The Foreign Service Journal, October 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2020 11 This insistence on some unending presence of white superiority in the Department of State, this suggestion of the need for the department to exert power over the whole employee—even over their thinking—amounts to despo- tism. As someone once noted: “Liberty is independence not only from the tyranny of a king but from that of an employer.” Further, it was not fitting for the ambassador to have publicly kicked the institution that has given him so much professional success. With tone and content, his contribution suggests that the Department of State is what it is not, a bastion of racism. The writer should have kept his unfortunate private encounters within the department, if not to himself, and not broadcast them for the world to see. Richard W. Hoover FSO, retired Front Royal, Virginia Restoring Order The July-August Journal reports that more than 500 former U.S. officials have signed a statement in opposition to “the use of the U.S. military to put down peaceful protests” (Talking Points, “NatSec Professionals Respond to Use of Military on U.S. Streets”). This is a position no one disagrees with, and no official has advocated oth- erwise. So it is unclear what the purpose of the statement is. Presidents of both parties have called on the military to restore order in moments of crisis. This is not just permitted under the Constitution; it’s an obligation for the president to preserve domestic tranquility. Perhaps the authors of the state- ment have a view on how much violence against our fellow citizens is tolerable and how overwhelmed local officials have to be to warrant extraordinary action being taken. Reasonable people can disagree on this. I don’t know if any of the signers had to stand by and watch a business they had put their life’s savings into looted and burned. Nor do I know if any of them or their loved ones were beaten, blinded, hit by a brick or killed during “mostly peaceful” riots. I hope they have not suffered so. But if they had, they might have a different perspective on this issue. Dennis K. Hays Ambassador, retired Reston, Virginia More Honest Evaluations I’m prompted to write by Bill Burns’ article earlier this year in The Atlantic about what the State Department should do to reinvent itself in a post-Trump era, perhaps after 2020. One thing it could do is to make the personnel evaluation process more honest. For decades, State sought fairness by offering the employee a look and a “review” of his supervisor’s perfor- mance evaluation. Meant to eliminate the occasional injustice, what it mostly did, however, was to produce a negotia- tion process between supervisor and employee that neutered real evaluations and allowed the mediocre and worse to “get by” because their bosses didn’t want to face confrontation with underper- forming employees. But if FSO supervisors are not to be trusted in the main to be just and honest in their evaluations, then they cannot be trusted at all, and that would be a damn- ing indictment of the Service. I do not believe it. My proposal is this: Performance evaluations should no longer be shared with or reviewed by those rated. Yes, there is a trade-off here—we will have to accept the occasional mistake (or even injustice) in exchange for getting rid of “Casper Milquetoast” evaluations that promote the mediocre. There is one possible ameliorative, which may already be in effect: If promo- tion boards are to put total faith in the evaluator, let them first review all or the majority of their previous employee evaluations to get a sense of the evalua- tor’s credibility. That may require a greater invest- ment of time by promotion boards, but if we’re always urging more positions for a “float” to support adequate language training for officers, why should we not be willing to invest more time in identify- ing and promoting the “best and the brightest” who are to be the core of the Foreign Service? Marc E. Nicholson FSO, retired Washington, D.C . n CORRECTION In the September editor's letter, we erred in referring to author and retired Minister-Counselor James Dandridge as “Ambassador (ret.).” While he did serve as chargé at two posts, he did not receive an ambas- sadorial appointment during his career. That said, we continue to think of this senior statesman as an ambassador! Share your thoughts about this month’s issue. Submit letters to the editor: journal@afsa.org