The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

54 MAY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL wit, Bohlen had a wide circle of friends in Washington and was popular with his colleagues and the press alike. But as a charter member of what the Republican right was calling Truman’s “architects of disaster,” Bohlen expected little from the new Republican administration. He was surprised, therefore, when John Foster Dulles, the new Secretary of State, informed him on Jan. 23 that the president personally had chosen him to be U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Eisenhower in his memoirs judged Bohlen “one of the ablest foreign policy officers I had ever met.” The two men had known each other and played golf together in Paris when Eisenhower was supreme allied commander in Europe and Bohlen was minister in the Paris embassy. Bohlen would certainly not have been Dulles’ first choice, however. Their close association at various international confer- ences during the early postwar years had bred a mutual antipa- thy. Put off by Dulles’ ponderous, moralizing anti-communism (a favorite phrase of Bohlen and his friends was “dull, duller, Dulles”), Bohlen never hesitated to disagree with him publicly. He became even more critical when Dulles, shedding any pretense of bipartisanship, became a strident critic of Truman’s foreign policy after 1948 to curry favor with the Republican right wing. Dulles, for his part, openly admitted, as State Department security chief Scott McLeod recorded in his diary, that he person- ally disliked Bohlen for having “repeatedly undercut him” in the past and “did not consider [Bohlen] the type of individual who should be named ambassador to Russia.” But of necessity Dulles bowed to the president’s wishes. Though naturally pleased, Bohlen accepted “with misgivings, given the political climate of the times,” he recalled. He worried that his long association with the Democrats, and in particular his role at Yalta, would prove a liability for the president, whom he deeply respected. He warned the Secretary that, if asked, he would give the version of what happened at Yalta, “which I knew to be correct and which would by no means tally with [that of] the Republican National Committee.” Dulles, slightly taken aback, suggested he downplay his role. Bohlen declined to come across as “the village idiot.” Partisanship and Anti-Communist Hysteria Bohlen’s fears were well founded. The Republicans had returned to power in a poisonous atmosphere of vicious par- tisanship and anti-communist hysteria. “A miasma of fear and suspicion infected America,” Bohlen would write. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) was at the height of his popularity and power, peddling to an anxious public a welter of false charges about communist spies in government, and enabled by a Republican Party that dared not criticize him. Multiple security investigations during the Truman administration had effectively rooted out any communist agents, but McCarthy’s witch hunts would continue unabated under Eisenhower. In 1953 McLeod, a rabidly anti-communist former Senate Charles Bohlen attended various international conferences, such as the Potsdam conference in Germany in July 1945. Left to right: Soviet leader Josef Stalin, Bohlen (interpreter for President Truman), V.N. Pavlov (interpreter for Stalin), President Harry S Truman, Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, Press Secretary Charles Ross, Secretary of State James Byrnes and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. U.S.NATIONALARCHIVESANDRECORDSADMINISTRATION