The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2021 57 “as inconspicuously as possible” to the State Department, he recorded in his diary. It became clear that the State Department had withdrawn “its protection.” Fighting the charges would be futile, Bohlen said, since the president and Dulles were bent on “‘getting along’ with McCarthy.” Thayer agreed to sign a letter of resignation, but then had to fight hard to exclude any mention of the unproven “morals charges” (i.e., homosexuality). AsThayer recalled, only when Bohlen “got mad, his hands and his face twitching with anger,” and threatened to withdraw his name did the State Department agree. All the while, the teletype in the next room continued to clatter out reports of the Senate debate on Bohlen. Bohlen’s wife, Avis, called to ask her husband if he knew where her brother, Charlie, was; Bohlen, sure his phone was bugged, lied that he had no idea. That night, after seven hours in the United States, Thayer flew back to Munich in great secrecy “like a fugitive criminal.” He felt, he would write later in a letter to a friend, that he “was in a cross between a madhouse and a gangsters’ hideout. Everyone was looking over his shoulder, whispering, sighing and groaning as though the devil was about to get them.” OnMarch 24, Taft, after overnight consultations with the For- eign Relations Committee and the administration, proposed to the Senate that two senators, himself and Democratic Senator John Sparkman fromAlabama, be authorized to read the file in Dulles’ office. The next day, they were able to report back to the full Senate that Bohlen was a “completely good security risk in every respect.” ThoughMcCarthy and others continued to denounce the nomina- tion, onMarch 25, 1953, the Senate voted to confirmBohlen 74–13. When Dulles called Taft to thank him for his efforts, according to Hoopes, Taft replied curtly, “No more Bohlens.” Standing Up for State “Hurray, huzzah and hosanna,” wrote one of Bohlen’s sup- porters. He was quietly elated: “I do not deny the feeling of triumph that possessed me,” Bohlen would write. He had not only “won the battle to occupy the position I trained for [for] nearly 25 years,” but also scored a victory for “the nonpolitical career For- eign Service [drawing] a line beyond which the witch hunters like McCarthy and McCarran could not pass.” This established “that Dulles and Eisenhower, not McCarthy or McLeod, would control State Department functions” and “preserved the President’s right to choose his representatives overseas.” Bohlen would always be proud that his nomination, McCarthy’s first serious defeat, had played a role in stopping the demagogue. He himself had come through his ordeal with flying