The Foreign Service Journal, April 2013

24 April 2013 | the foreign Service journal the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This bill was the subject of lengthy hear- ings, but it never reached the floor of the House. The Write-In Campaign What was novel about the reformers’ approach was the way they pressed their case. They saw AFSA’s odd election system as a way to demonstrate the broad support they believed their ideas had across the career Service. By this time Lannon Walker had been assigned to the depart- ment’s executive secretariat, a position that allowed him to specialists, journalists and the general public; and personnel exchanges with other agencies. The reformers, who came to be known as the Young Turks, drew heavily on earlier studies (among them: the Hoover Commis- sion Report of 1948, the Rowe-Ramspeck-de Courcy Report of 1951, the Jackson Subcommittee Report of 1960, and the Herter Committee report of 1962) and on management theories then prevalent in large industrial and financial companies. Many of the reformers’ ideas had found expression in a bill spon- sored by Representative Wayne Hays, D-Ohio, a member of Who Do You Think You Are? AFSA President Foy Kohler, who was State’s deputy under secretary for political affairs, thought that the election of the reformers would bring the association the “independence and vigor” and “combative concern” that would cause agencies to want to consult before making major changes in administrative or personnel policies. But Kohler’s seventh-floor counterpart, Deputy Under Secretary for Administration Idar Rimestad, saw things quite differently. Soon after becoming AFSA board chairman in 1967, Lannon Walker recalled in a recent interview, he was summoned: “I got word that I’m con- voked by Idar Rimestad. A rough-tongued guy. I went. He had every execu- tive officer in the building there. And he looked at me and said, just who the hell—he didn’t say hell, actually, he said f***—do you think you are? You don’t represent anybody, and you’re not going to get anything.” Idar Rimestad, a career officer, gave a similar account in a 1990 interview. “I took Lannon Walker aside and said, ‘You see that certificate on the wall, signed by the president? I think you will see my name on the top. Where in that certificate does it say that I am to abdicate my responsibilities to the Foreign Service Association? It doesn’t, and I don’t intend to do it!’ So AFSA and I had an adversarial relationship; very much so. I think they were wrong.” In reply to Rimestad’s challenge, Walker and the newly elected Young Turks called an open forum meeting that packed the Dean Acheson Audi- torium and demonstrated that AFSA had the backing of its members. The change of administration in 1969 led to the replacement of Idar Rimestad by William Macomber, who was sympathetic to the reform agenda. He engaged AFSA fully in the shaping of management policy, well before the associa- tion’s certification as a union in 1973. Idar Rimestad Francis Miller/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images The “Young Turks” drew heavily on earlier studies and management theories then prevalent in large industrial and financial companies.