Owen Lattimore and the 'cold war.' (column)

MR. TOM WICKER, a columnist for the New York Times, has published a piece in which he defends the late Owen Lattimore against charges made against him in the carly Fifties, charges reiterated in this space [see NR, July 14]. Mr. Wicker writes, "Mr. Buckley's column was in every [significant] respect a performance worthy of its author's mentor, Joe McCarthy, and a revived smear of a dead man more than thirty years after his name was, or should have been, cleared."

Now, Joe McCarthy has been dead for 32 years, during which I have been very active. I cannot remember, during those 32 years, imputing pro-Communism to more than, oh, four? five? people, in each case only if evidence was overwhelming that they were pro-Communist. I assume that a Communist is pro-Communist, though Mr. Wicker sometimes sounds as though it would be an act of McCarthyism to impute pro-Communism to Stalin, let alone Gorbachev.

But Wicker engages in more, merely, than a quarrel over Owen Lattimore. He wishes nothing less than to declare the cold war a great historical act of fiction. To this end he pulls out of a eulogy to Lattimore, by a former publisher of Science magazine, the words, "[Owen Lattimore was] a hero of the McCarthy era" who exposed "at its very onset the delusion of the cold war . . . no global, monolithic conspiracy threatened our security."

In a way, Tom's right. If there was no cold war-no conspiracy to threaten our security or that of our allies-then we should not have bothered to inquire into the activities of Owen Lattimore. But there were those who-reviewing the record of Lattimore, which included 11 days of interrogation by the chief counsel of a Senate committee came to certain conclusions about him which Mr. Wicker now suggests were surrealistic at best, iniquitous at worst.

Wicker's bandling of that committee's findings is such as to suggest that everybody involved was in a sense an agent of McCarthy, or of McCarthyism. Mr. Wicker has discovered (since his initial column on Lattimore) that Lattimore's legal problems did not, as he at first wrote, trace back to the Tydings-McCarthy Committee, but rather to the McCarran Committee, whichheld its hearings two years later. I have "a right" to my "views," Mr. Wicker concedes-"but not to such obfuscatory omissions as that the McCarran Committee's Democratic majority included .the likes of James O. Eastland of Mississippi and William Jenner of Indiana, hand-picked by the Red-baiting chairman."

Now just to begin with, William Jenner was a Republican, not a Democrat. So who else agreed that Lattimore was a Communist, after months and months of hearings? Harley Kilgore of West Virginia

a liberal. Warren Magnuson of Washington he died just a few weeks ago and was hailed as one of the stauncbest liberals in postwar political America. Anybody else? Estes Kefauver he ran for Vice President under Adlai Stevenson, and if Estes was a closet McCarthyite, it is a very well-kept secret. And there was Willis Smith of North Carolina, who was once the head of the American Bar Association.

The chief Republican was a Wisconsin liberal, Alexander Wiley, who often opposed the junior senator, Joe. Another Republican was William Langer of North Dakota, a moderate; and there was Arthur Watkins, who headed up the Senate committee that two years later condemned Joe McCarthy. It is the implicit point of Tom Wicker and a few others that these gentlemen, after producing a dozen volumes of testimony on the Institute of Pacific Relations, were wrong when they voted unanimously that "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy." When they ruled that "Owen Lattimore testified falsely before the subcommittee with reference to at least five separate matters that were relevant to the inquiry and substantial in import." When they ruled that "Many of the persons active in and around the TPR, and in particular though not exclusively Owen Lattimore . . . knowingly and deliberately used the language of books and articles which they wrote or edited in an attempt to influence the American public by means of proCommunist or pro-Soviet content of such writings."

And when they unanimously recommended "that the Department of Justice submit to a grand jury the question of whether perjury has been committed before the subcommittee by Owen Lattimore."