The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

16 OCTOBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SPEAKING OUT Seeking Parity Between the Civil and Foreign Services BY LARRY W. ROEDER J R . A s I’ve done for years, I attended this year’s Foreign Affairs Day celebrations at State, which featured some interesting speeches and seminars. But two events that day brought home to me, a retired civil servant, the long- standing disharmony between the For- eign and Civil Services, with the latter often portrayed as a B team backing up the former. First, a Foreign Service officer stood up in the plenary session and complained about the increase in the number of foreign affairs officers (FAO). He even described us as a harbinger of the demise of the Foreign Service. Later in the day, the speaker who led the dis- cussion of the new National Museum of American Diplomacy barely mentioned the Civil Service at all, as though we had no right to be honored there. In fact, we FAOs are an asset to the Foreign Service, and the State Depart- ment as a whole, not a threat. And modern American diplomacy needs a strong Civil Service as much as a strong Foreign Service. Larry W. Roeder Jr. retired from the State Department in 2005 (after 35 years of gov- ernment service). He last worked as a policy adviser on disaster management in the Bureau of International Organizational Affairs, where he focused on international humanitarian law, natural disasters and conflict resolution. He also served with the Army Security Agency in East Africa, as United Nations affairs director with the World Society for the Protection of Animals and as the series editor for humanitarian affairs at Springer, a German publisher. Currently, he works at Catholic University. He has written extensively on diplomatic practice and African-American history. Deep Roots I was born into the Foreign Service and grew to love the constant travel, meeting new cultures and fresh chal- lenges. Mom worked in intelligence and dad was an FSO; they met in Beirut. By the time I was 8, I had been through an earthquake, a locust infestation, an invasion and a naval evacuation, during which I had to be transferred between ships by bosun’s chair. I had also lived twice in Lebanon, as well as in Egypt, Cuba, Italy and Washington, D.C. Surviving the 1956 Suez Canal War was what really got me thinking about the need for diplomacy. Though I would first serve in the U.S. Army as an intelligence expert, my real goal was to join the State Department, to protect America through discussion and logic Today’s diplomacy is nearly always developed by a team of Foreign Service and Civil Service professionals. rather than bullets. That’s not an untypi- cal choice for Foreign Service “brats,” I’ve found. When dad began his Foreign Service career in Saudi Arabia in the 1940s, he got to know the Saudi ruler at the time. And, thanks to dad, I sat on Egyptian President Gamal Nasser’s knee and later shared a cigarette with Golda Meir. In those days, Foreign Service officers ran everything, or at least most things; and dad was successful, becoming a consul general in Israel and Canada. My own governmental career was very different from my father’s, reflecting profound changes in the practice of U.S. diplomacy. But I, too, came to know a king very well—King Hussein of Jordan, whom I met in the Army and later trav- eled with in his own country. I joined the State Department in 1972 as an FAO, the kind of fellow the gentleman in the Foreign Affairs Day plenary session mistakenly sees as a threat. My work began in consular affairs, then shifted to intelligence, followed by a long stint in economic affairs and, finally, emergency management. Fresh out of the Army, I chose the Civil Service as my entrée into diplo-