A Covert Affair (42 page)

“It was a real inquisition,”
Jane reported to Julia and Paul. “They produced no witnesses, no evidence, just interrogated me for eight solid hours.” She told them how the lawyers had dredged up more obscure incidents from the past in a deliberate attempt to make her look guilty. With no supporting evidence, they claimed that in 1942 she had been working for the “Second Front.” They cited an even more absurd incident, stating that in 1934 she had once said that “happiness was to be found in the Communist Party.” As to the latter, Jane admitted it was entirely possible: “I probably was drunk at the time.”

When it was over, Jane fled Washington. She went to New York, she told Julia and Paul, and
“holed up in a hotel room.”
She stayed at the Essex House, but it was infested with badly dressed
“whey-faced agents.”
She moved to a cheap dive downtown on Waverly Place. She kept to herself and waited.
“Afraid to go out,”
she explained. “Every time I did, the boys in gabardine coats were after me…. Afraid to call anyone for fear I would get them in trouble by associating with them.” She made herself physically sick with worry. She could not eat or sleep. When she forced herself to eat something, she vomited it up. She grew so weak that when she got out of bed her knees buckled and she collapsed.

On March 29, after she had spent two weeks locked in her hotel room, her lawyer called to say that the appeals board had handed down its decision: it was negative. As Jane put it to Julia and Paul,
“I had been finally and irrevocably turned down on the grounds that I ‘had joined the Communist Party in the 1930's and had for many years thereafter followed the Communist Party line.' Period.”
The following day, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, acting on confidential information presented to him by the FBI, approved the decision. It was
“not in the best interests of the United States”
to allow her to leave for France.

As a last resort, Jane made an appointment to see Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley,
the ogress in charge of the Passport Division of the State Department, described by
Time
magazine in 1951 as “
the most unfirable, most feared”
woman in government. Jane thought Mrs. Shipley more than lived up to her terrifying reputation, with her long, narrow face and autocratic manner, enthroned in her expensively appointed office and surrounded by opulent baskets of flowers. She stood at the far end of the enormous room and made Jane traverse the length of it before her,
“the way Mussolini used to do with visitors.”
When Jane extended her hand in greeting, Mrs. Shipley deliberately put her arms behind her back, as if she were afraid of catching something. Not too proud to beg by this point, she pleaded with the woman to give her back her passport and allow her to go home to Paris, adding plaintively that the only reason she had ever left was because she thought her mother was
“very sick.”

“Don't blame your mother!” Mrs. Shipley barked. “Never blame you mother!”

Surprised by her vehemence, Jane replied, “What do you mean? Of course I don't blame my mother. I blame you, frankly.” Needless to say, the rest of the visit did not go well.

It was one setback too many. Jane was exhausted. Her nerves were shot. What drove her to the brink of despair, she wrote Julia and Paul, was that she was flat out of options:
“There I was—with the one suitcase I came with, no husband (Georgie couldn't come …), no home, no work, and, had it not been for my father, no money.”
That was when she “really snapped.” Her father (“no fool he”) diagnosed her fragile state and sent her to see Dr. Harold E. Wolff, a leading Cornell neuropsychiatrist and, as it turned out, an expert in the field of Psychosomatic Medicine at Medical School. His assistants, various young doctors known as the “Wolff pack,” looked Jane over, ran a battery of tests, and within twenty-four hours had her checked into New York Hospital. “They were wonderful,” she reported. They provided the respite she needed to regain her strength. Their tests actually turned up a few physical ailments along with her obvious mental disorders, and she underwent minor surgery on a gland under her armpit. They assured her that she was not “a paranoiac,” that various agents were “all around the hospital” but they would not let them in. For the time being,
she was safe. She spent her days assiduously working on her paintings, trying to keep her mind off her problems. She gave three pictures to her brother-in-law when he came to visit, including a self-portrait he found “disturbingly dark.” Jane stayed in the hospital for five weeks, by which time the psychiatrists had “unwound her” sufficiently that she was starting to “make some sense.”

