Was he? Had he?
Corey Robin
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David Johnson · Chicago, 277 pp, £13.00 Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security by David Cole and James Dempsey · New Press, 320 pp, £10.99 General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy Baker · Kansas, 320 pp, £26.50 State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen · Free Press, 240 pp, £18.99 Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert · Free Press, 352 pp, $25.00 According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.
The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.
The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria’s top spy to force him to work for them.
The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn’t resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’.
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The government shares these weapons with private employers, who are often better positioned to use and abuse them. Because they aren’t subject to the constraints of the First Amendment, they are generally free to use their powers of hiring and firing, promotion and demotion, to silence dissent. During the McCarthy years, for example, the government imprisoned fewer than two hundred men and women for political reasons. But anywhere between 20 and 40 per cent of the workforce was monitored for signs of ideological nonconformity, which included support for civil rights and labour unions.
The effects of this outsourcing of repression are particularly visible in the media. As Eric Boehlert shows in Lapdogs, his scathing and exhaustively researched critique of contemporary journalism, the US media practises a form of censorship that must be the envy of tyrants everywhere. Without the government lifting a finger, informal pressure and newsroom careerism is enough to make reporters toe the line. The former CBS news anchor Dan Rather claims that conservatives are ‘all over your telephones, all over your email’. As a result, ‘you say to yourself: “You know, I think we’re right on this story. I think we’ve got it in the right context, I think we’ve got it in the right perspective, but we better pick another day.”’ Those at the bottom get the message fast. The television reporter Sam Donaldson, who covered the White House during the Reagan years, tells Boehlert:
Today, not all the bosses support their reporters. So if you’re a reporter at the White House and you’re thinking about further successes in the business and you’re nervous about your boss getting a call, maybe you pull your punches because of the career track.
Journalists afraid for their careers aren’t likely to question their government in time of war. And they haven’t. ABC’s Ted Koppel, reputed to be one of the most aggressive interviewers in the business, admits that ‘we were too timid before the war’ in Iraq. The PBS anchor Jim Lehrer says: ‘It would have been difficult to have had debates [about occupying Iraq] . . . you’d have had to have gone against the grain.’ The few journalists who bucked the trend were swiftly punished. After criticising the media for its coverage of the war, Ashleigh Banfield was ‘taken to the woodshed’ by her bosses, according to a Newsday report, and her career at NBC was finished. A Wall Street Journal reporter sent a personal email describing the terrible situation in Iraq: her editors pulled her out of the country and off the story.
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