FACELESS TALEBEARERS AND THE RIGHT TO TRAVEL
Baldinger, Wilbur H.
Faceless Talebearers and The Right to Travel By WILBUR H. BALDINGER Washington IT MAY NOT be true—although Representative Robert H. Hollo-han of West Virginia, among others in the Capital, thinks...
...In court the Department was obliged to admit that Kamen was never given reasons for the passport revocation and that, in fact, the Department never knew itself "the identity of the informants supplying any of the information upon which the decision was based...
...The suspicious affiliation had to be checked for links with Henry Wallace's Progressive Party and the Communists who ran it...
...Handsomely, the Department stipulated in July, 1955, that from the outset it lacked supportable grounds to think that Kamen had "engaged in activities which support the Communist movement...
...However, when Nathan's lawyer, Leonard B. Boudin, tried to get traveling papers for himself he was turned down vehemently...
...Rather than bother with a hearing or any further court admonitions, the government slipped Shachtman his passport...
...These maneuvers would serve to hold Americans safely inside the mainland while all menacing trespassers from traditionally peaceful good neighbor territory are kept away...
...It never became clear, but apparently someone, somewhere, had suggested to somebody that Kamen had been mixed up with something dubious at the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb in World War II...
...Who made the inferences...
...It is unlikely, for instance, that renegade British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean could have evaded American-type security screenings long enough to flee behind the Iron Curtain, which these two managed to do with embarrassing ease from London in 1951 to turn up in Moscow in February, 1956, as lifelong Soviet servants of "peace...
...What good does it do him to be apprised that a passport is denied him due to associations or activities disclosed or inferred from State Department files . . . ? What files...
...Once an atomic bomb scientist, Kamen was granted a passport in 1947 to lecture abroad...
...Kamen's passport was restored in the end when he instituted federal court injunction proceedings against Dulles following futile appeals and re-appeals, hearings and re-hearings, and the filing of non-Communist affidavits and applications and re-applications with the State Department...
...A restraint imposed by the government . . . therefore must conform with the provision of the Fifth Amendment that 'no person shall be . . . deprived of . . . liberty . . . without due process of law.' " The victor in this plodding chase for a passport was Max Shachtman, leader of the Marxist but violently anti-Kremlin Independent Socialist League...
...Stay-put, stay-out operations long since adapted by the United States for the cold war with the Soviet Union abroad would get forceful home-watch demonstrations...
...In an unguarded World War II gesture of solidarity with an ally, he had joined the Canadian-Soviet Friendship League and, lamentably, had neglected to renounce it...
...In the State Department's revival of Richard II the sovereign is played by Secretary Dulles himself or by any of a large number of understudies...
...When the Service is asked how much there is—really—to the prospect for bayonet-steel curtains across Northern and Southern exposures, a stock response has been that it is "of the highest security classification and therefore we have no comment...
...Immigration Service at West Palm Beach after one of them carelessly confessed that he was a card-carrier in Canada's Progressive Conservative Party...
...In 1215, King John's barons persuaded him at Runnymede to concede that except for prisoners, outlaws, and during any hot war, "It shall be lawful to any person, for the future, to go out of our Kingdom and return, safely and securely, by land or by water...
...II Cold war exigencies being what they are, this reluctance by the government to expose strategic safeguards against political contamination at home or abroad may be understandable...
...District Court, which ordered the Department to tell him the precise charges against him and who made them...
...Dulles, Attorney General Brownell's lawyers insisted that "under the law there are no judicially reviewable limitations upon the Secretary's power to refuse to grant passports...
...It's a formidable land-side defensive staff...
...Until recently, at least, the State Department has been no less resolute in repelling curiosity about how it protects the homeland from Communist subversion, coming and going, by sea and by air...
...And certainly there is no foreseeable chance that Washington (not to mention the Kremlin) will give receptive attention to the never-ratified Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled unanimously in a landmark Bill of Rights case: "The right to travel, to go from place to place as the means of transportation permit, is a natural right subject to the rights of others and to reasonable regulations under law...
...No reason was given, but she once was a child entertainer in Manchuria, which is now, but was not then, part of Communist China...
...Frances G. Knight, the omniscient mistress of the Passport Office, and a long roster of consular officers...
...But to qualify for visitors' permits they must pass State Department tests of subversive inclinations...
