, AFFILIATION, OR CONSCIOUS PROMOTION OF COMMUNISM ." Budenz's testimony on this matter was reviewed; so were all the other claims that Lattimore had been a Communist "stooge," that he had been "used" by the Party, that he was anti-Chiang Kai-shek, and so on. At the end of this review Jones was curt: "Budenz———and the majority of the other informants have no personal acquaintance with Lattimore. Their information appears to be hearsay and of no value as evidence." Also under item one Jones dealt with the massive IPR tiles. "The results of the review of the IPR files do not reflect a definite stand by Lattimore in support of Communism. This support can be assumed from some of the material, but is arguable, and does not appear sufficiently direct to controvert his sworn testimony. . . . The report sets out a number of comments from various individuals on Lattimore's books and writings. There is no indication that any of these individuals could be qualified as an expert to testify to matters of opinion in the Communist field."

Item two covered association with pro-Communist groups. Jones batted them down one by one. Lattimore may have belonged to, but certainly was not active in, the Maryland Association for Democratic Rights. He had addressed a meeting of the Washington Book Shop, but he did not deny this and did not know it was Communist-affiliated: no perjury. There was no evidence of membership in any proscribed organization. On the charge that Lattimore perjured himself in denying that he had ever said the Chinese Communists were mere agrarian radicals, Jones did not even consider the Budenz version of that charge worthy of comment. And the others who charged it were simply wrong.

The rest of the alleged perjuries were similarly rejected, except item eight: "POSSIBLE PERJURY IN DENYING KNOWLEDGE THAT CHAO-TING CHI WAS A COMMUNIST ." On the basis of E. Newton Steely's Civil Service Commission report in 1943, Jones felt that Lattimore could hardly have forgotten what Steely said and hence might have lied.^[86]

Jones drew no final conclusion. It was probably unnecessary. The Jones analysis, so devastating to the entire conduct of the SISS hearings, never left the bureau.

SISS took a three-week vacation after Budenz's appearance. On September 14, 1951, they heard their first Japanophile: Eugene Dooman. Dooman had hated Lattimore since the Pacificus article attacking him and

Grew; now for the first time he had an influential audience for his rancor. He reviewed the proposal to hire Lattimore as a State Department consultant in 1945, noted Grew's veto, and strongly agreed with Grew. He mentioned the Pacificus article ("Dangerous Experts") and claimed that it showed the writer to be subversive, but he did not publicly claim Lattimore had written it. He did claim that Lattimore was the most prominent proponent of a Carthaginian peace for Japan, since Lattimore wanted to eliminate the Zaibatsu and exile the emperor.^[87]

As Dooman told the story to SISS, Lattimore's views on Japan were accepted at the beginning of the American occupation, and the results were disastrous: "a capital tax of from 60 to 90 percent of all property above $1,000" was applied, which "almost at one stroke wiped out the capitalist class." This was a program similar to that of the Soviet Union in Poland. Senator Eastland wanted it clear what Dooman was saying: "That was a Communist system, was it not?" Dooman agreed that it was. The outcome was horrendous, according to Dooman: "Their [the capitalists'] places have been taken by hordes of black marketeers and Chinese and Formosan thugs of various kinds who have been engaged in illicit trade of various kinds and then amassed this enormous fortune." The picture of Japan in 1951 as bereft of capitalists and dominated by thugs did not strike reporters as reasonable. Even Willard Edwards's story in the Chicago Tribune skipped that part of Dooman's testimony. The Times did not cover Dooman at all. Dooman apparently did not believe that Japan would ever recover from the Lattimore-induced destruction of its capitalist class, and his contempt for those who disagreed with him on occupation policy was total.^[88]

On September 5, 1951, a new combatant entered the ranks against SISS, against witness Budenz, and against Robert Morris. This was Joseph Al-sop, prominent Washington columnist, strong anti-Communist, and vigorous supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. Alsop had been present at the Kunming conference of Henry Wallace and John Carter Vincent on June 25, 1944, at which the three conferees decided that Stilwell should be replaced by Wedemeyer as American commander in China. By 1951 Alsop disagreed violently with Vincent and Lattimore, who advocated recognizing the Peking regime. But Alsop knew that the judgments made by the beleaguered China hands were and always had been made as loyal Americans. He was outraged at the SISS attempt to condemn them as servants of the Kremlin.

Alsop's first column attacking McCarran came on September 5, 1951; the Washington Post headlined it "Investigate Everybody." Alsop ridi-

cules McCarran's attempt to "prove that the Communist victory in China was the result of a plot hatched in the Institute of Pacific Relations," defends Vincent and Wallace for their recommendation to fire Stilwell ("a profoundly anti-Communist document"), and even includes Lattimore in his exoneration: "The same rules apply to other poor wretches that McCarran is after. Prof. Owen Lattimore, a man of great learning and befuddled politics, also went along on the Wallace tour. He did not see the drafting of the report to Roosevelt, but he made no protest against it."

