CLOUT AND MORALE DECLINE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302440004-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 31, 2012
• Sequence Number: 4
• Publication Date: April 26, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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4?ei Ai
WASHINGTON POST
26 April 1987
AMERICA'S FADING FOREIGN SERVICE
First of a Four-Part Series
/Clout and Morale Decline
Reaganites' Raid on the Latin Bureau
By John M. Goehlto
Washington Post Staff Writer
plunged; future prospects dimmed.
The factors that brought this about are the subject of
this series of articles. They include:
In January 1981, William G. ? Changes in the promotion system that many believe
Bowdler, then assistant secre- now discriminate unfairly against officers with the
tary of state for inter-American greatest language and area expertise.
affairs, knew that he was one of A big crimp in chances for advancement caused by
several career diplomats holding Reagan's awarding of unprecedented numbers of am-
policy-making positions in the bassadorships to political appointees, most of whom are
Carter administration who was poorly qualified by Foreign Service standards.
likely to be replaced in the in- ? The austerity imposed by Congress' unwillingness to
coming Reagan administration's provide money for foreign policy purposes.
reshuffle of policies and person- ? The inability of the Foreign Service, a formerly tra-
nel. dition-bound bastion of white male elitism, to better re-
Rowdier was an accomplished Sect contemporary American society by providing op-
professional diplomat who had I portunities for *men and minorities.
been in the Foreign Service for What happened at the State Department in the early
30 years. Before taking over the days of the Reagan administration seemed to demon-
Latin American policy job, he I strate how vulnerable the Foreign Service bureaucracy
had served under: Republican is to shifting political winds. In Britain, France or West
and Democratic presidents ae. Gennany, election results may lead to modest changes
ambassador to ELSalvador, Gulp of direction in foreign policy, but they have only mar-
temala and South Africa and as ginal effects on the career diplomatic services of those
the State Department's director countries, which are left in command.of all but the most
of intelligence and research. By senior policy-making diplomatic posts.
traditional Foreign Service stan-.
dards, those credentials would'
have entitled Rowdier to a major_
ambassadorial appointment
from the new administration.
Instead, within 24 hours of
President Reagan's inaugural,
Rowdier was told to empty his
desk and leave, that there was
no longer a place for him in the
Foreign Service. It was the
opening move of a purge; in the
next few months the Reagan
team at the State Department
swept aside virtually every ca-
reer diplomat who had been in-
volved in planning and directing
the Carter administration's Cen-.
tral American policies.
Administration Denies Bureau Purged
The election of Ronald Reagan demonstrated that in
the United States such stability is far from guaranteed.
The impact of the Reagan revolution on Foreign Ser-
vice morale was severe, according to many officers.
Some privately compared it to the early 1950s, when
then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) made it fashion-
able to blame the alleged incompetence and treason of
professional diplomats for the gains made by commu-
nists in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The Reagan administration always has denied that
there was a purge in 1981. In private, though, senior
officials admit that their aim was to get rid of everyone
who they felt could not be entrusted to implement what
would become the most controversial foreign policy of
the Reagan presidency: Its effort to block what the new
administration perceived as a Soviet-Cuban effort to
use Nicaragua as a base for spreading communist sub-
version through the hemisphere
For the Foreign Service it over time, the administration's pursuk of that goal
was the beginning of what has , would evolve into its now embattled policy of support
turned into one of its most trou- for the guerrilla war waged by the contras against the
bled periods in three decades. 6, leftist Sandinista government in Managua. The treat-
During the 1980s, Problems ment meted out to Rowdier and his associates hit the
that had festered for years
Foreign Service
side the Foreign Service have ,i, with a shock whose
cone to the surface; ' nevi Crft..? ,; aftereffects are still being felt. Oth-
challenged traditionar er administrations, including the
leis=
of doing busbies% morale., one of President Jimmy Carter, had
ways
sought to impose their ideological
views on foreign policy, particularly
in regard to Latin America.
But the wholesale purging of the
Bureau of Inter-American Affairs
carried out by the Reagan team
caused many career diplomats to
conclude that a new rule Was being
written: That if they are too diligent
in trying to carry out the policies of
a specific administration, their loy-
alty may be questioned when the
shifting tides of American politics
cast up a different president with very different views.
Ideological pressures have receded, according to
many career diplomats, since George P. Shultz suc-
ceeded Alexander M. Haig Jr. as secretary of state in
1982. Shultz restored morale considerably by picking
bright young members of the service as his key aides.
And he has stood up for the Foreign Service in difficult
moments. For example, in the furor involving security
at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Shultz has asserted
that the responsibility is his and has sought to avert a
new wave of Foreign Service bashing by Congress.
Still the 1980s have been an especially unhappy time
for the nation's career diplomats. It began with the
trauma of seeing 52 of their colleagues from the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran held hostage for 444 days while the
American government looked on in helpless anguish.
Now, as the decade nears an end, the Iran-contra affair
has exposed the Foreign Service to new humiliation,
revealing how its ostensible role as the principal instru-
ment of U.S. foreign policy was usurped by the staff of
the National Security CounciL ?
State Department Was Circumvented
Foreign Service officers with Years of experience in
dealing with Iran and the Middle East had to face the
realization that the White House consciously chose to
ignore their advice and expertise. Instead, Lt. Col. Ol-
iver L. North, a supposedly low-level NSC staff member
with no background in Mideast affairs, had been allowed
.to circumvent the authority of Shultz and the State De-
partment.
North's adventurism and the chaos it created for
Reagan's ability to govern was described privately by
one senior State Department official is the worst-case,,
horrible example of what can happen when the govern,
ment and people of this country can't decide whether
they want a professional diplomatic service and are will-
ing to entrust it with the conduct of foreign policy."
Increasingly, the State Department has been rele-
gated to the humdrum routine of diplomacy?the un-
glamorous work of stamping visas and helping Amer-
ican tourists who have fallen ill or lost their passports,
of acting as mail carries is routine exchanges with oth-
er -governinents ankit a time when terrorism has be-
come the sinister mirror image of diplomacy, of assum-
ing the risks inherent in maintaining an American pres-
ence abroad.
However, when policy decisions are being made,
presidents and their senior advisers, usually trained in
the result-oriented school of domestic politics, are eas-
ily frustrated by the caution and compromises that are
the traditional tools of professional diplomats. Often,
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their impatience with "the fudge factory," as John F.
Kennedy called the State Department, causes them to
turn to agencies advocating solutions that seem to
promise quicker and more clear-cut results.
Throughout the postwar period, the struggles for
power and influence between the State Department and
other agencies with a stake in foreign policy?the Na-
tional Security Council staff, the Defense Department,
the Central Intelligence Agency?often have been as
dramatic as the world events they mirrored. And the
State Department has often been on the losing side.
"It's more important for senior diplomats to learn to
speak the language of domestic politics than it is to
learn a foreign language," said David D. Newsom, who
served in the Carter administration as undersecretary
of state for political affairs, usually the department's
highest career post.
"The typical Foreign Service officer knows more
about the politics of Gabon or Bolivia or whatever than
he does about Wisconsin or Alabama," added Lawrence
S. Eagleburger, who held the same post in the Reagan
administration.
