THE CHINA LOBBY MAN: The Story of Alfred Kohlberg

A long, ill-organized eulogy which gravitates between apologia and celebration. Kohlberg was a businessman who spent years writing, organizing and testifying on behalf of Chiang Kaishek and against any accommodation with his successors. The book depicts him as the only important member of ""the China lobby""; contests the imputation that Kohlberg's commitment sprang from his post-revolutionary loss of access to cheap Chinese labor, and argues that he was scarcely ""the man behind McCarthy."" Though there are long reconstructions of Kohlberg's battles with those who called the Nationalists corrupt and ineffective against the Japanese, there is little factual refutation. Both Kohlberg and the author are the sort of conservatives who never fail to be outraged when the Communists are ""thinking and acting in terms of Communist goals""; they perceive tactical retreats as abrogations of principle, so that the enlightened cold warriors of the Institute of Pacific Relations turn out to run ""a Communist-operated propaganda and espionage organization."" Final impression: neither saintly nor sinister, but rather silly.