A Matter of Loyalty
ON April 3, 1948, the U.S. Congress approved the Economic Cooperation Act (ECA), implementing the Marshall Plan for bringing about the economic recovery of Europe, then in a desperate condition and threatened with the prospect of Communist revolutions. Some four months later, the Economic Cooperation Administration was a going concern with a viable program. I had the good fortune to have a grandstand seat at these events.
Don Stone, whom I had known and briefly worked for at the Public Administration Clearing House, had since 1941 been director of the Administrative Management Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget. He had several times offered me positions in his division, but I had declined, preferring an academic career. I did, however, frequently serve as a consultant to the Bureau.
Don was selected by Paul Hoffman, a former automobile manufacturer who had been appointed by President Truman as administrator of the ECA, as his staff man for organization. Don invited me and a few others to come to Washington for some months to help organize the agency. I took several extended trips to Washington in the spring of 1948 and spent the entire summer there, first holding a position as consultant, then as director of the Management Engineering Branch of ECA.
As I have told the story of how ECA came into being in an article that is reprinted as chapter 16 of the third edition of Administrative Behavior, here I will limit myself to some of its personal aspects.
When we began, there was no agency, just a few desks and telephones, and a telephone directory that grew rapidly—from 15 names on April 13 to 741 names on July 26. Classical organization theory would have called for us to draw up an organization chart, with divisions and sections and branches, and a manual describing the functions of each. There was no time for that. Instead, we focused on drawing up a mimeographed document, Basic Principles of ECA Organization, that described the mission of ECA, selecting and emphasizing one particular point of view of the many that were competing for hegemony. There were at least six important alternative approaches to conceptualizing ECA, and we blended those that seemed best to us while playing down the others.
Our policy document never received any official approval—that would have taken months and much compromise—but it was widely circulated, giving each new person who entered the organization a specific picture of what it was about. That picture emphasized negotiating with a unified Europe through the Paris office (rather than bilaterally, with the individual European countries), and placed the balance of payments in the center of agency planning and budgeting. This conception of the program served as both a weapon and a motive for the competitors in the power struggle that went on in this, as in every, burgeoning organization. Units that fit the conception could use it to claim a larger place in the program, and the administrators of those units were led to see the broadening of their functions as essential means for implementing the ECA program.
The Management Engineering Branch had one other arrow in its quiver. Before the Personnel Division could fill a position with a permanent employee, we had to provide a formal job description. By setting our priorities properly, we made it easy for units that fit our conception of how the ECA should operate to hire employees, and very difficult for the others. We used that power discreetly but vigorously.
I do not want to exaggerate my influence, or the influence of the Organization and Management Division in general, over the shape that ECA and its programs took. In the long run, in this as in many other situations, it was mainly the nature of the task to be accomplished and the pressure of the task requirements on the organization that shaped the agency. But perhaps we helped to start it in a good direction and to speed it on its way. Whether or not we were influential, it was a most educational experience for me.
By 1948, Communists and supposed Communists were being discovered under every rug—beginning with William Remington and followed soon after by Alger Hiss. Any graduate of the University of Chicago, with its reputation of tolerance for campus radicals, was guaranteed a full field investigation before he could obtain a security clearance. The ECA Security Office found me a highly questionable character, and gave me my clearance with great reluctance. To explain how this came about, I must give a fuller account of my history as a liberal activist, and my history as an investigatee of security agencies. The story begins before the period we are now considering, and continues long after, but it will be more easily understood if it is told in one piece.
LIBERALISM, DEPRESSION STYLE
At what age I became a civil libertarian is not recorded. While yet in grammar school, I had a letter published in the Milwaukee Journal in defense of atheism. I was indignant that my father forbade my doing such a thing again. After all, I had signed my own name, and the fact that some people, misled by the common address, had confused “Herbert” with “Arthur” was no fault of mine. Nonetheless, I did abstain from writing further letters of this kind.
At school and church, I was a nonconformist in certain minor ways, and learned to bear the embarrassment that nonconformity brings with it. By the time I reached college, I was more or less a Socialist, and became aware that socialism and communism were often considered indistinguishable, and that communism (and supposed communism) was very little tolerated by society, especially as represented by the Chicago police. One of my dormitory fellows spent a night in jail because he attended a meeting that was raided. Whether it was literally a party meeting or just some sort of fellow-traveling protest I don’t remember. I conversed with Communists on the campus, and argued with them, but never had an impulse to join them. I was (and am) a New Deal Democrat, probably imprinted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s inaugural address.
