Fighting Commies, in the American Midwest

April 22-23, Abilene, KS to Independence, MO

In Abilene, Kansas, we stopped by the Eisenhower Presidential Library to see its version of America. Not only was John curious to see what was there, as the former head of the JFK Presidential Library Foundation, but I wanted to research what happened to my father during the Eisenhower administration’s anti-communist purge of the State Department.

My father had proudly worked at the UN Charter conference in San Francisco, as a junior State Department economist. Seven years later, our family was living in Mexico, where he was serving in the foreign service, when he was suddenly fired with no explanation. A State Department colleague confided to him privately that he had been part of a purge of the civil service, to create more slots for political appointments. The excuse, during these dark days of GOP Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts, was that he was a security threat! This was preposterous. But apparently when Dad had gone to the UN charter conference, he had needed the sign-off from his State department top boss, someone he really didn’t know. That man’s name was Alger Hiss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss

So my father, the most patriotic US Navy reservist, intelligence officer during WW2, moderate Republican and pro-American person in every possible way, had summarily lost his government job without any discussion or official explanation from authorities. Our later efforts to find an explanation for this, when the Freedom of Information Act was passed, were fruitless. He was told that his personnel records had been purged and destroyed as a privacy measure!

The Eisenhower library staff were willing to help, but we didn’t make much headway. We drove on to Independence, MO, home of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. It was full of propaganda posters that confirmed the scary political atmosphere of the 1950s. McCarthy claimed to have evidence of an international communist conspiracy within the State Department, controlled by Russia.

Forty years later, when I served on the bipartisan Presidential Commission to Protect and Reduce Government Secrecy, I learned that there was indeed a Russian spy network in US government during the 1950s. But historians agree that the threat from a few spies was misused as a broad weapon against innocent officials, artists, liberals, trade unionists, government critics, homosexuals, and others. Fortunately, my father went on to a happy academic career, including many consulting contracts with the U.S. government, so he wasn’t ruined, as many others were, by McCarthy’s reign of terror. When he died, my father was a captain in the US Naval Reserve, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Our current Republican President is waging the opposite kind of scare campaign now, saying Russia’s genuine efforts in 2018 to undermine our democracy, which the intelligence community has documented beyond any doubt, were manufactured by the Democrats to personally discredit him. He calls anyone with specific, verified evidence a liar, and says they are spreading “fake news.” Instead, he says, we should be afraid of the rag-tag refugees who are desperately pouring over our border from war zones.

Let’s see how history judges Trump and his approach to Russia and the refugees.

Feeling as if we were refugees from Trump’s America, and had been transported back into a simpler past in the 1950s, we stopped for an ice cream sundae at the drug store lunch counter in Independence, MO where Truman worked as a young man.

Then we got into Easy Rider, and headed back to reality. Our next stop: St. Louis, home of the Lewis and Clark expedition, wicked barbecue, and those famous Blues. We would leave white suburban America for Black urban America, with its many cultural gifts and challenges.