The Foreign Service Journal, June 2018

10 JUNE 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS The FSJ as Living History “A Century of Journals” by Harry Kopp (April FSJ ) is an evocative, historically valu- able and journalistically significant achievement. It is evocative to me because it recalls my involvement as a junior FSO in the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy’s (R-Wisc.) war to rid the State Department of purported com- munists. As director of the Frankfurt America House in 1953, I was confronted by McCarthy’s junketeering gumshoes Roy Cohn and David Shine, who had invaded the U.S. Information Service library to find and root out books and periodicals by communist authors. They wanted to remove Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man from the shelves. I insisted that the library had no communist authors, but to no avail. Their assault continued in the peri- odicals section, claiming that it lacked anticommunist literature because we didn’t have The American Legion Maga- zine . The diatribe was finally interrupted when United Press International corre- spondent Marshall Loeb said: “Mr. Cohn, my office sent me to watch you burn the books in the library as the Nazis did in 1933.” Cohn and Shine exploded, finally taking the pressure off me. The Cohn and Shine confrontation resulted in a McCarthy-ordered FBI investigation that reportedly determined that I had been a member of only two organizations in my short life, the Boy Scouts of America and the U.S. Army. Unfortunately, some of my colleagues fared worse. The above tale is but one brief example of the value of “A Century of Journals ” as a living history of the Foreign Service and its members in the last 100 years. Kudos. Hans N. Tuch Career Minister, retired Bethesda, Maryland Trust and Loyalty I am extremely pleased to extend my congratulations to the Foreign Service Journal team on such a momentous and special occasion as the launch of the Journal ’s centennial year (April FSJ ). Well done! I do, however, truly regret that this milestone, at least in the minds of many active and retired employees, will not sig- nal the real honor it might have for the once-proud institution of the U.S. Foreign Service. That someone formerly in charge allowed a relative handful of employees to publicly demonstrate what many perceived then and now as “disloyalty cloaked by dissent” was not only nationally and globally embarrassing; it was damaging. More than a year later this institutional blunder continues to jeopardize the role of any U.S. Secretary of State, whose consti- tutional duty is to serve as the president’s chief foreign policy adviser. As any diplomatic practitioner through the long history of our Service knows well, trust is the coin of the realm. And today neither the State Depart- ment nor the Foreign Service is trusted because confidence has been lost. Nevertheless, none of the above detracts from my admiration and respect for The Foreign Service Journal . I continue to be very proud to have had my own articles published therein. I can only pray that the Journal out- lives what appears to be an exceedingly dark and less than promising future for what once reigned as the premier agency within the U.S. government. And I must wonder, can trust and confidence somehow be rebuilt? Timothy C. Lawson Senior FSO, retired Hua Hin, Thailand Poullada’s Wisdom In the January-February 2016 Journal you reprinted Leon B. Poul- lada’s remarks from a February 1966 article called “A Foreign Service Training Corps?” (50 Years Ago quote) in which he advocated a true Foreign Service Reserve Corps of available retirees. It strikes me as being very relevant to the cur- rent “threats” from the Trump administration to downsize the State Depart- ment by 30 percent. The FS Reserve Corps is only one of many suggestions in articles my late husband published from about 1954 until his death in 1987. I’d like to see someone find all these articles, which might produce a useful think piece for future policies we’d advocate. Leila D.J. Poullada Saint Paul, Minnesota n Share your thoughts about this month’s issue. Submit letters to the editor: journal@afsa.org