3

BEHIND THE SCENES

IN THE NINE MONTHS between the Chicago meeting to test the sentiment for a new national student organization and the constitutional convention in September 1947 in Madison, Wisconsin, American attitudes toward the Soviet Union hardened. In March, President Truman issued an ultimatum: henceforth, he told Congress, the United States would oppose any Soviet move to bring Greece and Turkey into its sphere. In the summer of 1947, the Soviet Union refused to participate in the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, a rejection made inevitable, perhaps, by the inclusion of unacceptable demands, but a decision that heightened East-West tensions. In another omen of communist influence, Czechoslovakia, whose leaders had heralded the country’s role as a bridge between East and West, followed Russia’s example and refused to participate in the Plan.1

The prospect that an American student organization might affiliate with the Prague-based International Union of Students captured the attention of the FBI, the Vatican, the American Catholic hierarchy, and U.S. Department of State officials, most of whom shared the view that the IUS was a Moscow-directed front organization.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered his agents to infiltrate all sessions of the Chicago meeting. Afterward, Hoover distributed the name of every delegate, alternate, and observer to his field offices for further investigation.² Since Hoover obtained the lists before the Chicago meeting, we can reasonably infer that someone inside the planning apparatus supplied them. After Chicago, FBI agents debriefed professional youth leaders from the National Intercollegiate Christian Council and others, including Douglass Cater’s bête noire at Harvard, Professor William Y. Elliott.3 Someone from the YWCA, most likely Muriel Jacobson, praised the Catholics for supplying the force that prevented communists from wielding influence in Chicago.⁴

These FBI reports, declassified decades later with heavy redactions, hint that other still-protected sources monitored the Prague and Chicago meetings. A YMCA Student Division official, most likely Edwin Espy, told FBI agents that he kept abreast of developments “by virtue of his position in [redacted].” In addition to exhaustive information on students from regional and state FBI bureaus, Hoover also received reports on American students traveling overseas from his legal attachés to American embassies in Europe.⁵

The U.S. government quietly stepped up its efforts to monitor Soviet initiatives aimed at students, youth, labor, and other constituencies. While the Central Intelligence Agency did not officially exist until September 1947—the same month the NSA held its constitutional convention—the United States had other watchdogs at home and abroad. These included intelligence units in the Departments of War and State, an interim Central Intelligence Group, a special office based in Germany known as EUR/X, dedicated to fighting international communism, and several ad hoc coordinating committees. Special intelligence panels reviewed reports and coordinated raw intelligence.⁶

In addition, many intelligence officers in the civilian Office of Strategic Services formed a new State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research. On April 1, 1947, the Bureau initiated a sweeping study of communist influence in the World Federation of Democratic Youth, including an analysis of national chapters and individual members. Louis Nemzer, a Soviet propaganda specialist who headed the Social and Cultural Affairs Branch and served as an informal adviser to the bishops’ conference and Catholic student leaders, oversaw the study.⁷

Some NSA founders depict the State Department as uninterested in their activities, but that was not the case. In addition to intelligence collection, the State Department had its own observer in Chicago, a man with a long history of involvement in international student politics. Kenneth Holland, the assistant director of the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs, was once a staff director of the U.S. ISS Committee (1934); he subsequently joined the board. During the war, Holland had facilitated funding for a prospective ISS-sponsored Pan-American student conference to build solidarity in the Western Hemisphere.8 Holland secured financing from his boss, Nelson Rockefeller, director of the wartime Inter-American Agency, a temporary organization responsible for activities in Central and South America, including intelligence, under White House guidance. When the U.S. ISS Committee imploded in 1943, the successor group of educators retained the funds even though the conference was canceled.

Holland understood the political stakes of the Chicago meeting, especially the danger of left-wing influence. But he also recognized the potential of strong, noncommunist student leadership to represent American democracy abroad. His office, for example, secured former troop ships to make student travel to Europe affordable during the summer of 1947. On June 30, Holland saw off the Marine Tiger, a converted troop ship, from the New York harbor, and told the students, “You are fighting another phase of the same war your brothers fought by force of arms.” He bid them be ambassadors for democracy.⁹ Like Nemzer, Holland was fully informed on the IUS affiliation question.

