The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

28 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL their program—a program of institutional change, developed in great detail, that would recognize the professionalism of the career Foreign Service and raise the level of responsibility entrusted to it. With a grant from John D. Rockefeller III, they had the Journal publish their proposals in a 128-page report called “Toward a Modern Diplomacy” (November 1969 FSJ, Part Two). The ambitious reforms that they proposed never came to pass, but the drafting of the manifesto (as the report came to be called) engaged scores of Foreign Service officers in rigorous thinking about the Service as an institution, a profession and a career. As these officers considered their situation, they became less defer- ential and more adversarial. The idea that members of the For- eign Service were labor and the upper levels of the department were management moved from the periphery toward the center of thinking of AFSA’s officers and directors. In editorials like “A Professional Association” (November 1970), the Journal offered full-throated support for recognition of AFSA as the exclusive labor-management representative—the union—for members of the Foreign Service. The Journal distributed ballots for the many elections that addressed the issue and celebrated AFSA’s victories in its pages. The Journal and the Union The collective bargaining agreements between AFSA and the Department of State that followed unionization in 1974 gave AFSA access to State’s communications systems for certain messages on union business, reducing the association’s reliance on the Journal to communicate with its membership around the world. At the same time, the Journal ’s “AFSA News” section, which had been just a page or two, grew in scope and took on an identity of its own. Beginning in September 1975, the Journal ’s editors felt it wise to inform readers: “While the Editorial Board of the Journal is respon- sible for its general content, statements concerning the policy and administration of AFSA as employee representative … on the edito- rial page and in the AFSA News, and all communications relating to these, are the responsibility of the AFSA Governing Board.” In the run-up to passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980, the Journal ’s role was subdued. There were no essay contests or efforts to engage the readership in development of new Foreign Service structures, as there had been during the drafting of the Act of 1946. Newly empowered to speak for the Service, AFSA instead met directly with its constituents in Washington and used its own channels to survey its members in the field. The changing nature of AFSA’s relationship with its members, and with management in the Department of State and other agencies, brought changes in the Journal , as well. The Journal began to shift the balance in its content, leaving AFSA’s union issues to the AFSA News section and devoting more attention to such topics as professionalism, diplomatic history and practice, dissent, diplomacy and the military, security and terrorism, the role of the Service in policy formation and the unfortunate popu- lar image of the career diplomat. Discussions of these and similar perennial questions filled the pages of the Journal in the 1980s and 1990s. Active-duty and retired members of the Foreign Service contributed most of the material, but civil servants, academics, journalists and politicians wrote for the magazine, as well. “The Journal took on a more jour- nal istic tone,” said Managing Editor Nancy Johnson in “A Stroll Through 75 Years of the Journal ” in the May 1994 FSJ . Defending the Profession A reader of the Journal during those years would have been struck by its introspection and defensiveness. Most issues, it seemed, carried some material deploring the sorry state of the Service, suggesting improvements in the institution and appealing for measures to repair the lack of funding, the lack of training and especially the lack of understanding of its work, its efforts and its character by Congress and the public at large. The Journal defended professionalism and the career principle with a wealth of anecdote, but it preached only to the converted: circulation in 1989 averaged about 11,200 per issue, including copies sent to more than 9,200 members of AFSA. Readership outside the Service itself was small, and outside the foreign affairs community it was essentially nil. At least five editorials defending the professionalism of P assage of the 1946 Act was a high point for the Foreign Service. But signs of trouble were already evident. Attacks on FSOs in China as communist sympathizers had begun...