Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China
Clifford, Nicholas R.
REMEMBER RED-BAITING? OWEN LATTIMORE AND THE "LOSS" OF CHINA Robert P. Newman University of California Press, $30, 649 pp. Nicholas R. Clifford ewman's book brings backpainful memories to...
...Such omissions are a bit odd in the tale of the career of a China expert...
...Other important facets of Lattimore's career are well drawn: his passion for Central Asia and his admiration for the Mongols, caught between Soviet and Chinese encroachment (the latter rather more serious...
...The courts, of course, eventually exonerated Lattimore of the various 18: 22 May 1992 Commonweal charges against him, but not before his career in this country was virtually ruined...
...Of course there was no reason Lattimore should have known this...
...When they turned against him, it was in the Hopkins History Department that he found a home...
...The landscape Maxwell sets out to detail is a human one...
...You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters...
...Now, Chi was a graduate of Chicago and Columbia, who had joined the party in America, was active in its work in New York in the thirties, and helped to edit Amerasia, before returning to Chungking to work for the Nationalist government, all the while acting as a covert Communist agent...
...How many children have been harmed, and continue to be harmed, by men who love as fiercely and protectively, as ineptly and selfishly as Blue...
...Lattimore was a highly intelligent, broadly experienced, complicated man, who was still capable of writing in 1966 (in a passage Newman does not quote) that "if there is anything we must all learn, it is that in Mongolia, and in most post-World War II revolutionary countries, Marxist thinking is accepted as the great intellectual liberation...
...his wartime service in China and his early support, against the mounting evidence of inefficiency and corruption, for Chiang Kai-shek...
...These criticisms aside, Newman has done a valuable service in reminding us of the hysteria of the McCarthyite years...
...Her words and their tone of rueful surprise kept coming back to me as I read William Maxwell's Billie Dyer and Other Stories, a collection of portraits culled from the eighty-four-year-old writer's boyhood in Lincoln, Illinois...
...Americans and Europeansoffer their analyses in this provocative volume...
...Moreover, it would have been illuminating to have had more on Lattimore's views from Leeds on the changes that China was undergoing in Mao's later years...
...There is no longer any older generation...
...ISBN 0-89633-171-7 paper, - 170-9 cloth ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER an • 8 • a a Commonweal 22 May 1992: 19 during the various hearings of whether Lattimore knew that a certain Chi Ch'aoting was a Communist...
...And indeed of some of his colleagues...
...But when people with whom Newman disagrees are "antiCommunist," there emerges rather an odor of disapproval, as if they were no more than paranoid red-baiters...
...All this Newman tells well, in great detail, and it is useful to have the information pulled together in a single work...
...Take one small point, for example...
...Jews, Protestants, and Catholics...
...Jozef Tischner...
...a wastrel uncle who never lived up to family expectations...
...Twentythree distinguished commentators-theologians, social scientists, political theorists, lawyers, and journalists...
...9.95 paper $29.95 cloth Available at bookstores or from National Book Network, 1-800-462-6420...
...Perhaps, then as now, Raced Richards Cooper few years before she died, my grandmother, then well up in her nineties, was answering a question of mine about her childhood when she broke off and said, with a flustered smile, "You know, everyone I ever knew is dead...
...Characterizations are more or less successful...
...In other ways, the work is rather less satisfying...
...What did he think of the drastic volte face that took place after Mao's death under Deng Xiaoping...
...Blue is not an evil man...
...More hopeful...
...Much was made • • . "When John Paul H speaks, people listen...
...and if some of McCarthy's victims, who had joined left-wing causes to oppose Hitler, thought of themselves as "premature anti-Fascists," perhaps some of Stalin's opponents were no more than premature anti-Communists...
...after all, opposing Communism no more makes one a McCarthyite than being anti-Nazi makes "Believe me, democracy wouldn't be so popular if we called it Communism...
...Braver...
...The plot could tighten in places, surge forward in others...
...El responsible for the "loss" of China, or was the leading Communist agent in the United States-or indeed a Communist agent of any sort...
...They may not always agree, but they listen...
...Naturally this novel is flawed in the ways that such a letter must always be flawed, in the way that Blue's particular brand of self-indulgence requires...
...What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generations to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past...
...20: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...Yet surely there were very good reasons to be antiCommunist in those days...
