Of Cells & Onionskins

Owen Lattimore arrived first with his wife, took a seat in the front row of the big, marble-walled caucus room in the Senate Office Building. He waved to friends, clasping his hands above his head like a boxer. Big Senator Joe McCarthy came in and sat down behind the committee table. By the time a rumpled man had taken his seat at the witness table, spectators filled every aisle, teetered and craned from the ledges around the walls.

Louis Budenz, glancing warily right & left, began testifying in a casual tone. He retold the history of his own ten years as Communist Party functionary and managing editor of the Daily Worker. He mentioned the Institute of Pacific Relations, which was not, he added, a Communist organization but one that had been infiltrated by Communists. "First there was Frederick Vanderbilt Field," said Budenz. "With him was associated Philip Jaffe, who was connected with Field surreptitiously in the publication of China Today . . . Mr. Jaffe and Mr. Field are to my knowledge Soviet espionage agents. In this cell was also Owen Lattimore."

The three wire-service men jumped up, and pushed their way to the door. A hum of excitement swept the crowded room.

Zeal & Conspiracies. There was a conspiracy, said Budenz, designed to influence U.S. policy toward China. "Mr. Lattimore can be placed in that conspiracy." Budenz testified that he did not know Lattimore, had never met him. But Budenz testified to U.S. Politburo meetings that he himself had attended. At a 1937 meeting, said Budenz, "Field commended Mr. Lattimore's zeal in seeing that Communists were placed as writers in Pacific Affairs ... It was agreed that Mr. Lattimore should be given general direction of organizing the writers and influencing the writers in representing the Chinese Communists as agrarian reformers . . ."

In 1944, when Lattimore, as OWI chief in the Pacific, accompanied Henry Wallace to China, Jack Stachel, a top Communist functionary, "advised me to consider Owen Lattimore as a Communist. To me, that meant to treat as authoritative anything that he said."

Lattimore's name was one of perhaps 1,000 which Budenz, as the Worker's managing editor, had to keep in his head because to print them would risk disclosure. They were not "small fry" but "large-sized" individuals whom the Worker was to treat with respect. Politburo instructions were issued on onionskin documents "so secret that we were instructed not to burn them, but to tear them in small pieces and destroy them through the toilet." In these documents, "L or XL in Far Eastern affairs referred to Mr. Lattimore. I was so advised by Jack Stachel."

The Senators began to question the witness. Did Budenz know--of his own knowledge--that Lattimore was a Communist? Replied Budenz: "Outside of what I was officially told by the Communist leaders, I do not know."

What about McCarthy's charge that Lattimore was "the top Russian espionage agent in the U.S.?" Said Budenz: "To my knowledge, that statement is not technically accurate."

Faint Damns. Committee Counsel Edward Morgan pointed out that Lattimore had helped raise money for Finland during the Soviet-Finnish war and had also supported the Marshall Plan, but Witness Budenz seemed not to be impressed. Exemptions from the party line were granted to people "in delicate positions," he said. He also had his own explanation of the Worker's criticism of Lattimore's recent book, Situation in Asia: "It is a policy to praise them with faint damns. We have this method used on a number of distinguished men, who if praised too closely would simply be destroyed."

Budenz admitted that he had not mentioned Lattimore to the FBI until "a couple of days" after committee members had been shown a summary of the FBI's file. Why hadn't he mentioned Lattimore before? He hadn't had time to get around to it, explained Budenz, though he conceded that he had been supplying names to the FBI for five years. He had even taken Lattimore's name out of a recent piece for Collier's because "all concealed Communists can sue anyone for libel, not for the purpose of winning, but to bleed white anyone who accuses them."

Basis in Fact. Lattimore, who had been scribbling notes furiously as Budenz testified, promptly struck back. His lawyers sent to the stand Brigadier General Elliott R. Thorpe, a retired officer who was General Douglas MacArthur's wartime counter-intelligence chief. He had investigated Lattimore, said Thorpe, in the 19303, in 1944, in 1947. "Never in my experience as an intelligence officer have I heard a man so frequently referred to as a 'Communist' with so little basis in fact," testified Thorpe.

Lattimore himself, in a press conference next day, insisted that in his eleven books and hundreds of articles there was not "a single instance" where he had referred to the Chinese Communists as "agrarian reformers," the political euphemism used in the Communist Party line. Said Lattimore: "But I suppose that to [Budenz] every anti-Communist statement that I made was either for the purpose of covering my true affiliation or was by what he calls special dispensation."

Problem of Proof. As the hearing recessed, the evidence against Lattimore was entirely based on hearsay, as Budenz himself admitted. But it had come from a man whose testimony could not lightly be dismissed. He had been one of the witnesses who named Alger Hiss as a Communist, had exposed Gerhart Eisler as the Soviets' top espionage agent in the U.S., had been used by the Government as its star witness against the eleven Communist leaders. Born in Indianapolis 58 years ago, Budenz grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, but soon after his graduation from law school, he married a divorcee and was excommunicated. He plunged into socialist and labor activity, became an A.F.L. organizer (he was tried and acquitted 21 times in eight years in labor disputes). In 1935, he joined the Communist Party, left it ten years later, returned to the Catholic Church, is now teaching economics at Fordham University.

Budenz' testimony against Lattimore--undocumented and uncorroborated as it was--might be impossible of proof. Lattimore's task of disproving it seemed equally difficult. He could show when & where he had differed from the party line, but Budenz had already anticipated that by saying that such divergences were sometimes a party tactic. Stachel or other members of the party hierarchy might be called to testify, but--whether they substantiated Budenz or Lattimore--few were likely to believe them.

And so the matter stood: Owen Lattimore had not been proved a Communist, but he had not proved that he was not one. The shadow of the Hiss case made all men uneasy. Said Vermont's cautious Senator Ralph Flanders: "I find it disturbing."

Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy went rushing madly on. To the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he declared that the security clearance of Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup was "almost a deliberate mischievous playing with American security," that General George Marshall had been "pathetic and completely unfitted" to be Secretary of State, and his appointment "little short of a crime." The editors applauded when he sat down.

Two nights later, before the same audience, Secretary of State Dean Acheson replied to McCarthy's attack for the first time. He spoke informally, after his discussion of the world situation There was a right way and a wrong way of combating disloyalty, he said. "It is as though you said to yourself that the best way to find a fire is to ring every fire alarm in the city; not that you know of any fire, but if you get all the apparatus out and have it wheeling around through the city, you might find one."

But what was going on was "much madder and more vicious." It reminded him of "that horrible episode in Camden, N.J. when a madman came out on the street in the morning with his revolver. With no purpose, and with no plan, as he walked down the street, he just shot people, without sense, without purpose, without direction."

Neither he nor his department asked for sympathy or for help, said Acheson, but merely asked understanding. "The department is manned today by able, by honorable, by loyal and by clean-living American men & women." He pointed to Under Secretary James Webb and his fine war record ("There you really have a marine," said Acheson). There was Jack Hickerson of Texas, Ed Barrett of Alabama, Dean Rusk of Georgia, Walton Butterworth of Louisiana--"Southern Communists of the Hull-George-Connally type," said Acheson with a laugh. There was Willard Thorp, a onetime partner in Dun & Bradstreet. The chief of the department's loyalty board was Republican Conrad Snow, "an old-fashioned New Hampshire Communist." Then he had called in those "obvious Communists," Republicans John Foster Dulles and John Cooper. ("Pour it on, Mr. Secretary," cried dignified Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)

When Acheson finished, the editors stood and cheered. Only one man sat glowering at a side table, his hands jammed in his pockets. He was Senator Joe McCarthy.

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