Now that McCarran was out to rewrite history, was he going to charge the New York Herald Tribune , the New York Times , and Life magazine with the loss of China? They had all carried dispatches from reporters who detested Chiang and sympathized with Mao. "Are they," Alsop asks, "or is Henry R. Luce, to be investigated now? And what about Maj. Gen. Patrick Hurley? Again, this reporter can personally testify that General Hurley used to say the Chinese Communists were not Communists at all, and even to boast that he had Stalin's and Molotov's assurances on this crucial point. Is Hurley to be investigated?"

This first Alsop attack did not mention Budenz's testimony on the Wallace mission. Alsop wanted to do a thorough job on Budenz, and by September 12 he was ready. "To suggest that testimony given under oath is specifically untruthful is a very grave thing to do. In all honesty, however, it is now necessary to ask whether the much-publicized ex-Communist, Louis Budenz, has not been untruthful in his testimony before the McCarran subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee." What follows is a powerful attack on Budenz: his inconsistent claims, his eagerness to give Morris the expected answers, his dependence on "official reports" that were highly improbable, his absurd classification of the Wallace cable about Stilwell as in accord with Party wishes. Alsop concludes, "The contemporary documentary evidence refutes Budenz' late-remembered verbal evidence in implication and in detail. Every word he said about Vincent would surely be thrown out in any court in the land. The hard facts cannot be escaped."^[89]

Alsop wrote another anti-Budenz article on September 14 that caught the attention of Senator Herbert Lehman of New York. Lehman told the Senate that there were "grave published charges" involving "demonstrably false" testimony before SISS and that they should be investigated. Lehman wanted to put the Alsop columns in the Congressional Record ; Senator Herman Welker of Idaho objected, and they were not entered

until September 24. McCarran thereupon exploded at Lehman: Lehman was accusing him of subornation of perjury.^[90]

Alsop's newspaper onslaught, even with Lehman's backing, did not change the ways of SISS. But the war was not over, and SISS was eventually forced to give Alsop a public hearing.

On September 20 Kornfeder was brought before the public. As previously noted, that professional witness was on such shaky ground that Morris refrained from even asking him about Lattimore.^[91]

Then it was Kenneth Colegrove's turn. He told SISS the story of his refusal to take the Japan desk at OWI, explained how he disagreed with Lattimore on the "benefits of Dutch rule in Indonesia" (Colegrove thought Dutch administration had been good for Indonesia), claimed that Lattimore told him the Chinese Communists were "real democrats," said Lattimore followed the Communist line on Japan to the letter, and jumped on the IPR with both feet. Under Eastland's solicitous questioning Cole-grove affirmed that the "Lattimore group" at the 1949 State Department conference was indeed the "group largely that had betrayed the Chinese Government to the Communists." The FBI boggled at this accusation; Colegrove had been far left until at least 1946^[92] . Within a year of his testimony he was to write a ringing defense of Joe McCarthy.

Next on the SISS agenda was Raymond Dennett. Dennett had been secretary of the IPR American Council during 1944 and 1945, but he was not an uncritical defender of that organization. He had "grave doubts" as to whether the IPR staff were "objective research workers."^[93] Hence the committee's treatment of Dennett was totally different from the harassment of Carter, Field, Lattimore, and other IPR stalwarts.

Nowhere in the IPR transcript does the committee's flagrant use of leading questions show more clearly than in the Dennett hearing. Sometimes he allowed himself to be led, as when Morris questioned him about Lattimore's role in the Hot Springs IPR conference of 1944 (see chapter 8). Other times he rebelled, as when Sourwine said to him about an IPR pamphlet, "This pamphlet distorted the facts for the benefit of the Soviet Union, did it not?" Dennett balked: "You are putting words into my mouth which I don't think I put there."^[94]

Dennett's major contribution to the committee's case against IPR lay in his description of how the IPR attempted to influence opinion by selling pamphlets to the army and navy, conferring with government officials, and inviting them to conferences such as Hot Springs. Although

he had doubts about the objectivity of some IPR staff, he resolutely rejected attempts to get him to label Jessup, Lattimore, or Carter as pro-Communist.

