The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

an exercise in understanding truly staggering in its dimen- sions — understanding not just of the minds of a few monarchs or prime ministers, but under- standing of the minds and emo- tions and necessities of entire peoples, and not just of a few peoples at that, but of a round hundred of them — peoples in all conceivable stages of progress from the state of prim- itive man to the greatest com- plexity of modern industrial society. And what is involved here is the necessity for under- standing the lives of these peoples in all their aspects: social, economic, cultural, as well as political. It is this vast work of cognition and analysis in which the Foreign Service officer participates so prominently and responsibly; and it is in this task, commensurate — I repeat — in its demands on the mind with the tasks of academic scholarship and science, that I have person- ally come to see diplomacy’s escape from the triviality and sterility that so recently threatened it, and its ele- vation to one of the really great and challenging callings of mankind. On the other hand, inspiring as this task may be, I think we have to recognize that this profession also suf- fers from certain inevitable and probably incurable handicaps. The first of these is its congenital remote- ness from popular understanding. I doubt that this can ever be fully cured. The external needs of a democra- tic country are always going to be to some extent in conflict with the internal attitudes and aspirations of its people. To most national societies, the world outside is mainly and normally a nuisance: something that impedes and limits the ability of people to live the way they would like to live. And the diplomatist cannot help it: his duty is to reflect the realities of this bother- some outside world, whether his fellow-countrymen like it or not. It is his task, very often, to say the unpleasant things — the things people neither want to hear nor like to believe. … The second great drawback of foreign service seems to me to be the fact that it so often is, or can so easily become, an unhealthy mode of life — unhealthy in the sheer physical and nervous sense. … But the question arises: if this is really the nature of our profession — if it is really thus isolated, thus misunderstood, thus unhealthy and dangerous — where does one find the rewards, the satisfactions, the compensations that could make it personally worthwhile? … To find meaning and satis- faction in this work, one must learn, first of all, to enjoy it as a way of life. One must be able to love the great diversity of nature and of human living — to forget one’s self at times, to be curious and detached and observant, to be sensitive to beauty and to tragedy, grateful for the opportunity to see life from many sides, accepting glad- ly the challenge that the external world presents to the understanding and the capacity for wonder. This is something which the over-ambitious, self-centered man will never be able to do, because he will never be able to see much beyond himself. … But there is something more, too, something more important still. You must also have, if you are to taste the full satisfactions of this work, a belief in its essential importance and even — if I may use this term — its solemnity. I don’t want to sound corny. Perhaps, for this rea- son, the less I say about this, the better. But this is, after all, an endangered world, endangered in the grimmest sense of that term: a world endangered by the atom, by the phenomenon of overpopulation, by the lack of uniformity in the economic and social advancement of various branches of the human family, with all the tensions that produces, and finally by the ideological prejudices in the name of which certain great peoples are today ruled. It is to this pattern of dangers that the foreign policies of our country are, in large part, addressed; there is no country whose poli- cies are, from this standpoint, more important; and there is no Foreign Service officer whose work and atti- tudes do not have something to do with the formulation of these policies. Unless one realizes these things, unless one cares F O C U S 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 One must be able to love the great diversity of nature and of human living — to forget one’s self at times, to be curious and detached and observant, to be sensitive to beauty and to tragedy…