Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

At the same time, Dulles alienated himself domestically from all his older associations within American life, and from the forces of rationalization and science which were increasingly a force there. Like Eisenhower, Dulles had an unusual conception of his office; indeed, it was much more unusual than was Eisenhower’s. Dulles refused to take any responsibility for the internal functioning of the State Department. His concern was, he thought, only with the high policy of international politics on a world basis as the eyes, ears, and probably the mind of the President. Accordingly, instead of the usual under secretary of state, Dulles appointed two: General Walter Bedell Smith to the regular post, and Donald B. Lourie, president of Quaker Oats Company, as a second one in charge of all departmental administration. Under Lourie he named a McCarthyite, R. W. Scott McLeod, as state Department security officer. In this way the full disruptive force of McCarthyism was brought into the inner fortress, that is, into the personnel security files of the department against which McCarthy and his associates had directed their most blasting assaults. Nor was that all. In his first week in office Dulles announced his policies to the department, and informed its employees that he expected “competence, discipline, and positive loyalty.” There is nothing objectionable in these three qualities except that Senator McCarthy had temporarily made “positive loyalty” his own criterion of condemnation.

This beginning became worse. Dulles made no effort to protect his subordinates from the attacks made upon the department or on them individually. His justification for this attitude soon destroyed the morale of much of the department and especially of the Foreign Service. Dulles felt that once an employee became the target of a public attack as unreliable, the question of his guilt or innocence became definitely secondary to the question of whether his value to the department had not been destroyed simply by the fact that he had become a subject of controversy. If so, he should be released from service, even if innocent. This point of view, which was almost an invitation to the McCarthyite to increase their attacks, was never, however, applied to Dulles himself when he became, in a short time, a figure of controversy. The real damage to the Department arose from the elimination of some of its most knowledgeable members. The Radical Right, having eliminated almost everyone who knew anything about the Far East, especially those who knew the Chinese language, now, under Dulles, shifted their target to those who knew anything about Russia, especially the language. In this way, George Kennan was eliminated, and Charles Bohlen narrowly escaped. Paul Nitze resigned in disgust. Some of those eliminated found refuge in Ivy League academic posts.

The chief victim of these purges was Robert Oppenheimer. The attack on the “father of the A-bomb” began in the summer of 1953, as soon as Lewis Strauss succeeded Gordon Dean as chairman of the AEC. On July 7th, at the request of Strauss, the AEC ordered that classified documents in Oppenheimer’s possession in Princeton be taken from him. On November 7, 1953, W. L. Borden, who had earlier left the Joint Congressional Committee for private employment with Westinghouse Electric, wrote a letter to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI: “The purpose of this letter is to state my own exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” This charge was supported by a biased rehash of all the derogatory stories about Oppenheimer which had been known when Oppenheimer was appointed to Los Alamos by General Groves in 1943. Much of the letter was made up of wild charges which no responsible person has ever been willing to defend: “He has been instrumental in securing recruits for the Communist Party,” and “He was in frequent contact with Soviet espionage agents.” According to Borden, “The central problem is not whether J. Robert Oppenheimer was ever a Communist; for the existing evidence makes abundantly clear that he was … The central problem is assessing the degree of likelihood that he in fact did what a communist in his circumstances, at Berkeley, would logically have done during the crucial 1939-1942 period—that is, whether he became an actual espionage and policy instrument of the Soviets.”

On the basis of this letter and at the direct order of President Eisenhower, Chairman Strauss suspended Oppenheimer’s security clearance and thus his access to classified information without which scientific work for defense is impossible. The news was given to Oppenheimer by Strauss on December 21, 1953, four days after he received an honorary degree from Oxford University. As provided by law, Oppenheimer appealed the AEC decision to an ad hoc investigation committee of three men, one of whom was a scientist. The hearings, from April 12 to May 6, 1954, allowed Oppenheimer to have counsel who were permitted to cross-examine witnesses, but the conduct of the hearings was most unsatisfactory.

The older assumption, which had been practiced regularly in American history and continued, fairly generally, in the Truman Administration, was that any person had a right to be employed by the government unless something adverse could be proved against him. The chief adverse something, in scientific work, would be disloyalty. In the course of the years 1951-1953, these concepts were changing and were formally modified by President Eisenhower’s Security Order 10450 of April, 1953. The first change was that public employment no longer was a right but became a privilege; the second was that disloyalty was no longer the chief criterion, but security was; and the third change was that the government no longer had to prove anything derogatory, but merely needed to have a doubt that a person’s employment was consistent with the security of the country.

Taken together, these three modifications placed the burden of proof on the employee rather than on the accuser and made the area of proof so wide that it could hardly be met. The government has to prove nothing; it merely must have a doubt, and that doubt need have nothing to do with loyalty or with the employee’s work, but may simply be about his discretion, his drinking habits, his truthfulness, or any other personal characteristics of an adverse kind whether these operate in the area of his work or not. The task of an employee seeking to dispel the doubt that he may drink one too many cocktails before dinner, or that he may gossip, or even talk in his sleep is formidable. For example, one of the AEC commissioners who sat in judgment on Oppenheimer fell asleep in a railroad car on June 11, 1954, with the transcript of the case on his lap, and awoke later to find it gone. This was why the transcript was immediately printed and released on June 16th, in spite of the assurances to its forty witnesses throughout its pages that it would be kept secret. A case might be made that an AEC commissioner who lost classified materials by falling asleep while reading them in public was a “security risk.” He would have some difficulty removing that doubt.

The shifting of the burden of proof from the board to the accused and the use of an investigatory tribunal rather than the more familiar technique (to English-speaking peoples) of an adversary trial made the hearings even less satisfactory. For the accused, faced with the need to establish the truth in order to dispel any doubts of the members of the tribunal, could hardly establish the truth when he had access only to those documents which had been selected by the counsel for the AEC. In this case the AEC counsel, a one-time United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, conducted the hearings as if he were the prosecutor in an adversary trial. He was allowed to use secret data, from which evidence was pulled at short or no notice, while Oppenheimer’s counsel was excluded from access to classified documents for security reasons.