“I believe you can ask almost any school child who the architect of our far eastern policy is, and he will say ‘Owen Lattimore.’ †– Joseph McCarthy
                Washington, D.C. Isabel Ward, Administrative Assistant to Owen Lattimore,   Deputy Director for Pacific Operations. Far East Section, Overseas Branch, Office of War Information
Thanks to the Library of Congress digitising the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographs we can view this picture of Owen Lattimore’s Administrative Assistant Isabel Ward, complete with Lattimore snapshot in the upper right corner.
After his period advising Chiang Kai-Shek, Lattimore was in charge of US propaganda for the Pacific Theatre.
Often cited, little understood, Venona was an American effort to decode 1940s Soviet espionage cables which was only declassified in the 1990s. Oodles of agent and contact names poured forth, and the McCarthy-Was-Right industry got new tires.
Owen Lattimore is  dragged into this fanciful historicizing, usually via the formula that Venona proves there were Soviet agents, which resembles McCarthy’s claims, then a quick dash back to the McCarran Committee’s crackpot theories for the “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” money quote.
But just as Lattimore became McCarthy’s top Soviet agent in the State Department without actually working there, in this world he’s proven guilty by the Venona papers, dispite never appearing in them.
Diana West supplies this week’s “McCarthy Was Right” entry, with a spirited version of a beloved old chestnut:
new evidence proves Lattimore was guilty of something all along!
West has a book review/interview with our old pal Stanton Evans, who paired with the tireless Herbert Romerstein recycled his Blacklisted By HistoryMcCarthy apologia into an exciting new package:  Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government.
The usual lies have been assembled, especially our favorite, that Owen Lattimore caused Pearl Harbor:
“Thus did the policies promoted in official U.S. circles by [Harry Dexter] White, [Lauchlin] Currie, and [Owen] Lattimore dovetail with those advanced by the [Richard] Sorge-[Hotsumi] Ozaki network in Japan – all converging toward the result that there would be no American-Japanese rapprochement and, even more to the point, no Japanese attack on Russia.â€Â
Owen did it by sending FDR a memo, single-handedly causing the wily plutocrat to drop talks with Japan and drift into war.
This sort of stuff used to be left to the openly crazed, but you work with what you have.
Especially fun is West and Evans bemoaning their inability to move the public with spy tales:
 Which particular rocks these two live under is unclear, but even liberal fever wet dream The West Wing covered this territory. Who can forget the  sprightly episode where “Sam” [pretty boy Rob Lowe] is devastated to learn that a dead accused liberal commie spy was GUILTY!
Possibly feeding the insane rage causing right-wingers to sputter “New McCarthyism” when called out on things they’ve really said, a tiresome Internet meme slandering McCarthy is in endless circulation.
A new low in the crusade against “New McCarthyism,” the shape-shifting menace that means whatever you want it to mean. Â Now even Nazis are whining about it!
Why “New?” Because Irony! Â The clowns rolling out the “New McCarthyism” want to spruce up your granddad’s tired old McCarthyism in order to attack the Left, or what they pretend to see as the Left, by accusing them of using the old red baiters toolkit. Â Their examples are usually come from toothless halfwits as opposed to Senate Committee Chairmen, but we must not waver in the fight.
Let’s savor the Post’s Have You No Decency Of Today:
Pretty much content and context free “problem solving” like Rowland’s requires magical bipartisan fairies to come together, and for that to occur you’ve got to absolve office holders of complicity in McCarthyism & Groverism.
Writing of course for the Huffington Post, Rowland finds that much Republican  anti-tax rhetoric  been insincere!  All the while apparently they were  prisoners of Grover Norquist’s “simple, clean narrative,” but now everything’s going to be great! Lions of the Senate like Saxby Chambliss have dropped hints they might like some new money in the till, and Rowland proclaims an new Era of Good Feeling.