Of all the government agencies affected by the loyalty and security program, none was so battered as the State Department. Reactionary elements of Congress who despised the New Deal and the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union tarred State as a coterie of Communists, fellow travelers, homosexuals, Ivy League intellectuals, and traitors.
The attack began with the Amerasia case of June 1945 and the Marzani case of the following summer. But in 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a self-described Communist spy, came forward with charges of espionage against Alger Hiss. The resulting drama riveted the nation and provided the turning point for the ascendancy of the far Right.
Hiss was the consummate New Dealer. A brilliant lawyer educated at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a fervent supporter of Roosevelt’s reforms, he represented everything the Right hated. On the other hand, Chambers was a slovenly wreck of a man, given to suicide attempts and sensational tales of espionage. In the ensuing legal battle, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sent to prison. Whether he was really guilty or the victim of a psychopathic liar whose story suited the designs of ambitious politicians—most notably Richard Nixon—is as hotly argued today as it was more than four decades ago.
The Hiss case provided the Right with a handy cudgel to batter the State Department New Dealers. So when China went Communist in 1949, it was no surprise that the Right painted the two events with a seamless Red stoke. The defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces by the Communist armies of Mao Tse-tung was no surprise to State Department and academic experts. They had long warned that the corrupt and inefficient leadership of Chiang’s Kuomintang Party (KMT) would lead to a Communist victory.1 But to the Republican Party and the China Lobby,2 the “loss” of China could only have occurred through the treachery of the Alger Hisses in Washington.
Accordingly, the main villains in the plot were the China Hands. These were the Foreign Service’s Far Eastern experts, men with decades of experience in China. They had correctly predicted the defeat of Chiang, but now were accused of having willed the event. Such was the purge that followed that of the twenty-two Foreign Service officers assigned to China before the war, only two remained in 1954. The rest had been either dismissed or scattered around the globe; one officer with eighteen years of Far Eastern experience found himself stamping visas in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Using the China furor as a stepping-stone, Joe McCarthy made a leap to national prominence with his 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia, speech charging that 205 people known by the Secretary of State to be Communists were still working in the State Department. Even though McCarthy juggled the numbers from day to day and refused to open his “list” to scrutiny, the controversy was such that Truman finally authorized a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee to investigate the charges. After much testimony and perusal of loyalty-security and FBI files, the subcommittee, under Senator Millard Tydings, characterized McCarthy’s allegations as “the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of this republic.” Unfortunately for those publicly named by McCarthy, this slap in the face did little to cool the ardor of conservative reaction. By January 1953, eighteen of the thirty-four had been forced out of government.
During the Eisenhower years, State Department employees suffered a reign of terror under a former FBI agent named Scott McLeod. Hired by Secretary of State Dulles to appease J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy, McLeod headed the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, and soon ran personnel as well. With him came two dozen ex-agents to augment the hundreds of security officers already in place. McLeod informed his staff that he hated Commies, Comsymps, liberals, intellectuals, and fairies (reportedly in those exact words)3 and found no difference between them. The ex-agents put their training to work: they rifled desks and file cabinets, opened employee mail, tapped phones, grilled employees on their reading habits, kept them under surveillance, and burglarized their homes. Suspect employees were informally notified that an investigation would begin in forty-eight hours, but they were free to resign without charges in the interim—provided they not defend themselves or attempt to return to government service.
With its members regularly whipped in public as homosexuals, bunglers, and Communists, the Foreign Service became known as a graveyard of careers. In 1950, the post of assistant secretary of state went begging through thirty-two men before the thirty-third accepted it. Officers in the field became extraordinarily cautious, even staging mock hearings to anticipate harsh interrogations. Theodore White commented that America now had “a Foreign Service of eunuchs.” As late as 1960, one State Department official confided to a researcher that it had been eight years since he had read an overseas report that he personally disagreed with but nevertheless felt was worthy of study.
In 1948, Hiss was a highly respected New Deal lawyer and State Department official, the newly elected president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That was also the year he became the target of Whittaker Chambers, who had confessed to a lurid career as a Communist spy. Chambers’s accusations eventually put Hiss behind bars for nearly four years. He has fought his case for more than forty-five years.
My case was largely a political issue, an attempt of the Republicans to damage the Democratic tradition. Almost all New Dealers were attacked by the Right. In fact, before the House Un-American Activities Committee there was the Dies Committee, and someone appearing before that had even called Mrs. Roosevelt a Communist.
While I was at the State Department, I was involved with the founding of the United Nations and I attended the Yalta Conference.1 The right wing was very glad to have me as a target. There is no doubt about that. They used my case to attack the New Deal and Roosevelt’s foreign policy mercilessly.
J. Edgar Hoover, who at that time was considered a laudable public servant, was trying to ingratiate himself with what he thought would be the incoming Republican regime. At that time a lot of people hoped that Truman would not be reelected, and as you know, Hoover stayed in office for a long, long time by devious methods, which, years later, included the actual blackmailing of Kennedy.2
We New Dealers had discovered that Hoover was not loyal to the New Deal program,3 and this was reported to Roosevelt. We made no secret of our belief that J. Edgar Hoover was disloyal to the President, so he had it in for all of us.
Whittaker Chambers first told his story to Adolf Berle4 in 1939. He named various people as Communists in the government, some of whom obviously were unjustly accused, including myself and my brother, who was also in the State Department at the time. Nothing ever came of the charges against my brother.
Not one of the accusations against me was ever alleged by anyone other than Chambers and the people who repeated Chambers’s charges. They were continuously recycled until there seemed to be many sources, but they had all come from the FBI, which leaked Chambers’s statements.
In 1946, I was in London attending the first meeting of the United Nations as an adviser to the American delegation. When I returned to Washington, Secretary of State Byrnes let me know that several Republicans in Congress were claiming I was a Communist. He said the rumors had come from the FBI, and suggested I go see Hoover to clear the matter up.
Hoover wouldn’t meet with me, but passed me along to one of his assistants. As I recall, he asked me a series of rather perfunctory questions about whether or not I knew various people. Some I did, some I didn’t. He seemed satisfied, and I thought that was the end of it.
Two years later, when I was at the Carnegie Endowment, the charges came up again. The source was revealed as a man named Whittaker Chambers. He had asserted before HUAC that I had been a Communist some twelve years before and that we had been friends.
The name Whittaker Chambers didn’t mean a thing to me. He looked vaguely familiar from the news photos, but I couldn’t recognize him. I wanted to confront him personally. This was in the beginning of August 1948. Two days later, I appeared voluntarily before the committee to rebut the charges. Unfortunately, Chambers wasn’t there. I told the committee his name meant absolutely nothing to me. I answered all their questions and everything seemed to go fine.
Unbeknownst to me, Richard Nixon convinced the committee otherwise.5 They called an executive session for a few days later. It was only then that I finally met Chambers. He had changed a lot, but I recognized him. I knew him under the name George Crosley, and only for a couple of years in ’35 and ’36, while I was with the Nye Committee investigating the munitions industry.6 Back then, he claimed to be a freelance journalist, and we had struck up a sort of haphazard relationship. I sublet our old apartment to him, as the lease wasn’t up, and he borrowed money from me; small amounts, nothing much. He never paid any of it back, but would come around asking for more. This went on for a while, and I did him favors. I gave him an old Ford that was going to waste, and a few other things. Then I came to my senses, realized this guy was just a deadbeat, and I cut the thing off. That was in 1936 and I hadn’t had any contact with him until this executive session. I challenged him to repeat his accusations in public, so I could sue him for libel.
Some time later, he did so on Meet the Press, and I followed with a suit. In the course of the libel suit, he expanded his accusation to include espionage, which he had previously denied under oath. He backed this up with a sheaf of State Department documents, all dated in 1938, that allegedly I had passed to him. Before a grand jury, I denied doing any such thing, then found myself indicted on two counts of perjury. They couldn’t charge me with espionage, as the statute of limitations had run out on that, so they charged me with denying espionage! [Laughs.] There were two perjury counts, one alleging that I had given Chambers documents, the other alleging that I had known him after 1936.