Expertise Most Valuable Asset
But even this expertise about far-off places, which
once was considered the Foreign Service's most valu-
able asset, often is not put to its best use. In the Iran-
contra affair, it was ignored. And in policy situations
such as Central America, where the State Department
has had a big role, such traditional skills as the ability to
speak Spanish and knowledge of the area's history, pol-
itics and culture have been regarded as less important
than a reputation for can-do managerial talent
Ideological pressures have been greatest in the Bu-
reau of Inter-American Affairs, according to State De-
partment officials. In that area Shultz has not reversed
the pattern first set in 1981.
That year, in addition to Bowdler, Robert E. White,
the ambassador in El ? Salvador, was summarily fired;
Lawrence A. Pezzullo, the ambassador in Nicaragua,
was farmed out to a university as a diplomat in resi-
dence and retired shortly afterward; George W. Lan-
dau, who had been slated to become ambassador in
Guatemala with a mandate to take a tough line toward
the military dictatorship then in power, saw his nom-
ination put on permanent hold. (Landau later was made
ambassador tO Venezuela.)
? Here, John A. Bushnell, who had been Bowdler's
principal deputy, was blackballed by the White House
far an ambassadorial appointment and, after a year in
limbo, finally was sent to Argentina as deputy chief of
mission. An even more distant exile was decreed for
James R. Cheek, Bowdler's deputy for Central America,
who was appointed deputy chief of mission in Kat-
mandu, Nepal.
Haig took office with franldy radical plans?de-
scribed in his memoirs?for defeating the left in Cen-
tral America. To implement his policies, Haig picked a
group of career diplomats known for their energy and
ambition rather than their knowledge of the region.
To replace Bowdler as assistant secretary, the ad-
ministration chose Thomas 0. Enders, who had held a
succession of top ambassadorial and policy posts, none
related to Central America. Enders had been deputy
head of the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia at the height of
the involvement in Southeast Asia. And many of those
who worked with him on Central America had experi-
ence in Indochina during the Vietnam war.
Enders, the first of three men to head the bureau
under Reagan, came to doubt the plausibility of a mil-
itary solution to the Nicaragua question; he was reas-
signed because hard-line Reaganitei regarded him as
lacking sufficient commitment By contrast, the current
assistant secretary, Elliott Abrams, a political appoin-
tee, is a conservative Reaganite closely identified with
support of the contra program.
Last fall, Abrams fired a highly experienced career
diplomat, John A. Ferch, as ambassador to Honduras
because he allegedly was insufficiently zealous in sup-
porting contra operations from that country. More re-
cently, Francis J. McNeill, one of the Foreign Service's
most respected Latin America hands, retired as the
State Department's deputy director of intelligence after
charging that his analyses of weaknesses in the contra
program had led Abrams to question his loyalty. ?
Instead of area experts, the administration has
tended to rely in Central America on Foreign Service
officers with reputations as good generalists willing to
follow orders and not raise troubling questions. These
have included senior diplomats such as Deane R. Hinton
and Thomas R. Pickering, both career ambassadors at
the peak of the service. Each served a hitch as ambas-
sador to El Salvador.
More typical of the type of Foreign Service offiters
who came to be associated with Central America in this
period were John D. Negroponte, who, as ambassador
to Honduras before Ferch, was the on-scene overseer
of contra activities, and L Craig Jolmstone, who served
successively as director of Central American affairs and
deputy assistant secretary for Central America.
Both were diplomatic veterans of South Vietnam who
had come to the attention of senior officers there as
take-charge types. After moving into Central American
affairs, they acquired reputations for acting with abra-
sive disregard for Latin American sensibilities or the
cautions of domestic American critics. Negroponte, in
particular, stirred controversy by allying himself with
those conservatives in Congress who are the strongest.
supporters of the contras and by criticizing U.S. diplo-
mats whose reports differed from his assessments.
Disagreement on Latin American Policy
However, while the administration has found many
officers such as Negroponte willing to pursue its Cen-
tral America policy with enthusiasm, very few have
come from the department's experts on the region. It is
an open secret throughout the State Department that
the majority of old Latin American hands privately dis-
agree with much of the rationale of administration Pol-
icy. This group regards support of the contras as a pol-
icy that has little chance of achieving its stated objec-
tives and one that may work against U.S. interests. ?
"By supporting the contras, we are pursuing a policy
that gives Nicaragua a credible excuse for presenting
itself as the aggrieved victim of American-suppated
military intervention, but that does not give the United
States a credible vehicle for getting rid of the Sandidis-
tas," one of these diplomats said.
Said another Foreign Service officer, concluding- a
tour of duty in Central America midway through the
Reagan administration:
"It isn't embarrassing that the secretary of st.Nte
doesn't know anything about Central America. is
only moderately embarrassing that the assistant
feta", doesn't know very much. But it is very bad
the deputy assistant secretaries and even the office 419. ?
rectors know so little."
The fact that State Department experts can beige
critical of a centerpiece of administration foreign policy
suggests why Foreign Service morale is so low and ex-
plains why the White House is so suspicious of the ea.
reer diplomatic service it inherited.
NEXT: Experts or generalists?
!
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WASHINGTON POST
27 April 1987
AMERICA'S FADING
FOREIGN SERVICE
Second of a Four-Part Series
Tradition Bows
To the Demand for
Management Skills
By John M. Goshko
Washington Post Staff Writer
When Loy W. Henderson died last year at the
age of 93, the news stirred only the faintest
echoes at the State Department, from which he
had been retired for almost 30 years. Younger
members of the Foreign Service were aware of
him only as a ghost from an earlier time whose
name adorns the cavernous room where secre-
taries of state now hold their news conferences.
Few were aware that almost 50 years ago,
Henderson helped set the stage for what is cur-
rently a matter of anguished controversy within
the Foreign Service. It is a debate about wheth-
er the demands of diplomacy can best be served
by training officers in management techniques
or in the specialized expertise?knowledge of
the language, culture, politics and economics of
a country or a region?that was once consid-
ered the most important attribute of a profes-
sional diplomat.
One officer, who asked not to be identified,
cited as an example of "how not to get ahead
under the currently fashionable rules for pro-
motion" the 15 years he has spent concentrating
on West European affairs and learning to speak
fluent German and French. He said:
"The question facing those of us who now are
a rung below senior rank is whether you want to
really know an area and be able to operate in it
with ease or whether you want an ala carte ca-
reer where you dabble in many different areas
on the theory that you're learning to be a man-
ager. Now to concentrate on a specific area is a
recipe for not getting promoted."
This is a far cry from the days when Hender-
son played a leading role in establishing the
principle that depth of area expertise should be
the major standard for judging a Foreign Ser-
vice officer's qualifications.
In the early 1930s, Henderson, then in
charge of the State Department's Soviet sec-
tion, was instrumental in recruiting a group of
14 promising young officers for intensive train-
ing in the Russian language and Soviet affairs.
Only a few survived the grueling regimen.
But those who did?among them George F.
Kennan, Charles E. Bohlen and Llewellyn E.
Thompson?went on to form the cadre of dip-
lomats who skillfully managed U.S. policy to-
ward Moscow during the superpower confronta-
tions of the postwar era.
Their accomplishments are still remembered as
ione of the prouder chapters in the history of
fAmerican diplomacy, and are frequently cited by
contemporary diplomats as an example of the For-
eign Service at its best.
But the idea that diplomatic professionalism is
synonymous with expertise has come under in-
creasing challenge from a new generation of man-
agement-oriented officials. They argue that a dip-
lomat who is a brilliant linguist or political or eco-
nomic analyst will not necessarily be equally effec-
tive as an ambassador or assistant secretary.
