Report on the I.P.R.

The Truman Administration is under attack on charges of two kinds of corruption: 1) the garden or influence-peddling variety, and 2) even more serious allegations of ideological corruption that led to failures of foreign policy. Last week, while the Republican National Committee was hurting that party's chances of walloping the Democrats on the first count, a Senate subcommittee headed by a Democrat, Pat McCarran of Nevada, brought in a highly damaging report against the Administration on the second.

The McCarran subcommittee, set up by Congress in December 1950, plunged immediately into a complex inquiry: Was the Institute of Pacific Relations infiltrated by Communists and their sympathizers? If so, how much control did the I.P.R. exert on U.S. public opinion and U.S. Far Eastern policy?

Last week, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran committee gave its answer. A 226-page report, packed with fascinating quotations from witnesses and documentary exhibits, boiled down to a crushing verdict against the I.P.R.: "The subcommittee concludes . . . that the I.P.R. has been, in general, neither objective nor nonpartisan, and concludes further that, at least since the mid-1930s, the net effect of the I.P.R. activities on United States public opinion has been pro-Communist and proSoviet, and has frequently and repeatedly been such as to serve international Communist, Chinese Communist, and Soviet interests, and to subvert the interests of the United States . , ."

Loaded for Bear. The McCarran committee, unlike the Tydings committee, which preceded it and which seemed more interested in belittling subversion than in pinning it down, was loaded for bear. But McCarran's counsel, Robert Morris, rigorously avoided star-chamber or headline-hunting procedures, sifted evidence for fairness in secret executive sessions.

The committee found:

P:54 persons connected in various ways with I.P.R. were identified by witnesses as participants in "the Communist world conspiracy against democracy."

P:14 men & women connected with I.P.R. had refused to say whether they were Communists on the ground that their answers might incriminate them. Among better-known names: Lawrence Rosinger, Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

P:25 men & women connected with I.P.R. and involved by evidence in pro-Communist activities were out of reach (abroad, dead, in hiding, etc,) of subpoena. Included: Gunther Stein, Agnes Smedley, Andrew Roth.

P:A small core of I.P.R. officials and staffers, who were proCommunist, also carried the main burden of I.P.R. activities behind a screen of non-Communist officials and contributors to the institute. To the I.P.R. protest that most writing in the institute's periodicals was nonCommunist, the committee answered: "NonCommunist or 'neutral writing' plus . . . pro-Communist writing means, whatever the exact percentages, a net pro-Communist effect . . ."

P: "Over a period of years, John Carter Vincent [former chief of the China desk in the U.S. State Department, now Minister to Tangier] was the principal fulcrum of I.P.R. pressures and influence in the State Department . . . The I.P.R. . . . through . . . influence in the White House, by reports from . . . the field . . . sought to bring pressure to bear to undermine the Chinese government, and to exalt the status of the Chinese Communist Party . . ." This effort had aimed at giving the Chinese Communists 1) the status of "a recognized force," 2) then a place in a "coalition" government, 3) finally, recognition as the legitimate government of all China.

False Testimony. In its probing, the committee believed it had come across two important cases of false testimony.

Johns Hopkins' Professor Owen Lattimore edited I.P.R.'s Pacific Affairs from 1934 to 1941. The report denounced him as a "conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy"; Lattimore denounced right back, calling the report "fantastic and inane." On "at least five separate matters," charged the committee, Lattimore had not told the whole truth. One example: "The evidence . . . shows conclusively that Lattimore knew Frederick V. Field to be a Communist; that he collaborated with Field after he possessed this knowledge; and that he did not tell the truth before the subcommittee about this association with Field . . ."

John P. Davies Jr., now political adviser to the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, had long served as a top China expert in the State Department. From a former Central Intelligence Agency operator, the committee heard that Davies, in November 1949, had recommended that such proCommunists as Agnes Smedley and Anna Louise Strong be used for CIA "consultation and guidance." Davies, under oath, had denied doing so. The committee urged the Department of Justice to submit its evidence of perjury, by both Lattimore and Davies, to a federal grand jury.

The charges of perjury might not be easily proved in a court of law. Far more important was the fact that the McCarran committee has pulled together a strong case against the I.P.R. and has shown its influence on the U.S. Government to be a factor in U.S. policies that led to catastrophic losses in the Far East.

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