In the closet in the White House: Gays In Government

Discussion in 'Race, Religion, Science and Politics' started by OckyDub, Nov 28, 2018.

  1. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    In the annals of presidential directives, few were more chilling than a document signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in April 1953. Crafted during the height of the Cold War, Executive Order 10450 declared that alongside Communism, “sexual perversion” by government officials was a threat to national security. The order became the trigger for a massive purge of the federal workforce. In the years that followed, thousands of government employees were investigated and fired for the “crime” of being gay.

    Written by Peter Shinkle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, it tells the life story of the author’s great-uncle, a central character in the creation of Executive Order 10450. A blue-blood liberal Republican from a prominent Boston family, a Harvard graduate and member of the elite Porcellian Club, a wealthy banker and U.S. Army general during World War II, Robert “Bobby” Cutler Jr. became a close adviser to Eisenhower during his 1952 presidential campaign. He was then tapped by Ike to serve as White House special assistant for national security affairs, the forerunner to the position of national security adviser.

    In that post, Cutler, who prided himself on never talking to the press, was a pivotal figure, helping to direct U.S. foreign policy during an era of tense global confrontation with the Soviet Union. And it was Cutler who oversaw the drafting of Executive Order 10450 — a role all the more remarkable because, as Shinkle reveals, Cutler was a gay man who secretly pursued a passionate, years-long relationship with a young naval intelligence officer on the National Security Council staff.

    “Bobby served the nation’s strategic defense and national security interests brilliantly, while living in private agony as a closeted homosexual, deprived of the affections for which he longed,” writes Shinkle.

    As advance word of Shinkle’s book has spread, it has already begun making waves among historians and activists who have been trying for years to resurrect the erased history of the U.S. government’s demonization of homosexuals, and to understand how it came about.

    “It’s an incredible piece of research,” said Charles Francis, president of the Washington Mattachine Society, who has filed multiple freedom of information requests to uncover documents relating to the government’s past persecution of homosexuals.

    [​IMG]

    “The Eisenhower executive order caused unspeakable damage to loyal LGBT Americans,” he said. “Tens of thousands were investigated and had their lives ruined. This is the texture of history. That you have a homosexual — known to himself as a homosexual — writing this order, it blew my mind.”

    Francis said his first reaction to Shinkle’s book was anger. He regarded Cutler as the “ultimate Quisling” for unleashing a policy that did great harm to people like himself. But upon reflection, Francis softened his judgment somewhat. “To be fair,” he now says, “he was living in McCarthy’s America.”

    The story of how Shinkle came to learn about Robert Cutler’s private life is nearly as fascinating as what he discovered. In 2006, while on a family vacation, his aunt and mother first told him the closely guarded family secret: that “Uncle Bobby” (a lifelong bachelor who died in 1974 and whom Shinkle never met) had been gay. Shinkle was intrigued by the puzzle of how a figure at the pinnacle of power in the U.S. establishment could keep such a secret for so many years. He reached out to Harry Lodge, the son of one of Cutler’s best friends, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and Richard Nixon’s vice presidential running mate in 1960) Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. The younger Lodge told him that Cutler’s sexual orientation was widely known among his peers. “He didn’t bother to hide it when he wasn’t at work,” Lodge told him.

    Shinkle’s trail soon led to the Eisenhower Library, where he located thousands of pages of documents about his great-uncle that had been donated by another former Eisenhower aide, Steve Benedict, who had served as White House security officer.

    With the help of an Eisenhower Library archivist, Shinkle reached out to Benedict, then in his late 80s and living quietly in Toledo, Ohio. When they met, Benedict told him an even more astonishing story. Benedict was also gay. His lover was a Russian-speaking naval intelligence officer assigned to the national security staff named Tilghman B. “Skip” Koons. Benedict and Koons lived together in a “bachelor’s house” in Alexandria, Va., that was frequented by Cutler. Koons — who photographs from the era suggest had movie-star looks — was the object of Cutler’s passionate affections, feelings that eventually turned tragically obsessive.

    In short, Shinkle had come across a gay triangle at the heart of the White House national security apparatus during the height of the McCarthy era — a tangle of relationships previously unknown to historians. But Benedict had something else even more revealing in his personal archive, what Shinkle calls the “crown jewels”: Cutler’s six-volume personal diary, which he had left to Koons (and which Koons, after his death, had left for Benedict). When Shinkle opened it, he was amazed to find hundreds of pages in which the president’s chief national security aide poured out his love for the young White House staffer.

