The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2018 27 the program. The AFSA board, which consulted closely with the department’s management, extended its control over editorial content throughout the decade, requiring the Journal to consult before publishing “material of major importance.” Dissent and Change In the early 1960s, the Journal , like the country, pushed back against censorious conformity. “The Foreign Service has special reason to be thankful,” said an April 1961 editorial, “for President Kennedy’s statement … that the new administra- tion ‘recognizes the value of daring and dissent’ among public servants. …To our readers, we say: Speak up!” Speak up they did, softly at first, and then with force and volume. In 1963 AFSA set up a Committee on Public Rela- tions and became far more transparent. The Journal began to publish detailed news about the association, including full or summarized minutes of meetings of the board of directors, as a regular feature. AFSA’s president, Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson, placed a “Dear Colleague” letter, the predecessor of today’s “President’s Views” column, in the Journal ’s March 1966 edition. Articles on current topics in foreign affairs and diplomatic practice began to appear with greater frequency—in January 1965, for example, the Journal carried a long and thoughtful piece, “Vietnam: The War That Is Not a War,” along with a story on the aftermath of a Vietcon g raid on a village in the Mekong Delta and a report on USIA’s field work in Laos. Demands for changes in the management of the Service and its treatment by the department took on growing impor- tance, with the Journal serving as a primary link between reformers in Washington and Service members in the field. The pace of change accelerated as the decade advanced. In 1967 a slate of reformers—the “Young Turks,” led by Lannon Walker and Charlie Bray—won every seat on AFSA’s board of directors. The reformers deliberately ran a stealth campaign, rallying support in missions around the world through private communications, without using the Journal . As soon as they had won, however, they turned to the Journal to promote