If they want to investigate something rotten at Cornell, let them do a complete review of the pro-Hanoi studies production of Prof. George McT. Kahin’s Indochina Studies Group.
In fact, check Kahin’s Red Chinese contacts going back to Indonesia in the 1950’s if not earlier. There is one journalist who knows where the red skeletons are buried.
Hanoi’s top “genocide/Hue Massacre/Bloodbath Theory” denier, Gareth D. Porter, was Kahin’s prize leftist with his “Myth of the Bloodbath” about what happened in No. Vietnam during Ho’s “Land Reform” programs from 1954-56, where he slaughtered tens of thousands, or more, of his own peasants who didn’t want his communist “reform” and devastation of their farming practices.
Others got printed in the Washington Post and/or New York Times during the war. Then they got their propaganda “Cambodian genocide” denying pieces published in leftwing magazines including the American Maoist-oriented “The Guardian” (Hildebrand and Gran, among others).
Yes, Cornell has produced very decent, honorable students in many fields, but their have also created “cancers against the truth” re the Vietnam/Indochina War which still poison minds today.
Those “cancers” must be exposed and expunged, just like they have done to Wansink. Otherwise, the “truth is still under attack” and Cornell will be complicate in its demise.
I recall looking at their slickly packaged crap back in the 70’s. They spun off something called the Indo-China air Power study to combine lots of real data with lying spin to prove the US was committing genocide by air on the Norks. That Kahin was recruited by the commies and had his career boosted by them doesn’t surprise me a bit. There are a number like him at Cornell and Berkeley who flourished in the same way.
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Luce’s choice of publishers was significant. Following his resignation from IVS, Luce had spent 1968 at Cornell, which was his alma mater. There he worked at Cornell’s Center for International Studies as a research assistant with the Center’s Project on International Relations of East Asia, credited in the preface to his book. In this capacity he interacted with an antiwar network centered around Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, directed by George McTurnan Kahin (usually referred to as George McT. Kahin). Kahin’s 1967 book The United States in Vietnam is cited on page 277 of Luce and Sommer’s book.
Kahin was a pivotal figure who stood at the nexus between the popular antiwar movement and its academic and political supporters. Before coming to Cornell in 1951, he had worked part-time as a journalist in Indonesia. There he asked Minister of Education Ali Sastroamidjojo to suggest a research assistant for him, and he was assigned Selo Soemardjan, secretary to Sultan Hamengku Buwono IX, who had been a leading figure in the Indonesian independence movement against the Dutch. Soemardjan introduced him to other political figures, most significantly President Sukarno. Kahin maintained his relationship with Sukarno until 1963 and invited Soemardjan to come study with him in the United States. Kahin’s academic attacks on Dutch colonialism led Dutch authorities to regard him as persona non grata and prompted the US State Department to withhold his passport from 1949 to 1954.
After returning to the US in 1949, Kahin became an instructor at Johns Hopkins University, where Asian studies specialist Owen Lattimore was Director of the Page School of International Relations. Lattimore’s FBI file includes an informant’s report on a private discussion Lattimore had about the Page School’s appointment of Kahin to research Indonesian nationalism. Lattimore mentioned that Kahin’s appointment was part of an effort to promote comparative work on nationalism in Asia, with Kahin to work on Indonesian nationalism, Chinese linguist John DeFrancis to work on Chinese nationalism, and an undesignated anthropologist or sociologist to be assigned to work on Mongolian nationalism (a field Lattimore later worked in).
Kahin and DeFrancis became research aides for Lattimore’s legal defense team after Lattimore was accused by Joseph McCarthy in 1950 of being “Moscow’s top spy” and “one of the principal architects of our Far Eastern policy”, allegations which remain controversial to this day even among anti-Communist historians. Two different Senate subcommittees reached conflicting conclusions about Lattimore, and subsequent research has not resolved the question of his precise relationship to Soviet intelligence. Declassified Soviet Venona cables do not directly settle this issue, implicating some of Lattimore’s associates but making no mention of Lattimore himself. US government documents pertinent to the case include over 8,000 pages of relevant FBI files and Senate testimony, which are still being digested by historians.
