Chinagate

• JUNE 1978 $1.25 Ebeling, Also: Jeff Riggenbach, Ri(~hard Murray Rothbard, Walter Grincler, Tom G. Palmer, Jonathan Marshall, Rcllph Raico the effects of the drug itself may help define it: if the drug works, the problem must be the ailment for which the drug was indicated; if it doesn't, try something else, or try several drugs at once, or increase the dosage until the patient is stupefied. In short, the drugs are a means of control. And control is precisely, in the last analysis, what Schrag, what Gross, what Szasz, what the culture generally, has found so objectionable about the "happiness engineering" of the 1970s. Drugs are a nteans of control. And in the last analysis, control is precisely what Schrag, what Gross, what Szasz, what the culture generally has found to be so objectionable in the 1970s' "happiness engineering." Bestsellers like This Perfect Day, hit films like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," hit science fiction nQvels like Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang - they all signify the same fear that Huxley was right, the same culture-wide suspicion of "helping professionals" who get most of their funding from the government and are now more numerous than the police. As Schrag puts it: "The mental-hearth system has become a form of control impinging on the whole society. By defining deviance as illness and deviants as cases, it teaches everyone that its standards of normative behavior rest not on moral authority, cultural tradition, or political fiat, but on a 'science' from which there is no appeal and against which there can be no rebellion." • Jelf Riggenbach l?f LR . June 1978 lS contributing editor Chinagate by Jonathan Marshall The Committee of One Million: "China Lobby" Politics, 1953-1971, by Stanley D. Bachrack. Columbia University Press, 371 pp., $14.95. "Koreagate," the latest of Washington's tragi-comic scandals, with hundreds of thousands of dollars passed in unmarked envelopes to scores of congressmen, has once again drawn our jaded attention to the political machinations of agents for foreign powers. In the early 1960s, short-lived Congressional inquiries into corrupt lobbyists for Caribbean dictators Rafael Trujillo and Anastasio Somoza threatened the careers of several prominent politicians, until the investigations were brought to hasty conclusions. A decade earlier, news headlines bruited discoveries about the powerful China Lobby, and exposed the brazen intervention of Nationalist China into American politics. Nowadays, with its leading figures dead or fossilized, it is hard to take the China Lobby quite seriously. Certainly it expired, unofficially, when Nixon made his triumphant visit to China in 1972. Conservatives were quick to abandon their old loyalties: the late Joseph Alsop, a perennial prophet of famine and revolution in China, finally went there and discovered paradise; Gerald Ford praised the way China disciplines its youth; and James Schlesinger led the calls for closer military cooperation with China to contain the Soviet Union. This ignominious end to the China Lobby obscures the influential role it played in the 1950s in promoting a rigid policy of hostility towards the People's Republic of China (PRC). The China Lobby was not a tiny conspiracy, but a broad pressure group, including Chinese diplomats with bulging bank accounts and their paid agentsjournalists and wealthy publicists, retired diplomats, and above all, an impressive array of senators and congressmen. According to Ross Koen, the group's first, and best, historian, this lobby had two distinct elements: an inner core, often motivated by self- interest, "which consistently supported and pursued the interests of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang"; and ideologically motivated "affiliates who were increasingly allied to the Chiang regime in their sYmpathies." Together, these groups exploited the public's fear of communism to eliminate all critics of the Chiang regime from positions of policy influence, and to stifle debate on China policy. There can be no doubt that this well-organized lobby, with the aid of a politically partisan Republican Party, McCarthyism, and the Korean War, scored a major political triumph. Where Koen looked at the lobby as a whole, Bachrack now focuses on an organization around which many of Chiang's American friends coalesced: the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations (COM). COM's success in Congress best reflects the extent of its influence. On its steering committee sat John W. McCormack, the House minority whip (and later Speaker); John Sparkman, now chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and H. Alexander Smith, chairman of the Senate Far East subcommittee. The signers of its 1953 petition to President Eisenhower against admission of the PRC to the U.N. (which would "destroy the prestige and the position of the United States and of the Free World in Asia"), included Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, Warren Magnuson, and 50 other members of Congress, as well as governors, generals, businessmen, labor and religious leaders, publishers, and journalists. The COM's congressional success owed much to the resourcefulness of its president, Congo Walter H. Judd (RMinn.), a former missionary whose fervent support for Taiwan impressed his colleagues. But much of the credit must go to COM's enormously energetic secretary, Marvin Liebman, who was once called "the best