George Shaw Wheeler
"(The New York Times, 8 April 1950, page 1[3]) George Shaw Wheeler was born on May 22, 1908, in Rollingbay near Tacoma, Washington.
[5][6][7][8][9] According to Jay Lovestone, Wheeler was there to help control Brigadier General Frank McSherry, "a patsy for the Communists" according to David Dubinsky and who had worked with Sidney Hillman on the War Production Board.
[4] On July 9, 1947, US Representative George Anthony Dondero publicly questioned the "fitness" of United States Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson for failing to ferret out Communist infiltrators in his department.
The cause for concern arose from what Dondero called his lack of ability to "fathom the wiles of the international Communist conspiracy" and to counteract them with "competent personnel".
Dondero cited ten government personnel in the War Department who had Communist backgrounds or leanings: Colonel Bernard Bernstein, Russell A. Nixon, Abraham L. Pomerantz (lawyer who defended Valentin A. Gubitchev in Coplon Case[11]), Josiah E. DuBois Jr., Richard Sasuly, George Shaw Wheeler, Heinz Norden, Max Lowenthal, and Allan Rosenberg (member of Lowenthal's staff).
He also became Prague correspondent for the radical National Guardian of New York City, according to the publications executive editor James Aronson.
He cites a stream of "excellent" ratings for performance (most late in September 1947) and a letter of recommendation from an Army colonel dated March 10, 1948, for his "policies and plans" as "democratic and practicable".
(i.e., by Wheeler's alleged communist sympathies) with his own thoughts on suing Dondero for slander but concludes it too "time-consuming" and a "costly procedure which I cannot afford".
[20] (In 1949, Noel Field, another American spy for the Soviets, found inspiration in Wheeler's successful flight and new life led him to seek refuge in Czechoslovakia for himself.
[5]) In April 1950, the story of Wheeler's defection received renewed press when he publicly requested political asylum in Czechoslovakia.
[3][21][17] The Washington Post noted that "The loyalty record of George S. Wheeler, ousted United States military government official who last Friday asked asylum in Communist-run Czechoslovakia was aired in Congress nearly three years ago."
Stone, by then at Voice of America, denied Dondero's allegation; Morse, by then at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, made no statement.
[12] Time article "Foreign News: At Home", which recounted how Wheeler had recently "denounced the frauds" of the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Pact, the Truman Doctrine and aid for backward areas as undermining the welfare and independence of the countries affected and enriching American capitalists.
He derided former Brigadier General William Draper Jr. for being a vice president of Dillon, Read & Co., "representing the interests of Wall Street".
[23] On October 19, 1950, columnist Walter Winchell (who by then had gone from liberal to conservative) commented:The Man Without a Country has turned from fiction to fact ... George Shaw Wheeler (native American), who denounced the United States and renounced his citizenship–asked' the Communists in Prague for asylum ...
On one hand, he has been an assiduous cultivator of high-level friendships, including Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis.
Alger Hiss and Lee Pressman benefited by his friendship, and, for a time, did one George Shaw Wheeler, a young lawyer who became so carried away by communism that he denounced his United States citizenship to make a new career bebind the Iron Curtain.
Back in 1920, at the time of her admission to the New York bar, Carol also was a Lowenthal protégée, and it was in his office that she served her first and only legal clerkship.
As early as 1944 the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Board had found Wheeler disloyal because of Communist and espionage activities.Listen to these dates, if you will.
In October 1945, Harry Truman, as President, the Civil Service Commission then reversed itself and ordered Wheeler reinstated.and, of course, as you know, Wheeler is now behind the Iron Curtain, having admitted that he was an espionage agent(The New York Times, 25 November 1953, page 5[27]) In a speech on November 24, 1953, broadcast on radio and television, US Senator Joseph McCarthy cited Wheeler as an example of how the New Deal government was "crawling with communists" (a week after US Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. had questioned Truman's role in promoting the late Harry Dexter White).
[9][28][29] Newspapers reported that "Democrats interpret the Wheeler reference, therefore, as a carefully veiled warning to Ike", in that then General Dwight Eisenhower was still based in Germany at the time.
[31][32] On April 24, 1954, United States Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell told the US House Appropriations Committee that his department had dismissed five employees for "falsifying their job applications" and another 17 with "unfavorable information in their files were allowed to resign".
During the same hearing, US Representative Fred E. Busbey stated that Under Secretary David A. Morse "once helped to get a loyalty clearance for a Federal employee who later "went behind the Iron Curtain to join the Communists".
[4] On April 21, 1959, during testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), labor leader Harry Bridges stated that he had met twice with Wheeler in Czechoslovakia.
