McCarthyism: Waging the Cold
War in
Newly Uncovered Secret Data Confirm Wisconsin Senator's
Major Charges
05/30/1997
Forty years ago this month, the mortal remains of Joseph R. McCarthy were laid to rest near Appleton, Wis., not far from the modest farm where he was born. His death apparently closed a raucous, controversial saga, one of the most bitter and brutal in our nation’s history, with McCarthy typecast as the villain. Events of recent years, however, suggest the final chapters of this astounding story have yet to be recorded. McCarthy was only 48 years old when he died, and had been a member of the U.S. Senate for a decade, mostly as a minority backbencher.
Yet during the period 1950-54, he often dominated its proceedings, the headlines of the nation’s press, and our debates in general. In that tumultuous four-year stretch, he tangled with both Democratic and Republican administrations and the whole of the "establishment" meaning the complex of political-media-academic bigwigs who shape opinion in our country and set the course of national policy on key issues. It is remarkable that, in so brief a span, this relatively junior member of the Congress had the enormous impact that he did.
More remarkable yet is that his career and fate should still be matters of burning public interest, nearly half a century after he first barged into the limelight. Most remarkable of all is the degree to which his name became, and has remained, a synonym for evil routinely used in our political debates as a term implying cruel, unfounded, and highly public charges. Given the frequency of this usage, one might suppose that people who talk about "McCarthyism" so glibly have some kind of factual basis for their statements, but this seldom proves to be the case. It seems safe to say, indeed, that few people in our political-media-academic world (including those who write supposedly learned books about the topic) know much about McCarthy, the disputes in which he was embroiled, or the specifics of his conduct. This article is an effort to fill in some of the blanks, though it would take an essay many times this length to do the matter justice. To grasp the meaning of McCarthy’s story, it is required to know a bit of background. Above all, there can be no comprehension of the drama without first recalling the deadly Cold War struggle of which it was a part.
The latter 1940s and early ’50s
were a time of tense, explosive conflict, in the world at large and in the
politics of our nation. Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control
of
Officials Ignored FBI’s Repeated Warnings
Beginning with the Truman
Administration and the Democratic majority in the Senate, then
spreading to myriad press accounts and a seemingly endless chain of books, TV
shows and movies, McCarthy’s charges on all these fronts were systematically
denied. In fact, it was averred, there had been no Communist penetration to
speak ofor, if there had been, it was fairly
limited and swiftly dealt with. The State Department, in particular, was
depicted as alert and quick to move against such problems. Subversion of our
policy never happened. In short, McCarthy was either a lying scoundrel or a
madman, his charges smears of helpless people whose lives were thereby ruined.
Which version was the truth? In the perspective of four decades, we are in much
better position to learn the answer to this question than was possible at the
time. While a lot was known back then (though usually not to the general
public), a great deal has come to light that was unavailable in the ’50s. We
now have, for instance, a pretty good picture of the Philby-Burgess-Blunt-Maclean
spy ring in
Also, with the collapse of the
Soviet regime, we have data from the Communist archives, though not in the
quantity we might like. More to the point, we have access to material long in
the possession of our own Federal government, some of it astonishing in nature.
Most notable in this regard are the so-called Venona
transcripts, which decode transmissions between the spymasters in the Kremlin
and their agents in
· As early as September 1939, nine years
before his public revelations, Whittaker Chambers gave data relating to Alger
Hiss and others involved in Communist infiltration to State Department official
Adolph Berle. Though Berle
himself viewed such matters with concern, nothing much was done to impede Hiss’
steady forward progress (together with several of his soul mates), up to and
including playing an active role at the
· Likewise, in November 1945, J. Edgar Hoover
informed the White House of evidence that an extensive spy ring was at work
inside the U.S. governmentnaming Treasury
official Harry Dexter White, former White House assistant Lauchlin
Currie, and nine others. (
· In 1948, when Chambers made his public charges against Hiss, the official White House response was to dismiss the case as a "red herring." Internally, White House staffers went a good deal further, setting out to discredit Chambers, rather than focusing on the mind-boggling peril implied by Hiss. Once more, the Venona papers give us an intriguing glimpse behind the scenesincluding suggestions that Chambers, not Hiss, be tried for perjury, and an effort to find out if Chambers had been in a mental institution.
