The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

54 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Another key ally was found in Edward Stettinius. Though Yost recognized Secretary of State Stettinius’ limitations, he also credited him with implementing critical reforms to the antique and rigid department—reforms that survived countless reorga- nizations over several decades. In January 1945, Secretary Stettinius offered Yost the position of executive secretary of his new “Policy Committee,” which would evolve into the Policy Planning Staff under Secretary George Marshall and George Kennan. Yost’s additional duties included preparing a daily two-page summary of cables, reports, memoranda, Allied messages and “magic” intercepts for Presi- dent Roosevelt. Yost’s summaries, which became a standard department exercise, resulted, he later wrote, in his transforma- tion into “one of the best-informed individuals in Washington, except about purely military planning” during the last year of the war. Loyalty Oaths in America O aths of loyalty are an old and honored American tradition. The Constitution provides in Article VI that “the Senators and Representatives … and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all execu- tive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.”The Pledge of Allegiance, a loyalty oath that dates from the Civil War, is regularly recited in public forums. The loyalty oaths that proliferated after WorldWar II, however, added a condemnation of communism to the affirmation of American ideals. Under the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), labor union leaders had to swear that they were not communists and did not favor the overthrow of the government. Different levels of government soon levied similar requirements on various targets, including residents of federally assisted public housing; employees of the state of California, the city of Chicago, the county of Los Angeles and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; as well as students in NewYork State high schools and students receiving aid under the National Defense Education Act. President Harry S Truman’s loyalty program, imposed by executive order on March 21, 1947, required every federal civilian employee to submit to a loyalty investigation car- ried out by loyalty boards established in every government agency. A loyalty board could order the dismissal of any employee if it found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the employee was disloyal. Those grounds could include membership or “sympathetic association”with any group or “combination of persons” that the U.S. Attorney General designated as subversive. Employees under investigation had no right to counsel and could be denied access to the evidence against them. President Dwight Eisenhower’s program, imposed by executive order in March 1953, shifted the focus from purg- ing the disloyal to purging security risks, not just in certain agencies but across the government. Security risks were broadly defined, including those whom the government saw as social misfits—persons who were “not reliable or trustwor- thy” or whose conduct was considered “infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful.” The results of these programs are hard to pin down. Most of the investigative files have been destroyed, and there are gaps in the record. Landon Storrs, in her 2012 book, The Second Red Scare , estimates that from 1947 to 1953, 4.75 million employees submitted loyalty forms to investiga- tors. Between 1947 and 1956, says Storrs, 2,700 federally employed civilians, 750 military personnel and 5,400 con- tract workers (mostly in port security) were dismissed; many others resigned before investigations were complete. An unpublished 1964 study by Rutgers Professor Paul D. Tillett estimated that 6.5 million people were investigated, leading to thousands of dismissals, with consequent loss of livelihood and “suicides, mental illness, and the breakup of families.” For all their sweep and personal devastation, the loy- alty investigations caught not a single spy. In time, the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts invalidated much of the fed- eral loyalty program, and many other loyalty oaths, as failing to protect due process and infringing on freedom of speech and association. —HarryW. Kopp