The Lie Detectors (28 page)

Soon after he delivered his notorious speech of February 1950 in West Virginia, alleging that 205 communists worked for the State Department, McCarthy began to issue challenges indiscriminately, urging use of the lie detector. Witnesses who presented conflicting testimony to Congress should take a lie-detector test, as should anyone who sought a "sensitive" job in the federal government; and so on, until his final showdown with the army, when he took the theater of ordeal to its logical conclusion. For years critics had taunted McCarthy by saying that he himself ought to submit to the lie detector. Now he offered to do just that. He had complete confidence in the test, he said, having used it to resolve cases since his days as a county judge in Wisconsin in the 1930s (a plausible claim, given Keeler’s successes in the Appleton area at the time). As usual, though, McCarthy was bluffing; he never took the test. But while he bluffed his way to ignominy, McCarthyism took root in America.

Arousing fears of secretive internal enemies has long been a potent political weapon. But denouncing communist infiltrators had one major drawback; notwithstanding certain causes célèbres, honest-to-goodness American communists were actually quite scarce in the government. Even expanding the witch hunt to include "communist sympathizers" did not promise to snare many more. Far more promising was the campaign against sexual deviants. The so-called "lavender scare" of the late 1940s and early 1950s intensified when such allies of McCarthy as senators Kenneth Wherry and Styles Bridges sought to bolster his campaign by alleging that the U.S. government was riddled with homosexuals. This apparent non sequitur had one huge advantage: there actually were homosexuals working for the U.S. government. Furthermore, this was a witch hunt the federal bureaucracy was willing to pursue. Thus, even though Deputy Undersecretary John Peurifoy indignantly repudiated McCarthy’s charge that the State Department harbored 205 card-carrying communists or had shielded Hiss, he proudly admitted that it had recently purged ninety-one homosexuals as "security risks."

Denunciations of homosexuals played on many of the same fears as denunciations of communists. Homosexuals were said to pass unnoticed, collude by secret signs, conspire to recruit others to their cause, and sap the moral strength of the nation. Some even suggested that homosexuals, like communists, possessed unusual mental abilities that they had turned to evil purposes. In suggesting that homosexuals had infiltrated the federal bureaucracy, the nativists were attacking the civil service as effete, ineffectual, and decadent. This was grist for down-home voters concerned about the rising power of mommy-knows-best government. It also allowed them to impugn the manliness of the patrician "striped-pants" elite of Truman’s foreign policy establishment, led by Dean Acheson. If the cold war could be won only by force of will, then America was as vulnerable to the depredations of limp-wristed government as it was to deliberate treachery. Many high-profile accusations of political disloyalty also involved thinly veiled accusations of homosexuality.

The national chairman of the Republican Party, writing in support of Senator McCarthy, denounced "the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government" as "perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists." To be sure, a homosexual was not a traitor so much as a "security risk," a hazy category which nominally embraced anyone who might betray the nation’s secrets because of some moral defect: blabbermouths, alcoholics (because they were blabbermouths), and those susceptible to blackmail because they engaged in illicit sex. Ostensibly, the last group included heterosexual adulterers. In practice, though, only homosexuals were purged, despite the fact that no one could name a homosexual who had ever been blackmailed into betraying a state secret. As some commentators noted, if homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail, it was because of the purges.

Lending urgency to these accusations was the discovery that America was overrun by homosexuals. The Kinsey Report of 1948 had presented some jaw-dropping numbers: while "only" 4 percent of American men were exclusively homosexual, 10 percent had been homosexual for at least three years, and 37 percent of all males had experienced at least one homosexual act since puberty. It was enough to make the novelist John Cheever wonder, "Is he? Was he? Did they? Am I? Could I?"

In fact, the expansion of the civil service since the 1930s had attracted many homosexuals to Washington. Lurid exposés like
Washington Confidential
(1951) warned that in addition to the "90 twisted twerps in trousers…swished out of the State Department" there were 6,000 homosexuals living covertly on the government payroll. When the son of the Democratic senator Lester Hunt was arrested in Lafayette Park on a morals charge, the Republican senator Styles Bridges threatened to publicize the case if Hunt did not halt his campaign for reelection; Hunt vacillated before committing suicide in his Senate office.

