Diplomacy Without Diplomats?

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, September/ October 1997

Summary:  America could have had a foreign service second to none. But Washington could not accept any such rigorously selective and nonpolitical corps. And with the diffusion of authority around the globe, many entities from outside the diplomatic world are busy representing their nations abroad, for better or worse.

George F. Kennan was a career officer in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1926 to 1953, retiring as Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He has been Professor, then Professor, Emeritus, at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Democracy will always have ambassadors and ministers; the question is whether it will have diplomats.

by Jules Cambon, former French diplomat, 1925

If the standards set out by the founders of the Foreign Service of the United States had been consistently applied over the many years required for the shaping of a real career corps, America would long since have had a service equal or superior to any in the world. But the hopes for a strictly nonpolitical and scrupulously selective service were not destined to be vindicated. The political and bureaucratic establishments in Washington cannot tolerate for long any body of public servants established on a conceptual basis so different from their own and demanding such independence of administration. But in the era that is already upon us of rapidly decentralizing government and broadly diffused authority, perhaps the foreign service of today, lacking the rigidities of earlier visions, is as well suited as any arrangement to find new ways of interacting with the world.

THE CURIOUS EVOLUTION OF OUR FOREIGN SERVICE

In the first two decades of what is now the passing twentieth century, two federal services, both of which had developed not in accordance with any preconceived plan but as responses to international customs and perceived national needs, looked after American interests abroad. The diplomatic service was designed primarily to provide staff support for senior envoys, ambassadors, and ministers charged with the U.S. government's regular communication with its foreign counterparts. Like the envoys under whom they served, the diplomatic staff were accredited to the central government of the foreign country in question and resided in that country's capital. The other service was the consular one. Consular officials and their professional staff, far more numerous than the diplomatic one, were stationed in major ports and other commercial centers abroad, and their accreditation was to the local authorities. Their tasks consisted mainly of providing passport and visa services and protecting the interests of private American citizens living, traveling, or doing business in that region. The two services, diplomatic and consular, were poorly related to each other, and there was no proper uniformity in Washington's treatment of their personnel.

To handle new demands for foreign representation abroad after the First World War, Congress in 1924 approved the Rogers Act, which amalgamated the two services into a single Foreign Service of the United States. Officers in the two older services were to be integrated into the new one at comparable rank, but new candidates would enter only at the bottom, and only after passing exhaustive and impartially administered written and oral examinations. Both recruitment for and governance of the new service were to be nonpolitical in the strictest sense. To this end, the service was to be largely self-administered. Those charged with running it would be senior career officials of the service itself or the State Department, well acquainted with the tasks the service would have to perform and devoid of any strong domestic political commitments; ultimate authority was to rest with the secretary of state. The members of the new service, in other words, were to be held to many of the same standards of honor, discipline, and dedication as commissioned officers of the armed forces, and their nonpolitical status, it was assumed, would be entitled to equal respect on the part of government and public. Anything else would have placed the service at the mercy of the political spoils system, and all possibility of basing appointments on merit and achievement would have been lost from the start.

These were fine standards. It is hard to think of any better. In its first few years, the new service was administered largely by the public-spirited men who had designed it -- among them Joseph C. Grew, Wilbur Carr, and Charles Evans Hughes -- and within a short time it was well on the way to producing the results they had in mind. The writer of these lines was a member of the second class of officers admitted under the Rogers Act, and he has vivid memories of that period of high aims and hopes. It remains his conviction, based on many years of firsthand experience, that such a service, properly cultivated, would have come to constitute a significant and irreplaceable component of the national security structure.

The founders hoped that the service would become an accepted feature of the federal government and retain indefinitely the qualities they had envisioned for it. But we know today that such an expectation was unrealistic. To endure, a professional service so out of accord with the ingrained habits and assumptions of other government employment would require extensive understanding and acceptance by the public, the press, and a fairly long succession of presidents and Congresses. Only a broad informational campaign could have built and maintained backing for it until it gained the support of habit and tradition. Yet no such effort was undertaken. So it was not long before the new service came under the control of people in both the executive and legislative branches who had little knowledge of what it was intended to be, or indeed of the need for anything of the sort in the government. And that state of affairs has lasted to the present day.

In its first 25 years, one by one the principles on which the foreign service was founded were cheerfully ignored, abused, or violated by higher authority. Among the first to fall by the wayside was entrance only at the bottom and by examination. In the early 1930s President Hoover insisted on incorporating into the service, at higher ranks, a small group of business experts whom he had recruited while secretary of commerce; this incursion was later withdrawn, but a precedent had been established for much more far-reaching interference. During the Great Depression, regular admissions to the service were suspended for several years, interrupting the normal rhythm of recruitment and advancement and leaving the corps seriously unprepared to meet the demands soon to be imposed by war. At the same time, a new form of administration largely under political control gradually replaced limited self-administration. Congress passed legislation sealing this change in 1946.

During the Second World War, the State Department, while privately assuring foreign service officers that the greatest contribution they could make would be to continue serving at their overstrained foreign posts, failed to protect them from the military draft. Entry to the foreign service was suspended for the duration, leaving it even more seriously understaffed at war's end than before. Hostilities over, the government then unceremoniously unloaded into the foreign service's ranks hundreds of people who had been hastily recruited for various forms of nonmilitary wartime duty but for whom no other convenient place could now be found.