There were other discreet relationships between the wartime educators and the Prague 25 delegation. Douglass Cater, the recently retired OSS officer, declined in Chicago to accept the presidency of the interim National Continuations Committee, but he did not leave the stage.¹⁰ A few weeks before the gathering, he had established the Harvard International Activities Committee (HIACOM), a subcommittee of the Student Council, to serve as a clearinghouse for student projects in the international field pending the birth of the new national student organization.¹¹ The “temporary” body would last nearly eight years and become an entry point for CIA covert operations. Its establishment and role, therefore, must be added to the list of forces that shaped the NSA international program months before the organization formally existed.

After the Chicago meeting, HIACOM expanded its activities. On February 6, 1947, the Harvard Crimson carried an announcement that the subcommittee would publish an international activities bulletin to inform students about “exchange, travel, relief, and rehabilitation of students all over the globe.” Content would come from “information provided by the embassies of various nations and such world-wide organizations as American Friends Service Committee, the World Student Service Fund, and the Unitarian Service Committee.”¹² The bulletin would be sent to all delegates and observers who had been in Chicago to keep them informed of international developments prior to the constitutional convention.13

The announcements for the various HIACOM programs proposed over the next year match almost word for word proposed programs crafted by the ISS educators who in 1943 incorporated as the Student Service of America. In October 1945, General Secretary Harry D. Gideonse had called for an urgent resumption of activities.¹⁴ Clyde Eagleton, George N. Shuster, and Arnold Wolfers, among others, had met and voted to expand the board, inviting college presidents and educators to join them. They also brought in several OSS officials, thereby creating another tie with intelligence veterans.¹⁵

On March 19, 1946, nearly four months before the Prague 25 sailed for Europe, Gideonse convened another meeting in his office at Brooklyn College. The expanded board adopted an omnibus program of “international student conferences (local, regional, national and international), travel, relief activities (Europe and Asia), and student exchange programs.”¹⁶ Retiring assistant secretary of state for public affairs and former ISS committee member Archibald MacLeish informed the group that he had passed the proposals on to his successor, William A. Benton. A former advertising legend, Benton, like MacLeish, sat atop a growing bureaucracy of information and cultural exchange programs that included Kenneth Holland’s division.

The March 1946 minutes of the SSA indicate that the omnibus program had been submitted to several foundations, including the Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers, Marshall Field, and Carnegie Corporation. Discussions had been held with top-level officials, including the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Raymond Fosdick, and his assistant John Marshall. The SSA board considered whether to give their plans publicity, then decided, according to the minutes, that “on the general form of its activities, and its special projects, no publicity shall at this moment be given.”¹⁷

The minutes also indicate that the educators anticipated spearheading the resumption of international student activities. But the prospect of a new American national student organization altered their plans. Subsequently, the Gideonse group transferred its activities to the World Student Service Fund in New York.¹⁸ While there was nothing clandestine or nefarious about these activities, the frequent changes of identity (from ISS to SSA to WSSF) and the men’s desire to work quietly behind the scenes have obscured their role in creating a postwar student international program.

The World Student Service Fund served as a common denominator in all HIACOM’s international projects, even though each project appeared to have a different origin, sponsors, and funders. On February 21, 1947, two months after the Chicago meeting, Cater announced a Seminar on American Civilization, to be held in Salzburg.19 He heralded the project as “entirely student-run,” despite a faculty of renowned academics, several of whom served in the OSS, including Margaret Mead.²⁰ Other projects in the WSSF portfolio included the Foreign Students Summer Seminar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which brought aspiring engineers and scientists from Europe to the United States, and the Program of American Studies at Yale University for Foreign Students.

Sponsoring programs was an entirely new role for the small fund. Previously, the World Student Service Fund had conducted war relief drives among American high school and college students, and sent the proceeds to ISS headquarters in Geneva. Despite its name, an adult, Wilmer Kitchen, a pipe-smoking young Protestant minister who had long been active in the New England Christian Movement, directed the fund.²¹

In such a circuitous fashion, the New York–based fund provided the basis for the future NSA to describe itself as an “information agent” for the Salzburg Seminar, the MIT program, and others, giving it an instant international portfolio without actual financial or administrative responsibility.²² George Shuster, a veteran of both the ISS and the SSA, became the new WSSF president.²³ Its budget soared to $600,000—an astronomical figure in 1947, and twice as high as its wartime budgets when the impulse to contribute war relief funds ran high. Since its financial statements usually identify income sources by category, such as “Foundations,” it is difficult to reconstruct precisely where the money for different projects came from, although large grant awards are traceable through the Rockefeller and other foundation archives.

