Over 17 days in April 1953, two Americans in their mid-twenties turned their country into a laughing stock across Europe. Their names were Roy Cohn and G. David Schine.

Since the late 1940s, promoting an image of America as the ‘land of the free’, in contrast to the totalitarianism that characterised Soviet Russia, had been central to the US Government’s efforts to wage a cultural Cold War. As the superpower ideological struggle heated up during this period, millions of dollars were spent constructing an infrastructure of cultural diplomacy and propaganda intended to make the United States attractive and paint the Soviet Union in the worst possible light.

Yet, in a little over two weeks, these efforts were wrecked; carefully crafted representations of America were replaced by images of Nazi-style ‘book burning’ and buffoonery.

The press had a field day with the two Americans. Within days of landing in France on 4 April, the pair began to acquire a plethora of nicknames. ‘Junketeering gumshoes’ was probably the most well-known of these. Others included: ‘rover boys’, ‘schnufflers’, ‘gumshoes’, ‘scummy snoopers’, ‘travelling snoopers’, ‘distempered jackals’, ‘precocious youngsters’, ‘quiz kids’, ‘juvenile comedians’, ‘snoophounds’, ‘unfortunate creatures’ and ‘young jerks’.

For American officials, however, the two visiting ‘henchmen’ of Senator Joseph McCarthy were scarcely a source of jocularity. Rather, they inspired terror and despair. A US diplomat based in Athens noted that ‘everybody was scared to death’ about their impending visit. To get on the wrong side of the two risked public humiliation and a wrecked career. John Foster Dulles, the recently appointed Secretary of State, gave instructions to extend every courtesy to the pair during their European tour. Senior diplomats were obliged to humble themselves and serve at their beck and call. The two took full advantage.

Paul Cushing Child, a US State Department official based in Paris, and husband of the chef and author Julia Child, referred to them as ‘typical Fascist bully-boy types… filled with the euphoria of second-hand power and riding roughshod over everybody’. Another official, Chester H. Opal, dedicated a chapter of his fictional memoir, Men of Career, written under the alias John Lorraine, describing their 41-hour visit to Vienna. As he put it, they ‘addressed me as though I were a chattel, a witless creature indentured to them’. Ben Bradlee, then a press officer at the US embassy in Paris, referred in his memoir to the pair’s ‘ludicrous, destructive crusade through Western Europe’, observing that they went about ‘berating Foreign Service officers whose socks they couldn’t hold’.

Over 17 days, Cohn and Schine, then working, respectively, as Chief Counsel and Chief Consultant to McCarthy’s Senate Investigations committee, visited Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade, Athens, Rome, Paris again, and finally London. The visits to each city lasted hours, but their actions were vividly recalled in minute-by-minute detail, years and, in some cases, decades later. Cohn, never one to admit mistakes, a lesson he later imparted to his ‘apprentice’, Donald J. Trump, nevertheless admitted in his autobiography that if there was one thing he could have done differently in life, ‘I sure as hell wouldn’t have taken that trip.’

The origins and purpose of Cohn and Schine’s European trip remain obscure. A couple days before departing Washington DC, the State Department was provided with few details and only a partial itinerary. Investigating the Voice of America and the US Information Service in France and Germany was the reason Cohn provided to the CIA’s legislative liaison, Walter Pforzheimer, who, somewhat ironically, was a noted bibliophile. Upon arriving in Europe, the reasons shifted from looking for disloyal personnel, to checking on waste and mismanagement, to promoting efficiencies.

On the other hand, none of these explanations seemed plausible. Cohn and Schine did not spend enough time in any one place to conduct a meaningful investigation, nor were they professional investigators. Schine’s sole claim to being an expert on Communism was that he self-published, via his family’s hotel chain, a six-page ‘book’ entitled Definition of Communism.  For a trip supposedly intended to investigate waste, the two were dogged by stories of expensive meals, hotels and nightclubs. An official audit some months later found that Cohn and Schine were each given a $74 allowance per day ($900 today), and the trip cost US taxpayers some $6,000 ($72,000). One US official who served as their escort in Yugoslavia later claimed that their main interest was local sightseeing.

Regardless of their actual motives – no doubt a combination of official business, self-promotion, and a taxpayer-funded holiday – the principal image associated with their trip was the removal of books from US Information Service (USIS) libraries by authors considered to be Communists and ‘fellow travelers’. Over the preceding weeks, McCarthy’s committee had been investigating American information programmes abroad. Prior to Cohn and Schine’s trip, the newly inaugurated Eisenhower administration had already begun removing books identified by the committee as being pro-Communist, and would continue to do so after they departed. It was this initiative that raised concerns about ‘book burning’ and inspired Ray Bradbury to write Fahrenheit 451.

In each city they visited, Cohn and Schine spent brief periods in USIS libraries, sometimes only 30 minutes, browsing the card catalogues for authors on their list of subversive writers. These included Agnes Smedley, Theodore Dreiser, W.E. Dubois, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, Howard Fast, Anna-Louise Strong, and Theodore H. White. Dashell Hammett came under particular scrutiny, with copies of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man held up as examples of books that ought to be removed. In at least one library, Hammett’s books were hidden to avoid being spotted if Cohn and Schine visited. In addition to books, the libraries were criticised for carrying magazines such as Time, the Nation and the New Republic.

In addition to US libraries, Cohn and Schine visited similar Soviet libraries in East Berlin and Vienna searching for books by American authors. When the USIS libraries were found to contain the same books, this was held up as proof they contained subversive literature, although this included authors such as Mark Twain and Jack London. Alternatively, if USIS libraries failed to contain copies of the American Legion Magazine or the Freeman, then this was highlighted as insufficient possession of patriotic content.

Another notable feature of Cohn and Schine’s journey was the media spectacle it generated. The two young American Congressional aides received a level of media attention normally reserved for visiting dignitaries and movie stars. At each of their stops, journalists flocked to them. They spent nearly as much time giving press conferences as they did investigating the USIS libraries. Although, from the beginning of their trip, journalists made a mockery of their statements, and portrayed them in satirical terms, this did not make them shy away from reporters.

Nor did the damage they were doing to America’s international reputation seem to matter to them in the slightest. On the contrary, they mostly embraced the publicity, despite being almost entirely negative. It was only with their final stop in London, where rumours circulated that Cohn and Schine were coming to investigate the BBC, that the two curtailed their visit. The British press were utterly ruthless in their criticism and mockery.

Upon returning to Washington, Cohn claimed their trip had been deliberately sabotaged by the State Department, which, he alleged, had them ‘trailed’ and leaked derogatory information to the press. Back in Europe, morale among US officials continued to plummet. Fearing the end of their careers, they resorted to gallows humor, telling their colleagues: ‘See you tomorrow, come Cohn or Schine.’

The sense of national humiliation was aptly captured in a cartoon published in a Yugoslav magazine. Entitled ‘McCarthy’s Children’, the cartoon featured two young pipe-smoking investigators with their feet on a desk in a US embassy. They ask an embassy official ‘Is there anything around here which would injure respect for America?’ The official replies: ‘Besides you, nothing else.’

Beginning with McCarthy, the lesson that causing mayhem and destroying careers could guarantee one’s place in the media spotlight would be passed from father to son, and from mentor to apprentice.