Because so many others were cowed, Lattimore felt all the more compelled to confront the evil of this smear campaign. "People find it more and more easy to take refuge in rationalizing," he lamented in a letter to his old friend, diplomat John Carter Vincent.
And in December 1952, a seven-count grand jury perjury indictment was handed down by the Justice Department. It claimed that Lattimore had lied under oath when he denied that "he had been a promoter of communism and Communist interests." Once again, Lattimore was dragged back into the political limelight.
What was so ironic about Owen Lattimore's life and fate was that while it was the study of Mongolia and other border peoples in central Asia that were his first love, it was China that caused him most of his political trouble.
When Owen Lattimore picked up the phone in his Stockholm hotel room on June 28, 1955, and was told that U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. had dropped perjury charges against him, it was difficult for him to believe that what he called his "ordeal by slander" had at last come to an end.
Lattimore's trek by camel across Mongolia produced The Desert Road to Turkestan, in which he describes his spellbinding journey into this "strange country where I might travel but the one time in my life, living for a few score days the life of men in other ages.".
One of the virtues of his new job was that it gave the young Lattimore a chance to travel on company business into the interior of China. It was this happenstance that began his transformation from an ordinary businessman into an explorer, ethnographer, linguist and scholar roaming remote Chinese border regions.
A person of great resilience and adventuresome exuberance who grew up as far as one could get from Washington and its corrosive politics, Lattimore was a man of enormous moral rectitude.
Since by then Lattimore had some knowledge of the rough-and-tumble world of camel caravans and the dangers along the route from inclement weather, bandits and marauding soldiers, the newlyweds decided that he should set off on the first leg of this honeymoon journey across Mongolia alone and telegraph when he arrived in Urumchi, the capital of Xinjiang Province, so that Eleanor could set out via the Trans-Siberian Railway and join him. Then, they planned to journey together by horseback and horse cart through "High Tartary," more commonly known at the time as Chinese Turkestan. This second and less dangerous leg of their journey would take them across Xinjiang through the Tianshan Mountains, around the Taklamakan Desert to Akesu, Kashi, Shache and then finally over the Karakoram Pass down to Ladakh, Kashmir and India.
He went on to St. Bees, a public school in England.
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.