Even in the midst of her breakdown, Jane had the wherewithal to feel outraged when the investigators turned their smear tactics on her family. After all they had put her through, she found the attack that was hardest to bear was the one on her father. She had heard it quite by accident while listening to Walter Winchell's broadcast on the radio, which she tuned into Sunday nights in the hospital as a form of self-flagellation. She had been half listening to the trademark machine-gun introduction when she suddenly realized that Winchell was talking about her:
“
Rat-tat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat-tat.
Good evening, Mr and Mrs America. Watch for the initials JF in the Cutter scandal. I repeat the initials JF. I'll give you the name later.”

That summer of 1955, Cutter Laboratories, where her father served as medical director, had been engulfed in scandal when a batch of Salk's vaccine—a newly developed polio vaccine manufactured by Cutter—resulted in a number of cases of polio-related paralysis and the deaths of several children. The public panicked, and Cutter's vaccine was immediately recalled. Federal virologists crawled all over the California-based family firm
to determine
the cause of the problem, and a number of high-level health officials were fired. Her father, who had strongly opposed the manufacture of the Salk vaccine as premature and had pushed for further testing, had been overruled, but his name was dragged through the mud with those of all the others. Then the FBI had the bright idea that perhaps Jane had sneaked into Cutter and contaminated the vaccine. The FBI greatly added to her father's woes by repeatedly questioning the company director, Robert Cutter, one of his oldest friends, as to whether or not Jane could be the culprit. It was crazy, of course—they were wildly shooting in the dark, hoping to bring her down—and beyond cruel.

In time, she got her strength back, and her will to fight. She fired
her first lawyer, on whom she had squandered five thousand dollars, and hired Leonard Boudin, a well-known civil liberties attorney and “passport specialist.” Her mother had come across his name in recent newspaper reports about the case of Dr. Otto Nathan, a leading economist, who had sued the State Department and won. In her enterprising way, Eve Foster, with her refined whisper of a voice, had somehow managed to get Nathan on the phone, explain that her daughter was in the same situation, and ask about his lawyer. Nathan had not only recommended Boudin highly, he had offered to meet Jane and do what he could to help.

Jane had been well enough to meet him at a Schrafft's in Midtown. Nathan was little, wore gold-rimmed glasses, and spoke with a thick German accent. After fleeing the Nazis—he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1939—he joined the faculty of Princeton University and struck up a close friendship with the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Albert Einstein. The State Department had denied his application for a passport for years on the grounds that he had been a member of various Communist-front groups and that this made his travel “undesirable.” It all became a matter of international import because Nathan was the sole executor of Einstein's estate, and following the physicist's death in April it became urgent that he be allowed to attend a conference on relativity in Switzerland in order to preserve some of Einstein's important papers. Jane thought Nathan was
“a loveable little man,”
and she was inordinately grateful to him for his kindness.

Boudin, Nathan's lawyer, was a supremely confident being. Just staring up at his handsome, intelligent face, she felt better. He had just won a series of victories in the courts, arguing that the ban on travel by American citizens whose political views were not in accordance with those of the State Department was unconstitutional. In June, he had managed to get the courts to recognize that the State Department's Passport Office, in the person of Mrs. Shipley, had been operating as
“a law unto itself,”
consistently denying Americans their passports “without hearing, evidence, specific reasons, or appeal.” Boudin made the Passport Office's improper regulations the main focus of his legal attack in Nathan's case. He argued that his client had been denied due
process, and the judge agreed, ordering the State Department to set up and submit for his approval a proper legal procedure. When the State Department failed to do so, the judge ordered it to grant Nathan his passport forthwith. The State Department appealed, but before the case reached the court of appeals, the department suddenly issued Nathan his passport, ostensibly on the grounds that it had reversed its decision as to the danger he posed society. Boudin maintained it was more likely that the State Department wanted to avoid risking a higher-court precedent that would undercut its powers.

