Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (45 page)

In basic ways, there was nothing exceptional about Albert Hirschman’s unknown shadow. In the age of state secrecy, especially during the Cold War, millions of lives have been affected or destroyed by the contents of files they had (and still have) no access to. Hirschman’s is revealing because of its ordinariness and because one can track the decisions he made as he struggled to conform to the effects of the secret file.

The file, in this sense, has a biography—a “life”—all its own, independent of the person about whom it purportedly reported, in part because it was so inaccurate, a likeness of someone else. Anyone familiar with the rituals of declassifying documents in the United States will recognize the silly, if thwarting, blocking of names and information to protect the privacy of third parties—as if one could not figure out whom “Mr. Hirschman” married in Berkeley on June 22, 1941, or for whom he translated at the pioneering War Crimes Trial held in Rome on 8 October 1945. Both of these—and many others’—names are black-lined out by censors. The file remains nonetheless a sad portrait about the power of innuendo and paranoia that governed some peoples’ lives for many years. When I gave a copy of the 168-page file to Sarah, she was, not surprisingly, aghast to discover why their lives had to take such mysterious turns.
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Hirschman’s dossier was opened in 1943, when in the early summer, the army dispatched him to serve in the Office of Strategic Services. The adjutant general of the army had already been assured by Hirschman and his sponsor at the Rockefeller Foundation, Tracy B. Kittredge, that he upheld liberal and democratic causes and that he was “
not
a Communist.” This first round ended in November, with a general recommendation to restrict Hirschman’s security clearance; there was reason to believe that he was a risk. It relied exclusively on reports by a field agent who shuttled between New York and San Francisco. We know that a Bay Area FBI field agent, Russel McTwiggan, traveled to New York to pay a visit to Alexander Makinsky of the Rockefeller Foundation. Makinsky, who had met
Hirschman in Lisbon, assured the FBI that there was no reason to doubt Hirschman’s loyalty. We also know that a San Francisco FBI agent—probably McTwiggan, who told the foundation that he had been “contracted” by a third party—found an informant who was able to disclose a surprising amount of detail about Hirschman’s European background, his affiliations, and activities. McTwiggan, “ingratiating” but “professionally secretive” to Makinsky, alluded to “fragmentary references that some suspicion of Fascist leanings might be involved.”
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Though the FBI could not confirm Communist or Fascist involvements, and all the evidence pointed to the contrary, the extent of activism in Germany, Spain, and Italy set off alarms. It was enough to create doubt about Hirschman’s reliability.

But what were the causes for concern? Where did they come from? The sources of the information about Hirschman’s European past emerge only if one digs deeper into the file itself—for like so many files, they often tell the history of their own evolution.

The file haunted him from the time Hirschman set up in Washington in early 1946. The file also accrued an inner life of its own, separated from the man it was supposed to record. This was because it was a file embedded in a history of files; secret services all around the world were buying warehouses of cabinets for them. Hirschman’s return to Washington came on the heels of the defection of a Russian agent, Igor Gouzenko, in Ottawa, who turned over a cache of files to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that revealed the extent of Soviet espionage in the West. The RCMP, MI5, and the FBI (the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, did not yet exist) grilled him and revealed an extensive network of operatives in Canada, Britain, and the United States; it set off a witch hunt of mammoth proportions to root out “disloyal” members of the civil services of all three countries. Meanwhile, unaware of the effects of the defection north of the border, Hirschman was on the lookout for a job in Washington, still nursing ambitions of working in the area of economic intelligence. He submitted applications to the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, and the Federal Reserve Board and hoped something would come along.

