15

HOMOSEXUALS

Bullitt’s friend, President Roosevelt, may have betrayed him, but Bullitt directed much of the blame toward an enemy, the diplomat Sumner Welles. Welles was handsome, smart, and lucky. Married to a rich heiress eight years his elder, he was so close to Roosevelt that the presidential couple sometimes stayed in the Welleses’ luxury home in Washington. Having served in several Latin American countries, in 1937, Welles was named undersecretary of state, which only sharpened his rivalry with veteran Secretary of State Cordell Hull. In his efforts to stop the war, Roosevelt dispatched Welles to Europe with a secret mission in February 1940, which failed completely. When America entered the war, Roosevelt ordered Welles to assemble a team of experts to define American political objectives in the conflict. Roosevelt’s idea was to correct Wilson’s mistakes by preparing a plan for future peace that would be better than the Treaty of Versailles and by creating an international organization that would be better than the League of Nations. Clearly, triumphal America would be a member, host, and leader of this new organization.

Sometimes Welles found himself in the center of strange scandals. He drank a lot, which was normal in those days, but apparently could not contain his sexual desires while intoxicated. Just after returning from his unsuccessful “peace mission” to Europe, Welles took part in the official funeral in Alabama of the former Speaker of the House, William B. Bankhead, and on September 16, 1940, was returning on the presidential train that was full of congressmen, officials, and journalists. In the evening he drank with Vice President Wallace and another high official, and then went to his compartment. Around six in the morning he called the conductor, an elderly black man, and offered him twenty dollars for oral sex. The conductor refused. Then Welles found another conductor and made the same request, with the same result. The two conductors contacted the secret service, which reported the incident. The file went to the FBI and from there to Roosevelt’s desk, where it remained until April 13, 1941.¹

That day Bullitt visited Roosevelt at the White House to talk about preparing public opinion for the imminent war with Hitler. Changing the subject, they proceeded to discuss mutual friends. Referencing the late Walton Moore, the counselor of the State Department to whom Bullitt reported as ambassador, Bullitt told the president about Welles’s train adventure. Bullitt said that on his deathbed, Moore left him the documents about Welles that he received from railway officials and asked Bullitt to make these documents public. In his conversation with the president, Bullitt suggested that Welles was a threat to national security: his reasoning was that if a high-ranking official could commit such acts he could be blackmailed, and enemies could get important secrets that could cost American lives. The morality of the State Department was at risk if a man like Welles was at its helm, Bullitt argued. Roosevelt replied that he knew about the situation and had given Welles a permanent guard who was ordered to prevent him from repeating the incident. In response, Bullitt mentioned a recent speech of Roosevelt’s and said that if the president sent troops on a new crusade in the name of American values, Welles could not possibly be among the leaders of that crusade. Roosevelt pointed to the door and told his secretary that Bullitt will burn in hell for his gossip.

Two years passed. In the spring 1943, Litvinov, who was then the Soviet ambassador to Washington, demanded that the State Department remove its Russian experts, who he believed were poisoning the Soviet-American friendship. These were Loy Henderson, Elbridge Durbrou, and Charles Bohlen (Kennan had already moved away from Washington). All of them had been Bullitt’s men in the past. At that moment Roosevelt feared that Stalin could make a separate peace with Hitler, and Undersecretary of State Welles chose to appease Litvinov. As a result Henderson was sent to Iraq, and Bohlen was promoted to advise Harry Hopkins, whom Bullitt believed to be a Stalin appeaser.²

Having lost the support of the State Department, Bullitt unleashed a campaign of revenge. Together with the expelled Russian experts, Bullitt accused Welles of misinforming Roosevelt about Stalin and of making unsuccessful attempts to appease Hitler. At this point Bullitt saw Welles’s strategy of creating the United Nations as being in immediate opposition to Bullitt’s project for a united Europe. While his project of European unification was a radically new idea, Welles’s design of the United Nations was, according to Bullitt, a revival of the League of Nations with all its fatal problems. Bullitt wrote that by its charter, the United Nations was made powerless to act against an aggression of “any bandit Great Power” that had veto power in the Security Council.³ It was the same argument he had used against the League of Nations in 1919; and unfortunately, this argument was, and still remains, valid.