Without a lengthy digression into the Lattimore investigation, some significant known facts may be summarized briefly. The FBI had flagged Lattimore as a suspected Communist and potential security risk as early as May 1941, when he was being considered for a position as the Roosevelt administration’s political advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. The Nationalists similarly opposed Lattimore’s appointment, but President Roosevelt forced him on Chiang, according to an FBI informant quoting Chiang’s wife. Lattimore had initially been recommended for the position by White House aide Lauchlin Currie (previously with the Treasury Department) and Treasury Department assistant Harry Dexter White, both later discovered to be members of the Silvermaster Group spy ring supervised by Jacob Golos and Elizabeth Bentley. At this time Currie was President Roosevelt’s personal representative in China and the head of the US economic mission to the Chinese Nationalist government. Lattimore received a desk in Currie’s office at Room 228 in the State Department Building, telling associates he could be reached there in a 1942 letter (contradicting his later Senate testimony that he never had a desk at the State Department). Meanwhile White and his staff at Treasury were blocking the delivery of US aid to the Nationalists which had been approved by Congress.
At the same time White was seconding Currie’s recommendation of Lattimore as a political advisor to the Nationalists, he also recommended that the Nationalists’ Ministry of Finance hire Communist spy Chi Ch’ao-ting, who like Lattimore was associated with the publication Amerasia. In June 1945 the FBI raided Amerasia, uncovering approximately a thousand stolen government documents, along with a spy ring linked to Soviet agent Joseph Bernstein which included Lattimore’s associates Philip Jaffe and T.A. Bisson. Follow-up investigation of Amerasia and other Soviet espionage activity eventually drew attention to Lattimore himself.
Several Communist Party informants and Soviet defectors told the FBI and Senate investigators that they had heard Lattimore was a Soviet agent. The FBI was apparently unable to substantiate this with direct surveillance evidence (at least judging by a declassified 1949 report, which is heavily censored in certain key sections), but did document regular contact between Lattimore and Communist front groups, party members, and agents. In addition to Currie, White, Jaffe, and Bisson, Soviet agents Lattimore had been in contact with during the 1930s and 1940s included Comintern agent Willi Munzenberg’s lieutenant Louis Gibarti, Agnes Smedley and Chen Han-seng of the Sorge spy ring, and Michael Greenberg of the Cambridge Five. All this does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt, by the standards that would apply in a court of law, that Lattimore was a spy rather than a fellow traveller or sympathizer, but it does nothing to exonerate him of reasonable suspicion in the court of history, either. At a minimum, he owed his position as a political advisor to a pair of key agents in the Soviet campaign to undermine the Chinese Nationalists, and his foreign policy statements were evidently viewed by these agents as conducive to the Soviets’ foreign policy goals in Asia.
In a similar way, Kahin’s foreign policy statements would prove useful to the North Vietnamese. While working for Lattimore’s defense, Kahin applied for a job at Cornell. There, using a strained analogy between the Indonesian nationalist movement and the Vietcong to portray the latter as “nationalists” rather than communists, he became an early supporter of the Vietnam antiwar movement. Joining the Teach-In movement in 1965, he quickly becoming one of the antiwar movement’s most prominent academic spokesmen. He agreed to debate Johnson administration representative McGeorge Bundy, which led to Bundy’s brother William attempting to co-opt him by inviting him to join the State Department’s East Asia Advisory Committee. Kahin accepted the invitation, but used the opportunity to network with government critics of Johnson’s Vietnam policy, including the leader of the Senate antiwar lobby, J. William Fulbright, as well as 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern. In this way Kahin became a key contact between the antiwar movement and the Congressional antiwar lobby. Several of Kahin’s associates at Cornell would likewise become involved with the IRC’s efforts to influence Congress, including Luce, David G. Marr, and Gary Porter, who have collectively been referred to as the “Hanoi for Lunch Bunch”.