When Bill Cooper and I and some others (including Dorothea) formed a Progressive Club on campus in the autumn of 1937, we were noticed by the monthly campus magazine, Pulse, which reported our activity in such an atrocious imitation of TIMESTYLE that I cannot resist quoting from the article:
Testimony to the progressives’ characters and purposes can be found in no better source than their potent faculty members, all active, who exuberated in delight at discovery of students who thought by themselves, for themselves. Faculty men were pleased to allot time from already crowded hours to furtherance of cherished ideals which had at long last found untinged company in a campus organization. Understandably proud therefore was President William J. Cooper in announcing traditionally hard-to-get faculty mentors Charles Merriam, Paul Douglas, Jerome Kerwin, Malcolm Sharp, Edward Levi, as charter members, smilingly adding that there were more to come.
. . . .
Nearest approach to pinko viewpoint is found in advocation “(5) Such legislation as will protect the consumer, aid the underprivileged, promote economic stability, provide more adequate support for education, operate for a more equitable distribution of wealth, and reduce the dominance of vested interests over the economic life of the nation.”
More significant than their pros are the Progressives’ cons—opposition to: any form of fascism or communism; undermining of the democratic process; use of coercion and violence; sabotage; instigation of class warfare; fomentation of animosity with view to revolutionary upheaval.
While they haven’t yet been pestered by Communists, whose platform calls for active participation in all “progressive parties,” an ejection provision in their constitution will care for such as these. Meanwhile they concentrated on action.
The Progressive Club focused most of its attention on local government (Bill Cooper, Dorothea, and I were all working in that domain), which in Chicago at that time was maximally corrupt. Dorothea and I also joined a newly formed organization, the Hyde Park Independent Voters, to support a reform, antimachine candidate for alderman of the 5th Ward. We canvassed our precinct from door to door, were generally received genially and even warmly—and earned a total of fifteen votes for our candidate in the election. We had to conclude that we were not very effective canvassers, but we look back on the experience with fondness, for the Hyde Park Independent Voters later became the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI), which ultimately merged into Americans for Democratic Action, of which we are therefore prenatal members.
Like most student organizations, the Progressive Club never grew to any size, and most items on its agenda never progressed beyond the grandiose statements in its constitution. But the club did not represent my total activity as a liberal at that time. While I was working for Clarence Ridley at the City Managers’ Association, some of the employees in the Public Administration Clearing House (PACH), of which this was one unit, decided to form a union. I was generally sympathetic to unions, but had never thought of myself, an intellectual and white-collar worker, as a prospective union member. But when I learned that Louis Brownlow, director of PACH, was greatly alarmed by the notion of a union and was actively campaigning against it, I immediately decided that if a union were formed I would surely join it. The union never materialized, so it was a tempest in a teapot. I mention it to illustrate my touchiness on matters of civil liberties.
During these last two years in Chicago, Dorothea and I dined very economically in an eating cooperative, the Ellis Co-op, organized on the principles developed by the Rochdale cooperatives in nineteenth-century England, hence explicitly nonpolitical. The diet was adequate, and Mrs. Polacheck cooked expertly, but by reason of budget constraints rutabagas were ubiquitous on the menu. Once every semester, she splurged by preparing a dinner of delicious blintzes.
If the Co-op was nonpolitical, most of its members were not. In particular, there was a large contingent of Troskyites, who propounded most extraordinary theories about how the war in Spain should be conducted by the Republicans (“cooperation at the front, but no cooperation at the rear” was the basic Troskyite axiom). These same Troskyites constantly tried to persuade the Co-op to adopt political resolutions about Spain and other matters. In general, we outvoted them, but it was nip and tuck.
Meanwhile, as already recorded, my close friends Leo Shields and Winston Ashley and their Trotskyite-Aristotelian-Catholic associates had taken over the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. And to flesh out our popular front alliances with radicals, Dorothea and I attended one or more discussion meetings that were obviously organized by members of a Communist cell.
