From the highest echelons of Congressional staffer-dom to the halls of the local DMV, government bureaucrats have a generally bad reputation. Many of these individuals have a tremendous amount of power, which is very concerning considering how difficult it is to fire them. The idea of entrenched inept bureaucrats is nothing new. In 1992, Phyllis Schlafly wrote about a bureaucrat who made a life-and-death mistake of international proportions, but was rewarded rather than fired for his malfeasance.
Boris Klosson was a State Department employee in 1961 when a man named Lee Harvey Oswald tried to get into the United States from the Soviet Union. Oswald had previously renounced his citizenship, but claimed to have a change of heart and wanted to take his Russian wife back to America with him. Klosson signed an infamous document called “Foreign Service Dispatch No. 49, which stated his belief in Oswald’s change of heart and his endorsement for Oswald’s return to the United States. Two years later, Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
Imagine making a mistake so big that it resulted in the death of the President of the United States. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testified that the FBI allowed Oswald’s entry without any kind of follow-up or surveillance directly because of Klosson’s glowing endorsement. Obviously, Klosson was hopelessly incompetent at best or compromised by communists at worst. Either way, he had no business in the State Department.
Yet, rather than being fired, Klosson was actually promoted. He became part of Henry Kissinger’s inner circle power group. He also served as deputy U.S. representative to the Geneva strategic arms negotiations. As far as anyone can tell, he was never confronted with his life-ending mistake by championing Lee Harvey Oswald’s return to America.
Boris Klosson may be gone, but many employees on the taxpayers’ dime are just as bad if not worse. Certainly there are some who do fine work, but the Deep State is alive and well in Washington, D.C. Let’s stop pretending like the Deep State is some joke. If you want to know whether the Deep State is a joke, just ask JFK.
