Looking back, Julia and Paul realized they had seen the dress rehearsal for McCarthy’s brand of character assassination in late 1945, when President Truman fired Patrick J. Hurley, then the American ambassador to China. Hurley had attempted to cover his humiliation in a blaze of vitriol, attacking his embassy staff for undermining him and sabotaging U.S. foreign policy, charging that “the weakness in American foreign policy together with the Communist conspiracy within the Department” were reasons for “the evils that are abroad in the world today.” Hurley had pointed a finger at their friend John Stewart “Jack” Service, along with a number of other veteran China hands, and implied that Service was subversive for being critical of Chiang and overly sympathetic to Mao. Hurley’s statements kicked up a storm of controversy. Service was raked over the coals for allegedly sharing information with a correspondent from Amerasia magazine, a publication charged with being a front founded by the “millionaire Communist” Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Before the “Amerasia affair” was over, Service was recalled from Chungking, suspended, and hauled before a Senate hearing. The fact that most of the reporters they knew in China considered Hurley to be empty-headed to the point of advanced senility—Al Ravenholt thought he had “lost his mind”—and utterly unsuited for the delicate diplomatic role of mediating between Mao and Chiang, never seemed to get reported.
The charges against Service were eventually dropped, but in 1951 McCarthy fastened on the issue of the loyalty of the China hands and turned it into fodder for his fearmongering campaign. With the intensification of the Cold War and the Hiss and Rosenberg cases driving home the reality of Soviet espionage within the United States, America’s hysteria reached fever pitch. The country needed someone to blame for its new vulnerability, and a good place to start was the painful reversal in China that had resulted in the establishment of the People’s Republic under Mao while Chiang and his followers were forced to retreat to Taiwan. Looking for headlines, McCarthy put a pernicious spin on the old charges of “leftist leanings” among the Foreign Service officers and made the case that they had contributed directly to the “loss of China to the Reds.” Service was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and summarily fired from his job for “doubt of loyalty.” From then on, it was open season on the China hands.
Julia and Paul were extremely fond of Jack Service and his wife, Caroline, and were appalled at what was happening to them. As a result of McCarthy’s accusations, their friends now faced another round of intrusive security investigations, repeated questioning by Senate committees, and ruinous publicity. The loyalty standards were changed, and old cases in which Jack Service had been cleared were reopened, reportedly because of new accusations and evidence. Dick Heppner, working out of Donovan’s firm, was helping to prepare his defense, but it was going to be a long, grueling process. Whatever the end result, Service’s diplomatic career was most certainly destroyed.* “He was treated very shabbily,” Julia recalled, noting that almost all their old State Department pals from China—among them John Paton Davies Jr., O. Edmund Clubb, and John Carter Vincent—were “drummed out of the Foreign Service by McCarthy’s tactics.”
Julia had read hundreds of reports from field agents across China and knew the importance of having experienced local operatives like Service and Davies, both of whom had been both born in China and were fluent in Mandarin. What made them “so invaluable,” she argued indignantly, was that they loved the country, knew it intimately, and could “penetrate in” and gather deep intelligence far beyond anything the Washington experts could hope to glean from Kuomin-tang functionaries. The China hands candidly relayed the facts about Chiang and Mao as they saw them, facts that were later twisted to mean something quite different than they had at the time. Service’s realistic reports from Chungking to the effect that the Communists were “here to stay” had proven true, but instead of acknowledging him for being right, McCarthy was pointing to his past statements as a reason to question his integrity.
John Carter Vincent, the latest of McCarthy’s victims, was someone Julia and Paul particularly liked and respected. They had seen quite a lot of him in recent years while he was minister to Switzerland. Vincent had been a senior State Department advisor in Chungking and a sharp critic of Chiang’s government, and McCarthy was clearly bent on making him an object lesson. Accused of being a former member of the Communist Party, he was forced to retire in 1952, and was vilified during six days of interrogation by HUAC. Many of the journalists who covered the hearings were shocked by the shameful spectacle. “Vincent all but had a light shined in his eyes and was beaten by a rubber hose,” Joseph and Stewart Alsop reported in their New York Herald Tribune column.
Julia would later recall that period as “a disgusting era.” The State Department was too weak to defend its own people, and instead bowed to McCarthy’s pressure and the howls of powerful anti-Communists in Congress and agreed to set up its own Loyalty Review Board to carry out internal investigations. Ironically, Dean Acheson, by then secretary of state, had personally overseen the publication in 1949 of the White Paper on China, which concluded that the wartime reporting of the China hands had been balanced and had had no impact on the failed U.S. intervention in the Chinese civil war, but because of the angry backlash, its findings were largely ignored. In the end, Acheson was willing to toss a few men to the lions in order to satisfy the mob and protect the reputation of the institution as a whole. When, after months of closed-door sessions, the Loyalty Review Board recommended Service and Clubb be discharged from the State Department, Acheson did not object. Julia and Paul were crushed. It was a travesty of justice.
