Books in Brief: The Ordeal of Otto Otepka

The Ordeal of Otto Otepka, by William J. Gill (Arlington House, $8).

Mr. Gill details dubious security records of critical U.S. policymakers, bureaucratic infighting, an attempted frame-up, unprosecuted perjury, plus an extra measure of news manipulation. He offers persuasive evidence that, in late December 1960, Bobby Kennedy and Dean Rusk singled out Otepka for removal from the State Department’s Office of Security because he hindered their plans to pack State with advocates of “convergence” with the Soviet Union. Otepka was exiled to a small cubbyhole and a make-work “special project” while being denied access to his files. His telephone was tapped, his office bugged, his garbage examined by Foreign Service officers, his house watched, and his associates ordered to avoid him. In a 1967 star-chamber hearing, State withdrew all the criminal charges they had placed against Otepka and dropped him for the heinous crime of delivering two classified memoranda to that infamous enemy of the people, the chief counsel of the State Internal Security Subcommittee. Having hung onto the tattered shreds of his work throughout the Kennedy-Johnson years, Otepka’s hope for vindication evaporated when President Nixon failed either to clean house in State or to shoehorn Otepka back into a meaningful job.

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D. B. Duval

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The Ordeal of Otto Otepka, by William J. Gill (Arlington House, $8).

Mr. Gill details dubious security records of critical U.S. policymakers, bureaucratic infighting, an attempted frame-up, unprosecuted perjury, plus an extra measure of news manipulation. He offers persuasive evidence that, in late December 1960, Bobby Kennedy and Dean Rusk singled out Otepka for removal from the State Department’s Office of Security because he hindered their plans to pack State with advocates of “convergence” with the Soviet Union. Otepka was exiled to a small cubbyhole and a make-work “special project” while being denied access to his files. His telephone was tapped, his office bugged, his garbage examined by Foreign Service officers, his house watched, and his associates ordered to avoid him. In a 1967 star-chamber hearing, State withdrew all the criminal charges they had placed against Otepka and dropped him for the heinous crime of delivering two classified memoranda to that infamous enemy of the people, the chief counsel of the State Internal Security Subcommittee. Having hung onto the tattered shreds of his work throughout the Kennedy-Johnson years, Otepka’s hope for vindication evaporated when President Nixon failed either to clean house in State or to shoehorn Otepka back into a meaningful job.