Eric Rubin, president of the American Foreign Service Association, reflected on the impact of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1940’s and 50’s on U.S. diplomats. (“Foreign Service Duty,” The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020)

During those beginning years of the Cold War, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy led an investigation with unsubstantiated claims into supposed Communist infiltration of the State Department. McCarthy was later censored by the Senate. However, ruined careers from the hearings caused American diplomats to be cautious about their reporting and advice, not wanting to be tarred with accusations of being “soft” on communism and seeing their careers ruined.

Rubin quotes from Theodore White’s book In Search of History: Junior diplomats now “knew that prediction of a Communist victory would be equated with hope for a Communist victory. They learned to temper their dispatches of observation in the field with what their political superiors wished to hear.”

Thus, Americans may not have been warned of the dangers of the later Vietnam quagmire as they should have.

The example is a call, Rubin said, “to stay true to our mission and to tell it like is, in service to our country and to our fellow citizens.”

To do so may indeed require courage, even as the politicization of higher State Department offices and other departments of the government have increased in the last few years.