The Korean War: A History (14 page)

McCarthy came from a farm constituency of Catholics and German-Americans, giving colorful voice to their hatred of the British and Anglophile easterners, for whom Acheson, with his phony British accent, waxed mustache, top hat and tails, was the flypaper. A bizarre sexual politics attended this farcical drama; McCarthy managed to make anyone with a Boston blue-blood accent, or with intellectual pretensions or worldly knowledge, seem like a sissy if not a homosexual (Everett Dirksen, a centrist, referred to the “Lavender Lads” in the State Department, and indeed the period saw widespread purges of homosexuals in government).

McCarthy was supplied documentation on alleged subversives, most of it classified, by J. Edgar Hoover, Willoughby and Whitney of MacArthur’s staff, and even Walter Bedell Smith of the CIA. Willoughby had begun McCarthy-style investigations of his own in 1947, especially of scholars working for “the extremely leftist” Institute for Pacific Relations; his first case was Andrew Grajdanzev, the author in 1944 of what remains today one of the best English-language accounts of Japanese rule in Korea. Willoughby had him
tailed, read his mail, and determined that he might be “a long-range Soviet agent”—the evidence being that Owen Lattimore, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, had written a recommendation for him, and that he wanted to purge Japanese leaders with unsavory pre-1945 records whom MacArthur and Willoughby supported. Willoughby fingered crafty subversives such as Anna Louise Strong and Agnes Smedley who somehow, despite their blanketed obscurity, brought Mao to power by remote control. In a letter of May 1950 to the head of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Willoughby said that “American Communist brains planned the communization of China,” fellow-traveling people who had “an inexplicable fanaticism for an alien cause, the Communist ‘Jehad’ of pan-Slavism for the subjugation of the Western world.” Willoughby paid particular attention to names and birthplaces that might indicate Jewish origin.
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Owen Lattimore’s experience says much about McCarthyism, the China Lobby, and its relationship to Korea. It is forgotten that McCarthy began his attacks well before the Korean War, that Lattimore’s views on Korea were one of McCarthy’s central subjects, and that by June 1950 McCarthyism seemed to be losing its momentum—its capacity to establish “China” as an issue in American politics. McCarthy first attacked Lattimore indirectly on March 13, 1950, alleged a week later that he had found a “chief Russian spy,” and finally named Lattimore when information leaked from his committee. Beyond Lattimore stood Philip Jessup, “a dangerously efficient Lattimore front” (he was a professor of international law at Columbia then in the State Department), but ultimately his object was Acheson, whom McCarthy termed “the voice for the mind of Lattimore.”
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Acheson was his final target: Why? In part because by the spring of 1950 he was the last high official (besides Truman himself) standing between Chiang Kai-shek and the American backing he desperately needed to survive an impending Communist invasion.

In early April McCarthy claimed to have a document incriminating
Lattimore as a Soviet agent, prompting Lattimore to release it to the press—it was a memorandum he wrote for the State Department in August 1949, arguing that “the U.S. should disembarass itself as quickly as possible of its entanglements in South Korea.” Lattimore saw Korea as “little China,” and Rhee as another Chiang: If we could not win with Chiang, he said, how could we win with “a scattering of ‘little Chiang Kai-sheks’ in China or elsewhere in Asia”? Of greater moment, Lattimore’s memo also implicitly criticized the developing bureaucratic momentum in the summer and fall of 1949 for not just containing communism, but rolling it back:

In mid-May 1950 McCarthy again attacked the “Acheson Lattimore axis” (or, the “pied pipers of the Politburo”) on Korea policy, saying Lattimore’s plans for Korea would deliver millions to “Communist slavery.” Taking direct aim at the Nationalists’ principal antagonist, Acheson, he blared, “fire the headmaster who betrays us in Asia.”
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Lattimore’s fuller views on Korea were given in the fall of 1949 when the State Department called in experts to consult with them on a new Asian policy. Generally speaking, liberal scholars such as Lattimore, Cora DuBois, and John K. Fairbank tried to point out that the revolution sweeping much of East Asia was indigenous, the culmination of a century of Western and imperial impact. Conservative scholars such as William Colegrove, David Nelson Rowe, and Bernard Brodie sought instead to argue that Soviet machinations
were behind Asian communism. Liberals were dominant within scholarly circles, however, and in these meetings a consensus emerged, looking forward to the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC.

The United States should stand with progressive and liberal forces in Asia where they existed, Lattimore said, but should not place itself in the path of changes that were already faits accomplis, such as the Chinese revolution, which would be self-defeating and stupid. Meanwhile: “Korea appears to be of such minor importance that it tends to get overlooked, but Korea may turn out to be a country that has more effect upon the situation than its apparent weight would indicate.” After this prophetic mouthful, he argued that the ROK politically was “an increasing embarrassment,” an “extremely unsavory police state” where the