It was the application to Treasury—where he most wanted a posting—that enabled the file initiated by the OSS to build its own career. This was because the US Treasury Department, which was playing a major role in wartime and postwar reorderings, was coming under suspicion when several senior officers, including Harry Dexter White who had collaborated with John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods Conference and laid the basis for the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were accused of passing secrets to the Soviets. At first, Hirschman appeared to be on his way to Treasury at precisely a time in which a cloud of suspicion was gathering over the department. He explained to his sister that he was going to rush to Washington “to meet the heads of the Treasury who offered me a, I believe, quite interesting job relating to the International Fund and Bank (Bretton Woods agreements). Because of that I submitted a request to be admitted into the Civil Service and I will wait for the answer.”
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He was delighted. In February 1946, an agent of the Treasury Enforcement Agency gave Hirschman a clean bill of “loyalty” health; “references regard him as a loyal American of outstanding character.” The door appeared to begin to open for Hirschman’s appointment to Treasury.

But then the chief coordinator—name blocked—stepped into the case. He observed that the enforcement agencies’ consultation with the old OSS records on March 6, 1946, had revealed something fishy and insisted that it be followed up. He told the staff to dig deeper. This double-checking investigation provides further clues about the OSS’s background checks three years earlier, and it gave the original, flimsy report a new lease on life. The November 1943 review, probably conducted by McTwiggan and based on an interview conducted with a source in the Bay Area, had yielded an “unfavorable report,” and thanks to the chief coordinator of the Treasury’s 1946 probing we know why: it was based on Hirschman’s membership in the German Social Democratic Party’s youth movement, which meant that he had “frequent contact with, and substantially indicated that this organization could have been more readily identified as being communistic rather than socialist inspired.” McTwiggan’s work also revealed that Hirschman had worked as a courier for antifascist groups
in Italy and was heavily influenced by Eugenio Colorni, who had been arrested (and was thus by implication “suspicious”) by the Italian government. All of this occasioned doubts about Hirschman’s leanings. The OSS therefore had concluded that Hirschman’s educational and linguistic background made him potentially useful but that his engagements “had been extremely limited due to the highly classified type of work performed by” the organization. In short, “derogatory information” revealed by the OSS investigation and inscribed in the file “was sufficient in scope to prevent his being assigned very important or secretive work.” So, he was brought into the organization, given brief training, and “immediately ordered from the country.” No wonder Hirschman felt an uncanny affinity for Josef K, whose arrest for a crime he never knew he committed was the beginning of a litigious bureaucratic nightmare in Franz Kafka’s
The Trial
, which Hirschman read—not uncoincidentally—to pass the time while idling for the OSS in northern Italy.

One is tempted to speculate about the provenance of this misinformation. Could it have been Peter Franck, the best man at Albert and Sarah’s wedding and a former Communist, who was the only person in the Bay Area with such an intimate knowledge of Hirschman’s politics from Berlin and about whom Hirschman had become increasingly suspicious? Or was it Franck’s friend, Haakon Chevalier, also a party member, whom Franck had introduced to Hirschman? Chevalier was, by 1943, under FBI surveillance because in the winter of 1942–43 he had asked J. Robert Oppenheimer, the guru of the Manhattan Project, to share scientific findings with an agent of the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Hirschman certainly knew that Chevalier was trouble from the moment he met him. When he returned home from the rendezvous, his face had the expression of someone who had just smelled rotted meat. Unfortunately, the claim that Hirschman was affiliated not with socialists but with Communists was acidic and hereafter repeated itself over and over as the file thickened.

What is striking is this: what was unsaid by the FBI in its 1943 report now became, thanks to the Treasury’s probe, inked into Hirschman’s classified profile. In the spring of 1946, as a result, a picture was developing in the mind of the chief coordinator of the Treasury’s review as he also noted
that Hirschman had fought in the Republican Army in Spain. A memorandum of March 29, 1946, stated that “although most of the appointee’s abilities and character” were positive, the Treasury Enforcement Agency “was unable in view of appointee’s associations with other Governments to establish that his primary loyalty was to the Government of the United States.”

