"Never Considered"

Flanked by two State Department aides and equipped with bundles of evidence, Ambassador Philip C. Jessup sat down last week before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee. The narrow question before the committee was: Should he be confirmed as a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. General Assembly?

Actually, he was there for two other reasons. First, to defend himself against the noisy charges of Senator Joe McCarthy that Jessup had an "affinity for Communist causes." Secondly, he was there, as a stalwart Administration policymaker, to defend the thesis that U.S. policy has always been right.

Incisively, Jessup cut to pieces most of the McCarthy charges. Jessup had been associated with Communist Angel Frederick Vanderbilt Field; for a while, these two shared isolationist views. After Hitler invaded Russia, Field switched with the Communist line and Jessup remained a staunch America First isolationist right down to Pearl Harbor. This fact was a far stronger indication of Jessup's essential non-Communism than his earlier association with Field was an indication of Communism.

In his testimony, Jessup also undertook to answer a charge by Harold E. Stassen that Jessup had once favored U.S. recognition of Communist China.

Stassen recalled a conference of experts on the Far East called by the State Department that he attended in October 1949, where, he said, Jessup told him that "the greater logic" was on the side of giving diplomatic recognition to the Chinese Communists.

In trying to refute this, Jessup made one of the most startling statements in all the recent reviews of U.S. Asia policy. He said: "The United States has never considered recognition of Communist China"; it was therefore "inconceivable" that he could have made the remark attributed to him by Stassen.

The Record. This might be a quibble: the U.S. is an abstraction and cannot consider anything; only men can consider. But certainly the U.S. Congress, press and public were led to believe that many of the men in charge of U.S. policy had at least "considered" recognition of Red China--as they were in duty bound to do. It would be damaging to the State Department if the public believed what Jessup seemed to say: that the department had never given a thought to a policy that was adopted by Britain, the closest U.S. ally.

The record showed that State was not as careless as Jessup made it out to be.

In January 1949, George Kennan, then the top State Department policy planner, made a flat prediction to a TIME correspondent: "By next year at this time we will have recognized the Chinese Communists."

On May 17, 1949, the New York Times's Benjamin Welles reported from London that "the United States and British governments have agreed to coordinate their policies toward eventual recognition of the Chinese Communist regime . . ."

In October 1949, Lincoln White, State Department press officer, said that the U.S. had begun talks on recognition of Communist China many months previously. He added: there would be further conversations in the future with all the nations interested in diplomatic relations with a Chinese government of unquestionable authority.

In December 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson told a TIME correspondent: "What we must do now is shake loose from the Chinese Nationalists. It will be harder to make that necessary break with them if we go to Formosa." On the same day, another high State Department source told the same correspondent: "Acheson has been steadily arguing with Truman to go along on an early recognition of Communist China. Just before Truman left for Key West, Acheson got him to admit the logic of early recognition. Truman said that Acheson had made a forceful case. The trouble now isn't with Truman, but in persuading him to override the pressure from congressional and other groups not to recognize."

Continued Pressure. The pressure inside the department for recognition of Red China continued right down to the Chinese invasion of Korea in October 1950, and there is some evidence that it continued even after that.

Jessup's bland effort to show that he and others never entertained the idea of recognizing Red China is a continuation of a monumental State Department project: an attempt to rewrite the department's private history so that it will read better in the light of current events. This effort, undoubtedly influenced by the climate of McCarthyism and the 1952 election, would be hazardous at any time; it is worse than that today, when the U.S. should be looking to the future.

Congress not only has the right, but the duty, in any year to inquire into the past policies and judgments of men such as Jessup, nominated for positions of power and trust. To date, Philip Jessup has lacked the courage to admit that he and the Administration were wrong--which even Henry Wallace has done.

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