John Melby; Diplomat Was Fired During McCarthy Era

John Melby, an American diplomat who blamed his firing during the McCarthy era on an affair he had with author Lillian Hellman, has died. He was 79.

The State Department investigated Melby, who died in this Ontario town Dec. 18 of a heart attack, at the height of the anti-Communist fervor in the United States in the 1950s.

Hellman, who died in 1984, was said to be a former member of the Communist Party, although she never publicly acknowledged it.

Melby, a native of Portland, Ore., came to Canada in 1966 when he was unable to find work in the United States, and the following year joined the faculty of the University of Guelph. He eventually chaired the political science department.

Melby had met Hellman in 1944 in Moscow. He was working at the U.S. Embassy, and she was on a cultural goodwill mission. She continued, however, to be involved with author Dashiell Hammett during the years she knew Melby.

She testified on Melby’s behalf before the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board, but he was fired in 1953.

Melby earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago and joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1937. He was assigned to Moscow in 1943 and sent to China in 1945.

He was recalled to Washington after the Communist victory in 1949 and wrote an analysis known as the China White Paper. In 1971 he published “The Mandate of Heaven, a Record of a Civil War, China 1945-49.”