Dorothea was for a time a member of the American Student Union (ASU), and I also attended some ASU meetings. The ASU was never a Communist organization but was heavily infiltrated by Communist students, sometimes controlled by them, and definitely regarded by the FBI as a Communist-front organization. In loyalty investigations you get black marks for talking with Communists, but no brownie points for arguing with them or contesting their control of an organization.
During this period, the only morning newspaper in Chicago was the Chicago Tribune, which was incapable of distinguishing news from opinion. When a new left-wing newspaper, the Midwest Daily Record, appeared, we subscribed immediately. It was soon obvious that it was essentially a Midwestern edition of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. We retained our subscription, however, relying on our political sophistication to interpret and discount its news stories, and much preferring it to the thick stream of bile poured out by the Tribune. It was not until many years later that I learned one uses one’s time best by reading no newspaper at all.
Dorothea and I were intensely political animals at this time, deeply concerned about events in Europe (first the Spanish War, then the aggressions of Hitler in central Europe). By many definitions of “fellow traveler,” but not ours, we were fellow travelers, not accepting either Stalinism or Trotskyism, significantly more concerned about the dangers from the Right than the dangers from the Left, but quite aware of both dangers.
We believed that a French-Russian-English military alliance was essential to the safety of democracy in Europe, and migrated from our natural pacifism to a strong interventionist position for America. When in doubt, we could determine our policy by looking at the Chicago Tribune and opting for the opposite position.
The situation in Europe was becoming steadily more grim as Hitler stepped up his demands for the incorporation into the Reich of Memel, Danzig, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia. In April 1938 there was a great blizzard in Chicago. Dorothea and I struggled through the drifts to our respective offices, she to the Political Science Department and I to ICMA. At noon, a caterer was persuaded to bring some food into our building so that we would not have to brave the elements, and a group of us gathered together in the commons room at the Public Administration Clearing House, where ICMA was located. When someone turned on the radio, we were assaulted by the high-pitched tones of an enraged Hitler denouncing the president of Czechoslovakia. “Benes, der Lüger!” (“Benes, the liar!”) I remember the phrase, and the hate in Hitler’s voice as he uttered it.
It was too much for me. I put on my overcoat and trudged the half-mile through the snowdrifts to the lake shore at the foot of 57th Street. It had stopped snowing, but the strong northeast wind was driving blasts of spray from the half-frozen lake against the great blocks of ice that had piled up along the beach. The battle of wind with ice seemed to echo the battle of wills that was going on in Europe. I stood watching the struggle for a quarter of an hour, my face to the wind, then turned and walked back through the snow feeling somewhat calmer.
Even though it was entirely clear that fascism was the enemy, defining one’s political position was not easy during this period. The Stalin-Hitler pact in the summer of 1939 completed our disenchantment with the Stalinists. The political trials in the Soviet Union during the 1930s had already caused us great concern, but we were unsure what they meant.
As late as our stay in Berkeley, from 1939 to 1942, I spent hours in the library stacks reading transcripts of the trials, unable to comprehend them. Why did the victims confess so abjectly? What were they really guilty of? The answer came to me only with the publication of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941). I picked his book up one afternoon and did not put it down until I reached the last page at dawn. Then I understood.
Our associates at Berkeley, primarily the staff of the Bureau of Public Administration and the Political Science Department, were nearer the middle of the road than were most of our Chicago friends. Milton Chernin, my closest associate, was active in liberal politics in California and suspected by the authorities of Communist connections if not party membership. In fact, he was a liberal Democrat, and if he had ever been further to the left, I never had evidence of it.* “Liberal Democrat” was the label that fit most of us.
During the three years at Berkeley, my little research group carried out three major projects that have already been described, one of them a large-scale field experiment in the California State Relief Administration. The study was authorized by the state office of SRA, where Chernin had earlier been director of research. In the two field offices in Los Angeles that were turned over to us, we set up a careful experimental design, which was to govern the operations for three months.
At the same time, a great political donnybrook was going on at the state level, so that we more than once arrived at one of our district offices on a Monday morning to find that the director had been fired. We would then proceed down to the state headquarters, also in Los Angeles, pound on the desk, and demand (and get) the director’s reinstatement.
