ashes to ashes-dust to dust

Ashes to Ashes-Dust to DustProgramming Systems and Foreign Policy Leadership by Frederick Mosher; John E. Harr; TheProfessional Diplomat by John Ensor HarrReview by: Rowland EggerPublic Administration Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1971), pp. 463-473Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/975032 .

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463

BOOK REVIEWS and NOTES ROBERT T. DALAND, Editor

ASHES TO ASHES- DUST TO DUST

ROWLAND EGGER Princeton University

PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS AND FOREIGN POLICY

LEADERSHIP, Frederick Mosher and John E. Harr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Pp. 260, $6.50 cloth, $2.95 paper.

THE PROFESSIONAL DIPLOMAT, John Ensor Harr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Pp. 404, $11.50 cloth.

FINDINGS: (1) no Secretary of State within the memory of living man has ever made the slightest effort to manage the Department; (2) no underling who has ever grappled with its policy management has survived; (3) no adviser who has ever offered suggestions for improving its policy processes can look back on anything more than wholly superficial change, frequently not for the better, and invariably undertaken for the wrong reasons; (4) the utter failure of the diplomatic missions to respond to the Kennedy letter of February 19, 1961, has shattered any hope of ambassadorial leadership in the field-except for cere- monial purposes the Ambassador is to knowl- edgeable people frequently the Number 2 or Number 3 American official with whom they deal; (5) the inability of the Department to respond to NASM 341 seems to affirm the essentially clerical level of operations in Wash- ington; (6) responsibility for the sum total of foreign policy planning and direction has probably passed irrevocably to the White House,

and we may be closer to Kennedy's dream than we realize.

SUCH ARE THE IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS,

amply documented and demonstrated with no small elegance, that emerge from Programming Systems and Foreign Policy Leadership and The Professional Diplomat. In fairness to Pro- fessor Frederick Mosher and John Harr it should be noted these are not the conclusions they draw, at least in such categorical terms. It may be they did not perceive them. Perhaps their sense of fitness inhibited them from hurl- ing such raucous and derisive language down the corridors of power. They may even wish to deny them. But in the warp and woof of the argument they have so tightly drawn, the conclusions are all but inescapable. If the conse- quences fall short of serendipity, they at least put us in a position to deal bluntly with the curious imperviousness of the foreign policy process to modern management.

In a well-ordered universe the delicate and always contingently balanced visceral processes of the shakers and movers of foreign policy would be disastrously upset by the waves Mosher and Harr are making. But an amor- phous collection of protoplasm capable of smothering the Rowe report and thumbing its nose at the directive of 1951, converting Wris- tonization into a caricature of a caricature, emasculating and then killing the Herter pro- posals, and sabotaging the Taylor recommen- dations will undoubtedly find ways of dealing with the relatively gentle, and gentlemanly, admonitions in these books. It is quite possible, therefore, that they will pass unobtrusively into the academic literature, to be read by a few professors and graduate students of political science, and resurrected centuries hence by

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a bug-eyed anthropologist. The books are quite different. Programming

Systems and Foreign Policy Leadership is the sad saga of the Comprehensive Country Plan- ning System from its conception in 1962 to its interment in unhallowed ground in late 1966 -one of a long and uninterrupted series of failures in policy planning modernization, and by no means the most recent. The Professional Diplomat is a macrostudy in the best behav- ioral tradition, with even a (mercifully brief) methodological appendix, of the foreign service as a caste system. Harr was a member of the staff of the Herter Commission, of which Mosher was staff director; Harr was subse-

quently director of the Office of Planning Management in the Department, and as such involved in events of which Mosher has written in his PPBS Comes to Foreign Affairs. Both authors are so full of their subject-and what strong stomachs they must have-one senses they might write a number of books on the Byzantine aspects of American foreign policy management without repeating themselves, as in fact they have.

In their own ways both books are utlimately addressed to the half-dozen classic issues of

foreign policy administration. It would be odd if this were not so. Since the process never

really solves anything, all its major issues are

guaranteed the longevity required to attain classic status. The issues may be summarized, grosso modo, as follows:

(1) The parameters of the foreign policy process, especially the role of the Department in a government in which almost every agency has extensive overseas concerns and commit- ments;

(2) The anatomical and physiological order-

ing of an antiorganization that has no central nervous system;

(3) The Department and the White House, in a world in which diplomacy is too crucial to national survival to be trusted to diplomats;

(4) The Department and the Missions, and the problem of how to be super primus in the field when one is managerially sub pares in Washington;

(5) Ambassadors as administrators, and why those who press the pants prefer to wear them themselves;

(6) The Foreign Service.

