Of Camels, Yurts and The FBI : OWEN LATTIMORE AND THE “LOSS” OF CHINA <i> By Robert P. Newman (University of California Press: $30; 649 pp.) </i>

When Owen Lattimore married his wife, Eleanor, in 1926, they headed off from Beijing to a honeymoon in Chinese Central Asia--though not on the same path. Owen commissioned a camel caravan to travel overland from Inner Mongolia, evading marauding warlord armies eager to conscript the camels and trading tales with Mongol camel pullers; Eleanor took what was thought to be the safer route, the trans-Siberian to Semipalatinski, where Owen was to meet her. When he didn’t show up in Siberia, she found her way through the winter snows on a sled to the Chinese border town of Tahcheng, where Owen, who had been denied a Soviet visa, prayed she’d find him.

Their idyllic six months of horse-cart travel after they were reunited in Tahcheng cemented both Owen Lattimore’s passion for Central Asia and a partnership that sustained him through the most fantastical inquisitions in Congress, the courts and the media as Joseph McCarthy’s “top Soviet spy.”

“Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China” is the story of how a relatively minor scholar of Inner Asia was systematically pilloried on specious accusations of treason and perjury. The result of years of exhaustive research by University of Pittsburgh rhetoric professor Robert Newman, the book draws on 38,900 pages of FBI documents released under the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, numerous archives and congressional records and interviews with many of the key players, including Lattimore and his family.

The result is a tour de force of scholarship and analysis. In microscopic detail, Newman describes a witch hunt as absurd in its premise as it was exhaustive in its exertions. There were hundreds of thousands of hours of bungling investigation and biased prosecution--wanton interference in the career of a dedicated Asia hand whose unswerving intellectual interest remained the customs and society of the Mongols.

Although Lattimore’s accusers attempted to evoke insidious genetic associations by making a Russian orphan out of him, he actually was born in Washington, D.C., in 1900. He spent his early childhood in China, where his father taught English and French, and finished his education in Swiss and English boarding schools. He returned to China to work assessing insurance risks for a trading company and to perfect his language skills. In 1933, the Lattimores returned to the United States, where Owen found a longterm job as an editor of “Pacific Affairs,” the journal of the New York-based Institute for Pacific Relations. His efforts to present varied views and to solicit Soviet contributions (he received, and printed, only one), came back to haunt him, as did his 1937 visit to the communists in their caves in Yanan, where he tried to discuss communist-Mongol relations with his hosts.

Lattimore’s unusual credentials made him an effective wartime public servant. In 1941, he went to live in Chungking as Roosevelt’s personal representative to the chief of China’s ruling Kuomintang party, Chiang Kai-shek; Lattimore and Chiang developed a warm and trusting relationship. In 1942, he served in San Francisco as Office of War Information director of broadcasts to the Pacific. He accompanied Vice President Wallace on a 1944 trip to the Soviet Union and Mongolia--a frustrating trip for Lattimore because Wallace’s fitness mania made it difficult for him to sit in a yurt for more than a few minutes and led him to forgo substantive discussions in favor of races up hillsides. In 1950, Lattimore directed a technical assistance mission to Afghanistan; in the same year, he made futile efforts to save Tibetan documents from Chinese invaders.

Throughout his lifetime, Lattimore sounded certain themes; in retrospect, he was remarkably prescient. A strong advocate of capitalism, he believed that development in Asia rested on the creation of a stable economic climate; that colonialism was doomed; that Mao’s communists were hard-liners independent of Moscow (he was wrongly accused of describing them as agrarian reformers). If he made any analytical error, it was his lingering belief in Chiang’s capacity to unite China, reform the Kuomintang and defeat Mao, even after other experts were coming to the view that the United States had little choice but to cut its losses and come to terms with the communists.

Newman describes the government’s targeting of this “typically inner-directed, iconoclastic scholar” as “haphazard and reckless.” There was nothing in FBI files to support it, and it may have been the intervention of John Foster Dulles with McCarthy on behalf of another potential “top spy” that led McCarthy to reach casually for the file of a different candidate.

In fact, the Republicans were desperately seeking an issue that they could use to wrest power back from the Democrats, who had shut them out of the White House for 16 years. The myth that Lattimore helped us “lose” China seemed the perfect issue. Although today it is clear that no one but Chiang Kai-shek himself “lost” China, the theory was propounded that treasonous advisers in the foreign service (ironically, Lattimore was not, and had never been, in the State Department) had manipulated the outcome in Asia so it would be favorable to the communists.

As the climate for free speech continued to deteriorate in the early 1950s, Lattimore was investigated by Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; by Senator Patrick McCarran’s Senate internal security subcommittee; by the FBI, the CIA and the press. Despite overwhelming testimony to Lattimore’s loyalty, including a statement by 170 prominent scholars, and absolutely no evidence to support allegations of treason in his writings or actions, his accusers were determined to prove that he was “a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy.”

Newman’s description of the political climate is chilling. “Would-be informants came crawling out of the woodwork,” many of them from “an underclass of kooks and winos, drifters and opportunists.” Some later went on salary as professional witnesses. “There is no adjective adequate to describe the insanity of the times, the corruption and unreliability of the informants, or the gullibility of senators and their staffs,” he writes. “It was (a) nether world of fanatics, psychopaths, alcoholics, con artists and demagogues.”

Investigators outdid each other in obsession with minutiae. The effort and time devoted to trivial matters was “mindboggling.” The hours devoted to these tasks were filled with some stellar examples of comical bungling. At one point, the Baltimore FBI wrote to the Milwaukee FBI asking for the address of the National Academy of Sciences. (It is in Washington D.C.) Hiding in the bushes near the Lattimores’ Vermont vacation home, another agent managed to load his film backward. Newman describes Lattimore’s treatment as “Pure Kafka.”

Throughout the hearings, indictments and appeals, Lattimore did his best to work quietly at Johns Hopkins University, where he had been on the faculty since 1937. But after a federal grand jury turned up an indictment on seven counts of perjury, his support began to fall off, and lecture invitations dwindled. By the 1950 Chinese invasion of Korea and rout of the U.S. Eighth Army, the public pillorying had grown vicious: In the view of ordinary people, Lattimore had the “blood of 20,000 young Americans on his hands.” He had difficulty getting a passport, and by the time of his trial in October, 1953, even Johns Hopkins had withdrawn its support.

In 1952, parts of the case against him were declared unconstitutional, and in 1955 a judge threw out another indictment for being “imprecise and ambiguous.” Finally, the government dropped all of its charges.

Remarkably, the years of persecution and the shadow of suspicion under which Lattimore lived to the end of his days did not break this courageous and energetic man. His later years appear to have been productive and happy. He found a new home for himself and Eleanor in England at the University of Leeds, where he set up the major Western center for Mongolian studies and continued to write, lecture and teach. In 1969, he was invested in the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Wearing a traditional Mongolian gown, he read a five-line poem he had composed in Mongolian alliterative rhapsodic style.

Eleanor’s sudden death in 1970, when Owen was 70, was the end of a “honeymoon of forty-four years.” Nevertheless he dreamed of spending a year in Mongolia, “watching the full cycle of the herding year, recording the life experiences, the songs and legends, the reactions to communism of these formerly nomadic tribes,” but decided he had too many projects to commit to paper. Still, he made repeated visits to Asia, often in the company of a son or a niece. When he was 86, he was honored with the use of his name for a newly-discovered Mongolian dinosaur.

Owen Lattimore died of pneumonia on May 1, 1989, having managed despite the odds to live a rich and marvelous life. The weight of his achievement only underscores America’s shame.