As of the latter ’40s, the
bizarre mindset suggested by these cases was nowhere more pronounced than in the
U.S. State Departmentwhere it was, for obvious
reasons, also most harmful. This was to some degree ironic, as the department
had in prior years been known as a staid, conservative place that took a
tough-minded stance on issues of this type, as on most others. In notable
contrast were the laid-back security ways of war-time outfits such as the
Office of War Information (OWI) and Board of Economic Warfare (BEW), where the
"red herring" view of possible Communist infiltration was in favor.
Beginning around 1944, however, a fierce internal struggle unfolded at State,
in which relatively hard-line anti-Communists such as Berle,
Joseph Grew and Eugene Dooman were attacked,
sidetracked, or ousted. This turnover of high-level personnel in essence was
completed in the next two years as Gen. George C. Marshall replaced James
Byrnes at State, Dean Acheson was ensconced as second in command, and
"China hand" John Carter Vincent assumed responsibility for Asia. Berle would give his own particular view of this rolling coup
d’etat as follows: ". . . [I]n the fall of
1944 there was a difference of opinion in the State Department. I felt the
Russians were not going to be sympathetic and cooperative. . . . I was pressing
for a pretty clean-cut showdown then while our position was strongest. The
opposite group. . . in the State Department was
largely. . . Mr. Acheson’s group, with Mr. Hiss his principal assistant in the
matter. . . . I got trimmed in that fight, and, as a result, went to
First and foremost, there was a
drastic change of front in our policy toward
Investigations conducted in the
1950s would show that White and such of his Treasury aides as V. Frank Coe and
Solomon Adler maneuvered to block the transfer of $200 million in gold and
other credits pledged to Chiang, and that Adler as the Treasury’s man on the
scene sent back a stream of anti-Chiang reports from China. Like White himself,
both Coe and Adler would be identified by Bentley as members of the Communist
governmental network. Also, to round out this astounding picture, it developed
that Adler shared a house in
McCarthy Takes on Department of State
Such was the security-policy
scene into which Joe McCarthy ambled in February 1950. Relatively youthful,
obviously a bit naive, but combative and a quick study, McCarthy picked up on
the concerns of others in the Congress, frustrated counterintelligence types,
and anti-Communist researchers. Drawing on what his precursors had put together
(but also developing new data as he went), he took to the hustings
and the Senate floor with his version of the problem. That version would focus
the white-hot glare of public notice on security issues at the State Department
like nothing seen before, or since. Beginning in Wheeling, W.Va., on February
9, McCarthy made a series of Republican Lincoln Day orations in which he raised
the cry of Communist foul play, and these political talks would eventually
spawn a cottage industry of charge and counter-charge all by themselves.3 These
topics are well worth pursuing, but cannot detain us here, as we shall be
hewing to the official documented record. In this respect, the obvious place to
start is the marathon speech McCarthy made on the Senate floor on February 20,
his first such effort in that forum, and by all odds the most prodigious. In
this six-hour tour de force, subject to constant interruptions but
maintaining his composure, McCarthy discussed some four-score individuals who
had worked in the State Department, or agencies such as OWI and BEW, and in his
opinion had records suggesting they were security-loyalty risks at best,
outright Communist agents at the worst. Despite such records, McCarthy claimed,
these people had been routinely "cleared" or never carefully looked
into.
Accordingly, on March 8, McCarthy
appeared before the Tydings panel, and tried to
present the evidence he had on a selected group of individuals (known as
"the nine public cases"). Once more he was subjected to repeated interruptions,
so that a coherent presentation became all but impossible. Again there are
collateral issues that need discussing, but for space reasons have to be
omitted (with one exception; see box, "A Discourse on Method," page
S2.) We shall stay, not only with the record, but with the central issue of
alleged policy subversion. In this respect, the core of McCarthy’s case was
that security problems at the State Department and the course of
For McCarthy, this was the
touchstone of pro-Communist subversion in our country and of official
complicity with it. Amerasia had previously
burst into public viewto disappear as quicklyin June 1945. Agents of the FBI, after many
weeks’ surveillance, had arrested two editors of the journal and one of its
frequent writers, along with three
On returning to the United States
in April 1945, Service immediately took to hanging out with Jaffe (whom he
supposedly had just met), delivering copies of his reports, and commenting that
"What I said about the military plans is, of course, very secret"
(recorded by FBI surveillance). Given all this, McCarthy said, J. Edgar Hoover
believed he had an "airtight case," and Justice Department officials
geared up for prosecution. Then, for some mysterious reason, Justice decided to
downplay the matter and treat it as a minor indiscretion; Service got off scott-free and was restored to State Department duties.
