INVESTIGATIONS: 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.)