The WSSF also played a behind-the-scenes role in encouraging the Chicago meeting. According to Kitchen’s correspondence, the fund financially supported Prague 25 delegate Bill Ellis in making the rounds of “some of the larger colleges in the mid-west.”²⁴ At the Chicago meeting, Kitchen announced a program of student travel to Europe aboard the former troop ships secured by Kenneth Holland’s office. Few students were aware of Kitchen’s relationship to the Department of State or that he had acceded to State Department demands to screen all student travelers for communist affiliations.25 After the Chicago meeting, Kitchen financed at least one, if not all three, issues of the International Information Bulletin announced by Cater.²⁶

Between May and September 1947, Kitchen sought to remedy the dearth of student participation in WSSF. He invited half a dozen American student organizations to become sponsors of the fund. These included Cater’s HIACOM, Hillel, the NICC, the National Federation of Catholic College Students, and the National Newman Club Federation, along with the future National Student Association. The arrangement enabled older activists like the Ridgley Manor–trained Catholic John Simons to build influence in student circles. It blurred the lines between student leaders and adult professional youth leaders, such as Muriel Jacobson and Edwin Espy, who remained active participants. Its intricate series of committees, subcommittees, and ad hoc committees kept control in adult hands. All these arrangements defied bureaucratic charting; they were chaotic, eternally changing, and rarely understood by anyone but a handful of insiders.

Years later, one former CIA officer claimed that the WSSF had served as the Agency’s first funding conduit. If that is the case, and scant evidence supports it, the WSSF role must be distinguished from that of a later period, when funds came to the NSA from the CIA covert action office, a unit that was not established until September 1, 1948. More likely, educational elites, State Department officials, intelligence veterans, and major philanthropists who had forged common goals during World War II continued their informal cooperation. Similar networks would later facilitate an almost seamless transition to covert action.

These relationships should dispel the notion that government officials were uninterested in the formation of the NSA. The government even discreetly approached some of the leading Prague 25 figures. According to State Department records, in August 1947 Acting Secretary of State Robert A. Lovett assured the American embassy in Prague that Bill Ellis, who had been elected to the IUS Secretariat, had “favorably impressed Dept concerning desired cooperation Dept and his loyalty.”²⁷ Earlier, FBI officials reported that they had received a twelve-page report from Ellis on the February 1947 IUS Council meeting in Prague, although it is unclear whether Ellis or someone else supplied it.28

Informal cooperation, even report sharing, is not the same thing as covert action, and should be distinguished from it. Nevertheless, lines of influence were being forged between key players and government agencies long before the constitutional convention formally created the Unites States National Student Association.

AS THE CLOCK TICKED toward the Madison convention, the Catholic activists faced unexpected pressure from the Vatican. In January 1946, shortly after the World Federation of Democratic Youth was formed, the Vatican had issued orders prohibiting Catholic participation in it. Martin McLaughlin had traveled from Prague to Rome after the World Student Congress to urge the Vatican’s cardinal secretary of state, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI) to delay judgment on the new International Union of Students.²⁹ McLaughlin argued that a premature condemnation by the Vatican would weaken minority forces (mainly Catholics) in the anticipated IUS and in any new American student union.

Three weeks before the Madison convention, the Vatican acted. The apostolic delegate in Washington conveyed a confidential document to the American bishops’ staff that read: “I have received a confidential communication from the Holy See stating that according to information reaching the Holy See communistic elements are working actively in order to have the National Congress of American Students, to be held probably next September, affiliate with the International Student Union [sic]. Since this Union is nothing other than a communistic organization it seems advisable that some action be taken [in Madison] to prevent the sought for affiliation.”³⁰ If anyone noted the irony of an outside power trying to dictate the agenda of an American organization, the very thing that destroyed the American Student Union, it is not recorded.

What is recorded is the dilemma the papal communiqué created for McLaughlin and others. If, as expected, sentiment to join the IUS remained high at the convention, the minority Catholics would be hard pressed to stop it. If Catholics fought openly against world student unity and IUS affiliation, their chances of coalescing with non-Catholics on other issues, especially the election of officers, could be damaged.

Faced with these difficulties, the Catholics chose subterfuge. They adopted a strategy identified by Father Bermingham as originating in “confidential memoranda from the across the sea.”31 An unidentified author advised the Catholics to appear supportive of IUS affiliation but to use delaying tactics to stop immediate action. The “kicker,” a term used by Father Bermingham to explain the strategy to his superiors, would be to invoke the IUS constitutional provision that required members to conform to its policies, argue that the provision was undemocratic, and demand repeal as a condition of American affiliation.

