THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2025 27 recognizes his or her primacy in foreign policy, and has served successive Presidents and Secretaries of State as a motivated and disciplined force for implementing national policy. The Association enthusiastically welcomes your repeated declarations that Presidential diplomatic appointments must be based on merit. While we fully appreciate the contributions of certain distinguished non-career diplomats, we have long opposed politically motivated appointments of non-career incompetents, and we have enough self-confidence to believe that in a competition based on merit, the Foreign Service can produce winners most of the time. We look forward to developing, with your transition team and other interested persons and organizations, criteria for such appointments and procedures for evaluating potential Presidential nominees. The Association is also impressed with your systematic approach to the organization of the federal government, and we believe we may be able to make a useful contribution to a review of our foreign policy bureaucratic structures. We have noted your practice of seeking information and advice from all responsible sources before making up your mind, and have for many years strongly supported the maintenance of institutions whereby the President can receive the best possible information and advice from the Foreign Service, including alternative views. As exclusive employee representative for the State and AID Foreign Service, we have many matters to raise with you. For example, we hope that you will authorize a review of our policy toward terrorists who kidnap American diplomats, and the governments who support or provide sanctuary to these terrorists. We hope that AID Foreign Service will be given a permanent career status commensurate with that of their State and USIA colleagues, and with the long-term nature of the international development challenge facing the United States. We earnestly hope that we can avoid the traditional phase of suspicion between new Presidents and the career Foreign Service, and make a smooth transition to a productive relationship which serves the national interest. For this purpose, the Association has established a Transition Task Force which will be available to work with your transition officials in any manner you may desire. “Ambassadorial Appointments” December 1976, AFSA Editorial [In his Why Not the Best?, Jimmy Carter wrote:] “For many years in the State Department we have chosen from among almost 16,000 applicants about 110 of our nation’s finest young leaders to represent us in the international world. But we top this off with the disgraceful and counterproductive policy of appointing unqualified persons to major diplomatic posts as political payoffs. This must be stopped immediately.” AFSA warmly seconds the views of the President-elect and proposes the following reforms to effect the needed overhaul of the ambassadorial selection process: • A non-partisan advisory panel, patterned on the American Bar Association’s Committee on the Federal Judiciary, should examine the credentials of ambassadorial nominees—career as well as non-career. • The President, as part of the standard nomination process, should inform the Senate Foreign Relations Committee what special foreign affairs qualifications and skills a proposed political appointee would bring to the assignment. • Congress and the Executive Branch should agree on guidelines to limit appointment of non-career ambassadors to ten per cent globally and fifteen per cent in any geographic region. The report of the AFSA Committee on Presidential Appointments can be found elsewhere in this issue of the Foreign Service Journal. 1981: JIMMY CARTER TO RONALD REAGAN “Congratulations, Governor Reagan” December 1980, Association News The letter reprinted below, to Governor Reagan from the president of the Association, represents the approach the Governing Board is taking with the foreign affairs advisers and transition team of the new administration. Dear Governor Reagan: The members of the American Foreign Service extend to you our warmest congratulations on your election as our next president. We welcome the opportunity to work for you in advancing the themes you outlined during your campaign to strengthen our national security and to support our global interests. As professionals, experienced in the close relationship between the level of our national strength and our skill in knowing how and when to use it, we appreciate the challenges you and your secretary of state will face over the next four years. You will encounter interrelated economic, political and military issues compounded by international population and social pressures more complex than those addressed by any of our previous presidents.
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