Streamlining the Senior Officer Corps
The clash between these two points of view has
been exacerbated by the Foreign Service Act of
1980, adopted by Congress to streamline the ser-
vice by eliminating what was considered an excess
of senior officers. The idea was to give the Foreign
Service the equivalent of the armed forces' rigid
up-or-out promotion system, which enables com-
petent officers to serve for about 20 years, but
allows only a select few to stay longer and earn a
general's or an admiral's stars.
The law means that many Foreign Service of-
ficers, who previously could serve until age 60 or
65, now are being forced into involuntary retire-
ment in their late 408 or early 50s. Under the
complex new rules, an officer has roughly 20 years
to advance through the ranks and win promotion
into the Senior Foreign Service. Those who do not
make it after a certain number of tries?a process
that Ronald I. Spiers, undersecretary of state for
management, calls "sudden death overtime"?
must retire.
At present, the service's most experienced mid-
level diplomats are being pushed out at the rate of
about 100 a year. While this figure will begin to
fall next year, the wrenching dislocations caused
by the new system have created a severe morale
problem in Foggy Bottom.
Two weeks ago, the White House announced
with great fanfare that the United States and six
other major industrial countries had reached an
agreement to limit the threat of nuclear war by
putting stricter controls on the export of missiles
capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
The U.S. team that spent four years negotiating
the agreement was headed by William H. Guns-
man, 53, of the State Department's politico-mil-
itary affairs bureau. While Gussman was deeply
immersed in the talks that produced what some
senior administration officials called "the most sig-
nificant nonproliferation agreement of the past
decade," he was notified that he had not been pro-
moted and would have to retire later this year.
Thomas F. O'Herron, 47, has devoted 10 of the
21 years he has spent in the Foreign Service to
working on international trade questions; he is
considered one of the State Department's most
knowledgeable experts on the subject. Yet, at a
time when trade issues are moving to the top of
America's foreign policy agenda, O'Herron is be-
ing pushed into retirement.
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"I can't afford to miss any paychecks," said
O'Herron, who has three children in college. "Two
of my daughters are at Bryn Mawr, where the tu-
ition, room and board for each next year will be
$17,000. So the retirement pay I'll be getting?
about $25,000 a year?doesn't allow me to sit
back and relax."
O'Herron, who is a lawyer, feels confident that
he can parlay his trade expertise into a
law practice. But, he added, "While I
don't anticipate any financial hardship,
it's likely to be very different for the
other guys who are pushing 50 and who
have degrees in political theory or Ital-
ian literature. Only so many can go into
consulting. A lot of the others are going
to be scrambling to teach high school."
In belated recognition of this fact, the
State Department now is advising
younger Foreign Service members to
cultivate a second career in their spare
time so they will have some way of pay-
ing their mortgage and tuition bill if
they do not clear the promotion barrier
when they reach their mid-40s.
"Our personnel system makes it more difficult to
develop and retain our best and brightest," said
Gerald Lamberty, president of the American For-
eign Service Association, the official representa-
tive of the diplomats. "The nation will see an un-
easy bleeding of our foreign expertise at a time
when it is more than ever needed. Those who have
acquired it will be gone, and younger officers will
be unwilling to risk their promotion prospects by
taking nonmanagerial assignments."
Many of the service's most talented people have
been reluctant to accept assignments as political
or economic counselors in key capitals such as
Moscow, Paris, Manila or Mexico City, even
though these are posts of great importance to the
mainstream interests of American diplomacy and
formerly were regarded as the glamorous, fast-
track routes toward an ambassadorship. Filling
these jobs takes months of pressuring and cajoling
reluctant officers.
But the department now is having similar prob-
lems in attracting applicants for the job of deputy
economic counselor in Tokyo and the top economic
posts at the American embassies in South Korea,
Argentina and Venezuela.
Instead, ambitious diplomats are in a cutthroat
competition to become a deputy chief of mission at
embassies in the smaller, diplomatic backwaters of
the Third World. Impelling them is the near hys-
terical conviction sweeping through the Foreign
Service that an officer who does not have "man-
agerial experience" noted in his personnel file can-
not be promoted.
According to department officials, in the cycle of
reassignments that began last November, 80 of-
ficers applied for the deputy chief of mission job in
the Bahamas.
Younger officers fear that their promotion
chances will be jeopardized if they undertake the
multiyear commitment required for specialized
study of difficult languages. A recent internal stu-
dy by Monteagle Stearns, a former ambassador to
Greece, concluded that the State Department
faces a critical shortage of diplomats with fluency
in Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese and is
doing very little in its promotion and assignment
policies to encourage younger officers to fill the
void.
Lamberty noted that nearly half of the almost
200 officers facing their last chance for promotion
in 1986 and 1987 had the department's highest
levels of language skills. He said eight spoke Rus-
sian, seven Chinese, six Japanese, six Arabic, sev-
en Indonesian; 19 have various East European lan-
guages other than Russian; eight speak Vietnam-
ese, three Turkish, three Hindi, four Greek, two
Farsi, two Swahili, two Swedish, and others are
fluent in Hebrew, Somali, Burmese, Lao, Malay,
Afrikaans, Cambodian and Dari, a local language of
Afghanistan.
The Need for Managerial Talent
Spiers and his boss, Secretary of State George
P. Shultz, make no secret of their belief that seek-
ing people with managerial talent for the depart-
ment's top jobs is the correct course. One justifi-
cation for this is the fact that diplomacy in the
postwar era has become so complex that many of
its specialized functions are handled not by the
State Department but by the many other agencies
such as the Defense and Treasury departments
and the Central Intelligence Agency.
In the typical American embassy today, less
than 30 percent of the personnel belong to the
State Department. As a result, proponents of the
managerial approach argue, an ambassador's real
task is to gain control over the staff and ensure
that it works together harmoniously.
David D. Newsom, who during the Carter ad-
ministration was undersecretary for political af-
fairs, the department's highest career post,
summed up the situation this way:
"When an ambassador goes abroad, he carries a
letter designating him as the president's personal
representative in the country to which he is ac-
credited. But the letter is not an invitation to com-
mand. The experienced diplomat knows that the
letter is only an invitation to negotiate with the
other agencies that have a toehold in his embassy."
Spiers noted that he has seen the situation from
both sides. After years of specializing in arms con-
trol, he served as ambassador to Turkey and later
to Pakistan. Reflecting on these experiences, he
said:
"There are many jobs?deputy assistant secre-
taries, office directors, economic and intelligence
analysts?where you want specialists. Similarly,
there always will be a role at the senior level for
people who are deep specialists in critical lan-
guages. In the light of the Stearns report, we are
allowing younger officers who want to study the
hard languages to forgo some normal assignment
requirements so they will have more time for stu-
dy.
"But there comes a transitional or break point
where something else is needed. We used to
choose ambassadors almost exclusively from po-
litical officers, and most couldn't manage their way
out of a paper bag. It forced us to realize that am-
bassadors and assistant secretaries should not nec-
essarily be specialists. No one is going to become
our ambassador in Tokyo simply because he
speaks excellent Japanese. That's more important
for the political counselor than for the ambassador.
"When I went to Turkey, I didn't know three
words of Turkish. It would have been better if I
did. But that wasn't the main job requirement. I
had maybe 14 subordinates who could speak Tur-
kish for me. My job was to sort out a big mission?
one that had major non-State Department func-
Ceid
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tions like a huge military assistance program and a
huge narcotics control program?and see that the
various parts did their jobs without getting at each
other's throats."
