A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  These strictures emerged from the experience of the years since the Second World War. The role of American diplomacy in prewar days had been largely spectatorial and ceremonial. But in the postwar world our diplomats could no longer be merely observers. They were operators in more than a hundred countries around the planet, and they needed regional knowledge and technical skill as well as personal initiative to make their interventions effective. But in many cases the older career men deplored the new tendencies toward specialization, whether functional or (except for the Russia and China services) regional. They continued to see themselves as gentlemen, not players; the political officer remained the Service’s beau ideal. Economic, scientific, cultural, commercial and agricultural attachés made up a rather grubby supporting cast. As for regional expertise, the State Department efficiency report as late as 1963 did not even include the heading “Knowledge of Country and Area,” long standard in USIA forms; of seventeen items under “Qualities” not one pertained to area specialization. Younger officers feared that, the better their qualifications for a particular country, the lower rating they would get under “General Usefulness.”

  Nearly every problem inherent in the Foreign Service process had been compounded by its prodigious growth. In 1930 the Department of State had a budget of about $15 million, the total membership of the Foreign Service was about 1700, and the telegraphic traffic for the whole year amounted to little more than two million words. By the 1960s State had a budget rising toward $300 million, there were over 9000 in the Foreign Service, and every two months the telegraphic traffic was greatest than in all 1930. The Department itself had moved from its pleasant and leisured home beside the White House, with its high ceilings, great fireplaces and swinging doors, to a vast, unlovely building in Foggy Bottom, correctly described by August Heckscher, the President’s Special Consultant on the Arts, as a “monument to false functionalism and false grandeur.”

  As it grew in size, the Department diminished in usefulness. This was in part the consequence of bureaucratization. ‘Layering’—the bureaucrat’s term for the imposition of one level of administrative responsibility on top of another—created a system of ‘concurrences,’ which required every proposal to run a hopelessly intricate obstacle course before it could become policy. Obviously clearance was necessary to avoid anarchy, but it often became an excuse for doing as little as possible. The mounting unwieldiness of the procedures drove Kennan to the gloomy conclusion that, in really delicate and urgent situations, “American statesmen will have to take refuge in a bypassing of the regular machinery and in the creation of ad hoc devices—kitchen cabinets, personal envoys, foreign offices within foreign offices, and personal diplomacy—to assure the intimacy of association, the speed, the privacy, and the expression of personal style essential to any effective diplomacy.”

  Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull had started the Department’s descent from its traditional place at the summit of the foreign policy process—Roosevelt because he wanted certain things done and Hull because he was not temperamentally able to do them. Thwarted in the Secretary’s office, Roosevelt fell into the habit of using other instruments—first Sumner Welles, the Under Secretary; then other Cabinet members, like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.; and later General George C. Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, new agencies such as the Office of War Information and the Board of Economic Warfare, and personal envoys, like Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman. No Secretary of State after the war, not even Acheson or Dulles, was quite able to gather back the vanished powers. By 1961 the State Department was but one of many bodies involved in foreign affairs. The London Embassy, for example, housed representatives of forty-four agencies of the United States government.

  Bureaucratization was only part of the explanation for State’s malaise when Kennedy came to office. The other part was the shock of McCarthy—or rather the shock of the readiness of Dulles, as Secretary of State, to yield up Foreign Service officers to McCarthyism. The Dulles period was a time of distress and humiliation for the professionals. These years saw the expulsion of experienced and independent-minded diplomats, like John Davies, Jr., and the exile of others, like Charles Bohlen. A proud Service found itself ordered about by Scott McLeod, a coarse straw boss whom Dulles brought in as Security Administrator, and cowering before juvenile comedians like Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. Circumspection had always eased the path to advancement in the Service; now it became a requirement for survival. The McCarthy era, by demonstrating the peril of dangerous thoughts, elevated conformism into a conditioned reflex. Career men stopped telling Washington what they really thought and consecrated themselves to the clichés of the cold war. Some did this more skillfully than others, and the result, as Davies wrote later, was that “many cautious mediocrities rose to the top of the Service,” along with those most uncritically committed to the cold-war view of the world.

  The Service was not so much an instrument of action as a way of life. And it was a way of life which not seldom divested career officers of strong views of their own. The way to success lay in the faithful support of established policy. The lack of continuity in assignment—Iceland one year, Tanganyika the next—made it difficult to develop an intense interest in new policies. It was no coincidence that the Russia and China services, where the necessity of learning a difficult language compelled continuity, were precisely the services where the professionals were most outspoken on policy matters—and were in consequence most punished in the Dulles-McCarthy years. By the time, moreover, that career officers received independent responsibility, they were often, as Kennan said, too old “to grow in the exercise of it.” At times it almost looked as if the Service inducted a collection of spirited young Americans at the age of twenty-five and transmuted them in twenty years into bland and homologous denizens of a conservative men’s club. “I have seen, over the decades,” Kennan said, “an unduly high percentage of older men in this Service who prematurely lost physical and intellectual tone, who became, at best, empty bundles of good manners and, at worst, rousing stuffed shirts.”

