INVESTIGATIONS: The Right Touch

Professor Owen Lattimore retired from his battles with Joe McCarthy last summer with his guns still smoking. His parting shot was a pamphleteering book entitled Ordeal by Slander. In it, he pictured himself as a simple scholar who was all but martyred by McCarthy's overblown charges that Lattimore was "the architect" of U.S. Far Eastern policy and a "top Russian espionage agent." Lattimore's last chapter warned that McCarthyism was undermining U.S. scholarship and morals.

Last week there was no evidence to indicate that Lattimore was either a spy or the architect of U.S. foreign policy, but the U.S. got a revealing look at Lattimore's ideas of scholarship and morals, and at his past willingness to push the Communist line. All this was laid out in a letter Lattimore wrote in 1938 to his friend Edward C. Carter, then secretary general of the Institute of Pacific Relations, whose membership included many prominent Americans as well as party-liners. The letter turned up among 300,000 I.P.R. documents dramatically seized last February in Carter's barn near Lee, Mass. Carter and the I.P.R. objected to the seizure indicating that they would willingly have produced the papers themselves.

Lattimore was pleased, he wrote Carter, at the I.P.R.'s plans to survey the issues of the Sino-Japanese War. "I think that you are pretty cagey in turning over so much of the China section of the inquiry to Asiaticus, Han-seng and Chi [all since identified as Chinese Communists], They will bring out the absolutely essential radical aspects, but can be depended on to do it with the right touch . . .

"For China, my hunch is that it will pay to keep behind the official Chinese Communist position—far enough not to be covered by the same label—but enough ahead of the active Chinese liberals to be noticeable . . . For the U.S.S.R.—back their international policy in general, but without using their slogans and above all without giving them or anybody else an impression of 'subservience.' "