The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2014 23 Civil Service systemwith which we now work.” Secretary Rusk’s top management official, Deputy Under Sec- retary for Administration Bill Crockett, followed his chief’s lead. Crockett, a lateral entry into the Foreign Service, was tireless and optimistic. “I was the Foreign Service’s Don Quixote,” he later said in an oral history interview. “I saw windmills to combat, and I never contemplated failure. I was naïve or inordinately optimistic about what we could accomplish.” Crockett enlisted the support of Representative Wayne Hays, D-Ohio, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1965 Hays produced a bill that would have placed nearly all employees in State, the Agency for International Development and the U.S. Information Agency in a unitary Foreign Service. The bill would have added to the regular, staff and reserve officers a new category, foreign affairs officers, comprising professionals who would serve primarily, but not exclusively, in the United States. His bill passed the House but died in committee in the Senate. Hays blamed Senator Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations and a former FSO. Pell, said Hays, “didn’t like the selecting-out thing.” Crockett blamed the often-reported animosity between Senate Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., and his erratic House counterpart. Whatever the reasons, the legislative path to integration had reached its end. WilliamMacomber, a political appointee, took Bill Crockett’s job as State’s under secretary for management in 1969. Nomi- nally a Republican, he had already been Kennedy’s ambassador to Jordan and had served as Dean Rusk’s assistant secretary for legislative affairs in the late 1960s. Macomber used administrative measures to create a new For- eign Service personnel category, the foreign affairs specialist, to which members of the Civil Service and the Foreign Service staff corps could convert. The FAS corps was a hybrid, taking rank- in-person, selection-out and mandatory retirement from the Foreign Service system, but without a requirement for worldwide availability. Foreign affairs specialists were expected to serve primarily in the United States. The FAS programwas short-lived. Federal courts accepted the position of the American Federation of Government Employees that the program had no basis in law and shut it down in 1973. Still, it had been popular. Hundreds of civil servants, especially in the U.S. Information Agency, had converted to FAS before the court decision, and many, including the head of AFGE’s USIA local, chose to remain foreign affairs specialists to the end of their careers. Henry M. Wriston, at right, the newly inaugurated president of Brown University, was introduced by former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, at left, at the school’s alumni dinner at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on March 15, 1937. Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division