J. EDGAR HOOVER LEAVES THE STATE DEPARTMENT

by Sanford J. Ungar (SANFORD J. UNGAR, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist and a former national reporter for The Washington Post, is the new managing editor of FOREIGN POLICY - 1975).

As a headline-catching development, it could not possibly compete with the new Panama Canal treaty, the SALT proposals or the openings to Vietnam and Cuba. But measured in terms of bureaucratic politics as a message to the permanent subculture on Capitol Hill and in Foggy Bottom, one of the more significant events in the State Department during the early days of the Carter administration was an ostensibly routine personnel action: the decision not to grant a third one-year waiver of the mandatory federal retirement age to a woman who had turned 70 back in 1975.

Such a decision would ordinarily attract little attention outside the office where the woman worked. In this instance, however, it provoked bipartisan wails of protest from Congress, at least one attempted direct appeal to Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance from the woman's husband, a millionaire publisher, and private chuckles from political appointees who felt they had accomplished the impossible. That is because the villain (or heroine, depending how you look at it) of the piece is Frances Knight, for the past 22 years director of the U.S. Passport Office and a woman so powerful, cagey, and persistent that she has often been compared with J. Edgar Hoover, the late director of the FBI.

The comparison with Hoover (accepted as flattery by Knight) seems particularly apt in retrospect, since they were both members in good standing of an unofficial right-wing internal security establishment within the federal government. For years, they worked together, sometimes properly and sometimes questionably. (One known questionable case is the occasion, in 1966, when they instituted surveillance on H. Stuart Hughes, a Harvard historian opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, while he was abroad.) Recently, and particularly since Hoover died in 1972, the ranks and the influence of that internal security establishment have been dwindling. The ,Justice Department has reduced its Internal Security Division to a mere section. The House of Representatives has done away with the successor to the Un-American Activities Committee.'The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee withered away this year for lack of anyone willing to become its chairman. And the Subversive Activities Control Board is gone.

Yet in her own immodest, albeit limited, way, Knight has remained at the ramparts proposing two years ago, for example that every American citizen be required to carry a national identity card complete with fingerprints. She has been one of the few people outside its own ranks that the beleaguered Central Intelligence Agency could count upon. Knight gladly accommodated the CIA's requests for false passports for its agents (and at one point declined to give even the secretary of state a list of those passports to save him potential embarrassment); several CIA people are believed to work under cover at the Passport Office.

But the similarities between Knight and Hoover run deeper, extending beyond political philosophy to style of operation and method of making a large department submissive to one of its subdivisions. Both started out as small-time clerks, Hoover at the Library of Congress and Knight at the National Industrial Recovery Administration of the New Deal. Each came in on a wave of reform, promising to clean up corrupt practices--Hoover, the investigation of citizens for their political beliefs; Knight, the arbitrary issuance of passports under her predecessor, Ruth Shipley, who ran the Passport Office for 28 years—but later sliding back into the same habits and abuses. Both Hoover and Knight built up reputations for extraordinary efficiency, buttressed by endless precise statistics and impressive claims of money saved for the citizens. (Just as Hoover, in his early days, returned some unspent appropriations to the Treasury, Knight made a show of sending it the Passport Office's annual profits.)

For each of them, this reputation became the first step toward winning important friends and influencing the legislative process on Capitol Hill, bypassing their nominal superiors to establish an independent relationship with Congress. In her heyday, Knight managed to provide overnight passport service for her favorite senators and congressmen--ranging across the spectrum from Hubert Humphrey (D.-Minnesota) to Strom Thurmond (R.-South Carolina) --and for their favorite constituents. Like Hoover, she kept careful track of these favors and cashed in her chips from time to time. As was the case with Hoover, few of Knight's most ardent admirers actually knew her well; but they realized a bizarre fact of Washington political life--they could enhance their own reputations by becoming known as her friends. They could also keep her happy by annually introducing legislation to turn the Passport Office into an independent agency.

Filing Things Away

Just as they took care of these friends, Hoover and Knight also watched out for their enemies, real or presumed. According to people who have worked both above Knight in the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs and below her in the Passport Office, she, like Hoover, maintained extensive personal files in her private office on political and other figures. What happened to those files when she retired in disgust last July 31 is about as unclear as the disposition, after his death, of most of Hoover's controversial personal archives.

What motivated Knight to become the-Hoover of the State Department is a mystery that for the moment she herself does not care to help solve. One theory is that early in her career, Knight was stung by accusations that she, like other dedicated young New Dealers, was a member of Communist or Communist-front organizations, and that she then felt she had to prove her anti-Communist credentials. That she did, avidly enforcing the Internal Security Act of 1950 by denying passports to acknowledged or suspected Communists. (One of her earliest official acts was to deny one to the black performer Paul Robeson.) When Abba P. Schwartz, administrator of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs from 1962 to 1966, tried to enforce new regulations requiring that anyone accused of Communist sympathies be confronted with the evidence against him and given an opportunity to respond before being denied a passport, Knight exploded with rage. The result was one of a series of protracted hearings before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, in which it was determined, among other things, that Schwartz's office at the State Department had been repainted twice.

