The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2011

34 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 To underscore just how excep- tional these men were, here is how Varian Fry described Harry Bing- ham’s replacement — perhaps a more typical specimen of the time: “The new man in charge of visas at the Marseille consulate is young and inexperienced. This is his first post. Afraid of making mistakes, he tries to solve his prob- lems by refusing visas whenever he can. “But he is also a snob,” Fry continued. “The other day I talked to him about just two cases, both women. One was a German Social Democratic underground worker. She had a good affidavit. The other was the Countess X. She has [sic] no affidavit at all. B. refused to give a visa to the German political refugee. ‘How do I know she won’t do underground work in the United States if I let her in?’ he asked. “But when I mentioned the Countess X, he became sweet as honey. ‘Oh, I’m sure there’ll be no difficulty about her visa,’ he said. ‘Just tell her to come in any time she wants to and ask to see me personally. I’ll fix her up right away.’ He didn’t even ask what the countess’s poli- tics were.” The Bureaucratic Tightrope Melissa Jane Taylor of the State Department’s Office of the Historian has documented the strains experienced by U.S. consuls in Vienna as they tried to square organiza- tional discipline with their conscience. She singles out John Wiley in particular, who was counselor of the U.S. legation and then became consul general after the 1938 Anschluss, when the legation became one of four con- sulates in the combined Germany/Austria. Fifteen men worked in Vienna as consuls or vice consuls from 1938 until the consulate closed in July 1941. After Germany’s annexation of Austria, the two coun- tries’ annual quotas under the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 (25,957 and 1,413 respectively) were combined for a total of 27,370. In Berlin, the strict application of the public charge clause meant the American embassy could issue only 10 percent of the available quota each year. In the face of restrictive U.S. immigration quotas and a sudden influx of Jews seeking to emigrate to the U.S., Taylor notes that Wiley’s consulate “would respond to the Jews’ plight in a humanitarian manner, but would not sub- vert the Department of State’s restrictionist policy. Wiley and his staff walked a fine line that allowed them to uphold the law, but in such a way as to grant Amer- ican visas to as many qualifying ap- plicants as possible.” Just over two-thirds of the Jews who lived in pre-Anschluss Austria — 128,500 from a population of 185,000 — emigrated from March 1938 to November 1941; of this number, 28,165 emigrated to the United States. Dissent Today In the Department of State, like any other large bu- reaucratic organization, the norm is to allow dissent and open debate in the formulation of policy, but to require that all employees fall into line with the policy once it is formulated. If an individual continues to object strongly to a particular policy, he or she has the option of resigning — but not of disregarding the policy or refusing to carry it out. This was certainly the sequence of events regarding U.S. Balkans policy in the early 1990s, when five State Department employees eventually resigned in protest of U.S. reluctance to intervene to stop genocidal attacks in Bosnia, and during the run-up to the 2003 U.S. interven- tion in Iraq, when another three diplomats resigned. Yet while both sets of resignations attracted strong media at- tention, the value of taking such action is debatable. Some argue that staying allows dissenters to continue in- fluencing the direction of future policy from within the system. The quandary for diplomats in World War II, however, was more immediate and direct. The diplomatic role and its associated immunity changed the calculus of interven- tion for these officials, as opposed to a private individual who did not represent a foreign government. Faced with a need for action, a diplomat has the responsibility to de- termine whether to “expropriate” his or her government’s authorities and privileges toward an objective that might not be consistent with the sending country’s foreign policy. Whether, and how, any public servant should register dissent is a never-ending dilemma. Each Foreign Serv- ice member could be called on at any time to choose be- tween conscience and duty. Although under special, and hopefully never repeated, circumstances, the experience of these “savior diplomats” 70 years ago may still hold lessons for us today. F O C U S Some of these figures acted in ways that would normally be considered improper or even illegal.