INVESTIGATIONS: Absent-Minded Professor?

Monday, Mar. 10, 1952

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Lattimore had told the Tydings committee that he didn't have a desk in the State Department; he had also told an executive session of the McCarran inquiry that he never took care of the mail of Lauchlin Currie, then an assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt. Under crossexamination, he confessed to being absentminded. He did, after all, remember having a room in Currie's offices in the old State Department building; he used it frequently. Furthermore, it was true that during Currie's absence, he read Currie's mail.

This week the Senators continued their probe of the professor's faulty memory. They were not proving Lattimore a Communist; but they were exposing what looked like a powerful Communist web of propaganda and persuasion, around him, the I.P.R. and, ultimately, around U.S. policymaking.

^{* Among Lattimore's governmental assignments: President
Franklin Roosevelt's personal emissary to Chiang Kai-shek (1941-42),
head of the OWI Pacific operations (1942-44), traveler with Vice
President Henry Wallace in Soviet Siberia and China (1944), co-writer
of the Pauley Mission Report on Japan (1946), participant in State's
conference on China policy (1949).
* Last week Field was freed from
federal prison at Ashland, Ky. He had been sentenced last July for
contempt of court, i.e., for refusing to answer questions concerning
Communist bail funds.}