But purging the U.S. government of these deviants would be no simple matter. Even the authors of
Washington Confidential
admitted that it would not be possible to "stop at every desk and count people who appear queer." How would perverts be identified? What were the telltale signs? Vigilant citizens had their own methods. Blanche Blevins, an unmarried fifty-five-year-old secretary in the State Department, suspected her own boss of lesbianism because the boss’s best friend had "peculiar lips, not large but odd shaped." Miss Blevins also tipped off security officers to men at the State Department with a feminine complexion or a girlish walk. But were these reliable signs? Indeed, what made a person a homosexual, anyway? Was homosexuality a matter of deed or desire? And if deed, how often, and at what age?

To answer these pressing questions, the U.S. Senate, under pressure from Republicans, authorized an investigating committee in 1950. Behind closed doors Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked psychological experts if there was a "quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?" She was discomforted to learn that experts did not consider homosexuals deficient in any visible way. Indeed, the committee report would conclude, "Most authorities believe that sex deviation results from psychological rather than physical causes, and in many cases there are no outward characteristics or physical traits that are positive as identifying marks of sex perversion." Nonetheless Senator Karl Mundt seized on a navy psychiatrist’s admission that the lie detector might offer a way to peer beneath the surface of ordinary behavior to catch the essential difference (not that the psychiatrist advocated such tests). In fact, the test had already been used at the State Department to "out" recalcitrant gays. One applicant in 1947 who aroused suspicion because of his "mannerisms and appearance (use of perfume etc.)" initially denied that he was a homosexual; but when he was put on the polygraph, he confessed to homosexual activity and was promptly denied the post.

During the Truman administration, however, the professionals in the State Department cautioned against such methods. "Unless scientific tests can be devised and adopted (this is not a recommendation), it should be expected that the problem [of homosexuality] will continue to be with us." But after Eisenhower took office in 1953, R. W. Scott McLeod, an ex-FBI man with close ties to senators McCarthy and Bridges, was detailed to the State Department to intensify the purges. He put two of his security officers to work full-time on the problem. These investigators were not to halt their inquiries just because a staff member was married or professed "ardent Catholicism." Homosexuals were known to adopt conventional social and sexual guises. Instead, investigators assembled a full dossier, interviewing all male applicants, inquiring after "hobbies, associates, means of diversion, places of amusement." They were to take note of any unusual traits of speech, appearance, or personality, including a "jelly hand shake" or "feminine complexion." The officers then combed through the applicants’ school records, police records, and lists of acquaintances. "Look into his period of studying costume design," noted the file of one junior diplomat stationed in Vienna. On the assumption that homosexuals recognized one another, admitted homosexuals were pressured into outing others. Once a damning dossier had been assembled, the individual was confronted with the charges, whereupon, according to the snoops, 80 percent confessed. Those who continued to deny their perversion were invited to "clear their name" with a lie detector test. Thanks to these methods, McLeod’s team soon boasted that they were firing one pervert a day.

The lie detector had been used in sex cases from the beginning. In Berkeley in the 1920s, Larson had used it to extract confessions from homosexuals, though these were men accused of specific criminal acts. In Chicago in the 1930s, Keeler had deployed it to help a local sociologist chart the homosexual world, though less to intimidate subjects than to map sexual mores and press for legal reform. In forcing closeted homosexuals to declare themselves, security officers took advantage of the instrument’s ability to blur the distinction between deed and desire, and the question of whether once was enough. This left the definition of homosexuality to be filled in by the subject—a matter of self-proclaimed identity, albeit one shaped by the subject’s fear of what he believed the examiner believed to be the case.

Keeler was among those who adapted his technique to this new quarry. There were two ways to trap homosexuals. One was for the interrogator to discuss homosexuality calmly with the subject in advance of the test, explain that the question was merely for "security" reasons, then invite him or her to volunteer any information up front. From there, it was relatively easy to lure individuals into confessing complicity by degrees. If the subject denied being a homosexual, the operator could point to a bump in the chart and ask for a clarification. The subject would often then recall an experience he "just happened to remember," which occurred when he was, say, seven. The operator would then readminister the test, and show the subject where the telltale bump had reappeared. Suddenly the subject recalled that "darn if it didn’t happen when he was seven and a half." This pattern was simply repeated until "you work him on up until last week and there you are."

