The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

24 JULY-AUGUST 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 1967), Kennan modestly sug- gested that his message had such an enormous influence because of the receptivity of his audience. Six months earlier, he argued, it would have been received with “raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval.” Six months later, “It would probably have sounded redundant, a sort of preaching to the convinced.” Kennan’s Washington readers in all likelihood received batches of cables, delivered to their real (not virtual) inboxes, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Handling cables mandated some engagement with these texts, even if only to glance at the summary paragraphs, or at least the subject lines, before marking them for shredding. Readers would annotate noteworthy missives by highlighting sen- tences, scribbling notes in the margins, or sharing them with colleagues. It is hard to imagine an 8,000-word telegram on any subject being read today, let alone having a similar impact. Kennan himself acknowledged that he divided the telegram into five sections so it would not appear “so outrageously long.” And therein lies an intrinsic tension. Most Washington readers would counsel, “the shorter the better,” while most drafters in the field bristle at “oversimplifying” for the sake of brevity. Today, Washington readers enjoy the advantages of paper- less systems, but they also generally devote far more attention to their email inboxes than their cable queues. News Washington can use is often quickly conveyed to tar- get audiences via email in easily digestible form. In contrast, a reporting cable on the same subject is more cumbersome to access, or it may be drowned out by the sheer volume of telegrams that pour in from embassies and consulates daily. It may even seem duplicative, merely “memorializing” previ- ously communicated information. From Action to Reaction Foreign Service officers at home and abroad must con- front what Marshall McLuhan, in The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Bantam Books, 1967), had already branded a “global village” of “allatonceness.” McLuhan argued that the speed of communication, which keeps increasing, forces us to “shift our stress of attention from action to reac- tion.” The breadth, depth and pace of news and commentary today are so colossal that there is precious little time for delibera- tion and reflection. Diplomacy was once likened to three-dimen- sional chess, but today the more apt simile would be speed chess. In such an environment, cables that have real impact are likely to have been shared as an email attachment with someone’s strident exhortation: “Read this!” They also most likely mimic email messaging by frontloading conclusions, using ticks or bullets, or employing a breezy sentence structure. A snappy subject line always helps, and embedded images may attract attention. Even so, how many overtaxed desk officers, working hard to meet the everyday operational needs of their office, would prefer to plead the Fifth Amendment than honestly answer the frustrated query of a political or economic counselor: “Didn’t you read our cable?” A Massive Breach of Confidentiality It’s not just the short attention span of harried Washington audiences with which drafting officers must cope, however. They are also working in the wake of an unprecedented assault on the integrity of classified communications systems. Diplo- mats rely on confidentiality just as much as doctors, lawyers and the clergy. That’s why the State Department waits at least 30 years before publishing diplomatic correspondence in its Foreign Relations of the United States series. Previous experiments in speedier public access fared badly. William Seward, President Abraham Lincoln’s Sec- retary of State, opted to print recent letters between his office and American ministers abroad for public inspection. Seward biographer Walter Stahr quotes the American minis- ter (ambassador) to London as complaining that the “rather liberal publication of my more confidential dispatches may stand in the way of my future usefulness at this post” ( Seward , Simon & Schuster, 2012). Nor is the United States the only country to have its diplo- matic correspondence leaked with deleterious consequences. The British Foreign Office once had a storied tradition of ambassadors sending valedictory dispatches as they prepared to leave their posts. That custom reportedly ended in 2006, in large part due to the difficulty of keeping the wit, candor and condescension of departing chiefs of mission confidential. The illegal transfer of an enormous trove of alleged diplo- matic cables to WikiLeaks in 2010 posed new challenges for Are reporting and analytical cables going the way of the airgram?