conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, or sexual perversion;
4. Any adjudication of insanity or treatment for serious mental or neurological disorder without satisfactory evidence of cure;
5. Any facts which furnish reason to believe the individual may be subjected to coercion, influence or pressure which may cause him to act contrary to the best interests of the national security.
The dispatch concluded with this sentence, "The President ordered the head of each government agency to use those standards in setting up security programs for his department." Packed into these innocuous words is the promise of many hundreds of sleepless nights for the whitecollar and professional employees of civil service. In case the casual reader has dismissed the items in this dispatch with, "Oh, well, homosexuals were mentioned only in Point Three. That was to be expected," please note that the United Press did not entitle this new program, superseding the Truman Security Policy of 1947, as tough for nothing.
To labor under the illusion that the new "standards" of Eisenhower's Loyalty-Security Program are little more than a business-as-usual continuation of Truman's Security Policy, infamous as that was in its relationship to homosexuals, is to be thoroughly misled. These standards are not measures to be put into operation only upon the hiring of new employees. These standards are retroactive, and, further, are to be maintained on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. Item 1 clearly shows that the information to be measured by these standards does not come from direction examination but is information gained in the now standard pattern of unspecfied charges anonymously preferred.
If you couple Item 2 with 1 and 5, you can easily see that any employee who is acquainted with a homosexual, is himself a security risk unless he volunteers his suspicions in daily rectification of his own "omission of material facts." As the Foundation Board pointed out in its statement, since a fairly conservative estimate of the percentage of homosexuals might be 13 percent (one out of eight), how many National Security employees DON'T know at least one homosexual in every eight of their acquaintances?
In these days of bureaucratic retrenchment and payroll trimming, it may be difficult for many employees, both in government and in enterprises doing business with government, to refrain from "rectifying omissions of facts" to guarantee personal success in the scramble and competition to keep jobs. And it is conceivable that the malice behind
one
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