"While Eisenhower personally was immune to McCarthy's charges, he nevertheless tried to insulate his administration against the senator's witch-hunt in the federal bureaucracy by instituting an antisubversive program of his own. In April 1953 the president signed an executive order authorizing the heads of all federal departments and agencies to fire any employee whose loyalty, reliability, or "good conduct and character" were in doubt. Hundreds of federal employees lost their jobs under the new security system, but not a single traitor, spy, or subversive was indicted by the government. The Department of State was particularly hard hit by the Eisenhower security program. Among those who lost their jobs were a number of experts in Chinese affairs, including John Patton Davies and John Carter Vincent. However, they were dismissed, not because they were subversives, but because they had predicted the collapse of the Nationalist government in China and had favored a more realistic policy toward the Chinese Communists. The decline of expertise and morale in the foreign service that resulted from this purge did much to prevent the formation of a realistic policy toward communism, particularly Asian communism, in the years ahead."