...Yet surely with the collapse of Communism in the last several years, the time has come for some reflection on what the term "antiCommunist" means, and meant back in those days...
...was a good deal less forthcoming), so that he has managed to uncover a good deal of new and fascinating detail about the period (such as, for example, the poisonous rivalries between various government agencies concerned with prosecuting Lattimore...
...files on the Lattimore case (the C.I.A...
...Not surprisingly, after his ordeal, he decided to go abroad, finishing his career on the other side of the ocean at the University of Leeds...
...a young teacher dying of TB...
...one a Stalinist...
...How many children are harmed because the body of their innocence cannot be left alone by those who claim to cherish them...
...Why do so many of us refuse to love our children, to know our children, the way God loves and would know us all...
...Full of faith...
...The final section is particularly troubling in its failure to bring Lyn to life as a person, not a destination...
...But through its insistence to be every bit as anguishing and baffling and disheartening as a good life, Blue Calhoun becomes a great novel...
...But perhaps to be "good enough" is not to be good at all...
...but we do know now, and it would have been interesting for Newman to have pointed out these connections (as he points out in considerable detail the insalubrious connections of the various witnesses against Lattimore...
...The book opens with a condensation of the encyclical and the pope's own comments on it...
...Or perhaps within the final paragraph resides the salvation that will allow Blue to find a way to be truly good at last...
...They fill in gaps left not only by time but by the steadfast innocence of the boy Maxwell was, who moved away from Lincoln at fourteen still believing the town an "Earthly Paradise," and who was "not much better informed about the grown people around me than a dog or a cat would have been...
...Over and over he protests that Lattimore and those like him were "anti-Communist," and that's good, because it shows that they were freedomloving democrats...
...Robert A. Sirico, C.S.P...
...The view after seventy," Maxwell writes, "is breathtaking...
...More seriously...
...perhaps because the author's main interest lies in the controversy surrounding Lattimore, he often sounds like a defense attorney...
...One has the sense that it is still implicitly a dirty word in Newman's vocabulary-except when it is used to describe McCarthy's victims...
...It'sunlikely that any of the readers of this journal ever believed that Owen Lattimore was harm a child or you'll be wishing some kind soul would hang a millstone round your neck and throw you out in the midnight sea...
...Among the contributors are: Peter L. Berger Rocco Buttiglione Milton Friedman Mary Ann Glendon J. Bryan Hehir Michael S. Joyce Richard John Neuhaus Michael Novak James V. Schall, S.J...
...Newman writes as if the battles of the forties and fifties were still being fought, as if our perceptions of the world had changed little since those years...
...Nothing is said of the great famine of the early sixties (though Lattimore, like most China experts of the day, was probably either ignorant about, or dismissed the evidence of the magnitude of that disaster) and little about the Cultural Revolution...
...Did the pope help define a new worldly order, one built on human freedom and human solidarity but avoiding the utopian and totalitarian temptations...
...His stories take up the lives of outsiders and underdogs: a black doctor suffering the daily indignities of smalltown prejudice...
...still, such statements suggest that there is a more complex side to Lattimore's character than Newman indicates...
...he's better than many of us will ever be...
...It enraged me...
...What is new and valuable here is Newman's use of the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the F.B.I...
...even if he had nothing to say on such subjects, that in itself would be interesting...
...It broke my heart...
...Finally, as a historian, I cannot help noting that when he was under attack, Lattimore was, of course, a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins, a position that not only assured him of a job during his troubles, but protected him from the wrath of at least some of his trustees...
...He was by no means alone in such views, of course, and 1966 was not 1992...
...conservatives, neo-conservatives, and liberals...
...Nicholas R. Clifford ewman's book brings backpainful memories to anyone who has read about,or lived through, the eraof Joseph McCarthy...
...A NEW WORLDLY ORDER John Paul II and Human Freedomedited by George Weigel 184 pp...
...What did they hear in the encyclical Centesimus Annus...
...Though the publisher's blurb calls the book a "magisterial biography," it deals primarily with the years between 1945 and 1955, when Lattimore found himself the target not only of Senator McCarthy, but of the China Lobby, the F.B.I., the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the House Un-American Affairs Committee, to say nothing of various other individuals and groups who had appointed themselves guardians of this country against Communism...
...Billie Dyer is his attempt, through memory and historians were less affected than some others by the currents of political correctness-whether coming from the Right or the Left...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