The political situation was so confused that no one knew what authority we had, and those momentarily in charge assumed we would not be so peremptory if we had none. Hence, they always backed down, and our experiment ran through its rocky course to completion. One of our allies in the state office, a former assistant to Chernin, also subsequently turned up on the FBI lists as a suspected Communist. Meanwhile, on more than one occasion, I had written reference letters for him and for Chernin, as I certainly ought to have done.
After a time, we discovered in one of our two experimental districts a very active Communist cell, complete with a mimeograph machine. The members were good case workers and nice people, who later got into deep trouble and ultimately into prison as a result of perjury or contempt convictions (I don’t remember which) for their testimony before a Red-hunting committee of the California legislature. Our only political entanglement with them was to attend a lively party they gave just when the agency was going into final collapse toward the end of our study. They all expected shortly to be unemployed.
So much for radicalism in the Los Angeles offices of the SRA. Back in Berkeley, the statistician on my project was leaving for another job, and I had to hire a replacement. (Actually, my boss, Sam May, was supposed to hire the replacement, but it never occurred to me to bring him into the act until I had made the decision and needed a signature.)
The mathematician Griffith Evans recommended two of his doctoral students for the job: Kenneth May, who was Sam May’s son, an excellent mathematical economist; and Ronald Shephard, who was more of a statistician, and worked closely with Jerzy Neyman. After conversations with both, I chose Shephard, mainly because I thought it slightly awkward to hire the boss’s son. Both were probably overqualified for the job.
Shephard was hardly on the payroll when Kenneth May burst into the newspaper headlines by publicly announcing that he was a member of the Communist party. The special piquancy of this development was that his father had recently become head of California’s civilian defense agency. Sam essentially disowned his son, although they were reconciled some years later. When war broke out, Kenny volunteered and served in the ski troops in Italy, where he was commissioned a captain in the field.
This did not prevent the radicalism issue from shadowing his academic career after the war, and I always felt that his scientific productivity was greatly diminished by the energy he had to spend to defend himself politically. I had learned a great deal of economics from him and Shephard, and that personal contact added to my distress at his political difficulties.
Ronald Shephard turned out to be a fine member of my staff and, like Kenny, a lifelong friend. He was what one would call an original, always having an unusual way of looking at things—particularly at the irrationality of social conventions. After the war, when housing was difficult to find, he went around to university campuses, stating that he would accept any job that brought a house with it. Purdue University provided the house and he went there.
I never learned much about Shep’s politics (he was what one would call a “personal anarchist,” a label not predictive of political allegiances), but when we left Berkeley, he presented me with his personal copy of Karl Marx’s Capital, all three volumes, which he said he was discarding. I put them conspicuously on my living room shelf, first in Chicago and then in Pittsburgh, with the mental resolve that if it ever became politically necessary for me to remove them, I would at once migrate to Australia or New Zealand.
MY SECURITY FILE
That ends the recital of my contacts with radicalism in Chicago and Berkeley. Many years later, when, pricked by curiosity, I used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the papers relating to my security clearances—all 550 pages—I was able to learn how much of my private life during this period was known, and how much unknown, to the FBI and Air Force Intelligence. Any of you who belong to the Depression or postwar generations will have recognized that there are at least a dozen items in this autobiography that could have been used to deny security clearance under the standard (and dangerous) rules of the game. The actual intelligence harvest, as recorded in my dossier, was quite random and very incomplete.
The items that later got me in trouble (I will tell the story shortly) were my subscription to the Midwest Daily Record and my friendships with Milton Chernin and his SRA associate, both of whom had used me as a reference. The newspaper had been noted by our Chicago landlady, who evidently inspected our trash barrels and reported it to the FBI when interviewed a decade later, in 1948.
My wife’s ASU involvement was dimly suspected (it had been reported to the FBI by a dean of students at the University of Chicago) but never nailed down. The FBI certainly had no conception that we spent our main effort in that organization struggling against a Communist takeover; that was far too sophisticated for their world picture.
Among the things that never found their way into the FBI record were the Ellis Co-op; our attendance at one or two Communist cell meetings; my numerous Catholic-Trotskyite friends; the Communist cell in the SRA district office of our California experiment; Kenny May; and my volumes of Capital. Not a very good batting average for the FBI agents. Since, in the political climate of the 1940s and 1950s, any one of those items would likely have sunk me, I don’t regret the inefficiency of the investigators. What I do regret, and resent, was the existence of an inquisitorial system that could build subversion and crime out of wholly legitimate activities and associations.
