The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2011

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 explained that he could not possibly comply with the re- quest to give Boyatt’s dissent to the committee, as doing so would breach the loyalty he owed his subordinates in the State Department. “The ‘Dissent Channel,’ through which this memo- randum was submitted,” he wrote, “provides those offi- cers with the Department of State who disagree with established policy, or who have new policies to recom- mend, a means of communicating their views to the high- est levels of the department.” If these officers are to “give their best,” he explained, they “must enjoy a guar- antee that their advice or criticism, candidly given, will remain privileged.” Kissinger continued: “There have been other times and other committees — and there may be again — where positions taken by Foreign Service officers were exposed to ex post facto public examination and recrim- ination. The results are too well known to need elabora- tion here.” But he elaborated them nonetheless: “gross injustice to loyal public servants, a sapping of the morale and the abilities of the Foreign Service; and serious damage to the ability of the department and the president to for- mulate and conduct the foreign affairs of the nation.” Invoking the Ghost of McCarthy Kissinger was, of course, invoking the specter of Mc- Carthyism, which had taken such a great toll on the State Department in the 1950s and whose scars had not yet fully healed. In accusing the diplomatic establishment of tilting U.S. foreign policy in the interest of world com- munism, McCarthy and others made a point of obtaining the policy papers of the rank-and-file, which they used as evidence of communist conspiracy. In the months, years and decades following these at- tacks, the department vowed to protect the rank-and-file from future political assaults. Never again, its leaders promised, would outsiders be able to hold a Foreign Service officer responsible for his or her positions. In place of individual responsibility, in its dealings with Con- F O C U S