The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

20 April 2013 | the foreign Service journal whose Washington jobs were opened to Foreign Service personnel. This transformation of the Service from a small, collegial body to a more democratic, if bureau- cratic, organization took place during a time of vicious political pressures. In the early 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., and his allies accused members of the Foreign Service of pro-commu- nist sympathies; the leadership of the department, also under attack, did not defend its personnel, many of whom saw their careers destroyed. Even after McCarthy’s fall in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles demanded “positive loyalty” that punished candor and rewarded conformity. The American Foreign Service Association in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a quiet place that operated out of a couple of rented rooms. Its assets in 1960 were worth less than $200,000, including $95,000 in a dedicated scholarship fund. AFSA was, in the judg- ment of one of its members, “an effete club of elderly gentle- men whose headquarters could not be located and who took care never to fight for any cause.” Others had similarly harsh words for the state of the Foreign Service as an institution. A report prepared by President John F. Kennedy’s transition team said that the Service suffered from “professional deformations,” due to its vast increase in size and the “trauma of the Dulles-McCarthy years.” The report went on to note that the whole Department of State exerted a “tremendous institutional inertial force,” and “even such a distinguished career group as the Foreign Service has failed to keep pace with the novel and expanding demands of a changing world.” George F. Kennan, then in private life, dismissed the senior men in the Service as “empty bundles of good manners.” The Postwar Foreign Service In particular, the Foreign Service was struggling to absorb new personnel. With new postwar responsibilities, the Service had grown tenfold in a single decade: from about 800 employ- ees in 1940 to about 8,000 in 1950. In 1948, when a blue-ribbon commission recommended combining the Foreign Service and the State Department’s Civil Service corps, Secretary of State George C. Marshall said no. His successor, Dean Acheson, did likewise when he received a similar recommendation two years later from another panel. But when Henry Wriston’s commission recommended a partial merger of Foreign and Civil Service employees in 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles agreed. Over the next two years, to the dismay of many old-school officers, the Foreign Service took in about 1,500 State Department civil servants, Harry W. Kopp, a former FSO, is the co-author (with the late Charles Gillespie) of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service (Georgetown University Press, 2008). He is now at work on a history of AFSA. Above: In the early 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., accused members of the Foreign Service of pro-communist sympathies. On p. 19: AFSA members and staff depart for a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. Michael Rougier/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images As late as the 1960s, AFSA was still widely dismissed as “an effete club of elderly gentlemen…who took care never to fight for any cause.”