The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

50 JULY-AUGUST 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL diplomatist lacks the spiritual satisfaction that comes from being able to see in concrete form the results of cultivating one’s own home and one’s own garden. His life, as that of his children, is subject to peculiar forms of insecurity, physical and psychic. For all these reasons, I think this to be in some respects a dangerous profession. It seems to me that I have seen over the decades an unduly high percentage of older men in this Service who prematurely lost physical and intellectual tone, who became, at best, empty bundles of good manners and, at worst, rousing stuffed shirts. They are not to blame for this. They have eaten one too many a diplomatic dinner. They have pumped one too many a hand. They have exhausted the capacity for spontaneity. Let us not be superior! We all face these dangers— and some of us sooner than we like to think—and it will take our best efforts to avoid them. If this is really the nature of our profession—if it is really thus isolated, thus misunderstood, thus unhealthy and danger- ous—where does one find the rewards, the satisfactions, the compensations that could make it personally worthwhile? Let me volunteer some answers—not complete answers, certainly, but perhaps suggestive. One looks for these rewards, first of all, in the understanding and respect brought to one’s work by one’s own colleagues—in the sheer professional comradeship they afford. This is true of many professions: it is to the colleague, not to the outsider or the client, that one looks for real appreciation. Ask the doctor, or the lawyer, or the teacher. And it’s precisely because this is so—because the people of our Service have this high degree of dependence on one another—that the Service has a special need of wise and sensitive administrative direction. It is for this reason that it needs a set of administrative and disciplinary rules that take account of its many peculiarities, of administrators who know something of the substance and the subjective sensations of its work, of a reasonable uniformity in the qualifications of membership, of fair and consistent standards in selection and promotion. It is for this reason that it should never be permitted to become impossibly large and mechanical and impersonal. It is for this reason that it should have personnel and security procedures which do not proceed in watertight compartments, which take as their objective the whole man, not just part of him; which take cognizance of his virtues as well as his weak- nesses and make their judgments on the balance of the two; which breed mutual confidence laterally and vertically rather than mutual suspicion; which avoid the evils of anonymity; and which ease, in short, the special burden of insecurity that rests in any case on Foreign Service life instead of adding to it. The individual officer, too, must make his contribution with a view to creating the only tolerable sort of collegial atmo- sphere—it is up to him to discipline himself to avoid the petty jealousies, to refuse to listen to the office-intriguer and the trouble-maker, to recognize a responsibility for the morale of those around him, just as he has to draw on them for his own morale. No one, in my opinion, will experience the full satisfac- tions of this work if he only regards it as a means of personal advancement—only as a means of satisfying personal ambition. Ambition is all right, to a degree. God forbid that anyone should be wholly without it. But in our case, it is not enough. Curious, Detached and Observant To find meaning and satisfaction in this work, one must learn, first of all, to enjoy it as a way of life. One must be able to love the great diversity of nature and of human living—to forget one’s self at times, to be curious and detached and observant, to be sensitive to beauty and to tragedy, grateful for the opportunity to see life frommany sides, accepting gladly the challenge that the external world presents to the understanding and the capacity for wonder. This is something which the overambitious, self-centered man will never be able to do, because he will never be able to see much beyond himself. It takes modesty, as Sigmund Freud once pointed out, to be clear- sighted. You must also have, if you are to taste the full satisfactions of this work, a belief in its essential importance and even— if I may use this term—its solemnity. This is, after all, an The achievements of diplomacy are hard for the public to discern. The position of the diplomatist, on the other hand, is such that he constitutes a ready target for blame when things go wrong.