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*210See Chapter 7.
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*211As with Stephen Brunauer, Tydings wasn’t content merely to finesse the issue of Duran but handled things so as to tilt the record in the suspect’s favor. This was done by inviting Duran to respond to McCarthy’s charges as he wished, either in person or in writing. Duran prudently chose the latter, submitting a lengthy statement that ostensibly answered McCarthy’s charges and argued that all such assertions were the malicious doing of the Franco regime in Spain. This was reprinted verbatim in the Tydings report, following a skeletal outline of McCarthy’s charges, so that the Duran response by volume outstripped the McCarthy version by a ratio of about five to one. Duran was thus able to get his apologia in the record without running the gauntlet of rebuttal or cross-examination.
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*212Thereafter, Hoover sent a similar, slightly more restrained, but still acerbic protest to Peurifoy. “Inasmuch as the question appeared to center around whether I made a statement,” said Hoover, “I am at a loss to understand why I was not consulted” prior to State’s release of the letter. He added that had he been questioned at the time of the Amerasia arrests, “I certainly would have been most emphatic in stating that the arrests were thoroughly justified” by the evidence gathered. Peurifoy and State were thus on notice that the Ford rebuttal to McCarthy was bogus.
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†213 The somewhat garbled transcript has him saying “top gossip reports,” but “teacup” is undoubtedly what he actually said.
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*214In support of this view, McInerney quoted from the Hobbs report saying the documents had little military importance—neglecting to point out that the Hobbs committee based its opinions on what McInerney and other witnesses from Justice told it.
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*215The Tydings panel would make a particular point of whether the Bureau had actually seen Jaffe handing documents over to Communist espionage agents. The Bureau rejoined by citing the Bernstein connection, the five-hour meeting with Earl Browder and Tung Pi-wu, and the other contacts noted, observing that such sessions gave Jaffe ample opportunity to pass along various of the papers received from Service. The Bureau memo on this then dryly added, “It’s not customary for spies to hand over documents in settings where they can be observed doing so.”
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*216To this Lou Nichols would add, concerning one of the Bureau’s many confabs with Peyton Ford: “I told him if this reasoning followed certainly the case was already tainted before it was ever given to the Bureau by OSS, that everyone in the government of any responsibility knew of this as well as the Bureau’s entry, and if the taint was there, then why didn’t somebody think about it before authorizing the arrests, etc. I told him it was rather disgusting.”
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*217In a memo to Bureau official Clyde Tolson, Lou Nichols would describe the tussle over this as follows: “[Ford] started to paraphrase the material and referred to Service discussing political matters. We told him this was not true; that Service discussed military plans. He then wrote in military plans. We then told him that Service had specifically termed the military plans as secret. He then wrote this in.”
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*218Service in fact got back on April 12.
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*219Currie would eventually flee the country, as would Adler, at the height of the McCarthy furor in 1950.
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*220Among such contacts, in addition to Hiss, Vincent, and Currie, were Haldore Hanson, Laurence Duggan, and Michael Greenberg at State; John K. Fairbank, Duncan Lee, Joe Barnes, and Lattimore at OSS/OWI; Benjamin Kizer at UNRRA; Philip Keeney, Herbert Norman, and Bisson with the postwar occupation forces. All these IPR contacts would be named under oath as members of the Communist Party or Soviet agents.
The policy leverage of this group was the greater for having still other contacts who weren’t so named but worked closely with the IPR contingent. These included Service, John Paton Davies, O. Edmund Clubb, John K. Emmerson, and Raymond Ludden, all of the Foreign Service. IPR contacts at State included Robert and Patricia Barnett (both former staffers at the Institute), William Stone and Esther Brunauer (incorporators of the American IPR), Jay Robinson, Cora Dubois, and various others. The most important of these was Philip Jessup, who had been a top official at IPR and would become a leading figure at State.
Among the IPR associates and staffers identified by the FBI as being involved in official wartime services were Barnes, Lattimore, Elizabeth Downing, William Holland, and others at OWI; Hilda Austern, Hollis Gale, Katrina Greene, and Rose Yardumian with UNRRA; the two Barnetts, Charles Fahs, Mary Frances Nealy, William Johnstone, Catherine Porter, and several others with the State Department; Andrew Grad, Miriam Farley, and William Lockwood with the occupation forces; Irving Friedman with the Treasury, T. A. Bisson with BEW, Jessup and Carter in miscellaneous positions, and on and on.
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*221In The Great Terror, Robert Conquest writes: “[I]n Kolyma, the death rate was particularly high…the death rate among the miners is estimated in fact at about 30 per cent per annum….In one of the Kolyma penal camps, which had started the year with 3,000 inmates, 1,700 were dead by the end…” Of course, without all the cucumbers and tomatoes, the death toll might have been even higher.