There were many documents, none of which were of any particular importance. Some of them had passed through my department, but we showed that only three of the many documents would’ve gone through my office.7 Those had my initials on them. And if indeed I was engaged in espionage for Chambers, it is hardly likely I would’ve initialed something before giving it to him. [Laughs.] The great bulk of the documents we proved passed through different offices. They were also available to a man named Wadleigh,8 who admitted he had given papers to Chambers and who at times came into my office because his division was under the supervision of my chief, Mr. Francis Sayre. When Wadleigh was put on the stand as a government witness, he said he didn’t know whether he had given Chambers these particular documents. So it was never absolutely clear that’s where they came from. Then the prosecutor argued that I might have gone out to Wadleigh’s division to appropriate the papers.
The other evidence they used against me were documents Chambers had put on five rolls of thirty-five-millimeter film and hidden in a hollowed pumpkin on his farm. He did this the morning before he rather dramatically revealed them to the press. After that, they became known as the Pumpkin Papers.
Two rolls of film had dull nonsensitive State Department documents about routine trade negotiations with Germany. The other three rolls weren’t released until 1975, when my lawyer got them under the Freedom of Information Act. One of these was blank, and the other two had inconsequential Navy Department memos, including one about the proper painting of fire extinguishers. Documents that were available through any government library. If I had been a spy, I was giving him pretty lousy information.
My old Woodstock typewriter came into play, as some sixty of the documents had been copied on a machine believed to be a Woodstock. Chambers claimed that my wife had typed the copies and I had turned these over to him. It hardly makes sense that a spy would spend long hours retyping documents, instead of just photographing the originals. But you have to remember the hysteria of the times made fantastic charges seem acceptable.
We had disposed of the Woodstock back in 1937. After a long search we found it. It was introduced into evidence by my counsel because we believed that it had been our typewriter. It was only later we discovered that it could not have been our typewriter as its serial number did not fit the dates when my father-in-law acquired his typewriter,9 which is the one that came to me through my wife.
Much later, we discovered FBI documents that showed the FBI knew the typewriter in court was not my typewriter and reported to Hoover that the dates were off. So the prosecution, including Hoover, misled the court, misled the defense, and of course, misled the jury.
Obviously, Richard Nixon had much to gain if he could manipulate Chambers. And very clearly the FBI did manipulate, because they took him to various places I had lived, so he could identify them in court. As it happened, one house in particular had been extensively remodeled since I knew him. He described it in court as it stood in 1948, not 1935. Years later we discovered that his pretrial statements to the FBI contradicted the statements he made in court.10
Nothing produced in the trial was independent of Chambers. Under perjury rules, the prosecution’s evidence must be asserted by two independent witnesses. Not only were there not two independent witnesses, there was no documentary evidence that wasn’t dependent on Chambers’s word. A number of important people came to my defense.11 Supreme Court Justices Frankfurter and Reed both appeared as character witnesses for me. I did not ask them to appear at the second trial because the right wing was so critical of them for having helped me at the first trial. Adlai Stevenson was also a character witness. None of them ever backed off. In fact, when I applied for readmission to the Massachusetts bar, Justice Reed, who had since retired, wrote a letter saying he still supported me. Frankfurter was dead by that time.
I was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury. After which, Nixon spoke of impeaching the judge because he had not been a hanging judge. There was so much hysteria in the country that it wasn’t possible to get a fair-minded jury for the second trial. After I was convicted, we appealed the case and were eventually turned down for a hearing by the Supreme Court. You need four votes to gain a hearing. Frankfurter and Reed had testified for me and therefore couldn’t vote. Douglas and Black did want to take the case and voted for it. If Frankfurter and Reed had been able to vote, the court would have taken the case. In his book, Go East Young Man, Justice Douglas says that no court could have sustained the conviction as there was no independent witness to corroborate Chambers’s story.
I was in prison for forty-four months. Once I was released I immediately started to try and clear my name. The Justice Department was none too happy about it, but that is not surprising. But again a lot depends on what judge you get. When I filed my coram nobis petition12 for a new trial, I got a judge who had been appointed by Richard Nixon. But I have continued and I have firm support.
I would like to add that in September of 1992, General Dmitri Volkogonov, a high-ranking Russian official, reported that a review of the KGB and other Soviet archives revealed not a single document supporting the charges against me. I take that as a complete exoneration.13
The first federal employee to be persecuted, Carl Marzani is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a former member of the Communist Party (1939 to 1941). After serving with distinction with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War Two, Marzani was transferred to the State Department. He resigned his post in October 1946. Three months later, he was indicted under eleven counts of fraud for denying past Party membership before the Civil Service Commission. He spent three years in prison.
The FBI wanted to know who sent me to the OSS. Well, nobody sent me. What happened was a friend of mine had a friend named Barton in the OSS. My friend said to Barton, “Boy, Marzani would be terrific for you.” I went to see him and he hired me on the spot. But then I had to be cleared. I told him, “Look, I’m going to have trouble with the FBI.” I said to him specifically, “You ask me any question you want, but there are some questions you don’t ask me. But whatever you ask me, I’ll tell you the truth.” I wanted him to be able to deny he knew I had been a Communist. He said, “We’ll have no problem.”
The next day he told me that the guy who was the very top of OSS research and analysis was Baxter, my college president from Williams. His assistant was my history professor, Birdsell. Birdsell had considered himself a Left liberal, and I had told him I had been a member of the Communist Party. So I said to Barton, who hired me, “There’ll be no problem because Birdsell is my friend.” The next day Barton said, “Boy, if that’s your friend, God help you in your enemies.” He said, “Birdsell is going around the top echelon saying Marzani’s a Communist and you shouldn’t hire him.”
Then Barton and his superior figured out a way to beat the FBI. They said we need Marzani right away, so while the FBI does the checking, we’re going to check with Navy Intelligence, and G-2, Army Intelligence, and if he’s clear, we’ll hire him. Of course, there was nothing in ONI and G-2. Donovan1 said okay, so they hired me. After you’re hired, the FBI can’t do fuck-all. The Civil Service Commission can fire me; Donovan can fire me only with the Civil Service Commission approval.
The FBI pushed the Civil Service Commission not to hire me, and they had a hearing. Donovan sent his personal attorney to represent me. I lost that one. We immediately appealed, and on the appeal, Donovan’s attorney was saying, “We need this guy,” and the commission approved me.
Truman didn’t like the OSS—he thought it was a Gestapo and he didn’t like Donovan.2 After the war, he broke up the OSS.3 A big piece of it went to the State Department to set up an intelligence group. The State Department didn’t want it, because the State Department was constructed so that every country had a desk officer who controlled everything. If you get an intelligence outfit, there’d be dualism.
I was transferred from OSS to the State Department without having any say on the subject. I was simply part of the outfit that was shifted over. After Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri, speech I realized that Truman was really bent on a Cold War and I resigned, but I didn’t do it right away because I had an enormous amount of leave. In the five years I was in the OSS and the government, I had never taken one day leave. So I decided, with the agreement of my boss, that I would take three months off before I resigned. So I actually resigned in October of ’46. But when I was indicted on January 1st, I discovered that the government had scratched that October date out and wrote in December, indicating that they had caught me while I was still in the State Department. They were stupid, because there was a stamp on my resignation papers which was not legible, but with infrared it was brought out and it was marked “Accepted” with the original date.
My case represented three different strains coming together. One was the FBI hatred of the OSS—Donovan and Hoover hated each other.4 I heard Donovan say that Hoover was a fascist, just like that. And Hoover, of course, thought the OSS was full of Reds.5 Another strain was the loyalty oath, which was then being debated and went into effect about a month after I was indicted. But the indictment was part of that, to show what they would do to anybody who had been a Communist. The third was a film I made while on leave, during the summer of ’46, for the United Electrical Workers, CIO. Deadline for Action was the first work saying that the Cold War is the responsibility of Truman. General Electric, the company that employed the majority of UE members, was shown in the film to have worked with Nazi Germany, to have lied to the government, indicted and found guilty, and had settled out of court. They spent millions of dollars to block this, and here I come with a big film, which got tremendous distribution. GE was just burned like hell.