Other senior diplomats, while acknowledging
that there is some merit in Spiers' arguments, still
are concerned that the pendulum might be swing-
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eign Service to expect that Congress, at a time of
extreme budgetary austerity, will back away from
its insistence that the service slim down and end
the old system that frequently resulted in =pro-
moted senior officers becoming so-called "corridor
walkers" looking for something to do.
Yet, despite these realities, there is no question
that the present emphasis on a stripped-down,
management-oriented Foreign Service threatens
to deprive the department of some precious as-
sets.
Nowhere has the decline in expertise been more
evident than in Soviet affairs. In marked contrast
to the postwar era, the Reagan administration has
spent six years dealing with Moscow without one
top-flight Soviet expert at the senior levels of the
State Department.
On the Soviet side, political leaders long have
relied on their professional diplomatic corps to
produce personnel whose influence on policy has
been far greater than that of any career diplomat
in this country. This is particularly true in regard
to relations with the United States.
Andrei Gromyko's three-decade career as So-
viet foreign minister followed considerable first-
hand American experience in Washington and at
the United Nations. Anatoliy Dobrynin, whose 24
years as ambassador here gave him legendary ac-
cess to the Washington establishment, now serves
at the pinacle of power in Moscow, and appears to
be Mikhail Gorbachev's most important adviser on
the United States. Alexander Bessmertnykli, a
former Dobrynin deputy here, appears to have a
similar status in relation to Foreign Minister
Eduard Shevardnadze.
By contrast, both Ambassador Arthur A. Hart-
man, who recently left Moscow after a five-year
stint, and Rozanne L. Ridgway, the assistant sec-
retary for European affairs, are highly regarded
diplomats of the generalist stripe; but they have
had to deal with the Soviet Union on a learn-as-
you-go basis.
Hartman has now been succeeded in Moscow by
the department's most senior Soviet specialist,
Jack Matlock, 57, who has spent most of his career
working on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Matlock is a fluent Russian speaker and scholar of
Russian literature.
In seeking help from a Foreign Service that cur-
rently is thin in Soviet experts, they and Shultz
have had to lean heavily on two up-and-coming but
relatively junior officers: Thomas W. Simons Jr.,
48, Ridgway's deputy for Eastern Europe, and
Mark R. Parris, 36, director of Soviet affairs.
Simons, who holds a BA from Yale and an MA
and PhD from Harvard, has been a political officer
in Poland and the Soviet Union. In his State De-
partment records, he lists Polish but not Russian
among the languages in which he has at least rea-
sonable fluency. However, other officials say that
he is able to converse easily in Russian and works
regularly to improve his proficiency. Parris, who
served in Moscow from 1982 to 1985, ending his
tour as political counselor, is considered to have a
good command of Russian.
Both are regarded by their colleagues as able
officers who are expected to rise much higher in
the department hierarchy. But at this point they
cannot represent the State Department with the
authority that a Thompson, Kennan or Bohlen
once were able to bring to internal administration
policy debates about the superpower relationship
that is the principal concern of U.S. diplomacy.
NEXT: Underqualified ambassadors
ing too far. Stearns, currently a diplomat in res-
idence at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the
Smithsonian Institution, said:
"Embassies are too big today for ambassadors to
be able to ignore their management responsibil-
ities and busy themselves with being scholars of
the local culture. Still, the one thing an ambassa-
dor can supply to the U.S. government that no one
else can is a sense of the foreign environment in
which U.S. policy initiatives must function. That
requires a very high degree of sensitivity to the
country and a profound knowledge of the country
in all its aspects."
"Ideally an ambassador should be both a man-
ager and an expert," added John D. Scanlan, an
East European and Soviet specialist who currently
is ambassador to Yugoslavia. "But if I had to
choose between the two qualities, I'd pick the one
with substantive knowledge and leave the manage-
ment to a good DCM (deputy chief of inissionj. I
wouldn't want a superb manager who doesn't
know much about the country. In the countries
I've served in?particularly in Eastern Europe?
an ambassador like that wouldn't be of much use."
Another former ambassador still serving in the
department put his criticism of the managers-first
philosophy more bluntly. "It's a lot of crap," he
said.
Those who prefer senior officers who are man-
agers or at least good generalists also contend that
specialization can create problems of excessive
parochialism. In that respect, they say, the later
career of Loy Henderson is instructive.
Henderson was nudged out of Soviet.affairs dur-
ing World War II when President Roosevelt, seek-
ing to deflect Moscow's complaints about Hender-
son's tough, anti-Soviet attitudes, made him the
U.S. minister to Iraq. The resilient Henderson
quickly became the dominant figure in what would
grow into the Bureau of Near Eastern and South
Asian Affairs; and under his leadership, it devel-
oped qualities that illustrate both the strengths
and weaknesses of area specialization.
Under Henderson, the bureau became the do-
main of the department's Arabists?a term that
originally applied to Arabic-speaking officers, but
that took on other meanings when Israel came into
being in 1948. The Mideast specialists led by Hen-
derson pushed the department into such open op-
position to creation of a Jewish state that Presi-
dent Truman was forced to repudiate it.
For years afterward, long after support for Is-
rael had become a major tenet of bipartisan nation-
al policy, the bureau continued to be dominated by
officers who insisted that Israel was a detriment to
U.S. interests and had no right to exist. Although
such views no longer are heard in the bureau, be-
cause of its earlier reputation it remains the object
of lingering suspicion among Israel's supporters.
Many officers feel that the 1980 act's emphasis
on preventing an oversupply of senior diplomats
frustrates efforts to accommodate the talents of
both specialists and generalists.
Spiers said, "If a man is performing capably at
the level of a first secretary of embassy, I'd like to
see him be able to stay and keep working at that
rank." But. he added, it is unrealistic for the For-
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RED
WASHINGTON POST
28 April 1987
AMERICA'S FADING FOREIGN SERVICE
Third of a Four-Part Series
Appointing
Loyalists
As Envoys
By John M. Goshko
Washington Post Staff Writer
Early last year, Peter E. Voss,
then vice chairman of the U.S.
Postal Service Board of Govern-
ors, decided that he wanted to be
an ambassador, and obliging
White House officials, after scan-
ning the list of pleasant Euro-
pean capitals, told the State De-
partment that they thought the
Netherlands was a country well-
suited to Voss' ambitions.
The department protested
that Voss, who was cochairman
of Ronald Reagan's 1980 Ohio
campaign, didn't have the best
qualifications for representing
the United States in a country
where it has important strategic
and trade interests. But the
White House rejected these pro-
tests and proceeded with its plan
to nominate Voss for the ambas-
sadorship?until it was discov-
ered that Voss had a prior en-
gagement with a federal judge.
Last May, a major probe of
Postal Service contracting ille-
galities resulted in Voss pleading
guilty to charges of expense
fraud and accepting kickbacks.
He was sentenced to four years
in prison and fined $11,000.
Until now?the administration
has managed to keep quiet the
fact that it almost sent a soon-
to-be-convicted felon to rem-
sent the United States in an im-
portant West European capital.
But the incident illustrates what
has become an increasingly con-
tentious issue within the Foreign
Service.
That is the feeling that the
Reagan White House has abused
its prerogative to name the pres-
ident's ambassadors by filling 40
percent of the nation's 148 dip-
lomatic missions around the
world with political loyalists
rather than career diplomats.
