Chowin' down with Chou

On August 9, 1971, The New York Times carried a piece by James 'Scotty' Reston--who was part of preceded the Nixon-Kissinger entourage visiting that visited China [in early 1972], opening it to the West for the first time since the Communists had taken power there in 1949--entitled; An Evening With the Premier of China.

During dinner, which included the proletarian hors d'ouevre of prawns, green beans, cold duck and chicken, and delicious morsels of fish, the talk turned to China Hands Owen Lattimore, John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies Stewart Service and John K. Fairbank. About whom, Chou En Lai said, Take good wishes to them...If they want to visit China we will welcome them. Which invitation, when John Carter Vincent was made aware of it, thrilled him, according to China Scapegoat: The Diplomatic Ordeal of John Carter Vincent.

The author of that book, Gary May, goes on to say that Vincent leapt at the opportunity and sent this to Chou;

Dear and Esteemed Friend,

Your message sent to us through Mr. Reston brought us great pleasure. Our first inclination was to accept your invitation at once ....

But Vincent and his wife had a previously planned trip to Europe, so he asked to make the trip to China in the early autumn of the next year if it is convenient then. ...I look forward very much to seeing you and China again.

Which is a rather amazing response by Vincent, who had been at great pains to deny that he had any connection to the Chinese Communists when pressed several times, two decades earlier, during his ordeal at the hands of the McCarthyites. We can forgive the objective observer for concluding that, maybe the McCarthyites might have been on to something when trying to get to the facts about Who lost China, during congressional hearings all those years ago.

The ones that are usually described in terms such as, having knowingly made up facts and destroyed the reputations of people who were not involved in communist conspiracies.

[Addendum] We should add that Mr. Vincent died before he could take that trip to visit a man he claimed to have barely known. However, his good friend and colleague John Stewart Service did take advantage of Chou En-Lai's invitation. Quickly too, he went to China at the end of September 1971 and stayed for six weeks. No doubt talking of the good ol' days with the comrades.

Ordeal by Lattimore V (D Day celebration)

By one of the coincidences that makes life ironic, the BBC chose to post the above picture on its Democracy Day web-lebration. Which reminded us of a guy--note the Che Guevara button on the righteous lad's chest--who used to have a similarly loose definition of democracy. None other than Owen Lattimore, who was indicted for perjury for denying, under oath in front of a Senate subcommittee, that he'd ever promoted the philosophy of the Soviet Union.

Some excerpts from that noble martyr's 1945 book, The Solution in Asia;

If we are politically intelligent ....We may count on seeing, over wide areas, the partial acceptance of Marxist ideas and the adoption of one or another part of the Soviet system. [p. 24]

Maybe even in;

The Japanese, like other people, can adopt any system of society; but only if the changes made go beyond catchwords and permeate the whole society. Democracy in Japan cannot  be attained by changing the status of the emperor, but will require democratic changes throughout Japanese society.

There is in fact a democratic potential in Japanese life.... [p. 44]

But not like elsewhere;

It is a mistake to think that Japan could achieve "democratic monarchy" by reform. We Americans are likely to be misled by thinking of England as the example of a democratic monarchy. [p. 48]

Fortunately, thinks Owen (The architect of our Far Eastern policy, moi?) Lattimore, others are wiser in re Japan;

...the post-revolutionary Russians [aka, Communists], coming on the scene with fresh minds, or at least with preconceptions quite different from ours, were often right in stressing a number of phenomena whose importance we underestimated .... [p. 51]

 Owen ends chapter II with; Have we any idea what course to set? Then on to chapter III, REVOLUTION AND NATIONALISM IN CHINA;

Sun Yat-sen knew China could only be saved by a multiple process. Penetration into China of European and American thought had to be encouraged but the penetration of European and American control had to be pushed back. ....

Into this complicated situation there intruded the influence of the Russian Revolution, the effects of which were felt all over Asia. We in America have never yet properly grasped the character of that influence. Wherever we see Russian influence, we still tend to look for Russian "agitators" upsetting the minds of people who would not make trouble if they were not "stirred up by troublemakers" We cannot understand either the Asia of yesterday or the Asia of today and tomorrow if we resort to such absurd simplifications. [p. 67-68]

Unlike the sophisticated Owen Lattimore, that is. The table setting goes on for several more pages, but eventually we get to dine. On page 121, we're finally hit with the situation on the ground in China as Lattimore sees it in early 1945; The political structure under the Communists is more nearly democratic than it is under the Kuomintang.