While this memo might have come from the Vatican, it could also have come from Sally Cassidy, one of the Ridgely Manor–trained Catholics. Shortly before the group departed for Europe in the summer of 1946, Bishop John Wright, the private secretary to Archbishop Cushing, had approached Cassidy and asked if she would like to remain in Europe to report on student developments. Cassidy, who held a Ph.D. from Fordham University, portrays herself today as a sophisticate, well-versed in Marxism: “I read Trotsky when I was twelve,” she sniffs. She dismissed the Ridgely Manor training as simplistic, disparaging Ruth Fischer as “a kind of batwoman.” But eager to get away from her controlling mother, Cassidy said yes to the bishop and accepted his check for $2,000.³²

Based in Paris, Cassidy filed regular reports to Martin McLaughlin and personally briefed Vatican officials. During her interview, Cassidy said that she used a military APO address for McLaughlin, which again raises the question of whether he was on active military duty, and, if so, whether he formally reported to U.S. government authorities.³³ On several occasions, Cassidy traveled to Rome, as McLaughlin had done, to brief the cardinal secretary of state. Presumably, she discussed future courses of action.³⁴ The author of the advisory memo to American Catholics, either Cassidy or a Vatican official, argued that the IUS would never amend its constitution because “other national student organizations in other countries would demand the same autonomy of action.” If the ploy to keep the NSA out of the IUS worked, the author concluded, Catholics could “defeat the whole Communist strategy.”³⁵

To pursue this goal, the Joint Committee for Student Action put out a twice-monthly newsletter and tightened regional ecclesiastical supervision over Catholic delegates, while vowing to do a better job of keeping priestly intervention hidden from view. Once the constitutional convention began, JCSA leaders met nightly to plot tactics.³⁶

NEITHER THE CATHOLICS nor the Harvard liberals, albeit for different reasons, wanted an open fight over communism that would risk tearing the Madison convention apart. The Catholics wanted to prevent IUS affiliation without having to say they did; liberals wanted to avoid blame for precipitating an East-West split. Both Catholics and liberals debated the central question of IUS affiliation in a kind of code. Rather than call the IUS communist dominated, they said it engaged in partisan political activity. Rather than argue against the IUS mandate to debate social and political issues, they called for a focus on students as students, the language of Campobello, meant to restrict debate to issues such as tuition costs, housing, or course curricula.

An occasional voice at the convention urged a broader focus. The American Youth for Democracy delegate Lee Marsh, who in a later interview described himself as a scrawny kid from Brooklyn who had once traveled as a young communist organizer with folk singer Pete Seeger, made the case for engaging with social and political issues. Students in colonial countries, he argued, “feel as strongly about anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism as we do [about] democracy.”37 But few American undergraduates identified with students who lived under the thumb of a colonial power, and they readily adopted the restriction.

In the end, undergraduates deferred to the Prague 25 and a few Campobello graduates to decide key issues. Press and FBI reports identify the leaders of the IUS debate as Martin McLaughlin, Douglass Cater, navy veteran Frank Fisher (Cater’s second-in-command on the Harvard committee), and Campobello graduate George Fischer, now at Harvard. The convention voted overwhelmingly in favor of affiliation with the IUS (429–35), but, happily for the Catholics, the delegates attached conditions to the vote that postponed a final decision for at least a year.³⁸ The conditions included daunting procedural obstacles such as referring the final decision on IUS membership to the member campuses, and requiring a yea vote from “one-half of the member colleges containing two-thirds of the member students.”³⁹ The convention also agreed to send an NSA team to Prague the following summer to determine whether the IUS met democratic standards.

However pleased the American Catholics might be with their tactical success,—and they were ecstatic—the Vatican did not share their sense of triumph. Following the convention, in January 1948, the apostolic delegate to the United States, A. G. Cicognani, notified the American bishops that the report on the NSA constitutional convention had been “submitted to the Holy Father and carefully examined.”40 The Vatican was displeased with “the compromise resolution” that left the door open to IUS affiliation. Still, the Catholics had bought a whole year’s delay. McLaughlin and others drafted a response to the Vatican pledging that there would be no affiliation with the IUS and promising other actions on behalf of the NSA that would have shocked the Madison delegates: “NSA intends, however, to do more than merely not join IUS; it intends to destroy the present IUS and replace it with a genuine world student confederation.”⁴¹ In fact, the Madison delegates had enthusiastically opted for cooperation with the IUS while awaiting formal affiliation. It would not be the last time that Catholics would cite their own agenda as if it were NSA policy, even though they did so in this case to placate ecclesiastic superiors. Such actions reflected their apostolic mission—to destroy the IUS and create an alternative.