Several months after I was indicted, there was a public relations convention at the Waldorf Astoria, and one of the people present was an ex-Red, Saul Mills, who had been a CIO state official. But he now was in public relations with a private firm. And GE public relations said, “There are different ways of skinning a cat. For example, take the case of Carl Marzani. We pointed out that he was a Red and now he’s in jail, and that’s one way of solving problems.”
They indicted me for fraud, for taking my salary without revealing that I’d been a member of the Communist Party. You see, during World War Two, Congress passed a law that the statute of limitations, which is three years, would be suspended for fraud against the government. That’s to block the armaments manufacturers from doing what they did in World War One, which was rip us off and then you could never collect because of the statute of limitations. Now they suspended the statute so that for fraud the statute of limitations would be three years from the end of the war rather than three years from the time it was committed.
So they prosecuted me. Now they had the original FBI interrogation in which they asked, “Were you a member of the Communist Party?” I said no, which was a lie. They could have prosecuted me for perjury, but the statute of limitations had run out on perjury. So by prosecuting me for fraud, they were able to bring in all the evidence that I had been a member. Then to be covered, they had a guy from the State Department testify that towards the end of 1945, he had asked me had I been a member of the Communist Party and I said no, which of course was absolutely untrue. The guy was lying, the prosecutor knew he was lying. And the judge must have known they were lying.
I worked with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I worked with General Marshall6 directly. I didn’t go around saying I used to be a member of the Communist Party, but everybody knew I was radical. I never made any secret of it. We weren’t bullshitting anybody. It was known that I had been a Red. When I told my boss, “Ask me any question, but there’s some questions you shouldn’t ask,” I’m giving him deniability, as they say, as Poindexter said for Reagan. But it was evident, he knew that that’s what I was saying.
During the clearance process, I was pretty much told by my superiors, “Look, just deny you’re a Communist.” But I couldn’t quite prove that, but as people kept dying off—Donovan died, Barton died—I suddenly realized that if I don’t get something on paper, it’ll be my word against the FBI. So I wrote to Edward Mason, who was the very top guy, next to Donovan, for our outfit. He was the OSS representative on the Joint Intelligence Conference of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I said I’m writing my memoirs, and I’m writing the recollection of how I was hired and I’m sending you a copy and I would appreciate it if it checks out with your recollection or whether there are differences. And I laid out all the details, and how it was all done. He wrote back, “To the best of my recollection, you’re quite accurate, this is the way I remember it.” This was a number of years ago, I think he’s dead now. He was in nineties then.
I was indicted on eleven counts. The first nine: had I ever been a member of the Communist Party, had I ever given money to the Communist Party, had I ever worked for the Communist Party, had I ever distributed leaflets for the Communist Party, etc. In other words, the counts were always the same thing, I’m a Communist. Since the government used the fraud statute, the appeals court said that the statute of limitations applied, so the first nine counts were thrown out. The court of appeals upheld the last two counts. It went up to the Supreme Court, and they split four to four, with Douglas abstaining.
We petitioned for a rehearing. In the whole history of the United States, there were only eight rehearings. Mine was the eighth. In our brief we said that whatever reason Douglas had for abstaining, we had complete confidence in his integrity and would waive any question, that we thought it was important that there should not be a four-to-four decision. But Douglas abstained again and they split four to four. A split court means that the lower court stands.
Anyway, I got three years and I served thirty-three months. Ordinarily, with good behavior, you only serve twenty-seven months and twenty days out of thirty-six months. But in jail I started writing a book on my case and tried to smuggle the manuscript out. They took five months good time away for that. The day before, a guy had been caught with a knife and they only took three days off his good time.
They didn’t want us to write, they didn’t want us to read. In other words, they treated us like the political prisoners we were. But to this day, the government will not accept that we were political prisoners. They’re all criminals that broke the Smith Act, they defrauded the government, and so on. So you find yourself in a situation where you have to fight within their terminology.
In fact, every goddamn rule that the jails had was broken, did not apply to the political prisoners! Prisoners are allowed to write—but we weren’t allowed to write. Prisoners were allowed to get anything to read—we couldn’t get anything that had the word “Russia” in it, even if it says “We hate the Russians.”
The fundamental rules of the jail are designed, number one, to prevent your escape; number two, not to get any weapons in; number three, to prevent homosexuality. Those are the major problems. In the meantime you can write, you can teach. They help you get a high school equivalency degree, so they need teachers. Here I am, a graduate of Williams and Oxford, with degrees in three or four different disciplines. They wouldn’t use me because I’m a Red.
There was one exception. The guy who was teaching American history was sick one day. He had been a teacher somewhere. He was in for molesting and taking a small girl across state lines. So the deputy warden called me and asked if I would take over this class on the American Revolution. He said, “No Red stuff now.” I said, “No Red stuff.” So when I teach that evening, the son of a bitch sits in the front row to make sure. I thought, “I’ll show you.”
I started off by saying, “I don’t want to go into too much detail about the American Revolution, but I want to talk about what it takes to make a revolution.” I started to quote Lenin—but he didn’t know it was Lenin—on the three conditions for revolution. Number one, you have to have a deeply held population-wide resentment on something, and generally speaking the most prevalent ones were independence, like the American Revolution, or overthrow of a tyranny, like the French Revolution, or losing a war, like the czar did. The second condition was to have a group of people who are willing and able to run a revolution, like the American Committees of Correspondence, the Jacobins in France, the Bolsheviks in Russia. And I said the third, you must have a bunch of nincompoops on top, like George the Third, like the czar. That night, I gave them a first-class lesson in Marxism, and the deputy warden’s there nodding, nodding.
Parnell Thomas was in jail with me for taking kickbacks of a dollar and a half or two dollars a week from his secretary.7 He got a year and a day. I was in jail with him and the Hollywood guys, Ring Lardner and Lester Cole, and with one of the directors of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Jacob Auslander. As a matter of fact, Auslander and Thomas came face to face in the chow line. I was there. I was watching Auslander, he was Viennese, very cultured. He was trembling with anger and he looks at Thomas and finally he says, “You . . . you . . . cocksucker!” It was the worst thing he could think of!
By the way, Thomas got paroled on the very first day he was eligible. I didn’t get paroled three times, even though the first name on my parole petition was Albert Einstein, the second name was Thomas Mann, the third name was General Donovan, and then came the names of more than fifteen hundred professors, heads of departments at Harvard and other universities. Not a peep from the parole board, nothing. I did all my time.
The tragedy in my case was that my wife was very ill with multiple sclerosis and ended up in a wheelchair. That made it very tough. She got multiple sclerosis before I went in but after I was indicted. They didn’t give a damn. It’s such shittiness that people find it difficult to believe.
On the other hand, I was lucky because I was the first case and there was lots of money. Hollywood used to send us donations. By 1947 the government had just started its Red Scare, but McCarthy wasn’t there yet, so the hysteria wasn’t as bad. By the time you get to 1950 and McCarthy, there were too many people in need. At the time I was the only one, so the money came in and my wife was taken care of.
I had two little children. One was a year old when I went in, and the other was around three or four. They suffered, they really did. You don’t realize it. When I got out, my daughter would come and sit close, but the moment I’d acknowledge it, the moment I put out my hand, she’d run away. Obviously, what had gone into her head was don’t show too great a love for your father because he might go away again.
Service was with the Foreign Service in China from 1933 to 1945. When the Nationalist government fell to the Communist forces, he and other China Hands were accused by Joe McCarthy of “selling China out.” In 1950, Service was fired by the Loyalty Review Board in connection with espionage charges that he had been cleared of six times previously. He fought his case for reinstatement to the Supreme Court and won. After retiring in 1962, he spent ten years at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
The loss of China to the Communists in 1949 really brought the State Department China specialists under fire. In those days, America considered herself omnipotent, and China was supposed to be our great friend. The public couldn’t understand how this could have happened; all the wonderful things that the U.S. had done for the Chinese people.1 We had the missionaries there; we protected China’s integrity with the Open Door policy—never mind that it was primarily to make sure American businessmen didn’t lose out to British and other businessmen. How could this happen? Never mind that China was a big country that wasn’t ours to lose! There must be treachery, a conspiracy somewhere, that betrayed China to the Communists.