On September 28 William M. McGovern testified. Unlike his Northwestern University colleague Kenneth Colegrove, McGovern had never flirted with the Left. He had been ultraconservative all his life and was, from the committee's point of view, the perfect witness. Among other qualifications, he had a doctorate from Oxford. McGovern proved his worth early in his hearing, when he was asked what he thought of the Chinese Communists: "By 1937-38 I was convinced they were Communists. And that they were in close cahoots with the Kremlin."^[95]

Most notably, McGovern despised Lattimore. On almost every dimension of controversy McGovern claimed that in private conversations, Lattimore expressed opinions diametrically opposite to what he was writing at the time. On the allegiance of Mao and colleagues, McGovern claimed that Lattimore told him many times in 1937 that "they were not Communists." McGovern claimed that in a Far East Advisory Committee meeting in 1945 Lattimore wanted to "reduce Japan to beggary and impotence. . . . to reduce Japan back to an agricultural country and destroy all Japanese industry." McGovern alleged that Lattimore wanted the Japanese emperor murdered and that he seemed to advocate the same fate for the emperor's wife and children.^[96]

Eastland and Ferguson, the only two senators present, were delighted. The Times ignored McGovern, and even Wittfogel described him as a "dwarf."^[97]

The next witness was top drawer. Harold E. Stassen, "boy governor" of Minnesota, serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1948, and in 1951 president of the University of Pennsylvania, came before SISS October 1. Stassen, a fire-breathing supporter of the rump Chinese Nationalist regime on Taiwan, had attended the State Department roundtable conference on Asian policy in October 1949 with an impressive entourage of assistants to present charts, graphs, and specific programs for reversing the Nationalist defeat.^[98] Had Stassen prevailed at the 1949 conference, and had his plan succeeded in restoring Chiang, the nation would no doubt have been very grateful.

But Stassen did not prevail. Lattimore, Rosinger, and others who thought the People's Republic was in China to stay were in the majority. The course of argument during this conference, as explained by Stassen, would make a book in itself. It took more than one SISS hearing to get it all:

Stassen appeared again on October 6 and 12, each time with "new documents" which he claimed would show the "Lattimore group" advocating capitulation to the Communists.

After Stassen's first appearance Lattimore requested the State Department to release the transcript of the 1949 conference. On October 11, this was done. Stassen's charges evaporated. Most of what he charged to Lattimore was someone else's opinion, and the rest Stassen had garbled shamelessly. William S. White's front-page story in the New York Times the next day avoided explicit judgment but made dear how far Stassen's mythical conference departed from reality. Stassen struggled once again, in his final appearance before SISS October 12, to show that his attack on Lattimore (and on Jessup, who was in the middle of a Senate confirmation battle) held water. It was a pathetic attempt, a preview of the slide into ridicule and irrelevance that marked Stassen's subsequent quadrennial attempts at the presidency.^[99]

On October 5 Budenz, wounded by the Alsop attack, was again given a chance to develop his version of the Wallace Kunming cable before SISS. However, he had little to say about Kunming; the committee moved on to Wallace's subsequent career, and Budenz recounted at great length how the Communist party had worked to get Wallace the Democratic nomination for vice president in 1944 and, failing that, to get him appointed secretary of commerce, at which they succeeded. En route to his condemnation of Wallace, Budenz named several more "concealed Communists" known to him through "official reports."^[100]

Surprisingly, Budenz was not again called before SISS, and the later vigorous attacks on his truthfulness by Alsop, Wallace, Lattimore, and Vincent went unanswered. Perhaps growing FBI doubts about his credibility spilled over into Senate channels. In later years Budenz refused even to discuss his Lattimore testimony. Donald Crosby, S. J., author of God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 , interviewed Budenz and asked him about discrepancies in his Lattimore testimony. Budenz said it "wasn't pertinent" to discuss.^[101]

The committee now turned to William L. Holland, then secretary general of the IPR. Holland was determined not to accept meekly the kind of abuse Edward C. Carter had been subjected to. He succeeded. Calmly but firmly, he refused to answer Eastland's bullying, "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions. Holland, as contrasted with Carter, was in full command of his faculties.

Sen. Eastland : Did you know traitor Harry Dexter White?

Mr. Holland : May I ask, Mr. Chairman, if the Senator would state his question again?

Sen. Eastland : Did you know traitor Harry Dexter White?

Mr. Holland : I certainly cannot answer that question, Mr. Chairman, because I have no knowledge that Mr. White was a traitor.

Sen. Eastland : Did you know him?

Mr. Holland : No, I never met Mr. Harry White. I know he was invited to one IPR conference, but he did not come.

Sen. Eastland : The information is that he was at the head of an espionage ring in Washington. That is true, is it not, in the Government in Washington?

Mr. Holland : I have no evidence which would make me believe—

Sen. Eastland : You read that?

Mr. Holland : I have read the story, but do not consider it at all convincing, but, Mr. Chairman, may I say that the Senator said, "You know that is true, do you not?" I wish it to be understood that I do not know it is true.

