92 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Jim Bullington, a retired Foreign Service officer, was ambassador to Burundi and dean of the Senior Seminar. He served three tours in wartime Vietnam, followed by assignments in Thailand, Burma, Chad, Benin, and Senegal. His post–Foreign Service jobs included director of international affairs for the city of Dallas, Texas, and Peace Corps country director in Niger. He is the author of Global Adventures on Less-Traveled Roads: A Foreign Service Memoir. He and his wife of 55 years, Tuy-Cam, who was a Foreign Service National at Hué, Saigon, and Danang, are now retired in Williamsburg, Virginia. My family background is a combination of north Alabama redneck and east Tennessee hillbilly. I grew up on a small cotton farm west of Huntsville and in a working-class neighborhood of Chattanooga, and when I entered Auburn in 1957, I was the first in my family to go to college. In that culture, and that time, the State Department and the Foreign Service were as unknown as the dark side of the moon. And yet I went directly from being a redneck hillbilly student at Auburn to being a career diplomat. Now how the hell did that happen? The governor of Alabama had a significant role in making this transformation possible. To explain, it’s necessary to recall the Foreign Service and the entry process of that era. b When Congress created the Foreign Service in 1924, it instituted a competitive entrance examination, beginning with a nationwide written test similar to the GRE or LSAT. That was followed by an oral exam at the State Department that featured a three-hour grilling by a panel of senior Foreign Service officers. From “Redneck Hillbilly” to “Radical” to Career Diplomat BY JAMES R. BULLINGTON Plus, academic records, foreign language competency, recommendation letters, and work experience were all taken into consideration. Only about 3 percent of the applicants ended up as FSOs. Until the 1970s, FSOs were almost always the sons of wealthy elites and professional people; and the overwhelming majority were graduates of Ivy League and other prestigious universities, mostly with advanced degrees and international experience. Half the members of my entering Foreign Service class graduated from three universities: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The rest were alumni of Georgetown, Stanford, Duke, and similar schools. My university, Auburn, the land-grant university of Alabama, produced primarily farmers and foresters, engineers and schoolteachers, and lots of military officers through one of the country’s largest ROTC programs. It had never produced an FSO. I got the idea of joining the Foreign Service from a Newsweek article. Consequently, when I came to Washington in 1962 to enter the Foreign Service, I felt seriously out of place among my junior officer classmates. On discovering that the State Department had recently begun an effort to diversify its recruitment base, I concluded that I must have been that year’s token redneck. In addition to possibly benefiting from some affirmative action, I’m confident that the most important reason for my success was my Freedom Riders editorial and the reaction to it. b I became editor of the Auburn University student newspaper in May 1961, at the time of the Freedom Riders incidents, which involved young people riding Greyhound buses across the South in an attempt to integrate bus terminals. When the Freedom Riders got to Anniston, Montgomery, and Birmingham, they were attacked by white mobs as Alabama state troopers stood by and did nothing. These scenes were featured on national television. I had always accepted segregation as the natural order of my limited world. At Auburn, it was in full force. No one in my family or among my friends or teachers or REFLECTIONS AUBURN UNIVERSITY/FLICKR The author (left) receives Auburn University’s Lifetime Achievement Award from Auburn Alumni Association President Regenia Sanders in 2022.
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