At first, most of us thought it was just a passing phase. We didn’t expect the catastrophe that happened; there was no precedent for anything like this hysteria. Sure, I was an obvious target because of the Amerasia case,2 but then pretty soon Davies was attacked, then Vincent, then Clubb.3 Gradually we realized that we were all under attack because of our views in reporting on China. The Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s party, certainly did their part; their secret police kept us under surveillance and probably pilfered some papers. In Washington all our telephones were tapped.
I first “got into trouble,” you might say, in June of 1945 when I became involved in the Amerasia case. Philip Jaffe, the editor-publisher of a magazine on the Far East called Amerasia, was discovered to be getting copies of U.S. government documents.4 They were apparently supplied to him by a man named Larsen who worked for the State Department. Jaffe was either a Communist or very close to it.5 His magazine was anti–Chiang Kai-shek and was the only specialist magazine dealing with the Far East. Originally it was very good. Later on it became, shall we say, more devoted to a particular point of view.
The FBI had already raided Jaffe’s office6 and were watching him when I came home on leave from China in April ’45. When Jaffe looked me up, they thought, “Oh boy, this all fits together!” I allowed Jaffe to see some personal copies of my reports about China.7 But that was customary. I allowed many members of the press to see them for background information. But the copies that were found in his files were not from me, they were from Larsen.
I was arrested in June, along with five other people, and charged with espionage. They anticipated that after the arrest they would get more information. They searched my apartment and seized the contents of my desk, but they didn’t find any smoking gun.
The case against me was very thin. I don’t think anybody knows what all was in back of it. But the FBI was working in China, along with the Office of Naval Intelligence. ONI had a working agreement with the head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police. I was the chief villain as far as the Chinese secret police were concerned, because of my contacts with the Chinese Communists. My guess is that the FBI people in China had already had some communication about me with the FBI in the States.
Originally the charges were laid under the Espionage Act. I don’t think they ever had any evidence of espionage against Larsen.8 The thing never got very far. Three were indicted by the grand jury; Jaffe, Emannuel Larsen, and Andrew Roth. Three were not indicted. The FBI had made a lot of illegal searches, and the evidence was tainted. So the government finally settled for a much lesser charge—illegal possession of government documents. Jaffe paid a fine, Larsen pled nolo contendere, and Roth went to England. But they never actually made any very serious efforts to bring him to trial.9 I was cleared. The grand jury refused to indict me—twenty to nothing. But dropping the charges didn’t end the business, because the case was continually picked up and recycled.
The State Department reprimanded me for being indiscreet. I said, “Sure, I’ve been indiscreet. I’m willing to acknowledge that.” I felt that our policy of backing the Chinese Nationalists was a hell of a mistake. I was talking fairly freely about the need for an evenhanded policy in a rather hotheaded, youthful way—I was what, thirty-five, thirty-six? I thought what was going to happen in China was a disaster. Well, it was a disaster. Civil war was starting in China, and we knew a civil war would end in Communist victory. It was going to make things a lot worse. We hoped a civil war could be avoided or made much shorter.
The professional Red-hunters always alleged that the case had been suppressed. There were also people who were in the House—a man named Dondero10 and several others—who kept bringing up charges that the case had not been properly prosecuted. And then Patrick Hurley used that as background for his charges against me when he resigned in November ’45 as ambassador to China. He had failed in his mission to bring about a conciliation between the Communists and the Kuomintang. He was looking for a scapegoat, so he blamed me and some other people for having not supported him in China.11 The charges were a lot of hogwash, but they gave me a lot of unfavorable publicity. Of course, the China Lobby people kept pushing it as well.
Then in 1949 the State Department published a China White Paper in an effort to prove that they had tried to support Chiang, but it was his failings and the corruption of the Kuomintang government that lost China. In the White Paper they published an appendix showing that Davies, myself, and some others in China had correctly predicted the downfall of the Chiang government. Unfortunately, this involved excerpting a lot of our reports, which laid open that we had been critical of Chiang Kai-shek. The State Department thought this was a good idea, but it was disastrous for us, because it publicized that we had advocated some cooperation with the Chinese Communists in the war against Japan. We argued for a Tito policy: we supported Tito in Yugoslavia, and we said we should do the same in China. And so this fed into the developing public hysteria about the loss of China.
And then McCarthy started in February of 1950.12 He was fed by a newspaperman13 a list of people who were being investigated in the State Department. Well, most of these were people who had worked for the Office of War Information or the OSS, and after the war they were discontinued and the remnant staff was temporarily taken over by the State Department. These people were being phased out. Most of them had no connection with State.
Any rate, McCarthy’s bluff was called by the Senate and they set up the Tydings Committee,14 a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, to investigate his charges. McCarthy was up a tree—most of his hoorah was about people who weren’t on his original list. I wasn’t on his original list. He had nothing; most of his charges were baseless. So I got involved after the China Lobby, and to some extent the FBI, came galloping to his rescue with more charges. Those were based on the fact that I had been in Yenan and had a lot of contact with Chinese Communists, was favorably impressed by them, and figured that the United States ought to maintain an evenhanded policy in China because they were going to win.
McCarthy’s charges are always very vague. He had all these roundabout ways of saying you were a Communist without actually coming out and saying it. It was mostly innuendo—“He was a Communist stooge.” If you said anything good about Communists in those days, then you were as good as a Communist. So that if Owen Lattimore15 was accused of being a Communist, and you knew Lattimore, you were a Communist. If the Communists advocated deposing the Japanese emperor and you thought the emperor institution wasn’t very good, why, you also were a Communist. All sorts of tenuous connections created these allegations.
After the grand jury had refused to indict on the Amerasia, case, I had a hearing before a personnel board in the State Department and they cleared me on the same charges. Then after the loyalty program was set up, there were several investigations just on the file. But after McCarthy made his charges, the State Department had to institute regular full hearings on the same thing, and that went on for a long time. We went into everything that anybody had said; every charge that had been flung around by a China Lobby man or anybody else. The State Department cleared me. Then they changed the standards and they cleared me again, and then there was more evidence submitted, which was real hokum. Because once you get enough publicity, there are crackpots who come to the FBI with all sorts of allegations—that I had a police record in New York for homosexuality and all sorts of nutstuff.
The State Department kept clearing me, but this did not satisfy the Loyalty Review Board, which was the top board. So they said, “Well, we’re going to have our own hearing.” They had a one-day hearing—a kangaroo court. In those days, you didn’t have to find anybody disloyal, all you had to do was find what they called “reasonable doubt of loyalty.” It’s a very hard thing to disprove. They instructed the State Department to fire me. The State Department checked with the White House. But Truman had created the Loyalty Review Board, and it was a hot political potato at the time. The White House said, “Well, there’s nothing you can do. If they say fire him, then fire him.” I was dismissed on twenty-four hours’ notice, at the close of business the next day.
There were some people in sensitive positions, certainly, who had to break off contact, but none of our China friends or the people we knew well. I had trouble renting an apartment in New York. The only question they asked was “Is this the same man who was fired by the State Department? Sorry.” I was even turned down for life insurance. I wanted to get term insurance, because I’d lost my Foreign Service insurance. The guy said, “Well, how do we know? You may jump out a window.” By this time there had been one or two people who were under attack and had committed suicide. So from a life insurance point of view, maybe the guy had a point.
We exhausted all the administrative remedies. The Loyalty Review Board was presumably under the Civil Service Commission, so we asked them first that the Loyalty Review Board would have a reconsideration, that they’d not considered all the evidence, and they turned us down. Then we asked the Civil Service Commission to have a reconsideration, and they refused. We went to the White House, and the White House refused. So then we went to court. We had a terrible time just getting our case heard, because the government fought to have the courts reject it. We finally got a complaint accepted and we worked our way through the courts. It took a long time, seven years. We lost in the district court and we lost in the court of appeals. Finally, in 1957, we won unanimously in the Supreme Court, eight to nothing!