After Knight had also effectively killed Schwartz's attempts to have travel restrictions on American passport-holders lifted, Schwartz managed at one point to arrange for Knight's transfer out of the Passport Office and into another job; but at the last moment, then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, under pressure from Knight's friends on Capitol Hill, backed off. Such tales are legion. They demonstrate the extent to which the State Department, but her own account, Knight declined dozens of requests for interviews at the time of her forced retirement. She refused to talk with FOREIGN POLICY and even the State Department Newsletter, but cooperated with the right-wing weekly, Human Events, on a name-calling story about her demise. The rest, she insisted, would be saved for a book in which she will blow the whistle on incompetents in the State Department. no less than the Justice Department, permitted an independent, untouchable empire to grow up in its midst (although the mischief that could be caused by an uncontrolled Passport Office was considerably less than the potential of a renegade FBI).

Knight had the same name for State that Hoover had for Justice---"the Department," always treated as an alien, outside force that was not to be allowed to interfere with day-to-day business. She would not permit Foreign Service Officers to be assigned to the Passport Office, which she staffed almost entirely with female civil servants whom she terrorized. For delicate determinations of exactly who was an American citizen and therefore was entitled to a U.S. passport, Knight insisted upon using lawyers on her own staff, rather than the State Department legal adviser. Contacts between the Passport staff and other parts of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs were forbidden, and any phone calls from State to the Passport Office's independent headquarters across town were to be logged and referred directly to Knight. One State Department regime after another left Knight alone. Barbara M. Watson, a black Democratic politician from New York, who served as administrator of Security and Consular Affairs from 1968 to 1974, was dropped by the Ford administration, and then returned to the same job under Jimmy Carter, paid her first visit ever to the Passport Office (theoretically one of the most important parts of her realm) only 10 days after Knight's retirement. Even after Knight had left, Watson was faced with the requirement of opening three new regional branches of the Passport Office--- in Detroit, Houston, and an unspecified location in Connecticut--that the State Department never wanted, but that Knight convinced Congress to write into the annual authorization bill. (For years, Knight insisted that the passport applications submitted through the post office in major cities like Detroit be sent to Washington for processing, rather than another regional office like Chicago; thus she created a self-fulfilling prophecy of slower service that would justify a need for new regional offices.)

The man credited with (or blamed for) doing in Frances Knight is Richard M. Moose, who served for four months this year as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Management. The Carter administration was already violating some of Knight's most cherished policies--for example, by granting holders of American passports the right to travel to Cuba and other countries previously off limits. And there were growing doubts concerning her plan to introduce a new magnetized passport that could be automatically read by computers at airports around the world---doubts that arose from the fact that only a few countries would soon have the appropriate equipment and that many others would probably never be able to afford the devices necessary to read the supped-up American travel document.

A Prime Candidate for Surgery

But according to sources close to the matter, Moose's recommendation that Vance deny Knight's request for another waiver of the federal retirement age was based largely on the fact that the Passport Office turned up as one of the "organizational anomalies" in the State Department inherited by the Carter administration. Not so efficient after all, in Moose's view, the Passport Office suffered from a misdistribution of staff; and Knight's insistence on a totally separate operation had created overlap with the Visa Office, also part of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. In the new era of government reorganization and zero-base budgeting, these defects made the Passport Office a prime candidate for surgery, which could not be performed without first removing Knight.

Confronted with an event that she thought would never occur, Knight pulled out all the stops. Her usual congressional fusillade did not work, so she wrote to Carter, reminding him of a cordial discussion they once had over lunch and pleading with him to overrule Vance. The president declined to see her personally, but sent Knight a handwritten note, expressing, "on behalf of your fellow citizens.., appreciation and gratitude for your devotion to duty . . . .”

Does Knight's departure foreshadow a significant change within the State Department? Both the old regulars and the new arrivals find it hard to say. It could be read as a signal that entrenched forces in the bureaucracy will no longer be permitted to hold the line so firmly against a newly elected president's people. That is an issue at the State Department now, inasmuch as 15 out of the 21 top positions there have been filled by noncareer appointees and political selections have penetrated below the usual assistant secretary level. (By contrast, under Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, only seven of those jobs were held by political appointees.) Particularly because of the bold initiatives he is taking in Africa and Asia, and because of his efforts to inculcate the American view of the importance of human rights, Carter has insisted upon putting his own people in place.

But there is no guarantee that Carter's nominees will understand and appreciate each other. Watson, barely free of Knight, is already locked in a bitter struggle with the woman responsible for enforcing the human rights policy, Part Derian. Sounding a bit like Knight herself, Watson is complaining to anyone who will listen that Derian, by concerning herself with Americans held prisoner by other nations, is invading part of the traditional turf of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. And so it goes. Meanwhile, Knight, although out of sight, is not yet out of mind. She is requesting batches of State Department documents under the Freedom of Information Act and warning darkly that she intends to have her revenge on Moose and anyone else who cooperated in the evil deed. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.