Foreign Service officers contend
that the White House has unfair-
ly blocked deserving profession-
als from promotion and devalued
the quality of U.S. overseas rep-
resentation.
The Voss case was not an iso-
lated incident. Within days of his
guilty plea, the administration
was embarrassed by the forced
resignation of William A. Wilson,
a political appointee who had
been serving as Reagan's emis-
sary to the Vatican. Wilson left
after it was revealed that he had
engaged in a number of bizarre
indiscretions, including a secret
1985 meeting with Libyan lead-
ier Moammar Gadhafi at the time the administration
was pressuring its European allies to isolate Libya.
Sources familiar with the case said that for reasons
never made clear, Wilson, a former oil company exec-
utive and longtime friend of Reagan, repeatedly ignored
direct orders from superiors in Washington to break off
unauthorized contacts with Libyan officials. Instead,
they said, he apparently exploited his relationship with
Reagan to mislead Italian Foreign Minister Giulio An-
dreotti into thinking that the White House wanted the
Italian government's help in arranging the meeting with
Gadhafi.
Another well-connected Reagan loyalist, Faith Ryan
Whittlesey, fared somewhat better. She has held on to
her post as ambassador to Switzerland, but only after
Attorney General Edwin Meese III decided there
wasn't sufficient evidence to pursue a criminal inves-
tigation of charges that she misused an $80,000 embas-
sy fund raised from private donors and hired the son of
one donor for a $62,400-a-year job at the Bern embas-
sy.
The Whittlesey case forced Secretary of State
George P. Shultz to decree a ban on future solicitation
and use of privately donated funds to cover embassy
expenses such as entertaining.
Not all of Reagan's political ambassadors have been
embarrassments, of course. Some have performed com-
petently, and at least one?Arthur F. Burns, former
chairman of the Federal Reserve Board?won high
marks from, professional diplomats for his skillful rep-
resentation of the United States during four years in
West Germany.
Tradition of Noncareer Appointments
Appointees whose qualifications are limited to their
connections or the size of their election contributions
are not a phenomenon unique to the Reagan adminis-
tration. Former president Jimmy Carter, who made a
special effort to appoint ambassadors of distinction and
set up a special review panel to assess their credentials,
reserved a number of embassies for Georgia cronies
and people who had been generous to his campaign.
-
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To which *tow replied: "That's hos,...r it is with ;Wem-
bassy."
Last November, Ronald I. Spiers, undersecretary of
state for management, provoked the ire of the White
House staff by making the same point in an unusually
blunt speech to the National Academy of Public Admin-
istration.
Spiers noted that since 1981, when 75 percent of
U.S. ambassadors were career diplomats, the figure
had fallen to 60 percent. He added:
"This is a low point for the past four decades. A net
reduction of 23 senior positions filled by career person-
nel since 1981 makes managing the Foreign Service
difficult indeed. . . . Recently we have lost a number of
superb officers who spent a lifetime preparing for sen-
ior appointments, only to see those prospects dissolve
at the last minute."
He charged that the quality of many administration
political appointees "makes it painful to recognize the
lack of respect this implies for our profession" and
concluded:
"A disturbing trend is the use of Foreign Service po-
sitions for political patronage. I believe this will have a
corrosive effect on the career service. Years ago, gen-
erals were commissioned on this basis. No one today
would argue for appointing a political supporter to com-
mand the 24th Infantry Division, although in peaceful
times, and with a good deputy, the division would prob-
ably survive as well as our embassies." ?
Elaborating later in an interview, Spiers said: "The
White House has made clear that they don't want me
talking about this, but it's not really possible to run a
rational career personnel system when you don't know
1 how many top jobs will be available for officers to aspire
to. I'd almost rather be told that the Foreign Service
will get only a flat 50 percent of ambassadorial appoint-
ments. Then you'd at least have some parameters to
work within.
"I have 25 ambassadors coming up for reassignment
this summer?all of them good people and no jobs for
them because 23 more senior positions in the 4:lepart-
ment and abroad are being held by outside political ap-
pointments than was the case in January 1981," he said.
"The blockage that this creates has a cascade effect
down the ranks that's not helpful to retaining younger
officers who see a likelihood that their career aspira-
tions will be blocked."
Robert Tuttle, White House personnel director, de-
nied that the Reagan administration had appointed un-
qualified persons to ambassadorships and insisted that
many of the president's political appointees are fluent in
foreign languages and have extensive knowledge of the
countries to which they are accredited.
"This administration came to Washington to make a
difference, and it has been extraordinarily successful in
coming up with people who are extremely well qualified
to be ambassadors," he said. "They got their jobs be-
cause they are qualified and not because they are
friends of the president. There are people outside the
Foreign Service who know about foreign affairs, and it's
not right to infer that appointment of a few well-qual-
ified outsiders should be a cause of poor morale in the
Foreign Service." ?
Americans have been arguing about what makes a
good ambassador since 1778, when Benjamin Franklin
was dispatched to the French court to enlist the aid that
became a major factor in helping the rebellious colonies
win independence.
Franklin was the progenitor of a long line of inspired
amateurs whose diplomatic skills have been displayed
most notably in recent years by men such as W. Averell
Harriman, David K.E. Bruce and Ellsworth Bunker?all
outsiders who came to be accepted by the career ser-
vice as revered figures in the pantheon of American
diplomatic history.
TY Cd11.11 AllU 4 WILIILL1IC LU Ube IL nave lung nimpeu
would-be ambassadors win appointments. So have po-
litical connections. For example, Julian M. Niemczyk,
the ambassador to Czechoslovakia, is a former head of
the "ethnic" division of the Republican National Com-
mittee and a retired Army officer. To the dismay of the
Foreign Service, the White House picked him ahead of
Saul Polansky, one of the State Department's most sen-
ior and most respected specialists on central and east-
ern Europe.
Many political appointees have been content to enjoy
the ambassadorial life and leave the diplomatic work to
their Foreign Service subordinates. However, the Rea-
gan administration also has been noted for a goodly
number of political ambassadors who have seemed sur-
prised that the countries to which they are accredited
don't do things according to Reaganite precepts and
who have not shrunk from publicly scolding foreign gov-
ernments about perceived shortcomings.
A number of ambassadors over the past six years?
among them John A. Gavin in Mexico, Evan G. Gal-
braith in France, Paul H. Robinson Jr. in Canada, Curtin
Winsor Jr. in Costa Rica and David B. Funderburk in
Romania?have spent much of their time in noisy feuds
with the press and officialdom of their host countries
and, when Washington tried to rein them in, with their
State Department superiors.
Winsor, a business consultant who served for a time
in the Foreign Service, became known among Costa
Ricans as "the cancer specialist" because of his constant
denunciations of the leftist government in neighboring
Nicaragua as "a cancer" that should be excised by mil-
itary intervention.
In October 1983, when the administration was
weighing whether to invade Grenada, it wanted to know
if the action would be supported by other island states
of the eastern Caribbean. However, the ambassador to
Barbados and the neighboring islands, Milan D. BM, a
former Nebraska state highway commissioner, was re-
garded?as one official who took part in the planning
put it?as "so incoherent and befuddled" that neither
the State Department nor the Pentagon was willing to
depend on him. So Shultz sent a veteran career diplo-
mat, Francis J. McNeil, on a secret mission to sound out
the views of regional leaders.
