His father, U.S. Army Signal Corps Colonel Samuel Reber II (1864–1933), was an 1886 graduate of West Point, and his mother Cecelia Sherman Miles (1869–1952) was the daughter of Lieutenant General Nelson A.
[3] He went overseas again for a short assignment in Martinique, then in control of Vichy France, to seek guarantees that French possessions, ships, and planes in the Caribbean would not be used by the Axis powers.
In 1946 he was political adviser to the U.S. delegation to the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris and the next year was director of the State Department's Office of European Affairs.
[3] Reber represented the State Department in negotiations among deputy foreign ministers for an Austrian peace treaty in the years following World War II.
He shared his critical assessment of Winston Churchill's 1953 thoughts of an alliance of Great Britain, the U.S., West Germany, and Spain: "The grand old man had apparently again drunk too much whiskey and felt himself back in the time of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough!
Reber provided them with an aide to make travel arrangements, but he refused to support them when they denounced Theodore Kaghan, Deputy Director of the Public Affairs Division for the High Commissioner's office, for his radical past.
[18] Kaghan had mocked two of McCarthy's staff members, Roy Cohn and David Schine, as "junketeering gumshoes" when they toured Europe to investigate un-American publications held in the libraries of the United States Information Service.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote to Adlai Stevenson that "The most eminent recent victim is, of all people, Samel Reber, who apparently is being forced out on a vague homosexual allegation, fifteen years old.
And the thing is reaching the point where, as John Davies told me, the very fact of accusation makes a man, in the eyes of these thugs, a future risk....As some one said, we have passed beyond the Kafka phase, and are moving into Dostoievsky.
[21] He thought McCarthy's attempt to influence the Army's assignment of Schine was unremarkable, but of Cohn's insistent phone calls he said here was "no instance under which I was put under greater pressure."
McCarthy asked: "Are you aware of the fact that your brother was allowed to resign when charges that he was a bad security risk were made against him as a result of the investigation of this committee?"