In this fight Secretary of State Cordell Hull was on Bullitt’s side. Welles was Hull’s rival, and without Bullitt’s intervention Hull would probably have had to work with Welles for years to come. But at this point, Welles’s misadventures leaked to the newspapers. Roosevelt suspected Bullitt of passing the documents over to his old friend Cissy Patterson, who then owned the Washington Times. Even worse, Roosevelt suspected that Bullitt bribed the conductors to testify against Welles. As Bullitt told McCloy in 1944, Roosevelt “believed the outrageous lie that I [Bullitt] had bought the affidavits in Welles’ case for $50,000 and [gave] them to Cissi Patterson.”⁴ The accusation was probably slander, indeed. Facing the leaks, Hull threatened Roosevelt with resignation if he did not dismiss Welles.

Welles’s resignation was finally announced in September 1943, exactly as he was preparing for an international conference in Moscow. Stalin and Molotov lost the pleasure of being briefed about the whims of Welles. Hull later told Roosevelt he should have been grateful to Bullitt for the elimination of Welles: “the exposure of his behavior would blow the Administration into the air,” Hull said.⁵

Amazingly but expectedly, in the same months of 1943, another diplomat found himself in a similar situation, and this time it was Bullitt’s friend. Carmel Offie, a longtime secretary of Bullitt’s, was trying to strike up a relationship with a man walking in a park near the White House, but the man turned out to be a federal agent who brought him to a police station. Powerful friends, most probably Hull, saved Offie from persecution, but his career was ruined.⁶ Bullitt and Offie could only praise God that Roosevelt’s America was not Stalin’s Russia: they knew that if a similar intrigue occurred in Moscow (as the one that befell Dmitrii Florinsky, their friend from the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs), Offie would have been tortured, forced to produce evidence against his boss, and perished along with him. Whether the campaigns against Welles and Offie were coincidental, or Offie’s arrest was Welles’s revenge on Bullitt, one of the ideological weapons of the Cold War had been cemented in these cases: the accusation of homosexuality became an established method of political discreditation.

Later, in 1953, the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed the White House not only that Offie was a homosexual but, moreover, that he was a “mistress” of Bullitt. According to this report the FBI investigated Offie because “a reliable informant” advised the Bureau in July 1948 that Offie, who was then employed with the CIA, “was a homosexual and ha[d] participated in sexual activities with two individuals.” Moreover, Offie “was a recipient of a substantial monetary gift from Bullitt,” and Hoover’s “reliable source of information advised that he understood the payments by Bullitt to Offie were similar to payments bestowed upon mistresses.” The case was closed in June 1951 because Offie left the CIA. Two years later, Hoover wrote his memo to prevent Offie’s appointment in the federal government.⁷

Despite the FBI’s informant who misinterpreted Bullitt’s long-standing and intimate partnership with Offie, Bullitt was probably heterosexual. However, his awareness of homosexuality was unusual for the time. A few years earlier he had accused his wife, Louise Bryant, of being a lesbian, in order to get custody of their daughter. To some extent Bullitt’s awareness of these issues was rooted in his familiarity with psychoanalysis. The book he coauthored with Freud was written during the crisis of Bullitt’s marriage and contained a detailed discussion of “psychological androgyny” that can be characteristic, Freud and Bullitt argued, to people of both sexes. “To be born bisexual is as normal as to be born with two eyes.”⁸ Usually people do not completely realize the psychological androgyny in their sexual activities; instead, this androgyny finds an outlet in political and cultural endeavors. Thus, according to this biography of Woodrow Wilson, the feminine core of his personality, which he never realized in sexual relations, drove both his successes and failures in politics. Having mastered these ideas in a scholarly collaboration with Freud, Bullitt could have applied them to his private affairs.

