The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

62 OCTOBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL This seal was expertly carved, and beneath the eagle’s beak were barely visible pin holes made by a jeweler’s drill which admitted voice waves to the diaphragm of the miniature micro- phone. For this and other ultimately successful assignments I was “rewarded” with a Washington job. Little did I realize then what a return to Washington would mean with Senator Joseph McCarthy producing random lists of alleged communists within the Department of State and the Foreign Service. First, however, with the late Charles E. (“Chip”) Bohlen, who would soon become a prominent target of the McCarthy campaign, and with key officials of the Department of State, I conducted briefings concerning the Moscow “find.” The most memorable of these briefings was with Secretary of State Dean Acheson who also was to become one of McCarthy’s favorite targets. … As I settled into the Washington job the cold war was raging in full. The laws of evidence that I had learned in law school were being totally disregarded and replaced by massive presumptions of guilt—from personal as well as institutional associations. … Senator Joseph McCarthy and certain other members of Congress questioned the nomination by the Eisenhower admin- istration of Chip Bohlen to be the next ambassador to the Soviet Union. …The most highly advertised bit of “evidence” was a tape recording, allegedly containing Ambassador Bohlen’s voice. This tape purportedly implicated him in activities which made him a security risk. Secretary Dulles called me to his office, where the security office file and the FBI reports on Ambassador Bohlen were assembled on his conference table. I was instructed to bring a tape recorder. As I entered Secretary Dulles’s office, I was introduced to Senators Taft and Sparkman. The secretary, with a flour- ish, instructed me to review with the senators the files on Mr. Bohlen. The secretary noted, however, that allowing the sena- tors to see these files was “without prejudice to the concept of executive privilege.” Neither senator found anything incriminating in the files, and then we proceeded with the tape recording. Unfortunately, the extension cord for the recorder was too short, the quality of the tape was poor, and the volume potential of the recorder was low. This meant that Senators Taft and Sparkman and I had to lie down on the floor of Secretary Dulles’s office in front of his desk and listen to the recording. I certified in a document that it was not Ambassador Bohlen’s voice. That was also evident to all present. Shortly thereafter Ambassador Bohlen was cleared and took off for his new assignment. Nerves were constantly on edge in the department. This led to over-reaction whenever relatively minor incidents occurred. … There was a general sentiment and belief in the department during the McCarthy years that there was telephone and mail censorship. … The promotion list was held up for many months under new requirements while the loyalty of long-time officers of the domestic and Foreign Service was subjected to so-called full- field investigations. Key officials of the office of security were interrogated at length, accused of removing files or covering up. As a consequence, they were either transferred or left volun- tarily. I had opposed Senator McCarthy in his efforts to obtain the “raw” files of officials of the Department of State for use by his committee. C. P. Trussed in a special edition of the New York Times recorded my bitter exchange with Senator McCarthy and the senator’s frustrated response of “I give up,” in an article of February 21, 1953. I had removed from access to security files an office of security agent who took notes and references from those files to McCarthy. Roy Cohn of the McCarthy Committee threatened me with contempt of Congress for intervening with a congressional witness. It was in July 1953 that I received a beautifully worded memorandum from the bureau of security and consular affairs giving me unsolicited “sick leave.” … The McCarthy era was an unforgettable experience. But one conclusion I came to … was that not one single case of disloyalty to the United States surfaced during my period. Cases involv- ing the temptations and social weaknesses to which all persons are subject, yes. But the dominant characteristics shown in the thousands of files I had an opportunity to review then were loy- alty, devotion, and intelligence on the part of our Department of State people, both domestic and Foreign Service. In going over these recollections of those unfortunate days of the McCarthy era, it behooves us to recall that somehow it all began because of foreign policy reverses, concerning which only history could make an assessment. To try to preempt his- tory may perpetuate the kind of bitter quarrels of the McCarthy years that a few of us can still remember vividly even after a quarter of a century has passed. As Winston Churchill said before the House of Commons in June 1940, during the Battle of Britain: “If we open a quarrel between the past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.” n