The Queen of Passports

I have been reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, the long tome that was the inspiration for the recent movie “Oppenheimer”. At one point the book discusses the Berkeley-based chemist Martin D. Kamen who in 1940 together with Sam Ruben was the first to synthesize carbon-14 in a cyclotron and who went on to use this carbon isotope to investigate the biochemical reactions involved in photosynthesis in 1941. He then was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, but in 1944 a couple of incidents led him to be unjustly accused of espionage, and he was blacklisted for many years until finally winning his legal battles in 1955.

One of these battles was getting his passport back, which was revoked in 1947 by one Ruth B. Shipley, the head of the Passport Division of the State Department. It turns out that between 1928 and 1955, all decisions about issuances of passports ran through Mrs. Shipley, and they were not subject to judicial review. Depending on one’s perspective, she was both greatly admired and feared. Franklin Delano Roosevelt praised her as being a “wonderful ogre”. In the era of anti-communist hysteria she denied passports to many people in addition to Kamen, including the actor Paul Robeson, the playwright Arthur Miller, and the chemist Linus Pauling. She retired in 1955 at the mandatory age of 70, and at this point her power was starting to wane. The denial of the passport to Linus Pauling elicited the wrath of Senator Wayne Morse, and Pauling did obtain his full passport to be able to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954.

Jeffrey Kahn discusses Mrs. Shipley’s career in an article in the Connecticut Law Review published in 2011. He compares the reign of Mrs. Shipley with contemporary screening systems. Kahn views today’s systems e.g. the Terrorist Screening Database and its subset the No Fly List as the digital descendants of Mrs. Shipley’s files. But there is no longer a single authority governing who is in these databases, and responsibility for them has disappeared into anonymity.