When the Supreme Court came down with its decision, I was riding the subway in New York. Every paper had my picture on the front page. I felt conspicuous as hell, because here I was in this damned crowded subway train with my picture on the paper. But no one recognized me! [Laughs.] Not a single person. By then, sentiment toward the loyalty program had gradually changed, and most of the headlines reflected that, except for Time magazine, which had always been against the critics of Chiang Kaishek. Time said that the Supreme Court had ruled that the State Department didn’t follow its own regulations, so “now that you know what to do, do it the right way and fire him!” [Laughs.] But Time was out alone.
It was frustrating, years and years, the whole business of getting through the courts. But eventually I won, and so I did as I’d planned to do: I went back to the government, much to the government’s horror! [Laughs.] I was a political embarrassment, as far as they were concerned. They were going to send me to Germany, but that fell through. The German government was tired of being a dumping ground for security cases. They’d had several already, so they didn’t want another one. They ended up sending me to the American consulate in Liverpool, England. Liverpool was a bit of a Siberian backwater with no work of any importance. Mainly, the office just issued visas. After three years there, I realized there wasn’t a prayer for a worthwhile assignment or promotion. So what the hell, why stay around? I’d made my point. So I retired at fifty-two.
During those years the State Department got rid of a lot of people with a more balanced point of view. Others were apt to be conservative, or pro-Kuomintang—and a lot of people in State were pro-Kuomintang. Because of that, I’m sure the reporting was hampered. If you read the White Paper, you can see that the reporting, by and large, was pretty straight. The conservatives didn’t come out and say the good things about Communists that we’d been saying: that they had popular support, that their policies benefited the farmer, and so on. But nonetheless, they were critical. Practically all Americans with any real contact in China, even Wedemeyer,16 wrung their hands about the corruption in Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
Where the real pinch came down is not so much on the reporting from the field, but on limiting the type of people who go into the Foreign Service. The security program has discouraged a lot of the best and the brightest from even considering the Foreign Service. Look what happens. Once you decide you want to take the Foreign Service exam, you’re at the mercy, without any knowledge or appeal, of a security clearance procedure which is run by policemen. A lot of them not very bright policemen. And they’re not going to take any chances on someone who attended a rally or signed a petition. So anyone that has shown any liberal or radical political activity will be blackmailed by the security people, and they will never know why they didn’t get clearance. So what do you have left? Certainly not the best and brightest! [Laughs.] I’m not trying to say that it’s the dregs, by any means. But most of the people that come into the Foreign Service now are pretty conventional. They haven’t done very much, certainly in the political line, or even shown very much interest in anything like that.
In 1951, John Melby was considered a brilliant Foreign Service officer with impeccable anti-Communist credentials. In September of that year, he was charged with being a security risk for having “maintained an association” with playwright Lillian Hellman. In 1953, after seven loyalty-security hearings, Melby was fired.
My problem in the McCarthy period concerned exclusively my association with Lillian Hellman,1 whom I had met in Moscow during the war. We had quite an affair, and it continued, in one sense or another, up until the time she died. In September 1951, I received a letter from the Security Office, with a series of questions which I was requested to answer. Most of them just the usual garbage. Although there were a couple on Lillian in there, I didn’t think that was particularly serious. I still thought what was bugging them was me in China and the China White Papers, because after all I’d really written that White Paper. But no, that wasn’t so. So I answered the original interrogatory, particularly the questions on Lillian. And this on the advice of a lawyer in New York, who said, “Look, you can’t possibly remember all the times you’ve seen her. Just pick out a representative selection of the times and frequencies.”
So I answered those two questions that way. Then in November they came back at me with a second interrogatory that concerned Lillian exclusively. And there they said the department has information that you spent a weekend with Miss Hellman, who is alleged to be a member of the Communist Party, at her farm in Westchester County. Well, it so happened that it was true and it was one of the times that I had not mentioned. All I could do was say, “Yes, it’s quite true. I was there. I spent a whole weekend with her. There wasn’t anybody else there, just the two of us.2 She had let the servants go for the weekend, and the farmer was away. So, sure, I was there, so what?” Well, this clearly did not satisfy them, and this was followed in April by formal charges: having associated with one Lillian Hellman, who is a member of the Communist Party.3 A date was set for a hearing, July 19, 1951. The last hearing ended eighteen months later.
They started out with “Are you a Communist?” My lawyers at that time saying, “Let’s go on the record, he is not and never has been a member of the Party.” They knew that and they didn’t pay any attention to it. It was a question of association with somebody who is alleged to be a member of the Party.
The way the system worked in those days, you were given charges but you were not told who had made them. You were not permitted to confront the accuser, and you were not permitted to answer him directly. You couldn’t refer to files or anything else.4 I, frankly, had accepted some bad advice from some friends, who said, “Look, this thing is a lot of nonsense. Get the most conservative lawyer you can find, and do exactly what he wants you to do. Then forget it and it’ll be all over.”
Well, that was a mistake, because my lawyer, who practiced before the Federal Communications Commission, was a good enough lawyer, but he didn’t know anything about this area of the law—he didn’t claim to. He didn’t know what to do when they’d throw these questions at me.5 He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In the end they found against me. Fortunately, none of this ever got any publicity. Largely because I knew a great many newspapermen in Washington. Some of them came to me privately and said, “We understand you’re in trouble. Do you want some publicity on the thing?” And I said “No, I don’t,” so they laid off.
That was very fortunate, because in May, Lillian was to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She was very concerned about two things. One: would my name be brought up in the hearing? And two: Averell Harriman was beginning to run for President, and she had been a house guest of his in Moscow.6 You can imagine, in the McCarthy period, what could be made of this alleged Communist as a houseguest of a candidate for the highest office in the land. You can imagine the scare headlines in the tabloids. As it turned out, nothing was said about either Harriman or me. We were all amazed. But so much of this was done on a buckshot approach. Fire the buckshot, and if you happen to hit somebody, go after ’em. It is entirely possible that they didn’t even know.
As a matter of fact, after I’d been terminated in 1953, Father McGuire, who’d been a friend of mine in China with National Catholic Welfare, a very liberal kind of guy, went to Scott McLeod, who was then director of security7 under John Foster Dulles. Father McGuire was prospecting to see what could be done about my troubles. And what McLeod said to him was “Look, my advice to you is keep your hands off this case, because if you don’t, we’re going to turn Melby’s files over to Senator McCarthy. He doesn’t know about it yet.” So McGuire then phoned me and said, “Look, John, what do you want me to say on this?”
I said, “Oh my God, the last thing I want is McCarthy getting his sticky fingers on this thing. I’ve got two sons who are getting to be military age, and they’re planning to apply for a commission in the Army. Furthermore, there’s the question of Lillian, who says we can go to court on this, but I cannot ask her to testify, which she would have to do. I don’t think she realizes what would be involved if she had to testify about me and her. I just cannot do this to her, any more than I could turn on her.”
Which is what they wanted me to do in my hearings. The main thing they were after me to say was “I have made a terrible mistake. I am ashamed of myself. I will never again have anything to do with her or anybody like her.” What I told them was “I can’t do that. I have no reason to believe she’s a Communist. A left-wing radical, sure. So am I, in a sense. But a member of the Communist Party, I do not believe it.” They kept hammering, “Will you promise that you will never again see her?” I said, “I will not do that. I have to live with myself.”8
Those who were on the loyalty-security board who were trying me were a bunch of slobs, except on the appeal hearing. The chairman of that was a fairly well known Foreign Service officer, Joe Satterthwaite. And Joe said, “Look, Mr. Melby, let me ask you. Considering the atmosphere today, do you think you have any right to associate with anyone who might by any interpretation be construed by anyone as undesirable?” I just looked at him, I said, “Mr. Chairman, I don’t have any answer to that.” The counsel for the board once asked me the question “We have a report that you’ve been seen in hotel lobbies in Washington a good deal recently. Do you think it’s a good idea for you to be seen in public while this is going on?” I said, “A hotel lobby is a public place and I’ll go anyplace I want to.”
But that was the atmosphere. The people who were not of my vintage, or Jack Service’s, have a hard time visualizing the atmosphere of terror, really, it was terror, that pervaded everything. People whom you’ve known most of your life would see you coming down the street and they would cross the street so they wouldn’t have to pass you.
