The Foreign Service Journal, September 2017

42 SEPTEMBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL In reaction, the Foreign Service took on a culture of timidity and self-censorship that recoiled fromdissent and sought not to give offense or attract attention. The culture put at risk each step in the sequence of honesty on which sound policy formation depends: candor in reporting, analysis untainted by predetermined out- comes and confidential debate of policy options. An April 1961 FSJ editorial, "Daring and Dissent," described what proved to be a recurring dilemma. The FSO, the writer warned, “finds that a calling which has claimed his abiding loyalty … is being assailed and degraded by irresponsible demagogues. He discovers that what he may report [may] be distorted and publicly held against him. He learns that his associations can be suspect.” Each officer faced a choice: restrict his reporting to “what will harmonize with the temper of the times,” report honestly and place “his career and his reputation” at risk, or simply resign. Officers for the most part followed the safest path. Hannah Gurman, author of a study on dissent in the Department of State ( The Dissent Papers , Columbia University Press, 2012), wrote of this period: “Fear … took hold of many Foreign Service officers,” who adopted “a strategy of hibernation.” Professional Dilemmas of the Vietnam Years In Vietnam the sequence of honesty at the heart of the poli- cymaking process broke down at its starting point, leading to erosion of discipline and rising levels of dissent. “Many FSOs,” wrote retired ambassador Kenneth Quinn in the September 2014 FSJ , “had considerable difficulty getting their report- ing telegrams approved and sent if they dared to express any doubts about U.S. policy.” The problem ran deeper than policy: it went to basic infor- mation. Many officers recalled experiences like that of Lars Hydle, a young FSO at the Saigon embassy in 1967. In his 1994 ADST oral history project interview, Hydle said that the politi- cal section “was basically trying to make the South Vietnamese government look as good as possible. … Reports were continu- ally massaged and changed around to make them seem less bad than they were.” Negative reports, his superiors warned him, had to be suppressed, lest they be leaked to the press “and used against the policy.” Of course this attitude exacerbated the problem it meant to solve. Journalist David Halberstam said in his 1950 best- seller, The Best and the Brightest , that the inability to get candid reporting to policy levels through official chan- nels encouraged leaks to reporters like him, who could get the news out through the media. As Ambassador Chas Freeman wrote in Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy (USIP, 1997): “Governments that con- done candor will get it. Those that don’t, won’t.” The U.S. government did not condone candor in reports from Vietnam—not from the Foreign Service and not from the military, whose officers faced pressure to produce data that showed progress in the conduct of the war. By denying itself honest reporting, the administra- tion confirmed its preconceptions and magnified its mistakes. For many Foreign Service officers, the clash between hon- est reporting and Service discipline created a professional, if not a moral, dilemma that could not be satisfactorily resolved. According to retired FSO David Jones, writing for the April 2000 Journal , “in 1968 alone 266 Foreign Service officers, 80 percent of them junior officers, resigned.” The frustration and anger that many junior Foreign Service officers felt about Vietnamwere very much a part of “the temper of the times.” In April 1970, some 250 State Department employ- ees, including 50 Foreign Service officers, sent Secretary of State William P. Rogers a statement opposing the just-launched U.S. bombing campaign in Cambodia. President Richard Nixon’s impulse was to “fire the sons of bitches,” but the department resisted, the impulse passed and the signers kept their jobs. The Dissent Channel Is Born The Cambodia statement led the department to establish a “dissent channel,” to give its employees (including those at USAID) a way to communicate dissenting views on substantive policy, in confidence and without fear of retaliation, to senior officials who were required to respond. The Dissent Channel was meant to keep dissent out of the press; but its use, then as now, The U.S. government did not condone candor in reports fromVietnam. By denying itself honest reporting, the administration confirmed its preconceptions andmagnified its mistakes.