McCarthy and kept a photo of the senator on his desk. In October 1953, the Community Chest, a charity, reported complaints that McLeod was coercing employees under his supervision to contribute. On January 16, 1954, a group of former ambassadors denounced his attacks on the State Department. McLeod called their charges a "scandalous libel". In February 1954, Democrats denounced the speeches he made for the Republican Party, calling him a "party huckster". McLeod himself later said the speaking tour might have been "ill advised" and admitted he worried he might lose his job over it. Though some thought he had violated the Hatch Act, State Department counsel ruled that he was not covered by the act's prohibitions on political activity by certain government employees. In March 1954, Dulles relieved McLeod of responsibility for personnel administration, leaving him with security only, though a week earlier McLeod had told a congressional committee that the two functions were "inseparable". When criticized for slow progress in implementing the Refugee Relief Act (1953), which expanded immigration from southern Europe, he blamed complexity that Congress had added to the legislation and proposed easing its requirements. Life thought him right about the statute, but called him "a pleasant but unimaginative flatfoot" whose firing "would be no great loss". In 1956, his erstwhile conservative allies viewed him as a traitor when he supported the Eisenhower administration's immigration reform proposals. McLeod had principal responsibility for implementing the security rules established in Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450, which covered both disloyalty based on political views and affiliation and security risks based on character, stability, and reliability, which translated into sexual irregularity. McLeod directed the security investigations that resulted in the departure, either by dismissal or by resignation under pressure, of some 300 State Department employees on suspicion they were Communist sympathizers and of 425 State Department employees for suspicion of homosexuality. For columnists who did not sympathize with the administration's security campaign, McLeod personified its worst excesses. One described him as "a shadow that lurk[s] over every desk and every conference table at Foggy Bottom" and another called him "one of the most powerful and controversial officials in the United States government." Stewart Alsop wrote that "McLeodism" was "the State Department's dutiful imitation of McCarthyism." Bridges, who had first brought the issue of homosexuals in the State Department to public attention in 1947, may have been the driver behind McLeod's purge