Well, I appealed my suspension and I got a new lawyer. The man I got was Joe Volpe, who had been general counsel to the Atomic Energy Commission and had handled all the security matters for them. Joe had also been Oppenheimer’s lawyer. Joe was as good as they come in that business. He did a beautiful job on it, but it was hopeless. Finally in May, I was terminated. The only notification I got was a letter from the undersecretary for administration, who merely said, “The Secretary has determined that your continued employment is no longer in the national interest.” So, I guess I was the highest-ranking officer in the Foreign Service to be fired.
It took me two years to find another job. Not that my potential employers knew anything about my hearing, but in those days the mere fact that you had worked for the State Department Foreign Service was enough. Everybody was scared of it—a bunch of Communists.9 In fact, the reputation of the service was such that even though there was normally between five and ten thousand applicants a year to the Foreign Service, that second year when I was still looking for a job, there was none.
I finally got a job at Yale University, as a research associate in Southeast Asian studies. Yale apparently decided that, State Department or no State Department, the question was, does he know anything about Southeast Asia? After a while it got where nobody paid much attention to my State Department background.
When Kennedy became President, I thought, well, here at last, we got a good Democratic president, and Dean Rusk is the Secretary of State. I’d worked for Dean in the department. I went around to see him. He said, “I know this is terrible. Just leave it with me, and I’m going to straighten things out.” Nothing happened. Additional queries, and nothing happened. So finally I go to see Roger Jones, who had taken a postretirement job as undersecretary for administration of the State Department. Jones said to me, “I’m going to tell you what did happen. I’ll probably get fired for telling you, but I don’t care.” The chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee had served notice on Rusk that “if you attempt to get anyone on our list promoted or advanced, or if you bring anybody else to us who is on our list,10 the State Department is going to have one hell of a bad time with its appropriations. It’s up to you.” In other words, he was blackmailing Rusk.
But I did get cleared. That happened in 1980, in the last months of the Carter administration. I realized that if I was going to get anything done, this administration was probably my last chance. So I went again to Averell Harriman, who was very close to the Carter administration. I told him I thought this was the last chance, and he said, “You’re absolutely right, and we’re going to do something about it.” And he did. I’d been at it for some thirty years.
John Melby died at age seventy-nine on December 18, 1992.
Anthony Geber’s problem with the Foreign Service security apparatus began when his parents were imprisoned by the Communist government in Hungary. We meet at his home in a suburb outside of Washington, D.C., a neighborhood of ranch-style houses and sloping lawns.
I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1919 and came to the United States as a student in 1938. I was drafted into the Army in 1943 and they sent me to Berlin two years later. I was anxious to visit my parents, who still lived in Budapest. I hadn’t seen them for seven years. It wasn’t easy, but finally, the Russians, who were occupying Budapest, opened up and allowed American military personnel who had close relatives in Hungary an entry permit. When I got back, there was a call from a colonel who was planning an official trip to Hungary and Rumania. He asked if I was interested in going again, and I said yes. That answer decided my fate. In order to go, because I was about to be discharged and shipped back to the States, I had to either sign up for another six months in the Army or become a civilian employee of the military government. I chose the latter, and this is how I became a bureaucrat.
In April 1946 I was stationed in Berlin. Military governors came and went, but I stayed. Eventually, I became a Foreign Service staff officer. During the blockade, things got so bad the government couldn’t afford to feed us, so we were sent to the Zone: first to Nuremberg, then Bad Nauheim, and eventually I got back to Berlin. In 1952 I went to Bonn, working for the Office of Political Affairs. That’s when my troubles started.
The Stalinist regime in Hungary started deportations of thousands of people, mostly of the middle class. They were deporting them to small villages in eastern Hungary, miserable places. Among them were my parents. It was a rather cruel procedure, and I know of numerous examples where it was evident that their primary objective was cruelty against the “bourgeois” rather than any rational policy objective.
But through either foresight or luck, my parents got the attention of the Dutch minister in Budapest. He found them a refuge, inviting them to move up to a house rented by the Dutch in Budapest. The very same night my parents moved, the political police came to drag them out of the house. But luckily and with great foresight, the Dutch minister who lived next door stayed up that night and when the political police arrived he told them they could not enter the premises, which were under diplomatic protection. So they left, and there my parents lived. (Incidentally, the Dutch minister was commended by his queen and the story of my parents became quite well known.) At first they didn’t dare to move out of the house or the garden. Later on, they took short walks around the premises. But their situation became increasingly tenuous.
The minister wrote me that it was not a permanent solution, that one would really have to do something about it. First of all, if Hungary asked for extradition, he could not protect them, because they were Hungarian citizens. Second, he expected to be transferred in the near future and this was an action he had taken on his own and he would prefer not to burden his successor with the problem.
I tried a great number of things to get them visas. They each needed an exit permit from the Hungarians and an entrance visa from the U.S. The exit permit was the more difficult of the two to get. There were stories that if one paid five thousand dollars at the Hungarian consulate in New York, one could get an exit visa. But nothing worked.
Finally, I contacted a man who used to be counsel for the Hungarian National Bank before escaping to Austria. Now he spent most of his time trying to get others out. He offered me a rather iffy proposition. There was this Hungarian farmer who lived in Vienna. Before the war he had smuggled flint for lighters and saccharine. Now he was smuggling people, so he was a very experienced smuggler. He had already brought out groups of twenty or thirty people, some of whom I knew by name and could ascertain that this had happened.
It was risky and involved things like marching through fields. My father was seventy-four, in good condition and good health, a strong man; but my mother was rather frail. I really didn’t know what I could or should do. But finally, I decided that I had to leave it up to my parents. I deposited a certain amount of money in escrow in a bank that would be his if the plan was a success. I never dealt with him directly, you understand, it was all through the lawyer.
Well, toward the end of 1952, he went off. We hoped my parents would get to Vienna in time to celebrate Christmas together. He went and he came back, and there were various stories as to why he came back, but then he went out again. He didn’t arrive by December ’52, and nothing was heard of my parents. Then in March came rumors that something went wrong, that my parents had been arrested. It was much later that I found out the details.
The smuggler had contacted my parents. They did not think they could or should undertake this very risky flight, but they wanted to think it over for a day or two. Then the smuggler got arrested. Under torture, he apparently gave out the names of people he had contacted. Just at that time, my parents got a call that my father’s younger brother had a stroke and was probably in his last hours. They decided to take the risk and go to town to see him. But that telephone conversation had been tapped. They were arrested by the political police a couple of blocks away from the house where they lived.
On May 21, 1953—it’s a date relatively easy for me to remember because it’s the day my oldest child was born in Bonn—I got a letter from a lawyer in Budapest. He explained how my parents had been arrested, how he had very good connections in the appropriate circles in Hungary and he could do them some good, but for that we should meet somewhere. The signature was illegible, it gave an office and street address. The whole thing sounded rather phony. I consulted my superiors, friends of the family. I checked with the CIA representatives, as to what they could do to safeguard me against possible kidnapping.
In the end, I decided to send a telegram saying that I was willing to meet with him at the Bristol Hotel in Vienna, which was under U.S. Army control, on two days’ advance notice. I also added to please give my parents the news that their first grandchild was born. He wrote back saying unfortunately the possibility for him to come to Vienna was out, and I probably had more of a possibility of moving around freely. He asked me if I could suggest another place, the implication being why don’t I come to Budapest. He also said he transmitted my message to my parents, and there was a slip of paper that was obviously detached from something else, in my father’s handwriting, saying congratulations. I learned later that the slip was the bottom part of a letter in which my father, contrary to the wishes of his jailers, cautioned us against any dealings with the Hungarians.
Shortly after that, a fairly high-ranking police officer from Hungary escaped and was interrogated in Vienna. He knew about my parents’ case and told those who interrogated him that they were all right, considering the circumstances. They had gotten a year in jail. He also said that the Hungarian intelligence services would try to contact me in the form of a so-called lawyer, which, of course, had already happened. This information was cabled to intelligence in Bonn, and I was told about it. It also went to Washington. This is when our security people got interested in me.
Because my parents were in jail behind the Iron Curtain, it was decided that I was not supposed to handle classified material, or I could handle it only “under control.” I had two responsibilities in Bonn’s political office—Berlin relations and the Saar relations.