Once the war began, however, Lattimore expressed his support for the American intervention.
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In spite of the obviously political and mendacious nature of McCarthy’s witch hunt against Lattimore, within a few weeks major organs of opinion were already giving the classic formulation that enabled them to escape McCarthy’s gunsights: supporting Lattimore’s right to his opinions, but condemning them as irresponsible or extreme. In mid-April
The New York Times
singled out his “unsound” position on Korea; it found Lattimore’s view “quite shocking,” saying that the State Department had “rejected flatly
Mr. Lattimore’s advice to cut and run in Korea.”
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The historian Mary McAuliffe is right to say, “One of the major ironies of the period was the unexpected role which liberals played, first in constructing a new liberalism which rejected the American left, and then in accepting some of the basic assumptions and tactics of the Red Scare itself.”
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In the atmosphere of McCarthyism, the British author Godfrey Hodgson wrote, “Liberals were almost always more concerned about distinguishing themselves from the Left than about distinguishing themselves from conservatives.” Thus they joined “the citadel of … a conservative liberalism.” If the fear of being investigated had shown the intellectuals “the stick” in the early 1950s, “the hope of being consulted had shown them the carrot” thereafter. Being an influential client meant accepting the confines of one’s patronage.
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But in 1950, it was the stick that counted, and a mighty one it was.

Let’s say you supported North Korea or China in the war in Korea. What might an American citizen have faced if he or she demonstrated militantly in favor of that position? The United Nations determined that the invasion was a “breach of the peace,” wrote Morris Amchan (deputy chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials); it was therefore “aggressive and criminal.” Any person who thereafter would “substantially participate” on the North Korean side “must be charged with knowledge of the fact that he is participating in the waging of an aggressive war and illegal aggression.” All “high persons” doing this should be “held responsible before an international tribunal.”
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If you were a Korean or a Communist, mere pro–North Korean sentiments or mild protest brought a harsh penalty. The FBI investigated and deported several Koreans, permanent residents in the United States who were known as anti-Rhee leftists or who took the Northern side; the records are still classified on this, but it is alleged that some who were deported were subsequently executed in South Korea, and that others went to the North.
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The McCarran Internal Security Act, named for its sponsor, Patrick McCarran (D-Nevada)—the ignorant and corrupt inquisitor of China scholars, and the model for the senator in the film
The Godfather, Part II
—was passed on September 23, 1950, establishing among other things concentration camps for those construed as a threat to American security. Iconic liberals such as senators Paul Douglas (D-Illinois) and Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota) voted for it; a bipartisan coalition passed the bill.
U.S. News & World Report
published “rules for Communists” under the act: the government would not set up camps for Communists “right away.” But, once they existed, who would go into them? “Many Communists and fellow travelers. Others would be rounded up, too. Anybody could be held if considered dangerous to U.S. security.” The Ku Klux Klan would not count, however, because it lacked “connections with the Communists.”
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Readers who hasten to point out that no one was ever placed in the camps might recall that no one could have known that in September 1950.

Strangely enough, during the crisis occasioned by China’s intervention in Korea—what Truman deemed a “national emergency”—McCarthy and his allies were curiously quiet. Perhaps it was because of MacArthur’s palpable failure, or the enormous increases for defense spending happening under crypto-pink Democratic rather than patriotic Republican auspices. Or, it may simply have been that McCarthy was occupied with other matters. The Washington insider Drew Pearson had once again surfaced innuendos about McCarthy’s manhood, stirring an important but subterranean sexual politics that animated the capital. On December 13, Pearson’s fifty-third birthday, McCarthy cornered him in the cloakroom of the Sulgrave Club, kneed him twice in the groin in good Tailgunner Joe fashion, and slapped him to the floor. Whereupon Richard Nixon intervened: “Let a Quaker stop this fight.”
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The United States during this period is not to be compared with authoritarian states such as prewar Japan or Germany, or the Soviet Union. It remained open, over the long term, to a reversal of some of the worst excesses of the 1950s (although by no means all of them); the press was not muzzled and dissenters were not confined, unless they were the leaders of the Communist Party (and the Supreme Court later overturned their convictions under the Smith Act). But this is not really the point. Judged by the ideals America established for itself and its fight for freedom on a world scale, the early 1950s were a dark period indeed, a maximization of the potential for absolutist conformity that Tocqueville warned about. If critics were not shot or tortured, they nonetheless suffered loss of careers, ostracism, intense psychological pressures, and admonitions
to change their thoughts or be excluded from the spectrum of political acceptability. Tailgunner Joe was a good marksman: he left a generation of liberals looking over their shoulder to the right, fearing yet another case of mistaken identity.

President Truman signs declaration of National Emergency, December 1950.
U.S. National Archives

McCarthyism also served to draw attention away from the corruption and intrigue of high officials with the Nationalists and the China Lobby, including the filching of top-level secrets on behalf of a foreign government and U.S. agencies of justice working closely with sordid foreign secret police: in 1953, for example, the Justice Department worked with Willoughby, Ho Shih-lai, and Chiang Ching-guo on the cases of Lattimore and John Paton Davies—Chiang, of course, being the son of Chiang Kai-shek, with long experience in the KMT secret police. Perhaps most shocking, several of these investigations were faked.
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Through McCarthyism a narrow set of interests combined to achieve (not single-handedly, of course) the result of maintaining American-Taiwan ties for two decades, wrecking the careers of nearly all government officials who had spoken the truth about China, and enriching the pockets of numerous hangers-on. Congress and the Justice Department should have been investigating this, and perhaps still should; but McCarthy’s ferocious and wild attacks diverted attention all to the other direction.