From The New York Times Thursday, May
11, 1989 "O. Edmund Clubb Is Dead at 88;
China Hand and McCarthy Target"
O. Edmund Clubb, a United States Foreign
Service officer who became a major target of
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's investigation of
supposedly disloyal Americans in the State
Department in the early 1950's, died of
Parkinson's disease Tuesday at
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 88
years old and lived in Manhattan and in
Palenville, N.Y.
Mr. Clubb served for more than two decades in
the Foreign Service. He was the last American
diplomat stationed in Beijing after the Communist
takeover in 1949, and it fell upon him, as Consul
General , to haul down the flag there in April
1950. Returned to Washington, he was named chief
of the China desk at the State Department, only
to be suspended a year later as a security risk.
One of his many character witnesses, and army
colonel, wrote of him, "I always thought you
were secure to the point of being boring."
He was nevertheless condemned by a loyalty board.
Cleared on appeal, but assigned to an obscure
job, he concluded that his career was finished
and submitted his resignation.
Those Who 'Lost China'
Mr. Clubb, along with other Government
officials, was stigmatized as having "lost
China." Unlike the others so treated, he had
not been involved in the wartime dispute over
policy toward Chiang Kai-shek. Mr. Clubb's
misfortune came long before, in a brief encounter
with Whittaker Chambers in 1932.
Home on leave that year, Mr. Clubb carried
letters of introduction, one of them from Agnes
Smedley, a well-known left-wing journalist in
China, to an editor of New Masses, a Communist
magazine in New York.
The editor was no longer there, but Mr.
Chambers was. Mr. Clubb's diary entry for that
day in 1932 told of a visit to "a horrible
rag" and an encounter with "one
Wittaker Chambers, a shifty-eyed unkempt
creature."
The young diplomat wrote that he was unable to
show "revolutionary enthusiasm" because
"I was out of my bailiwick -- masquerading
under false pretenses."
When investigators questioned the authenticity
of the diary, Mr. Clubb gave it to his superiors,
on their pledge to protect his privacy. The
contents nevertheless leaked, and the diary
circulated among several Government agencies, Mr.
Chambers was by then a fervent anti- Communist
who had become the accuser of Alger Hiss.
Mr. Clubb was not permitted to confront his
accusers or to learn what they had alleged except
by inference from questions put to him. He thus
inferred that a consular official with whom he
had had some friction had accused him of being
"pink" during the 1930's.
In 1932, Mr. Clubb had reported form China
that the Communists were strong and popular in
the regions they controlled and that the
Nationalists were corrupt but that they might
force the Communists to flee to the west. His
prediction foreshadowed the Long March, and was
later to be cited by his critics as evidence of
his pro-Communist leanings.
Suspension Is Lifted
In the climate of the Korean War and Senator
McCarthy's attacks on the State Department, his
reports were viewed as disloyal. The careers of
most of the "China hands" suffered, and
four of them, including Mr. Clubb, were dismissed
or resigned under a cloud.
He appealed the findings of a State Department
loyalty board. It was brought out that the case
against him rested entirely on the suspicion that
he had lied about he visit to New Masses and that
he had doctored his diaries. He was upheld on
both counts, and his suspension was lifted on
Feb. 7, 1952.
Mr. Clubb was not restored to the China desk
but was transferred to the division of historical
research, with no work assignment. He resigned
five days later.
In a 1975 book recalling this experience,
"The Witness and I," Mr. Clubb wrote,
"I felt that the Government of which I had
long been a part had been disloyal to me."
Son of a Cattleman
Oliver Edmund Clubb was born on Feb. 16, 1901,
in South Park, Minn., the son of a cattle raiser.
During World War I he enlisted in the Army at age
17, later working his way through college, first
at the University of Washing, then at the
University of Minnesota.
He had majored in international law, but had
been fascinated by some courses on China. In
1928, he qualified for the Foreign Service and
was sent the next year to Beijing.
Two days before Pearl Harbor, Mr. Clubb, then
in Indochina, was seized by occupying Japanese
forces and was held for two months in solitary
confinement and six months more with other
internees, then exchanged for Japanese held by
the Allies.
With the exception of a brief period in
Washington, Mr. Clubb spent the rest of the war
and the immediate postwar period in the Soviet
Far East, Manchuria and China.
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