Whether the NSA would adhere to the Congress’s mandate for cooperation with the IUS rested on the shoulders of the officers who were elected at the Madison convention, especially the vice president in charge of the international program (the International Commission). The decision made in Chicago to exclude national organizations from the NSA limited the field of candidates to campus delegates, including graduate students, so long as they remained officially enrolled at a college or university.⁴² Several Prague 25 veterans, among them Curtis Farrar of Yale and Douglass Cater, constructed a slate of talented students with balanced representation in terms of race, sex, religion, and geography for all offices, except—notably—the crucial position of international affairs vice president.

None of the candidates for president, treasurer, vice president for educational affairs, and secretary came to Madison with the intention of running for office. The future president, William (Bill) Welsh, from liberal Berea College in Kentucky described his recruitment in later conversations. He was awakened one evening by loud knocks on his dormitory door. Someone, he thinks perhaps Curtis Farrar, intoned, “Wake up and run for president.”⁴³ Sleepy and aware that a University of Chicago delegate, William Birenbaum, had thrown his hat into the ring, Welsh asked, “What’s wrong with him?” But he finally agreed to run. While Birenbaum had Catholic support and opposed affiliation with the IUS, the more liberal Welsh favored affiliation and won, 312 to 244.⁴⁴ The other officers included a female (Secretary, Janice Tremper, Rockford College), an African American (Treasurer, Lee Jones, Buffalo State University), and a Catholic (National Affairs Vice President, Ralph Dungan, St. Joseph’s College).45

By contrast, the candidate to fill the international position had not been left to chance. The old ISS/SSA committee had positioned a student from Yale. In the fall of 1946, Arnold Wolfers had hired Wallace Doerr, a former OSS officer and Central European expert, as staff director for the ISS/SSA. Doerr, in turn, helped select Robert Solwin (Bob) Smith, a U.S. Navy veteran and Yale senior, to attend the Chicago meeting that December.⁴⁶ Wolfers and Doerr also tapped Smith to be a delegate for the ISS General Assembly, scheduled to meet in the summer of 1947 in Arhus, Denmark. One of Smith’s tasks was to clear up confusion over who represented the United States in the ISS after the collapse of the U.S. Committee.

When Smith boarded the Marine Tiger, carrying students to Europe on June 30, he had two senior advisers in tow, Doerr and Douglass Cater.⁴⁷ There is no evidence that these two former OSS officials still worked for U.S. intelligence, although the possibility must remain. Most likely, they acted as talent scouts, seeking to find and groom a politically reliable student for a crucial leadership position.

Smith, a New Yorker with an upscale address on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art who summered in the Hamptons, later described his life before the European trip: “I used to be a pretty average sort of a guy—Yale, white shoe, party weekends.”⁴⁸ The summer sojourn in Denmark transformed the future diplomat’s interests and aspirations. His itinerary expanded to include a tour of the country, trips to Paris and Geneva, attendance at the World Youth Festival sponsored by the WFDY and IUS in Prague, and an introduction to IUS politics.

By the time Smith and Cater arrived in Prague, American embassy officials were beside themselves over the behavior of the American delegation. The State Department had ignored pleas from the Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, to send a representative delegation, leaving the way clear for left-wing students to go instead.⁴⁹ The final straw for the embassy was the delegation’s display of a poster that featured the lynching of an African American placed next to a fifteen-foot-high illuminated statue of Stalin.⁵⁰

Smith and Cater joined a handful of other Americans in Prague who were deemed “competent observers” by U.S. intelligence officials to run a last-minute self-described guerrilla operation against the offending left-wing delegation.51 The group worked out of the hotel room of Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., a recent graduate of Columbia University’s new program in Russian Affairs.⁵² As part of his summer learning intensive, Smith saw firsthand the increasingly bitter divide between American liberals and the far left, a division that would soon affect him personally.