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the peak of the Cold War was accompanied by paranoia, about which Freud would have had much to say. Well before his collaboration with Bullitt, Freud had articulated his explanation of paranoia as displaced, non-realized homosexuality. Joseph McCarthy saw homosexuality as an identifying feature of spies, as did Nikita Khrushchev, who addressed his 1962 battle cry, “You the damned pederasts,” to the Soviet artists who practiced the non-figurative art. In America, many victims of McCarthy’s accusatory campaign were homosexuals. Alger Hiss, one of the darkest figures of American diplomacy and a coauthor of the Yalta Treaty, was a Soviet agent and a homosexual. Journalist Whittaker Chambers, who outed Hiss, was also a homosexual and a former Soviet agent.

If McCarthy and his people needed a formal justification for the political harassment of homosexuals, they used the same rationale that Bullitt used against Welles: homosexuals should not hold positions of responsibility because they have something to hide, which makes them an easy target for blackmail. To some extent McCarthy’s homophobia was a product of American provincial life, in which Cold War politicians cultivated isolationist fears. According to McCarthy’s implicit logic, all depravity came from Europe, and homosexuality was an altogether alien, foreign invention. In fact, it usually turned out that the most cited reason for the cooperation of elite diplomats, financiers, and scientists with the Soviet regime was not blackmail but their ideological disagreement with the right turn of postwar America. But those on the Right, like McCarthy, did not wish to acknowledge this fact.

Homophobia was an important part of the campaign that McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched against the State Department in 1950. Acting in coordination with the FBI but often competing with it, this committee outed homosexuals in various federal agencies, which led to the dismissal of dozens of people. The diagnostic “symptoms” of homosexuality, which the officials used in their secret but official correspondence, were laughable: a special kind of smile, a manner of speaking, a friendship between men, or a long stay abroad. The committee and related agencies considered anonymous tips and invited denunciations. As a final judgment they used fashionable psychological “tests,” especially the Rorschach test and the lie detector. This sexual inquisition was carried out in different parts of the administration, including Military Intelligence and even the National Park Service. However, McCarthy had a special interest in the State Department. Of the twenty-five hundred letters McCarthy received during his 1950 campaign against the State Department, three-quarters denounced homosexuality among the employees. In a 1950 report Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy revealed a “homosexual underground” in the State Department. Responsible for internal security at State, Peurifoy explained that during the previous three years he had been able to identify and dismiss ninety-one employees, almost all of them for homosexuality. A German émigrée, Countess Waldeck, applauded the purge: “Somehow homosexuals always seemed to come by the dozen. . . . A homosexual ambassador or charge d’affaires or Undersecretary of State liked to staff his ‘team’ with his own people. . . . It goes without saying that Moscow has long recognized the potentialities of the Homosexual International.”⁹

The most prominent victims of this campaign were two senior diplomats who had been members of Bullitt’s embassy in Moscow—Charles Thayer and Charles Bohlen. Like most of Bullitt’s appointees, they made rapid ascents through the State Department bureaucracy. Thayer worked for a time as the director of Voice of America and in 1952, was nominated to be the American consul-general in Munich. At the same time, Bohlen was nominated to be the US ambassador to Moscow. He was meant to replace Kennan, whom the Kremlin had declared a persona non grata because he publicly said that the Soviet Union felt like Nazi Germany, where he had been interned during the war. Conceding to the Soviets, President Eisenhower withdrew Kennan and nominated his close friend Bohlen. Together, Thayer and Bohlen had to get Senate approval; that’s when the problems started. The Senate received denunciations that accused both men of being homosexual, though not of being lovers. The two diplomats were certainly close to one another: Bohlen was married to Thayer’s sister. They had all met in Moscow. Avis Howard Thayer visited her brother while he was serving in Bullitt’s embassy and shared an apartment with Bohlen. Avis Thayer and Charles Bohlen married and lived happily thereafter, though Bohlen continued to enjoy a reputation as a ladies’ man.