  2. FOGGY BOTTOM IN 1961

  This was the situation which confronted Kennedy in his attempt to make the Department the agent of coordination.

  The new administration almost immediately bogged down in the bureaucratic tangle. Men like Harriman and Kennan, who had known the Department as late as the Truman administration, were startled by the transformation of a decade. When a foreign ambassador made a courtesy call on Harriman early in 1961, a junior officer mysteriously appeared to record the conversation. Harriman ascertained that he planned to write an aide-mémoire, submit it to Harriman for correction and send copies to all interested bureaus and embassies, where presumably it would have to be read, pondered and filed. Shuddering at the proliferation of paper and the expenditure of energy, Harriman said that, if by chance anything of consequence were said, he would inform somebody and told the officer to go away.

  The machinery was becoming an end in itself. Dean Rusk remarked to the Jackson National Security Subcommittee that he often read in the morning telegrams specific questions to which he knew the specific answer, but each telegram would nonetheless have to go “on its appointed course into the Bureau, and through the office and down to the desk. If it doesn’t go down there, somebody feels that he is being deprived of his participation in a matter of his responsibility. Then it goes from the action officer back up through the Department to me a week or ten days later, and if it isn’t the answer that I knew had to be the answer, then I [have to] change it.” (We experienced the results with some exasperation at the other end of the White House line. The Department had the habit of sending cables over at the end of the day and demanding immediate presidential clearance in the most urgent terms, when we knew that the document had probably taken three weeks to move from the country desk into and out of the top offices on the seventh floor.) And all this involved more than just the waste of time. “The heart of the bureaucratic probl
em,” Rusk once observed, “is the inclination to avoid responsibility.” The President used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a façade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.

  Nor did the Department respond to the President’s own emphasis on the values of specialization. A friend of Kennedy’s on a trip to Morocco came upon a young officer who loved the country and had learned the Berber languages but was about to be transferred to the Caribbean. When this was reported to the President, he said wearily that he had sent the Department a memorandum six months ago saying that it was better to let officers build up expertise than to rotate them mechanically every two years. An acquaintance of mine in the Service had sixteen years of Japanese language competence; he never was assigned to a State Department post in Japan. An officer who spoke and wrote Korean, served seven years in Korea and published articles in American and Korean scholarly journals, came to the conclusion that specialization in countries of small size constituted a dead end in the Service. In his letter of resignation, he wrote, “We have been willing to leave 30,000 men on the battlefields of Korea, but we have seemed unwilling to support with consistency and hope of ultimate success a single career dedicated to American relations with Korea. . . . The tacit assumption that countries of medium size can absorb American blood and treasure, but are somehow unworthy of the sustained interest of an intelligent mind or an ambitious career is, in these areas, unhelpful to our interests and repute.”

  Worst of all, bureaucratization and McCarthyism had strengthened the most defensive and conservative impulses within the Foreign Service. I remember sitting in our Georgetown garden on an August night in 1961 when Harriman came back to Washington during a break in the interminable Geneva conference on Laos. The Foreign Service, he said, had been so thoroughly brainwashed by Dulles that it almost required what the Chinese called “thought correction” in order to adjust to the New Frontier. The Service, he added sadly, had declined greatly in purpose, clarity and liberalism since he had last known it. One’s own experience documented this resistance to the spirit of the new administration. When José Figueres came to Washington in the spring of 1961, our embassy in San José cabled that it viewed the prospect of his seeing President Kennedy “with consternation”; it feared that a meeting with the former president of Costa Rica would upset the present Costa Rican regime. Naturally Kennedy wanted to talk to a leader of Latin American democracy who had been among the first to endorse the Alliance for Progress and whose knowledge and influence went far beyond the borders of his own small country. The Department in Washington, more sensitive to the new mood, interposed no obstacle, the meeting took place, and the Costa Rican regime survived. But it was a constant struggle.