When Boudin first came to see Jane in July, they talked strategy. He told her he would essentially be taking the same tack as in the Nathan case. He had decided not to
“fool around”
with the State Department and intended to go right to the courts. They would file suit against the secretary of state and ask the court for a preliminary injunction preventing the State Department from withholding her passport pending her suit. Jane was
“shaking like an aspen leaf”
at the very prospect of a trial, but Boudin was optimistic. He said the
“log-jam”
of cases was breaking up and predicted that he would make rapid progress.

On August 3, Boudin appeared before Judge Burnita S. Mathews of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. Two weeks later, the judge summoned Boudin and the lawyer representing Secretary of State Dulles. Jane, who had reentered the hospital for another small operation and some psychiatric follow-up, was not present but had it all straight from Boudin, who described the horse trading that took place in the judge's chambers and led to her case being dismissed:

[Judge Mathews]
told them first informally, that she was going to find for me, that the State Dept. had committed an illegal act in taking my passport, and that they had produced no evidence to support their charges, and that even the charges all dated from long before my residence in Europe. That therefore “grievous injury” had been done me, and she was not even going to order State to give a quasi-judicial hearing as had been done in the Nathan and Foreman cases, but would order State to issue me a passport immediately!

This would have made legal history and set a precedent, as it had never been done before. It would also have seriously limited the State Depts. right to issue passports. It threw the Dept. of Justice lawyers into a tizzy and they asked for five minutes to talk to Boudin before the decision was formally issued. They told him that if he would withdraw his motion for a preliminary injunction (forcing State to issue the passport) I would have my passport in three days!

Boudin accepted the deal. Jane went on to explain that if he had refused the deal the State Department would have appealed and she would have had to wait many more months. It went without saying that her attorney was concerned about what another delay might mean in light of her mental state. As a result, she was a free woman, and her case,
Zlatovski v. Dulles
, was no more than a footnote in Boudin's files. She added that her esteemed attorney believed the State Department wished to avoid the publicity that the judge's decision would have elicited, particularly as Jane's story
“did not show them in a very good light”
and they were “getting nervous.”

What actually transpired behind closed doors, however, was very different from what either Jane or her lawyer believed. Judge Mathews had ruled that unless the State Department produced additional
“derogatory information”
about Jane, particularly information dated more recently than 1948, she was going to grant her a passport. The court forced the secretary of state's hand. Faced with having to disclose that she was the subject of the top-secret “Mocase” investigation and risk exposing the identity of their double agent, the government had to give Jane back her walking papers. Dulles could not risk jeopardizing the decade-long investigation of an international Communist conspiracy. The bureau had expended considerable time and effort on the case: apartments, offices, and hotel rooms had been bugged, paid informants employed, and dozens of agents had pursued leads across the country, as well as in Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Many more agents were chasing down investigative leads arising from the case. Dulles did not want to let her go, but it was the lesser of two evils.

On Monday morning, August 22, Jane marched into the State Department building in New York and walked out an hour later with a brand-new passport. It was only temporary, valid for three months, and marked with various stamps declaring her questionable status like a subversive's stigmata, but she did not care. Determined to celebrate, she booked a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where she had often stayed with her parents in happier times, and threw a victory party. She invited everyone who had been kind to her in the hospital—her various doctors and psychiatrists—as well as her lawyers. Even Otto Nathan came to wish her well. At the end of the evening, one of her doctors confided that the FBI had demanded to see her medical records. When the doctors refused to
“break the seal of the confessional,”
the FBI had gone over their heads to the hospital administration. Instead of forcing the doctors to cooperate, New York Hospital had unleashed its lawyers, who insisted on protecting her rights as a patient. She did not know what they said to the agency, but from the day she left the hospital
“the boys in gabardine coats”
had left her alone.