INVESTIGATIONS: Absent-Minded Professor?

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When the professor started to read his statement before the Senators, he found the going rough. At every sentence he was interrupted by indignant questions. Gruff Pat McCarran said the professor's tactics of "intemperate and provocative expressions" were also Communist tactics.

Maryland's Herbert R. O'Conor asked: "What steps were taken by you to prevent Communists from having a voice in the Institute of Pacific Relations?" Lattimore answered: "I was not responsible for employment." Pressed further, the professor, long cited as an American authority on Soviet Asia, said he was really an innocent on ideologies: "I was not an expert on Communism . . ." Had any mistakes been made in U.S. China policy? Sidestepped Lattimore: "I make a distinction between mistakes and lack of success."

Cross-Examination. It took three days for Lattimore to finish reading his statement. Then, in a more subdued atmosphere, his cross-examination began. Again the professor fell back on his self-claimed naiveté about Communism and Communists.

Some 20 contributors to Pacific Affairs had been previously identified before the subcommittee as Communists or proCommunists. Lattimore swore, "I don't believe I ever knew or was told" they were Communists. The Senators then confronted the professor with I.P.R. documents, and he began to retreat a little.

Before the Tydings committee Lattimore had said he did not know Frederick Vanderbilt Field, an active I.P.R. official,* as a Communist until "1940-41," when Lattimore's term as Pacific Affairs editor was ending. A letter from the I.P.R. file persuaded him to change his mind. He must have known Field's ideology as early as 1939. "My memory was in error by about two years," he admitted. One I.P.R. memo, from Field to Lattimore, read like an order: discussing a certain article, it cautioned Editor Lattimore that "the analysis is a straight Marxist one and . . . should not be altered."

"Answer Yes or No." Subcommittee Counsel Robert Morris produced an I.P.R. report of a meeting in Moscow (1936) at which Lattimore conferred with top representatives of the I.P.R.'s Russian council. The Russians, Geographer V. E. Motylev and Comintern Veteran G. N. Voitinsky, discussed Pacific Affairs. Motylev asked for a "more definite line" in articles. According to the I.P.R. report: "[Lattimore] said he would like to meet the Soviet suggestion as far as possible ... If the Soviet group would start on such a line, he would be able to make [other councils] cooperate more fully . . ."

Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson: "That line was the Communist Party line, wasn't it?"

Lattimore: "In my opinion, no."

Ferguson: "What line was it ... if it wasn't the Communist Party line?"

Lattimore: "The line of the Soviet Council of the I.P.R. . . Nothing Communist about it . . ."

Chairman McCarran (banging gavel): "Answer yes or no."

Lattimore: "I believe the Russians have at various times followed lines . . . that had nothing Communist about them . . ."