    [​IMG]

    The passages, quoted in Shinkle’s book, are poignant and sometimes painful to read. “I took his hand our fingers for a moment interlaced,” Cutler wrote after Koons drove him home in his Thunderbird after a night at the movies in 1957. “It was at that moment the greatest adventure of my life began: the best, the purest, the most penetrating moment I ever knew.”

    From the diary, though, it appears that Cutler’s relationship with the young staffer was never consummated, leaving the older man tormented even while he later pursued relationships with other young men. In 1958, while dealing with the crisis over the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, Cutler writes of gazing longingly at night at a “blown up photograph” of Koons in his bedroom. “I love him with all my heart, more than I ever cared for any human being,” Cutler wrote in a 1959 entry. “But between us – me, 64-1/2, he 32-3/4 – the thought of love to his normal serene soul is out of course.”

    All this cast another light on the creation of the antigay executive order that did so much damage to others in similar situations. As Shinkle reconstructs the story, Eisenhower had promised during his 1952 campaign to root out “subversives” in the government — a pledge made to appease the demagogic Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a man Ike privately disdained. Early in the new administration, the new attorney general, Herbert Brownell, sent the White House a brief draft executive order to tighten security procedures and enhance background investigations by federal agencies — without specifying exactly what conduct would be disqualifying.

    It was Cutler who, after reviewing Brownell’s memo, recommended that it be toughened with more expansive language (previously recommended by security officials but never adopted under President Harry Truman) specifically identifying “sexual perversion” as grounds for dismissal. It was based on a shaky premise: that gays were susceptible to Soviet blackmail and therefore couldn’t be trusted with government secrets (although there was no evidence of this actually happening). Still, the new language was adopted, with no record of objections raised at the White House or the Justice Department.

    Why did Cutler do it? Certainly, it was a sop to McCarthy, who quickly praised the new executive order as a “tremendous improvement.” But Shinkle lays out evidence suggesting a darker possible motivation: to counteract rumors that had begun to spread in Washington of Cutler’s own homosexuality. Shinkle cites an overlooked passage from the posthumously published memoirs of the influential columnist Joseph Alsop (himself a closeted gay man) recounting a nasty confrontation in Georgetown between Cutler and the distinguished diplomat Charles (Chip) Bohlen. Bohlen had been nominated by Eisenhower to be ambassador to Moscow, but his confirmation in the Senate was being threatened by McCarthy’s smears about the nominee’s own private life and that of one of his relatives. Upset that the new administration wasn’t doing enough to support him, Bohlen grew angry and — according to Alsop — was about to bring up Cutler’s “incorrect tastes in love” when Bohlen’s wife intervened, deliberately knocking over a tea tray to defuse the situation.

    Whatever the motivation, the impact of the executive order Cutler helped draft was devastating. Shinkle writes about the “climate of fear” it created for gays and lesbians. Security investigators forced them to take lie detector tests and pressured them to reveal names of associates. One security agent at the State Department, Peter Szluk, boasted of being the “hatchet man” and disparaged hearings and due process as “a waste of time.” He would say, “The son of a bitch is queer, out he goes!” Szluk, to be sure, later expressed some regret about the number of his targets who killed themselves, sometimes “within minutes” after leaving his office. “One guy, he barely left my office, and he must’ve had this thing in his coat pocket — and boom! — right on the corner of 21st and Virginia,” Szluk is quoted as saying.

    Over time, the climate of fear he helped create caught up with Cutler and his young gay White House friends. Cutler resigned in 1955, apparently fearing that he could become an embarrassment during the president’s reelection campaign the next year. He cited “personal and private concerns.” Eisenhower, who appears to have looked the other way at the rumors about his close aide’s sexual orientation, wrote Cutler a warm note saying his departure was like “losing my right arm.”

    After the election, Cutler returned to his White House national security post, although by then, J. Edgar Hoover was on his trail, having picked up allegations about Cutler’s s homosexuality from a gay White House correspondence clerk. But Hoover, who was ruthless in pursuing gays as part of an FBI “sex deviates” program, inexplicably never pressed the investigation of Cutler. Shinkle speculates the FBI director backed off because he feared that pursuing Cutler would have done “severe damage” to Hoover’s standing with Eisenhower (and, even more speculative, that Hoover, who himself was a lifelong bachelor, may have seen in Cutler a “kindred soul”). Benedict and Koons, both of whom had left the White House and gone to work for the U.S. Information Agency, were not so lucky. They endured years of investigations that, writes Shinkle, put them through “agony” and, although they never had their security clearances yanked, ultimately drove them from government service.

