The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

the Foreign Service journal | February 2013 23 (Lucius Battle and Douglas MacArthur II), and one career ambassador (Chip Bohlen). These were not men with the time, indepen- dence or (for the most part) inclination to confront the department’s management or the administration on workplace issues. The burden of leadership therefore fell to the chairman of the board of directors, who, of course, had a full- time job of his own in the department. The Rise of the Young Turks Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the move- ment that transformed AFSA began outside the organization. It was customary at that time for junior officers to spend their first two tours overseas and then take an orientation course at the Foreign Service Institute before a Washington assignment. When Lannon Walker returned from consecutive tours in North Africa and took that course in 1966, he discovered that concerns about the Service he’d thought were unique to his own experience were widely shared among his colleagues. He responded by organizing a small group of like-minded officers to look at two connected sets of issues that were not so very different from those identified by Pres. Kennedy’s transi- tion team: a State Department unable to provide the inter- agency leadership in foreign affairs that the president expected of it, and a Foreign Service unable to break away from old rigidities in policy formulation and personnel management. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration had already addressed State Department leadership in a National Secu- rity Action Memorandum (NSAM 341, dated March 2, 1966) that sought to replicate in Washington the “country team” approach used in American embassies around the world, with the Secretary of State or his designee taking the role played by the ambassador abroad. The officers’ group supported this approach. The Service, they wrote in an internal memo, had seen a “steady erosion of [its] influence in the conduct of foreign affairs” leaving, in the absence of reform, “consider- able doubt as to the validity of the concept of a career Foreign Service.” The officers were forward-looking reformers (the Foreign Service Journal called them “positivists”). But they were also looking back to a Golden Age that never was. The unreal- ized model in the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which provided for a single career Service working for all foreign affairs agencies and administered by a direc- tor general independent of the Department of State, seemed to them nearly ideal. Such a structure, they wrote in an internal memorandum, would allow the Foreign Service to perform its “proper role…not the conduct of foreign affairs, but rather their direction”—meaning their management and coordination. The reformers also called for “openness,” a word that in the language of the day had several meanings: respect for candor and dissent; encouragement of initiative; close and informal relations between members of the Foreign Service and members and staff of Congress; interaction with academic The Foreign Service Club in the new AFSA building at 2101 E Street NW opened on March 24, 1969. The main dining room seated 72 and the upstairs lounge accommodated 25. FSJ Archives The reformers saw AFSA’s odd election system as a way to demonstrate the broad support they believed their ideas had across the career Service.