A Covert Affair (38 page)

Jane, who was coping with another extended visit from her own father—at that very moment ensconced at the fashionable Hôtel
Lutetia—understood Julia's muzzled anger. It was a condition she knew all too well. As Paul observed,
“From her description, her father is the psychological spit and image of Mr. McWilliams: a California transplant from New Hampshire in his youth, wealthy, a retired surgeon, nice, extremely Right Wing Republican.”
It was uncanny how similar their backgrounds were. They decided the OSS must have made a point of recruiting the free-spirited daughters of rich, reactionary Californians.

While she often made light of it, Julia found the political climate in her home state truly dismaying. On her last visit to Pasadena, she had been so upset by the accusatory
“soft on Communism”
blather of her father and old family friends that she could not relax until she was back on French soil. She blamed Nixon, then California's freshman senator, for whipping people into a frenzy. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Congressman Nixon had investigated the Communist sympathies in the movie industry and succeeded in jailing the Hollywood Ten, who included directors and screenwriters such as Edward Dmytryk and Ring Lardner, Jr. Many other famous figures, among them Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb, were pressured into testifying against their colleagues. Nixon had followed this onslaught with his famous interrogation of Alger Hiss, which led to the former State Department official's being convicted of espionage and sentenced to five years in prison.

Throughout the 1952 presidential race, Nixon—whom Paul called
“the master of innuendo and slythytovery”
—had toadied up to McCarthy and helped campaign against the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson, smearing the Ivy League liberal as
“a PhD graduate of the Cowardly College of Communist Containment.”
In the highly charged election, with the American public's paranoia amplified by the Soviet Union's acquisition of the bomb and the outbreak of the Korean War, Nixon's strategy worked; it won him national prominence and a place as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice presidential candidate. Disgusted with Nixon's
“dirty fighting,”
Paul had fumed to his brother, “I hate the stench that emanates from that political piggery where Senator Nixon does his wallowing.” Julia, who had rather liked Ike in the beginning,
was undecided (“a straw in the wind”) as to which candidate to support, but by that November was so repelled by Nixon she voted the Democratic ticket by absentee ballot.

They had all been living abroad when McCarthy spearheaded his campaign to root Communists out of high office in 1950, but it had shaken the State Department to its very core, and the tremors could be felt throughout the entire far-flung diplomatic community. He had accused the State Department of harboring Soviet “fifth-columnists” and declared that he and his team of investigators were determined to ferret them out. His infamous “list” of “traitors,” which seemed to keep growing, had resulted in the creation of the “Tydings Committee” (a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, informally named for its chairman, Senator Millard Tydings). This subcommittee was authorized to conduct the State Department Employee Loyalty investigations.

Julia, Paul, and Jane knew countless people from their OSS days whose names had somehow ended up on the senator's list, including their close friends Cora DuBois and Jeanne Taylor, whose loyalty and patriotism were beyond reproach. Paul could not help wondering if the reason they were singled out was more personal than ideological: Cora was unorthodox in her private life and had begun a lesbian affair with Jeanne in Ceylon. The two women were now living as a couple (they had visited Paris the previous spring), and it seemed probable that someone with McCarthy's mentality might view their relationship as a “risk factor” leaving them open to blackmail or outside pressure to betray secrets. It was absurd, of course. Paul remembered Jeanne confiding in him about the hard time she had been given by the civil service investigators when she joined the OSS because she had once, five years earlier, signed a petition nominating some candidate for election in New York City who was a Communist and as a consequence been
“suspected of all sorts of subversive and liberal ideas.”
Now, as then, it seemed to him “hardly possible that this sort of thing could be going on.”

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 their 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.”