The Foreign Service Journal, December 2009

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 13 eral draft essays to a more senior col- league in the Bureau of Public Affairs (then located at the U.S. Information Agency), who promised to take a look and see what could be done. Nothing came of any of them, mostly because I didn’t follow through. I didn’t really know how. So my early enthusiasm for this kind of public expression began to wither on the vine. The Clearance Process: Not So Clear Fast forward a few years. After hav- ing written several articles for the For- eign Service Journal in the past, I decided to take another shot at outside publication. As the official organ of the American Foreign Service Association, the FSJ constitutes a good venue for writing to and for one’s colleagues and other insiders; obtaining department clearance generally isn’t an issue. But publication in the Journal does not necessarily give one access to the larger mass of outside readers potentially cu- rious about a life and profession they know little or nothing about. The subject I chose to address was a colleague’s small act of heroic de- cency, which embodied the best tradi- tions of the Foreign Service while also spotlighting the varied and sometimes competing responsibilities of a diplo- mat’s work. I sought to contrast the misleading popular image of the diplo- mat I described at the outset of this ar- ticle with a concrete humanitarian action, above and beyond the call of duty. The story seemed a handy vehicle for demonstrating how rubber-hits- the-road diplomacy can touch lives. A number of people suggested to me it might merit broader dissemination. Thus began the complicated and prolonged clearance process, which I initiated out of an abundance of cau- tion. Getting agreement from post leadership was a snap. However, the front office of the Public Affairs Bu- reau responded that it wouldn’t review the text until all other clearances were gathered. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I was determined to pursue the matter. What it turned out to mean was persuading many persons in many dif- ferent offices to take time out from their busy jobs to go over my draft. As is to be expected, some of these indi- viduals performed this “favor” with en- thusiasm, others less so. The murky process, full of fits and starts, took sev- eral weeks. After that, I resubmitted the draft to PA. With some helpful prodding from several Washington-based col- leagues, the draft finally emerged fully “cleared” about a month later. By that time, however, I had already packed out from post and moved on, physically and mentally. So it wasn’t until some time later, during the relative quiet of home leave, that I took a closer look at pre- cisely what that clearance meant. It was predictably benign throughout most of the text — until I scrolled down to the final section. There, sev- eral paragraphs had been crossed out nearly in their entirety and without ex- planation. When I used the “accept tracked changes” function to see more clearly how the text now read — my words had sometimes been pared down to favorable effect by good edi- tors in the past — what remained was a kind of wreckage on the page: frag- ments of sentences that made no sense, like a house ransacked and then abandoned. The manifest indifference to the final product, not the deletions them- selves (which may well have been jus- tified), was what struck me most. I wrote e-mails to the individuals appar- ently responsible for the edits to re- quest clarification or concrete sug- gestions for repair. Radio silence en- sued. Back to the Future If my experience is in any way rep- resentative, then a great deal of poten- tially useful public expression (I flatter myself, I know) has been suppressed in our ranks. Not deliberately — I’m sure the responsible parties felt they were just doing their job — but the outcome is the same. Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this structural problem. We can simply resurrect a new version of the Office of Public Communications, and assign it a clear mission: help our people com- municate directly with an outside au- dience, and do so from start to finish (including by securing all necessary clearances). That mission could include proac- tively identifying candidates with in- teresting stories to tell or compelling experiences to convey (many profes- sional editors seek out the “right” writ- ers for a particular story idea), and continue all the way through to help- ing authors place their products in strategically appropriate media venues — from specialized technical blogs to national news magazines. Whatever we call the new office, State should ensure that it has the tools it needs to do its job. Its staff must be committed to strategic outreach as a priority, conversant with the latest technologies, focused on quick turn- around and capable of working the bu- reaucratic terrain to extract required feedback fast. This nimble new entity could col- S P E A K I N G O U T