The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 11 eight weeks of orientation (the A-100 course) and four months of Spanish- language training, my first assignment was as a JOT in Quito. There I did administrative, consular, political, and economic work. In each section, I found a mentor will- ing to give me as much responsibility as I could handle. Friendships with several of these individuals lasted well beyond my time in Ecuador. Memories of Ecuador include going to the port of Salinas to assist captains whose tuna boats had been seized for violating Ecuador’s self-declared 200-mile territo- rial limit, keeping an American tourist out of jail who had gone on a drunken and naked romp in a Quito hotel, and being sent to our consulate in Guayaquil to take over the visa line when malfeasance was uncovered. When I went to Quito, I had no career track (or “cone”). I left Quito knowing I wanted to be an economic officer. I asked for and received an assignment as an economic-commercial officer in Europe. I never liked State’s later decision to require applicants to select a career track before entering the Service. No doubt it was related to the decision to abolish JOT positions for budgetary reasons. In my first decade, the Foreign Service provided me with 13 months of training in two languages, six months of in-house economics training, and an academic year of graduate economics. This was in addi- tion to the A-100 orientation course and the 20-month apprenticeship in Quito. Later generations of junior officers were not so lucky. I was also fortunate later in my career to be assigned to the Senior Seminar, a nine-month program designed to prepare its members (half coming from other U.S. government agencies) for leadership responsibilities. The course fea- tured monthly trips to different U.S. regions to give participants a better sense of the country we were representing. I still have vivid memories of time on a family-run dairy farm in Minne- sota, riding with the night shift in a police patrol car in Detroit, and riding around with the Border Patrol in El Paso. We were all assigned an essay on lead- ership. This helped me craft a leadership style that stood me in good stead during my subsequent assignments to Riyadh as deputy chief of mission and Muscat as ambassador. Sadly, the Senior Seminar disappeared during the first term of the George H.W. Bush administration, likely because of the need to fill “real” jobs. David Dunford FSO, retired Tucson, Arizona Learning the Ropes The cover of the March 2023 FSJ was brilliant, capturing pictorially the history of “reform” in the Foreign Service. Every 20 or so years, a new generation rises to bring the system up to date. That seems quite extraordinary to me. I don’t believe there’s anything like it elsewhere in our government service. I would also like to comment on one of the articles, “Learning the RopesThrough Rotations ,” by Beatrice Camp. Camp describes a wise practice that was unhap- pily abandoned by State decades ago. In the early 1960s new officers assigned to embassies were usually, though not always, “over complement” and rotated through the various sections and, some- times, other agencies, for six-month stints to learn those “ropes.” And learn we did. In my case, it was two or three months with USAID, which