Word: asia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Owen Lattimore was perhaps the best brain, and certainly the best pen, in a group of experts, educators and diplomats-both in & out of the State Department-who strongly influenced U.S. policy in Asia. Specifically, this group consistently opposed U.S. aid to Nationalist China and Chiang Kaishek, whom Lattimore regards as the No. 1 enemy of progress in Asia. In his twelve books (The Mongols of Manchuria, America and Asia, The Situation in Asia, etc.), Lattimore has offered the U.S. a lot of advice on how to win friends in the Far East. One of his opinions, preached steadily...
...State Department, which McCarthy cited as evidence of Lattimore's disloyalty to the U.S., did not prove any such thing as disloyalty, but it did prove that Lattimore was still on the side of a soft policy that could result only in a Russian victory in Asia. The memorandum paid lip service to the idea that Asiatic Communism must not be appeased, but it was in effect a thorough and detailed program for appeasement...
...memorandum, Lattimore specifically urged the U.S. to 1) pull out of Korea; 2) forget Japan as a potential chief ally in Asia; 3 ) hurry up recognition and trade with Communist China; 4) divorce itself from America's European allies in the Far East, i.e., Britain, France, The Netherlands; 5) avoid local entanglements-meaning, presumably, military assistance to non-Communist nations-that might annoy the Russians if & when the U.S. negotiates an overall deal with Joseph Stalin...
...policy in Asia in recent years had led to disasters many times worse than Pearl Harbor. Yet it was not fair either to Lattimore or the U.S. Government to charge, as McCarthy did and does, that Lattimore was the "chief architect" of that policy. Dump heaps have no architects. But Lattimore's' ideas did work to thwart the development of an effective program of U.S. help to anti-Communist forces in Asia...
Those ideas did not constitute a crime, and they did not constitute disloyalty. But it was nevertheless a tragedy that U.S. complacency about Asia allowed the ideas of Lattimore & Co. to have as much effect as they...