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It's actually all the sadder, because it is in many ways an unrequited love." I think his final understanding that he loved this young man, Skip Koons, with all his heart came as late as 1957. Peter Shinkle: "Bobby Cutler's life struggle to understand his sexual orientation played out through these very trying years in the crucible of the National Security Council. On Cutler gradually coming to terms with his sexuality There's almost no truth whatsoever to the proposition that homosexuality predisposes anyone to either communism or to being blackmailed." Stephen Benedict: "It really goes back to 1947, and that is when the Lavender Scare, so-called, really began to get a head of steam, and partly because it was associated with the whole Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers affair, which helped to combine these two issues of communism and homosexuality - it's almost complete myth.
On how the Lavender Scare originally came about "That was something one did almost like it came as natural as drinking a glass of water, because you knew that the atmosphere was such that you would never even be considered for a job were you to come out yourself." Interview Highlights "I lied many times, of course," Benedict, now 92 years old, recalls of working in government as a gay man alongside Cutler.
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So were other men in national security: Skip Coons, a Naval intelligence officer who Cutler repressed while in government but fell deeply in love with later, and Coons' friend Stephen Benedict, who held several important security jobs after both Cutler and Coons died.īenedict inherited Cutler's diaries, which he gave to Shinkle, who used them to write the book " Ike's Mystery Man: The Secret Lives of Robert Cutler." Hoover would report his latest suspicions to Cutler, unaware that Cutler was gay. "It's an incredible example of what can happen: People who have political power begin blaming our problems on a minority." "Executive Order 10450 identified and targeted a vulnerable minority, to point to this minority as causing lots of societal ills," reporter Peter Shinkle, Cutler's great-nephew, tells Here & Now. That led to not only disruption and persecution, but suicides. Edgar Hoover, both thought to be secretly gay, ferreted out others who were. Those efforts came during the Red Scare - driven by fear of communists - and the lesser-known Lavender Scare, when Sen. He was also gay, at a time when being out meant losing one's career, or worse.Ĭutler backed Eisenhower's efforts to ban communists, gays and lesbians from government, including Executive Order 10450. No man with the possible exception of the president knew so many of the nation's strategic secrets, The New York Times wrote at the time. He was called "Ike's mystery man" - often at the president's elbow calling, for instance, for more candor about the dangers of nuclear weapons.
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Eisenhower brought Cutler to Washington in the 1950s to overhaul national security, promptly appointing him the country's first national security adviser. He was a charming Harvard raconteur, lawyer, former Army general and trusted backroom negotiator - so much so that President Dwight D. (Jack Mitchell/Here & Now) This article is more than 2 years old. "Ike's Mystery Man: The Secret Lives of Robert Cutler," by Peter Shinkle.