The Foreign Service Journal, January 2006

wide world — essentially, everything else that is written for publication. Thus there are retired FSOs who are novelists, historians, commentators on foreign affairs, short story writers, biographers, poets and journalists. Some are even benighted enough to write about the Department of State between the covers of the Foreign Service Journal. These are some facets of writing that appealed to me personally. Write that book. At one point or another, many FSOs have muttered to themselves, “I could write a book.” Well, some of us have. Some of us have even gotten that book published (a much more difficult chore if you are not doing an exposé on the crisis of the decade)! But, even if it never reaches the public domain, simply writing such a manuscript has its own satisfactions. And if you self-publish, your heirs might rescue it from other dusty relics of your estate. The steady expansion of the Journal ’s annual November roundup of books by Foreign Service-affiliated writers points to the attractiveness of this option. Journalist/commentator. Many of us have spent a career suppressing our opinions (or restricting them to a carefully couched “comment” at the end of a reporting telegram). Or when we wrote an analytical cable, the design was still for that Great Reader in the Sky (or at least on the 7th floor) who wanted infor- mation provided in certain ways with more fact and less panache. So writing op-eds is the ultimate exercise in intellectual freedom: If you write it — and a paper or magazine publishes it — the words are all yours. F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 Writing op-eds is the ultimate exercise in intellectual freedom: if you write it — and a paper or magazine publishes it — the words are all yours.