A year earlier, when the South Atlantic war broke
out between Argentina and Britain, Reagan's first
ambassador to London, John J. Louis Jr., a Johnson's
Wax heir, was traveling in the United States. Ac-
cording to several State Department officials, the
department, whose initial inclination was to order
him back to his post immediately, was reminded that
Louis was regarded by the British as an amiable but
utterly ineffectual diplomat. On reflection, the offi-
cials said, it was decided that the wiser course was to
keep Louis out of London until the crisis had wound
down, leaving the diplomacy to his highly regarded
deputy chief of mission, career diplomat Edward J.
Streator Jr.
In the past, such situations would cause career
officers to do little more than grit their teeth and
privately remind each other of the famous Foreign
Service story about Malcolm Toon, an outspoken.
retired ambassador who, commenting on Louis' nom-
ination as ambassador to Britain, described him as a.
man "whose only qualification for the job is the fact
that he speaks English."
During a meeting several years ago, the admiral
commanding the U.S. Mediterranean fleet told Toon
that he wanted to become an ambassador after he
retired from the Navy, Toon shot back that after his
retirement from the Foreign Service, he wanted to
command an aircraft carrier.
The admiral said that was ridiculous, because years
of training and experience were necessary to acquire
tz4:47't
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In the postwar era, the slimmest pickings for career
diplomats before the Reagan administration were in the
early 1960s when John F. Kennedy, who had limited
regard for the Foreign Service, sought to infuse over-
seas embassies with new blood from academic and jour-
nalistic circles.
But while career officers resented what Kennedy
did, they grudgingly acknowledge that many of his
outside appointees?academicians such as Edwin 0.
Reischauer in Japan and former diplomats such as
George F. Kennan in Yugoslavia?had impressive
foreign policy credentials. The difference between
then and now, they add, is that the same can't be said
for most of Reagan's choices.
Distrust of the Establishment
"This administration has been very atypical both in
terms of the number of political appointments it has
made and its tendency to keep them on long past the
point where other administrations would have sent
them back to their old jobs," said Diego C. Asencio, a
retired diplomat who heads the Una Chapman Cox
Foundation, which is devoted to strengthening the For-
eign Service.
"It even is atypical in terms of Republican adminis-
trations," Asencio added. Its appointees are not the old
eastern establishment Republicans with which the For-
eign Service has been accustomed to working, but peo-
ple with a radical distrust of the eastern establishment
and of the Foreign Service."
Career officers who worked under Whittlesey dur-
ing her two separate tours at the embassy in Switzer-
land say her problems resulted from what one private-
ly called "a feeling of paranoia that she was sur-
rounded by liberals who were out to get her. If you
wrote her a speech on the most innocuous subject,
she'd go over every line looking for Marxist influ-
ences. She honestly believed that there was no one
she could trust except those people she brought into
the embassy from outside."
Such suspicions are common among "movement con-
servatives" who, despite Reagan's hard-line policies,
have waged an unrelenting war against the State De-
partment throughout his presidency. The activist part
of that campaign has been led most noticeably by Sen.
Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who has delayed Senate approval
of scores of Reagan's ambassadorial and departmental
nominees in an effort to force more conservative ap-
pointments.
In return, 22 of Reagan's politically appointed am-
bassadors publicly endorsed Helms for reelection to the
Senate in 1984, an unprecedented public gesture that
caused Shultz to send a cable to all embassies stating
that partisan political activity was inappropriate for
American ambassadors.
Many intellectual underpinnings of the Helms cam-
paign come from the Heritage Foundation, the conser-
vative think tank whose theories have greatly influ-
enced Reagan's domestic policies.
Foundation analysts concede that they have had
much less success in winning serious attention for their
foreign policy ideas?for example, a proposal by James
T. Hackett, a former Foreign Service officer, to fill all
State Department policy-making positions with political
appointees who share the president's "philosophy and
objectives" rather than career diplomats "who often
have little or no commitment to the political -philosophy. ,
of his party."
But if Shultz has kept most aspects of foreign policy
on a course that is more centrist and pragmatic than
the ideologies want, he has had to pay a price by ac-
cepting what George S. Vest, director general of the ?
Foreign Service, calls *the larger political role inserted
into the system by this administration."
Secretary of State's Limited Power
So Shultz has not fought the White House insistence
on retaining a large number of ambassadorships as pa-
tronage plums. He has generally accepted the tendency
of many political appointees to think of themselves as
representatives of the president rather than subordi-
nates of the secretary of state.
Usually, when one of these ambassadors has become
too difficult to control?when a Funderburk denounces
as hypocritical the State Department's tendency to
soft-pedal the dictatorial practices of Romania's com-
munist regime or when a Galbraith publicly lectures
France's socialist government?Shultz has managed
over time to ease them back into private life.
However, as John Gavin's five-year tenure at the em-
bassy in Mexico City made clear, Shultz has had to
maintain a well-developed instinct about which political
ambassadors he could and couldn't fire.
When Gavin went to Mexico in 1981, he was known.
like Reagan at an earlier time, primarily as a former
grade-B movie actor. The Mexican press sarcastically
suggested that an appropriate response would be to
send Cantinflas, the comedian who gained international
fame in the film "Around the World in 80 Days," as
Mexico's ambassador to Washington.
But Gavin did have some qualifications. He spoke
near-perfect Spanish learned from his Mexican-born
mother, had majored in Latin American economics and
history at Stanford and, having worked in Mexico as an
actor and businessman, had extensive first-hand knowl-
edge of the country.
More important, he was a close friend of Reagan and
of William P. Clark, who served for a time as Reagan's
national security adviser. That meant Gavin knew Rea-
gan's political views intimately and, unlike many other
ambassadors, had the clout to bypass normal State De-
partment channels and take a problem directly to the -
White House.
Yet, once he pt on the job, Gavin frequently seemed
intent on trying to break all the rules of diplomacy by
ignoring State Department objections and engaging in
name-calling feuds with key officials of Mexico's left-
of-center government.
By the time he left in 1985, Gavin often was cited by
conservatives as a model political ambassador. In par-
ticular, his admirers applauded his pugnacious deter-'
mbiation to respond in kind to every Mexican criticism
of the United States and to keep matters such as the
fight against narcotics trafficking at the top of the Mex-
ican-American agenda.
He was able to do these things, his supporters argue,
because he was not a career diplomat concerned with
smoothing the sharp edges of policies and messages the
Mexicans might not like. Instead, they say, as a certi-,
fled Reaganite with ties to the inner White House cir-
cle, he was able to give the Mexicans a first-hand look-
at the president's attitudes toward their country:
Nevertheless, a story told in Mexico City indicates
that the Mexicans didn't particularly appreciate the
experience. At a dinner before his. departure, Gavin .
made a graceful farewell speech. But according to the
story, when it came time for a response, the remarksin 7
praise of Gavin came not from the senior Mekican of-
ficials present but from Cantinflas?a sign that the
Mexicans haan't Chabeed their inigls. ??/te fifelestr
of his tenure about what would have been an appropri-
ate exchange of diplomatic representation.
NEXT: Blacks and Women
a
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) Yvonne Thayer probably could write the
book on what it is like to be a Foreign Service
wife: It is a *ay of life that she's seen from
every angle.
In the early 1970s, while in Brazil on a
graduate fellowship, she married Randolph
Reed, a Foreign Service officer at the U.S.,
Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, and settled into the.
routine that long was the traditional lot of a
diplomat's ' dependent wife?balancing the
management of a household with the social
functions and charitable work expected of ev-
ery spouse.