Jaffe and Larsen escaped with fines, and all the others walked. In essence, the
whole thing was shoved under the official rug, to be conveniently forgotten. It
was, McCarthy charged, a security breach and cover-up of immense proportions.
The Tydings Committee and the administration viewed
it more benignly; "an excess of journalistic zeal," Jaffe’s attorney
had called it, and the prosecutors had agreed, so what was the big problem?
Such was the anti-McCarthy view that was handed down to legend. We now know,
however, that all of this was false, and that McCarthy was right in what he
said. The whole thing was fixed from the beginning, engineered by Elizabeth
Bentley’s agent Lauchlin Currie, operating from the
White House, and carried out by
When I made these points on a TV show a few months back, one anti-McCarthy panelist replied that "a stopped clock is right twice a day" and that McCarthy’s correctness on this front did not excuse his constant lying about others. However, a survey of numerous other cases routinely yields the same conclusion: Charges by McCarthy, followed by much uproar and outrage; vehement denials by his foes, treated in the liberal press as gospel; then, after the smoke has cleared, emergence of hard, empirical data that prove McCarthy had been right from the beginning. Two vignettes that draw on the recent revelations suggest the pattern:
· One of McCarthy’s targets in his early
speeches was T.A. Bisson, yet another Amerasia stalwart, a former employee of the State
Department and of the BEW. It seems probable most Americans now, as in the
’50s, have never heard of Bisson, except perhaps as
one of McCarthy’s countless "victims." In fact, McCarthy went after
this seemingly minor figure at least half-a-dozen times for allegedly promoting
the cause of the Chinese Communists in his writings. So who was T.A. Bisson? Here is what Venona
tells us, in a transmission from Soviet agents in
"Marquis [Joseph Bernstein] has established friendly relations with T.A. Bisson (hereafter Arthur). . . who has recently left BEW; he is now working in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and in the editorial offices of Marquis’ periodical [Amerasia]. . . Arthur passed to Marquis . . . copies of four documents:
(a) his
own report for BEW with his views on working out a plan for shipment of
American troops to
(b) a
report by the Chinese embassy in
(c) a brief BEW report of April 1943 on a general evaluation of the forces of the sides on the Soviet-German front. . . .
(d) a
report by the American consul in
· As to the
There is, unhappily, even more.
Yet another
Such individual cases could be
rehearsed at length, but this would wander from our main story line concerning
When Jessup appeared before the Tydings panel, its majority members fell over themselves to
proclaim his sterling virtues, and those of IPR. (His IPR connections, they
found, "do not in any way reflect unfavorably upon him when the true
character of the organization is revealed.") Effusions of this type are
writ large in the conventional history of the era. Once more, however, when the
smoke had cleared, the points McCarthy madeor
tried towere borne out by the record, and in
this case we didn’t have to wait decades for the verdict. In 1952, the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the IPR,
the kind of investigation the Tydings committee
should have undertaken but didn’t. This showed, beyond all doubt, that the IPR
was precisely what Sen. Anderson suggested it was nota
vehicle for pro-Communist leverage on American policy in
Small Pro-Red Clique In Charge
Among other things, the hearings revealed the intimate workings of IPR, and showed that it had been effectively run by a small inner circle of officialschiefly such enduring mainstays as Edward Carter, Owen Lattimore, Frederick Field, and a few others. These were in constant communication, discussing lines of policy, materials to appear in newspapers, magazines and books, or the agenda for some impending conference. Connected to this inner cadre was a far-flung network of writers, researchers, speakers and policy experts, including a substantial number who moved back and forth among the IPR, the press corps, the academy, and the government. Also revealed by the investigation was the truly colossal number of Communists and pro-Communists associated with IPR, though its officials professed not to know this. These witnesses preferred to focus attention on the prestigious non-Communist names that appeared on their letterhead as trustees, but there wasn’t much evidence that this otherwise busy and important group of people had much to do with shaping program. The policymaking stuff, and the personnel who made it, were much more along the lines of Amerasia. To take a specific case in point, revealing the high degree of interlock that prevailed in all these matters, the committee examined a list of possible attendees at an IPR conference of 1942, as recommended by Philip Jessup. Of this projected list of 30-plus invitees, almost a third were individuals who had been identified under oath as members of the Communist apparatus (and many of whom have also appeared in our discussion). Committee counsel Robert Morris summarized the situation as follows: "In reply to [a] question about the 10 people who have been identified as part of the Communist organization on that . . . list recommended by Mr. Jessup, I will point out that we have had testimony that Benjamin Kizer was a member of the Communist Party, testimony that Lauchlin Currie was associated with an espionage ring and gave vital military secrets to the Russian espionage system, the military secret being, in one case, the fact that the United States had broken the Soviet code. . . . "John Carter Vincent has been identified as a member; Harry Dexter White as a member of an espionage ring; Owen Lattimore as a member of the Communist organization; Len DeCaux as a member of the Communist Party; Alger Hiss as a member of the Communist Party; Joseph Barnes as a member of the Communist Party; Frederick V. Field as a member of the Communist Party; and Frank Coe as a member of the Communist Party."
