The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

22 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL The 1946 Foreign Service Act created a service of great flex- ibility, able (at least on paper) to add and subtract personnel as needs changed. But the legisla- tion left untouched the manage- rial complexity of a Department of State with two personnel systems, and failed to provide overseas exposure for the home service or Washington assignments for the Foreign Service. Its passage turned out to be just the beginning, not the end, of a long period of organizational flux and debate. Curing a “Cancerous Cleavage”: Hoover to Wriston A series of blue-ribbon panels, beginning with the Hoover Commission of 1947-1949 (chaired by former President Herbert Hoover) urged the department to restructure itself. Citing “a can- cerous cleavage” between the Foreign Service and the Civil Ser- vice in the department, the commission’s recommended solution was clear: “The personnel in the permanent State Department establishment in Washington and the personnel of the Foreign Service above certain levels should be amalgamated over a short period of years into a single foreign affairs service obligated to serve at home or overseas and constituting a safeguarded career group administered separately from the general Civil Service” [emphasis in original]. Dean Acheson, the former under secretary and future Sec- retary of State, was a member of the commission and “heartily concurred” with this view. But when he became Secretary of State in 1949, he fudged by appointing New Deal lawyer James H. Rowe to head a new commission to study the report of the old one. Rowe’s report reached his desk in 1951 with another recommen- dation for merging the Civil and Foreign Services. It cited a survey that found that 81 percent of the department’s civil servants and 59 percent of its Foreign Service officers supported an integrated service—albeit with caveats. Members of the home service wanted assurances they would not be penalized if they chose not to go abroad; FSOs feared loss of pension and retirement benefits and worried about a decline in standards. Secretary Acheson was even more reluctant to act in 1951 than he had been in 1949. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt was in full cry, and the department was in turmoil. Acheson (refer- ring to himself in the third person) later wrote: “It would seem understandable that the Secretary regarded a far-reaching and basic reorganization of the status of every person in the Depart- ment [of State] as General Grant might have regarded a similar proposal for the Army of the Potomac between the Wilder- ness and Appomattox.” So, as had happened under Secretary Byrnes, the moment for uniting the services passed again. President Dwight Eisen- hower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had far fewer qualms about disrupting the depart- ment. In 1954 he appointed a committee of eight under Chair- man Henry Wriston, president of Brown University, to review past reports and recommend action that would be swift and decisive. Just five months after the committee’s first meeting, its work was done, and Secretary Dulles accepted its main recommendations. The Wriston Committee called for the integration of the Foreign Service and the home service “where their functions and responsibilities converge.” Implementation would entail making some 1,450 home-service positions in Washington available to members of the Foreign Service, and admitting a like number of home officers from the Civil Service to the Foreign Service, along with a large number of new recruits. The Foreign Service officer corps was to grow from around 1,300 to nearly 4,000. Congress passed the necessary legislation in August 1954, and enacted related reforms the following April. Although in surveys FSOs claimed to favor integration of the Civil and Foreign Services, in practice many objected to bringing in new officers at any but the lowest grades. And many con- sidered members of the Civil Service unworthy of joining their ranks. The country’s most famous Foreign Service officer, George F. Kennan, certainly held that view. Writing in Foreign Affairs in high patrician style, Kennan, then on extended leave from the department, referred to himself as “an antiquated spirit” who would prefer “25 really superior officers to 2,500 mediocre ones.” He dismissed the Wriston Report as “a pamphlet.” Last Gasp of the Single-Service Impulse Wristonization, as the process was soon universally known within State, was completed in just four years’ time, but few found the result satisfactory. The incoming Kennedy administration found a State Department that still contained two personnel sys- tems. An outside committee on foreign affairs personnel under former Secretary of State Christian Herter produced a report that Secretary Dean Rusk approvingly sent to the president. “Espe- cially welcome,” he wrote, “is the proposal for a single foreign affairs personnel system, instead of the dual Foreign Service and For all its virtues, the Foreign Service Act of 1946 did not address key organizational problems.