Word: achesons
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...shrugs, the protests of legalities tended to fuzz up the record, the more they clarified it too. U.S. Communists and fellow travelers were allowed to congregate in the U.N. secretariat because no top-ranking official thought the matter very important. It was, indeed, a case of "mechanical" slippage. Neither Acheson nor Lie did much about it until the New York grand jury began taking testimony and the congressional investigations made the matter headline material-to the infinite damage of U.N. prestige in the U.S. (and vice versa). Never had the case for public investigation of Communist infiltration been more eloquently...
Last week Dean Acheson flatly refused to dismiss Career Diplomat John Carter Vincent, the Old China Hand whose loyalty has been found in "reasonable doubt" by the President's Loyalty Review Board (TIME, Dec. 29). In a long memo to Harry Truman, the Secretary of State argued that he could not fire Vincent, as the LRB recommended, until he had "further guidance...
...verdict, said Acheson, left him confused and disturbed. The board had neither "accepted nor rejected" but had "taken into account" 1) testimony by ex-Communist Louis Budenz who said that Vincent was a Communist, and 2) a finding by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee that Vincent was a fulcrum for pro-Communist influence in the State Department. "I am unable," said Acheson, "to interpret what this means...
Furthermore, continued the Secretary, the LRB had raised an issue that went to the heart of the Foreign Service: "The issue of accurate reporting." Acheson, who collaborated with Vincent in writing the directive for George Marshall's disastrous mission to China in 1945-46, implied that Vincent was being condemned for "reporting the facts as he saw them . . . We should not by inadvertence take any step which might lower the high traditions of our own Foreign Service to the level established by governments which will permit their diplomats to report to them only what they want to hear...
...Acheson proposed a special agency to review the Vincent case once more. For its membership he suggested: retired Federal Judge Learned Hand as chairman; John McCloy, ex-High Commissioner to Germany and now board chairman of the Chase National Bank; former Assistant Secretaries of State James Rogers and Howland Shaw; and former Ambassador to Turkey Edwin Wilson...