...Nor, probably, could Bruno Pontecorvo have packed up his atomic research papers, as he did at a secret center at Harwell, England, to make his unimpeded way to Moscow in 1950 to accept Soviet citizenship and a 1955 Stalin Prize for his nuclear science gifts to Russia...
...But no citizen may lawfully leave his native shores, for whatever reason, unless he has explicit passport permission from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles...
...One of the cases involved Otto Nathan, an economist living in New York City, who needed to go to Europe to settle the late Albert Einstein's estate as executor of his will...
...When the government contended that in any event it "would be contrary to the best interests of the United States" for Nathan to leave the country, the Circuit Court insisted that he be given a full hearing under ground rules consistent with Constitutional rights...
...The fact that there are no postwar American parallels to these top British defections may be due in part, at least, to the exercise of more suspicious official attitudes in this country...
...The State Department's claim to absolutism in the field of overseas travel was most baldly advanced in a series of passport cases which began to roll in federal courts last year...
...For example, a Canadian-born Pittsburgh clergyman and his wife, back home on a visit, were refused re-admission to rejoin their Pennsylvania flock...
...Once proposed hopefully—if unrealistically—by the United Nations, the Declaration guarantees that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country...
...Boudin was rejected partly because he swore he hadn't been a Communist since 1954 but refused to discuss any prior affiliation, partly because (as Dulles put it to the Circuit Court later), the State Department had a damning dossier on Boudin gathered from "informants whose identity is not known to the Department...
...There are intra-continental harassments, though...
...General Swing, a West Point classmate of President Eisenhower, would have trusted aides at his side to insure isolation of the country by land from inimical foreign elements...
...III In a succession of similar passport cases the State Department reversed its field, bypassing any court-imposed obligations to disclose secret sources of derogatory information about restless citizens who had been forced by the government until then to stay home...
...At about the same time the U.S...
...The Department avoided such a messy procedure by swiftly issuing the disputed passport...
...The barriers, manned by thousands of armed civilian volunteers, would be thrown up to stop any mass infiltration of the United States from elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere...
...Foreigners may qualify for international recognition as scientists...
...Overseen by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., the Immigration Service can be as correctly cautious about public information on its inland work as any other security-dedicated division of the government...
...If part of the Magna Carta is half-buried under our travel laws and regulations, and if the government shows an excusable disinclination to disinter it, the State Department does display much energy in trying to restore and polish another Anglo-Saxon doctrine from out of the past...
...Rika Dialina, 21, was unable to compete as Miss Greece in the Miss Universe contest at Long Beach, Calif...
...Overland travel in the Western Hemisphere, where passports and visas are not absolute necessities as tickets of passage, is not yet quite so restricted despite possible "barricades of bayonets" surprises for unwary tourists...
...Abroad, where most other Western-Oriented nations permit relatively free border crossings by nationals of one country into another and back again, State Department agents are as adamantly arbitrary in passing on applications for visas from foreigners (particularly those interested in atoms) who want to visit the United States...
...Boudin protested to the U.S...
...manifesto on tourist liberties may be— and there are valid arguments that it is visionary, indeed, in a time of demonstrable acts of treason against the free world—the Declaration undertakes little more than a restatement of an Anglo-Saxon legal precept in Chapter 42 of the Magna Carta...
...Another aide is Brigadier General Edwin B. Howard (retired), assistant commissioner in charge of enforcement...
...tary stores along the un fenced Canadian and Mexican stretches, and for training volunteers to blow up bridges and build roadblocks as well as to wield bayonets...
...The scientist's lecture engagements were lost, but after eight years he did have a paper attesting that he was not disloyal...
...But if the Bill of Rights doesn't stand as the unfurled symbol of freedom in the cold war, no banner will do...
...Faceless Talebearers and The Right to Travel By WILBUR H. BALDINGER Washington IT MAY NOT be true—although Representative Robert H. Hollo-han of West Virginia, among others in the Capital, thinks it is—that the Eisenhower Administration secretly is ready to mobilize a "barricade of bayonets" along historically placid Canadian and Mexican borders...
...soil...
...But it was revoked at the last minute without explanation except for the implication that the Secretary, under unlimited discretionary authority, was "satisfied" that the trip would "be prejudicial to the orderly conduct of foreign relations...
...She once drew an illustration for a book written by a Communist...
...But this is not an ideal age...
...However impractical the U.N...
...At home, a forerunner in the passport cases challenging State Department autocracy was Professor Martin D. Kamen of Washington University at St...