Doing it “under control” meant that my boss called me in the morning, showed me the classified telegrams, and asked me to draft answers. When I finished, I took them back and he stamped them “Confidential and Secret.” It was a farce. This went on for a while. Then I was dismissed.
No one ever sat me down and questioned me about my parents. Everything I had ever done to get them out was aboveboard. My superiors knew. They still fired me because of it—because my parents were in jail, because the Hungarian intelligence services evidently made an effort to contact me, succeeded in contacting me. But first and foremost, I was fired because there was Senator McCarthy in Washington. The State Department was under attack, and security people throughout the government were shaking in their boots and were not going to take any risks if they could avoid it.
I never had a loyalty-security hearing. First of all, I was a temporary employee, as most of us were still at the time. I went through two committee interviews for getting into the Foreign Service, but I was a staff officer. I had no employment rights.
I soon learned that my mother had died, about ten days before she would have been released from jail. They let my father out on December 23, just in time to go to my mother’s funeral. I informed the administrative and security people in the department that there was a change in the situation with my parents, and my security question was submitted to a review.
I became a test case in the department. It was decided that people who have relatives behind the Iron Curtain should not be automatic dismissal cases. I was cleared. In the end, I got my clearance from no less than the security chief in the department, Mr. McLeod.
Then my problem of getting gainful employment with the government started. It coincided with the reduction in force in the early days of the Eisenhower administration—people who had tenure were bumping each other off. It was very difficult to find a job. But from the moment I got the official notification that I had been cleared, I was never without at least two job offers in various organizations. But nothing ever seemed to work out.
I was pleased to get a job offer with the Foreign Aid office in Tehran, but they gave it to somebody who’d originally had a security problem, but had now been cleared. I was rather indignant that they would even talk to someone who had had a security problem. [Chuckles.] Then Foreign Aid Administration offered me a job to go to Indonesia, which seemed a very remote place, but I told them to put in my name. The next thing I heard was they could not give me a security clearance. I asked why not. After all, the only thing I did have during that crazy time was a clearance, fresh and hot off the press from the great Mr. McLeod, who wasn’t known to be very generous with them.
Luckily I had a friend who was a former security officer. He found out that just because my department had given me clearance didn’t mean others were going to accept it. Each agency had its own security procedures and didn’t tolerate anybody else’s intervention.
I got a phone call from the Operations Control Board that they had a job for me. They said, “Go home, we will call you in a couple of days.” A couple of days went by and there was no phone call. Finally, I called and they said, “We have some problem.” I asked if it was security. They wouldn’t tell me over the phone. They said it would take another couple of days. I again called my friend and told him that something was going on. This was early in the morning, and he said, “Go have a drink.” I said, “I don’t usually start drinking this early, but if you insist, I will. Just tell me what is going on.” He said, “They’re getting cold feet, but rest assured, you will get the job.” When I asked, “What are you doing about it?” he said, “I’m warming their feet.” The job never came through.
Just about that time, I had a call from Howard P. Jones, who was head of the high commissioner’s office in Berlin while I was there. I didn’t report directly to him, but he knew me quite well. He told me, “I have been appointed mission director of the aid organization in Indonesia. Would you like to come with me as program officer?” I said, “Howard, you probably must have heard how that job was offered to me before, but I was turned down for security reasons.” But Howard did his magic, and within two days I was sworn in for the job. After my assignment in Indonesia, I reverted back to the State Department, became a Foreign Service officer, and had a successful and rewarding career.
My father came out of jail in December 1953. I never was able to get him out of Hungary. I wasn’t permitted in and he wasn’t permitted out. The next time I was issued a visa to enter Hungary was in 1962 to attend his funeral.
1The Chinatown purges resulted from this furor. Chiang had long been unpopular among the Chinese in San Francisco and New York. To stifle this criticism, the KMT formed the Chinatown Anti-Communist League. To be anti-Chiang was to be branded pro-Communist. FBI agents prowled the alleys, subpoenas were issued, and nearly one hundred Chinese were deported. Eugene Moy, editor of the China Daily News, was imprisoned under the Trading with the Enemy Act for accepting an ad from the Bank of China.
2The China Lobby originated in the Chinese embassy during World War Two. The lobby coordinated pro-Kuomintang propaganda and reportedly subsidized its expenses by smuggling narcotics. In the postwar period, it was transformed into a high-profile pressure group through the support of wealthy conservatives who believed Truman was betraying China to the Communists.
3Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 409.
1Conference of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin held over eight days in February 1945 in the Soviet town of Yalta. The right wing habitually criticized the decisions reached there as “selling out” Eastern Europe to the Soviets.
2See “Hounds,” footnote 1.
3From March 1933 to July 1934, Hiss served as counsel to the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). There he became aware that FBI field agents were operating in direct opposition to the liberal AAA policies: openly siding with critics of the program and actively harassing members of farm organizations who supported New Deal programs.
4Adolf Berle (1895–1971) was a member of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust and assistant secretary of state (1938–44).
5Nixon was concerned that if the committee backed out of the case, its reputation would be destroyed for good. At this point, Nixon also knew what Hiss and the rest of the committee didn’t, that a dozen years earlier, Chambers had gone by another name.
6In his investigation of war profiteering, Senator Gerald P. Nye, a leading isolationist, was operating on the theory that business profits lead to foreign entanglements. Hiss made a number of enemies through his performance as counsel, among them Irénée and Pierre Du Pont and Bernard Baruch, the highly respected “adviser to Presidents” who had been chair of the War Industries Board during World War One. Baruch, incensed by Hiss’s zealous questioning of his finances, made no secret of his belief that Hiss must be a Communist.
7At Hiss’s second trial, Walter Anderson, chief of the State Department’s record branch, testified that routinely twenty-five to fifty copies of each document were distributed through twenty-two offices, where at least 250 people had access to them. The pressroom received “a great many” of these documents. No records were kept of the destruction of extra copies.
8Henry Julian Wadleigh confessed to passing hundreds of documents to Chambers in the late thirties. He also testified that he knew nothing of Hiss’s alleged involvement with Chambers and went on to describe Hiss as “a very moderate New Dealer with strongly conservative instincts.”
9Apparently, Hiss’s father-in-law had acquired the machine in 1927. Thus its serial number would fall between 145000 and 204500. The Woodstock introduced in court was number 230098, which would have been manufactured in 1929.
10Over the years, Chambers had given a variety of dates for his break with the Communist Party: 1935, early 1937, at the end of 1937, in the spring of 1937, early 1938, and late February 1938. Yet all the documents supposedly passed to Chambers by Hiss were dated between January 5 and April 1, 1938. Several weeks after he leveled espionage charges against Hiss, Chambers changed his story again, saying he had left the Party on April 15, 1938. The FBI then suppressed most of his earlier conflicting statements.
11Another longtime supporter was Secretary of State Dean Acheson. On the day of Hiss’s sentencing, Acheson was asked at a press conference for a comment on the case. The Secretary responded, “Whatever the outcome of any appeal . . . I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” The resulting outcry (Nixon labeled the statement “disgusting”) moved Acheson to submit his resignation to Truman, who turned it down.
12A petition for writ of error, coram nobis concerns errors so egregious that they command the attention of the courts no matter how many years have passed. Filed in 1978, this was Hiss’s last legal move for vindication. The case was assigned to Judge Richard Owen, a Nixon appointee, who Hiss felt had demonstrated his bias against him in a earlier suit under FOIA. In 1983, Owen denied the petition. The court of appeals affirmed, and the Supreme Court again declined to hear his case.
13“Mr. Hiss had never and nowhere been recruited as an agent of the USSR. Not a single document, and a great amount of materials have been studied, substantiates the allegation.” General Volkogonov claimed he had searched KGB and military archives and was in the midst of reviewing the Presidential archives. In conversation with John Lowenthal, a Hiss case historian, the general further stated that while he could not give a 100 percent guarantee “that something wasn’t destroyed . . . if [Hiss] was a spy then I believe positively I would have found a reflection in various files.” (New York Times, October 29, 1992) Some weeks later, in the midst of the commotion set off by his claims, Volkogonov hedged his bet with the assertion that he was “not properly understood,” that if such evidence did exist “there’s no guarantee that it was not destroyed, that it was not in other channels.” (New York Times, December 7, 1992) But he did not retract his original statement. Two years later, as of this writing, no documents contradicting the general’s original statement have been forthcoming.