The Parameters of Policy Making

The day after President Kennedy abolished the Operations Coordinating Board, Secretary Rusk, in a statement which time has cruelly transmuted into what must be one of the most fatuous observations of American administrative history, told the policy-making officers of the Department of State, "We are expected to take charge." No one knows, of course, who anticipated how much of what would result from this action, but however modest the expectations of the President and the Secretary may have been, they were foredoomed to dis- appointment. In 181 years the Department has never "taken charge" of anything. Like all inchoate masses, it can be organized only against something-usually the President. It can obstruct. It can obfuscate. It can sometimes even destroy. It cannot create. Its creative impotence derives in part from general governmental structural inhibitions, in part from the way power is put together in Wash- ington, in part from its well-established reputation for managerial ineptitude, and in part, as in all social instrumentalities, from the charac- terestics of the men who dominate its councils.

It has been said again and again that almost all agencies of the government have overseas concerns. That is true. But except for State, AID, and USIA, these concerns are peripheral to their dominantly domestic programs. Viet- nam aside, even the military overseas concern is almost inconsequential in comparison with hardware and domestic operations. Anyone who expects these agencies to accept any sort of policy or administrative tutelle from the

Secretary of State as the price of maintaining their peripheral operations is expecting more than the facts have ever warranted. And while it is apparently possible in some conditions for a President to abdicate the sum total of his

managerial responsibilities in favor of a Secre- tary, as Coolidge did in favor of Mellon, the leverages in foreign affairs are so slight it is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which the abdication would be in favor of the Secre- tary of State, or would do him any good if it were.

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The centripetal influence of the political power structure is summed up by Mosher and Harr in these words:

. . .most of the realities of history and current prac- tice favor the agency. Each has its own powers and responsibilities, usually authorized by statute and official delegation. Each seeks its own resources-i.e., budgets-and has responsibility and accountability for their use. Each has its own subcommittees of Congress to deal with on both substantive and appro- priation matters. Each hires its own personnel, controls their assignments, commands their loyalties ....

Rightly or wrongly-and the evidence sug- gests mostly rightly-State has a firmly established reputation for managerial ineptitude. Harr stated it this way: . . .it has a very poor reputation in management. One can see this as far back as the 1945 Bureau of the Budget study and the 1951 Brookings study, which said: "The Department's administrative record is better than it is frequently supposed to be, but the distrust of the Department's administrative competence is sufficiently widespread at present to limit the possibility of making assignments that would other- wise be justified and desirable."

This criticism has been most pronounced over the period of the expectation-reality gap-1961 to the present . . . although the criticisms are often exaggerated, usually attack symptoms (overstaffing, too much paperwork) rather than causes, and are somewhat weak on positive solutions, they nevertheless exist and have more than a little foundation in fact. A poor reputation, in the case of State, can become a serious obstacle to efforts aimed at improving the situation.

For evidence on the mentality of the policy echelons in the Department-as though the autobiographies were not utterly damning and wholly sufficient-we can go to Ambassador Lucius D. Battle:

Serious challenges to our superiority have come not when we wished to expand our influence but rather when we viewed it too narrowly. The challenges have come not because our horizons were too vast, but because we made them too restrictive . . As a result, new agencies were created to do what we should have done but would not accept as legiti- mate.

What Battle seems to be telling us is that the place is dominated by small men, from a small service, with small ideas.

These are not the earmarks of an instru- mentality capable of integrating and leading a unified policy-making process encompassing the aggregate of the country's overseas interests.

Organizing the Unorganizable

Harr quotes an anonymous White House staff member as follows:

The State Department is not an organization in the Lusual sense. It is a constellation of small power centers-some moving, some standing, some compet- ing, some hiding, some growing, some decaying, a few coalescing, but more breaking apart into smaller fragments. which soon develop all the organs and physiology of their parents. There is no central nervous system. It is an anti-organization....

Harr claims no importance for this view, which he regards as somewhat exaggerated, because the author cannot be cited. But there are other, and I think better, criteria for judg- ing the value of this bit of trenchant prose. I accept the truth of the two concluding state- ments on esthetic grounds-the beauty and elegance of their demonstration. I accept them also because my experience and observation provide no evidence to contradict them.

