The Foreign Service Journal, June 2003

cessive “Participation Slates” led by Bill Harrop and by the smart and hard-charging TomBoyatt made it succeed. AFSA’s leadership met numerous times with Under Secretary Macomber to discuss these problems. The ground for procedural reform and employee participation had already been tilled by an earlier major management effort led by Macomber that AFSA strongly supported. He had organized 13 reform task forces in which scores of State employees produced hundreds of recommendations to reorganize the State Department and improve its per- sonnel and administrative systems. Some critics charged that these task forces were designed to put a “human face” on the implementation of key management decisions that had already been taken. But the initiative was more than that. It was, in fact, a sweeping effort to change and mod- ernize how the Department of State did its work and how it treated its employees in Washington and overseas. After vetting by Secretary Rogers, the Macomber Task Force proposals were issued in February 1972 as a blue- print for “Diplomacy for the 70s.” This would eventually lead to the introduction of job bidding, new tenuring rules and, most importantly, the introduction of cones. (Previously, most FSOs were “generalists” who moved from job to job without a functional specialty. The “cone system” was established to curtail the surplus of “general- F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 T HE R EMINGTON A Final Salute Negotiating a grievance system for the Foreign Service took over three years of effort by several AFSA Boards. A negotiated grievance system was finally signed in March 1976 by AFSA President Lars Hydle and Management Under Secretary Larry Eagleburger. At the eighth-floor signing ceremony, Eagleburger saw a small group of AFSA grievance negotiators in the back of the room. After signing the document, “the Eagle” looked up and subtly extended his middle finger across his tie as a final salute in a long battle. — Tex Harris