What also did not get into the record was the Progressive Club at the University of Chicago, with its active policy of excluding Communists from membership. Once one understands the inquisitorial mentality, this is not at all surprising. Positive evidence of loyalty has no important place in the FBI record. Thirty interviews with friends, acquaintances, and associates who state with certainty that one is not a Communist do not weigh in the balance against a single interview that suggests that one may be. The negative item is recorded on the summary sheet, the positive items are not. One could have an interesting intellectual discussion of the Bayesian probability model that lies implicit in this inference process. Its practical effects are wholly corrosive of democratic freedoms.
LIBERALISM, THE POSTWAR PERIOD
By 1946, I had advanced to the chairmanship of the Department of Political and Social Science at Illinois Tech. The number of members of the department was not much more than the number of words in its title.
I continued to be sensitive to civil liberties issues. Much to my surprise, for I have absolutely no recollection of it, I recently recovered from my files a long memorandum I mailed in 1946 to Arthur Macmahon, then president of the American Political Science Association, recommending that the association set up a committee to address academic freedom in the universities. I reproduce here the first paragraphs of my memorandum to illustrate my concerns, and my views on academic liberties at that time.
PROPOSAL FOR A COMMITTEE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION
There are a number of indications that the current anti-Communist enthusiasm is leading to a full-fledged attack on “leftist” tendencies among college textbooks and teachers in the social sciences. As in the past, this attack will not confine itself to individuals or books that are demonstrably communistic, but will broaden itself to include any person or thing that can be labeled “liberal.” The members of the American Political Science Association, by virtue of their profession, should possess expert judgments as to the proper limits of academic freedom in the political realm, and as to the proper definition of “subversive.” For this reason it is both suitable and highly necessary that the Association be in a position to take prompt action in defense of academic freedom should the anti-red campaign develop to dangerous proportions. It is proposed that a committee of the Association be created with power to investigate instances of alleged subversive speech or writing, and to publicize its findings in each case.
MacMahon took my proposal quite seriously, and presented it—on more than one occasion—to the board of the association. He also consulted with the director of the American Association of University Professors, who after long silence made a bumbling and ambiguous reply that suggested that these issues were on AAUP turf and intrusions were not welcome. In the end, after more than a year of correspondence and deliberation, calm heads prevailed and nothing was done. The William Remington and Alger Hiss affairs, early events in the postwar Red hunts, were still a year or two in the future, and evidently did not cast a sufficiently dark shadow before them. I accepted the decision (I had to) as undoubtedly the product of more wisdom and experience than a young man possessed.
During the period of this correspondence, a small cloud crossed over my own sky. A letter was sent to Henry Heald, president of IIT, complaining that one of the members of my department had used a speech of the president of the National Association of Manufacturers in a deprecatory way (perhaps as an illustration of interest group propaganda). When Henry Heald interposed a courageous and appropriate protective shield, nothing came of the matter.
The 1948 U.S. presidential election also gave me some moments of anxiety. Among the members of my department, two were precinct captains for Henry Wallace’s candidacy (supported by the Communists, among others), two for the ADA (backing Harry Truman), one for the “regular” Democratic machine, also backing Truman, and none for Dewey. If that had come to the attention of the Chicago Tribune, there would have been trouble for IIT and for me.
Perhaps I am craven in jittering about such matters, but perhaps jitters don’t compromise your principles as long as they don’t make you prudent. I certainly did nothing to deter my colleagues from performing their civic duties as they saw them, nor did I hint my concern to them. And of course nothing happened—except for Harry Truman’s marvelous victory.
At IIT, I taught an evening public administration class for public managers in federal (and a few state and local) positions. One of my students was a supervisor in the Chicago post office, Henry McGee, some years later to become the first black postmaster of Chicago. We became good friends, as did our families, and he convinced me that I should join the NAACP. On the FBI copy of my security application, there is a neat penciled check opposite this item on my list of affiliations. Why would a white man join the NAACP in 1946? In the security interviews I have had, only in 1948 was that question actually asked.