An administrative mass is not to be criti- cized merely because its actions and move- ments do not take place within the pyramidal confines, or flow along the set channels, implicit in the Weberian theory. Very few organizations do operate in this manner. Indeed, an admirable analysis of matrix management at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston recently published in the Interna- tional Review of Administrative Sciences dem- onstrates quite clearly the efficiency, in some circumstances, of quite different principles and practices of organization. Our passionate ano- nyme describes matrices without management. The Manned Spacecraft Center has a very healthy central nervous system, culminating in the Configuration Control Board, which tells it why, what, and how-as well as when. The Configuration Control Board has lots of hard data on which to operate.

In 1945 when the BOB was putting together its report on the organization of the Depart- ment of State which Secretary Byrnes had requested, I recall handing a memorandum to Dean Price, then ramrodding the drive for the Bureau, dealing in part with a research and intelligence facility in foreign policy. Nothing more was ever heard of it, and I think out of friendship for me he had it classified, not as

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secret, but as too incredibly naive for circula- tion. This was the Alice in Wonderland era, when even BOB consultants were optimists. The argument of the piece was that if we could establish a center in the Department for

clearing information about foreign policy research, systematically collecting hard data on matters affecting foreign policy, and develop- ing analytical and research techniques, we would provide the policy machinery with a brain, from which at least an elementary central nervous sytem might develop in due course. Once this was achieved, the Department could deal with its problems of organization and

management on an essentially empirical basis. An intelligence and research unit was even-

tually established, but in a line of events quite unconnected with the BOB report or my memorandum. Like most hopeful starts in State, it reached its finest flower in the process of with-

ering on the vine. Harr tells us that in 1964 the Department spent $83,000 on research. The intelligence distillate from this massive investment must have been submicroscopic. In his managerial strategy for the future, Harr calls for the creation of "a major research and

development capability, including new technol-

ogy (i.e., information management system), social science research, and the study of organizational effectiveness (i.e., a sophisticated case study program on crisis management)." It

is, of course, only one of eight major propos- als, the others involving administrative restruc-

turing, reform of the foreign service, comprehensive PPBS and organizational development programs, and money, money, money. One's attitude toward these undertakings turns essen-

tially on one's optimism or pessimism, i.e., on whether one believes, or does not believe, in the ultimate perfectibility of the human per- sonality. Mr. Harr gives me a heavy load to bear.

Assuming that resources remain unchanged, a problem is not solved by shifting its locus. On the other hand, an administrative change of venue may have results as salutary as those sometimes attributed to the transfer of a court first hand of the events, but I have been told that in the Gulf of Tonkin incident decisions case to another jurisdiction. I know nothing at

ordinarily made and commands usually issued

by and on the responsibility of the flagship bridge were in fact emanating from a briefing room in the White House, so complete and instant were telecommunications. If one can make decisions 12,000 miles away from the scene of operations with as much information and assurance as the officer on the deck where the action is taking place, technology has obviously written a new chapter in doctrines of command. It may be that the place for the head of a Mission is not in Rio or London or New Delhi, but in Washington under the immediate command of the President. Kenne- dy's estimate that 30 really first-rate men could handle the job, if backed up by modern research and information retrieval facilities and electronic communications, may be quite accurate.

Under our constitutional system the Presi- dent bears a very special relation to two con-

geries of activity. As Commander-in-Chief he is involved with the armed forces, and as the

"only channel" of diplomatic communication he is involved with foreign affairs in ways and to degrees quite different from those he bears to other governmental activities. He is not Chief Forester, he is not Head County Agent, he is not Director of Internal Revenue. There are deficiencies in both foreign and military policy processes for which the President is

responsible some distance below the level at which a National Security Council can operate. The foreign service is no more the cause of these deficiencies in foreign policy than the officers corps are responsible for the deficiencies in military policy. Stewart Alsop wants us to leave the poor old Foreign Service alone. He may be right-after we get it out of a business it should never have gotten mixed up with in the first place. And to do that we have to

get the business in the hands of those who should have been doing it in the first place. Perhaps the time has come for the presidency to answer institutionally to its responsibility of decisions which, as events have shown, it can in no case avoid.

