The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

The president’s press conference on March 6, in the wake of the administration’s failure to win the support of the United Nations for the war, was the straw that broke the camel’s back in making me decide to resign. Speaking to a docile media in a faux-imperial White House setting, red carpet and all, his scripted perfor- mance was a disastrous effort to explain why the United States should attack Iraq at this time. Tom Shales, the intelligent TV commentator for The Washington Post , wondered if the president “may have been ever so slightly medicated.” After that debacle, I could not see myself continuing to work for the State Department, knowing that I had done nothing against a war that I now believed was totally unjustified. So I sat in front of my computer for many hours to write a resignation letter. By March 10, I had had enough of staring at draft after draft on the monitor. I realized that if I didn’t send the resig- nation letter I’d never be able to get down to serious work. So I submitted it and immediately felt an enormous sense of relief. Personal Factors I write these words in June, more than three months since I resigned, and in hindsight I’ve identified addi- tional circumstances that led, indirect- ly and perhaps subconsciously, to that decision. These have to do with my family background, where I’ve served in the Foreign Service, and my career as a United States Information Agency officer. My father, John L. Brown, who died last November (he did not like the mushy term “pass away”), was a great influence on me. He served in Paris, Brussels, Rome and Mexico City as cultural attaché and counselor in the 1950s and 1960s. A poet and literary critic, he was a fiercely inde- pendent person who couldn’t tolerate parochial attitudes or slow-moving bureaucracies. In a wonderful article for the Foreign Service Journal pub- lished in June 1964 (recently reprinted on the American Diplomacy Web site), he gave the following advice, which I think every junior officer (and not only those in the public diplomacy cone) should read: “[N]o good cultural officer has ever had the illusion that the people he really should know will make an appointment to see him in his office. Professional ‘friends of America’ may —but few others. He must seek them out himself. Only then can he start operating in terms of people he knows and of places he’s been, and of situa- tions he has experienced. No amount of theoretical knowledge can replace such contact with concrete reality. Like Léon-Paul Fargue, he should opt for ‘l’intelligence qui mange de la viande,’ that can observe the shape of roofs and the color of skies and can seize the importance of such things in understanding people and communi- cating with them. For he must under- stand … before he can convince.” (My emphasis) My father was against the war in Vietnam long before I ever was as a college student. As I look back on my decision to leave the Foreign Service over the planned conflict in Iraq, I believe he would have done the same thing. (I should note, since this col- umn is something of an apologia pro vita sua, that I escaped the Vietnam- era draft in a way of which I am not proud, by claiming a minor medical problem. In deciding to resign from the Foreign Service, I wanted to show my opposition to another unjustified war in a more honorable way, perhaps the result of my becoming older and perhaps a little wiser.) For most of my 22-year career I served in Eastern Europe and Russia, and I’ve had the privilege to meet extraordinary persons who stood up for cultural freedom and human rights at great personal risk (and with the encouragement of the embassies for which I worked). My resignation, of course, in no way can be compared to their struggle for truth and justice, but as I think about my decision to leave the State Department, I now realize that I was influenced by the example of those dissidents more than I was aware of at the time. This became apparent to me when I received an e- mail of support for my resignation from the editor of a Belgrade opposi- tion daily, Nasha Borba , whom I had come to know quite well during my tour in Serbia from 1995 to 1998. I was delighted — and proud — to hear from him. Finally, I realize now that as a for- mer USIA employee I never really felt fully “at home” in the new setting of Foggy Bottom. It is a much bigger and more anonymous bureaucracy than my prior agency, consolidated into the State Department in 1999 with, I believe, only limited success, in part because State’s slower administra- tive procedures are not always appro- priate for public diplomacy field work. Moreover, I sensed that my profound interest in culture, a crucial element in public diplomacy, was not a priority at the State Department, although State 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 S P E A K I N G O U T The eloquent Feb. 27 resignation letter of my Foreign Service colleague John Brady Kiesling made a strong impression on me. Continued from page 14