Acheson Denies Professor Drew Up Far East Policy

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23219, 3 April 1950, Page 7

Acheson Denies Professor Drew Up Far East Policy

WASHINGTON, Mar. 31. Thß Secretary of State, Mr. Dean Acheson, said today that Professor Owen Lattimore, professor of the John Hopkins University, was not the architect of the United States Far Eastern policy as charged by the Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Senator McCarthy had said at the Senate hearings on his charges of Communist infiltration of the State Department that Professor Lattimore had been a Soviet agent while acting as consultant to the State Department -on Far Eastern Affairs. Mr. Acheson said the records showed that, from October 1943 to February, 1946, Professor Lattimore had been an economic adviser to the reparations mission to Japan but he had not been responsible to the State Department. Mr. Acheson added that, apart from two speaking engagements with the Foreign Services Institute and a roundtable discussion at the State Department. Professor Lattimore had no connection with the State Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation today received the documents which McCarthy said yesterday would prove >his charges against Professor Lattimore. The officials would not say whether Senator McCarthy’s documents contained information not previously known to the F. 8.1. In the House today Mr. Charles Halleck struck back at President Truman Who asserted yesterday that Senator Mc,Carthy and other Republican critics 7 ef • the State Department were the Kremlin’s best assets in the United I: States.

Mr Halleck said: “President Truman fa telling the American people 'Fill your fire extinguishers with gasoline and you’ll be safe’.” Senator Robert Taft, the Republican domestic policy leader, said in a speech ,at Portland. Maine: ‘The only way to 'Set rid of the Communists in the State Department is to change the head of the Government.” Senator Taft, who was addressing the Maine Republican State convention, said that a change should take place in 1952 with the election of a Rcpub lican President.