The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2014 21 Despite repeated calls to move to a unitary personnel structure, like most other federal agencies, the State Department has refused to act. after passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1980. Broken by War World War II broke the Foreign Service, as it broke so many institutions. Recruit- ment was halted to avoid interference with the military draft, leading the increas- ingly short-handed department to implore its senior officers to stay on the job as long as possible. Under the Rogers Act, the percentage of officers in each of the top six (of nine) ranks was strictly limited: no more than 6 percent, for example, could be in Class 1, the highest rank, and no more than 14 percent in Class 6. The percentage caps, lifted finally in 1945, effectively blocked promotions. As officers grew frustrated, many resigned to join the armed forces. In 1941 Congress addressed the shortage by authorizing the department to form a Foreign Service Auxiliary of people hired outside the examination process, to serve for the duration of the war. Auxiliary personnel were paid according to their civilian experience and sometimes outearned regular Foreign Service officers doing similar work. Many had skills in economics and finance that regular FSOs often disparaged as technical or “spe- cialized.” By 1943 planning for a postwar world was already underway. The department’s top administrative official, a career member of the Foreign Service named G. Howland Shaw, saw a need to retain the skills that the Auxiliary had brought into the service. Regular career FSOs feared that an influx of Auxiliary personnel into the career would inhibit their own advancement. A Decem- ber 1943 Foreign Service Journal editorial defended the “versatil- ity and adaptability” of the “trained Foreign Service officer” who is “better fitted to handle the coming postwar duties than any group of specialists or technicians recruited from civil life.” But the hiring freeze in the career service had made that think- ing irrelevant. In January 1946, the 976 officers in the Auxiliary outnumbered the 820 officers of the regular career corps. Under the Manpower Act of 1946, the department held examinations that brought 360 new officers into the career service at all but the most senior grades. The new officers came from the Auxiliary, the military and the Civil Service, or had been clerks and vice consuls in the non-career Foreign Service. A July 1945 Washington Post editorial called for “a complete overhaul and radical expansion of the State Department,” includ- ing “democratization of the Foreign Service.” The Bureau of the Budget urged Secretary of State James F. Byrnes to place the depart- ment’s Foreign Service and Civil Service employees in a single system. Foreign Service personnel, said the BOB, would benefit from more time in the department, and Civil Service personnel would gain from tours abroad. The bureau also recommended recruitment and hiring into the middle and upper grades of the Foreign Service, to break down its closed, elite structure. It argued, as well, for more atten- tion to building leadership, supervisory and administrative skills through systematic training for all of the department’s employees. Seldin Chapin and the 1946 Act Seldin Chapin, head of the department’s Office of Foreign Service (a position roughly equivalent to today’s director general of the Foreign Service), led a study group that proposed a 10-year transition to a consolidated service whose members would all serve at home and abroad. But consolidation, even over a decade, would surely have met resistance from the career Foreign Service, and likely from the home service as well. State management did not want to deal with such friction, and turned aside Chapin’s recommendation. Instead, it directed him to work on legislation to preserve a separate Foreign Service. The Foreign Service Act of 1946 evolved from Chapin’s efforts. It created a service that included an officer corps, a staff officer corps (providing a career for the non-career clerks) and a reserve. Reserve officers held commissions for up to five years and were often chosen for their specialized skills and knowledge. Staff, reserve and regular officers were all on the same pay scale and received similar benefits. The foreign and home ser- vices remained separate, but members of the home service, the staff officer corps and the reserve corps with at least four years of experience (or three years for those over the age of 31) could seek lateral entry into any but the highest level of the Foreign Service. Chapin, a career FSO, was a graduate of the Naval Academy. His legislative draft introduced several features of the Navy’s per- sonnel system to the Foreign Service, notably “promotion up or selection out”—mandatory retirement of regular (but not staff or reserve) officers repeatedly passed over for promotion or repeat- edly ranked at the bottom of their class.