I.e., Mao is the democrat, not our ally Chiang Kai-shek. Mao is aligned with the Russians, and;

One way of rating the prestige of any country is to compare what it does with what it says. With Russia, more than with any other country, what is done counts relatively more and what is said relatively less. What Russia says, more than what any other country says, is subject to distortion. [p. 129]

But those wise Orientals can see through that distortion;

The propaganda of what the Russians were actually doing in their own territory had a far more powerful effect of attraction in adjacent territory than any propaganda of theories; people who could not have been attracted by the abstract and invisible Marx were attracted by the concrete and visible Marxists. [p.137]

Who had been murdering their own countrymen wholesale, but apparently that didn't count. No, Owen assures the reader that for Koreans, Mongolians, Uighurs, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks;

To all of these peoples the Russians and the Soviet Union have a great power of attraction. In their eyes...the Soviet Union stands for strategic security, economic prosperity, technological progress, miraculous medicine, free education, equality of opportunity, and democracy: a powerful combination.

The fact that the Soviet Union also stands for democracy is not to be overlooked. It stands for democracy because it stands for all the other things. Here in America we are in the habit of taking a narrow view of foreign claimants to the status of democracy. If China, or Russia, or some other alien people does not measure up to the standards of the particular American modification of Anglo-Saxon democracy, we say that it is not democratic. [p. 139]

 Btw, the reader had to take Owen's word for all this, since he didn't bother to produce any evidence that that is how Asians themselves saw Russia and Communism. And anyone who disagreed with him was just a fascist like that Joe McCarthy (who came along later to remind Owen Lattimore just what he'd been claiming back in 1945).
 
Happy Democracy Day!

Ordeal by Lattimore IV (Here's mote in your eye!)

As we wrote in the immediately preceding post--Lattimore III--the slander of McCarthyism (supposedly, making up facts and telling lies about innocent people) has its origins in the 1950 book Ordeal By Slander. Which miraculously (Owen Lattimore's description) was published in July of that year, after Lattimore's testimonies before The Senate Tydings Committee in March through May. The Tydings committee concluded its proceedings in that same July.

So, for the edification of Tom Meyer of Ricochet, as well as his designated homework doer Michael Moynihan, we offer this, selected almost at random, from Prof. Lattimore's  (when he thought he was home free) paean to his own martyrdom;

I wonder a bit how a man so young as Joseph McCarthy [HSIB note; he was 42 years old at the time, Lattimore all of 50], whose acquaintance with national and international affairs is so recent [HSIB note; he was a Marine Corps veteran of WWII], can have become such a great expert on the difficult and complex problem of China and the Far East. My wonder on this score increased when I read his speech on the Senate floor. Some of his material is from Chinese and Russian sources. Or perhaps I should say that some of his exotic material on Mongolia appears to trace back to some Russian source of distinctly low caliber.

I did not know that the Senator was a linguist. But really, the material that the Senator read is so badly translated and so inaccurate that I am sure that I should not like to place the blame for in the learned Senator. Indeed, I fear that the sound and fury come from the lips of McCarthy, but that there is an Edgar Bergen in the woodpile.

Get it? Charlie McCarthy was Edgar Bergen's dummy! Oh, Owen was quite a card. And this clever witticism is from Lattimore's testimony to the Tydings Committee. He's so enamored of it that he repeats it a few pages later;

Senator McCarthy, without, I am sure, knowing what he is about, has been and is the instrument or the dupe of a bitter and implacable and fanatical group of people who will not tolerate any discussion of China which is not based upon absolute, total and complete support of the Nationalist Government in Formosa. They do not hesitate-they even insist on--policies that potential allies of ours in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries will call ruthless imperialism. ....

But I am sure that the methods of that faction of these people who are McCarthy's Edgar Bergen [our bold], are wrong--as wrong as they can be. Their methods are to intimidate persons like me and even officials of the United States Government from expressing views that are contrary to their own. Their weapon of intimidation is McCarthy's machine gun: namely, accusation of disloyalty and traitorous conduct. I get a certain amount of wry amusement out of the fact that some of these people are acknowledged ex-Communists. Perhaps that status gives them a special right to criticize those of us who do not happen to be Communists, ex or otherwise. Certainly, it provides them with ideal training and unique skill for the kind of campaign of vilification and distortion that the so-called China Lobby is conducting through the instrumentality of the Senator from Wisconsin.

Of course, Owen isn't just saying all this for himself. Nope, he's the champion of all those ink-stained wretches who will be filing stories on his testimony;

I say to you, gentlemen, that the sure way to destroy freedom of speech and the free expression of ideas and views is to attach to that freedom the penalty of abuse and vilification. If the people of this country can differ with the so-called China Lobby or with Senator McCarthy only at the risk of the abuse to which I have been subjected, freedom will not long survive.

