The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

the Foreign Service journal | April 2013 21 reported that the board had “only partially come to grips” with the questions raised in McClintock’s memo. Lightner had come into office, he said, “raising soul-searching questions having to do with the fundamental nature of the association and its potentialities for better serving its membership,” and he left the board unsatisfied. When board chairman Hugh Appling gave his valedictory report in 1962, he noted that the board had discussed “the propriety and desirability of…taking an interest in pending leg- islation affecting the Foreign Service.” But though it appointed an ad hoc committee to examine the issue, the board took no further action. AFSA’s hesitation did not pass unnoticed. Foreign Service officer Jack Armitage wrote to the Journal in 1962: “It is a fact known to all that there is little, if any, deeply felt association with AFSA on the part of the membership. Large numbers [of members of the Service] do not even belong. …I would submit that AFSA has no meaningful concept of what the Foreign Service should be and of what it—the association—should do to develop, sustain and maintain it.” Armitage was right about membership. In 1961, AFSA had fewer than 3,600 active members, out of an eligible pool about For these and other reasons, by 1960 many Foreign Service officers were dissatisfied with the structure, management and culture of the Service. The Kennedy transition team noted growing frustration among “young, imaginative, all too often circumscribed” FSOs. These new officers began to use their social organization, the Junior Foreign Service Officers Club, to agitate for institutional change. A Lost Opportunity This widespread dissatisfaction with, and within, the Service offered an opportunity that AFSA failed to seize. Pres. Kennedy’s 1962 executive order on labor-management rela- tions touched off a surge in membership in public-employee unions—but not in the Foreign Service. Well before that opening presented itself, Robert McClintock, chairman of the Foreign Service Journal Editorial Board, had argued in a 1958 memorandum to AFSA’s board of directors that the association should provide leadership to its members and assert itself more vigorously on their behalf with the department, Congress and the public. When the chairman of the 1957-1958 AFSA Board of Directors, E. Allan Lightner Jr., left office in October 1958 , he FSJ Archives AFSA President Ambassador Foy Kohler, at right, confers with outgoing Board Chairman David H. McKillop, center, and new Board Chairman Lannon Walker, left, in September 1967. A 31-year-old FSO-5, Mr. Walker was “the youngest and least senior chairman of the AFSA board within living memory,” the Journal reported at the time. Walker led the “Group of 18” slate put together by the “Young Turks” to run for AFSA’s electoral college in the 1967 election, pledging to choose AFSA’s new board from among themselves.