The Foreign Service Journal, October 2013

8 OCTOBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL LETTERS Dissent in the Foreign Service I have just finished reading the July-August issue of The Foreign Ser- vice Journal concerning professional ethics and dissent within the For- eign Service. The articles reconfirmmy admiration for the authors and the actions they have taken to challenge authority on major policy issues. Yet I do not believe they have gone far enough if the objective is to change those policies. Resignations have little effect unless they involve someone at the sub-Cab- inet or ambassadorial level, or higher, and are effectively publicized. At a minimum, those resigning must have special knowledge that gives their views credibility. Cyrus Vance and Elliot Rich- ardson are the only two people in recent history who met these tests. Those FSOs who picketed the State Department at lunchtime during the Vietnam War (I was one of them) may have felt good about their efforts, but they had no impact on policy. On the other hand, a resignation by Colin Pow- ell might have stopped the Iraq misad- venture—but he chose instead to be the good soldier. The Dissent Channel, so widely admired by those who never use it, has a very poor record of accomplishment. So what can a public servant do when he discovers his government is engaged in possibly illegal and certainly unwise behavior? The accepted course of action is to fight the issue up the chain of comand. Good luck with that, particularly if your supervisors are part of the problem. If you then do not choose to resign, should you just shut up and suck it up? I think not. Really rotten policies are often decided without much thought, on the basis of tightly held misinformation of ques- tionable provenance, by people with little personal knowledge of the situation. Or, to put it more succinctly: Strongly held ideology may be reason enough. That may sound hypothetical, but I have personal expe- rience with several such instances. In one case, after being stonewalled by State, I reluctantly decided to brief a member of Congress and a respected news reporter to get the sorry story out. A little sunshine was enough to stop some very serious foolishness. Another time, it was possible to use bureaucratic delaying devices to keep the Secretary of State from making a major mistake until, by sheer luck, Mike Wallace came to the rescue. The gory details can be found in Charles Kennedy’s oral history archives at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The choices I made regarding these issues are not for everyone, and do not lack moral ambiguity. But I have no regret for having blown the whistle when the other alternatives all seemed worse. I like to think it was part of earn- ing my pay. Samuel F. Hart Ambassador, retired Jacksonville, Fla. Quiet Dissent Your excellent July-August issue, which featured several articles focusing on dissent, called to mind an episode from the early part of my own Foreign Service career. As a U.S. Information Agency FSO in 1964, I was working at State on U.S. exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Congress had just passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the president the authority to do whatever was necessary, includ- ing the use of armed force, to assist any member of the Southeast Asia Col- lective Defense Treaty—all without a formal declaration of war. One day I was called over to USIA, where a high official told me that the agency was establishing a task force on Vietnam, and wanted me to be its deputy director. I was certainly a logi- cal choice for the job, having served as chief of the Voice of America’s Viet- namese Service and spent two years in Laos (for which I was awarded USIA’s Meritorious Service Award). I replied that I was honored by the choice, but was the wrong man for the job, since I did not believe in the Viet- nam War and did not think we could win it. As it turned out, State declined to release me, and I continued to fight the Cold War from a desk in Washington. Yale Richmond FSO, retired Washington, D.C .