Smith and Cater had expected to confer with Bill Ellis at an IUS Council meeting scheduled for after the festival, but in June, Ellis had taken ill. He was subsequently diagnosed with paratyphoid, and was recuperating in a Swiss sanitarium. Cater exercised Ellis’s proxy on the IUS Council, and passed it occasionally to Smith, an act that later gave rise to conservative charges that the NSA flirted with international communism. Before he left Prague, Smith promised the U.S. cultural attaché, Paul Lewand, a full report on his summer experiences.⁵³

Unknown to Smith, his performance during the IUS Council meeting was closely monitored by Sally Cassidy, who had come from Paris to cast a proxy vote for Martin McLaughlin. Fortunately for Smith’s future career, Cassidy found him “the only one of the American delegation who was neither a fellow traveler nor an opportunist.”⁵⁴ She shared the Catholics’ disdain for the liberal Cater—more than five decades later, she bristled upon hearing his name: “I wouldn’t be caught dead in the same room with him.”⁵⁵ Cassidy’s favorable evaluation later helped Smith win Catholic votes in Madison.

In order to get to Wisconsin in time for the constitutional convention, Cater and Smith took a transatlantic flight back to the United States, an expensive rarity in those days. In Madison, Smith learned that he would chair the Sub-Commission on International Affairs, through which all resolutions on the IUS would pass.⁵⁶ Armed with the latest information on the ISS Assembly, the World Youth Festival, and the politics of the IUS, Smith established himself as an international expert, one of the few delegates whose authority could match that of the Prague 25, many of whom were no longer students. He also had backup: Wallace Doerr remained at his elbow, as he had at Arhus, serving in small committee sessions as a technical expert.⁵⁷

During the larger plenary session, delegates suspended the rules in order to listen to a report about Smith’s experiences in Europe. Thanks to this deft positioning, he became the sole candidate for international affairs vice president.58 Doerr left Yale soon afterward, his whereabouts a mystery to many who had worked with him.⁵⁹

Then came a move that cleaved the new NSA in half and made oversight of the International Commission nearly impossible. Delegates had deliberately chosen a midwestern location for their headquarters, to be accessible to more students but also, and more important, to avoid the intense political environment that characterized urban campuses, especially on the East Coast. But Smith refused to work in Madison; rather, he insisted on setting up the international office in Cambridge, where he was beginning graduate school at Harvard. (Years later, Bill Welsh remembered Smith’s intransigence: “he was absolutely adamant.”)⁶⁰ The two offices, more than eleven hundred miles apart, were forced to communicate by mail, since the students’ spartan budget permitted few long-distance phone calls.

But Smith’s move wasn’t the only thing that obscured the lines of authority between Cambridge and Madison. Convention delegates asked the Cater-created Harvard International Activities Committee of the Student Council to continue working under mandate to the new NSA. Thus, Harvard University was home to not one but two NSA international offices. Smith set up an office in Hillel House on the edge of campus, while the HIACOM students worked out of the Phillips Brooks House on campus. Relations between the two offices in Cambridge varied from year to year, sometimes cordial, sometimes tense, but their actions were almost always opaque to NSA headquarters in Madison.

The geographical distance permitted Smith considerable discretion in what to share with the Madison-based National Commission staff, including funding. After the constitutional convention, Smith had stopped in New York City to see Wilmer Kitchen at WSSF and confer with John Simons. He never told his Madison colleagues, who were scraping by on meager NSA salaries, sharing meals, and shooing rats out of a ramshackle office, that he had obtained another source of funds. WSSF records indicate that Smith was hired as a publicity director for a period of one year beginning October 1, 1947.⁶¹ While no salary figure is cited in the minutes, it is possible that Kitchen viewed the formal designation as a way to make travel funds available to Smith. In later years, the CIA secretly subsidized the salaries of individual NSA students, but it must be noted that from the beginning, outside funding was available for the international programs. The WSSF subsidy to Bob Smith lasted nearly two years, until April 1949, only ceasing long after his one-year term of office had expired.62

Meanwhile, Smith immediately began pressing Bill Welsh for authority to seek outside funding.⁶³ When Welsh was slow to answer, Smith raised the issue several more times, referring to unspecified “people up here who can get funds.”⁶⁴ In November, he informed Welsh in a hope-you-don’t-mind letter about a proposed mailing to Canadian students, “I am going to try and get outside funds from one of the educational foundations.”⁶⁵ Welsh finally responded that he preferred to defer the decision about external funds to the December executive committee.⁶⁶

