The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2008

budget of $3.5 million, and a profes- sional budget process. AFSA is now the equivalent of a mid-size company. And that requires us to be serious about managing our finances so that we don’t do silly things with our members’ dues and contributions. Our Finances and Audit Committee has a mix of mem- bers with private sector and NGO experience who know what they’re talking about. The committee is independent, making decisions about investments and expenditures on their merits, without being influ- enced by the fads of the moment or the enthusiasms of AFSA officers. As a result, our financial portfolio has taken off and we’re in good shape. FSJ: The third element you identi- fied as key to success is institutional strength. What do you mean by that? TDB: The first element of institu- tional strength is unity. AFSA and 10 other organizations are all together in the Foreign Affairs Council. Second is money: You can’t do anything without money and committed people, and we have both. And third, which has been very important, of course, was AFSA’s becoming the legally recognized exclusive employee representative for Foreign Service personnel. That was the basis for everything. FSJ: That’s a good segue for us to talk a bit more about the “Young Turks” movement you helped lead. Our June 2003 issue celebrating the 30th anniversary of AFSA’s becoming a union, to which you contributed an article, gives a lot of the historical details. But to set the stage, would it be fair to say that AFSA was more a social club than an advocacy group at that time? TDB: Yes, but the real problem was that the same people who had the senior positions in the State Depart- ment — the under secretary for polit- ical affairs, the director general, many of the assistant secretaries and so on — were also officers in AFSA. That struck many of us as a huge conflict of interest, when what we needed was an independent voice. Each of the Young Turks had something they wanted: Tex Harris wanted a grievance system; Charlie Bray wanted a linkage of resources to policy; and I wanted co-determination of personnel policies and procedures. We had these very discrete elements of change, but when you put them all together, they added up to more than the sum of the parts. And so the ques- tion was, how do you get that? You have to have a base, and the only base we saw was AFSA. When the time came to elect the new AFSA Governing Board, we real- ized that there are more mid-level and junior officers than seniors, so we could win an election. We put up a slate and we won (with some support from senior officers, I should add). That gave us an organizational base of people paying dues, and a magazine with which you’re familiar that allowed us to do outreach — a propa- ganda arm, if you will. That happened in the late 1960s. Then, very early in the 1970s, President Nixon signed the executive order bringing white-collar unions into the Civil Service. There was a big fight over what the structure of that would be, which we won. Then we got a showing of interest and we per- suaded the Foreign Service itself that we had to unionize — even though that was a dirty word for a lot of peo- ple. But we made the argument that forming a union was the only way to gain some degree of control over our destiny, and bring equity and trans- parency to the whole process. We won the internal struggle for the soul of the Service, and then beat the American Federation of Govern- ment Employees in elections to become the exclusive employee rep- resentative for the people of the Foreign Service in 1973 — not just at State but at USAID and all the other foreign affairs agencies. And we developed huge momentum that is still growing. FSJ: Let’s talk about your Foreign Service career now. You entered the Service in 1959, right after three years in the Air Force. What drew you to pursue a diplomatic career? TDB: I had an epiphany during my studies at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. In that program, you participate in a policy conference every semester. In the spring policy conference of my junior year, in 1953, the subject was Puerto Rico and the focus was economic development. For the first time in its history, Princeton kicked in airline tickets for the conference participants to travel there and see for themselves how economic development was being achieved on that small island. My fel- low travelers to Puerto Rico included Ralph Nader, by the way. Inspired by the brio of all that, I decided then and there that I wanted to be in the Foreign Service, and I switched from the domestic to the international side of the Wilson School. I went on to the internation- al affairs graduate school at Fletcher, 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 “Forming a union was the only way to gain some degree of control over our destiny and bring equity and transparency to the whole process.”