The Ninth Commandment

Corliss Lamont, son of Morgan Partner Thomas Lamont, has a long record as a Soviet apologist and a sponsor for Communist fronts, including a term as chairman of the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship. In its investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations. Senator Pat McCarran's subcommittee has made great play with Lamont's name as an Institute member.

Last week, in a letter to McCarran, Corliss Lamont, now a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia University, made some sharp points. Lamont protested that the subcommittee "has tried to give the totally false impression that I am a Far Eastern expert and have been a prime mover in the affairs of the Institute . . . But in fact I have never been particularly interested in the Far East and have for only a few years been a member of the Institute, and a very inactive one at that.

"However, my late father, Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co., did have considerable knowledge of the Far East and visited both Japan and China. For more than twenty years he participated actively in the work of the Institute of Pacific Relations and contributed generously to it ... On the other hand. I did not start contributions to the Institute until 1946. From that year until the present I made six donations totaling $800, or about one-eighteenth of the total of my father's gifts. Yet your subcommittee and its investigators have never once mentioned my Republican father's long and deep interest in the Institute. Instead, this subcommittee has stressed my own slight and brief association with the Institute, obviously as part of its effort to paint [the institute] as Red by concealing the fact that leading bankers and conservatives have been among its chief backers."

Lamont pointed out that he differed from Communists in supporting free speech for all (including Trotskyites), that he supported Tito, that he condemned Communist aggression in Korea. Said Lamont: "It seems to me that your subcommittee is constantly encouraging the violation of the Ninth Commandment, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.' "

As for himself, wrote Lamont, "I am a radical American dissenter carrying on as best I can the dissenting tradition of my ancestors who came over in the Mayflower."

McCarran's committee had other and solider evidence against some staff members of I.P.R. It had hurt its case by exaggerating Corliss Lamont's influence on the Institute.

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