If you think that that is a masterpiece of self-unawareness, how about what Lattimore did to discredit one of those ex-Communists who testified that he'd known Lattimore was a Communist when he, Louis Budenz, had been editor of The Daily Worker. Which was to produce (miraculously?) a transcript of a deportation hearing in which Budenz had testified;

Beginning at page 143 of this transcript Budenz admitted that even before he joined the Communist Party he engaged in certain personal activities which, to say the least, are offensive to accepted standards of decent and conventional behavior. .... These indications of Budenz's sordid personal life ....

Since that time [of leaving the Communist Party] he has been engaged in commercial exploitation of his own sordid past, resorting to methods which, in my opinion, are a menace to our society.

No estimate given by Lattimore how long freedom could survive such abuse as he was subjecting Louis Budenz. Nor of this abuse of Joe McCarthy heaped upon him by Lattimore, in later testimony;

The Senator...gave voice to ...a defense of the Nazi SS generals who massacred defenseless American soldiers and a large civilian population in the infamous brutality of Malmedy. .... I hope with all my heart that Joe McCarthy will come to understand that the principles of justice and fairness which he loudly proclaimed on behalf of the Nazi murderers are also the birthright of American citizens.

Which is a reference to the fact that McCarthy had listened to and acted upon complaints from an American military officer about the mistreatment of German soldiers who'd been tried for War Crimes in the Malmedy Massacre during the Battle of the Bulge. Complaints so serious that the Army formed the Simpson Commission to investigate, and one of whose members wrote; All but two of the Germans in the 139 cases we investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators.

Did Lattimore mean he was in favor of such treatment of enemy soldiers?

Ordeal by Lattimore III

We last left the saga of Owen Lattimore as he was scrambling to explain to the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, in 1952, how it was that he forgot to mention that he'd briefed the POTUS, in 1945, on his recommendations for our policy toward post-WWII China. Not very successfully, as the subcommittee concluded in its final report on the hearings that the evidence showed that Lattimore had been a conscious agent of the Soviet Union and was a major factor in China's falling to Mao's Communists.

Further, the subcommittee forwarded the testimony of Lattimore to the Truman Justice Dept with a recommendation that he be investigated for perjury. With the result that a Grand Jury did indict him on seven counts of lying under oath. When the trial judge threw out four of the counts as too vague, the prosecutor appealed his decision and got two of the counts restored. Then, he re-submitted amended charges of Lattimore lying about having ever promoted the foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union to a Grand Jury.

The re-submission made the charges more specific--to cure the supposed defects that led the trial judge to dismiss the first charges--by citing nine specific things Lattimore did to promote Soviet policy, supported by 132 statements Lattimore had made.

Bolstered by the testimony of former Ambassador to Russia, Wm. C. Bullitt, who said that in 1936 Lattimore, while in Russia, came to the US embassy to urge him to recommend to FDR that we recognize Outer Mongolia as an independent state. Bullitt testified that it was obvious to anyone who knew anything at all--Lattimore spoke Mongolian--about the matter, that Mongolia was dominated by Russia. To Bullitt, either Lattimore was working for Russian interests or he was woefully ignorant of the political reality.

That Grand Jury duly re-indicted Lattimore on two counts of perjury. However, after the prosecutor attempted to get the judge in the case to disqualify himself as biased for Lattimore, he refused and again dismissed the new indictments. Finally, in 1955, two years of legal wrangling went for naught and the Justice Dept. concluded that it  would be pointless to proceed further in Judge  Luther Youngdahl's courtroom. Lattimore went unprosecuted.

Though he was not able to be as unbridled in his enthusiasm for that as he had been in 1950 when former Senator Millard Tydings exonerated him of essentially the same charges, after a kids glove treatment of the charges. That chapter had ended with Owen Lattimore inventing the slander of McCarthyism, in his book Ordeal By Slander. The irony not only lost on Lattimore, but on countless commenters to follow, to this day.

To which we will be returning, soon.

Ordeal by Latimore II (not wild about Harry)

In the immediately preceding post--Lattimore I--we related details of Owen Lattimore's dilemma before a March 5, 1952 Senate subcommittee hearing. Following that appearance Lattimore again had to testify, on March 14. William S. White reported that;

Prof. Owen Lattimore asserted today that he had not told a previous Senate investigation of a 1945 China policy recommendation to President Truman because he had "forgotten the whole business."

