The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

48 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL my way. (I shudder to imagine the volume of the protest had social media existed back then.) To top it off, I got a death threat on my answering machine from someone calling himself a “defender of Israel,” which we immediately passed on to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. There was nothing DS could do, of course, but I still felt better that they knew about it. Though I did not disclose that threat to our readers, I did publish HonestReport- ing’s form letter critique (unfair as it was) in September 2002, along with reactions to the article from Foreign Service folks. Most of the people who wrote us over the next several months were broadly support- ive of our decision to publish Bird’s article, but several AFSA members excoriated us for it. Others attacked us for acknowledg- ing the very existence of opposition to her perspective. Awards and Demerits Appropriately, the focus of the June 2002 issue that included Bird’s article was a topic near and dear to my heart: celebrat- ing dissent in the Foreign Service. Each year during my tenure, we devoted more pages to promoting AFSA’s dissent awards program (which celebrates its 50th anni- versary this year) and gave the nomination process more prominent coverage, both in AFSA News and in the “white pages.” (The performance awards tend to draw plenty of nominations on their own.) Unfortunately, such efforts were not enough to overcome what I saw as a seismic shift within the Foreign Service culture away from dissent that began about that time. I’ll spare you my theories about why that happened (you’re welcome!), but the general trend line is undeniable: Fewer and fewer FS members have been nominating col- leagues in each of the four dissent award categories. As a result, in some years only one or two people have received dissent awards at the annual ceremony. I can’t say whether that situation has improved since I stepped down, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it has. [Editor’s note: In 2014 and 2015, all four dissent awards were given; in 2016, only one; and in 2017, three.] Lamentably, AFSA’s Awards and Plaques Committee refused even to consider the possibility that it needed to change its approach to promoting the program. Instead, its leadership mounted increasingly personal attacks on me and my FSJ colleagues, alleging that “the Journal ” was deliberately sabotaging the dissent awards for some unknown reason I still cannot imagine. When I got wind that the chair of that committee was lobbying the Governing Board to fire me, I asked to see the AFSA president to defend our record. I docu- mented the fact that we were already doing nearly everything our critics demanded to promote the dissent awards and encour- age AFSAmembers to nominate colleagues or themselves. (I did balk at putting the dissent winners’ photos on the cover, since I didn’t think our members wanted their professional magazine to resemble a high school yearbook.) I had even calculated howmany pages of each issue we had devoted to cover- age of the awards program for the past five years (quite a few), and presented those figures. None of that mattered. The AFSA president simply told me that I needed to do whatever it took to address the Awards and Plaques Committee’s con- cerns. That moment was the first time in nearly a decade that I thought seriously about resigning, but my native stub- bornness kicked in, and I decided to stay the course. As a last resort, I drew on the negotiating skills I had supposedly acquired during my Foreign Service days to arrange a summit between the Edito- rial Board chair and the Awards and Plaques Committee. That meeting didn’t really resolve anything, but the cam- paign to oust me lost steam afterward. The Journal ’s December 2011 focus on the Foreign Service in the USSR was groundbreaking; its December 2016 focus 25 years later on “The New Russia” won a silver medal in the June 2017 Association Media & Publishing EXCELAwards Competition.