Although IIT was located nearly in the center of Chicago’s South Side “Black Belt,” nearly all its black employees in the 1940s were janitors. The library had courageously, and over much opposition, hired one black clerical employee. When our department got money for a full-time secretary, my colleagues and I decided that the appointee would be black. Dean Larkin, although he was a cautious man, agreed to the action, and we took some steps to prepare other IIT employees to accept a black associate.
The next step was to find suitable candidates, which proved very hard. Since there were almost no secretarial jobs for blacks in Chicago, the Chicago high schools did not train them in secretarial skills, and black high school graduates did not find it profitable to pay tuition to private secretarial schools. After much search, we located Julia Jones, whose spelling was intuitive, whose grammar was not standard, whose vocabulary was limited, but who was obviously a bright young woman with good social skills, and willing both to learn what she needed to learn and to deal with whatever problems might arise in her lily-white surroundings.
Julia was a fine secretary during my remaining years at IIT, and my successor’s secretary thereafter. Later she wrote me to express her gratitude for my patience while she was learning her trade. Her letter warmed but also embarrassed me, for I had done only what I ought to have done. Today it is hard to recall the atmosphere of those times (fortunately) and to remember how difficult it was to observe elementary moral principles.
Housing provided other tests of our social sensibilities. We had always lived in rented quarters, but as our family grew and we seemed firmly established at IIT, the urge came to buy a house. In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that racial covenants limiting sales of real property to Caucasians were unconstitutional, thereby freeing up most of Chicago’s South Side, which had been bound by those covenants. We then felt we could buy a house without violating our principles, and acquired one in 1948 on 50th Street, a mile north of the University of Chicago campus.
A year later, to our surprise, we were on our way to Pittsburgh and had to sell our Chicago house. Meanwhile, the boundary of the Black Belt had moved up to 49th Street and was continuing to move. Should we show the house to black as well as white families? The answer may seem obvious in the light of our politics and values, but it was not. If we had been planning to stay in the neighborhood there would have been no question, because we could have participated in the solutions of any problems that might arise, and because if there were any financial costs to having black neighbors (it was generally believed that real estate values would fall), we would share the cost.
But because we were moving away, our white neighbors, a number of whom had become our good friends, might accuse us of copping out or even of being “block-busters,” interested only in money. An issue becomes a genuine moral issue when you feel it in the pit of your stomach. We felt the conflict between our loyalty to our good neighbors and our loyalty to our principles of human equality.
Before we put the house on the market, we discussed the matter with several neighbors whom we thought shared our liberal views. They took the high road, agreeing that liberalism did not mean much if it wavered the moment it touched the pocketbook. We then ignored the few complaints we heard from elsewhere on the block and offered the house through both black and white realty companies. In the end, it was sold to the little Episcopal church on the corner as its manse. Today, and quite independently of our tiny transaction, that neighborhood remains stable, racially mixed, and middle class. Our friends the Rothschilds lived there for many years and sent us news of it each Christmas.
There is one other instance I recall in Chicago that gave me a dubious association with communism. David Hawkins of the University of Colorado published a paper in 1948 containing a theorem that seemed too strong to me. Examining it closely, I soon found a counterexample which I sent to Hawkins. As we began to correspond about it, I also found the (weaker) correct theorem, and we agreed to write a joint paper making the correction and discussing the new theorem, which had interest in its own right. Our paper appeared in Econometrica in 1949. Some years later Hawkins appeared in Washington to testify (with dignity) before a congressional committee as an ex-Communist. I had co-authored a paper with a Communist whom I had never met—an excellent example of the potential for guilt by association!
Aside from noticing my NAACP membership, the FBI did not record my several expressions of liberalism during the IIT years. Their absence from the record could be attributed either to enlightenment or inefficiency.
LOYALTY CHALLENGED
In 1948, when Congress passed the legislation for the Marshall Plan and set up the Economic Cooperation Administration, part of the political bargain, to secure the right-wing (anti-Soviet) votes that provided half the support for the bill, was a provision for especially strict loyalty screening of ECA employees.
I accepted Don Stone’s invitation to join the ECA and was required, even though my post was temporary, to go through a security clearance process. It soon appeared that there were difficulties, and I was called in by the security officers to explain the dubious items in my record—principally the subscription to the Midwest Daily Record. Had I really read that paper and, if so, why? “Yes,” I answered, “I did. A political scientist reads a great many things in order to keep informed.”