1Major General “Wild Bill” Donovan (1883–1959) emerged from World War One as the most decorated soldier in American history. He founded the American Legion, served as U.S. assistant attorney general, 1925–29, and headed the Office of Strategic Services, 1942–45.
2Actually, Truman didn’t know much about the OSS or Donovan. Denied access to wartime intelligence reports, Truman relied instead upon information provided by OSS critics. Among them was J. Edgar Hoover, who leaked to Truman information regarding one of Donovan’s extramarital affairs, which deeply offended Truman, a devout family man.
3The OSS was abolished in September 1945, one month after the surrender of Japan.
4The Hoover-Donovan feud dated back to the 1920s, when Donovan served as Hoover’s immediate superior in the Justice Department. Hoover resented what he considered to be Donovan’s meddling in FBI affairs; Donovan, for his part, carelessly dismissed Hoover as a mere bureaucrat and a “detail man”—a misjudgment that haunted his career. Hoover, in waging war against the OSS, leaked derogatory information about Donovan, infiltrated the organization with his own agents, and ran surveillance on many OSS agents. Ruth Shipley, Hoover’s ally in the Passport Office, took to stamping “OSS” on the passports of Donovan’s supposedly secret operatives, until a complaint to the President stopped the practice.
5In 1941, with the war in full swing, Donovan was unconcerned with the political beliefs of his agents. He needed recruits who were fluent in foreign languages, familiar with partisan warfare, and able to work effectively with foreign resistance movements, many of which were led by Communists. The OSS recruited a number of agents from the most likely source—the American Communist Party. When the FBI showed Donovan files on three Communist veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion engaged in covert operations in Europe and demanded they be fired, Donovan reportedly snapped, “I know they’re Communists, that’s why I hired them!”
6George Catlett Marshall (1880–1959) served as Army Chief of Staff, 1939–45; originated the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan; later became Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense; and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
7J. Parnell Thomas (born John Feeny), a Republican from New Jersey, was the pugnaciously reactionary chairman of HUAC from 1947 to 1948. Thomas was charged with illegally receiving about $4,000 for expense vouchers and $7,000 in staff kickbacks.
1The Republican Party in particular had long regarded China with a proprietary zeal. “With God’s help,” exclaimed Senator Kenneth Wherry, “we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”
2This was the case in which Service was charged with espionage. See below.
3John Paton Davies, was suspended on security charges, cleared, reinvestigated, then cleared again, only to be grilled by the McCarran Committee and threatened with a perjury indictment. John Carter Vincent was dismissed as a “loyalty risk” after having been cleared four times. O. Edmund Clubb, Jr., was recommended for dismissal on security grounds, cleared by the Secretary of State, and demoted, at which point he resigned.
4The documents discovered were from the State, War, and Navy departments, many of which were classified Confidential. Later, Assistant Attorney General James McInerney testified that the documents “were very innocuous . . . a little above the level of teacup gossip in the Far East,” and that the classifications were “nothing short of silly.”
5Years later, Jaffe admitted to being a “close fellow traveler,” but never actually a member.
6Actually the FBI burgled the offices, planted bugs, and tapped the phones, and performed the same services on a half-dozen other locations as well. The raid, along with the arrests, came later; they seized some eight hundred documents in the raid.
7Among these were a report of an interview with Mao Tse-tung, eight or ten personal copies of memoranda on China that did not contain any discussions of U.S. political or military policy, and an unclassified transcript of a radio broadcast out of Yenan, the Chinese Communist capital.
8There was no evidence that the documents had been passed on to a foreign power or used for anything other than background for scholarly articles.
9Jaffe’s fine amounted to $2,500; Larsen’s was $500; Andrew Roth, a Navy officer, was discharged from the service the day before the arrests. His indictment was dropped in February 1946.
10Ultraconservative Republican George Dondero of Michigan, whose greater fame rests on the battle he led against the “Red art termites” of abstract expressionism. All modern art is Communist, an “instrument and weapon of destruction,” reasoned Dondero, “because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people.” Its creators and promoters “are our enemies.”
11Hurley’s letter of resignation read in part: “The professional foreign service men sided with the Chinese Communist armed party and the imperialist bloc of nations whose policy it was to keep China divided against herself. . . .”
12The infamous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, in which McCarthy claimed to possess a list of 205 secret Communists working in the State Department.
13Ed Nellor, a McCarthy speechwriter on loan from the Washington Times-Herald. He had passed on a report from Robert E. Lee, a former FBI man, who had become chief of staff to the House Committee on Appropriations. The report was not a list of Communists, but 108 case summaries of what Lee called “incidents of inefficiencies” in the State Department’s personnel security program.
14Chaired by conservative Democrat Millard Tydings of Maryland, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
15An eminent China scholar with unorthodox views, Lattimore was the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. Even though Lattimore had been only briefly connected to the State Department during the war, McCarthy nevertheless denounced him as “the chief architect of our Far Eastern policy” and the top Soviet espionage agent in the United States. He was finally cleared after five years of fighting the Justice Department on the flimsiest of perjury charges (i.e., did his lunch with the Soviet ambassador ten years earlier take place before or after the Nazi invasion of Russia?).
16In July 1947, Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, a staunch ally of the Nationalist Chinese, was sent by Truman to China and Korea on a fact-finding mission to appraise “the political, economic, psychological, and military situations—current and projected.” His confidential report asserted that the Kuomintang’s “reactionary leadership, repression, and corruption has caused a loss of popular faith in the Government.”
1Lillian Hellman (1905–84), playwright and screenwriter, was well known for her leftist politics and thirty-year association with writer Dashiell Hammett. Hellman was blacklisted in Hollywood from 1952 to 1961.
2As neither of them had told anyone about the visit, it was Melby’s first rather unnerving realization that one or both of them were being watched by the FBI.
3In mid-May, Melby received an amended letter of charges: there were two new ones. One was that while serving in China he had carried on an affair with a woman friendly to the Communists. The other was that he had been a regular reader of the Daily Worker while in El Paso in 1937. Largely window-dressing, neither of these charges received more than a passing reference during the hearings. The focus was always Lillian Hellman.
4It is worth noting that the allegations against Hellman of Party membership and subversive activity were based on the flimsiest of associations and the unreliable testimony of Louis Budenz, a professional witness, and Martin Berkeley, a Hollywood canary for HUAC. But Melby was not allowed to inspect or know the source of the “evidence” against his former lover, and was uncertain as to its reliability. Under the constant grilling, his confusion grew.
5From Robert Newman’s account, The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), it appears that for the most part, Melby’s attorney was an able performer. The syllogistic trap Melby found himself in was inescapable: Hellman was bad; Melby associated with Hellman; therefore Melby was bad. No number of stellar character witnesses (and there were many, including Dean Rusk), no amount of lawyerly skills, could break this implacable logic.
6Hellman was the guest of Harriman during World War Two, when he had been the U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Melby and Hellman met during this stay.
7Scott McLeod, friend of Joe McCarthy and former FBI agent, created a police-state atmosphere in the State Department. At the end of his first year of tenure, he proudly announced that 484 employees had been removed without a single hearing.
8At the time, under the incessant hammering of seven protracted hearings, Melby appears understandably to have been more diplomatic than defiant. While resisting a categorical promise never to see Hellman again under any circumstances, Melby twice went so far as to affirm that he had “no intention” of seeing her again. Finally, at the end of a long day of grilling, he capitulated further: “Had I the slightest suggestion . . . of this kind of activity and views that have come out here, the association would have been discontinued permanently, automatically, and right then and there.”
9Two years before his 1953 firing, Melby in his capacity as a Foreign Service officer gave a speech in St. Louis. Afterward, he overheard two astonished ladies appraising his performance: “He sounds like a normal American.”
10According to Jones, HUAC maintained a list of persons it did not wish promoted and of persons it did not wish to be reemployed. Melby’s name was on the list.