D URING the recent inquiry into charges of Communist infiltra- tion of the State Department, Dr. Owen Lattimore made a number of LATTIMORE: statements to the Tydings Committee and the press, flatly denying that he had ever been friendly to commu- nism, let alone an agent or spy as charged by Senator Joseph McCar- thy and others. Now he has brought together and elaborated these state- ments into a small book: Ordeal by Slander.* Dr. Lattimore presents his narra- tive as a black-and-white political morality play. His accusers figure (in his wife's words) as "the powers of darkness," bent on frameup and not beyond the arts of forgery. His friends and defenders, including sev- eral Communists, figure as angels of light, sometimes "stubborn" but al- ways "sincere." For himself he re- serves the role of a latterday Job, the truth-seeking savant afflicted and badgered by hysterical witch-hunters. The book, of course, cannot be considered in a vacuum, on its own merits-as most reviewers have done. A judgment based solely on the au- thor's testimony makes as little sense DREYFUS as the premature judgments of cer- tain jubilant souls after Alger Hiss first testified before the House Com- mittee on Un-American Activities. Guilty or innocent, a Dreyfus or a Hiss, Dr. Lattimore's role in the Asian debacle has been intricately OR HISS? woven into larger affairs: the organ- ized propaganda that "sold" the Chi- nese Communists to Americans as reformers independent of Moscow; the Amerasia scandal; the Institute of Pacific Relations, infiltrated by key Communists, which during criti- cal years supplied personnel and By Eugene Lyons guidance to government agencies. Author of "The Red Decade" The current American plight in and "Assignment in Utopia" Asia is at least a partial consequence of blundering policies geared to mis- understanding and tolerance of the Chinese Communists, tragic temporiz- ing, calculated appeasements of the Soviet Union and its fifth columns Little, Brown. 236 pp. $2.75.