"A Fool or a Knave"

It was Owen Lattimore's turn to answer Wisconsin's blustering Joseph McCarthy, and the Senate's big caucus room was packed to capacity. A short, mild-looking man with a scraggly sandy mustache, Professor (Johns Hopkins) Lattimore settled himself down at the microphones at one end of a T-shaped table, plumped down a fat, 42-page statement in front of him, adjusted his spectacles. Then he fixed a cold eye on his accuser, who smiled indulgently on him from the ranks of distinguished visitors behind the committee table.

Witness Lattimore had come to answer what he called McCarthy's "base and contemptible" charges that he was a top Soviet agent. But it was a little difficult, he declared, to decide just what he now stood accused of. The first time he had been named by McCarthy he had been let off as a simple "pro-Communist." Then he had become "the top Russian espionage agent," as suddenly had been demoted again to a "bad policy risk."

Twisted Quotes. What was the evidence that he was a Russian spy? Lattimore demanded. McCarthy had talked darkly of an ex-Communist who would swear that Lattimore had been under party discipline. "I do not know the name of this alleged witness," said Lattimore. But leaning forward earnestly, he made a sweeping denial that he was or ever had been a Communist, a Communist fellow traveler or a Communist dupe.

The rest of McCarthy's accusations,, said Lattimore, were based on "perverse and twisted" quotations from his books, on phrases lifted out of context, on old, discredited rumors and gossip from highly suspect sources. Said Lattimore: "I get a certain amount of wry amusement out of the fact that some of these people are acknowledged ex-Communists. Perhaps that status gives them a special right to criticize those of us who do not happen to be Communists, ex-or otherwise."

Maybe Wrong. Lattimore spoke with the smooth assurance of the experienced lecturer and he had the crowd with him. A few days before, he had made public his August 1949 memorandum to the State Department on U.S. policy in Asia (see INTERNATIONAL). At the hearing, he testified that the whole question raised by McCarthy actually got down to an argument over the best course for the U.S. to follow in the Far East. After restating his opposition to Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists, he urged one of two courses: 1) encourage Chinese nationalism even though it be Communist nationalism, in the hope of making a Tito out of Mao or preferably 2) "encourage in every possible way conditions that will make possible the survival of a so-called third force, a democratic group within China."

"Now, gentlemen," said Lattimore, "my analysis of this may be partly or wholly wrong. But if anybody says that it is disloyal or unAmerican, he is a fool or a knave."

At the end of his statement Lattimore paused for a moment, looked squarely at his accuser, added: "Let Senator McCarthy take note of this."

"Up to This Moment..." Just before the subcommittee's cross-examination ended, Chairman Millard Tydings broke in. Three Democrats and one Republican on the committee, Tydings said, had looked at a summary of Lattimore's FBI file prepared by Director J. Edgar Hoover and it was their unanimous opinion that "there was nothing in the file to show you had ever been a Communist or connected in any way with espionage . . . The FBI file puts you completely, up to this moment at least, in the clear."

McCarthy had promised to stand or fall on his case against Owen Lattimore, and he clearly had little left to stand on.

But one crutch was hesitantly proffered him. The fifth member of the committee, Iowa's Republican Bourke Hickenlooper, next day looked at the FBI summary and said he could not give any blanket absolution without a look at the full files, although he was "not making any final conclusions either way."

Hickenlooper's was just about the only encouragement that Joe McCarthy got all week long. Even before Lattimore took the stand, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge told the Senate that McCarthy had proved none of his charges. Then Republican Seth Richardson, who heads the Civil Service Commission's Loyalty Review Board, and Republican Conrad Snow, who heads State's own security board, testified that the whole loyalty program had not turned up a single example of espionage.

At week's end, McCarthy made one last desperate attempt to regain the offensive. Appearing at a meeting of the Marine Corps League in New Jersey to get the league's award for Americanism, ex-Marine McCarthy boldly announced that he was prepared to repeat his charges in public, as Lattimore had demanded, and dared anyone to sue him for libel. But what he produced was a far cry from his original talk of Communism and espionage; it was simply a weasel-worded statement that Owen Lattimore, Ambassador-at-large Philip Jessup and the State Department's John Service sometimes agreed with policies that paralleled the Kremlin line.

Having thus produced a dull thud, unstoppable Joe McCarthy set forth again. Protected once more by Senate immunity, he turned over to committee investigators the name of a man who, he said, would swear that Owen Lattimore was or had been a member of the Communist Party.

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