Owen Lattimore (July 29, 1900 – May 31, 1989) was a U.S. author, educator, and influential scholar of Central Asia.

He was accused by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of being "a top Russian spy." Some people credit Lattimore with coining the term McCarthyism, but Herbert Block was first to use the term, in a cartoon in the Washington Post.

Early life

Although born in America, Lattimore was raised in Tianjin, China, where his parents, David and Margaret Lattimore, were teachers of English at a Chinese university. (His brother was the classics translator Richmond Lattimore.) After doing research at Harvard University from 1928 to 1929, Lattimore returned to China to participate in business and newspaper work. He eventually began working in insurance, a job which led him to travel across the Silk Road. He became an expert on the subject, one of the few Westerners to have both visited the Silk Road area and read the Chinese language accounts of it—for his honeymoon he traveled overland from Beijing to Delhi, a mammoth feat in the first half of the 20th century. He spoke fluent Chinese and was deeply familiar with the country — he was the United States political adviser to Chiang Kai Shek during World War II and later became acquainted with Zhou Enlai.

World War II period, and after

From 1938 to 1950, Lattimore was the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He continued to be a lecturer there until 1963. During the 1930s, Lattimore sat on the board of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R) and edited the I.P.R.’s journal Pacific Affairs, in which he justified Stalin's Great Purge^[1], writing, "That sounds to me like democracy."^[2]

Lattimore outlined his editorial philosophy for Pacific Affairs in a 1938 letter he wrote to IPR General Secretary Edward C. Carter: "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.'"^[3]

In the same letter, Lattimore congratulated Carter: "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. They will bring out the absolutely essential radical aspects, but can be depended on to do it with the right touch..."^[4] “Asiaticus” was the Polish-born Comintern agent Moses Wolf Grzyb, alias M. G. Shippe (or Schiffe), alias Hans (or Heinz) Muëller (or Moëller)^[5]; “Han-seng” refers to Chen Han-seng, a member of Richard Sorge’s Soviet spy ring in Tokyo^[6]; and “Chi” was Red Chinese secret agent Chi Chao-ting.^[7]

As editor of Pacific Affairs, Lattimore sought articles from a wide range of perspectives.^{[citation needed]} In 1939, Lattimore received a memo from IPR Secretary Frederick Vanderbilt Field cautioning him with regard to a certain article to appear in Pacific Affairs, "the analysis is a straight Marxist one and . . . should not be altered."^[8]

In response to Soviet complaints that a Pacific Affairs article by William Henry Chamberlin was critical of Stalin, the minutes of a 1936 meeting in Moscow (found in the IPR's own files) record Lattimore telling the Soviets "that he had not realized Chamberlin’s position, but as soon as he learned of the Soviet opinion of Chamberlin he canceled an article on the Soviet press which he had asked from Chamberlin."^[9] Lattimore also said that "if the Soviet group would show in their articles a general line— -- a struggle for peace -- —the other articles would naturally gravitate to that line."^[10] He added that "If the Soviet group would start on such a line, he would be able to make [other councils] cooperate more fully."^[11] He was later accused of encouraging contributors with a pro-communist point of view.^{[citation needed]}

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie (identified in the Venona decrypts under the cover name "Page"^[12]) got Lattimore appointed U.S. advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.^[13] In 1944, Lattimore was placed in charge of all affairs in the Pacific for the Office of War Information, predecessor of the CIA.^[14]

During the 1940s, Lattimore came into increasing conflict with another member of the I.P.R's board, Alfred Kohlberg, who accused Lattimore of being hostile to and biased against Chiang Kai-Shek (who was Kohlberg's hero^{[citation needed]}) and in addition, too left-wing and sympathetic towards Chinese Communists. In 1944, relations between Kohlberg and Lattimore became so bad that Kohlberg left the I.P.R, and founded a journal Plain Talk intended to rebut the claims made in Pacific Affairs^{[citation needed]}. By the late 1940s, Lattimore had become an object of intense hatred^{[citation needed]} by Kohlberg and other members of the China Lobby. Kohlberg was later to became an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it is quite possible^{[citation needed]} that McCarthy first learned of Lattimore through Kohlberg.

At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry Wallace on a mission to China in 1944, for the US Office of War Information.[1]. The trip had been arranged by Currie, who recommended to FDR that Lattimore accompany Wallace.^[15] During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day landings, Wallace and his delegation stopped over in Siberia and were given a Potemkin village tour of the Soviet Union’s Magadan concentration camp at Kolyma. In a travelogue for National Geographic, Lattimore described this Siberian gulag as a combination of the Hudson's Bay Company and the TVA, gushing about how strong and well-fed the inmates were and ascribing to camp commandant Feliks Nikishov “a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.”^[16] Commentator Cal Thomas wrote in 2007,

"While many Westerners recall Nazi-run death camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, few remember Soviet death camps named Kolyma and Magadan. True, Alexander Solzhenitsyn mentioned them in The Gulag Archipelago as did Varlam Sjalamov in "Tales from Kolyma," but as the late Swedish journalist Andres Kung wrote, "There are people who have still not heard of these communist extermination camps -- even though the communists preceded the Nazis in creating such camps and killed an even larger number of people in their camps."^[17]

