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. During his years at the State Department, McLeod was "a figure of sharp controversy". 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. 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." 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. 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'."
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 was someone with valuable language skills. He told a Senate committee that in 1954 his department had investigated 3885 hires for permanent positions and terminated only 3. and headed the U.S. delegation to the same group in April 1957. ==Ireland==