National Affairs: The China Lobby

Just when cooler heads in the Administration had about decided to forget the whole thing, up jumped Connecticut’s Democratic Brien McMahon last week to wave excitedly at an old dragon. Joined by Oregon’s Republican maverick, Wayne Morse, McMahon presented a resolution: the Foreign Relations Committee should spend $50,000 to find out whether any attempt had been made by any group representing Nationalist China to influence U.S. foreign policy since Pearl Harbor.

What McMahon was pointing at was the so-called “China Lobby.” He had issued his lookout’s cry once before, during the MacArthur hearing, when the Republicans were blasting the Administration’s Far East policy. McMahon had countered with dark charges of the sinister efforts of a “China Lobby” to draw the U.S. into Chiang Kai-shek’s camp.

What did the dragon look like? In the Communist Daily Worker, where the words were first flung, and in such papers as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York Post, which gave them happy credence and currency, it was a sinister conspiracy, nourished on Chinese Nationalist gold and spouting un-Americanisms. It was so sinister, in fact, that the Communist Party, in its secret directive of 1949, ordered the faithful to hammer away at the propagandistic phrase.

The man most often named as the archconspirator is Alfred Kohlberg, New York importer, stoutly pro-Nationalist and antiCommunist, who passed some of the ammunition to Senator Joe McCarthy in McCarthy’s assault on the State Department. Others accused of being co-conspirators include private U.S. citizens, publishers, Congressmen (chiefly Walter Judd, ex-missionary to China), Senators (chiefly California’s Knowland and New Hampshire’s Bridges). It was yet to be shown that they had done anything sinister. Principally, they were concerned in saving China from Communism. In this they have some potent allies, ranging in the Senate from Ohio’s Robert Taft to Illinois’ Paul Douglas.

The McMahon-Morse resolution will probably not get far. Last week Foreign Relations committeemen took off for Europe to look into the foreign-aid program. They still have to get out a bill on the program. A number of McMahon’s colleagues indicated a singular lack of interest. This is unfortunate, since McMahon’s dragon will just be left out in the tall grass, there to flourish on fiction, undisturbed by fact.