Robert Walter Scott McLeod (June 7, 1914 – November 7, 1961) headed the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs from 1953 to 1957 and served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland from 1957 to 1961. He was the principal U.S. government official responsible for the purge of those charged with disloyalty or homosexuality from the State Department during the McCarthy era.
Early years
Scott McLeod was born in Davenport, Iowa, on June 17, 1914. He played football at Grinnell College and graduated with a B.A. in 1937.
After college, McLeod sold advertising for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. In 1938, he took a job as a police reporter for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1942 and worked as a special agent. Assigned to the FBI's Concord, New Hampshire, office, he left the FBI in 1949 to become an administrative assistant in the office of Republican U.S. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, an anti-Communist and anti-gay crusader who kept a lower profile than his colleague Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin. While working for Bridges, McLeod helped write the Republican attack on President Truman for removing General Douglas MacArthur from command.
State Department
When John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State in 1953, on the recommendation of Under Secretary of State for Management Donold Lourie, he named McLeod as the administrator of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. McLeod held that office from March 3, 1953, until March 9, 1957. Until January 1956, he was also responsible for the State Department's relations with Congress. His appointment was viewed as an attempt by Dulles to appease Republican critics of the State Department. During his years at the State Department, McLeod was "a figure of sharp controversy".
In 1953, McLeod provided Secretary Dulles with a report suggesting Charles E. Bohlen, a career diplomat whom Dulles was considering for Ambassador to the Soviet Union, was a security risk. When Dulles supported Bohlen's nomination, McLeod communicated his concerns to the White House, but Dulles chose not to use his insubordination to remove him. McLeod denied charges that he improperly furnished State Department information to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, and said he had no personal relationship with him. He denied making statements that opponents of the nomination attributed to him. At other times he spoke with pride of his closeness to McCarthy and kept a photo of the senator on his desk. In October 1953, the Community Chest, a charity, reported complaints that McLeod was coercing employees under his supervision to contribute. On January 16, 1954, a group of former ambassadors denounced his attacks on the State Department. McLeod called their charges a "scandalous libel". In February 1954, Democrats denounced the speeches he made for the Republican Party, calling him a "party huckster". McLeod himself later said the speaking tour might have been "ill advised" and admitted he worried he might lose his job over it. Though some thought he had violated the Hatch Act, State Department counsel ruled that he was not covered by the act's prohibitions on political activity by certain government employees. In March 1954, Dulles relieved McLeod of responsibility for personnel administration, leaving him with security only, though a week earlier McLeod had told a congressional committee that the two functions were "inseparable". When criticized for slow progress in implementing the Refugee Relief Act (1953), which expanded immigration from southern Europe, he blamed complexity that Congress had added to the legislation and proposed easing its requirements. Life thought him right about the statute, but called him "a pleasant but unimaginative flatfoot" whose firing "would be no great loss". In 1956, his erstwhile conservative allies viewed him as a traitor when he supported the Eisenhower administration's immigration reform proposals.