On this security clearance issue, Ray Monk in his biography on Oppenheimer ( Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk ) details an aspect to the security clearance process in the 1950’s that has certainly been scrapped, namely, the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept.
As Monk explains (sorry I can’t cite page I have an electronic copy):
The struggle was between upholders of two different concepts of security: the “Caesar’s wife” concept and the “whole man” concept. The phrase “Caesar’s wife” comes from the motto “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion,” which dates from the time that Julius Caesar’s second wife, Pompeia, was suspected of adultery. Caesar divorced her, not because he believed her to be guilty, but merely because the question of her guilt had been raised. “My wife,” he famously declared, “ought not even to be under suspicion.”The “Caesar’s wife” concept of security, in Green’s words, held that “if there was any significant derogatory information at all that might be true, clearance should not be granted; and there was no need to waste time and money in trying to find out whether or not the information was true.” The “whole man” approach, on the other hand, held that “it was unfair to those enmeshed in the security net and to the atomic energy program itself to deny security clearance merely on the basis of derogatory information without giving the individual an opportunity to set the record straight and without considering favorable information that might outweigh the blemishes, as well as the importance of the individual to the nuclear program.”
Shame, the ‘Caesar’s wife’ concept seems like a good one.