‘Specialized Political Flypaper’ for Reds
In its final report, the committee
provided a further summary of the amazing degree of Communist penetration at
IPR, in unusually colorful language for an official publication: "The IPR
itself was like a specialized political flypaper in
its attractive power for Communists. . . . British Communists like Michael
Greenberg, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley or Anthony Jenkinson; Chinese Communists like Chi Chao-ting, Chen Han-seng, Chu Tong, Y.Y. Hsu; German Communists like Hans
Moeller (Asiaticus) or Guenther Stein; Japanese
Communists (and espionage agents) like Saionji and Ozaki; United States
Communists like James S. Allen, Frederick V. Field, William M. Mandel, Harriet
Moore, Lawrence Rosinger, and Alger Hiss.
"Indeed, the difficulty with the IPR from the Communist point of view was
that it was too stuffed with Communists, too compromised by its Communist
connections. Elizabeth Bentley testified that her superior in the Soviet
espionage apparatus, Jacob Golos, warned her away
from the IPR because ‘it was as red as a rose, and you shouldn’t touch it with
a 10-foot pole.’ " The mention in this of
espionage agents Saionji and Ozaki refers to the
McCarthy’s Showdown with Prof. Lattimore
All of which, it will be
recalled, was precisely what McCarthy had been sayingthough
he didn’t at the time have the investigative apparatus of a committee at his
disposal, and most of all didn’t have the files of IPR. Thus far, on the main
issues that he raised, another vindication. There
remains, however, one related case to be considered, this one the biggest of
them all. This was McCarthy’s showdown with Prof. Lattimore,
of
The Tydings Committee conducted its inquiry into the matter, heard from Lattimore at length, and found him innocent on all countsthe victim of "promiscuous and specious attacks on private citizens and their views." Lattimore denied everything across the board (as did the State Department). He was not a Communist or pro-Communist, and was, if anything, anti-Soviet. As for influence, "the Department has never followed my advice or opinions," and he had no desk in the Department. He was simply a teacher and a writer trying to pursue his scholarly interests. McCarthy was a lying blackguard who had subjected the incensed professor to "ordeal by slander" (the title of Lattimore’s book about the subject). Thus the face-off between McCarthy andto that pointhis biggest single target. As this was in essence Armageddon, the reader is forewarned that we shall be devoting more attention to the Lattimore case than to the other individuals herein discussed all put together. As it is, even an extensive treatment can only scratch the surface, as the amount of material now available on Prof. Lattimore is immense: Some 3,000 or so pages of testimony by and about him, before the Tydings and IPR committees; 5,000 pages of files available from the FBI; Lattimore’s own writings, and analyses of his activities and opinions provided by many writers on the battles of the ‘50s. What follows is a selection from this trove of data. Whether Lattimore was or was not an "architect" of policy, he was far from a reclusive scholar.