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*222When the Soviets said Pacific Affairs should have a “definite aim,” Lattimore also picked up on this. He explained that Pacific Affairs was an international journal with articles coming in from member countries, and he couldn’t dictate to them what to write. He added, however, that if the Soviets themselves would contribute to the publication, their articles could help establish “a general line—a struggle for peace—the other articles would naturally gravitate to that line…” He added that he was “willing to have PA reflect such a line,” but needed such articles from the Soviets to get the goal accomplished.
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*223The file further shows Hoover confirming the accuracy of Ford’s statement. A version of these private Hoover comments was leaked to Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune and published in that paper. The Director, in internal memos complaining about the leak, acknowledged that this report, mirroring the comments of Ford, was a correct rendition of his verdict on the professor.
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*224When confronted by the FBI with the letter from Chen and the enclosed list of Nationalist troops, Lattimore said he had no recollection of ever having seen the letter or the list of troops, nor did he have any recollection of ever having asked Chen for such a roster.
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*225Added to this is the further fact that the FBI, on the weekend before the Amerasia arrests, had surveilled Philip Jaffe, John Service, and Andrew Roth at or in the vicinity of Lattimore’s residence in Ruxton, Maryland.
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*226All of which provides a possible clue as to why McCarthy may have made his original espionage statement. At the executive session where he said this, he intimated that he knew something of the contents of the Bureau’s Lattimore file—apparently conveyed to him by someone familiar with it (not, he said, J. Edgar Hoover). If McCarthy had such an inside contact, his source would have seen the file in its pristine state, not redacted as we now have it. As McCarthy had by this point got on the trail of Barmine, he could thus have put the various elements together to reach his espionage conclusion.
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*227The distinction was that Currie’s office was in the (old) State Department Building, not in the State Department offices as such, a point Lattimore belatedly made but could have brought out, perhaps to better effect, had he admitted the connection at the beginning. However, the fact that Currie was the President’s top in-house adviser on China, rather than simply one State Department official among many, made the linkage mor
e important, not less.
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*228GILLETTE: But you have taken no action of any kind. You did not consider it of sufficient moment to take any action to determine whether it [Jessup’s name] was properly there, or whether it was improperly there, or should be removed?
*228JESSUP: I have not, sir.
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*229Jessup was a professed isolationist, along the lines of the Chicago Tribune, Charles Lindbergh, Herbert Hoover, and Sen. Robert Taft. For some reason, he is just about the only such isolationist from that era who receives friendly treatment in our histories.
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*230Churchill in The Hinge of Fate would argue that he really didn’t want to invade the Balkans—this stated as a defense against the charge of being anti-Russian. Most students of the matter think he did aim for the Balkans, which in retrospect seems to his credit and not requiring defensive comment.
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†231 As McCarthy phrased it, the goal of U.S. policy at Yalta and after “should have been not how to get the Russians in, but how to keep them out.” His discussion of all this closely mirrored that of the New York Times’s Hanson Baldwin—frequently referred to in the speech—who noted that intelligence reports showing that the Japanese were already beaten, and that Russia’s entry into the war could and should have been avoided, were kept from high-ranking policy makers.
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*232Also, on the internal security angle that was McCarthy’s own main focus, there are indications that Marshall sought to tighten security measures in the State Department when he was secretary there. It was Marshall, for instance, who in June 1947 ordered the suspension of ten security risks under the McCarran rider and a few weeks later authorized John Peurifoy to permit the House Appropriations Committee probe that produced the Lee list. Though the first of these decisions was reversed, and the second never to be repeated, it’s noteworthy that in both cases Marshall’s initial moves were geared to better security practice and cooperation with the Congress.
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*233Thereafter, in what amounted to a preview of the Tydings inquest, Hurley’s accusations against Service et al. would be deftly smothered in Senate hearings (chaired by Tom Connally of Texas), the self-evident object of which was to discredit Hurley.
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*234Among other anomalies that might be noted, this bizarre formula gave the Communists de facto veto power over U.S. aid to Chiang. All they had to do to force the cutoff was to ensure that “peace and unity” didn’t happen—which, to say no more, was their natural inclination—and Chiang, not they, would pay the price. Assuming the Yenan comrades knew of this proviso, which they undoubtedly did given their extreme penetration of the Marshall mission and U.S. offices in China, it would have been impossible to come up with a concept more likely to ensure that “peace and unity” never happened.
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*235This blow against our nominal ally in China was accompanied by another telltale missive, signed by Truman but again the work of Vincent. “There is increasing awareness,” this said to Chiang, “that the hopes of the people of China are being thwarted by militarists and a small group of political reactionaries who are obstructing the general good of the nation by failing to appreciate the liberal trend of the times.”
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*236And when it got there, the material was only about 10 percent of what had been expected. Equally dismaying to the KMT forces, said Badger, the material was in many respects defective—machine guns without mounts or clips, no loading machines for ammunition belts, no spare parts. “For the KMT forces,” Badger testified, “it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” (This delivery of defective equipment was yet another aspect in which developments in China matched those that previously unfolded in the Balkans.)