Julia believed the lack of leadership on the part of the president—on everything from the Korean War to McCarthy’s mudslinging—had deeply shaken people’s faith in their country, but everyone in Washington was too scared of a “political blunderbust” to speak out. “My moral and spiritual point is this,” she declared in a letter to Charles. “The McCarthyites have reaped what they have sown; because they let ethics and honesty and morality out of the window they’ve let tragedy in the door, and the end result is a just payment.”
To lift their spirits, Julia and Paul decided to throw a dinner party to usher out 1952. The party would very probably mark the end of their stay in Paris, as the government appropriations for Paul’s position had run out and he had been told to expect a transfer in the coming year. In some ways it was just as well, as he had found his job increasingly frustrating. The USIS’s propaganda programs, particularly his own elegant if “unimportant” art exhibits, were so minor and trivial he felt they were nothing more than “a drop in the bucket” and all but useless in trying to penetrate the Iron Curtain. “The vigor and force of Communism’s electric current is burning up and changing the world,” he wrote with grim certaintly in his diary. “Karl Marx should have been christened Pandora.” Hoping for a promotion and a more challenging and vital assignment, Paul had finally worked up the nerve to take the Foreign Service exam. Then came the hard knock: not only had he failed it, but the examiner could not understand why he was considering a career change at such a late date. Paul received it as a snub, confiding in Charles that it was as good as being declared “not eligible for membership in The Club.” To cap it all off, the humiliation was painfully public. Most of their friends knew he had taken the exam and were waiting with bated breadth to hear the outcome. Merde!
It had been a discouraging year for Julia, too. After much sweat and toil, and hundreds of hours at the typewriter, she had sent off her sample chapter on French sauces to the publisher, Sumner Putnam, the head of Ives Washburn, only to have it critiqued as too unconventional. Now Avis DeVoto was helping Julia and her coauthors shop for a new publisher for their cookbook, a frustrating business to say the least. Julia had turned forty that August and was feeling decidedly middle-aged. It did not help that her sister, Dort, who had only married the previous June, had promptly become pregnant. The baby girl, born that spring, was named Phila after th
eir stepmother. She was a darling, and Julia could see that Dort was blossoming in the role of mother, describing her tellingly to Charles and his wife as “a real woman now with breasts full of milk.” Her heart was full of joy for her sister, but there was also a beat of regret.
Julia and Paul threw themselves into the preparations for their New Year’s Eve party, inviting all their closest friends, including Jane and George. Paul covered the table with a deep pink cloth, and he crafted a festive centerpiece out of fruit and surrounded it with a ring of holly. Julia cooked a “whiz bang” boeuf bourguignon. The snow fell heavily outside, but they were cozy and gay, and the last guests did not leave until two in the morning. Julia and Paul spent most of the next month holed up against the cold and fog of the Paris winter, devoting their weekends to lovingly crafting the 250 handmade Valentine’s Day cards they sent to their dearest friends and scattered wartime colleagues. “We have finally tracked down Jane Foster (Mrs. George Zlatovsky),” Julia reported on the card she sent out to Ellie Thiry and Basil Summers. “She is still as much fun as ever, and doing wonderfully good paintings. They’ve been here for three years, but everyone thought she was lost.”
In February, Paul was told he was being transferred to Marseille. With Julia’s work and book partners based in Paris, they returned often, and always made a point of stopping by Jane’s apartment for a drink and a visit. “Every time we went to Paris we would see her,” Julia reported to her OSS colleagues. As usual, they traded bits of gossip about mutual friends before moving straight to politics. The news on both fronts was distressing.
A number of journalists they had known well during the war had seen their careers come to an abrupt halt. Ed Snow, who had written favorably of Mao, had come under suspicion, been questioned by the FBI, and asked to disclose the full extent of his Communist activities. While he had not been subpoenaed, the Washington whispering gallery had him as good as tried and guilty. After he quit the conservative Saturday Evening Post over a disagreement with his editors, Snow found that all opportunities for work had suddenly evaporated. Jane heard he had moved to Switzerland. To avoid being similarly blacklisted, Teddy White, who had by then broken with Henry Luce and Time, had moved to Paris and was playing it safe, avoiding anything related to China and churning out upbeat stories about America’s efforts to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan. His book Thunder Out of China had been a huge best seller in 1946, but with the country now in the fevered grip of McCarthyism, he was under a cloud of suspicion and being monitored by the FBI. “I hate only a very few people,” Julia raged in a letter to a friend. “One being Madame Brassart, head of Cordon Bleu, who is a nasty, mean woman; McCarthy, whom I don’t know; and Old Guard Republicans, whom I see as little as possible.”
That’s when the stories about the book burning began. Both Ed Snow and Teddy White were on McCarthy’s target list. They were blacklisted authors whose works had to be expelled from the USIS libraries. In March, McCarthy’s two investigators, Roy Cohn and David Schine, descended unannounced on the Paris embassy. “These two men are young lawyers—about 26—typical Fascist bully-boy types, v. reminiscent to one chap here of Hitler’s Gestapo agents—filled w/the euphoria of 2nd-hand power and riding roughshod over everybody,” Paul wrote Charles.
