The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2014 15 Ki-moon delivered a broadside against the terrorist movement, calling it the “Un-Islamic Nonstate.” e Foreign Service Journal generally follows AP style and, accordingly, will refer to the organization as “the Islamic State group.” —Susan B. Maitra,Managing Editor State Ends Transgender Exclusions in Employee Health Plan T he State Department is taking the lead within the federal govern- ment when it comes to o ering health insurance to transgender employees and family members. At the department’s I n truth the Service has never made up its collective mind about the proper role of dissent and open discussion. We are schizoid on the question. On one hand, we are dedicated to the proposition that we are loyal servants of constituted authority. This principle is never seriously attacked. On the other, we feel that as career oœcers, we know, or should know, more than any- one else about how the Service should be run, and that we have a duty to indicate the path to those charged with making decisions. In controversial and important matters it comes down in the final analy- sis to a judgment as to where the dividing line lies between constructive com- ment and obstructionism. We have generally resolved the dilemma by dissent- ing only on trivia, or in such cautious terms that our dissent is all but inaudible. This accomplishes nothing. The central truth, however, seems to me to be another—namely, that little can be expected to result from isolated expressions of opinion, no matter how well founded or how skillfully phrased. They may point to the existence of prob- lems, but they can do little to resolve them. (How many of the splendid letters to the Journal have any e¢ect?) What the Service needs for the long term is an institutionalized approach, a prestigious group, immune from censorship, and recognized as having not only the right but the duty to study and to express itself, if need be in public, on all questions relating to the strengthening of the career principle. If such a group had existed in the past, many of our current problems might have been avoided. The Foreign Service Association is on the right track when it announces the intention to establish a committee to “deal systematically with the career service principle and the relationship of current policy and administration to the strengthening of the Foreign Service as an instrument of foreign policy.” This is a hopeful beginning. Let us hope it does not die aborning. —“On Dissent” by Foreign Service Ocer William E. Knight, FSJ , November 1964. 50 Years Ago