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scholar, was a different story. McCarthy, after all, had singled out Lat–
timore as a major Soviet spy-"Alger Hiss's boss," he called him.
Indeed, the Senator went so far as to claim that he would "stand or fall"
on his case against Lattimore, whom he called the "top Soviet espionage
agent in the United States." Later he would back down, and say that
perhaps he had "placed too much stress on the question of whether he
is a paid espionage agent," since the real issue was "his position of
tremendous power in the State Department as the 'architect' of our Far
Eastern policy."
Lattimore fought back, appearing willingly before the Senate to
answer the charges. In so doing, he gained the support and backing of
most of the liberal community. As Lattimore's most recent biographer,
Robert P. Newman, has written, "in truth [Lattimore] had [no influ–
ence] whatsoever"; hence the claim that his policies had led to the "loss
of China" were nothing less than preposterous. The eulogy, written by
Newman, is perhaps the judgment most held at present. According to
him, Lattimore was right in most of his observations; "his track record
is remarkable." And Newman concludes that he was "right to hold"
both McCarthy and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in con–
tempt, since it was "accumulating perhaps the greatest mass of lies and
perjuries ever assembled in the halls of Congress." And he attributes
Lattimore's "refusal to knuckle under, confess imagined sins, or run
away" as the factor that perhaps "stiffened the spines of others under
attack. "
While the attacks on Lattimore were taking place, first from
McCarthy and later from the Senate committee chaired by Nevada's
Senator Pat McCarran, the anti-Communist liberal intellectuals
responded quite differently. Once again, Diana Trilling looked at the
record, and concluded that evidence introduced proved that Lattimore
"consistently and consciously undertook to do what the Soviet Union
wanted done" in his editorial capacity at the Institute for Pacific Rela–
tions (IPR). True, she wrote, he was not a "spy or an agent or even a
member of the Communist Party." He was, however, "something far
more dangerous," an individual who served Communist policy while
appearing to be independent. She wrote that he was an honest and inde–
pendent thinker "whose idealism just happened to coincide with Russ–
ian realism." As an intellectual herself, Mrs. Trilling realized that her
observations provided a dilemma. One could not legislate those such as
Lattimore out of existence, "without simultaneously legislating true
independence of thought out of existence too." Her point was, rather,