single action-group organizer on the far right today"everything from the American Emergency Relief Committee on the Panama Canal to Young Americans for Freedom. Liebman organized the COM's huge petition drives (the first million signers of its petition gave the COM its name) to maintain pressure on Congress 35 and the administration. Few in Congress, remembering the hysteria of the McCarthy era, were willing to risk antagonizing militantly pro-Taiwan constituents organized by the COM, which accounts for the bipartisan support it attracted throughout the 1950s. Bachrack's workmanlike history of COM organizational efforts and activities, while not inspired, is capable; his use of Marvin Liebman's incomplete office files provides rich documentation of an effective pressure group in action. But his book will undoubtedly attract more interest for his charges concerning the committee's origins. "No longer," he concludes, "is it farfetched to hypothesize that the Committee may have been conceived as a small, covert [CIA] domestic propaganda operation designed to stiffen American resistance to any conciliatory diplomatic move toward the People's Republic of China." What evidence does Bachrack have for this alarming suggestion? He shows that the COM was spawned in a secret executive session of Walter Judd's subcommittee on Far Eastern Affairs, following testimony by a mysterious French "expert on psychological warfare," Count Nicholas de Rochefort. De Rochefort had previously sent C.D. Jackson, special assistant to President Eisenhower, a plan for "an offensive action of psychological warfare . . . opposed to the entry of Red China to the U.S." De Rochefort's interest in psychological warfare, a cryptic hint that he may have been known to the ass, and the fact that neither the CIA nor Judd's former subcommittee will reveal information about him lead Bachrack to wonder whether he was not really the agent of "a covert CIA domestic political operation." But Bachrack's evidence sometimes works against him. Jackson (who was White House adviser on psychological warfare, a fact Bachrack nowhere mentions) , threw cold water on de Rochefort's proposal: "I feel that it is not something I could possibly become interested or involved in . . . ." And why did Jackson need to inform the CIA director of de Rochefort's approach, if the plan originated in the CIA to begin with? The fact that the CIA now refuses to disclose whether de Rochefort was ever an agent simply reflects an under- June 1978 standable agency policy never to confirm or deny such speculations. Bachrack leaves us with hints and speculations instead of probing into the complexities of CIA policy towards the China question. It is clear, for example, that one CIA faction, probably composed of old ass liberals, concluded that Chiang Kai-shek's hopelessly corrupt bureaucratic dictatorship would not serve U. S. interests in Asia and Bachrack leaves us with speculations instead of probing the cOnlplexities of CIA policy towards the China question. ought to be abandoned. Some of the major revelations against the China Lobby were produced by men close to the CIA, such as Richard Horton of Reporter magazine, who was CIA station chief in Paris in the late 1940s, and Alfred Friendly of the Washington Post, a World War II intelligence veteran who also worked in Paris in the late 1940s (out of an office inhabited by numerous CIA agents, including E. Howard Hunt). Moreover, China Lobby leaders frequently grumbled that the CIA was actively backing "third force" leaders in Hong Kong, such as Li Tsung-jen, against the interests of Taiwan. But with the onset of the Korean War came growing national hostility towards the PRC, and a new commitment to Taiwan. Undoubtedly the CIA, although liberal by Washington standards, reflected the changing mood. It is at this point that we can begin to see major CIA operations mounted against the PRC, both abroad (such as the notorious mainland raids organized by "Western Enterprises, Inc." on Taiwan), and, more importantly for this discussion, on the home front. Several organizations, which Bachrack lists as active in pro-Nationalist propaganda, smell strongly of a CIA presence. For example, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China included as vice-chairman General William Donovan, wartime head of ass who continued to work actively with the CIA in Asia during the 1950s; while Jay Lovestone, a top CIA labor organizer active in Southeast Asia, sat on the board of directors. Another leading China Lobby organization, the Committee on National Affairs, included on its executive committee Cord Meyer, who recently served as CIA station chief in London. These CIA links to domestic propaganda organizations are themselves solid enough evidence to merit a congressional inquiry. But even the Committee of One Million had important CIA links, beyond those hypothesized about de Rochefort. In particular, Liebman, Judd, and Harold Oram, the COM's fundraiser and public relations expert (who employed Liebman), all were experts at raising money from CIA friends to fi- Div...si l 1l ITired of the same old line, out in the same old [handed I ,form? You need a change. You need the monthly review published by libertarian activists for libertarian activists. Everybody needs a little Div...sil1l Subscribe now: $5 a year 199 Dolores St. #7 San Francisco, CA 94111 Published by the Libertarian Party of San Francisco 37 nance anticommunist activities abroad and at home. Together, for