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During America’s dark period of McCarthyism, roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, a state of national paranoia was politically engineered, by suggesting that the global threat of communism included acts of treason in America, propagated through strategically placed, subversive citizens, who were intent on overthrowing our government and replacing it with a Soviet-linked totalitarian state. Anti-intellectualism was given new emphasis as our foreign policy decisions came down to mere reflex emotionalism. Any attempt at a more liberal or deliberative process for addressing our relations with other countries was tainted as communist influence. This was the age when reason gave way to an emotional state in which anticommunist fear gripped the country and elevated fools into positions of authority.  But not all of them were fools: the right wing used McCarthyism to destroy the New Deal and permanently change the State Department.  The main perpetrators of this march to America’s dark side, included Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin, whose actions were carried out within the Tydings Subcommittee of the Senate), the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. Many who, in retrospect,  have examined the historical record made available beginning in the 1970s through the Freedom of Information Act, have suggested that, when examining the complicity of the FBI in feeding information, much of it false, to the various committees and congressmen, the period we know as  McCarthyism might be more aptly described as  “Hooverism” after J. Edgar Hoover and the role of the FBI. Hoover was a rabid anticommunist who was not afraid to lie and distort in order to destroy his perception  of communism in America.

When McCarthyism ended in the 1950s, America did not pull back to some previous, blissful iteration of itself, but remained at a new level of anti-intellectualism that destroyed New Deal liberalism, neutered the United Nations and allowed the Korean and Vietnam Wars to develop without cautionary input from a more liberal and scholarly point of view. Had a more balanced viewpoint been available, both wars could have been avoided: each was a war of ignorance.  In many ways, those who had their lives shattered or died during those two conflicts can place direct blame for them at the doorstep of McCarthyism. A new version of McCarthyism was ushered in by the events of 9/11, resulting in  our present state of exaggerated paranoia and fear about the threat of terrorism, associated with reductions in civil liberties and suppression of those with more progressive ideas about conducting a rational foreign policy instead of one derived purely from emotional reactions: those alternative voices have been silenced once again by charges of treason against our national cause or being soft on protecting American lives. One person thoroughly familiar with the methods of Joseph McCarthy is Karl Rove.

President Harry Truman paved the way for McCarthy’s purges by signing Executive Order 9835 in 1947, making it possible to dismiss Federal employees who were found to be disloyal Americans. Truman was undoubtedly reacting to the Republican sweep of the 1946 election and was trying to firm up his own image as an anticommunist, in anticipation of his own election campaign coming up the following year. But the executive order had far reaching national implications: eventually “loyalty review” boards and offices sprang up in state, city and community neighborhoods to weed out the New Deal liberals from the grass roots of America. McCarthy began his style of attack in 1950, claiming that there were many subversives in the State Department, as he waived a list of names that varied in number from 57 to 81, depending the day of his pronouncement. His initial claim was met with widespread public attention and apprehension, with his base of operations carried out within the Tydings Senate Committee, who would call public officials and private citizens accused of subversive activities, to testify, while  denying the accused access to the information that would be used against them by special “witnesses” or other documentation, much of which was fabricated or exaggerated by the FBI.

The proceedings of the Tydings Committee  became something of a three-ring circus, in which an accusation from McCarthy was enough to damage lives, terminate careers and render accused Americans out of work and unemployable. It was a witch hunt in which the agreed objective was to validate the charges brought against the individual even if you had to distort or fabricate the evidence to convict. McCarthy’s targets were typically prominent figures and the easy ones were those in Hollywood or academia that had been members of the Communist Party, even though the party was a legally registered political party within the United States. One objective McCarthy had for initially restricting his charges to the State Department, was to purge the department of liberals who might suggest foreign policy alternatives other than the ideology of anticommunism. This was a particularly important issue for the Right, as they wanted to support the Nationalist Chinese through Chiang kai shek.  Anyone suggesting a more enlightened approach to the conduct of our foreign affairs could be charged and purged from the State department. McCarthy’s objectives were to suppress the State Department, shatter the New Deal liberalism and neuter the promises embodied in the United Nations towards a cooperative drive for World peace. The lasting influence of McCarthyism allowed the Korean and Vietnam wars to unfold with predictable disaster, because the knowledgeable people that tried to steer us clear of a one-sided liaison with the anticommunists in China for example, were discredited by McCarthy and charged with losing China to the communists as part of their subversive actions; the emotional state of blindly identifying communism as our mortal enemy, especially in Asia, left no room for any enlightened policy to develop that could have avoided the conflicts in Asia into which we fell, blindly trapped by a false ideology: as a nation, we were unable to see that Ho Chi Min and Mao Zedong were both nationalists, trying to unite their countries and remove the influence of foreign imperialism. Indeed, Ho Chi Min was inspired by our own Declaration of Independence and wrote a letter to Truman asking him not to allow the French back into his country (Truman never responded).  Thanks to McCarthyism, few within our government would challenge the new orthodoxy of blind obedience to anticommunism,  because the appearance of being soft on communism could cost you your job and destroy your future.

McCarthy’s influence might have been more pervasive had he not leveled charges of espionage against one man who fought back defiantly and brilliantly: Owen Lattimore, director of the Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins, was accused of being the top Russian espionage agent in America and, McCarthy claimed to have supporting evidence and testimony from sources that would corroborate his accusations. In those days, a charge such as that carried with it a sentence of guilty and anyone accused with such a morally reprehensible act as treason, would have an uphill battle to save his/her reputation, job, financial security and personal dignity. The accused often destroyed themselves by their testimony during congressional hearings.