    Shinkle, to his credit, presents the story with great fairness and compassion, against the backdrop of Cold War chicanery such as the CIA coups in Guatemala and Iran and controversies over nuclear brinksmanship and a supposed “missile gap.” He also addresses the ethical elephant in the room: Did the demands of history justify exposing Cutler’s private life?

    “It might be said that by revealing Bobby’s passion for Skip, I am ‘outing’ my great uncle, betraying his privacy,” Shinkle writes. But, he concludes: “After studying Bobby’s life and letters for more than a decade, I am confident that his love for Skip was so great that if he were alive today — with our era’s liberated view of homosexuality — he would want this story told.”
     
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  2. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    To beat our resident historian @Rico (Rico remembers everything) to the punch (I'm sure he will add more)

    Lets not forget Jeff Gannon, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlaman and Aaron Schock from the Bush II's administration.

    [​IMG] (Jeff Gannon - his nudes are on google)

    [​IMG]
     
  3. OckyDub

    OckyDub is a Verified MemberOckyDub I gave the Loc'ness monstah about $3.50
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    The Closets of Karl and Ken

    In July of 2004, Karl Rove was concluding a trip to Palm Springs, California and heading off to manage the reelection campaign of George W. Bush. The president’s senior political advisor had settled on a strategy that he was convinced would increase turnout of the conservative Republican base as well as appeal to fundamentalist Christians in the African-American community. Rove and his lieutenant Ken Mehlman, who ran the Republican National Committee, had targeted eleven swing states as locales to play out the wedge issue of gay marriage. Although they would work closely with the GOP state operations, Rove and Mehlman denied any coordination or involvement. They were, as they often are, lying.

    Rove had left a secret behind in the Southern California desert that made bizarrely cynical his decision to use gay issues to motivate GOP voters. His father, who had just died, was gay. Louis Rove had been a prolific smoker and died of lung diseases but he had loved his son and was very proud of his achievements. Although he was not Karl’s biological father, Louis was the only father he had ever known because Karl’s mother Reba had divorced very early in her son’s life. In an interview with Wayne Slater and myself after he had guided the first Bush victory, Rove emphasized that he did not consider Louis his stepfather. “I don’t call him Louis,” he explained. “He’s my father, my adopted father.”

    Nonetheless, Rove was decidedly circumspect when we asked him questions about his family. Louis and Reba Rove’s marriage fell apart in 1969 during Karl’s senior year of high school in Utah. Rove told us it was somewhat of a mystery but his father came home Christmas Eve and then returned to Los Angeles where he had taken a job as a geologist with Getty Oil. The family was supposed to move to LA with Louis at the end of the year. “But for whatever reason, that didn’t happen,” Rove told us. “My mother, who was very good at explaining things without explaining them, said it was not going to happen.”

    Karl seems to have inherited this particular talent from his mother. What he told us was fundamentally true; what he didn’t tell us was the most important part of the story. Louis Rove had informed his wife that he was gay and that he was coming out of the closet and wanted a divorce. After he retired from his job in LA, Louis Rove moved to Palm Springs and befriended other retired gay men. He drank and socialized at the Rainbow Cactus and the Martini Burger and became part of a group of gay men who referred to themselves as “The Old Farts Club.” According to his close friend of many years, retired insurance executive Joseph Koons, Louis Rove was one of the best people he knew and that both Louis and his son Karl were comfortable with the father’s sexual orientation. Although Karl lovingly accepted his father as a gay man and treated Louis’ gay associates with respect, Louis Rove’s death was a private matter. His friends knew nothing of a memorial service and no death notice was published in the Palm Springs newspaper.

    Rove may have felt his father had a right to a private life but he clearly thinks differently about other homosexuals. This fall Rove and the GOP will once more push the idea of a federal amendment to the constitution to outlaw gay marriage, repeating their silly message that it is a threat to the institution of heterosexual marriage. As nonsensical as these assertions are, there appears to be a legion of Republican voters who believe physically mature adults wake up one morning and decide to stop being heterosexual. Their goal is to marry other individuals of the same sex and destroy the fabric of American culture. The idea that sexual orientation is a biological determination is a notion fundamentalist conservatives cannot countenance. Their God would not make such a mistake.

