Professor Owen Lattimore retired from his battles with Joe McCarthy last summer with his guns still smoking. His parting shot was a pamphleteering book entitled Ordeal by Slander. In it, he pictured himself as a simple scholar who was all but martyred by McCarthy's overblown charges that Lattimore was "the architect" of U.S. Far Eastern policy and a "top Russian espionage agent." Lattimore's last chapter warned that McCarthyism was undermining U.S. scholarship and morals.
Last week there was no evidence to indicate that Lattimore was either a spy or the architect of U.S. foreign policy,...