That did not go down well, especially since I did not offer further explanations or elaborations. The FBI record shows that, when one of my inquisitors on that occasion was interviewed fifteen years later by an FBI investigator during a subsequent clearance process, he explained: “If he had simply denied subscribing to it, we would have believed him. But his explanation was suspicious.”
The ECA security people now did not want to certify my loyalty, a certification the law required for my continued employment. Fortunately, Don Stone had no doubts about me, nor did Ty Woods, an assistant director of ECA. After they went courageously to bat for me, I received the certificate of loyalty (suitable for framing, as the saying goes). But I am quite certain that a compromise was reached. The certificate was issued when the Security Division learned that I was only a temporary consultant who would soon go back to his university.
One nugget I later found among my security files, when I obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act, was a card bearing my name from the index file of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, dated 1948 and marked “questionable loyalty.” This label was removed only in 1963. I could not resist writing to the Civil Service Commission to ask how “questionable loyalty” was defined in the law, and was told (without a hint of humor) that it meant only that the loyalty in question had not yet been determined definitively. So the mark of Cain was on me, unbeknownst to me, from 1948 to 1963.
I say “unbeknownst,” but I was not entirely unsuspecting. Starting in 1948, I was several times asked by federal agencies to serve as a consultant, and then found that, after I had responded positively, there was no followup. The “certificate of loyalty” from ECA clearly attested to my loyalty only within very narrow boundaries of space and time, and the record of the investigation had not been lost.
The next episode of the story took place in Santa Monica, California, at the RAND Corporation. Financed mainly by the air force, RAND engaged in a large number of classified studies relating to air force strategy and national security. Some basic research was also supported, and each summer a sort of free-floating crap game was organized that attracted an elite group of academics from all over the country to come to Santa Monica and think and swim. Partly they thought about specific air force problems, partly about the theory of decision making and especially game theory.
Through my connections with the Cowles Commission, and Cowles’s with RAND, I was a RAND consultant once removed. Merrill Flood, a department head at RAND who had been a pioneer in applying management science techniques to municipal operations, knew me and my work and invited me in 1952 to come to RAND as a summer consultant. That, however, required security clearance.
In my reply to Merrill, I mentioned the difficulties I had had at ECA, and said that I would be willing to go through a security clearance only if RAND would not retreat at the first obstacle but would push the matter seriously. He agreed, I filled out the voluminous forms, and the clearance (at the lowest, “Secret,” level) went through, apparently without problems. At least none were brought to my attention.
From the spring of 1952, I was a frequent consultant at RAND, particularly in connection with the Systems Research Laboratory which was created that year, and then, after 1955, with the Computer Science Department. I spent the entire 1960–61 year on leave of absence at RAND. In September of 1960 a new air force decree came down requiring anyone employed in the RAND Santa Monica building to have a “Top Secret” clearance. Accordingly, a new set of forms was filled out (it wasn’t so bad—a secretary could copy most of the information from the previous set), and the FBI went about its full field investigation.
Months passed without any word. Then I was asked to report for an interview at an air force base in south Los Angeles. The base appeared to be almost deserted; I was directed to a totally isolated small building almost at its center, and in this intimidating setting two air force intelligence officers interrogated me. Nothing new emerged from the “interview,” except that my father had evidently sent some money to a Russian-American friendship organization during or after the war.
My questioners were particularly interested in the University of Chicago period, a quarter-century in the past, and when I mentioned (in the transcript of the interview, which they edited, I think the verb was “admitted”) that I had had contacts with Communists and with Catholics who also thought they were Trotskyites, they asked me to supply names. Then I did something for which I have always felt ashamed, although it did no harm. I mentioned my old friends Leo Shields (dead on Omaha Beach) and Winston Ashley (safe in his Dominican college). Harm or not, it was a violation of principle. From my security records I later learned that air force intelligence actually tried to locate Winston, without success.
On my return to Santa Monica, I suggested to Dorothea that we go for a walk (I was not at all sure that the house was not bugged) and I let off steam for half an hour. Walking has always been a good way for me to calm down. I had covered many miles of the streets of Washington, too, during the summer at ECA after my interrogation.