Then, in the mid-1970s, Thayer was ac-
cepted into the Foreign Service herself and
became half of what the State Department
calls a "tandem couple." For 10 years, she
grappled with the conflicting demands of pur-
suing a career while seeking assignments that
would take her to the same places as her hus-
band and allow time out to have and care for.
two children.
Now the cycle has come full circle for;
Thayer. Her husband is one of many career!
diplomats who failed to cross the new hurdles
into the Senior Foreign Service and are being I
forced into retirement. While Reed ponders -.
the problems_ of developing.. a new _career-.
Thayer, at 39, is a Foreign Service officer
with a dependent spouse.
"It's not the kind of situation where you're
thinking about becoming an ambassador or
. even about less ambitious career moves," said,
Thayer, who currently works on Central
American refugee problems. "My husband's
pension annuity is not all that great, and right
now our plans involve more immediate mat-
ters: making sure that I keep working so that,
we have an income." .
George E. Moose, 42, has spent the last 20.
years?his entire adult life?in the Foreign
Service, This is unusual in an organization in
which blacks like Moose normally do not stay.
long. Even more unusual is the fact that
Moose has been an ambassador. It was only a
ON PAGE Psi
ARTICLE APPEAftED
WASHINGTON POST
29 April 1987
AMERICA'S FADING FOREIGN SERVICE Last of a Four-Part Sams
Tackling a White Male Bastion
By John M. Goshko
Washington Post She Writer
beginner's posting to the tiny West African state
Benin, but his colleagues seem certain that Moose is
destined to hold big-time ambassadorships and senior
Ste Department posts in the years ahead.
"George has been marked as a winner; he's on his
way," said -Donald F. McHenry, who served TS ambas-
sador to the United Nations in the Carter administra-
tion.
Moose is understandably reluctant to discuss his sit-
uation. But he did say that many of the breaks that
came his way have been denied to other blacks "not
because of any conscious racism but by the natural.
workings of a system that is instinctively clubby for
people of similar backgrounds and simultaneously so
competitive that it doesn't dispose them to be generous
or concerned for people outside their little group."
"It's a system that makes blacks feel like outsiders?
like they are being isolated and looked down upon," he
said. "So it should come as no surprise when so many
blacks finally say, 'This is costing me too much in terms
of the wear and tear on my psyche- I'd rather go else-
where.'"
Finding ways to satisfy the professional needs of wo-
men and minorities is an enormous challenge to the
Foreign Service, one it has only begun to try to meet.
Senior diplomats?products of simpler times, when
most women had limited career ambitions and minor-
ities were rarely members of the Foreign Service?
have had a difficult time. taking the challenge seriously,
according to many younger diplomats.
The case of Eleanor Hicks, 44, is instructive. She
walked away from a promising Foreign Service ca-
reer?a surprise and disappointment to many who re-
member that only a short time ago Hicks seemed a liv-
ing recruitment poster for a new type of American dip-
lomat: an attractive, charming and brainy person who
also was a woman and a black.
In the 1970s, while serving as U.S. consul in Nice,
' she became a celebrity. She was cultivated by the local
establishment and doted on by the French news media,
which ran countless reports about every aspect of her
life from her fluency in languages to her after-hours
fondness for singing with local rock groups.
Yet, in 1983, after 17 years in the Foreign Service,
Hicks quit. She did so, she said, partly for personal rea-
sons. But, she added, she also was influenced by a feel-
ing that "political and philosophical differences were
impinging on evaluations of my work?that the percep-
tions I brought to some subjects as a woman and a black
clashed with the preconceived notions of some of my
superiors."
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"I can't say that I was discriminated against because I
was a woman or black, but perhaps the publicity that I
received in Europe caused some people to regard me as
not a serious person," she said. In any case, having de-
cided that she was at a dead end, 'Hicks went back to
her home town of Cincinnati, where, as associate pro-
fessor of political science at the University oi Cincin-
nati, she has discovered that "there is life after the For-
eign Service."
For most of this century, the Foreign Service was
the province of what historians of U.S. diplomacy called
"aristocratic amateurs"?socially well-connected people
with the independent incomes that were necessary to
supplement the service's parsimonious salaries and
travel allowances. Gradually, A more professional ap-
proach took hold, but as late as the eve of World War II,
the Foreign Service was dominated by people who
shared the narrow caste attitudes of the Protestant
monied class.
The tendency of its members to regard the sevice as
a "gentlemen's club" was evident in the way in which
the oral exam taken by all candidates for admission was
used for years as a device for screening out applicants
regarded as socially unacceptable. It was applied with
particular vigor to bar the entry of Jews.
Anti-Semitism was such a pervasively undisguised
force in the Foreign Service during the prewar years
that several historians have ascribed part of the blame
for the flohieaust to the State Department's wartime
soft-pedaling of rumors about Nazi atrocities and its
oppositiohlo permitting Jewish refugees to enter the
United States in sizable numbers.
After the war, the Foreign Service increased its size
and professionalism in response to America's new su-
perpower status. Jews and other ethnic Americans be-
gan coming in, and recruiters started looking beyond
the Ivy League in their search for new talent. But,
while the base was broadened, it remained essentially a
white male bastion?one that as recently as the early
1970s was gripped by a major internal debate about
whether a dependent wife's social graces should be not-
ed on her husband's efficiency reports.
Phyllis Oakley, now the State Department's deputy
spokeswoman, joined the service in 1957, but after
marrying a fellow officer, she recalled, "I unquestion-
ingly followed the unwritten rule that said I had to re-
sign." It was not until the 1970s when this practice had
been discarded that she was able to come back "as one
of the oldest junior officers in captivity." Oakley said her
"wilderness years" experiences in teaching and working
with the YMCA "may have made me a better-rounded
person, but they certainly didn't enhance my ability to
compete with men who spent those years gaining first-
hand experience as diplomats." ?
Recruitment a Lack of Follow-Through
Beginning with blacks in the 1960s and women in the
1970s, the service has been struggling to break free of
its ingrained old attitudes and make these groups feel
welcome and useful to the practice of U.S. diplomacy.
But, despite a resort to a number of special recruitment
programs aimed at minorities and women, everyone
involved says that the results have been disappointing. ,.
The record is especially poor with respect to blacks,
who are substantially underrepresented at all levels of
the service and who account for a disproportionate
number of the officers who fail to achieve tenure after
completing their probationary early years or who stand
at the bottom of each promotion class. According to the
most recent available figures, only 12 blacks are among
the 670 members of the Senior Foreign Service.
The situation recently prompted Ronald I. Spiers,
undersecretary of state for management, and George S.
Vest, director general of the Foreign Service, to an-
nounce plans for more vigorous recruiting and "the ap-
plication of real affirmative action in the assignment
process."
Black officers, many of whom are reluctant to be
identified, counter that they have heard it all before. As
one put it, "Every few years there is a reinventing of
the wheel that concludes more has to be done about the
special problems of blacks. It's all well-intentioned and
sincere, but because managers and administrations
change so frequently, there never seems to be a sus-
tained follow-through."