Throughout the 1940s, he held an
almost continuous series of government appointments, and had an amazing knack
for showing up where there was important action: Roosevelt’s appointee as
adviser to Chiang Kai-shek in 1941; director of Pacific operations for OWI,
1942-44; companion to Vice President Wallace (along with Vincent) on a fateful
trek to China in 1944; advisor to the U.S. government concerning post-war
policies in Japan, 1945-46; counselor to the State Department in its
deliberations concerning China, South Korea and the rest of Asia, as of the
latter ’40s. And, oh yes, that famous "desk in the State Department,"
which McCarthy said he had, and Lattimore swore he
didn’t. In the files of the IPR, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
found a letter Lattimore wrote in 1942, in which he
said: "I am in
These many Lattimore
assignments and connections become the more intriguing when we note the line of
thought that he consistently promoted about the
The fact is that for most of the people of the world today, what constitutes democracy in theory is more or less irrelevant. What moves people to act, to try to line up with one party or country and not with another, is the difference between what is more democratic and less democratic in practice." This uncanny power of attraction seemed to exert its fascination on Lattimore himselfup to and including bland extenuations of Stalin’s purge trials of the ’30s. While many liberal intellectuals (e.g., John Dewey) were horrified by these, Lattimore took them well in stride. "Habitual rectification," as he smoothly described this series of murders, "can hardly do anything but give the ordinary citizen more courage to protest, loudly, whenever in the future he finds himself being victimized by ‘someone in the party’ or ‘someone in the government.’ That sounds to me like democracy." Lattimore turned an equally complacent gaze on the Communists of Asia. In a newspaper piece of 1946, for example, he opined: "Japanese Communist tactics are reminiscent of the Chinese Communists who, as Randall Gould points out in his excellent new book, China in the Sun, often appear to be extremists only because they actually set out to practice reforms which the Kuomintang has approved of and talked about for many years, but has never done much about. In fact, we may be entering a period in which, for most of the world, the Russian Communists will represent power and toughness, while the Chinese and Japanese Communists will represent reasonableness and moderation."
Lattimore’s
other stock-in-trade was "realism," which translated into recognizing
not only the Communists’ "power of attraction," but their power in
general. After the United States pulled the plug on Chiang in 1949, Lattimore was a key figure at a State Department conference
to decide what should be done next (Marshall and Jessup were both in
attendance). For this conclave he laid out a whole scenario of
"realistic" actions in the East, extending to
There was more reason for concern, however, than the professor’s odd opinions. As it happened, there were witnesses who came over from the Communist side reporting that Lattimore had been made known to them as a member of the apparatus. Among these was Louis Budenz, formerly of the Daily Worker, who said his superiors told him Lattimore was a Communist agent and should be given appropriate editorial treatment. Not surprisingly, Lattimore devoted much of his time on the witness stand to attacking Budenz as either a venal or a psychotic liar. But it wasn’t just Budenz. Soviet defector Alexander Barmine gave similar statements to the FBI, and later to the Senate. Barmine said the chief of Soviet military intelligence had told him "Owen Lattimore and Joseph Barnes" should be considered as "our men." Barmine added that he had discussed Barnes and Lattimore with Walter Krivitzky, another former Soviet official, and that Krivitzky had confirmed this. Yet another defector, Igor Bogolepov, said Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov had discussed the question of how best to market the Soviets’ Outer Mongolian puppet to the world as "independent": ". . . as far as concerns the United States Litvinov’s own suggestion was to put on this business Mr. Owen Lattimore . . . it was said so short and in such a categorical form that there was no slightest doubt left to me that Mr. Lattimore was the right man who was to take this assignment."
Other Witnesses Confirm Budenz
It would thus appear that, if Budenz had simply invented his story as part of an insane
conspiracy to destroy Lattimore, he had somehow
inveigled Barmine and Bogolepov
into sharing his psychosis. Similar problems would arise concerning still other
witnesses and pieces of information that have come to view down through the
years. (E.g., in their recent book on Amerasia,
Klehr and Radosh note that
Communist propagandist Louis Gibarti said party
officials in the ’30s had sent him to Lattimore for
assistance.) As the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee would learn when it
got into the files of IPR, Lattimore had in fact met
directly with the Soviets in
His tastes in this regardand in editorial stylewere
reflected in this message to IPR official Edward Carter: ". . . I think
that you are pretty cagey in turning over so much of the
Lattimore engaged in other actions of this sort,5 which makes it easier to comprehend how one might think he was involved in spying. It turns out the FBI compiled an enormous file on Lattimore, based precisely on this suspicion. Like McCarthy, the bureau keyed in on the testimony of Barmine, and thereafter on Lattimore’s links to Amerasia. The professor had been on the journal’s board of editors, had a long-standing relationship with Jaffe, and entertained Service and Roth in his home a few days before they were arrested. The bureau accordingly put together a thick dossier on Lattimore (see inset, page S6) well before McCarthy made his first appearance.