WITHIN WEEKS OF THE Madison convention, the pending IUS question threatened the fragile existence of the new association. A prominent conservative Detroit banker, Allen Crow, one of many self-appointed watchdogs keeping an eye out for any hint that the American Student Union had been resurrected, charged that the NSA consorted with international communism.⁶⁷ Throughout September and early October, Crow bombarded the Madison office with letters and phone calls.⁶⁸ He sent a seven-page missive to college presidents, deans of students, and State Department officials. When Crow learned of Bob Smith’s appearance at the IUS Council meeting, he saw evidence that the NSA served “two masters,” implying that one of them was Moscow.⁶⁹

Campus newspapers headlined Crow’s charges. Students at Northwestern University refused to join the NSA. Even the University of Texas, which had had representatives among the Prague 25, voted not to affiliate with the NSA. The dean of students at the University of Georgia told Welsh “not to come on the campus or meet with any students.” The climate on southern campuses was so hostile to liberals, Welsh remembered, that a Louisiana University student hid his copy of the New Republic under his bed. The possibility of IUS affiliation kept the issue alive. “There wasn’t a campus in the United States that we didn’t have to deal with this problem.”⁷⁰

On October 7, Welsh accepted Crow’s invitation to speak at the Detroit Economic Club, and gave a self-described “flag-waving speech,” but the attacks did not stop.⁷¹ By then, Welsh recalled, the staff was “really desperate for a nod from the federal government for protection from the right-wing nuts.”⁷²

The nod came. On October 14 a telegram from the U.S. Department of State arrived at NSA headquarters. Welsh cabled its substance to Smith in Cambridge: “You appointed NSA member UNESCO.”73 Welsh remembered waving the State Department cable joyously around the office and shouting, “Look, look, we’re legitimate.”⁷⁴ He also remembered it as coming out of the blue. In fact, the appointment had been approved months earlier. Henry D. Gideonse served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and chaired the subcommittee that recommended the appointment of three student and youth representatives.⁷⁵ The decision had been made in March 1947, but State Department officials felt obliged to delay the official appointment until after the NSA’s constitutional convention.⁷⁶

The effect of the government imprimatur cannot be overstated. The men and women who served on the bipartisan U.S. National Commission for UNESCO were establishment figures, top diplomats, and university presidents whose credentials placed them, in 1947, beyond political attack. The UNESCO appointment signaled that the NSA had no connection to the defunct American Student Union. College presidents pointed to it as a way of reassuring concerned parents and wary boards of regents.⁷⁷ Without the appointment, Crow’s attack on the new organization’s political identity might have destroyed it.

U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark used the UNESCO appointment to answer public inquiries about communist penetration of the NSA. At the same time, he privately asked J. Edgar Hoover to open an FBI investigation to confirm that the NSA had no communist ties, unaware that Hoover had been on the case since 1946.⁷⁸

As the Crow campaign subsided, the NSA leadership fell prey to an internal witch hunt over the question of IUS affiliation, spurred on by external forces, including the Catholic Church. The battle mirrored the political war that was then consuming the wider public: advocates of cooperation with the Soviet Union were not only losing ground to those who wanted to fight the Soviets, but the very act of advocating cooperation was being seen as political heresy.

Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt’s vice president, became the symbol of the change in attitude. After Truman fired Wallace from the Cabinet over his position regarding the Soviet Union in September 1946, Wallace formed the Progressive Party and ran for president in 1948, accusing Truman of ushering in a “century of fear.”⁷⁹ Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberals led the opposition to Wallace, charging him with the “corruption of American liberalism.” Others called him Stalin’s candidate. But though there were few Wallace supporters in the top echelons of the NSA, a major exception was James W. (Jim) Smith, a Prague 25 member, who had been appointed to substitute for the ailing Bill Ellis in the IUS secretariat.

Smith, a former student body president at the University of Texas, had a droll sense of humor and a well-established reputation as a civil liberties advocate. When the Texas Board of Regents had fired President Homer Rainey for alleged communist tendencies in 1944—he had permitted John Dos Passos’s USA to be adopted as a textbook—Smith led demonstrations in support of Rainey.80 In December 1946, at the Chicago meeting, Smith had been elected president of the National Continuations Committee. He subsequently joined the Wallace-led Progressive Citizens of America. In Madison, his lack of student status kept him from running for office, but in the chaotic aftermath of an exhausting convention, the new NSA executive committee appointed him temporary replacement for the stricken Ellis.

