of homosexuals from State. McLeod told a congressional committee at the start of his tenure at State that "The campaign toward eliminating all types of sex perverts from the rolls of the department will be pressed with increased vigor. All forms of immorality will be rooted out and banished from the service." A friend of McLeod's described his law enforcement approach to homosexuality: "Scotty had the essentially simple approach to a fairy that you will find in a cop who has never had the benefit of, let us say, courses in abnormal psychology at Yale. ... Scotty had a very black and white kind of approach–and this wasn't white." He took a flexible approach to security issues, weighing, for example, how recent or extensive someone's contacts with leftists were, but viewed any homosexual activity as disqualification on the grounds that the employee would always be subject to blackmail. Charges of homosexuality had removed more than 500 State Department employees before him, and McLeod promised to replace them with "red-blooded men of initiative". He developed standards for assessing homosexuality that disregarded activity before the age of 18 but included all same-sex contact, and he hoped to make it "a standard for Government-wide application." According to the New York Times, he had good relations with the press and "[e]ven in his most controversial days, he would joke, with a puzzled air, about what he called his reputation as a 'beast'." In an August 1953 speech, he described his workload of 4,000 cases of personnel hired by the Truman administration, 2,000 never investigated and 2,000 inadequately investigated. He said his efforts were no "witch hunt" but an attempt "to eliminate from public service any person upon whom the investigation raises a reasonable doubt as to his security potential." Unlike in the previous administrations of Roosevelt and Truman, he said, "we are resolving doubt in favor of the Government." C.L. Sulzberger, in an article lamenting how diplomats were being misjudged and mistreated in the application of security standards, described a conversation with McLeod: In 1955, McLeod told a surprised Senator Hubert Humphrey that his view of a security risk was not absolute: "It is our policy that we will not be so secure that we will not get our work done. If we sometimes have to hire a security risk to get a job done, we're going to get the job done." His example