R. W. Scott McLeod

Robert Walter Scott McLeod (June 7, 1914 – November 7, 1961) headed the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs from 1953 to 1957 and served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland from 1957 to 1961.

He was the principal U.S. government official responsible for the purge of those charged with disloyalty or homosexuality from the State Department during the McCarthy era.

Scott McLeod was born in Davenport, Iowa, on June 17, 1914.

He played football at Grinnell College and graduated with a B.A. in 1937.

After college, McLeod sold advertising for the Des Moines Register and Tribune.

In 1938, he took a job as a police reporter for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

He joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1942 and worked as a special agent.

Bridges, who had first brought the issue of homosexuals in the State Department to public attention in 1947, may have been the driver behind McLeod's purge of homosexuals from State.

McLeod told a congressional committee at the start of his tenure at State that "The campaign toward eliminating all types of sex perverts from the rolls of the department will be pressed with increased vigor. All forms of immorality will be rooted out and banished from the service."

A friend of McLeod's described his law enforcement approach to homosexuality: "Scotty had the essentially simple approach to a fairy that you will find in a cop who has never had the benefit of, let us say, courses in abnormal psychology at Yale. ... Scotty had a very black and white kind of approach–and this wasn't white."

He took a flexible approach to security issues, weighing, for example, how recent or extensive someone's contacts with leftists were, but viewed any homosexual activity as disqualification on the grounds that the employee would always be subject to blackmail.

Charges of homosexuality had removed more than 500 State Department employees before him, and McLeod promised to replace them with "red-blooded men of initiative".

He developed standards for assessing homosexuality that disregarded activity before the age of 18 but included all same-sex contact, and he hoped to make it "a standard for Government-wide application."

Assigned to the FBI's Concord, New Hampshire, office, he left the FBI in 1949 to become an administrative assistant in the office of Republican U.S. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, an anti-Communist and anti-gay crusader who kept a lower profile than his colleague Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin.

While working for Bridges, McLeod helped write the Republican attack on President Truman for removing General Douglas MacArthur from command.

When John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State in 1953, on the recommendation of Under Secretary of State for Management Donold Lourie, he named McLeod as the administrator of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs.

McLeod held that office from March 3, 1953, until March 9, 1957.

In 1953, McLeod provided Secretary Dulles with a report suggesting Charles E. Bohlen, a career diplomat whom Dulles was considering for Ambassador to the Soviet Union, was a security risk.

When Dulles supported Bohlen's nomination, McLeod communicated his concerns to the White House, but Dulles chose not to use his insubordination to remove him.

McLeod denied charges that he improperly furnished State Department information to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, and said he had no personal relationship with him.

He denied making statements that opponents of the nomination attributed to him.

At other times he spoke with pride of his closeness to McCarthy and kept a photo of the senator on his desk.

In October 1953, the Community Chest, a charity, reported complaints that McLeod was coercing employees under his supervision to contribute.

When criticized for slow progress in implementing the Refugee Relief Act (1953), which expanded immigration from southern Europe, he blamed complexity that Congress had added to the legislation and proposed easing its requirements.

Life thought him right about the statute, but called him "a pleasant but unimaginative flatfoot" whose firing "would be no great loss".

On January 16, 1954, a group of former ambassadors denounced his attacks on the State Department.

McLeod called their charges a "scandalous libel".

In February 1954, Democrats denounced the speeches he made for the Republican Party, calling him a "party huckster".

McLeod himself later said the speaking tour might have been "ill advised" and admitted he worried he might lose his job over it.

Though some thought he had violated the Hatch Act, State Department counsel ruled that he was not covered by the act's prohibitions on political activity by certain government employees.

In March 1954, Dulles relieved McLeod of responsibility for personnel administration, leaving him with security only, though a week earlier McLeod had told a congressional committee that the two functions were "inseparable".

Until January 1956, he was also responsible for the State Department's relations with Congress.

His appointment was viewed as an attempt by Dulles to appease Republican critics of the State Department.

During his years at the State Department, McLeod was "a figure of sharp controversy".

In 1956, his erstwhile conservative allies viewed him as a traitor when he supported the Eisenhower administration's immigration reform proposals.

McLeod had principal responsibility for implementing the security rules established in Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, which covered both disloyalty based on political views and affiliation and security risks based on character, stability, and reliability, which translated into sexual irregularity.

McLeod directed the security investigations that resulted in the departure, either by dismissal or by resignation under pressure, of some 300 State Department employees on suspicion they were Communist sympathizers and of 425 State Department employees for suspicion of homosexuality.

For columnists who did not sympathize with the administration's security campaign, McLeod personified its worst excesses.

One described him as "a shadow that lurk[s] over every desk and every conference table at Foggy Bottom" and another called him "one of the most powerful and controversial officials in the United States government."

Stewart Alsop wrote that "McLeodism" was "the State Department's dutiful imitation of McCarthyism."