The Bohlen Case

The first stages of the fight against Charles E. Bohlen's confirmation as Ambassador to Russia were based on Bohlen's political background. New Hampshire's Styles Bridges, Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy and Nevada's Pat McCarran said that they were against Bohlen because he was part & parcel of the Roosevelt-Truman-Acheson foreign policy. Last week the battleground suddenly shifted from policy to what Joe McCarthy called "security."

The new objections to Bohlen were not made public. Georgia's Democratic Senator Walter F. George, defending Bohlen, said that the charges were based on an FBI investigation of Bohlen which included an anonymous letter, rumors, and hearsay reports that Bohlen had associated in the past with some "dissolute persons." One day last week, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spent three hours before the Foreign Relations Committee discussing the new charges in secret. After the long session ended, a reassured committee resoundingly (15-0) approved "Chip" Bohlen.

Acid & Orders. Senators Bridges, McCarthy and McCarran were refueled rather than reassured. Democrat McCarran charged that Dulles had cleared Bohlen despite objections by Robert Walter Scott McLeod, the State Department's chief security officer, who used to be Styles Bridges' administrative assistant. The case, said McCarran, was the "acid test" of whether the new State Department is any different from the old.

With Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Alexander Wiley at his elbow, Foster Dulles called in the press and flatly denied what McCarran said. The FBI report on Bohlen, said Dulles, contained entirely unsubstantiated rumors. (The FBI, following its longtime practice, did not evaluate the material in its report.) McLeod (who fired 24 homosexuals in his first three weeks on the job) had called the FBI material to Dulles' attention, but McLeod had not evaluated it. So, said Dulles, there were no differences between him and McLeod. Dulles' own evaluation of the derogatory material: "There is not a whisper or a suggestion that I have been able to turn up throwing any doubt at all upon his loyalty or upon his security as a person."

Picking up McCarran's remark about a test, Dulles said that since there had been a full investigation of Bohlen and that the President and the Foreign Relations Committee had been fully informed of it, the whole case was merely "an acid test of the orderly process of our Government."

But then Joe McCarthy threw back some acid of his own. He had "definitely established," he said, that McLeod had refused to clear Bohlen; Dulles' statements on McLeod's position were "untrue." Three times McCarthy scheduled meetings of his investigating subcommittee to hear what McLeod had to say. Three times McLeod failed to appear. Someone, said McCarthy, had "ordered" McLeod to lie low until the Senate confirmed Bohlen.

McCarthy proposed that Bohlen take a lie-detector test. Bob Taft rose to ask if McCarthy knew that the FBI has no confidence in the lie detector. McCarthy snapped right back at the majority leader. That was not true, he said.

Despite all the sound & fury, the prospect was still that Bohlen would be confirmed by an overwhelming margin. G.O.P. leaders on Capitol Hill didn't want to repudiate an Eisenhower appointment.

The Right Man? The victory would be no tribute to the Administration's handling of the case. Dulles had nominated Bohlen before the FBI check was made. Bohlen had never before been subjected to an FBI investigation. When the report came in, Dulles evaluated the implications against Bohlen as unproved and unsupported--and he convinced the Foreign Relations Committee that he was right. But McCarthy & Co. could take advantage of the fact that Dulles was in the awkward position of justifying an appointment made before he had the FBI check, and that his department's security man was not beside Dulles in the fight.

The Eisenhower Administration, like the Truman Administration, has properly refused to make public derogatory material about individuals which appears unchecked in FBI files. But if the material in these files is to be leaked to Senators by employees of the executive departments, it will become the subject of semi-public debate. Such debate can be more harmful to a man in Bohlen's position than an open accusation.

Some observers saw the Bohlen case as the beginning of an all-out fight between McCarthy and Eisenhower. This view was premature, at least. McCarthy was needling, not charging in, and Eisenhower, though supporting Bohlen, had launched no counterattack on McCarthy.

What the Bohlen uproar proved was that McCarthy would continue to bury serious public questions in a mass of personal innuendo unless the executive department improved its timing, and enforced some discipline on its own employees, who run to Senators with rumors and half-baked reports. The serious question buried in the Bohlen case was whether a man who defends the Yalta-Potsdam record, as Bohlen does, is the right man to send to Moscow in a period when the old policies are supposed to be changed.

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