54 MARCH-APRIL 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL dismissed because he was perceived as a security risk. Ladejinsky had worked as an interpreter for the Soviet’s Amtorg Trading Company in New York for several months in 1931, visited Ukraine in 1939, and the fact that he had family in the Soviet Union could make him susceptible to blackmail. News of his firing broke just before Christmas 1954, and the public reaction was swift. On December 18, Clark Mollenhoff, an investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register & Tribune, published a series of articles about the Ladejinsky case, which remained on the front page of newspapers across America for several weeks. Influential figures from all parts of the political spectrum, such as Congressman Walter Judd (R-Minn.) and Senator (and later vice president) Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), came quickly to Ladejinsky’s defense. Suddenly, he became one of the most recognizable figures in America and a symbol of the evils of McCarthyism. Though Joe McCarthy’s influence was already in decline (on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure him for conduct unbecoming a senator), the Ladejinsky case seriously undercut McCarthyism’s broader appeal. Embarrassed by the controversy, on January 12, 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower announced that Ladejinsky had been hired by the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), the predecessor to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to serve as an agricultural adviser in South Vietnam. On January 18, Harold Stassen, the director of FOA, granted Ladejinsky a security clearance to work for his agency. Under pressure, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, an enthusiastic anti-communist, withdrew his “security risk” designation but maintained that USDA had acted correctly. Later that year, on September 27, 1955, during testimony before a Senate subcommittee looking into the administration’s security program, Benson admitted he had made a mistake in denying security clearance to Ladejinsky. Benson said the program had been overhauled as a result of the affair. Ladejinsky’s Importance for Democracy Although agrarian reform efforts in South Vietnam met more obstacles and ultimately proved less successful than those in Japan, Ladejinsky spent the rest of his life working “in the field” on land reform issues in Asia with the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. Still dedicated to helping the rural poor in Asia at age 76, when others his age had long since retired, he suffered a stroke in India and died on July 3, 1975. Ladejinsky was an extraordinary person. An immigrant who didn’t speak English when he arrived in the United States, he started with nothing but, through hard work and determination, earned a college degree and rose through the ranks in the U.S. government and international development agencies. His essential work on land reform lifted millions of farmers out of poverty in Asia, helped prevent the spread of communism in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and played an important role in a U.S. security case that contributed to ending the threat of McCarthyism. Wolf Ladejinsky’s story demonstrates that democracy is never guaranteed and that defending it requires individuals willing to speak out. At a time when civil servants again face suspicion, his story reminds us that justice, even when it takes time, is worth fighting for. As Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” n Senator Joseph McCarthy chats with his attorney Roy Cohn during Senate subcommittee hearings on the McCarthy-Army dispute, 1954. He had reportedly told a friend that he would never be an American official abroad with his Russian accent and birth: “They just wouldn’t listen to me there.” LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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