Accusations

According to his FBI file, Lattimore was suspected of engaging in espionage for a foreign power as early as 1927, while in Shanghai.^[18]

During the Hitler-Stalin pact, on May 16, 1941, the FBI issued a memorandum that Lattimore, as a suspected Communist, should be considered for inclusion on the Custodial Detention Index in the event of a national emergency.^[19]

On December 14, 1948, Alexander Barmine, former Charge d'Affairs at the Soviet Embassy in Athens, Greece, advised Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that then-GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) chief General Berzin informed him prior to his 1937 defection that Owen Lattimore was a Soviet agent.^[20]

Communist propagandist Louis Gibarti, one of Willi Münzenberg's chief Comintern lieutenants, likewise told a Senate committee in 1951 that American Communist officials sent him to Lattimore for help in 1934 and '37.^[21] Regarding who should be assigned the task of representing the Soviet puppet regime in Outer Mongolia as “independent,” another defector, Igor Bogolepov, former Counselor of the Soviet Foreign Office, said Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov told him to “put on this business Mr. Owen Lattimore.”^[22]

In March 1950, he was accused by McCarthy of being a spy for the Soviet Union; the charge was subsequently repeated by McCarthy before the committee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings that was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department. At the time, Lattimore was in Kabul, Afghanistan, on a cultural mission for the United Nations. Lattimore dismissed the charges against him as "moonshine" and hurried back to the United States to testify before the Tydings Committee. Though Lattimore was well respected as a scholar of Asia, he was totally unknown to the general public before 1950. It was McCarthy's charges that first brought widespread fame to Lattimore.

At the Tydings Committee, Lattimore was a combative witness, and his testimony was noted for his verbal duels with McCarthy. In April 1950, McCarthy introduced as a surprise witness against Lattimore Louis F. Budenz, the former editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker, who testified that Lattimore was a secret Communist, but not a Soviet agent per se. Rather, Budenz claimed that Lattimore was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy without actually being a Soviet agent. Budenz said his Party superiors told him Lattimore's “great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language.”^[23] The majority report for the Tydings committee (which Time magazine reported "seemed more interested in belittling subversion than in pinning it down")^[24] cleared Lattimore of all charges against him; the minority report accepted Budenz's charges.

In February 1952, Lattimore was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (S.I.S.S), headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran. Before Lattimore was called as witness, investigators for the S.I.S.S. had seized all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R). Lattimore's twelve days of testimony were very stormy, marked by frequent shouting matches and verbal joustings between McCarran and McCarthy (who attended the S.I.S.S. hearings for nine of the twelve days of Lattimore's testimony) on one hand and Lattimore on the other.

The degree of antagonism between McCarran and Lattimore can be gauged by the fact that it took three days for Lattimore to deliver his opening statement; the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran challenged various claims made by Lattimore in his opening statement. During the hearings, McCarran used the records from the I.P.R. to ask questions that often taxed Lattimore's memory. During the hearings, Budenz again testifed against Lattimore, but this time claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent. Also testifying before the S.I.S.S. was Nicholas Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia and Tibet, who stated that Lattimore’s writings reflected Communist influence; Poppe, who had collaborated with the Nazis^{[citation needed]} as an interpreter in the Caucasus in 1942 and later worked at the SS Wannsee Institute in Berlin^{[citation needed]}, bore a great grudge against Lattimore^{[citation needed]} for refusing to help him immigrate to the United States in 1949.^{[citation needed]}

In 1952, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran Committee issued its 226-page, unanimous final report:

"Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy".

On "at least five separate matters," charged the committee, Lattimore had not told the whole truth. One example: "The evidence . . . shows conclusively that Lattimore knew Frederick V. Field to be a Communist; that he collaborated with Field after he possessed this knowledge; and that he did not tell the truth before the subcommittee about this association with Field . . ."^[25]

In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts. Six of the counts related to various discrepancies between Lattimore's testimony and the I.P.R. records; the seventh accused Lattimore of seeking to deliberately deceive the S.I.S.S. Lattimore's defenders, such as his lawyer Abe Fortas, claimed that the discrepancies were caused by McCarran deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s out of the hope that Lattimore would not be able to recall them properly, thereby giving grounds for a perjury indictment. Within three years, the charges against him were dismissed."1⇧ His book Ordeal by Slander is his own account of this episode.

Later life

From 1963 to 1970, Lattimore was the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds in England, where he taught Chinese History, strongly illustrated with personal reminiscences. While there, he also promoted the establishment of a Mongolian Studies Department. Lattimore had a lifelong dedication to establishing research centers to further the study of Mongolian history and culture. He is one of the few Westerners to receive recognition from the Mongolian state. The State Museum in Ulan Bator named a newly discovered dinosaur after him.