The sense of alienation among black Foreign Service
_officers is so strong that several recently filed a class-
action suit charging the State Department with system-
atic racial discrimination. The suit voiced complaints
that white officers tend to denigrate the skills of black
subordinates because many of them entered the For-
eign Service under the relaxed rules of special recruit-
ment programs; that blacks are ghettoized by being
assigned primarily to Africa and Latin American coun-
tries with large black populations; that they are denied
postings to other regions such as the Middle East be-
cause of a feeling that "blacks are not effective there,"
and that, in domestic assignments, they are pushed by
subtle discrimination patterns into jobs and bureaus
that offer the fewest chances for advancement.
Many note that the few blacks who have attained
important foreign policy positions usually came from
the outside rather than rising through the ranks. The
most notable case was McHenry, who began as a For-
eign Service officer but who quit for a career as a think-
tank scholar before being sent to the United Nations by
President Jimmy Carter.
McHenry, now a professor at Georgetown Univer-
sity, said his experience illustrates 'the need to teach
young blacks how to build political alliances if they're
going to be on the outside and how to maneuver suc-
cessfully within the bureaucracy if they're going to
work from within."
"Too many blacks go to African affairs, either be-
cause they're interested in it or because the system
pigeonholes them there," he said. "But it's the bottom
priority. You may be a world-beater. But no one in au-
thority sees you and gets to know your abilities."
Citing his Foreign Service background and that of
younger, rising black officers such as Moose, McHenry
said: "There is a classic success route in the Foreign
Service. The way you get breaks is to be assigned while
a young officer as a staff assistant to someone high up
who will be sensitive to your talents. That happened to
me. It happened to George Moose [who became an aide
to Undersecretary of State Philip C. Habib). It hap-
pened to ahnost all the successful white officers, and
steps must be taken to assure that the opportunity is
made available to & lot more blacks than just the occa-
sional Don McHenry."
Continued
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For all its difficulties, the department's minority
problem seems relatively Simple in comparison to the
complications of regearing U.S. diplomatic practice to
the changing situation of women, whether they are
wives, Foreign Service office* or both.
There are the spouses Of older officers who married
when Foreign Service wives Were expected to further
their husband's careers by being gracious, well-spoken,
hostesses and charity workers. Now, Mese women have
seen the rules abruptly changed in ways that make
them feel scorned and unappreciated.
Their resentment has forced the State Department
to explore ways of finding employment abroad for de-
pendent spouses and to suggest that the government
pay them a stipend for work formerly contributed on a
volunteer basis. However, such ideas have evoked little
sympathy from a Congress preoccupied with budgetary
austerity or a public unwilling to pay people for partic-
ipating in what it sees as the glamorous, black-tie whirl
of diplomacy.
Then there are the female Foreign Service officers
who, unlike blacks, have responded to the department's
recruiting campaigns in large numbers. This has forced
the department to deal with the same problems?equal
advancement opportunities, sexual harassment and al-
legations of male chauvinism?that have become com-
mon personnel issues in business and the professions.
Problems of 'Tandem Couples'
But there also are situations unique to the service,
such as accommodating the needs of tandem couples.
As Yvonne Thayer noted
"When problems or conflicts result, there still is an
innate tendency to expect that the women will make the
sacrifices. Everyone says they are all in favor of women
having careers as diplomats. But when the kids get sick,
it's automatically assumed that it's the wife and not the
husband who will stay home and take care of them."
As couples rise in rank, it becomes much harder to
match them with jobs commensurate with their grade
and experience. To give them automatic preferences
for job openings evokes charges of reverse discrimina-
tion from other aspirants. And, when one member of
the couple achieves managerial rank, such as an ambas-
sador or deputy chief of mission, federal laws and rules
against nepotism bar their spouses from working under
their control.
"The solutions that we can offer aren't very satisfac-
tory," Vest said. 'About all we can do in most cases is
offer the couple assignments in adjoining countries or
strike a deal where if one takes a leave of absence, he
or she will be the one that gets first preference on the
couple's next assignments."
Until now, most tandem couples have settled for such
arrangements. When it sent Carleton Coon to Nepal
and Jane Coon to Bangladesh, the Reagan administra-
tion was able to boast that it had set the precedent of
the first husband-and-wife ambassadors from the career
ranks to serve in neighboring couneries.
But this approach is encountering increasing resis-
tance from younger couples, who are more reluctant to
endure forced separations or make- choices about
whether to place marriage above career. Many say pri-
vately that if they find their advancement blocked by
the need for one or the other to endure an involuntary
-
leave; they will leave the service. - I
"There is no perfect answer for two peopfblanting-
interesting and mobile careers," said Sharon ,Weiner,
who is beginning an assignment as Libya desk
"You always have to be willing to make comp
and to think a few moves ahead."
She and her husband have been doing that since they
joined the service in 1978. She has a doctorate in inter-
national relations. He is a lawyer with a special interest
in labor law. "We joined because we thought that dip-
lomatic Work would allow us to pursue our special in-
terests and our desire to travel better than if he had
gone into a law firm and I had stayed with my original
intention to be a university teacher and researcher,"
she said.
"We have had no separations or situations where one
of us had to take leave without pay," she said. "We ex-
pect that eventually there will come a time when we
and .the system will clash. But up to now, we haven't
had to face it."
The most difficult personnel Problem facing the For-
eign Service, though, inyolves the growing number of
wives who want to pursue careers outside the Foreign
Service but who find they cannot make much. of a ca-
reer in the private sector if till& must take frequent
leaves of absence to accompani their husbands on as-
signments abroad. The increasing reluctance of wcirk-
ing wives to follow their husbands abroad applits )lot
only to undesirable Third- World countriesbut Sao to
once-coveted postings to the glamor capitals of Europe
.?
or key posts like Moscow and Peking. ?
? In some cases, this has-meant late-career problims
for officers who have invested many years in the For-
eign Service. James S. Landberg, 50, who has been dep-
uty director of the office of Mexican affairs, must retire
because he was not promoted into the Senior Foreign
Service. He believes that his chances were hurt be-
cause he took several extensions of his service in Wash-
ington in order to accommodate his wife's career in real
estate and local politics.
"I had several overseas opportunities that might have
improved my promotion chances substantially," he said.
"But I knew that my wife had become frustrated by liv-
ing overseas where she couldn't work. In the, early
years of our marriage, she accommodated to My job
needs. I felt that now I owed her the same. It came
down to a question of whether my career or my mar-
riage was more important."
Lawrence B. Lesser, 46, another of the group Oat
did not win promotion, also found domestic problems
clashing with his career aspiratinns. During his last las-
signment as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. EMIThe-
sy in Bangladesh, his wife remained here. '
"When we were married in the 1960s, she efla??tr-
aged me to join the service," he said. "But over ,the
years, our interests diverged. She is a painter rand a
teacher and wants to establish herself in the Walling-
ton area. So when I went to Dacca, she didn't alecont-
pany me. Now we are separated."
Continued
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The specter of separation or divorce looms as an
even bigger problem among younger officers who have
grown up in an atmosphere in which the two-carr
marriage has become the accepted norm. This raisin
the stakes to the point at which the Foreign Service
soon might find itself severely curtailed in its ability to
recruit and retain the coming generation of potential
diplomats. As one who asked not to be identified de-
scribed the situation:
"My wife is a lawyer. Her attitude is that she didn't
go to school for seven years to sit around in Quito or La
Paz letting her skills go unused. The other wives, who
have invested years in getting an MBA or an arthitec-
ture degree or whatever, feel the same way. For me
and for many other officers of my generation, it means
that we very likely will have to choose betwees our
marriage and our career?and we'll have to make that
choice very soon while there's still time to do Isime-
thing else."
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