Equally insidious techniques could be used when the interrogator wanted to snoop for homosexuals "without mentioning sexual perversion." Keeler trained his students to use his "peak of tension" method to expose homosexuals by slipping among their questions a word "loaded" for gay men in a way it wasn’t for "normal people." For instance, if the subject was read the series "buy…, sell…, trade…, donate…, borrow" and reacted to "trade," he was probably gay because "trade" was a code for casual homosexual pickups. Of course, he might also trade stamps; or work at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he feared being accused of insider trading; or simply be familiar with homosexual slang and worried that this line of questioning meant he was suspected of homosexuality.

Other scientific probes sought to expose sexual dissimulation in an analogous manner. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police experimented with a device that monitored the diameter of the subject’s pupil while he was shown pictures of naked men. Unfortunately, simply shuffling the pictures dilated the pupil more than the most alluring image. So in the 1960s, the Mounties skipped straight to the source, fastening a fluid-filled tube around the subject’s penis to register tumescence while he viewed lurid images of men, women, and children. To this day, the penile plethysmograph is used throughout North America to assess sex offenders, and U.S. courts have allowed prisons to make release or parole conditional on passing such tests. This polygraph of arousal, for all its crudity, simply inverts the assumptions and fallacies of the standard lie detector, so that bodily reaction equals desire, and that desire equals criminal propensity. This sort of reverse inference is a species of what Alfred Whitehead identified as the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," as if a specific response to a particular stimulus can be read as implying a specific cause or deed, when multiple factors could be responsible—for instance, the experience of having something strapped around one’s penis.

Yet this scientific aura gave a pretense of respectability to purges that were intended to shape American foreign policy. When Eisenhower appointed the Sovietologist Charles Bohlen, a man of ambiguous sexuality, as ambassador to the Soviet Union, the McCarthyite "primitives" in Congress counterattacked by accusing both Bohlen and his brother-in-law, Charles Thayer, of homosexuality. Bohlen refused McCarthy’s challenge to take the test, and the administration backed his decision, not wanting to risk failure. But Thayer, a patrician foreign service officer, had already taken an exam, during the course of which he had made one of those partial admissions that the lie detector so readily induced: an Afghan boy "might" have once performed a sex act on him in the 1930s. Knowing that this information was in J. Edgar Hoover’s file put Thayer in a state of "anguish, revulsion, and emotion." He resigned, knowing that if he persisted, McCarthy would use the report to "make mince meat" out of him.

The State Department insisted publicly that all tests were voluntary. But internal memoranda explained how easy it was to corner personnel into taking them. Security officers in the Miscellaneous Morals unit boasted that no subject had "beat" the machine, and that seventy-four out of seventy-six tests had investigated "morals" charges (i.e., homosexuality). Of the hundreds of men and women forced out of the State Department between 1945 and 1956, only one refused to resign after confessing to homosexuality, and he was forcibly terminated. In all, some 1,000 accused homosexuals lost their jobs in the State Department, and perhaps as many as 5,000 in the federal government as a whole.

Surprisingly, the most potent objection to the lie tests came from the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had a long-standing antipathy to the lie detector. This was not a matter of hostility to scientific police work in general. On the contrary, Hoover had followed Vollmer’s lead, brandishing ultramodern forensic science to underscore the incorruptibility and efficiency of his G-men. And certainly Hoover considered the ongoing struggle against political subversion to be a battle against lies. "More than anything else Communists fear truth—for deceit is their strategy, and lies and chicanery are their tactics." Moreover, he worked strategically behind the scenes to expose homosexuals. Yet Hoover dismissed the lie detector as little more than a "psychological aid" in public hearings before Congress, in private audiences with U.S. presidents, in handwritten memorandums to his staff, and in correspondence with Joe McCarthy. Why?