The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2011

F OCUS ON D I SSENT W HAT I F I D ISAGREE ? 18 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 1 1 poradically, the media become enthused by a “whistleblower” or an act of “telling truth to power.” Usually such interest is ex post facto. For exam- ple, a career employee of the Securities and Exchange Commission warned of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme years before it collapsed in 2009 — in time to save in- vestors billions of dollars. But he was ignored until the dam- age became public. The lesson is that to be effective within bureaucracies, dissent must be institutionalized. In the U.S. federal govern- ment (and probably in the world) such institutionalization exists in only one place — the U.S. Department of State. For more than 40 years, whistle- blowers and those prepared to speak truth to power have been protected and respected there. Such support exists equally within the formal bureaucratic system and within the informal — some would say more powerful — system in which professional reputation is paramount. In the State Department itself, the combination of tur- moil over the VietnamWar and the advent of white-collar unions in the early 1970s led to the establishment of an of- ficial mechanism for disagreement called the “Dissent Channel.” Procedures were promulgated in the Foreign Affairs Manual, State’s regulatory compendium, enabling any Foreign Service employee to write a dissent message addressed to the Secretary of State and sent through the O UR NATION HAS BENEFITED GREATLY FROM THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF DISSENT IN THE CULTURE OF THE F OREIGN S ERVICE . B Y T HOMAS D. B OYATT Thomas D. Boyatt, an FSO from 1959 until 1985, served as ambassador to Colombia and to Upper Volta (now Burkino Faso) and chargé d’affaires in Chile, among many other postings. Currently the treasurer of AFSA’s political action committee, AFSA-PAC, he has in the past been AFSA’s president, vice president and treasurer, as well as serving as a retiree representative on the Governing Board. He is currently president of the Foreign Affairs Coun- cil, chairs the Academy of American Diplomacy’s “Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future” project, and continues to lecture, teach and consult. Ambassador Boyatt received AFSA awards for dissent two times: the William R. Rivkin Award in 1970 while serving in Nicosia, and the Christian A. Herter Award in 1977 while serving as country director for Cyprus. In 2008, he received the Lifetime Contribu- tions to American Diplomacy Award from AFSA. This article is excerpted from Inside a U.S. Embassy: Diplomacy at Work (FSBooks/AFSA, 2011). Ambassador Boyatt testi- fies on Capitol Hill in 2007.