I was just reading Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s The Wise Men, an account of the foreign policy work undertaken by Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and their colleagues during and after the Second World War.
According to Isaacson and Thomas (Chapter 19), during Joe McCarthy’s rampage through the State Department looking for Communists and other undersirables, one of Dulles’s subordinates, responsible for internal security, being “vindictive and shrewd, hired 350 zealous but inexperienced investigators who quickly went to work ferreting out Foreign Service officers deemed drunkards, homosexual, incompetent, or ‘incompatible,’ a flexible category. They were replaced by true believers.”
Replacing civil servants seems to be a long standing part of the Republican play-book. This time will it end in another tragedy or in farce? I fear tragedy.
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