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Rebuttal. At week's end, Owen Lattimore got back to the U.S. to face his accuser, after sputtering indignant rebuttals at every airport between Afghanistan and New York. In Manhattan, at a press conference, he categorically denied the whole McCarthy indictment, whether McCarthy meant to accuse him of being a spy, or a Communist or just as a foreign-policy adviser. Said Lattimore:
"I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party or a Communist sympathizer ... If anybody has sworn that I have been or am a member of the Communist Party, he is a perjurer . . .
"No one," added Lattimore, "likes to be splattered with mud, even by a madman." This week, before the Senate's investigating subcommittee, he would get his chance to scrape it off.