The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

56 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL “This is one of the oldest pending LGE [Loyalty of Government Employees] Cases. Further delay will not be tolerated.” The FBI subsequently put Yost’s house under surveillance and tapped his phone; spoke with his family, neighbors and former professors; contacted credit bureaus, the passport office and the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police; and questioned Yost’s colleagues on three continents. When Conrad Snow, chairman of the Department of State Loyalty Security Board, interrogated him, Yost retorted he was “bitter and indignant” that his loyalty was being questioned. Friend, diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche echoed that sentiment when his loyalty was similarly questioned. The 1953 election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower brought no respite. In his maiden speech to department employees, Sec- retary of State John Foster Dulles stated that he expected loyalty. It soon dawned on Dulles’ staff that neither the Secretary of State nor the president would reciprocate. What’s more, Eisenhower replaced Truman’s Order with Executive Order 10450, which examined character as well as political beliefs. Within a month, State’s Office of Security questioned Yost while he was on home leave. The officials called it an “interview and not a hearing,” but it was neither. It was an interrogation. They informed Yost that source names would be withheld, and that source statements would become part of his official file. Two months later, the loyalty board summoned him back from Greece for another round. Fortune Smiles For many years, department colleagues wondered how Charles Yost had survived the Truman and Eisenhower purges. The answer lies in Yost’s dictum that the basis for a successful Foreign Service career was shaped by “who you knew, what you knew, and luck.” In addition to department Secretaries and former bosses such as Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup and Ambassador Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, the “who,” in this case, were two ultraconservative Republicans whose support during that era proved crucial: Hiram Bingham III and the afore- mentioned John Foster Dulles. Yost’s revolving high-profile positions had an unwelcome result—namely, the renewed attention of FBI Director Hoover. Senator Hiram Bingham III was the father of Yost’s fellow diplomat and friend Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV. When the sena- tor became chairman of the Loyalty Review Board, he person- ally urged J. Edgar Hoover to declare Yost “eligible on loyalty” to remain in the Foreign Service. (Hoover backed down but did not abandon his determination to have Yost discharged or jailed.) Yost’s long-standing connection to the Dulles family began in their hometown of Watertown, New York. The minister who mar- ried Yost’s parents, Allen Dulles, was the brother-in-law of one Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (responsible for recommend- ing a diplomatic career to Yost), and the father of John Foster Dulles. Family loyalty may be the reason why Foster Dulles was moti- vated to call Yost an exceptional diplomat and loyal American, and why his sister, Eleanor, testified that Yost was “as loyal as President Eisenhower.” Lest We Forget The year 1969 would be the last time Yost was subjected to an FBI background check—and the issue of his alleged communist ties would once again arise. He had been nominated as ambas- sador to the United Nations, the first FSO to achieve that distinc- tion. The irony that President Richard Nixon, a former member of HUAC who spearheaded the investigation of Alger Hiss, made the appointment was not lost on my father. Yost, however, was livid when in making his announcement of the U.N. appoint- ment, Nixon added that he had chosen to look past the Yost- Hiss association—thus raising the long-forgotten issue of Yost’s alleged communist ties for the press. As Yost recalls in his memoirs, these witch hunts left deep scars, which some, including he, never got over, and from which the Foreign Service did not recover for many years. In an unpub- lished 1964 paper, “The Social Costs of the Loyalty Programs,” Rutgers Professor of Political Science Paul Tillett quotes FSOs who lamented that in the State Department the process resulted in a Foreign Service that “was dying at the roots and suffering attrition.” In his memoirs, Charles Yost issued a warning we would do well to heed in the 21st century. Stating that the “monoma- nia and the intemperance of the Radical Right [was] a much more serious, because more indigenous, threat to American democracy,” he observes: “There lies buried not too deep under the skin of American democracy a strain of bigotry and know-nothingism that demagogues can tap with frightening ease; leaders concerned for liberty should be eternally vigilant against it.” n