Sen. Eastland : All right, Harry Dexter White was an active supporter of the institute, was he not?

Mr. Holland : Mr. Chairman—

Sen. Eastland : Look at me and answer my question.

Mr. Holland : No.^[102]

Holland vigorously expressed the unfairness of months of anti-IPR publicity with no chance for the IPR to reply in the same forum. Despite the committee's reluctance to accept a prepared statement Holland had brought with him, he effectively maneuvered it into the record. Morris was particularly frustrated by Holland's stubborn defense of IPR. Morris's planned agenda for the day included fourteen points of inquiry. As adjournment approached, he complained that he had been able to cover only two of them.^[103] The committee adjourned, expecting to call Holland back the next week. It was five months before they got to him again.

SISS now encountered heavy fallout from the revised Budenz testimony. Joseph Alsop was already in print furiously objecting to Budenz's claim about Vincent. Henry Wallace now joined the fray, demanding a

chance to tell the committee that Budenz was a liar. The chance came October 17, 1951.

Alsop was afraid of what McCarran's crew of interrogators would do to Wallace, so he sought first-class counsel for the former vice president. Alsop explained what happened in a letter to Ben Hibbs of the Saturday Evening Post on October 10, 1951: "I and two lawyer friends of mine . . . called altogether 30 lawyers before we found one with guts enough to appear on Wallace's behalf. . . . I can hardly remember having been in a tighter spot; for without [George W.] Ball it was perfectly clear that Wallace would be destroyed by McCarran, and Wallace's destruction meant my own destruction, and the destruction also of the large group of in my opinion perfectly innocent men untruthfully accused by Budenz."^[104] With George Ball's help, Wallace gave a good account of himself.

For all his volleyball mania and agricultural single-mindedness, Wallace knew something about world affairs. He may have been too trusting of the Soviet Union before the Korean War. He was too willing to let Communists staff much of his 1948 presidential campaign. But when Robert Morris began picking at him for pro-Soviet statements during World War II, when everybody from Roosevelt and MacArthur on down to the lowliest private fervently cheered Soviet resistance to the Wehrmacht, Wallace rubbed Morris's nose in the anachronism: 1951 was not 1944.^[105] Goodwill toasts to Soviet arms were not subversive during World War II. Soviet toasts to American emissaries were not sly hints that those emissaries were covert Russian agents. Wallace, like Holland, stood up to SISS bullying and gave as good as he got.

One of the items Morris raised was Wallace's enthusiastic description of Magadan, a description that Elinor Lipper had ridiculed. Mandel read into the record some of Lipper's invective. Wallace did not quarrel with Lipper's claim that Magadan was part of the gulag, but he did quarrel with her castigation of him: "With regard to slave-labor camps in Magadan, she calls it Potemkin Villages . . . which is the correct name. She does not indicate any way in which I could have known that there was slave labor at Magadan. . . . I visited experiment station after experiment station, and collective farm after collective farm. Always it created a favorable and a free expression—well, Wendell Willkie testified in exactly the same way that they were a pioneer people just like the kind of people he had known in the Middle West back in the time of his boyhood; that Mike Cowles, who accompanied Wendell Willkie, testified they were a magnificent pioneer race."^[106]

Before the Wallace party left Russia to return to the United States, the

Russians held a banquet for them, with many toasts. One of the Russians, S. A. Goglidze, offered a toast that Wallace reported in Soviet Asia Mission : "To Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent, American experts on China, on whom rests great responsibility for China's future." This remark, to SISS, established beyond a doubt that Lattimore and Vincent were serving the Kremlin. Wallace did not think so: "I may say Goglidze made three or four other toasts . . . it was one of those regular Russian situations where you toast everybody under the sun. . . . Incidentally, Goglidze did this very subversive thing. He toasted the reelection of Roosevelt. It was a terrible kind of thing to do, but he toasted his reelection."^[107]

Mr. Morris : Mr. Wallace, do you know what was meant by the expression "on whom rests great responsibility for China's future?"

Mr. Wallace : I can't read his mind.

Mr. Morris : You do not know what he meant?

Mr. Wallace : Of course not. Who knows what anybody means at one of these toasting affairs?^[108]

Morris went on and on about the toast; about an interview Wallace gave to the Spotlight , allegedly a Communist paper; and about the instructions Roosevelt gave Wallace.^[109] When Morris wound down, Julian Sourwine began nitpicking. Wallace had made a speech in Seattle on his return from China. Did Wallace write out his Seattle speech by longhand? Was any of it written on a typewriter? Where? Was there a typewriter on the airplane? Did he have access to it? Did anyone else type any portions of this speech? Did Wallace give a copy to Roosevelt? Was it a clean copy or a messed-up draft? After twenty minutes of such trivia, Sourwine was getting nowhere. Wallace knew that neither Lattimore nor Vincent had anything to do with his Seattle speech, but he did not recall the stages of its construction.

