Word: ricketts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Walter Rickett was known in Peking before his arrest as a fairly evenminded liberal. He talks today as an extreme liberal of the mid-'40s would have talked. He is driven to rationalize everything that the Communists do or say, including what the Communists did to him, and to assume that whatever the U.S. does is questionable and probably wrong. Rickett is, beyond all else, the ultimate example of what can happen to a non-Communist who does not believe or ceases to believe that Communism in itself is evil. He has made his personal accommodation with...
...Thinking Things Through." His justifications take sickening forms. Citing minor errors in the first press accounts of his release, he said that he was misquoted, that he had not seen other prisoners handcuffed, beaten or executed: "The Communists never beat anybody." Rickett conceded that the Communists did have three methods of physical persuasion. They handcuff your hands in front of you; they handcuff them in back; and they manacle hands to feet. "Now being handcuffed is damned inconvenient," said Rickett. "If you have to go to the toilet, for example, it's embarrassing to have to ask somebody...
...cells in his prison, Rickett continued with a faint smile, had wooden doors, and the guards sometimes forgot to lock them. "Most of us would shout to the guards to come and lock the doors, and they appreciated it. But there was a fellow next to me who would not behave himself. One day he tried to kick his door down, and the guard just came and said to him, 'Now what do you think that solves,' and locked it and left him alone. And that's the way it was. It's a matter...
Definition of Spying. Rickett tried to explain how it was after four years of imprisonment that he considered his jailer right and his own country wrong. When he first went to Peking in 1948, he thought the Communists were wrong; he thought that the Russians were coming down into China, that the U.S. should stop them. "After my arrest, I came to realize that the Chinese had a right to run their own country any way they wanted to run it. The new China exists. It is there, and it is a fact. No matter how we feel about...
...Rickett is obsessed with the evils that he attributes to Chiang Kaishek. "When I criticize the U.S., what I am really criticizing is its position on Formosa." He believes that the U.S. should abandon Formosa and drop its embargo on strategic trade with Red China. He remarked with quiet satisfaction that from what he had heard about the Geneva negotiations (which resulted in his release), "things are going the way I think they should." He claimed that he had been a U.S. spy, but, when questioned, he admitted that he had merely reported his observations of China to an American...