The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2023

38 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL women who have chosen to serve their country in the work of foreign affairs, we believe we are particularly qualified to help in that search. As an independent organization, we intend to keep putting the questions. We look forward to finding the answers together, in the interest of our common cause. —AFSA Board of Directors, February 1970 Paving the Way for Unionization; “Who Do You Think You Are?” Idar Rimestad, a career officer, gave [an account] in a 1990 interview. “I took Lan- nonWalker aside and said, ‘You see that certificate on the wall, signed by the presi- dent? I think you will see my name on the top. Where in that certificate does it say that I am to abdicate my responsibilities to the Foreign Service Associa- tion? It doesn’t, and I don’t intend to do it!’ So AFSA and I had an adversarial relationship; very much so. I think they were wrong.” In reply to Rimestad’s challenge, Walker and the newly elected Young Turks called an open forummeeting that packed the Dean Acheson Auditorium and demonstrated that AFSA had the back- ing of its members. The change in administration in 1969 led to the replacement of Idar Rimestad by WilliamMacomber, who was sympathetic to the reform agenda. He engaged AFSA fully in the shaping of management policy, well before the association’s certification as a union in 1973. —Harry W. Kopp, April 2013 AFSA Becomes a Union: The Reformers’ Victory The Macomber Era, 1969-73 . During this period of challenge and reform, the Department of State was managed with energy and vision by Amb. William Butts Macomber. Appointed as the under sec- retary for administration (later renamed management) in 1969, Macomber came to the job extremely well prepared. A fast-talking, overactive, pas- sionate Yankee Republican, he had already put in long years of service in Foggy Bottom. … Macomber knew the department inside and out, cared about it, and wanted change. The demands for major reforms from AFSA’s Young Turks, and later by the Harrop and Boyatt Par- ticipation Slates, made great sense to Macomber, who already wanted to break the State Department out of its “old boy” rut and had the wide-reaching personal connections on the Hill and in the White House needed to achieve change. Most importantly, he enjoyed the trust of Secretary of State William Rogers, who was dealing with Vietnam and myriad other major foreign policy issues and was only too happy to delegate management of the department. (It helped that Macomber’s wife, Phyliss Bernau, was Rogers’ longtime personal assistant.) … Macomber had a vision not only for reforming the depart- ment, but also for changing the way American diplomacy was conducted. An energetic, demanding doer who could charm or ream as needed to get things done, he quickly recognized the utility of the AFSA “Young Turk” and “Participation” reform agendas—and the need to involve everyone in the reform pro- cess. So he drafted hundreds of State Department Foreign and Civil Service employees to serve on a dozen task forces examin- ing almost every aspect of how the department conducted its business. Each group produced scores of recommendations which, after careful vetting by Macomber and a ritual blessing by Rogers and Irwin and the Board of the Foreign Service, eventu- ally formed part of an action blueprint set forth in a fat green book boldly titled Diplomacy for the 70s . The proposals intro- duced the cone system and open bidding for jobs, emancipated wives from ratings and unpaid work, mandated gender equality, provided for due process in evaluations, allowed officers to see their “secret” performance appraisals and much more. … In all these battles, AFSA was Macomber’s strategic ally, but sometimes his tactical enemy. … But while such bureaucratic conflicts were always fiercely fought, they were waged deep inside the new territory of reform. —Tex Harris, June 2003 Truth or Consequences Like all Americans, we at AFSA are concerned about protecting government secrets from spying. We believe, however, that the administration, in a well-inten- tioned effort to stem the recent spate of espionage, has placed the need to protect secrets ahead of the constitutional rights of its employees; has broken faith with those workers by reneging on promises not to implement several announced measures that abrogate those rights; and is ready to place unwarranted trust in an electronic countermeasure that has no scientific validity. The president [Ronald Reagan] said in his January news con- ference that the plan for polygraph screening of State Depart-