Mr. Sourwine : I don't mean to be unduly repetitious, but sometimes a memory will come back if you try to think about it. I am sure it must be as incredible to you as to us that you have no memory whatsoever of whether you saw a rough draft of the statement, or not.

Mr. Wallace : I do not think it is incredible in the slightest, sir. I have been so active over so many years that with regard to a minor matter of this sort, I see nothing in-

credible about it. I would say it would be remarkable if I did remember. If you were in a similar position—I judge you are about the same age as I—and you were testifying, you would find yourself in the same situation.^[110]

Finally the committee got around to Kunming. The fateful conference with Vincent and Alsop was discussed again, and Wallace now had a chance to express his opinion of Budenz and of SISS gullibility about Budenz's testimony. Wallace reviewed the background of the Chiang-Stilwell controversy, the setting of the Kunming conference, and the part played by Alsop and Vincent. He speculated that had Roosevelt followed his advice promptly, Chiang might have held on to power. As to the cable, Wallace said: 'I refuse to believe that members of a great and powerful body, the most distinguished legislative body in the entire world, can possibly fall for testimony that it was following the Communist line to recommend that Stilwell be replaced by Wedemeyer in 1944. Never have I seen such unmitigated gall as that of this man [Budenz] in coming before a committee of the United States Senate to utter such nonsense. I say it is an affront to the dignity of a great and honorable body, over which I had the honor of presiding for four years."^[111]

Wallace came out of this confrontation looking very good.

Alsop had also demanded a chance to appear before SISS. McCarran did not want to confront Alsop publicly and tried to confine him to an executive session, but the columnist insisted. He was scheduled the same day as Wallace. Since Morris and Sourwine took three and a half hours to grill Wallace, Alsop was postponed to the next day. Before the committee adjourned, Ferguson and Smith, the two senators present, agreed that Alsop would be permitted to "make a presentation of some length" to begin his hearing the next morning.^[112]

Given the tenor of Alsop's attack on Budenz and the publicity coming from Lehman's use of Alsop's columns, it is not surprising that McCarran himself presided at the opening of Alsop's testimony October 18. The senator from Nevada was in an ugly mood. He still felt the sting of Lehman's accusation of subornation of perjury. And he had not been told that Alsop had permission to read a prepared statement. The fireworks started as soon as Alsop tried to explain how Stilwell had been such a friend of the Chinese Communists and how the Wallace-Vincent-Alsop recommendation that Stilwell be fired was a "profoundly anti-Communist act." Alsop began to quote Stilwell's anti-Chiang statements, but McCarran immediately interrupted. Why was he quoting Stilwell and reading a pre-

pared statement? Alsop explained that Ferguson and Smith had told him he could. McCarran huffed and puffed:

Sen. McCarran : Whether you are running this committee or the committee is running itself is a matter to be determined very shortly.

Mr. Alsop : I am not trying to run the committee in the least.

Sen. McCarran : I think you are. You are proposing to quote something now that isn't your statement at all. It is a hearsay matter. What are you going to do with that. Are you going to be cross-examined on it, and if so, how?

Mr. Alsop : I am not going to quote anything that isn't a public document.

Sen. McCarran : I understand you to say you are going to quote from someone who is not here.

Mr. Alsop : I am going to quote from a series of public documents, Senator.^[113]

McCarran's challenge dearly reveals the committee's double standard. Budenz's hearsay was quite acceptable, but when Alsop wanted to cite Stilwell's diary, that was illegitimate: "It is a hearsay matter." There was further fussing and fuming before McCarran finally gave in, not on the grounds that Alsop had any rights, but on the grounds that the Stilwell quotes were taken from a HUAC report. But the committee's invincible belief in Budenz continued. The hearsay nature of Budenz's testimony was forgotten, and phrases such as "if Mr. Budenz knew for a fact that he and Mr. Vincent were Communists" cropped up throughout the day.

