He went on to St. Bees, a public school in England.
By Orville Schell. April 16, 1995. He is remembered -- when he's remembered at all -- as a prominent victim of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. But the real story of this explorer and scholar who found himself at the epicenter of American politics involves a kind of stubborn, principled courage that's rare in Washington today. (Part 1 of 2)
IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1933 that Lattimore became the editor of Pacific Affairs, the journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an organization dedicated to the study of the countries of the Pacific region and to improving relations among them.
In 1944, Lattimore accompanied Vice President Henry A. Wallace to the Soviet Union and China. During brief stops in Siberia, both Lattimore and Wallace were all too impressed by several Potemkinized labor camps in Joseph Stalin's gulag that they took for models of new voluntary settlements.
After all, he had occupied himself with the study of one of the most obscure regions of the world. But upon returning to China in 1934, he quickly found himself drawn into such controversial questions as the Japanese occupation of China and the rise of Mao Zedong's peasant Communist movement.