The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

24 SEPTEMBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FSJ : You did several domestic tours in a row, right? WCH: Yes. I was interested in the Atlantic Community, having been in Italy, so I took a job in the European Bureau’s Regional Affairs Office working on atomic energy. I was the desk officer for Euratom [the European Atomic Energy Community], which initially was seen as the most likely vehicle for European integration. As it turned out, that was not the case—the Com- mon Market was the vehicle. Still, it was very interesting work. After about a year and a half there, one morning in 1962, I received a call: “Oh, I’m sur- prised to find you over here—you’re now an African.” I said, “What do you mean?” “You have been reassigned to the Congo desk.” I was a bit annoyed by that, but I picked up my stuff and went down to be the economic officer in that office. That was another fascinating job, because the Belgian investment in Congo, the so-called Congo Portfolio, was very important. My colleague on the political side was Frank Carlucci, and we became the best of friends. Next, I went to Brussels as an economic officer. I was kind of the Congo expert there, too. It was an exciting period. Many hostages had been taken in Stanleyville and a Belgian paratroop unit—Dragon Rouge was the name of that operation—rescued them. FSJ : Around that time, you started diving more into African affairs. In fact, you spent about half of your career working on Africa, didn’t you? WCH: Yes, at least half. FSJ: How did it come about that you ended up specializing in that region? WCH: Complete luck. Toward the end of my three years in Brussels, the office director I’d worked for in AF, Mac Godley, became ambassador to the Congo. And he called me and asked me to think about serving as principal officer in Elizabethville. I agreed, and spent two years there. The name changed to Lubumbashi while I was there. FSJ: I understand that after that experience, you went to an even more exotic place: New Jersey. WCH: Yes, I attended Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for mid-career training. I don’t think I got as much out of the Princeton experience as I should have, but then again, I didn’t get as much out of my time at Harvard as I could have either. FSJ: And then? WCH: After my year was up, I went back to Washington to direct the Africa division of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While I was there, the outgoing chairman of the American Foreign Service Association, Lannon Walker, was des- perate to find a successor. It’s a peculiarity of the Foreign Ser- vice that although AFSA does a great deal for its members most people aren’t interested in working for it. But I agreed to run for chairman (at that time the president’s title) and was elected. FSJ: You’ve played a key role in making AFSA what it is today. When did you first realize that there was a need for AFSA to be a strong advocate for the Foreign Service as a union? WCH: Well, it was really less the relationship between AFSA and the department than the fact that the federal government was unionizing. At that time, the relationship between AFSA and State management was quite amicable, because there were Foreign Service people on both sides of the table. The AFL-CIO was quite excited about the prospect that the American Federation of Government Employees, its federal government branch, might become the exclusive representa- tive of the Foreign Service. And I just thought that was a very bad idea. We would have represented only about one-tenth of one percent of their constituents, so they wouldn’t have done anything for us. And that just looked like tremendous trouble. William C. Harrop (right), in his role as inspector general of the Department of State and the Foreign Service, meets with Secretary of State George Shultz. COURTESYOFWILLIAMC.HARROP