  One almost concluded that the definition of a Foreign Service officer was a man for whom the risks always outweighed the opportunities. Career officers had always tended to believe that the foreign policy of the United States was their institutional, if not their personal, property, to be solicitously protected against interference from the White House and other misguided amateurs; and by 1961 those favored in the Dulles years added to this proprietary instinct an immovable devotion to the attitudes of the past, whether good or bad. The hardest thing of all was to change anything—attitudes, programs, clichés. No one was more annoyed by this fidelity to the past, or more poignant in expressing his annoyance, than Galbraith. “You have no idea,” he wrote me from New Delhi in 1961, “how difficult it is to control one’s reaction over the smug pursuit of what experience has already shown to be disastrous policies.” The situation led Galbraith’s more philosophical associate, the social analyst Mark Epernay, to point out that, for the sophisticated man, the wisdom of policy naturally mattered far less than its stability. “Few things more clearly mark the amateur in diplomacy than his inability to see that even the change from the wrong policy to the right policy involves the admission of previous error and hence is damaging to national prestige.” This insight stimulated Epernay to design a “fully automated foreign policy” guaranteed to produce the proper response to every crisis. So, if Khrushchev threatened to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, the electronic computer could immediately type out the appropriate reply: “We stand willing to negotiate but we cannot act under threat or pressure and we must not make concessions. The reunification of Germany is essential but we do not thereby concede the existence of East Germany. We support the brave people of West Berlin.”*

  At times, it almost seemed that we had achieved the fully automated foreign policy. Thus I spent three years in the White House in a plaintive and unavailing effort to beg the State Department to stop using the phrase ‘Sino-Soviet bloc.’ This was a typical Foreign Service expression—barbarous in form (the parallelism would be ‘Russo-Chinese’ or, if absolutely necessary, ‘Sino-Russian’) and obsolescent in content. In a memorandum to the State Department Secretariat in January 1963, I wrote:

  Whatever substance [the phrase] might once have had as referring to a unified Russo-Chinese operation has surely been trickling away rather fast in recent months. Today the phrase is in most instances simply absurd. It suggests that those who use it don’t know what is going on in the world. I assume that this is not the case.

  Again in July, when the feud between Moscow and Peking seemed beyond all possibility of denial:

  In view of what is going on currently in Moscow, could not the Department bring itself to abolish the usage ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’? The relationship of that phrase to reality grows more tenuous all the time.**

  This dedication to the past found its ultimate sanction in what seemed the Service’s unshakable determination to protect those who, if wrong, were wrong in the right way and to penalize those who, though right, were right out of channels or out of cadence. The Foreign Service operated as a sort of benevolent society, taking care of its worst as well as—sometimes better than—its best. The promotion system was in effect a conspiracy of the conventional against the unconventional. J. Graham Parsons, having drastically misconceived the situation in Laos, was made ambassador to Sweden. His successor as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, a blameless but unimaginative career officer, having displayed no initiative in Washington, was sent as ambassador to a pivotal Asian state.

  On the other hand, zeal for good, but new, policies at the expense of bad, but established, ones was likely to gain an officer the reputation for causing trouble and—under the system where the challenged officer wrote the ‘efficiency reports’—a place at the bottom of his Foreign Service class. When Kennedy ended the unrelenting American opposition to the center-left coalition in Italy, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Rome, who had been single-handedly responsible for the prolongation of that policy long after it had become obsolete, became ambassador to Czechoslovakia; while an intelligent junior officer who had fought prematurely for the new policy in the Rome Embassy was marked down for insubordination, his offense having been that of carrying the case past the D.C.M. to the ambassador. This man was saved only by White House intervention from being ‘selected out’ (a phrase apparently adapted from Samuel Goldwyn) of the Service. Another young officer had served in an Iron Curtain capital. Visiting his country some years before, I had been impressed not only by his insight into the country but by his skill in the language and his exceptional range of acquaintances among writers, journalists and scholars. I ran into him again in 1962 and noted: “His is the all too familiar story. His independence and originality of mind brought him into conflict with his superior. . . . They denounced him as insubordinate; he was rated in the bottom five per cent of his class by the selection board; and is now slated for a consulship in [an Asian country]—obviously a punitive assignment.” As Harriman told the Jackson Subcommittee in 1963, “I have noted that men because they haven’t gotten along with one individual have been given very low ratings, when others have given them high ratings. .
. . Men with a spark and independence of expression are at times held down, whereas caution is rewarded.”

  Caution even smothered the Department’s relations with its own envoys abroad. In Western Europe after the Bay of Pigs one ambassador after another asked me in varying tones of perplexity and anguish what in hell had happened. On my return I called for the cable files and found that Washington had confined itself to sending around bland official ‘explanations’ couched in language suitable for public release. For what had really happened American diplomats overseas did better to rely on Newsweek and Time. Even though the Attorney General interested himself in the problem, we were never able to persuade State to level with its own embassies on this matter. This sort of thing was all too common. Galbraith, after receiving a similarly useless ‘explanation’ of policy, sent a crisp cable to the Department suggesting that in the future the confidential communications of the State Department not be used for purposes of “internal bemusement.” The suggestion was unavailing.