Washington fell in the grip of a Red witch hunt, especially once the “blonde spy queen” Elizabeth Bentley appeared before a Congressional grand jury in early 1948 with a list of “traitors.” This included Harry Dexter White and his Bretton Woods deputy, Lauchlin Currie (whose path Hirschman would later cross). She also fingered a spy ring operating in Treasury’s Division of Monetary Research. Concerns about espionage inside the state, and especially Treasury, became hysterical. Hirschman had the misfortune of applying right at this time to join the Treasury Department’s Office of International Finance. The door was slammed in his face. This time, the law enforcement coordinator concluded that “the appointee is a man who has a ‘blind’ foreign background which no amount of investigation would ever satisfactorily resolve in such knowledge as we have of him indicates that he is a poor risk, or perhaps a better term is a dangerous possibility. Frankly, I do not see any good purpose of making further inquiry, and to me, it is unthinkable that a man of this type should be put in a sensitive organization like OIF.” Then Treasury’s loyalty attorney chimed into the file: “This man’s background is too obscure for Treasury to risk. There are allegations unresolved and probably unresolvable of both Communism and Organizations with British Intelligence (not to mention other countries). Treasury didn’t take him in 1946. The situation is more serious now. We definitely shouldn’t take him.” The request was denied “because of [the] ‘loyalty’ question.” Did Hirschman know this? When I interviewed him, the details were hard to recall, and this whole aspect of his past was something he had characteristically preferred to forget than to let fester.

Worse was to come in 1951, when Hirschman, seeking once again to leave the Fed for the Treasury Department, applied for a transfer to serve more directly the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). The vetting
process was conducted by the Loyalty Review Board of the Civil Service Commission, an agency created in 1947 by President Truman as a sop to the growing hysteria in Congress that Communists had penetrated the government and were compromising the country’s security. Hirschman was one of three million employees investigated, and one of the 200 who were fired or resigned as a result. Now, doubts about his “loyalty” proved lethal to his career in the government. The FBI began to gather background information. It found one source “of unknown reliability” who claimed that Hirschman had been a Communist in France in 1940. It found another that noted that he had been an anti-Communist in Spain in 1936. That this evidence was contradictory did not erase any doubts about his loyalty—quite the opposite in the minds of his investigators! By late 1951, a frightened Hirschman began looking for a way out. But to this day, he has tended to think that his dismissal had more to do with changes in US economic foreign policy than concerns about his loyalty. Many years later, when asked by Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, his translator, if he was ever suspected of “un-American activities,” Hirschman was perfunctory: “No. Not at all.”
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His declared memory did not include this shadow.

Concerns about Hirschman’s disloyalty led to his “exit” from the government. But it did not put an end to the file’s career, as if to confirm that the file had grown purposefully autonomous from its subject. After all, isn’t that the point of secret investigation, lest the subject be able to tarnish the objective work of its authors? In August 1952, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve filed a memorandum from the Civil Service Commission, which advised that it was “taking precautionary measures to prevent appointee’s re-employment in the U.S. government at a later date, until the question of his loyalty was established.” But because Hirschman had since resigned his post at the Fed, the commission had closed its investigation. (When I asked the Federal Reserve Board to declassify Hirschman’s personnel records in order to see this memorandum, I was told that they had not been preserved.)

Then again, in 1954, San Francisco File Number 100-25607 was reopened in response to a search for a witness to Hirschman’s naturalization
petition of mid-July 1943 for more background information. Why this happened is not clear. The witness’s name is deleted because a third party is still covered by the Privacy Act. This source informed the FBI that indeed Hirschman had been a member of the youth movement of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, “which was largely communist and that a source had advised HIRSCHMAN was known as a communist.” It is unclear whether this is in fact what the source said or is what the FBI agent inferred from the source; in the ways these files unfold, the distinction is (deliberately?) effaced.

The Army and Navy Investigative Files reveal that the shadow of doubt lingered into the 1960s, even though the McCarthyite paranoia had passed. In 1961, Hirschman was being considered to go to the Army War College for undisclosed purposes. The file says simply, “for his attendance.” The secret services were on high alert: the allegedly covert operation of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs was miserably embarrassing. It would have been ironic that Hirschman, by then one of the leading Latin Americanists in the country, was being called upon to talk about the future of American security in the region to its guardians. If he was, his shadowers had second thoughts. This led to a security review, and the FBI passed information on to the army that led the department to decide “not to extend an invitation to the appointee for attendance at the Army War College.”