Two diplomats became fast friends in Moscow, in the stuffy atmosphere of the embassy that was guarded from the outside and bugged from the inside. In a letter to Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore, Bullitt spoke frankly about the unusual relationship between Bohlen and Thayer. They were “in an intimate friendship,” wrote Bullitt in his confidential letter, even in “intense intimacy.” This friendship proved to be “destructive” to Thayer who “fell completely under Bohlen’s domination,” while Bohlen was attached to Thayer “with an almost violent affection.” This relationship had led to an information leak, Bullitt wrote to Moore, though he did not specify this leak. Under Bohlen’s influence, Thayer drank too much, and while Bohlen became “sly and unreliable,” Thayer completely fell apart. Bullitt characterized Bohlen as a man of rare intelligence, but a snob, an egoist, and a “most peculiar person.” Bullitt concluded his letter by asking that Bohlen be promoted and removed from Moscow. He asked to replace Bohlen by Kennan, who was about to return to Moscow after a medical leave. Using intense language that was unusual for diplomatic correspondence, Bullitt did not say whether Bohlen and Thayer had a sexual relationship but opened up the possibility of such an interpretation.¹⁰

The recipient of this extraordinary letter, Robert Walton “Judge” Moore, was a long-term friend and supporter of Bullitt. An old bachelor, he revered Margaret LeHand and encouraged Bullitt’s affair with her. One would think that writing to this experienced official and well-connected man, Bullitt should not have hinted about anything inappropriate. More likely, something else happened. Moore interpreted Bullitt’s letter literally—as a warning about the unsuitable professional proximity between the two friends and relatives. In accordance with protocol, Moore kept Bullitt’s letter in the files that contained his highly classified correspondence. With time these files became available to his successors. Moore died in February 1941 as the counselor of the State Department, which was the number two position in the department, though Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles had more power. After Moore’s death, there was no counselor in the State Department until 1945, when Russian experts (first Ben Cohen, then Bohlen, Kennan, and Bohlen again) took the position and held it for many years. It is easy to suppose that, after Moore’s death in February 1941, his documents were moved to the office of Undersecretary Welles. He made use of this letter in his vendetta against Bullitt, which lasted long after Welles’s resignation in 1943. If Moore on his deathbed gave Bullitt the documents that compromised Welles, after Moore’s death Welles inherited the documents that discredited Bullitt’s friends.

McCarthy’s HUAC worked with the FBI, which had abundant but inconsistent information. The agency knew of Offie’s homosexuality and knew that for many years he had worked and lived in proximity to Bullitt, Bohlen, and Thayer. On the other hand, the FBI and the State Department had multiple denunciations of Bullitt and his “boys’” liaisons with Moscow ballerinas. Puzzled, the investigators stopped short of accusing Bullitt, choosing to focus instead on his former subordinates. McCarthy vehemently objected to Bohlen’s appointment. “Moscow is the last place in the world to which he should be sent,” said the senator. Bohlen and Thayer were both tested for their alleged homosexuality on a lie detector. Unfortunately for McCarthy, psychologists were unable to identify any sign of homosexuality. The FBI interviewed twenty officials who knew Bohlen, and his Washington neighbors as well; nobody confirmed Bohlen’s homosexuality.

