The Man Who Came Back

Out of Red China last week came six of the 41 U.S. civilians due for release under the recent agreement at Geneva (TIME, Sept. 19). One was a young airline pilot; four were Roman Catholic priests, one of whom bore shackle marks. There was also Walter A. Rickett, 34, of Seattle, alumnus of the University of Washington and the University of Pennsylvania, who had been a Marine Corps intelligence officer on Iwo Jima. Richett had gone to China as a Fulbright scholar in 1948, and since July 1951, he had been in jail for "espionage." After meeting Walter Rickett in Hong Kong, TIME Senior Editor John Osborne cabled:

Rickett has a little brown mustache that quivers as he talks. His voice wavers often, as if he suffers from a deeper weariness than he knows. He is utterly sure of himself, and he is sure in particular that the Communists favored him with a unique opportunity to "think things over," and to "decide for myself that certain things are right and certain things are wrong." The Communists have not so much converted him as stopped the clock for him, and maybe turned it back.

Walter Rickett was known in Peking before his arrest as a fairly evenminded liberal. He talks today as an extreme liberal of the mid-'40s would have talked. He is driven to rationalize everything that the Communists do or say, including what the Communists did to him, and to assume that whatever the U.S. does is questionable and probably wrong. Rickett is, beyond all else, the ultimate example of what can happen to a non-Communist who does not believe or ceases to believe that Communism in itself is evil. He has made his personal accommodation with it. Now he must justify it, and he does so, maintaining with all sincerity that he is "not a Communist." His way of saying this tells everything: "I am an American," he says firmly. Then he adds: "It takes a pretty good man to be a Communist."

"Thinking Things Through." His justifications take sickening forms. Citing minor errors in the first press accounts of his release, he said that he was misquoted, that he had not seen other prisoners handcuffed, beaten or executed: "The Communists never beat anybody." Rickett conceded that the Communists did have three methods of physical persuasion. They handcuff your hands in front of you; they handcuff them in back; and they manacle hands to feet. "Now being handcuffed is damned inconvenient," said Rickett. "If you have to go to the toilet, for example, it's embarrassing to have to ask somebody to help you, and it's hard to sleep with your hands behind you, but it's not bodily harmful. It doesn't really hurt you."

The cells in his prison, Rickett continued with a faint smile, had wooden doors, and the guards sometimes forgot to lock them. "Most of us would shout to the guards to come and lock the doors, and they appreciated it. But there was a fellow next to me who would not behave himself. One day he tried to kick his door down, and the guard just came and said to him, 'Now what do you think that solves,' and locked it and left him alone. And that's the way it was. It's a matter of thinking things through, as the Communists do. Most of us realized that if you behaved yourself you could have a good chance of a good future."

Definition of Spying. Rickett tried to explain how it was after four years of imprisonment that he considered his jailer right and his own country wrong. When he first went to Peking in 1948, he thought the Communists were wrong; he thought that the Russians were coming down into China, that the U.S. should stop them. "After my arrest, I came to realize that the Chinese had a right to run their own country any way they wanted to run it. The new China exists. It is there, and it is a fact. No matter how we feel about it, we have to live with it."

Rickett is obsessed with the evils that he attributes to Chiang Kaishek. "When I criticize the U.S., what I am really criticizing is its position on Formosa." He believes that the U.S. should abandon Formosa and drop its embargo on strategic trade with Red China. He remarked with quiet satisfaction that from what he had heard about the Geneva negotiations (which resulted in his release), "things are going the way I think they should." He claimed that he had been a U.S. spy, but, when questioned, he admitted that he had merely reported his observations of China to an American consul. That's spying, said Rickett. Walter Rickett concluded: "I feel that as an American I have a right to say what I please."

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