When the call came, though, it was not a journalistic commission. Instead, “this person . . . asked me if I would go into Washington” to meet with officers of the Central Intelligence Agency.1
Another surprise awaited Bauman in the nation’s capital. Across the desk from her was a face she recognized. It belonged to Cord Meyer, “a young man I had known as an idealistic youth when he had returned from the war and had spoken on the subject of World Government at a meeting I had helped to sponsor.”2 A tall, pale man in his early thirties “with a preoccupied smile and wavy brown hair,” Meyer literally bore the scars of the Second World War, having lost an eye when a Japanese grenade exploded in his foxhole on Guam (another grenade killed his twin brother on Oki-nawa).3 In 1945, determined to help prevent a recurrence of the sort of global conflict in which he had suffered so grievously, Meyer served as an
150
T H E T R U T H S H A L L M A K E Y O U F R E E
assistant to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco and afterward helped launch a utopian world government organization, the United World Federalists. Later in the decade, however, following a struggle with communists for control of the American Veterans Committee (a liberal alternative to the American Legion), Meyer “became convinced that it took more than idealism and goodwill to have a chance in the Cold War.”4 He joined the CIA in 1951, assisting Tom Braden in the International Organizations Division (IOD).
“Facing reality” was how he later described this move.5
Dorothy Bauman’s ideological journey to CIA headquarters was in many ways similar to Meyer’s, although it was also typical of a certain kind of American woman who lived between the first wave of feminism in the nineteenth century and the second in the late twentieth century: a wife and mother who engaged extensively in voluntary work for nongovernment organizations outside the home, and a patriotic U.S. citizen who believed that women had a potentially vital role to play in promoting international understanding between the warring nations of the world.
Born Dorothy Sprague in a small town in southwestern Minnesota, Bauman had three children with her first husband, from whom she was divorced after he lost his job and turned to alcohol during the Depression.
Happily married for a second time to businessman John Bauman, she worked for a variety of women’s voluntary organizations and New Deal relief agencies during World War II. Then in 1946, still hopeful of a united world effort in postwar reconstruction, Bauman helped convene the First International Assembly of Women in New York. “We believed that women could be influential in building a better world,” she later explained. In 1948, wanting to see for herself how the women she had met in New York were faring in their efforts to reconstruct civil society in their homelands, Bauman signed up with a lecture bureau and undertook a four-and-a-half month tour of Europe and the Middle East. Having witnessed the crucial spring elections in Italy and violent civil unrest in Greece, she visited Prague just as Czechoslovakia was being absorbed into the Soviet bloc, meeting a Czech women’s leader who, she learned subsequently, was later shot and killed by the communists. On returning to the United States, she wrote a report on her tour for the State Department and gave a series of lectures about “the influential role women leaders were beginning to play in the reconstruction and in the ideological strug-
W O M E N
151
gle in their countries.” She entitled her talks “Patriots in Petticoats,” cleverly evoking American women’s long tradition of civic engagement in times of national crisis, dating from the Revolution.6