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*237In the IPR hearings, committee counsel Jay Sourwine would ask John Carter Vincent, “Did you ever hear of a plan to assassinate Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek?” And “Did you ever see a memorandum or memoranda concerning such a plan in 1945 or 1946?” Vincent said he recollected nothing about such a plan or such a memo, and so the question was left hanging in mysterious fashion until the revelations of Dorn.
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*238Though this wasn’t an assassination plot per se, the likelihood that such a scheme would lead to the death of Chiang and those loyal to him was implicit and in keeping with the outcome of such military risings elsewhere. (In which respect the obvious parallel would be the murder of South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, after a virtually identical U.S.-supported coup in November 1963 when Rusk was Secretary of State.) According to Frank Dorn, in fact, there was an alternative coup proposal circa 1950 that explicitly envisioned the death of Chiang, though Dorn didn’t give the basis for this statement. In any case, the possible demise of Chiang apparently didn’t bother Rusk, who considered the chief danger in such a plot was that it might fail and that U.S. involvement might be exposed, which could have been a bit of a PR problem.
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†239 Diminutive for “generalissimo.”
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*240Linking all this back to Marshall and his part in the China debacle: With respect to the early schemes to murder Chiang, it’s hard to believe Stilwell would have been involved in such machinations without the knowledge of his longtime friend and mentor—particularly in view of Dorn’s suggestive comment that the order for the murder plan possibly came from “senior” levels in the Pentagon. On the other hand, Dorn in his tell-all mode explicitly said that, had Marshall known of such a plot, he would have disapproved it. As Dorn was in effect outing Stilwell, there isn’t any a priori reason to suppose he would have held back on Marshall.
*240As to the later episodes of State Department planning against Chiang, all this occurred in late 1949 and early 1950, after Marshall left the department. Acheson had become Secretary of State in January of 1949, and the policy planners involved in these machinations, including such as Dean Rusk and John Paton Davies, were Acheson protégés or selections (as were, in the earlier going, such pivotal players as John Service and John Vincent). The whole show, so far as we can tell, was Acheson’s. All of this would tend to support the view that Marshall, whatever his errors and susceptibility to bad counsel, was far from being the master strategist of State Department skulduggery on China.
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*241Tydings’s version was, “If we had done what the Republicans wanted in Korea, there would not have been a gun out there.” As earlier seen, Tydings had also lashed out at Senator Jenner of Indiana for allegedly voting in lockstep with the aims of Stalin. Charges of this nature apparently weren’t “defamation” if made by Tydings, but became so if made against him.
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*242The Post-Standard attack on McCarthy and subsequent retraction also touched on other topics, including the so-called Lustron deal and the chicanery of one Charles Davis, two further items alleged against McCarthy by Senator Benton and others. As this was one of the few occasions on which a major media outlet set the record straight about such matters, and as both these charges are still used against McCarthy, the full Post-Standard editorial is reprinted on Chapter 33.
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†243McCarthy and his ally William Jenner (a member and future chairman of the parent Rules Committee) added a further comment the Gillette committee failed to make: that the “composite,” though misleading as to when and how the pictures were taken, in substance was not misleading, since the import of the composite was to show Browder and Tydings in amiable concourse. In point of fact, such amiable concourse had occurred, as the Maryland senator treated the Marxist capo with utmost civility during his stint before the panel. (This too, as earlier noted, having been established in a courtroom.) So, in the outrage sweepstakes, it was a bit of a judgment call as to which was the more heinous: to print
a composite photo suggesting Tydings was on cordial terms with Browder, or for Tydings actually to be on cordial terms with Browder. Perhaps the proper answer is that both should be condemned, though only the first gets any notice in the standard treatment.
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*244It was through a series of coincidences that Benton would arrive in Congress. At the end of 1949 (in an oblique connection to McCarthy), Sen. Raymond Baldwin would resign to accept a Connecticut judgeship, at a time when Benton’s former partner Bowles was governor of the state. Bowles appointed Benton to fill the vacant seat, and Benton would then go on in the fall of 1950 to win election on his own—by a margin of about a thousand votes—to fill out the remaining two years of Baldwin’s tenure.
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*245The closest connection McCarthy’s critics could come up with was a charge that, in his unsuccessful Senate race of 1944, various of his relatives contributed money to his campaign that was actually his, derived from a stock market profit. If true, this would have been a circumvention of Wisconsin spending limits and could arguably have justified printing the relevant data (albeit McCarthy in that campaign had not been nominated, much less elected, so the whole subject was out of bounds, per Benton’s original resolution). Also, the committee reprinted various financial reports from McCarthy’s 1946 campaign for the Senate. What justification there might have been for printing all the other financial information has never been established.
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*246In addition, the suit gave McCarthy an opportunity to depose and cross-examine Benton and others on several matters, an exercise that proved illuminating not only on issues that divided McCarthy and Benton but on other topics. It was in this suit that McCarthy attorney Edward Bennett Williams cornered Millard Tydings and forced him to admit that, contrary to his previous representations, he had no recording of the speech at Wheeling. The suit thus turned out to be of historical value, though it never resulted in a legal judgment.
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Blacklisted By History Page 86
