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Illusions Die Hard. The diplomats, says Utley, were buttressed by "a minority of writers, professors and lecturers representing the pro-Chinese Communist views of the State Department." Upon many of these publicists, "Yenan, the Chinese Communist capital, exerted a fatal fascination." The proCommunist, or anti-Nationalist, coterie in the 1940's "enjoyed what amounted to a closed shop in the book-reviewing field . . . Week after week, and year after year, most books on China were reviewed by [the same people] with the same point of view." They included Owen Lattimore; Theodore (Thunder Out of China) White and his collaborator Annalee Jacoby; the late Richard Lauterbach (Danger from the East); John K. Fairbank, history professor at Harvard, and Nathaniel Peffer, professor of international relations at Columbia (both longtime apologists for
Communist China); and Edgar (Red Star over China) Snow, who wrote in 1944: "The fact is, there has never been any Communism in China even in Communist areas." Others who plugged that line:
ANNA LOUISE STRONG, who, although expelled from the Soviet Union (TIME, Feb. 28, 1949), continues to extol the Chinese Communist "People's Democracy."
T. A. BISSON, of the Foreign Policy Association, a leading advocate of the theory that Communist China should "more accurately be called Democratic China."
MAXWELL STEWART, who as an editor of the Nation wrote in 1944 that the Chinese Communists attracted all "progressive and peace loving Chinese."
Utley's conclusion: "Illusions die hard, especially when reputations depend upon their preservation . . . Those who direct United States foreign policy still nurture illusions . . . They have finally turned against Soviet Russia because of Moscow's obvious and implacable hostility to the United States. But ... a lingering belief that Communism is a progressive force when not perverted by Stalin still. . . . prevents the adoption of a realistic Far Eastern policy ... As Confucius said: 'A man who knows he has committed a mistake and does not correct it is committing another mistake.' "