[2] During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on U.S. policy toward Asia.

[2] In the early post-war period of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, American wartime "China Hands" were accused of being agents of the Soviet Union or under the influence of Marxism.

In 1988 Chen Han-shen, a member of the Sorge spy ring, mentioned in his memoirs that Lattimore placed a request for a Chinese assistant through Comintern channels.

The most important and lasting influence, however, was Arnold J. Toynbee and his treatment of the great civilizations as organic wholes which were born, matured, grew old, and died.

After being schooled at home by his mother, he left China at the age of twelve and attended Collège Classique Cantonal near Lausanne, Switzerland.

[6] The managers of his firm saw no advantage in subsidizing his travels but did send him to spend a final year of employment with them in Beijing as government liaison.

[citation needed] Upon his return to America in 1928, he received a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council for further travel in Manchuria, then for the academic year 1928/1929 as a student at Harvard University.

IPR secretary Edward Carter was eager to solicit the participation of Soviet scholars, and insisted that Lattimore meet him in Moscow on his way back to the States.

But he was also wary because of the attacks Soviet scholars had made on him – Lattimore's "scholasticism is similar to Hamlet's madness" – and for publishing an article by Harold Isaacs, who they considered a Trotskyite.

The Lattimores spent two weeks on the Trans-Siberian Railroad with their five-year-old son before arriving in Moscow for a two-week stay toward the end of March 1936.

Lattimore's request to visit the Mongolian People's Republic was denied on the grounds that "Mongolia now is constantly ready for war and conditions are very unstable."

Owen visited the Communist headquarters at Yan'an to act as translator for T. A. Bisson and Philip Jaffé, who were gathering material for Amerasia, an activist journal of political commentary.

Owen spent six months in Berkeley, California, writing a draft of the Inner Asian Frontiers of China and continuing as editor of Pacific Affairs.

As editor of Pacific Affairs he was expected to maintain a balance, but writing in another journal in the spring of 1940 he urged that "Above all, while we want to get Japan out of China, we do not want to let Russia in.

The following year in 1940, the Japanese were defeated militarily by the Kuomintang Muslim General Ma Hongbin, who caused the plan to collapse.

[14][15] In Suiyuan 300 Mongol collaborators serving the Japanese were fought off by a single Muslim who held the rank of Major at the Battle of Wulan Obo in 1939 April.

[16] Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Lattimore to serve as US advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek for one and a half years.

His advice was mostly disregarded by Chiang's officials, as defense secretary Wang Ch'ung-hui suspected Lattimore of understating Soviet interference in Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia.

[19] During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day landings, Wallace and his delegates stayed 25 days in Siberia and were given a tour of the Soviet Union's Magadan Gulag camp at Kolyma.

In a travelogue for National Geographic, Lattimore described what little he saw as a combination of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Tennessee Valley Authority, remarking on how strong and well-fed the inmates were and ascribing to camp commandant Ivan Nikishov "a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility".

[24][25][26] In March 1950, in executive session of the Tydings Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the top Soviet agent, either in the US, in the State Department, or both.

[27] The committee, chaired by Senator Millard Tydings, was investigating McCarthy's claims of widespread Soviet infiltration of the State Department.

When the accusation was leaked to the press, McCarthy backed off from the charge that Lattimore was a spy but continued the attack in public session of the committee and in speeches.

Budenz said his party superiors had told him that Lattimore's "great value lay in the fact that he could bring the emphasis in support of Soviet policy in non-Soviet language.

Nicholas Poppe, a Russian émigré and a scholar of Mongolia and Tibet, resisted the committee's invitation to label Lattimore a Communist but found some of his writings superficial and uncritical.

[citation needed] The most damaging testimony came from Karl August Wittfogel, supported by his colleague from the University of Washington, George Taylor.

John K. Fairbank, in his memoirs, suggests that Wittfogel may have said this because he had been made to leave Germany for having views unacceptable to the powers that be, and he did not want to make the same mistake twice.

[32] In 1952, after 17 months of study and hearing, involving 66 witnesses and thousands of documents, the McCarran Committee issued its 226-page, unanimous final report.

Lattimore's defenders, such as his lawyer Abe Fortas, claimed that the discrepancies were caused by McCarran deliberately asking questions about arcane and obscure matters that took place in the 1930s.

[41] Prominent figures in the anti-Communist American political left offered mixed evaluations of Lattimore's legacy in foreign policy.