Suspicion soon attached to every act Jim Smith took or failed to take. His early letters from Prague, intended to reassure the NSA that all was going well, had the opposite effect. Smith wrote that the secretariat was “quite elated over the statement that NSA will cooperate in IUS activities this year.”⁸¹ This was a statement of fact, but the implied enthusiasm rang alarm bells for Bob Smith in Cambridge. On December 13, he wrote to the Madison staff: “I don’t mean to sound like an old maid about it, but we’ve got to slow him down a little, for his own good and for that of NSA. There is nothing that IUS hdqtrs would like more than to ‘pull him over to their side’ in some of our difficulties.”⁸²

If Bob Smith was apprehensive, Catholics were in open revolt. Rumors spread that Jim Smith had belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s. Stories circulated about his summer work for the steelworkers union in Texas. He carried a lunch pail, which affluent Ivy Leaguers had thought merely odd, but which now offered ominous hints of working-class sympathies.⁸³

At a late-December meeting of the NSA executive committee, the regional chairs voted 19 to 1 to strip Jim Smith of his authority and his right to interpret NSA policy.⁸⁴ Some chairs expressed regret over their hasty vote to send him to Prague; others said that they felt they had been duped.85 The committee voted to place all authority on the IUS question in the hands of the annual Congress. This unexpected move astonished the other NSA officers. President Welsh noted later that he sensed forces outside the NSA in play, but he could not identify what they were.⁸⁶ He had no inkling of the Vatican’s involvement or of how much Catholics feared that the NSA would affiliate with the IUS.

Jim Smith’s situation in Prague was further complicated by the fact that technically neither he nor Ellis represented the NSA. Illness had prevented Ellis from resigning as an NICC representative, as planned, and being reappointed by the NSA. Thus, Jim Smith’s status at IUS was ambiguous. In February, Muriel Jacobson seized on this technicality and informed the NSA that Smith was not an acceptable replacement for Ellis.⁸⁷ Before that formal notice, someone outside the NSA, possibly Jacobson, suggested that Spurgeon M. Keeny, whose hotel room in Prague had been the site of the campaign against left-wing Americans, might travel to Prague and observe Smith at an upcoming IUS Executive Committee meeting. Bob Smith agreed and informed the Madison staff.⁸⁸

When Keeny arrived in Prague for the January 18 meeting, he checked in with the American Embassy before contacting Jim Smith. Ironically, Smith, unaware of Keeny’s purpose in Prague, was waging a successful fight to keep the IUS Executive Committee meeting open to observers. Once the issue was settled, Keeny was admitted and took verbatim notes of the marathon meetings, which began at 9:30 A.M. and lasted into the night. After traveling to Switzerland and conferring with Ellis, Keeny turned his notes into a twenty-eight-page single-spaced confidential report with one overriding conclusion: “One must accept the clear and obvious fact that IUS is at present a Communist controlled ‘front.’”⁸⁹

While Keeny recognized the difficulty of Jim Smith’s position, he damned him with faint praise. Yes, Smith had tried to represent the positions of the NSA fairly, but “I could not help feeling that he was always disassociating himself from these opinions and apologizing for rather than defending the attitude of the NSA and American students.” In Keeny’s judgment, Smith lacked the requisite backbone to deal with communists: “He compromised too far and too easily for a person in his position.”⁹⁰ Keeny found no objection to anything Jim Smith actually did—he simply sensed a lack of ardor in his arguments. Keeny, by contrast, was described by Bob Smith as a gung-ho anti-communist, an “‘action man’ on this student politics … business—feels that we should get in and fight IUS tooth and nail.”91

Unknown to either Keeny or the NSA, Jim Smith had already told relatives in early February that he planned to quit. He felt that the NSA had moved to the right, while the IUS had moved to the left.⁹² The attack by the Catholics deepened his disillusionment. He wrote to his family that Catholic leaders “spread the word that Jim Smith is a Communist, from one end of the country to the other.” He told his family that he would resign as of March 1, 1948.

Jim Smith did resign but not before events in Czechoslovakia took the matter out of his hands. The same events would bring the NSA closer to clandestine intelligence operations. But long before then, the external institutions and agencies that had developed a stake in the NSA’s political character and foreign policy made sure that the question of IUS affiliation would not be left to chance or the whims of American undergraduates.