...Diego Rivera, the Red-streaked Mexican artist, had to figure out an ingenious timetable to fly to his beloved Moscow for lectures on painting without touching forbidden U.S...
...If such an emergency B-Day plan against ground invasion is on tap— and the Administration hasn't said it isn't—it fits in well with some other unique government stratagems for the security of the nation in the hydrogen age...
...One is Major General Frank H. Partridge (retired...
...Instead of the citizen having the right as a pleasure and a privilege, his return home can be a summary trip ordered by an official passport-lifting summons...
...But this time the government, feeling it was on firmer ground, pulled up short...
...The government contended that a passport—once regarded as little more than a handy means of identification, like a credit card—is "a political document" and a "privilege" whose issuance and use are solely "controlled by the government as part of its conduct of foreign affairs...
...Perhaps the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Magna Carta are too loosely constructed to provide frames for adequate security screens along United States borders, including the hitherto-safe boundaries to the North and South...
...The Crown is the national security, and prejudicial behavior against it is written into the script as the State Department goes along...
...What evidence...
...Louis, and he had to do some indefatigable distance pacing over an eight-year course to triumph over Dulles...
...Ideally, all of the traditions of the Magna Carta are to be cherished and practiced by democratic people...
...He is assistant commissioner in command of field inspections and internal security for the Immigration Service which, by Swing's latest alarming estimates, copes now with the task of running down 14,500 separate reports that aliens who already have penetrated the United States are, or have been, engaged in subversive activities...
...This principle, in effect, . amended the Magna Carta to read that while transit from place to place might be lawful, all right, the state could forbid travel by subjects abroad and by strangers within if the sovereign alone—for any reason or for no stated reason at all—deemed it "prejudicial to the Crown...
...The State Department's main count of subversion against Nathan seemed to be that he was a Communist in pre-Hitler Germany, which Nathan denied...
...As first reported by Congressman Hollohan, a Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee who is perturbed by what he regards as a dangerous trend toward militarization of civil functions, B-Day tactical preparations are the responsibility of Lieutenant General Joseph M. Swing (retired), commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service...
...From what materials were those inferences made...
...Questionnaires in some cases demand precise addresses of every home the applicant has occupied and precise names and purposes of every organization to which he has belonged since the end of World War I. Nor is beauty exempted from visa rigors...
...The order of border battle purportedly calls for stockpiling miliWILBUR H. BALDINGER served with daily newspapers and the Washington Bureau of Newsweek before taking up his present career as free lance writer in the nation's capital...
...Two University of Toronto students, bound from a Nassau vacation, were held three days by the U.S...
...The visa requirements are so stringent and so humiliating that in 1955 alone such learned societies as the International Astronomical Union, the International Botanical Congress, the International Congress of Genetics, the International Congress of Psychology, the International Union of Crystallography, and the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics abandoned hopes of holding conventions here...
...His travel permit had been withheld because the feeble little League is on the Attorney General's unilateral list of subversive organizations, although for six years Shachtman had tried vainly to get a hearing to erase the stigma from his outfit...
...Yoshida (Shirley) Yamaguchi, who championed the American way of life by introducing the first kissing scenes in Japanese movies, was denied permission for a side trip from Europe to America...
...Whatever the merits of the Boudin case or whether the Supreme Court must resolve it ultimately, these bothersome questions are good ones to ask, even—-or, rather, especially— at a time when the government is locked everywhere in a mortal struggle between the free world and communism...
...They include Scott McLeod, administrator of security and consular affairs...
...The State Department appealed to the Circuit Court in February to uphold its arbitrary authority in the Boudin case, in which District Judge Luther W. Youngdahl had said: "More and more the courts have become aware of the irreparable damage which may be, has been, and is, wrought by the secret informer and faceless talebearer whose identity and testimony remains locked in confidential files . . . How can an applicant refute charges which arise from sources, or are based upon evidence, which is closed to him...
...In behalf of Mr...
...In contrast to Washington, which is entitled to some smugness about its own reservations, London has clung so closely to the Runnymede charter's magnanimous testament of faith and confidence in the decency and good faith of everybody that disasters have developed...
...According to a judicial ruling last year, Americans have a "natural right" to travel where they wish...
...This is a Fourteenth Century police principle, attributed to the despotic King Richard II, which finally went into disuse under protests by the restive British following generations of abuse...
Vol. 20 • April 1956 • No. 4
