R. W. Scott McLeod

Robert Walter Scott McLeod (June 7, 1914 – November 7, 1961), known as Scott McLeod, headed the U.S. Department of State's Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs from 1953 to 1957 and served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland from 1957 to 1961. He was the principal U.S. government official responsible for the purge of those charged with disloyalty or homosexuality from the State Department during the McCarthy era.

Scott McLeod was born in Davenport, Iowa, on June 17, 1914. He played football at Grinnell College and graduated with a B.A. in 1937.

After college, McLeod sold advertising for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. In 1938, he took a job as a police reporter for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. He joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1942 and worked as a special agent. Assigned to the FBI's Concord, New Hampshire, office, he left the FBI in 1949 to become an administrative assistant in the office of Republican U.S. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, an anti-Communist and anti-gay crusader who kept a lower profile than his colleague Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin. While working for Bridges, McLeod helped write the Republican attack on President Eisenhower for removing General Douglas MacArthur from command.

When John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State in 1953, on the recommendation of Under Secretary of State for Management Donold Lourie, he named McLeod as the administrator of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. McLeod held that office from March 3, 1953, until March 9, 1957. Until January 1956, he was also responsible for the State Department's relations with Congress. His appointment was viewed as an attempt by Dulles to appease Republican critics of the State Department. During his years at the State Department, McLeod was "a figure of sharp controversy".

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