The Senate confirmed Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow. He was influential enough to defend himself, but he could not help his friend and brother-in-law. After much deliberation, Thayer was dismissed from the Foreign Service for immoral behavior. He begged that the description of the reason for his dismissal would refer to his behavior with women rather than men. Even though FBI investigators knew that Thayer, who had been married for years, had had a love affair and child with his secretary, this request was not met. Dismissed without a pension, Thayer spent the rest of his life, along with his family, on the island of Majorca in the Mediterranean. Like Bullitt, Kennan, Offie, and many others in this circle, Thayer was not wealthy, and it would be inexpensive to live out his days there. In fact, the common perception of this group of diplomats as wealthy, snobbish aristocrats was entirely misplaced; it was their enemies, people such as Sumner Welles and Joseph Davies, who were wealthy. In Majorca Thayer wrote wonderful memoirs and an unpublished novel. In his diary he wrote, remarkably: “under Stalin you went to Siberia, under Hitler to Dachau or Buchenwald but under McCarthy to Majorca, which counts as progress.”¹¹

The FBI questioned Bullitt about Bohlen and some other Moscow “boys.” Bullitt told the agents that, in Moscow, Bohlen drank “excessively” and Thayer “horribly and dangerously”; Bullitt reprimanded them repeatedly but did not doubt their loyalty. However, Bohlen’s later role in the Yalta and other negotiations with the Soviets revealed him as a “careerist,” and the ambassador “personally opposed” such people: “Bullitt advised that he feels that a Foreign Service officer should stand for his country and the truth even if he loses his job for his action.” Sadly, the FBI did not comment on this statement.¹²

At the confirmation hearings, Senate majority leader Robert Taft said that “everybody who went to embassy in Moscow in 1933 and 1934 were homosexuals, the whole mission.” When Taft was asked to produce evidence, he played a tape that revealed something entirely different: in Moscow, Bullitt asked one man, “Have you got a girl?” and then said, “Anybody who did not have a girl there, well, you better watch that fellow.”¹³ The senators had to decide for themselves why Bullitt hired homosexuals if only to encourage them to have sex with Russian girls. These hearings brought another figure, Nicolas Nabokov, to the fore. Nabokov, a cousin of the writer and a well-known composer, had been working with Thayer at Voice of America. He loved chatting with diplomats, and later he became an important figure in cultural Cold War. In its investigation of Bohlen, the FBI produced a report that cast suspicion on Thayer, Offie, and Nabokov, who were all friends with Bohlen. Although the only actual homosexual was Offie, the investigation led to the removal of all three from their jobs and made sure that they could no longer work for the government.

Liberal-minded observers were horrified by the debate over Bohlen’s confirmation. Arthur Schlesinger wrote to a friend, “We have passed beyond the Kafka phase and are moving into Dostoyevsky.”¹⁴ Charles Thayer compared the FBI to “the Gestapo or the GPU.” He held the lowest of opinions about his enemies in the bureau: “They are clerks with access to files, junior officers who can screw some secretary in the archives to get the files for them. And they are everywhere.” But the liberal enemies of McCarthyism also had access to files. Acting very much like McCarthyites, these liberals accused McCarthy of being a homosexual in 1952. The old bachelor immediately married his secretary. Although many thought he might be gay, it is also likely that McCarthy acted out the psychological mechanism Freud depicted so well, in which projective paranoia causes the subject to blame the world for the features he suppresses in himself. In 1954 the Eisenhower administration finally managed to destroy the angry senator by leaking information about a relationship between his two male assistants. The Senate investigated these allegations; the hearings were broadcast on television, and McCarthy’s reputation was undermined forever.

Drawing on evidence that was inevitably insufficient, McCarthy and his people were trying to draw an essentialist, legally binding line between homosexuality and friendship. Bitterly decrying McCarthyism, which had destroyed some of his friends and threatened others, Kennan said the whole debacle resembled the Moscow show trials. It was against this cynical machinery that Kennan, in his memoirs, formulated the idea that the “intellectual intimacy” between men was the strongest and most satisfying among the human relationships. Even though Kennan knew from his time in the Soviet Union that friendship might not withstand torture, he saw during the McCarthy era that it could weather gossip and defamation. An ode to “intellectual intimacy” between men became a hugely important aspect of his life story.