Robert E. Lee was born on March 31, 1912, in Chicago to a family of Irish immigrants. He had at least one sibling, a brother Edward. In the 1920s, He attended St. Vincent's Grammar School. In 1935, he graduated from DePaul University's College of Commerce and Law.
Career
In 1932, while still a student, Lee began his career as a night clerk and auditor at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. In 1933, he had become assistant auditor at the Great Northern Hotel in Chicago. In 1935, he became auditor of the Roosevelt Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Later that year, he became auditor of the American Bond and Mortgage Company Bondholders Protective Committee. In 1938 through 1941, Lee served as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and worked in Washington, Newark, New York City, and Chicago. From 1941 to 1946, he became a chief FBI clerk and then administrative assistant to J. Edgar Hoover. In 1946 through 1953, Lee became director of Surveys and Investigations on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee.
Lee List
The Dixie Mission, was the first U.S. effort to establish official relations with the Communist Party of China. Domestic suspicion about China Hands undermined mission members such as State Department official John S. Service. Service was implicated in the "Amerasia Affair" espionage investigations of 1945–1946. In November 1944, U.S. General Joseph Stilwell was recalled from China amidst controversy about American support for nationalist and communist Chinese forces that made the cover of TIME magazine. In 1946, a House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Rep. Samuel F. Hobbs investigated the Amerasia case. "Thus, by 1946, "members of both parties and both houses were focused on the security shop at Satate, albeit from different angles, by the latter part of 1946." Fueling debate was the best-selling bookThunder Out of China by former TIME magazine correspondent Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby. During 1946, Congress attached a "McCarran Rider" to appropriations for the State Department: it empowered the U.S. Secretary of State to fire summarily anyone deemed "necessary or advisable in the interests of the United States." was a personal friend of Lee's In the Fall of 1947, Lee discovered and examined security files for 108 suspect cases, which resulted in the "Lee List" used by a congressional subcommittee. During a congressional hearing on March 10, 1948, Assistant Secretary of State John E. Peurifoy claimed the number had dropped from 108 to 57 names. On February 9, 1950, McCarthy gave a Lincoln Day "Enemies Within" speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. His words in the speech are a matter of some debate, as no audio recording was saved. However, it is generally agreed that he produced a piece of paper that he claimed contained a list of known Communists working for the State Department. McCarthy is usually quoted to have said: "The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." There is some dispute about whether or not McCarthy actually gave the number of people on the list as being "205" or "57". In a later telegram to President Truman, and when entering the speech into the Congressional Record, he used the number "57."
FCC commissioner
In 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Lee commission to the new Federal Communications Commission, where he served for nearly 28 years to 1981. Lee was a personal friend of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and so faced some opposition in the American press when Eisenhower appointed him FCC commissioner. Subsequent presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan re-appointed him. In his final year, he served briefly as Interim Chairman and Chairman. While in office, he served as vice chairman or chairman on a number of U.S. delegations to Geneva: Space Conference, Telephone and Telegraph Conference, World Administrative Radio Conference, World Administrative Radio Conference for Broadcast Satellites. In October 1979, he was a U.S. delegate to an International Conference on Satellite Communication in Dublin, Ireland. In March 1980, he chaired a U.S. delegation, Inter-American Telecommunication Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the 1980s, Lee served as consultant on telecommunications for law firm of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth, which specialized in telecommunications. In 1983, he was a delegate to the Geneva World Administrative Conference on Broadcast Satellites.
Personal and death
In July 1936, Lee married Wilma "Rex" Rector; she died in 1971. On September 27, 1974, he married Rose Anne Bente. Lee had three children: Patricia Lee, Robert Edward Lee, and Michael Lee. Lee died age 81 on April 5, 1993, of liver cancer in Arlington, Virginia. At time of death, he was the longest-serving FCC commissioner.
Legacy
Lee championed ultrahigh-frequency television, RCA Corporation's system for color broadcasting, educational television, pay or subscription television, and expanding FM radio. Lee's autobiography, "In the Public Interest", co-authored with John Shosky, was published in 1996. His papers were donated by his widow to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in 1998.
