4. IPR Files Discovered

The IPR was not formed originally for this purpose. It was organized in 1925 by a group of educators and businessmen interested in the social, economic and commercial problems of the Far East. There was a central body called the Pacific Council, which directed IPR's over-all policies. Grouped around it was a number of national councils representing the United States, France, England, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Russia. The Pacific Council was located in New York. The American Council was also in New York and the other national councils in their respective countries. The Pacific Council and the American Council occupied the same building and, working closely together, became the chief operating units.

The original purpose was sound—to create an agency to study the problems of the Pacific. But in time the Pacific and American Councils fell under the influence of men who sympathized with Red Russia and the Red Chinese. This is difficult to credit when one notes the names of those on the boards of trustees. Ray Lyman Wilbur, former President of Stanford University, was board chairman of the American Council. He was succeeded by Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California. On the board was a group of eminent Americans which included Admiral Yamell, Henry R. Luce, Juan Trippe and others as well known. An IPR booklet celebrating its respectability listed 26 great American business concerns as contributors, among them the Chase National Bank, Firestone Rubber Company, Standard Oil of California, Studebaker Corporation and others of the same caliber. The chief financial angels, however, were the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment. It can be said as a matter of fact that this costly operation against the peace and security of the United States was financed with funds provided by these two great foundations. For a public man seeking information about the Far East, where better could he go than to the organization behind this facade of rich and conservative sponsors?

However strange it might appear, while these eminent names were flaunted from the masthead of the vessel, down on the deck as well as on the bridge where the actual job of running the vessel was done, were a captain, mates and a crew utterly different from the eminent dupes whose names served as decoration and as decoy for the editors, politicians and officials who went to the IPR for information and counsel.

The executive director of this enterprise was eminently suited for his role. Dr. Edward C. Carter graduated from Harvard in 1900, enlisted in the YMCA secretariat and became chief of its operations in Europe in World War I. He joined forces with the IPR in 1926, first as assistant secretary of the Pacific Council and, after 1933, as executive director. The post called for a distinguished appearance, a scholarly make-up, and an imposing air of rectitude and benevolence. Carter had all these qualities and, in a high degree, that talent requisite above all—the ability to extract large contributions from rich men and women. He possessed not only the flair for dealing with his wealthy sponsors upon an exalted human plane, but also a highly developed capacity for intrigue which enabled him to inspire and direct that strange collection of writers in the corps of revolutionists under his command. He was above all—as was his corps of wandering apostles of mischief and change—a professional social remodeler. Under his calm, smiling, benevolent facade was a keen, resolute and industrious mind. His appearance on the witness stand before the McCarran Committee was a theatrical performance of the highest order—a masterpiece of evasion and amused tolerance, in striking contrast to the explosive ill-temper of the desperate Owen Lattimore as he felt the trap closing slowly around him.

We go back now to a moment in the excitement following the Korean invasion when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin stirred up a hornet's nest by his attack on Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Owen Lattimore and the IPR. This brought down on his head a stream of abuse of almost unprecedented violence. A Senate committee headed by former Senator Millard Tydings launched a so-called investigation of Senator McCarthy's charges. However, it investigated, not the McCarthy charges, but McCarthy himself, and ended by giving to Lattimore a clean bill of health and a severe denunciation of McCarthy. McCarthy in his first attack had called Lattimore a top Communist agent. He promptly withdrew that charge and said that Lattimore was a pro-Communist propagandist who had sought to promote Communist objectives in China.

It is possible that the full and complete proof of McCarthy's charge could never have been made but for an interesting incident. A young man in Massachusetts, who had followed the McCarthy controversy, wrote a letter to the Senate Sub-Committee on Internal Security (the McCarran Committee), telling of an immense cache of IPR files hidden away in an old barn on the estate of Dr. Carter, IPR director. Armed with the necessary legal warrants, the McCarran Committee seized these files. Its staff spent months examining them, after which Dr. Carter and most of his IPR staff members were summoned and confronted with the incriminating evidence in these files. Their testimony, together with the exhibits from the impounded files, is now available in the reports of the Senate committee. Here, then, is a mass of evidence unavailable when the Tydings Committee made its whitewash of Lattimore and the IPR.

These documents, along with the testimony of various witnesses, make it possible now to reveal completely the machinations of Carter, Lattimore and nearly two score members of the IPR staff and the associates of these persons. Their purpose was nothing less than an ambitious design, which succeeded beyond their fondest expectations, to deliver China and Korea into the hands of the Communist revolutionaries in China as a prelude to turning Asia into a Red continent. It is difficult to believe, but the evidence now leaves no doubt about the soundness of the charges.