“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 to
ld 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.
Two days later, she left for Paris. After all she had been through to get that “damned” passport, the Air France official barely gave it a second glance. As soon as she was safely home, she cabled Julia and Paul: ARRIVED PARIS YESTERDAY LA VIE RECOMMENCE.
In the fall, Julia and Paul made another sojourn to “La Belle France” and had a chance to see Jane, fresh from the wars of loyalty review. She had been shaken to the core, but was still defiant. They had been vastly relieved when they received her telegram telling them she was safely back in Paris. It stood to reason that the U.S. authorities would never have let her leave the country if they had anything on her, so Jane was probably in the clear. As much as they were dying to hear all about what she had been through, Julia and Paul did not pester her for details. She was still a bit fragile and protested that she did not want to spoil their visit with her sad histoire, but promised to send a blow-by-blow account of her battle with the state department.
Jane’s epic, single-spaced four-page letter describing all that had transpired reached Julia and Paul in Bad Godesberg in late October. “Forgive me for probably boring you with such a lengthy saga but I thought you’d like to have the story,” she wrote in conclusion. “I hope you don’t mind, Paulie, if I loathe your employer, the U.S. State Department, with a towering and terrible loathing. They took practically a year out of my life, uselessly and senselessly—wrecked my health, I am still under a doctor’s care—and for what? My dear, grateful country. The only decent thing about it is that I appreciate now how much I love our life here…. I go around grinning like a Chessy cat with sheer joy.” Striving to end on a positive note, she added, “But there are some really wonderful Americans and you are right on the top layer.”
One of the last things George told them that August afternoon at Les Deux Magots was that he planned to apply for French nationality. His lawyer had advised that it might take four to six months. As soon as the paperwork was finalized, Jane was going to apply for it, too. By becoming his little French wife, and giving up her American citizenship, she hoped to evade the long arm of the law and put her passport problems behind her once and for all. As Jane put it to them, “then I can really say—J’ai choisi la Liberté.”
Only days after Jane’s letter arrived, Paul received official confirmation that he had been cleared. On October 25, 1955, Charles M. Noone, chief of the Office of Security at the USIA, wrote to inform him that after his interview with the special agents Sanders and Sullivan in April, his “case had been considered” and “a favorable decision reached under the provisions of executive Order 10450.” That was it—six months of fear and tribulation dismissed in a six-line memo. Still, Paul was grateful to have the documented proof of his innocence. It wasn’t much, but it might help him sleep more soundly. His own vivisection at the hands of the FBI had just begun to fade from memory when Jane’s missive had come, and her frightening description of her ordeal had brought it all back, along with the anxiety and fitful nights.
12
THE TASTE OF ASHES
Try as they might, Julia and Paul were never really happy in Bad Godesberg. The best that could be said about their last year there was that they were boringly productive, with Julia toiling over recipes for “the Book,” as she had taken to calling her ever-expanding manuscript, and Paul traveling more than usual while overseeing seven major international exhibits. After his triumphant return from Berlin, still glowing from the stellar reviews for his show on the U.S. Space Program, Paul heard he was being transferred back to Washington. They had not expected to be uprooted again so soon but were secretly elated to be getting out of Cold War Germany. They were tired of Bonn and the USIS mission, which was a “dumping ground” for the worst sort of career diplomat and beset with office intrigues and personnel woes. Julia could not wait to see the back of Paul’s alcoholic boss, old “Woodenhead,” who had given him “poor marks” for administration in his latest efficiency review. After all Paul’s hard work, it seemed particularly petty and disappointing.
Julia, who was proud of her husband, as well as fiercely protective, believed his superiors’ grudging attitude revealed the residual doubts that still lingered in the wake of his loyalty hearing. Even though Paul had been exonerated, the stain on his record was permanent—those “unremovable smirches” he had rightly feared when he first realized he was under investigation. The very suggestion that he might be a “treasonous homosexual” irked him still. In a pointed repudiation of his cowardly accusers, Julia and Paul posed gloriously naked in a tub of suds for their 1956 Valentine’s Day card, with only a mound of bubbles covering her breasts. The tongue-in-cheek inscription read: “Wish You Were Here.”
It was a bold gesture, and it revealed just how dissatisfied they had become with the narrow constraints of government life. They “despised” John Foster Dulles and his crony, Scott McLeod, for driving the ablest men out of the State Department and stunting, if not destroying, the careers of so many of their friends. Sadly surveying the evidence of disarray all around them, they could not help feeling they had stayed in the Foreign Service too long. The world had changed. No one seemed to have any sense of purpose anymore. The only people who seemed to
get ahead in the increasingly polarized political climate were the “brainless bureaucrats,” the kind Paul said could be relied on to “never rock the boat.” The Woodenheads always survived.
At the end of October, Julia and Paul headed back to the United States, stopping off in Paris for a last hurrah. They booked into the Hôtel Pont Royal, where they had lived when they first arrived, and spent ten days running around frantically trying to see all their friends and fit in their many favorite restaurants. It was a bittersweet time, full of wonderful dinners, warm memories, and difficult farewells. No matter how busy they were, Julia and Paul would almost certainly have called on Jane before leaving the country, if only to check on her progress and try to cheer her up. There is no record of their visit, in part because Paul’s diaries for that period were lost.* By all accounts, it would have been a disheartening visit. Jane was in terrible shape. The last two years had not been kind to her. Nothing about her situation was any clearer. She could not banish her private fears about the FBI’s intentions and the feeling that the bureau was still after her. She was convinced she was being followed again, though by which agency she did not know. The “Wheyfaces,” as she called the agents trailing her, seemed to be French, but “that did not mean anything as the CIA had a number of ‘natives’ in their employ.” Her marriage had suffered during her long absence, and George’s increasingly brazen womanizing was a constant source of arguments and upset. She was nervous, depressed, and drinking too much. “She and George had always had a pretty well-lubricated lifestyle,” recalled her niece, Susan Tenenbaum. “But with all the pressure she was under, I think she really hit the bottle. From what I understand, she was in a very bad way.”
Just before Christmas, Jane attempted suicide. She swallowed a handful of Nembutal pills and washed them down with whatever she was drinking that night. She was rushed to the hospital, her stomach was pumped, and she spent a month in care. In her memoir, she noted bleakly that an attempted suicide is “a cry for help, but no help was forthcoming.”
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