A Covert Affair (2 page)

Their first glimpse of their new home did nothing to lift their spirits.
“Woe—how did we get here!”
Julia scribbled in her diary on October 24, 1954, the day they arrived in Bad Godesberg, a drab residential district
just south of Bonn. Flush with dollars from the Marshall Plan, the entire Rhine Valley had been rapidly rebuilt as part of the country's economic and industrial redevelopment, and it was full of blocky concrete office buildings and bristling with American soldiers. Julia and Paul were dismayed to find themselves back in the familiar embrace of the U.S. military, assigned to live in a segregated (“no Germans allowed!”) compound called Plittersdorf on the Rhine, which its unfortunate occupants had dubbed “the Golden Ghetto on the Rhine.” They had never cared for this part of army life—the rows of anonymous housing, streets crawling with jeeps and military policemen, and bars crowded with drunken young men in ill-fitting uniforms who wanted to be anywhere but there. Writing to her sister, Julia griped that she had
“had enough of that meat-ballery during the war to last her a lifetime.”
Still, there were plenty of opportunities for escape. Paul's Foreign Service salary enabled them to live well, especially as the dollar was strong against the mark. Whenever possible, they fled across the river to Bonn, a picturesque university town that had been occupied by American troops toward the end of the war and had somehow managed to survive relatively unscathed, its medieval battlements and grand boulevards still redolent of Old World charm. There they could sample the solid regional fare, the sauerbratens and sausages, inevitably served with groaning plates of potato pancakes. Afterward, too full to go far, they would stop to recover at one of the pavement cafés along the banks of the river.

Julia and Paul, like most in their seasoned diplomatic circle, had always been guilty of a certain disdain for GI culture, but what had once been mild distaste had over time developed into a visceral aversion. They wanted no part of the martial fervor that arose in the shadow of the Soviet threat in East Germany. Bonn, the makeshift capital, seemed by virtue of its very impermanence to bring out the worst in its American occupiers, who were so conflicted about their objectives in the divided region that they appeared to be almost paralyzed. Caught between the menacing Soviet Union and Western Europe's fears of military vulnerability, Bonn was emblematic of the tenuous peace, and of the uncertain prospects for American forces and American dollars to achieve a united capitalist postwar Europe to deter the spread of Communism.
Writing in
The New York Times
, Julia and Paul's friend Stewart Alsop observed that the U.S. diplomatic mission in Germany was
“a peculiarly depressing place for a peculiarly American reason”
and, in its confusion and excess of caution, was substituting “dogma for policy and the official line for serious thought.”

Within weeks of their arrival in Germany, Julia and Paul had picked up on the atmosphere of distrust and unease. The place was rife with closed-door meetings, simmering tensions, and subterranean plots. They were on the front lines of the Cold War in Europe, though Julia could not help feeling that the chill in the air had its origin in the
“rampant right wingery”
that had seized their own country in recent years. In Washington, the mood was so changed that on her last visit home she had scarcely recognized the city as the same place she and Paul had lived in those first happy postwar years.

When peace was declared, Americans had celebrated their achievement. The GIs had triumphed over Germany, over Japan, and, in the bargain, over the Great Depression, and in the first glow of euphoria that victory had seemed complete. The United States, with its great economic and military strength, seemed invincible. During the late 1940s, while based in Paris, Julia and Paul had watched as their country's ascendance as a global power led to a new confidence in its role in international affairs, as well as a greater sense of its responsibilities in preserving the peace and shaping the future, and the corresponding spread of U.S. policy-making agencies and legations around the globe.

As the rewards of war failed to meet the impossibly high expectations, however, the euphoria had quickly faded. New fears about the nation's security had gripped the public. The tone of political debate in Congress grew sharply partisan and bitter, with the Republicans making the most of charges of Communist infiltration of the Truman administration, as though that could explain the failure to foresee what had happened with the Soviet Union and China. In the spring of 1947, in an effort to protect his administration, President Harry S. Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, a broad measure instituting background checks and screening procedures for all incumbent and prospective government employees. But instead of reassuring
the public, the program helped legitimize the idea that international Communism posed a domestic threat. By the end of 1950, Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury, Klaus Fuchs confessed, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on espionage charges of passing bomb secrets to the Russians. Inevitably, in 1953, after years of relentless media coverage, the Rosenbergs got the chair. All of this seemed to confirm the existence of spies in every nook and cranny of government. Washington was awash in paranoia and suspicion.

Even more troubling than the hardening of ideology was the vicious Red-baiting of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. To Julia, the whole government, spurred on by McCarthy's unscrupulous zeal, seemed consumed with hunting for subversives. Venting her anger in a letter to her family, Julia wrote that she could not help thinking that most McCarthy supporters, of whom she was afraid her
“dear old Pop”
was one, were
“good-hearted but fat-headed people”
who were hopelessly stuck in the past. For twenty years, her father's animosity had festered under the New Deal and the Fair Deal: “Roosevelt was, to him, the anti-Christ. Roosevelt was socialism. The enemy. He boiled and seethed with hatred.” As far as she could see, McCarthy had tapped right into that source of hatred, fueling people's fears about the future: “Suddenly the new enemy is also Communism,” she continued. “It is these nasty foreigners with their socialistic ideas, these nasty intellectual egg-heads, who
like
the foreigners, & who have always caused all the trouble. What we want is to return to 1925, when we had no world responsibility (presumably), and no truck with foreigners. We just want to live alone. McCarthy is the savior symbol.”

