The Case Against I.P.R.

For five weeks, the Senate subcommittee on Internal Security has gone about its hearings on Far Eastern policy with an air of quiet authority. The quiet was imposed by Nevada's canny old Pat McCarran, committee chairman, who sensed that the public might be fed up with theatrics and McCarthy-style scare tactics; McCarran set his sessions in a small, fourth-floor capital committee room, banned play-by-play television and newsreel coverage. The air of authority stems from the fact that committee investigators swooped down on a Massachusetts barn last February and seized some 300,000 letters and memoranda belonging to the Institute of Pacific Relations. Committee Counsel Robert Morris, a patient young lawyer who was Republican counsel in the Tydings committee hearings last year, soon proved that he had done his homework well as he set up his bits & pieces of evidence.

By last week, the pieces began to form an interesting picture of I.P.R., a private, international organization with some 1,100 members in the U.S., founded in 1925 with the idea of increasing the world's sketchy knowledge of Far Eastern affairs. I.P.R. had always studded its boards and councils with big names of the business and academic world. But Morris was trying to prove that for years, Communists controlled part of its small, full-time staff, used I.P.R. to sell the U.S. a Soviet line on the Far East.

His hypothesis: 1) I.P.R. had the inside track in the field of academic research on the Orient, and its full-time professionals pumped one-sided opinion through

U.S. schools and universities in hundreds of pamphlets, the quarterly magazine Pacific Affairs, and the fortnightly Far Eastern Survey; 2) the professionals dominated the reviewing of books on the Far East, batted down those books which opposed their line and made bestsellers out of those that conformed; 3) they were summoned into Government to give top-level advice on the Pacific area during World War II, and effectively swung U.S. policy their way.

Missions to Moscow. The man who was supposed to know the most about I.P.R.'s inner workings was Edward Clark Carter, 73 (Harvard, class of 1900), a onetime Y.M.C.A. careerist who joined I.P.R.'s staff in 1926, became secretary general (1933-45) and then executive vice chairman. When Carter was summoned before the committee, he smiled a gentle, professorial smile and gave rambling answers. Lawyer Morris undertook to show that Carter had a long-standing softheartedness toward Soviet Russia. He had been instrumental in setting up a Russian Council of I.P.R. (with Stalin's brother-in-law, A. S. Svanidze, as a member), had made seven trips to Russia between 1929 and 1945, served as president of Russian War Relief during World War II. From I.P.R.'s files came an additional snippet: in 1938, he recommended Communist Secretary Earl Browder to a Canadian club as a possible speaker --"really very well informed, and contrary to the public view, is 100% American." (The club declined.)

Carter's right-hand man in the I.P.R. hierarchy was Millionaire Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Field joined the staff in 1928, just a year out of Harvard, later became secretary of the American Council and (at the same time that he was organizing the Commie-front American Peace Mobilization) an I.P.R. trustee. When Field was called before the Senate committee, he wryly listed his occupation as "prisoner" because he was under arrest for contempt of court (in the bail-jumping case of the four top U.S. Communist leaders--TIME, July 16). He bantered affably with Pat McCarran and refused, on the ground of possible selfincrimination, to say whether he was a Communist or had written for Communist publications. Ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers took the stand to testify that Field was a member of the Communist underground in 1937. Louis Budenz, onetime Daily Worker managing editor, described Field as the transmission link between the American Politburo and the I.P.R.

Inner Sanctum. Joseph Barnes, who was executive secretary of I.P.R.'s American Council in 1934, was called a Communist by four witnesses. Chambers said that in 1937, his Communist-underground boss, J. Peters, was worried--like any executive--over personal bad feeling between Barnes and Freddie Field. (In 1936, Barnes married Field's ex-wife.) After leaving I.P.R., Barnes became Moscow correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, foreign editor of the same paper and later, editor of the Marxoid New York Star.

In 1936, Budenz testified, Barnes was one of "a few" newsmen admitted to the inner sanctum of the Communist Party convention. (Barnes, now an editor with the publishing house of Simon & Schuster, denied all implications that he was under Communist influence.) Ex-Soviet General Alexander Barmine, an officer in Russia's prewar G-2 and now head of the Voice of America's Russian-language broadcasts, testified that Red intelligence regarded Barnes and Owen Lattimore as"our men."

Lattimore was the I.P.R. voice best known to the public. As editor of the I.P.R.'s Pacific Affairs (1934-41) and a prolific author in his own right, he guided the I.P.R. line on China. Budenz testified that Lattimore worked under Communist Party direction, and "his great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language." Morris flourished Lattimore's letter of 1938 congratulating Carter on the men he had selected to conduct an I.P.R. survey of Chinese and Japanese affairs (TIME, Aug. 6). Wrote Lattimore: "They will bring out the absolutely essential radical aspects but can be depended on to do it with the right touch."

Lattimore also suggested to Carter that the survey back Russian "international policy in general, but without using their slogans and above all, without giving them or anybody else an impression of 'subservience.'" Budenz inspected the letter, called it a "splendid example" of what he was talking about.

Hint of Espionage. It was left to General MacArthur's former intelligence chief, Major General Charles A. Willoughby, to introduce a hint of espionage into the I.P.R. hearings. Willoughby testified that I.P.R. writer Guenther Stein and the late Agnes Smedley (no I.P.R. writer, but an I.P.R. member) were part of the notorious Sorge Red spy ring in the Far East. When Richard Sorge, masquerading as a Nazi newsman, arrived in Japan in the early 19303 to set up his Red-spy network, he used Miss Smedley's contacts as his Japanese coconspirators, said Willoughby. The Sorge ring was so effective that two months before Pearl Harbor, it warned Moscow that Japan was planning to attack the U.S. and Great Britain in the Pacific. "The real cause for the Communization of China," said Willoughby, "is the long-range subversive operation, over the last two decades, conducted by professional Communists under orders of the Kremlin-controlled Third Comintern."

Neither Counsel Morris nor the committee was claiming that I.P.R. itself was an espionage network. In fact, with commendable restraint, nobody was claiming much of anything until the committee had heard all of its witnesses. But from the I.P.R. files and the testimony, Morris was obviously trying to show that I.P.R. was art intellectual instrument for inserting Communist policies into the U.S. Government, the U.S. press and U.S. academic life. If he could prove that in the hearings yet to come, he would make tales of espionage sound like child's play.

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