INVESTIGATIONS: Absent-Minded Professor?

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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.