The Foreign Service Journal, September 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2015 25 So we embarked on a huge effort to prevent it. There were several of us: Tom Boyatt and Tex Harris, and one or two others. I took a year of leave without pay to work on this, it was so demanding. Luck- ily, former Under Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon agreed to pay two-thirds of my salary, and I found someone else to pay the last of it—a New York investment fellow who had been a public mem- ber of a selection board and had come to like the Foreign Service. So that worked out pretty well. FSJ: Still, it must have been a real struggle. WCH: Yes. One woman in particular, a former FSO, wanted AFGE to be the union repre- senting FSOs. She really went after me in an unpleasant way. I actually knew her slightly; she’d been in Kinshasa just before I arrived in Congo, and we overlapped by about a week. Later, she was working in Southeast Asia and was due to come back to Washington to work at the Board of Examiners, which she didn’t want to do. I was then the director of the Africa part of INR, and she contacted me to ask if she could come work for my office instead. I called up the personnel people and they were fine with it, so she came to INR. Later, when I was elected chair of the AFSA Board, she filed suit with the Labor Department to disqualify me on the grounds that I was a management official, so not eligible to head a union. And she tried to use my helping her change assignments as evidence of that. FSJ: How ironic. WCH: It really was disgraceful. I was able to fend that off, but the episode showed how important it was to have the narrowest possible definition of a supervisor or manager, so virtually every FSO could be a member of the bargaining unit. Surprisingly, both the Labor Department and State, whose leadership was largely Foreign Service officers at that time, were sympathetic to that definition. In my opinion the whole system has worked well for more than 40 years now. But I continue to worry that we could lose our identity as a professional association and just become an outright union. We’ve seen that happen with the National Edu- cation Association. Within two years of unionizing, the NEA was no longer a professional association. I didn’t want that to hap- pen to the American Foreign Service Association, and it has not. FSJ: Maybe we’ll return to AFSA later because there’s a lot to talk about there. I know that you were deputy chief of mission in Canberra in the mid-1970s. What did you take away from that in terms of mentoring young officers? WCH: Well, before I went to Canberra, there was an organi- zation in Washington which I don’t think exists any more, the Junior Foreign Service Officers Club. As the name suggests, it was a group of mainly first-tour and second-tour diplomats who saw themselves as something of a rival to AFSA. I spent a lot of time with those guys, and I think I learned a good deal about how to deal with younger people, something I focused on during the rest of my career. I really was very con- cerned to bring people along. I remember one disaffected woman who was an entry- William C. Harrop with Mobutu Sese Seko, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1987. COURTESYOFWILLIAMC.HARROP