Owen Lattimore was our most knowledgeable and experienced scholar on Central Asia at the time McCarthyism began to take root.  Born in the United States in 1900, he spent the first 12 years of his life growing up in China, as his father took a teaching position there shortly after he was born. During the 1920s, he lived in China and worked as a journalist and businessman as he traveled into remote regions of the country, absorbing the culture, learning the language and immersing himself in the history of the region. As early as 1927, he predicted that China and Russia would find it difficult to merge their cultures into a unified brand of “communism,” and that both countries would have difficulties with peoples along their border regions, including Mongols, Uigers, Kashaks and the “high tartary” (the Uigers of course have been in the news lately with violence in Urumqi and East Turkestan). Lattimore wrote numerous books on Asia, which led to his identity as America’s best Sinologist. He received fellowship support from Harvard that allowed him to continue his extensive travels in Asia. In 1933 Owen was given a paid position as the editor of Public Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Public Relations (IPR), an organization consisting of a group of international scholars and business leaders and largely funded by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. He continued to travel extensively in China during the tumultuous war years and was able to interview Chou En-lai and Mao Zedong. He deplored Japanese aggression and the prospect of a civil war in China, as he urged the U.S. to stop their aid to Japan. In fact, he predicted a war between the U.S. and Japan, with Russia gleefully on the sidelines. His warnings were validated in 1941 when the Soviet Union and Japan signed a Neutrality Pact. But within our government, Lattimore’s warnings were ignored and because of that, we were caught completely off guard by Pearl Harbor in December 1941. When the Japanese invasion of China began to compromise Lattimore’s ability to move through that country, he returned to the United States and accepted a position as the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University, a position he retained from 1938-1950. It was there that his capacity as an outstanding teacher, lecturer and mentor surfaced, as the School attracted some of the most brilliant students who were interested in global geography, history and international relations. For a time, Hopkins became the leading University in America for Chinese and Mongolian studies. Lattimore was a rigorous scholar who insisted on documentation for every detail and claimed that “getting history right is a political act.” Although everyone was shocked when Lattimore was charged with espionage by McCarthy, in many ways, he was an unavoidable target. In his writings, he had always emphasized the value of an open discussion about foreign policy issues and he advocated that the United States should seek a balance in its relationship with China, favoring a position that benefited the people of that country. In that way he argued, the development of China would proceed along a course that benefited both the Chinese and our own interests in the region. In essence then, Lattimore was an pro-American internationalist, who felt that foreign policy should follow from an open discussion of the issues and the inclusion of scholarship and deep knowledge of the region. He was never a member of the communist party and was fairly apolitical, though, perhaps through his business experience, favored a more conservative philosophy; he never went through the liberalizing experience of getting an advanced degree at a time when the topic of governance was a major focus of university discussions and action.

Although McCarthy was able to shatter many lives and fractionate the New Deal, he took a wrong turn when he accused Owen Lattimore of being a top espionage agent. At the time of McCarthy’s charges,  Lattimore was in Afghanistan, leading a United Nations mission to evaluate the technical and economic aid needed by the country for its development. McCarthy announced on the Senate floor that he was willing to stand or fall on his accusations against Lattimore as the Soviet’s top espionage agent in America.  When Lattimore received an Associated Press cable in Afghanistan telling him about McCarthy’s charges, he replied with his own return wire  “McCARTHY’S OFF-RECORD RANTINGS PURE MOONSHINE.” But, however dismissive he was about McCarthy’s charges, he was well aware of the fact that he would be in a serious battle for his reputation, his position and even his financial security and future. For that reason Lattimore headed back to the United States, hired a good lawyer (Abe Fortes) and moved to Washington DC with his wife to settle down and fight the charges leveled against him by McCarthy. Lattimore directly challenged McCarthy and provided thorough documentation for his arguments, including many letters from prominent leaders who were shocked at the allegations made against him.  Lattimore wrote a book about his experiences during his first public trial in the Senate. His “Ordeal by Slander” is a blow by blow account of his appearance, testimony  and preparation for dealing with the charges McCarthy had leveled against him. The book was first published in July 1950 and has been characterized as the “First Great Book of the McCarthy Era” (part of the subtitle); it was published again in 2004 by the Lattimore Estate, in response to the rising tide of emotionalism that began to dominate our foreign policy decisions, as the American reaction to the events of 9/11 and our invasion of Iraq unfolded (the new edition has an excellent introduction by one of Lattimore’s former students, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook).  It seems that, buried within the DNA of Americans, lies a fear gene that, when aroused, leads to complete abandonment of rational thinking and  longitudinal analysis. In the presence of these active gene products, governing springs from the gut.

Following Lattimore’s remarkably strong testimony before the Senate, the Tydings Senate Committee dismissed all charges against Lattimore that had been brought into play by Joseph McCarthy. But that was not the end of his ordeal. After his first exhaustive testimony and trial,  he was charged with perjury, then acquitted on that charge. This was followed by another hearing and another trial in a seemingly endless effort to wear Lattimore down and finally come up with at least one “gotcha.” Lattimore’s entire career and all of his writings were scrutinized, distorted and mocked for five long years. To give you some indication of the kind of absurdity that was presented as evidence against Lattimore, was a charge that he must be a communist, because when he denied being a communist, he smiled. To this day, the right wing still dominates our foreign policy decisions and the left lies in fear that they are perceived as being too soft when it comes to national security issues. This state of affairs reflects the long-lasting residue of McCarthyism and the purges of scholarship and the elimination of serious academic input into the development of our foreign policy. If you have any doubt that the State Department, the presumed instrument of our foreign policy, was made ineffectual by McCarthyism, you have only to look at the Department’s poor showing during the American invasion of Iraq. Under Colin Powell, the State Department was an observer, not a participant or advisor.  More often than not, our foreign policy decisions are influenced if not controlled by the military, highly befitting a military empire.

RFM