The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

26 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL on p. 25). In correspondence published in the March 1945 FSJ , Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. thanked the Journal and the writers, assuring them that the essays were being studied by policymakers. The essays were a source of creative thinking in develop- ment of the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which provided career status and better pay for Foreign Service staff (today’s specialists), opened a path to career status for the temporary hires of the war- time Foreign Service Auxiliary and created the framework for rapid expansion of the Service, to 8,000 members in 1950. Passage of the 1946 Act was a high point for the Foreign Service, which for a brief moment had the attention and support of both Congress and the White House. But signs of trouble were already evident. Attacks on Foreign Service officers in China as commu- nist sympathizers had begun in 1945 and would soon metasta- size. By 1950 Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) had charged that the State Department was “infested with communists.” Between 1945 and 1953, hundreds of State Department employees were fired as security risks, as John W. Ford recalled in a November 1980 FSJ article, “The McCarthy Years Inside the Department of State.” Members of the Foreign Service felt constant pressure to ensure that their reporting from the field validated official thinking, or at least posed no challenge to it. The Journal courageously addressed the issue in July 1951, in an unsigned editorial titled “Career vs. Conscience.” The FSO, the Journal wrote, “finds that a calling which has claimed his abiding loyalty, and his unexpressed but deep devotion to his coun- try, is being assailed and degraded by irresponsible demagogues. … The choice is before him. Shall he remain in the Service, resolved to report only what will harmonize with the temper of the times? Shall he report honestly and fearlessly… knowing the dangers of honesty and the risk to his career and his reputation? Or shall he resign?” That editorial was a high point. Two years later, the editorial page carried a “declaration of purposes and principles” approved by AFSA and its board of directors that was so bland and bromidic that its authors called it no more than “an initial step in formulating a forth- right and vigorous expression of what the Service stands for.” What the Foreign Service stands for has been addressed over and over again in the pages of the FSJ ever since, with mixed results. After the declaration, the threat of politically directed reporting received far less attention in the Journal than the threat of “amalgamation,” the term used to describe the merger, proposed by a series of blue-ribbon commissions, of the department’s Civil Service and Foreign Service employ- ees into a single personnel system. In its April 1951 editorial, “The Directive to Unify,” the Journal offered limp support for the idea—so long as its implementation was “gradual” and “partial” and did not coerce employees into “careers which did not appeal to them.” When the department brought some 1,400 civil servants into the Foreign Service in 1954, the AFSA board, at the depart- ment’s request, refused to allow the Journal to publish negative comments and instructed the editors to turn over to the depart- ment any letters it received that expressed “anxieties” about T hroughout the 1930s, neither AFSA nor the Journal would have described itself as the voice of the Foreign Service.