A Yellow Light

Speaking from that eminently dignified platform of public expression, the letters-to-the-editor column of the New York Times, five distinguished retired U.S. diplomats issued a sharp and unusual warning this week. Subject of the warning: the "sinister results" of McCarthyism on the conduct of the U.S. Foreign Service. The nation may. they suggested, be "laying the foundations of a Foreign Service competent to serve a totalitarian government rather than the Government of the United States as we have heretofore known it."

The letter did not mention Senator McCarthy's name but it was obviously an attack on his methods and philosophy and those of the State Department's Security Administrator, Scott McCleod. It was signed by Norman Armour, onetime Ambassador to Spain; Joseph C. Grew, pre-World War II Ambassador to Japan; William Phillips, ex-Ambassador to Italy; Robert Woods Bliss, former Ambassador to Argentina; and G. Rowland Shaw, former Assistant Secretary of State. (Eld er Statesmen Grew and Armour were recently asked by Secretary of State Dulles to make recommendations for the improvement of the Foreign Service.) "Recently," the letter said, "the Foreign Service has been subjected to a series of attacks from outside sources which have questioned the loyalty and the moral standards of its members. With rare exceptions . . . these attacks have been so flimsy as to have no standing in a court of law or in the mind of any individual capable of differentiating repeated accusation from even a reasonable presumption of guilt . . . The conclusion has become inescapable, for instance, that a Foreign Service officer who reports on persons and events to the best of his ability . . . may subsequently find his loyalty and integrity challenged and may even be forced out of the service and discredited forever as a private citizen . . . "A premium therefore has been put upon reporting and upon recommendations which are ambiguously stated or so cautiously set forth as to be deceiving . . . The ultimate result is a threat to national security . . . Fear is playing an important part in American life at the present time ... It would be tragic if this fear, expressing itself in an exaggerated emphasis on security, should lead us to cripple the Foreign Service, our first line of national defense, at the very time when its effectiveness is essential to our filling the place which history has assigned to us."

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