The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

52 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The experience of a distinguished career FSO offers a look into the dark side of mid-century America. BY F E L I C I TY O. YOST Felicity O. Yost, the daughter of the late Ambassador Charles W. Yost, worked for 37 years in the United Nations Department of Public Information and as a U.N. election monitor. She is now writing a biogra- phy of her father, tentatively titled The Only Brave One in the Room: Charles W. Yost and the Golden Age of Diplo- macy , from which this account is drawn. A fter relentless FBI investigations, congres- sional hearings and State Department security interrogations, the prognosis was dire: It would be a time of “great malaise in the Department such as I have never seen before.” Writing this in 1980, Ambassador Charles W. Yost, my father, was referring to the federal witch hunts that began in the 1930s and lasted through the 1950s and McCarthyism. What follows are my father’s own experiences during that tumultuous time, which arguably resonate today. He was a loyal American and successful diplomat who was subjected to repeated investigation in the search for communists in the State Department. He took good notes. Moving into the Crosshairs Following World War I, in the early years of the USSR, it was not unusual for young diplomats to visit that country. In fact, Yost writes in his memoirs, it would have been foolish of him to ignore the part of Europe where some of the boldest social McCARTHYISM REVISITED and political experiments were occurring. As a result of his trips there in 1929 and 1933, the future Cold Warrior acquired insights into the Russian psyche. His third trip, in 1934, would eventually have disconcerting consequences, however. Before embarking, Yost made his book- ing through the Open Road travel agency and, once in Moscow, attended classes at the Anglo-American Institute of the First Moscow University (all while awaiting word whether his Polish girlfriend would marry him). He first became aware that this trip was a problem only in 1943, when his aunt reported that the FBI had questioned her about his communist leanings and attendance at a Moscow university. It was the beginning of a decadeslong investigation into Yost and his alleged communist sympathies and connections. Ten years later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) branded the Open Road agency a “Communist Front Organization” and the university a forum for communist propaganda. Long before HUAC’s investigation into Yost, his connection with certain questionable State Department colleagues caused his “infant file to grow like a plot of mushrooms in the darkness of the FBI vault,” as he recalled later. It all began in 1935, when the department established the Office of Arms and Munitions Control after passage of the first Neutrality Act by Congress. The Neutrality Act prohibited the export of “arms, ammunition and implements of war” from the United States to foreign nations at war and required U.S. arms manufacturers to apply for an export license. At the new State office, Yost and Joseph C. Green were tasked with registering and issuing, or rejecting, export A Time of “Great Malaise” FS HERITAGE