The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2020

22 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL What sets the present situation apart from the McCarthy era is not the bravery of the officials who speak out but the support they are receiving from their colleagues, from many members of Congress and from the public. communist victory in China’s civil war. The staff of State’s Far Eastern Division— today’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs—were “individuals who are loyal to the ideals and designs of communism rather than those of the free, God-fearing half of the world.” He accused Foreign Service officers who had served in China of disloyalty and treason, citing against them their knowledge of and contacts with actual Chinese communists. Almost without exception, the depart- ment failed to defend its people. Instead, it pursued themwith multiple, largely bogus investigations. Some of the China specialists—there were 13, almost all of whom spoke Chinese—were fired without pension, their reputations smeared. Those who remained in the Service were never allowed again to work in or on Asian affairs. Their knowledge and experi- ence were lost to the country, and for years no one dared take their place. McCarthy had broad support in the Republican Party, including Senators William Jenner and Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Pat McCarran of Nevada. Even Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the tall- est pillar in the Republican establishment, bought into the lie, decrying “a pro-Com- munist group in the State Department who … promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.” McCarthy’s charges of disloyalty were intertwined with a campaign to rid the State Department of “sexual perverts”—gay men, and a very few gay women—who were said to be vulnerable to blackmail and therefore security risks. David Johnson, in his invaluable book The Lavender Scare (2006), writes that “the constant pairing of ‘Communists and queers’ led many to see them as indistin- guishable threats.” Senator Bridges argued that homosexuals in the State Depart- ment “did not get there by osmosis, or by accident. They got there because Russia wanted them there.” Although Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1949-1953) defended State’s people as “honorable, loyal and clean- living American men and women,” the department’s leadership for the most part joined in the persecution. Acheson’s Deputy Under Secretary for Management, Carlisle Humelsine, told a congressio- nal committee that “in the public mind, [homosexuality] seems to be a psychologi- cal illness or sickness generally associated with the Foreign Service and the Depart- ment of State.” Between 1950 and 1953, according to the department’s official His- tory of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, State’s security office had 610 employees fired as alleged homosexuals, and another 117 fired for all other reasons. s Ambassador (ret.) William J. Burns, in an article published online in Foreign Affairs on Oct. 14, compared the leader- ship of the Department of State today to that of the McCarthy era and found them equal in spinelessness. There will be no argument here with that judgment. What sets the present situation apart