Most Republican political figures took a fairly balanced view of the communists-in-government issue. They regarded the administration of loyalty-security programs as a difficult problem for any political party. They saw the need for some personnel changes and a little tighter administration of loyalty-security matters.
But the Republican party also harbored a few overeager, inexperienced, and a few downright malicious men who tackled the job of personnel security with a wild, free-swinging vigor and little real judgment. There was a little evidence in 1953 and 1954 of Republican mismanagement of some security cases. However, no real tangible evidence surfaced until January 1955, when Senator Olin D. Johnston, the South Carolina Democrat, and his Committee Staff Director H. William Brawley started an investigation of the security program. Johnston was chairman of the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee with jurisdiction over government personnel policies.
The investigation had barely started when the Eisenhower administration sought to hide the bungling and incompetence by claiming “executive privilege.” By the time the hearings had been concluded in the following fall, the secrecy wall of “executive privilege” had been used by the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Civil Service Commission, and the White House. A conspiracy of silence hampered the investigation from start to finish, but I had obtained enough information on one celebrated security case to demonstrate the kinds of mistakes and mismanagement generally involved.
In December 1954 and January 1955, I had written a series of articles describing the Agriculture Department’s unjustified ruling on Wolf Ladejinsky. Ladejinsky, an agricultural attaché in Tokyo, was called a “security risk” by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson without the slightest evidence that Ladejinsky’s loyalty was questionable. The State Department had previously cleared Ladejinsky following an exhaustive investigation under the new and tighter security standards established by the Eisenhower administration.
I had been able to verify that the Agriculture Department made its adverse ruling on the same evidence that had been examined by the State Department when it cleared Ladejinsky. Harold Stassen, then head of the Foreign Operations Administration, moved in quickly to clear Ladejinsky. His report on Ladejinsky’s file stated that there was no evidence that Ladejinsky had ever been sympathetic to any communist causes in the nineteen years he had been employed as an economist by the government.
Even with FOA and State on record clearing Ladejinsky, it took more than six months of congressional investigation to force Agriculture Secretary Benson to withdraw his finding that Ladejinsky was a “security risk.” Throughout the entire period of time, the investigating subcommittee was obstructed by the refusal of various agencies to submit reports and give testimony.
Philip Young, chairman of the Civil Service Commission, refused to comply with a subpoena duces tecum, for production of records. He cited the May 17, 1954, letter on “executive privilege” and commented:
“The President’s letter points out that it is essential to efficient and effective administration that employees of the executive branch be in a position to be completely candid in advising each other on official matters, and that it is not in the public interest that any of our conversations or communications or any documents or reproductions concerning such advice be disclosed....”
R. W. Scott McLeod, who then headed the State Department personnel security program, refused to tell the investigating subcommittee of his conversations with Milan D. Smith, executive assistant to Agriculture Secretary Benson. He claimed that to tell what he told Smith on the Ladejinsky case would reveal advice within the executive branch of the government, and would violate President Eisenhower’s instructions on “executive privilege.”
The report of the subcommittee of the Senate Post Office and Civil Service Committee released on July 22, 1956, devoted an entire section to the problem of obtaining information from the executive branch in the face of the arbitrary secrecy policies being used under a claim of “executive privilege.”