In September 1961 I returned to Pittsburgh without having heard a “yea” or “nay” on my RAND security clearance. At that point I addressed a personal letter to Eugene Zuckert, secretary of the army, whom I had come to know when we both served on the board of directors of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation, stating that “if you could without impropriety express an interest in my application being acted upon within finite time, I should appreciate it.” I emphasized that I was not asking for special treatment, just for getting the papers moved off whatever bureaucratic desk they were on.
Within a few days of mailing that letter, I was informed that the clearance had come through, but it came so soon that I do not think the letter could have had anything to do with it; it was simply a coincidence. Perhaps there was a rule that all such cases had to be acted on within a year. The total elapsed time from the submission of my application to the approval of the clearance was a year and a week.
The RAND incident represented my last serious encounter with security problems. Of course when I was nominated to President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, I had to be cleared at the executive office of the president at Top Secret level, but either because of my clearance in 1961 or because the rules are different at the White House, there was no delay. Since that time I have received Top Secret clearances from time to time in connection with my activities in the National Academy of Sciences. Again, no trouble. But when my security records were later sent me, I noticed that in all of these cases the summary sheets still reported the derogatory information that had been gathered in 1948.
THE LOYALTY OF INTELLECTUALS
In recounting this long tale, I have not discussed the important question: Am I in fact loyal, and reliably so? Or should the government be concerned that I might commit subversive acts or violate security? That is not an easy question. Security specialists have, with good warrant, a general suspicion of intellectuals. Intuitively, they know that intellectuals seek to be loyal to abstractions like “truth,” “virtue,” or “freedom,” rather than to a national state or its flag. As I write these lines, just a month has passed since young Chinese intellectuals died near Tiananmen while defending such abstractions. What does it mean when an intellectual swears loyalty to his country? Under what conditions can that oath be trusted?
We have some empirical evidence on these matters. First, most—not all—of the security breaches that have been detected in this country since World War II were motivated by greed or blackmail, not by ideology. In exceptional cases, there was, indeed, loyalty to a “higher” goal, often thought by the miscreant not to be inimical to the interests of the United States. I would cite Alger Hiss, as nearly as we can understand his case, and the uncontrite Oliver North as examples, and there were no doubt others.
But in most cases the intellectual, and even the ideologue (it is a little difficult to think of North as an intellectual) is not a good subversive, certainly not a good mole. Normally, intellectuals want to trumpet their ideology and values, not hide them, to lead the revolution, not spy for it.
Thoroughly disciplined members of the Communist party, especially immediately after the war when official attitudes toward Russia were returning from friendly to hostile, are the principal contemporary exceptions. If these had been the main target of our security efforts, it should not have been as difficult as it proved to be to separate them from other varieties of liberals. But perhaps separation was not the goal of the security agencies. We can still remember President Nixon’s “enemies list.”
At the beginning of this account, I mentioned that I have been and am a New Deal Democrat. The reason is depressingly simple, and has little to do with the wisdom or unwisdom of specific policies of either political party. Among the fundamental problems in every society, two stand out. People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves adequately. You can think of it as the balance between incentives and distributive justice. Too much concern with the latter may weaken the former, and vice versa.
Using this simple-minded dichotomy, you can classify people (roughly) into two groups by their answers to the following question: Is it more important that (a) all chiselers be detected and removed from the welfare lists, or (b) no sparrow should fall from Heaven unseen and uncared for? If the answer is (a), the respondent is a Republican; if (b), a Democrat. Either answer is rationally defensible. I just happen to prefer the second one.
The introduction of this autobiography promised you mazes without minotaurs. Perhaps that was a little optimistic, because the maze of loyalty and national security that we have just been through did house a minotaur. Fortunately, and by not too wide a margin, I escaped being its victim. At the same time, I surely did not slay it, nor has it ceased to claim other victims. It remains a dangerous beast at large in a democracy.
Note
*Chernin did like to tell the story of the Battle of El Cerrito Hill, in which General David Prescott Barrows, sometime chairman of the Berkeley Political Science Department, and later president of the university, surrounded the small hill of that name, near the Bay, with police and National Guardsmen, and led a charge up it at dawn, having been advised that strikers were gathered there to launch some kind of revolutionary action. At the top they found two hoboes, lighting a fire to cook their meager breakfast. I don’t know whether this event actually occurred, but Chernin’s delighted telling of it on many occasions could not have endeared him to the authorities.