Lattimore’s Close Ties with Currie
Noteworthy in this context, as McCarthy pointed out, is that Lattimore had made a trek to Yenan in 1937 to meet with Mao Tse-tungalong with Jaffe and T.A. Bisson, both thereafter to be revealed as trafficking in U.S. official documents and dealing with Soviet agent Bernstein. Also in Yenan with Lattimore and Co. was Agnes Smedley, another identified member of the Sorge spy ring. The FBI files make frequent mention of Lattimore’s contacts, back in the states, with Jaffe, as well as with such known Communist operatives as Field. However, the most important reason for thinking Lattimore might have been engaged in spying was his close tie-in with Currie. This still shadowy figure has never received the full attention he deserves. It was Currie who provided Lattimore with his "desk in the State Department."
It was Currie who got Lattimore appointed as FDR’s emissary to Chiang (wiring
around the State Department to do so) and helped arrange the naming of Lattimore and Vincent as travelling mentors in
As already seen, he launched the cover-up of Amerasia. He also pulled off such amazing feats as arranging a personal interview in the State Department for Earl Browder with Under Secretary Sumner Welles, and went to bat for Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, when this identified Soviet spy was in danger of being ousted. Accordingly, Lattimore’s on-going links with Currie must have raised a lot of eyebrows, especially as the duo so often worked together in placing favored people. We have noted the smooth transition of Michael Greenberg from Lattimore’s shop at IPR to Currie’s in the White House; thereafter, when Greenberg was targeted for firing, Lattimore came to his defense.
Likewise, according to The
IPR Report, Lattimore-Currie tried in 1942 to
get a commission in military intelligence for Frederick Field, at that time
perhaps the most notorious pro-Soviet operative in the country. Each of these
incredible escapades, and many others in which Lattimore
was involved, would merit in-depth discussion on its own. E.g.,
the fact that Lattimore discussed his 1941
appointment as emissary to Chiang with Soviet ambassador Constantine Oumansky. This at a period when the Hitler-Stalin
pact was still in bloom, and
The reasons for this conclusion
are at least two: First, Lattimore’s role in shaping
policy on a global scale was far more important than simply filching papers, to
which in any event he did not have constant access. And second, the espionage
role could be far more effectively performed by his alter ego, Curriewhich, according to Elizabeth Bentley, is
precisely what occurred. All things considered, a
rather neat division of labor. So, on Lattimore, did
McCarthy stand, or fall? The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee put its
conclusions this way: "Owen Lattimore was, from
some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the
Soviet conspiracy." And: "Owen Lattimore
and John Carter Vincent were influential in bringing about a change in
McCarthy’s Efforts Changed History
There is of course a great deal more to the McCarthy story, but readers who have come this far may well feel that they have had, at least for now, enough. Many particulars of the battles from this early era have been passed over, and of course we haven’t discussed at all the climactic struggle in 1954 between McCarthy and the Army (some of which was touched on in my McCarthy piece of 1987).
Full treatment of these matters will have to wait until another day. However, a provisional verdict about McCarthy’s doings, and what he probably accomplished, may be offered here by way of wrap-up. In the voting of 1950 and 1952, judging by the candidates who were elected and defeated, there was evidence that McCarthy’s campaign, despite the forces ranged against him, had a fair amount of public impact.
There is also some considerable
reason to believe that, thanks to these elections and the general pressure he
exerted, McCarthy had a lot to do with tightening up security procedures at the
State Department. As should be apparent from what is said above, this was a
consummation devoutly to be wished. Beyond this, however, are larger questions,
concerning the course of the Cold War struggle, and of American policy in
dealing with this challenge. For instance, in the State Department conference
of 1949 discussing what kind of strategy to follow in the Far East, the
"prevailing view" was said to be that the
At the time, the momentum behind
these policy views seemed to be quite strong, and growing. In late December
1949, the State Department circularized a memo that basically envisioned giving
up
Thus, as of early January 1950,
when Acheson made this speech, the Lattimore plan for shaping American strategy
in the Pacific appeared to be on track, with little to deter it. One month
later, Joe McCarthy stepped to the podium in
Mr. Evans, author of Blacklisted by History, is a HUMAN
EVENTS contributing editor.
Originally published
at:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=455