The Reporter (magazine)

After the victory of the forces of Mao Tse-tung in the Chinese Civil War, Senator Joseph McCarthy and other conservatives accused the Truman Administration of previously not having done enough to make sure that China did not fall to Communism, and failing to sufficiently support the efforts to overturn the results of the war. In 1952, The Reporter devoted the bulk of two full issues to the influence of what it called the China Lobby on the American government.[10][11] According to the exposé, a select group of Chinese elites centered around defeated Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had since 1940 been working on convincing the American government to support its corrupt leadership, to the detriment of U.S. interests. The lobby was now allegedly preventing the United States from acknowledging that the Nationalist cause was lost and dealing with the situation in China in a realistic manner.

In order to promote its exposé, The Reporter purchased full-page ads in the New York Times. According to one author, the size of the report on the China Lobby and the investigative resources that it required indicate that some parts of the American government provided The Reporter with substantial financial assistance.[2] In fact, staff received information from, among other government agencies, the IRS, the Treasury Department, the CIA, and the FBI.[2] As the controversy over who lost China involved a rivalry between the pro-McCarthy FBI and the CIA, Elke van Cassel argues that "The Reporter got caught in the middle of this power struggle," siding with the latter.[2] Two years before the publication of the China Lobby exposé, Senator William Knowland had accused the magazine of being supportive of the Chinese Communists, a charge that Ascoli vigorously denied.[12]

The Reporter consistently used extremely harsh terms to denounce McCarthyism. History professor Peter Viereck called the phenomenon a form of "mob rule" and compared it to the excesses of the French Revolution.[13] In the words of Ascoli,

[t]he facts against McCarthyism were not difficult to dig out, the ideas against which they stood were the very ones on which America was founded. The protagonist himself was like an overdrawn caricature of the villain—a villain who doubly wounded the nation with his reckless, haphazard persecution of harmless human beings and with the immunity he granted to Communist agents by not catching a single one of them.[3]

Reflecting its liberal internationalist orientation, The Reporter supported the pacts, treaties, and agreements that would become the cornerstones of transatlantic cooperation and European unity. It warned against a weakening of the Atlantic alliance, which it saw as being important not only as a security organization, but as a force for the triumph of democratic ideals and political and economic cooperation.[14] In other articles it applauded the economic ideas underlying the Schuman Plan[15] and praised the expansion of the European Common Market.[16] A 1949 article criticized what the author perceived as isolationist tendencies in the British government of the time.[17]

Throughout the Cold War era, prominent foreign policy intellectuals would use the pages of The Reporter to attempt to shape public opinion. For example, in the decade before his joining the Nixon Administration, Henry Kissinger wrote several articles for the publication, among them one arguing for a more integrated Atlantic Alliance,[18] and another putting forth practical steps that could be taken towards German unification.[19]

The Reporter took a consistent position in favor of civil rights for African-Americans. A 1954 article, for example, argued that desegregation had been a success in the armed forces. Therefore, fears over the negative consequences of racially integrating the public schools were overblown.[20] The magazine did not simply focus on race relations in the American context; English writer Russel Warren Howe took to the magazine’s pages to denounce racism towards nonwhite immigrants in Great Britain.[21]

Despite its support for civil rights and other liberal causes, The Reporter also levied harsh criticisms at many aspects of the counter-culture and the New Left. In his farewell to the readers of the magazine, Ascoli took liberals to task for being hesitant in denouncing the lack of ethics among some younger activists and called participatory democracy "one of the best recipes of establishing tyranny that has ever been concocted…"[22] In the same issue, Edmond Taylor referred to the May 1968 protests in France as "the nihilist revolution."[23] Similarly, Professor William P. Gerberding wrote that in his opinion it was "wrong and destructive to embrace or even to adopt a tolerant attitude toward the radical politics of, for example, the New Left or the black racists."[24]

During the time that the United States began to become involved in Vietnam, The Reporter applauded and encouraged American efforts to help South Vietnam develop.[25] As American involvement deepened and the conflict developed, The Reporter sent journalists to Southeast Asia to cover the war.[26] Articles denounced the pessimism of some members of the American establishment and stressed what the magazine saw as the strategic importance of winning the war. In 1966, journalist Richard C. Hottlett mocked the idea that there was no military solution to the conflict and argued that American political goals could be achieved only after security had been established.[27]

According to Douglass Carter, who served on the staff of The Reporter for 15 years, Ascoli over time "became more hard-line than many hard-liners in government toward the American commitment in Viet Nam."[28] He claimed that it was because of this unwavering support for continuing the war effort that many former readers turned away from the magazine in the 1960s.[28]