The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

56 MAY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 15–0 to send the nomination to the full Senate. The following day President Eisenhower gave Bohlen a ringing endorsement in a press conference. Bohlen’s confirmation was henceforth assured, but not without several bumps along the way. Unlike Dulles, after read- ing Bohlen’s FBI file, Scott McLeod had concluded that he was a grave security risk. Miffed at being overruled by Dulles in his Senate testimony, McLeod, according to his diary, went over the Secretary’s head to complain to a top White House aide that Bohlen was “the keystone son of a bitch” of the Foreign Service, and the president should know he was a grave security risk. Dulles and the White House were furious at this act of open insubordination, but after several frantic rounds of consultations, they decided, according to Hoopes, that firing McLeod would cause a “firestorm” on the right and was therefore too dangerous. But then the Dulles-McLeod dispute leaked to the press, leading to further uproar in the Senate. By this time, McLeod was feeling somewhat abashed at the problems he was creating for the president and promised Dulles he would toe the line and support the president. Like some cloak- and-dagger spy drama, while Dulles publicly denied there was anything derogatory in Bohlen’s file, McLeod was spirited secretly out of the State Department with a staff member assigned to keep him out of reach of a subpoena fromMcCarthy, who was hot on his trail. He was kept overnight in an undisclosed location until he could be transported to his home in New Hampshire. With the Senate in an uproar over his FBI file, Bohlen now found out why Dulles had extracted his solemn promise not to withdraw “no matter what happened”: His brother-in-law Charles Thayer, consul general in Munich, was about to be dis- missed from the Foreign Service on the baseless charge—thrice disproven under Truman, but now revived—that he was, in the commonly used parlance, a “homosexual security risk.” Bohlen confronted Dulles, who confirmed that this was, indeed, why he had made Bohlen solemnly promise not to resign. Angry and disgusted, Bohlen agonized over whether to withdraw his name. But in the end, he felt bound by his promise to the president. Cloak and Dagger By this time, Bohlen’s confirmation had become a national cause célèbre, with daily, largely favorable, press coverage and letters of support from all over. The final Senate debate on March 23, with the FBI file now a central issue, was “long, angry, some- times eloquent, sometimes quite personal,” according to Hoopes, pitting Republican against Republican. McCarthy, the loudest and most long-winded, infuriated Taft by implying Dulles had lied when asserting that there was noth- ing derogatory in Bohlen’s FBI file. McCarthy claimed, falsely, on the Senate floor, to have certain knowledge that there was something “so derogatory” in the file that “we cannot discuss it [here].” At the end of many hours of debate, Taft postponed further discussion. Simultaneously, at the other end of town, CharlieThayer, sitting incognito in Bohlen’s office at the State Department, was facing the unpleasant realization that his career was at an end. He had arrived secretly in the United States and made his way President Dwight D. Eisenhower in conversation with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Charles Bohlen, shortly after his confirmation, on April 2, 1953. EVERETTCOLLECTION