Alsop's story of the Kunming cable got meticulous attention from Morris and Sourwine. SISS would not concede it even possible that Wallace and Vincent had acted to support Chiang. They did concede that Lattimore did not "guide" Wallace at Kunming (as, indeed, he could not have, having been disabled at the time). At the end, after Alsop had recommended that Budenz be indicted for perjury, Sourwine made one last effort to neutralize Alsop's testimony: "Mr. Alsop, do you see any difference between testifying that you do not believe a man and testifying that he is a liar?" Alsop replied, "The overwhelming evidence before the committee indicates he lied on this occasion."^[114]

About an hour into the hearing McCarran had to leave and turned the gavel over to Willis Smith. Smith was a no-nonsense presiding officer,

but he was not as hostile as McCarran was. The ugly confrontations ceased, and Alsop was able to present his case with some decorum. In fact, there is some evidence that Alsop began to persuade Smith that Budenz was indeed a liar. Alsop wrote Smith the day after the hearing thanking him for being fair, requesting a chance to discuss Budenz with him privately, and attacking Robert Morris as the éminence grise behind the committee's coddling of Budenz. This was the first of several exchanges of letters between Smith and Alsop. Smith responded cordially to Alsop's initiative, and in a second letter of October 23 Alsop again urged Smith to meet with him and talk the matter over face-to-face. He wrote Smith, "I find myself terrified by the new acceptance among us of these professional informers, with their unsupported and interested accusations. If honest men of every political coloring do not rise up to oppose this new tendency, I hardly know where we may end."^[115]

In a third letter, dated November 1, Alsop stated that if Morris continued in the subcommittee's employ and Budenz continued in the subcommittee's good graces, "I shall consider it a serious reflection on the subcommittee."^[116] Alsop and Smith did meet later in Washington. If Smith was persuaded, he failed to move the subcommittee: Morris continued as counsel; Budenz remained the paragon of truth.

In 1981, reflecting on his activities thirty years earlier, Alsop wrote, "I think back on the campaign of my brother and myself which began with the attempt to expose Louis Budenz, as one of the high points of my long career as a reporter. Although Budenz had been given the front page, my charging him with perjury and offering the strongest supporting evidence was held to deserve no more than three paragraphs in the New York Times . I also begged Reston of the Times to take over the hired perjurers story, with Stew and me merely supporting the Times . He told me solemnly that he did not think it 'timely.' But Stew and I kept after the hired perjurers all the same, and we got them dismissed in the end because Paul Crouch [a prominent ex-Communist witness] went too far in a Philadelphia hearing and was actually convicted of perjury."^[117]

After its bruising confrontations with Wallace and Alsop, SISS took a breather. Admiral Charles "Savvy" Cooke, a close friend of Kohlberg and a Chiang supporter, came in for some mutual admiration society palaver on October 19. Then the committee recessed for three months. The next witness, on January 24, 1952, was John Carter Vincent.

While the inquisition was being organized in the halls of Congress during the summer of 1951, a powerful drama involving Lattimore and the

future of Tibet transpired out of public notice. Lattimore was not a Tibetan scholar, but the Mongols he championed were Lama Buddhists, and Tibet was the seat of their religion. The Dilowa had lived in Tibet several years after the war and was close to the Dalai Lama and the Dalai's elder brother, the Takster Lama. From the Dilowa, Lattimore knew of the manuscript riches of Tibetan monasteries, hence his 1949 effort to interest the Library of Congress in obtaining these manuscripts before the Chinese Communists took over that exotic land.

The fourteenth Dalai Lama was young and had assumed full powers only in 1950 after a ten-year regency. The Chinese invaded in October of that year, and the Tibetans were forced to sign an agreement with the People's Republic in May 1951. But the situation was still obscure; the Dalai Lama's advisers were divided over the prospects of retaining real autonomy, some believing that the Dalai should go into exile, others believing that he should remain in Tibet and try to work under the Chinese. It was this dilemma that motivated a trip by the Takster Lama to the United States in summer 1951. The Dalai was living in a remote monastery on the Indian border; he wanted his brother, among other things, to consult the Dilowa and Lattimore as to whether he should return to Lhasa or flee to India.

The United States government was indifferent to the fate of the Tibetan libraries but quite willing to embarrass the Chinese Communists by clandestine support of Tibetan independence. This was the CIA's province; its newly created front, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA), flew the Takster Lama to the United States.^[118]

The Takster Lama had never been out of Tibet and spoke no English. CFA obtained the services of Major Robert B. Ekvall, son of a missionary who had served on the Tibetan border, fluent in Tibetan, and a former Army Intelligence officer during and after the war, to take charge of the Takster's American sojourn.

Ekvall was known to the Lattimores. He had contemplated leaving the army to work with Lattimore's Central Asian seminar in 1946, and Ekvall and his wife spent a weekend with the Lattimores in Baltimore. Lattimore liked Ekvall and encouraged him to enroll at Johns Hopkins, but the army persuaded Ekvall to reenlist.^[119]

When the Takster Lama arrived in the United States, Ekvall brought him immediately to Washington. The Dilowa, however, was then in Berkeley, and Ekvall frustrated all of the Takster's attempts to see the Dilowa or Lattimore. As the Takster reported in a letter to the Dilowa, who in turn wrote Lattimore, Ekvall said, "It would be a good thing for

you not to talk to the Dilowa Hutukhtu about the affairs of the Dalai Lama on which you have come. Also, Lattimore is no good." The Takster was greatly upset; Lattimore was furious.^[120]

