Download Ordeal by Slander: The First Great Book of the McCarthy Era djvu

A valuable reminder of government takeovers by hostile forces...valid today under the idiotic assholery of TRUMP. If you won't post this, then I am done reviewing ALL AMAZON products.

The book reviews the attack by Senator McCarthy and his fellow travelers against the core values of a free and
democratic society. The winner in this is Mr. Lattimore but the immense damage done by McCarthy to the United States
should not be underestimated.This book should be reprinted and used as a textbook of American history in high school
and college. If you read only chapter 9 you will get one of the best reviews of the tactics of the demagogue.

Owen Lattimore was my uncle. He was not a liar, nor a communist. Anyone in doubt should read more of his wide body of work, to understand that he was a scholar, not a subversive.

Ignore the McCarthyite axe-grinding above. Lattimore's ordeal was a look at the Iron Curtain on the American side, every bit as ugly (if not as bloody) as its cold war counterpart. Revealingly, the main direct "evidence" marshaled against Lattimore was an anecdotal reference allegedly made by Soviet GRU director, Janis Berzins, to Soviet ambassador and defector, Alexander Barmine, that "Lattimore is our man." Ironic that Barmine, in fleeing Stalinist denunciations and becoming senior advisor with the US Information Agency, should employ the same backstabbing tactics.

Barmine's eager-to-please snitching for his new bosses dovetailed nicely with the lies of Alfred Kohlberg and the "China Lobby," who had been out to get Lattimore for years. Lattimore had strongly advised against pouring more US dollars down Chiang Kai-Shek's rathole regime. As McCarthy's rise was originally fronted by the China Lobby, it was no surprise that Lattimore was their first target. The McCarthy movement tore apart the US Government with, as Lattimore wrote here, all the bitterness of a real civil war which hasn't died yet.

Real patriots can take it as proof that "the system" did work: instead of exiling its Solzhenitysns and imprisoning its Sakharovs, it allowed Lattimore to defend himself against his accusers and foil their worst attempts to destroy him. Though, afterward, Lattimore did leave the US to escape the poisonous residues of this affair. This book is strongly recommended as the courageous voice of an American dissident in one of America's darkest hours.

In March 1950, Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the "top Soviet agent" in executive session of the Tydings Committee. The committee, chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department. When the accusation was leaked to the press, he backed off from the charge that Lattimore was a spy, but continued the attack in public session of the committee and in speeches. Lattimore, he said, "in view of his position of tremendous power at the State Department" was the "'architect' of our Far Eastern policy," and asked whether Lattimore's "aims are American aims or whether they coincide with the aims of Soviet Russia." At the time, Lattimore was in Kabul, Afghanistan, on a cultural mission for the United Nations. Lattimore dismissed the charges against him as "moonshine" and hurried back to the United States to testify before the Tydings Committee.[20]

Lattimore was a combative witness and waged verbal duels with McCarthy. In April 1950, the surprise witness, Louis F. Budenz, former editor of the Communist Party organ Daily Worker. testified Lattimore was a secret Communist, but not a Soviet agent, that is, he was a person of influence who often assisted Soviet foreign policy. Budenz said his Party superiors told him Lattimore's "great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language."[21] The majority report for the Tydings committee cleared Lattimore of all charges against him; the minority report accepted Budenz's charges.

In February 1952, Lattimore was called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (S.I.S.S), headed by McCarthy's ally, Senator Pat McCarran. Before Lattimore was called as witness, investigators for the S.I.S.S. had seized all of the records of the Institute of Pacific Relations (I.P.R). The twelve days of testimony were marked by shouting matches which pitted McCarran and McCarthy on one hand against Lattimore on the other. Lattimore took three days to deliver his opening statement; the delays were caused by frequent interruptions as McCarran challenged Lattimore point by point. McCarran the used the records from the I.P.R. to ask questions that often taxed Lattimore's memory. Budenz again testified, but this time claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent. The Subcommittee also summoned scholars. Nicholas Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia and Tibet, resisted the committee's invitation to label Lattimore a communist, but found some of his writings superficial and uncritical. The most damaging testimony came from Karl August Wittfogel, supported by his colleague from University of Washington, George Taylor. Wittfogel, a former Communist, said that at the time Lattimore edited the journal Pacific Affairs, Lattimore knew of his Communist background; even though they had not exchanged words on the matter, Lattimore had given Wittfogel a "knowing smile." Lattimore acknowledged that Wittfogel's thought had been tremendously influential, but said that if there had been a smile, it was a "non-Communist smile." Wittfogel and Taylor charged that Lattimore did "great harm to the free world" in his disregard of the need to defeat world communism as a first priority. The influence of Marxism was shown by Lattimore's use of the word "feudal." Lattimore replied that he did not think that Marxists had a "patent" on the word feudal.[22]

In 1952, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran Committee issued its 226-page, unanimous final report. This report stated that "Owen Lattimore was, from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy", and that on "at least five separate matters," 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 . . ."[23]

In 1952, Lattimore was indicted for perjury on seven counts. Six of the counts related to various discrepancies between Lattimore's testimony and the I.P.R. records; the seventh accused Lattimore of seeking to deliberately deceive the S.I.S.S. Lattimore's defenders, such as his lawyer Abe Fortas, claimed that the discrepancies were caused by McCarran deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s out of the hope that Lattimore would not be able to recall them properly, thereby giving grounds for a perjury indictment. Within three years, the charges against him were dismissed."[24] His book Ordeal by Slander is his own account of this episode.

This is one of the most important books ever written about the horrible social and psychological consequences of being a slander victim. "Tail Gunner" Senator Joe McCarthy radicalized his Communist paranoia hysteria to such an extreme in the 1950's that he attempted to destroy the lives of some very innocent people.

Anyone stumbling on this book at this late date might be forgiven for falling for it's whiny self-justification, but only until the latest records are consulted. When this book was released Lattimore, like Alger Hiss and a number of others, had the reputation of being innocent,New Deal spawned intellectuals caught up in the whirlwind of the so-called red scare. However, since their workers paradise(the USSR) fell, the evidence is now in, clearly showing that Lattimore, Hiss and virtually all of the other fifth amendment communists WERE spies. Don't waste your time on the justifications and excuses until you know what these traitors actually did. Chances are,at that point,you won't even care what the traitors went through at the hands of McCarthy and HUAC....It wasn't nearly enough.