Lattimore's Theory on the Reciprocation between Civilization and the Environment

In An Inner Asian Approach to the Historical Geography of China (1947), Lattimore explored the system through which humanity affects the environment and is changed by it, and concluded that civilization is molded by its own impact on the environment. He lists the following pattern:

1. A primitive society pursues some agricultural activities, but is aware that it has many limitations.
2. Growing and evolving, the society begins to change the environment. For example, depleting its game supply and wild crops, it begins to domesticate animals and plants. It deforests land to create room for these activities.
3. The environment changes, offering new opportunities. For example, it becomes grasslands.
4. Society changes in response, and reacts to the new opportunities as a new society. For example, the once-nomads build permanent settlements and shift from a hunter-gatherer mentality to a farming society culture.
5. The reciprocal process continues, offering new variations.

Books

• The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929)
• High Tartary
• Manchuria Cradle of Conflict (1932)
• The Mongols of Manchuria(1934)
• Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940)
• Mongol Journeys [1941]
• America and Asia (1943)
• China, a short history (with Eleanor Lattimore)
• Solutions in Asia
• The Situation in Asia (1949)
• Pivot of Asia (1950)
• Ordeal by Slander (July, 1950) The informal and completely honest account of what happens to an American family not afraid to fight for freedom. Atlantic-Little, Brown and Company
• Studies in Asian Frontier History (1962)

Notes

1. ^ Richard L. Walker, "China studies in McCarthy's shadow: a personal memoir," The National Interest, September 22, 1998
2. ^ Pacific Affairs 11 (September 1938), pp. 370-72
3. ^ “The Right Touch,” Time, August 6, 1951
4. ^ Ibid.
5. ^ Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ISBN 0-520-07388-6, p. 452
6. ^ Maochen Yu, "Chen Hansheng's Memoirs and Chinese Communist Espionage," Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 6-7 (Winter 1995/1996), p. 274
7. ^ S. Rpt. 2050, 82d Cong., 2d sess., Serial 11574, pursuant to S. Res. 306, Institute of Pacific Relations (Hearings July 25, 1951-June 20, 1952 by the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary)
8. ^ "Absent-Minded Professor?" Time, March 10, 1952
9. ^ M. Stanton Evans, "McCarthyism: Waging the Cold War in America," Human Events, May 30, 1997
10. ^ Daniel J. Flynn, "Rethinking 'McCarthyism'," Accuracy in Academia, September 1998
11. ^ "Absent-Minded Professor?" Time, March 10, 1952
12. ^ Robert J. Hanyok, Eavesdropping on Hell: Historical Guide to Western Communications Intelligence and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Washington, DC: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2005, 2nd Ed.), p. 119 (PDF page 124)
13. ^ M. Stanton Evans, Op. cit.
14. ^ FBI Report, "Owen Lattimore, Internal Security - R, Espionage - R," September 8, 1949 (FBI file: Owen Lattimore), p. 7 (PDF p. 12)
15. ^ Roger James Sandilands, The Life and Political Economy of Lauchlin Currie (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), ISBN 0822310309, p. 151
16. ^ Paul Johnson, The Survival of the Adversary Culture (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1988) ISBN 1560005548, p. 180
17. ^ Monument to murder, By Cal Thomas, Washington Times, June 13, 2007.
18. ^ FBI Report, "Owen Lattimore, Internal Security - R, Espionage - R," September 8, 1949 (FBI file: Owen Lattimore), p. 1 (PDF p. 2)
19. ^ Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ISBN 0-520-07388-6, p. 52
20. ^ FBI Report, "Owen Lattimore, Internal Security - R, Espionage - R," September 8, 1949 (FBI File: Owen Lattimore, Part 1A), p. 2 (PDF p. 7)
21. ^ Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia spy case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996) ISBN 0-8078-2245-0, p. 240, n. 12
22. ^ M. Stanton Evans, Op. cit.
23. ^ "The Case Against I.P.R.," Time, September 3, 1951
24. ^ 'Report on the I.P.R.", Time, July 14, 1952
25. ^ Report on the I.P.R.," Op. cit.

• ^[1] US Senate, 82nd Congress, 2nd Session, Committee on the Judiciary, Institute of Pacific Relations, Report No. 2050, p. 224.

References

• David Buck, "Owen Lattimore," in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, ed., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 248-250.
• James Cotton, Asian Frontier Nationalism: Owen Lattimore and the American Policy Debate (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989). ISBN 0391036513.
• Fried, Richard Nightmare In Red : the McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York ; Toronto : Oxford University Press, 1990 ISBN 019504360X.
• Klingaman., William The Encyclopedia of the McCarthy Era, New York : Facts on File, 1996 ISBN 0816030979.
• Newman, Robert P. Owen Lattimore And The "Loss" of China, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992 ISBN 0520073886.
• Oshinsky, David A Conspiracy So Immense : the World of Joe McCarthy, New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan, 1983 ISBN 0029234905.
• Schrecker, Ellen No Ivory Tower : McCarthyism and the Universities, New York : Oxford University Press, 1986 ISBN 0195035577.
• Schrecker, Ellen Many Are The Crimes : McCarthyism In America, Boston ; London : Little, Brown, 1998 ISBN 0316774707.

External links

• FBI reports from the espionage investigation of Lattimore 5161 pages
• United States vs. Lattimore
• Newman, Robert P. (1992). Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China. University of California Press. ISBN 0520073886. 

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