On July 23, 1951, Lattimore wrote a long letter to Ekvall. It was restrained but firm. After reviewing the Dilowa's history, his flight from Outer Mongolia after the Communists tried him, his wartime service with Chiang Kai-shek, his residence in Lhasa, his coming to the United States in 1949, and his frustration at being unable to see the Takster, Lattimore wrote:

The Dilowa Hutukhtu was recognized in Tibet as the head of the rather large community of Mongol exiles and refugees from Outer and Inner Mongolia. When the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet the Dilowa Hutukhtu was in correspondence (as he still is), with Mongol Lama disciples of his in Kalimpong, on the India-Tibet frontier. Through correspondence forwarded by them, he is also in unbroken contact with the Dalai Lama personally and with certain of the elder statesmen of Tibet, such as Tsarong Shape. His advice and counsel is valued by them.

The Dilowa Hutukhtu's sole concern with Tibet and its politics is the preservation and continuity of his religion. He has feared that if a Chinese Communist "soft policy" should tempt the advisers of the Dalai Lama to urge the Dalai Lama to return to Lhasa, all would be lost. He is sure, from his own experience in Outer Mongolia, that it would only be a matter of time until the church would be dispossessed, the Dalai Lama deposed or disposed of in one way or another, and the "reincarnation" of a successor to the Dalai Lama prohibited. The branch of the Buddhist religion of which the Dalai Lama is head and the Dilowa Hutukhtu a distinguished prelate would then be extinguished in the world. Rather than let this happen, the Dilowa Hutukhtu is convinced that the Dalai Lama should go into exile, there to maintain at least a spark of the eternal flame of his religion. . . .

It would be a tragedy if, because of his personal friendship with me, the Dilowa Hutukhtu should be involved in the personal vilification and denigration to which I have been subjected and if, as a consequence, there should be sown in the minds of the Tibetans doubts and suspicions that their pathetic national tragedy is being wantonly subjected to mishandling, through no fault of their own, by contamination with the most corrupt and shameful, and to them obscure and frightening, side of American politics.^[121]

Ekvall responded the next day. The Takster's inability to see the Dilowa, he said, was due to ill health. The Takster was in the hospital but would receive the Dilowa as soon as he was able.

Ekvall eventually made good on his promise. Unfortunately, by then the moment of truth had passed. The Dalai Lama returned to Lhasa from his mountain hideout near the Indian border and began the uneasy coexistence with the People's Republic of China that ended in 1959 with the Tibetan uprising and the Dalai Lama's escape to India.

In December 1951, when the Dilowa was back in Baltimore, Ekvall let the Takster visit Lattimore. Eleanor Lattimore reported the visit in a letter to the Robert LeMoyne Barretts December 10:

We didn't hear anything more for a long time, but a week or so ago we had a phone call from Ekvall saying that the Takster Lama wished to call on us. He and a disciple and a keeper (doubtless from Central Intelligence) turned up and we gave a luncheon for them. Then in a few days Dilowa told us Takster and his disciple would like to come for a weekend. So last weekend we had the three lamas here (two Living Buddhas in one house!) It was lots of fun. Dilowa says this means Takster has declared his independence. But of course it's too late now to make any difference. One could certainly argue that if it hadn't been for McCarthy the Dalai Lama might not have gone back to Tibet and the Lama Buddhist religion, and a link between Tibet and the West, might have been preserved.^[122]

Nineteen fifty had been a disastrous year for the Lattimores. Abe Fortas, writing to a friend who had inquired about how things were going, said, "The McCarthy charges resulted in a serious financial drain. We were forced to get reimbursement from Lattimore for out-of-pocket expenses such as mimeographing and long distance telephone calls, and this ran into a substantial sum of money. We did not, as you know, charge him a fee. The Lattimores incurred expenses, on the whole, which for them were quite staggering. . . . The most serious trouble has been the spiritual and emotional drain upon these really fine Americans this savage attack has caused both of them to age perceptibly."^[123]

A year later they had spent more and aged more. Lecture invitations had dried up: in 1949 Lattimore had more than a hundred; in all of 1951, only three. There were now almost no social invitations in Baltimore since people were afraid to be seen with them. With the hiatus in SISS activities after October 1951, Lattimore began to think about accepting standing invitations he had to lecture to the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Central Asian Society in London. As Eleanor wrote the Barretts, "We thought that this Christmas would be a good time to get away and get a breath of fresh air before McCarran started up again."^[124] Lattimore

wrote the two societies in London, got enthusiastic responses, and applied for passports in late November.