    The zealousness with which Rove and Mehlman pursue an anti-gay agenda for political utility suggests more than just an ambition to win elections. Students of Freud might be able to artfully deconstruct their behavior but even lay analysts can see a bit of repression and self-loathing at work. Maybe Rove has a desire to get back at his father for leaving his mother when he “chose” to be gay. Or perhaps he is fighting his own homo-erotic impulses. His description of George Bush the first time they met goes a bit beyond a geek’s admiration of the cool guy quarterback:

    “I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, complete with the - in Texas you see it a lot - one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have.”

    Karl has always had an eye for detail and that could explain how Bush’s early image has moved through Rove’s memory for decades.

    But what about RNC chairman Ken Mehlman? His sexual orientation has been the subject of speculation by gay rights advocates for several years and has been discussed on progressive radio talk shows. Mainstream reporters have never asked Mehlman if he is gay but Eric Resnick, a journalist for a gay publication in Cleveland, chased Mehlman down at a GOP fund-raising dinner in Akron. Resnick told Mehlman that he had been outed on blogs and talk radio and he wondered how he justified being gay and pushing an anti-gay agenda. Mehlman was non-responsive. Resnick persisted and finally asked Mehlman if he was gay.

    “You have asked a question no one should have to answer,” Mehlman responded.

    The delicately chosen words annoyed Resnick and John Aravosis of Americablog. According to Aravosis, Mehlman, who is in his early 40s and unmarried, gave a “non-answer, answer.”

    “He’s at the top of his profession in a conservative political party,” Aravosis told me last year. “If he’s not gay, why wouldn’t he react the same way every straight guy does when someone asks them if they are gay? They sort of energetically tell you hell no they’re not gay. Mehlman says nothing. Seems like he would want everyone in his party to know he’s not gay. Maybe he’s a closeted heterosexual.”

    Mehlman subjected himself to such speculation after deploying a voter profiling mechanism for the 2004 election. The RNC used background data on voters such as what type of car they drive, how much they earn, marital status, the color of their skin, the neighborhood where they live, and other factors to arrive at various political conclusions about individuals and determine if they were likely GOP voters. His political critics have decided it is now fair to talk about what type of profile best fits Mehlman.

    Whatever he is, Mehlman and his political consort Rove are driving an issues agenda that is making life even more difficult for millions of Americans dealing with their sexuality. They are being discriminated against for the way they were born in the same manner as were African-Americans when their rights were also disputed by conservatives. And that’s what turns the personal lives of Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman into public affairs. They promulgate policies that invade the privacy of gay and lesbian Americans while covering up their own backgrounds.

    And it is time for their hypocrisy to come out of the closet.

    (This information is taken from our new book, “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.”)
    The Closets of Karl and Ken | HuffPost
     
  4. Winston Smith

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    It’s so funny that, as much as the GOP talks against homosexuality, almost all THEIR sex scandals involve closeted self-hating gays, while most liberal/Democrat sex scandals involve very heterosexual men (Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Adam Clayton Powell, John Edwards, etc.). Roy Cohn, Trumps apparently favored dead GOP lawyer, goes to show that masc gay men can-messiness any stereotypical queen

    The Roy Cohn I Knew Was a Small, Sad Man

    (Trump, open mouthed, about to return a favor to Cohn?)
    [​IMG]

    (Joe McCarthy: “Give us a kiss!”)
    [​IMG]


    My personal favorite remains to this day, Larry Craig. Being over six foot myself and size 14 feet, I could ALMOST (but not quite) accept his excuse to cover solicitation in restroom. If your diet is lacking in roughage, I guess a “wide stance” and some exertion would be needed to squeeze one out lol

    Larry Craig scandal - Wikipedia
     
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  5. BlackguyExecutive

    BlackguyExecutive Je suis diplomate
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    There have always been gays in government. I certainly know first hand from my days during Don't Ask Don't Tell to being a member of the gayest (in my opinion but I think the Department of Defense is the gayest by numbers of personnel) the US State Department.

    There are three camps. Those who are in the closet. Those who are out but not LGBTQ champions, and those who are LGBTQ champions/activist. They all have a role to play. I think there is a difference between a closeted politician and closeted government employee. Politicians make laws and for those who are actively supporting legislation that harms LGBTQ people should be named and shamed. If you are just your run of the mill government employee, I think you have a right to privacy and live your life how you best see it. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Gays are everywhere, working in every space, do every job. I am looking at you President Buchanan!!
     
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  6. Austin MD

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    I will like to add former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. I worked with a few politicians in DC and you’ll be surprise at how some of them get down. I was shocked they’re so freely showcasing their sexuality but not in the public eye.
     
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