It seems clear that they came not so much to investigate as to make it appear to their constituents and followers in the States that they were in Europe collecting on-the-spot facts. The three concepts which they brought with them—and which they are out to make the public believe—are: (1) USIS is following a pro-Communist line, as proved by either titles or authors of books in our libraries. (2) USIS is wasting the taxpayer’s money by featherbedding, duplication of effort & empire building. (3) The personnel of USIS & other agencies abroad is riddled by people who are security risks, either because they are followers of the Party line, or because they are sex perverts.
The next day, after a rude interview with the ambassador in their hotel bedroom, during which they forked scrambled eggs and made idle accusations, they abruptly took off for Bonn. The upshot, as far as Paul could tell, was “25 minutes of insolence, unproven charges, and threats to embassy officials, men who were older, wiser, more experienced, and certainly more devoted to the interests of the United States than they were.” Apparently, more such visits were to be expected.
As the summer months went by, the atmosphere in the Marseille office grew increasingly strained. Since McCarthy decided to attack the USIS, Paul had seen its monthly book purchases shrink from 20,000 to a meager 1,592. At the same time, he had been ordered to compile a list of all the volumes on its shelves so that they might be reviewed and then either removed, refiled, or destroyed. Another “undercurrent of anxiety,” Julia recalled, was the retrenchment being ordered by the congressional bean counters, who were allocating more and more money to the military and steadily cutting back on the postwar goodwill programs. It was all part of what Julia described in an irate epistle as the increasing “yellow-bellyism in Washington.” Meanwhile, Paul was getting very disgruntled. He was no “yes-man,” and he hated carrying out McCarthy’s mad purge of their little Marseille library. “He’s emasculating and stamping the life out of the Information Program,” Paul lamented to Charles. “He’s a dirty and astute demagogue, advancing himself, like a surfboard rider, on a wave of fear.”
McCarthy’s Red scare was fueled by names. All he had to do was set his sights on an institution for its leaders to begin turning on their own. Even at USIS, which Julia described as a “stepchild” organization and “not really part of the brotherhood,” the chilling effect made itself felt in the constant rumors about missed promotions, arbitrarily denied appointments, and exile to remote posts. No one, it seemed, was above suspicion or immune from scrutiny. Paul, with his long history of leftist politics and many artist friends who were avowed Communists, had to tread carefully. In the current “better safe than sorry” climate, it would take only a word for him to be out of a job. Julia expressed her growing anxiety in a letter to Avis DeVoto, who had become a close friend and confidante. “I am terribly worried about McCarthyism,” Julia wrote. “What can I do as an individual? It is frightening. I am ready to bare my breasts (small size though they be), stick out my neck, won’t turn my back on anybody, will sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband, and finally self….”
Julia had first written to Avis’s husband, Bernard DeVoto, a well-known columnist, after reading his meditation on the shortcomings of stainless steel knives. Julia, who was of like mind, had sent him a French carbon steel paring knife and a note, initiating an exchange of letters that grew into a steady correspondence. She had turned to Avis for advice because she knew that Bernard had stood up to McCarthy in the past. He had done so most notably in his “Easy Chair” column in the October 1949 issue of Harper’s, in which he, after being interviewed by the FBI, dared to mock the prying, snooping style of the HUAC squad in its hunt for closet Communists. In “Due Notice to the FBI,” DeVoto, taking a page from one of his wife’s cookbooks, imagined how a grilling of a Republican presidential candidate might proceed:
Does Harry S. Dewey belong to the Wine and Food Society? The Friends of Escoffier? Has he ever attended a meeting of either group? Does he associate with members of either? Has he ever been present at a meeting of any kind, or at a party, at which a member of either was also present? Has he ever read A. Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste? Does he associate with people who have read it? Has he ever been present at a meeting or a party at which anyone who has read it was also present?
Halfway through the article, DeVoto abandoned his farce and told his readers that he was fed up. The Red-baiting had “gone too far.” McCarthy and his henchmen were dividing the country into “the hunted and the hunters.” He ended by publicly declaring that he was done answering questions: “From now on any representative of the government, properly identified, can count on a drink and perhaps informed talk about the Red (but non-Communist) Sox at my house. But if he w
ants information from me about anyone whatsoever, no soap.”
The FBI had been furious and opened a file on DeVoto. In a speech about Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952, McCarthy took aim against DeVoto, who worked for the campaign, attacking him as a Communist sympathizer who in 1947 had led a Boston delegation from the American Civil Liberties Union protesting the ban on a speech by the wife of Gerhardt Eisler, a Communist who had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. McCarthy went so far as to try to cast DeVoto’s activities in a questionable light by quoting the Communist Daily Worker. DeVoto calmly maintained he could be anti-Communist and still want to uphold the freedom of speech as guaranteed by the Constitution. He told reporters at the time that he had done nothing then that he would not do for the senator, adding, “I think the United States will survive both McCarthy and the Communists.” It was a politically brave response, but it earned DeVoto the special antipathy of both McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, who instructed the FBI to keep the writer under close watch and dig for dirt. Avis DeVoto, who knew what her husband’s flair for controversy had cost—the headlines, hate mail, and constant attacks from critics on the right—warned Julia that if Paul valued his diplomatic career they should keep out of the line of fire.
A Covert Affair Page 29