Ruth Shipley presided over the passport barony. She was ferociously anti-Lattimore, convinced that Budenz and Barmine had told the truth, and determined to apply the McCarran Act of 1950, which had a clause saying, "It shall be unlawful for any officer or employee of the United States to issue a passport to, or renew the passport of, any individual knowing or having reason to believe that such individual is a member of such organization [World Communist movement]." On December 6, 1951, Shipley wrote an eleven-page letter to her superior saying that Lattimore's passport request should be denied.^[125]

There followed a bitter battle within the State Department. Senior officers, including Chief of Security Carlisle Humelsine, Undersecretary James Webb, and Counselor Charles "Chip" Bohlen, disagreed. They thought Lattimore was not a danger to the security of the country and should be allowed to lecture in London. Shipley was overruled; the Lattimores got their passports December 17.^[126] It was one of the few battles Shipley lost.

While waiting for their passports, and not anticipating that harassment from McCarran would last indefinitely, Lattimore indulged another fancy. In fall 1951 Delhi University invited him to lecture there during the next academic year. Delhi had no funds, but the Fulbright program had brought them many prominent American scholars. Wishing to avoid embarrassment, Delhi consulted the Fulbright committees in India and Washington; they were told that if Lattimore applied on his own, he might be turned down, but if the Indian government made an official request, it would be honored. Nehru himself wrote the letter on behalf of his government; the American embassy in Delhi endorsed the request. It was turned down by the State Department. Eleanor reported to the Barretts, "The Indians are furious and consider it an affront to them, and it's all very embarrassing. I suppose we should know better than to make these foolish plans. But the whole situation is so unreal and fantastic that we just can't make ourselves feel like lepers."^[127]

But the British lectures were still on. Before the Lattimores left for London, there were two ominous developments. John Service was fired on December 13, and John Carter Vincent began yet another State Department loyalty-security hearing on December 17. Lattimore was connected with both men.

The Service dismissal sent shock waves throughout the State Department. He had been examined, and cleared, six times; now the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Review Board, considering the most recent State

Department clearance, recommended to Secretary Acheson that Service be fired. For the public record, the reason given for the reversal was a reconsideration of the Amerasia case. But the board was lying. Its decision against Service was based on the faked reports from the Chinese Nationalist government in Taipei. McCarthy partially gave away this lie in a speech on January 15, 1952, when he said that Service "was known to have shared living quarters with a 'Soviet espionage agent.' "William S. White, writing in the New York Times after Service was fired, concluded accurately that the Service firing had "a significant meaning in partisan politics: a kind of vindication for Mr. McCarthy."^[128]

Owen and Eleanor Lattimore arrived in the refreshingly calm climate of the British Isles in late December. The British, who viewed McCarthy as insane and the accusations against Lattimore as hallucinations, received them warmly. Had he chosen to, Lattimore could easily have ignited British attacks on McCarthy and followers. The American embassy in London feared just such a development and followed Lattimore's activities. The embassy report on Lattimore's visit eventually reached the FBI, which in turn forwarded it to the Justice Department. One paragraph of this report was especially revealing:

In general, Mr. Lattimore attempted to avoid discussion of current Far Eastern problems and preferred to confine his lectures to his field of specialization, the nomadic tribes of Asia. . . . [He] explained privately to English friends that he would prefer not to talk on China policy because he was critical of American policy (on grounds that it is tending to isolate the Chinese Communists and to force them into greater dependence on the Soviet Union) and he was loath, as an American citizen traveling abroad to criticize his Government's policy. He has stated that his embarrassment in this regard is the deeper because of the fact that, with this one exception, he is wholeheartedly in support of American institutions and American policies. Perhaps it would be well to report a specific question put to him at Chatham House by Sir John Pratt, the well-known British fellow-traveler, whose ardent support of the Communist cause in Korea has proven so embarrassing for the British Government. At the end of Mr. Lattimore's lecture Sir John rose from his chair from among the audience and asked the following weighted question: "Do you, Mr. Lattimore, know of a single intelligent and well-informed American who does not believe that the South Koreans began the fighting?" Mr. Lattimore is said to have hesitated a moment for emphasis and to have replied: "Sir John, I do not know of a single intelligent and well-informed American who does not believe that the North Koreans began the fighting." (Italics in original)^[129]

By any standard, Lattimore's 1952 tour of England was restrained and judicious. This restraint was due partly to his belief that one does not wash the family linen before foreign publics, but it was partly because he did support American policy except in Asia. But there was another reason: the venue was conducive to moderation. Lattimore himself had not changed; the feisty combatant of the Tydings hearings still existed beneath the calm exterior. When he returned to an overheated Washington, where his good friend John Carter Vincent faced an SISS inquisition, Lattimore's outrage was rekindled.