The junior senator from Wisconsin's rapid rise to power was a recurring theme in the newspapers and Julia and Paul were riveted. They read everything they could get their hands on in Bonn, including the
Herald Tribune
and an edited version of the daily
New York Times
, and they beseeched family members to send articles from home. McCarthy had successfully made Communism a potent campaign issue, and he bullied President Truman into implementing an executive order to begin loyalty investigations of government employees. After the “fall” of China in October 1949, when the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung
proclaimed the formation of the People's Republic, McCarthy and his allies had stepped up their ideological attacks. On February 9, 1950, in a speech before the Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy had announced his crusade against government employees suspected of being members of the Communist Party, who were nevertheless
“still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Julia and Paul had seen the headlines that followed, all of which focused on McCarthy's claim that he had in hand a “list of 205” names of traitors.

McCarthy's Red scare became a real cause of concern, alarm even, to State Department personnel. He had made the overseas information agency one of his targets and had vowed to root out
“security risks.”
Hoping to appease McCarthy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had dismissed a number of high-level diplomats and had warned that anything less than
“positive loyalty”
from Foreign Service officers was “not tolerable at this time.” Julia and Paul had been en route to Germany when they had heard about the flurry of coerced departures in Bonn. This had been followed by reports of books being removed from the shelves of libraries run by the USIS, known as America Houses, in a number of European cities. Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled detective novel
The Maltese Falcon
was one of the many books McCarthy wanted “deshelved”—a neat euphemism for censored. In Berlin, a book entitled
Thunder Out of China
, written by their friend Theodore H. White, a
Time
magazine correspondent during the war, was found to be objectionable; it was removed and burned. Apparently White's sympathy with Mao and some of the Communist objectives made the book too dangerous for the eyes of impressionable Germans, the citizens of a country America was trying to turn into a unified democracy.

Julia and Paul learned from friends in Paris that Roy Cohn and David Schine, McCarthy's young assistants—the newspapers called them “the gumshoe boys”—had paid a surprise visit to the embassy there. Cohn and Schine had nosed around looking for dirt. Inevitably, they had rooted out a handful of employees who were disgruntled and interviewed them. One of Paul's former colleagues, Larry Morris,
the Paris cultural attaché, had happened on the two men in his office one Saturday afternoon, apparently making themselves at home with their feet propped up on his desk. Incensed, he had demanded they remove their feet from his desk and leave. They had gone quietly, but not before holding a press conference during which they made all sorts of unsubstantiated charges—
“vague, but dirty,”
as Paul put it. Naturally, no official at the embassy was given the opportunity to reply. Then Cohn and Schine announced that the next day—Easter Sunday—they would be questioning the ambassador, and wanted to meet with all the top USIS officers at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon at the library to examine the books on display. Everyone canceled his or her holiday plans and assembled at the library at the appointed hour, but Cohn and Schine never showed. Finally someone called the Hôtel de Crillon and discovered that the
“two young bloods”
had just risen from their beds and were eating breakfast in their suite. As far as Paul could tell, the only investigating they did was
“during most of Holy Saturday night, among the naked showgirls of Montmartre.”

Paul had seen only trouble ahead. Rumors about where McCarthy's tactics of intimidation—the book burning and finger-pointing—might lead had spread like wildfire through the diplomatic community. Paul was unnerved by McCarthyism and considered the senator to be
“a desperately dangerous, power-hungry, fascist-operating bastard.”
He was less than sanguine about the new president's ability to stand up to the notorious demagogue.
“Eisenhower appears to be trying to save the Republican Party at the expense of the country,”
he wrote his family in March 1954. “Sweeping the pieces under the rug in the plain view of the public won't disguise the disaster. He better hurry up and act or he'll find himself … eating out of McCarthy's hand.”

Julia and Paul had watched with sinking hearts as one after another of the career Foreign Service officers they had served with in China, among them some of their closest friends, had been forced out, while still others quit in disgust. Anyone who had departed from the official line in the Far East, or had had the temerity to write a critical report, was being labeled un-American and blamed for having “lost China to the Reds.” Somehow Mao's victory was now being seen as part of a master
Kremlin plot, enabled by a band of Sinologists—known as China hands—who had conspired to undermine U.S. policy.
“Quite a number of people were just ruined,”
recalled Julia. She and Paul had both served with the OSS in China and wondered if they should be worried, too. At the same time, it was difficult to judge to what extent some of the transfers and resignations being ordered from Washington were part of the normal changing of the guard and would have happened eventually, even without the buzz saw of McCarthy's Red hunt.

It was a point of personal honor with Julia and Paul that their colleagues could always count on their support. If loyalty was the burning question of the hour, they wanted to make it clear where theirs lay. When their old friend Haldore Hanson, a State Department official and longtime China expert—as a foreign correspondent in the 1930s, he had traveled the country by bicycle to cover the civil war—was accused by McCarthy of having “pro-Communist proclivities,” they immediately sent him a note of encouragement. On his day before the Senate subcommittee, he denied any involvement with the Communists, stating repeatedly that he was “a loyal American.” But as he later confided to Julia and Paul, he doubted whether his answer would
“ever meet up with the charges.”
Even though the subcommittee found no evidence against Hanson, as a result of McCarthy's accusations his neighbors in Virginia had circulated a petition to drive him out, and one even labeled him a Russian spy. Hanson wrote to Julia and Paul that he had been “very touched” to hear from them, adding,
“You have no idea what a few letters from friends can do for you in a time like that.”

Hanson's letter depressed the hell out of them, but they kept it as a reminder of the perilous times they lived in. There was nothing they could do but keep their heads down and hope for the best. Writing to her sister, Julia confided her misgivings:
“After the events of the last few years, I have entirely lost that nobility and esprit de corps. I feel, actually, that at any moment we might be accused of being Communists and traitors.”