example, they organized in 1952 Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (ARCI), sponsored by many of the same people who backed COM. Its purpose was to aid, and publicize the plight of, Chinese intellectuals who fled the mainland. ARCI was in constant touch with the Psychological Strategy Board, set up under Truman to oversee all CIA psychological warfare operations. And the CIA gave the ARCI its initial funding (as well as more later on). ARCI executive chairman Christopher Emmet admitted in a private letter that "Dram's contact in Washington, who works for the [CIA's] Free Asia Does the CIA share responsibility for initiating Alllerica's disastrous policies towards both China and Vietnalll? ACUE suggests just how close he was to the CIA. ARCI was more than a foreign CIA operation; it had an important domestic role as well. Christopher Emmet pointed to "the educational importance of this project in making Americans more aware of the Chinese anti-Communist cause. . . . The reason is that the humanitarian appeal for relief incidentally permits giving all the political facts about persecution, etc. . . . It does not invite argument and attack as in the case of direct political propaganda, however right it may be." Thus, through ARCI, the CIA was "incidentally" financing domestic political propaganda. The same was true of the Crusade for Freedom campaign which raised money for the CIA's Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe. Given Oram's central role as fundraiser for the COM, along with Liebman and Judd, is there not cause indeed to suspect some CIA role in the Committee's propaganda campaign against the PRC? This question, which .cannot now be answered, raises a host of other in triguing questions about the scope of CIA political intervention at home, which go far beyond the revelations of Operation CHAOS and domestic drug experiments. For example, did the CIA back the American Friends of Vietnam, the potent lobby for U.S. intervention in Vietnam? (AFV, well-stocked with CIA connected individuals, included Dram as fundraiser; he was at the same time a lobbyist for the Diem regime). Does the CIA, therefore, share responsibility for initiating America's disastrous policies towards both China and Vietnam? As Bachrack suggests, this kind of speculation is no longer far-fetched. We have learned enough about CIA crimes, and about the formulation of national policy in a climate of secrecy, to suspect the worst. But suspicion is no longer enough, and Bachrack's book, on top of everything else, is a welcome call for a serious investigation of how the American public is manipulated, and for an end to government secrecy. • Committee . . . got us the first $5,000 from them with which we started our work." However, Emmet noted shortly after the 1952 election, "Dram's contacts and connections were better under the Truman administration," which meant that Judd's contacts would have to pull more weight under Eisenhower. Thus when ARCI needed more money in 1953, one ARCI official wrote Judd, "Oram says that he will also contact his friends in the CIA, but he believes this should be in addition to your own call." In later years, Judd was in direct touch with Cord Meyer of the CIA, who took a personal interest in funding ARC!. It is perhaps also significant that in the first months of its formation, ARCI used the offices of the American Committee on United Europe, free of rent. ACUE, for which Oram also handled fundraising, Jonathan Marshall is a Marshall Scholar was wholly controlled and organized by at Sussex University, and has written for the CIA (several of whose top executives Inquiry, Pacific Research, and The sat on its board). Oram's work for Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. 38 New Mises translations by Richard Ebeling On the Manipulation of Money and Credit, by Budwig von Mises. Free Market Books, 296 pp., $14.00. Two thousand years ago, the ancient Chinese historian Ssu-Ma Ch'ien discussed the monetary policy of Emperor Wu-ti (155-87 B.C.). Ssu-Ma Ch'ien explained that, "The entire wealth and resources of the nation were exhausted in the service of the ruler, yet he found them insufficient." His appetite not satisfied, Emperor Wu-ti turned to monetary debasement and as "coins became more numerous and of poorer quality, goods became scarcer and higher in price." "The purpose of currency is to provide a medium of exchange between farmers and merchants," Ssu-Ma Ch'ien argued. But in the hands of the government, "it is subject to all kinds of clever manipulation." Analyzing the debasement of the British currency in the 1600's, the 19th century liberal and historian Thomas B. Macaulay was even stronger in his conclusions. "[I]t may be doubted," Macaulay charged, "whether all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings." The twentieth century has suffered from the same monetary plague that has rained ruin upon countless others since the beginning of recorded history. Excessive wage demands by trade unions are satisfied by monetary increases to pay the higher money wages; the decline in some American prices that would normally follow a relative rise in the price of oil imports is prevented through monetary expansion; minimum wage laws and union restrictions generate unemployment, and public works jobs are created for the victims by federal deficit spending-financed, once again, through monetary expansion; favors and subsidies are promised to special in- Libertarian Review