The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2014 19 If there is any indicator of future ambassadorial success, it is probably more a function of personality and the ability to effectivelymanage people. Career officers with extensive experience can fail as well as politi- cal appointees. To test the question of whether there is a measurable difference between the performance of political appointee ambassadors and career ones, I had four graduate students read the 139 inspection reports that the Office of the Inspector General had at that point posted on the IG’s website. They included 98 embassies with career COMs and 41 political appointees. The students were asked to assign two grades to each ambassador: one for internal mission management and the other for external relations. While the average grades for the career officers were slightly higher for both catego- ries, the difference was not statistically significant. The career ambassadors were more tightly grouped around the average-to- good rating, while the political appoin- tees had a flatter and wider distribution. This tends to confirm what many believe based on anecdotal evidence—that political appointees are more likely to be either superb or bad ambassadors, with fewer falling in the middle of the range where career officers tend to cluster. Bad ambassadors, whether career or political, could be avoided if there were a way to determine in advance what the qualifications for success are. That is not easy, and other professions have tried with little success. The American Bar Association does a thorough review of the background and experience of judicial nominees and declares each of them to be highly qualified, qualified or unqualified. The clearest measure of the perfor- mance of a judge is how often a higher court overrules his or her decisions. A recent study found little difference in the reversal rates of judges, regardless of the ABA categories in which they had been placed. An a priori ranking that some deem a true indicator of success may not work for ambassadors any more than it does with judges. In addition, every chief of mission has a career officer for a deputy. The deficiencies of a COM can be compen- sated for if the ambassador is smart enough and trusting enough to make good use of the DCM. If there is any indicator of future ambassadorial success, it is probably more a function of personality and the ability to effectively manage people— and that is as true for career COMs as it is for the political ones. However, mana- gerial skill and personality traits are not readily conveyed by basic biographic information. Performance Measures But there is an opportunity to make modest improvement in the way chiefs of mission are selected. Ambassadors do not have a readily available measure of performance as judges do, but a visit by a team from the Inspector General’s office results in a detailed evaluation of how well an embassy is being run. Those reports, now on the IG’s website with minimal redaction, are available for