A half-century after he faced serious charges of being a Soviet operative within the U.S. government, sixteen years after his death at age 89, Owen Lattimore has returned to the public arena - sort of.
On an episode of ABC's Commander-In-Chief last night, President MacKenzie Allen is grappling with an international crisis involving a U.S. submarine carrying vital intelligence that is stuck in North Korean sea boundaries. As North Korea rattles its military saber and threatens war over the incident, America's first woman president calls in her official family and outsider advisers - among them a professor she has known for twenty years named "Owen Latimer."
While not a major player in the deliberations over the crisis, Prof. Latimer cautiously advises against any strong military action on the U.S. part and is taken aback when the Republican Speaker of the House Nathan Templeton (played as deliciously Machiavellian by Donald Sutherland) suggests that if an engagement with North Korean troops ensued, "We’d be in Pyongyang in a week." As it turns out, President Allen (whose portrayal won Geena Davis the Golden Globe for “Best Actress” the night before) averts war with a cash donation of half-a-billion dollars to North Korea and a public apology; Pyongyang, in turn, permits rescue ships to come in their waters to bring the submarine crew home.
(By way of disclosure, Tuesday night is Commander in Chief night in our home. Although I don’t necessarily embrace "Mac" Allen's seemingly liberal politics, I do enjoy the way the former independent congresswoman and vice president deals with political rivals and supporters and the portrayal of some very strong characters - particularly Sutherland’s speaker and Peter Coyote as retired Gen. Warren Keaton, the blunt-spoken opponent to Allen for vice president in the last election whom she has named to fill the vice presidential vacancy created when the President died and "Mac" moved up; it goes without saying I love the scenes in the White House Press Room and the questioning by actors who look strikingly like Helen Thomas, the grande dame of the press room, and April Ryan, the combative reporter for the American Urban Network.)
In applying the name of Latimer (which is how Lattimore’s name was incorrectly spelled in some of the early transcripts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, including Whittaker Chambers' first appearance before HCUA on August 3, 1948), Commander In Chief writer Stephen Boccho has raised some questions among the history buffs in his audience. Although script writers have had fun bringing in names from the outside for characters on the small screen (one of the major writers for the 1960's Batman series, the late Stanley Ralph Ross, created a reporter named "Ballpoint Baxter" after his own nickname, "Ballpoint"), it does seem a little unusual to bring back someone whose apparent service for an enemy power was a premier topic of a congressional investigation more than fifty years ago.
A John Hopkins University professor, the real-life Owen Lattimore spent his youth in China and came to be an expert on the country - one of the State Department's "China Hands" in the 1940s who came to believe that Mao and the Red Chinese were the best hope for the Chinese people. His close friend and ally within Roosevelt's White House, Lauchlin Currie, was a Soviet agent, as declassified documents now show. In writings about Russia, he took a strong pro-USSR stance and, in fact, sent a memo to the Institute for Pacific Relations, a liberal think that published his magazine Pacific Affairs: "For the USSR - back their international policy in general but without using their slogans and above all without getting them or anybody else the impression of subservience." On Currie's advice, Lattimore hired a KGB collaborator named Michael Greenberg as his assistant at the magaizine and then Chen Han-Shen, a Red Chinese spy, as his co-editor. In 1950, a Senate committee chaired by Sen. Millard Tydings (D.-Md.) found that there was nothing incriminating in the FBI files of Lattimore, then a key adviser to the State Department. More than forty years later, pundit M. Stanton Evans read from Lattimore’s now-declassified file in researching his forthcoming book on Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisc) and his investigation into Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. The FBI file, according to Evans, said in 1941 that Lattimore was a Communist who should be detained in the event of a national emergency. Currie, [Foreign Service officer and alleged Soviet agent] John Stewart Service, and Lattimore all maneuvered cutting off aid to Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist forces and leading to a triumph in 1949 for Mao's Communists.
A strange person to name a character after, indeed - particularly one advising the president in an international crisis?
Could Boccho be setting fans up for a black eye for President Allen when the private deal of money-for-rescue with the North Korean becomes public - and "Latimer" is found to be a double agent? Stay tuned, fans.
