Was he? Had he?

London Review of Books explores freedom, security, and how right-wingers use government to control society in times of fear--BUZZFLASH

Corey Robin

The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government by David Johnson · Chicago, 277 pp, £13.00

Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security by David Cole and James Dempsey · New Press, 320 pp, £10.99

General Ashcroft: Attorney at War by Nancy Baker · Kansas, 320 pp, £26.50

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen · Free Press, 240 pp, £18.99

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert · Free Press, 352 pp, $25.00

According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.

The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.