The whole business being a meeting with the POTUS in the White House on July 3, 1945. Well sure, anyone could forget that. And Lattimore is definitely forgetful, if his 1950 book, Ordeal By Slander is any evidence. On page 201 of his book, he denies he has any important friends or acquaintances. He says that his attorney, Abe Fortas--himself important enough to be nominated to the Supreme Court by Lyndon Johnson, probably as a reward for Fortas having represented Johnson in 1948's Texas Senate primary dispute--urged Lattimore and his wife to make lists of all the influential people they could muster to speak up for him.

But the results were so disappointing that Fortas, according to Lattimore, said, "Good Lord! Don't you know anybody important?" To which, Lattimore responds, The fact of the matter is that I know very few "important people" as that term is ordinarily used.

Among the non-important people Lattimore definitely did know were, Chiang Kai-shek (to whose government he was named an adviser on the recommendation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and Vice-President Henry Wallace (who Lattimore accompanied on a notorious Potemkin Village tour of Siberia in 1944). As, it happens, Wallace spoke out about his being duped at about the same time Lattimore was explaining away his poor memory to the Senate Internal Security subcommittee;

Russian hospitality is proverbial, and it is not surprising that on this occasion the Russians should do everything possible to impress the Vice-President of the country which was sending them so many billions of dollars of vital necessities of many kinds. So on the whole these visits made a most favorable impression on me.

But, as I now know, this impression was not the complete one. Elinor Lippor, who was a slave laborer in the Magadan area for many years, has subsequently described the great effort put forth by the Soviet authorities to pull the wool over our eyes and make Magadan into a Potemkin village for my inspection. Watch towers were torn down. Prisoners were herded away out of sight. On this basis, what we was prodded a false impression. I was amazed that the Russians could do so much in such short time--as was Wendell Willkie, who had visited the same region in 1942. But unfortunately neither Willkie nor I knew the full truth. As guests we were shown only one side of the coin.

And he didn't get any help from his traveling companion, Lattimore, who spoke several Asiatic languages as well as Russian.

Ordeal by Lattimore I

On March 5, 1952 the New York Times printed a piece by William S. White that reported that Prof. Owen Lattimore acknowledged during his eighth day of testimony before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee, that Truman Administration policy toward China in 1946 had been 'closely similar' to his own thinking and proposals. The next paragraph in White's report was;

He asserted, however, that it was "an absurd exaggeration *** an absurd invention" to suggest that he had dictated or molded that policy, either as an individual or as a trustee of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

As White recognized, this was at last to the heart of the issue--what influence, if any, he had exerted in the State Department's adoption of what its critics call a "soft" line toward the China Communists. Because, two years earlier in front of a different Senate body--The Tydings Committee--Lattimore denied, under oath, that he was what Senator Joseph McCarthy had called him, i.e. the chief architect of United States' policy in China post WWII.

Lattimore then quickly published a vituperative, slanderous, short book repeating that denial; Ordeal By Slander (Little, Brown and Company; July 1950). So, Lattimore was faced with a problem when the SISS, chaired by Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran confronted him with the following:

1. A letter of June 10, 1945 Lattimore had written to President Harry Truman expressing alarm that United States policy seemed to be tending toward support for "only one party," meaning the Nationalist Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, and suggesting that if the United States took this course the Soviet Union might feel justified "in following that lead and committing itself to the other major party (the Communists)."

2. Truman's reply to Lattimore in which he invited him to come to the White House to discuss his ideas. Followed by a wire from the White House confirming a meeting on July 3rd of that year, and Lattimore's thank you note.

3. A memo for Truman to prepare him for what Lattimore would say in the meeting, which was two alternatives in China:

1. Division of the country between Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists. This would mean for Chiang, a permanent policy of getting American support for which he would give anything America wants; and for the Communists, a similar policy of getting Russian support, with similar results. The eventual consequence would almost inevitably be war between America and Russia. [bold by HSIB]
2. A unified China. To unify China, there must be a settlement between Chiang and the Communists and simultaneously an agreement between America, Russia, and Britain to build up China as a whole. The Communists would have to accept minority standing as a long-term status; but Chiang would have to give them real power within a coalition government, proportionate to their real strength, not just token representation.

In other words, we can have either a divided China, with Chiang having dictatorial power in his territory, subject to acting as an instrument of American policy, or we can have a whole China, at the price of pretty drastic political change [our bold again], including limitation of the personal power of Chiang.

Then, so Truman wouldn't miss it, Lattimore wrote; The basic American interest is represented by Policy 2. 

More to follow.