The Department and the White House

John Harr quotes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to the effect that President Kennedy "used to

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divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Depart- ment as a facade in which people might con- tentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau." President Franklin Roosevelt, an older and by that time perhaps a somewhat cynical man, said it more succinctly when, in the early days of American involvment in World War II, he expressed the polite hope the State Department would have the decency to remain neutral in that conflict.

The nexus of the White House-State relationship is, of course, the Secretary. What does a Secretary of State do? Sometimes, but very rarely, he runs the foreign policy process, as Secretary Dulles did in the administration of President Eisenhower-and what a virtuoso, heart-in-the-throat, macabre, slack-wire per- formance that was! On the infrequent occa- sions when Secretaries do run foreign policy, they do it without help or hindrance from the Department. Dulles conducted diplomacy just as he handled cases for Cromwell and Sulli- van, and the Department learned about the pleasures and perils of brinkmanship at the same time and in the same way the rest of the world (including the White House) did-they read about them in the Times.

The Secretary also advises the President on matters of foreign relations-but not very much. Few Presidents permit themselves exclu- sive dependency on State (or any other single source) for their foreign intelligence, and among available sources the Department's wares are rarely at the top of the credibility scale. Generally, however, Secretaries and their claques must content themselves with making a fairly meagre living off the "value added" to our own espionage by taking in the washing of the foreign diplomatic missions accredited to the United States. In this sort of operation the amount of value added obviously depends on the quality of the data collected and the appropriateness and sophistication of the analytical processes. As Hitch pointed out early in the Mosher-Harr case study, State didn't (and doesn't) possess even the elements of a basic data bank. The only thing it knows to do with a computer is write a payroll. State, in fact, does not collect data-it relays opinions.

The Department's failure as a source of policy planning advice and intelligence, which underlies the decline in its usefulness to the President, is a long story only incidentally ger- mane to this essay. Like most failures, it was the product less of anything that was done than of the many things left undone. The policy planning staff of the Department reads like the honor roll of American diplomacy. It has had much more than its proper share of the finest minds of the profession. The brilli- ance and perceptiveness with which its mission was conceived and the extraordinary ability of the men brought to its service laid foundations for what should have been one of the major breakthroughs in American administrative history. But it was put to work making bricks without straw. Since World War II, technology, decolonization, the Soviet Union, and the revolution of rising expectations have changed fundamentally and irrevocably not only the substance of the problems confronted by the international community but the ways in which they arise, their priorities, and the appropriateness of methods for dealing with them. The response of the Department to these changes has not been reassuring. Lucius D. Battle, Ambassador and sometime Assistant Secretary, is quoted by Harr as follows:

... we declined in years past to face new realities in the field of foreign relations-intelligence, information. economics, political-military relationships-and to equip ourselves for these challenges in times when the irevitable importance of these fields was apparent to some of us. We declined to impress upon ourselves and the Department of State the urgent need for facing these new areas of international policy.

Far from meeting the challenges Ambassa- dor Battle threw down, the Department has drawn its cloak more closely about it and retreated into narrower and narrower cul-de- sacs. Its elitist pretensions, especially among the FSO elements dominating the Department, led it into the rejection of new responsibilities and a preoccupation with what it regarded as the "proper" function of the Department- political affairs. But it was no more fitted to survive competitively in this area than in the areas it had renounced. For example, in the real world a political report is an analysis of political events, an appraisal of their signifi-

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cance, and a calculation of their effects. In the Department, a political report is an ex cath- edra statement based on the official position of the person issuing it and not amenable, within the Department, to the debate and adversary comment by which rational discourse is tested in other latitudes. Or, to take another example, a social scientist-likely an economist-writes a banal report on a matter of common and notorious knowledge and automatically stamps it CLASSIFIED. Of course he protects the

country (mostly from his banality) by this action, but of much greater importance he protects himself by preventing the report from

finding its way into the hands of outside econ- omists who might express frank opinions con-

cerning its intellectual value. The point is that when reporting and research are removed from the marketplace of ideas they quickly deterio- rate into mere subjectivity and lose completely their predictive value. The Department has

repeatedly fallen, and has permitted the Presi- dent to fall, into egregious error concerning the substance of international problems, priorities, and method. Any Princeton sophomore, and most freshmen, could supply chapter and verse. As Mosher put it in his Democracy and the Public Service:

The failure of a career system to accommodate to

growing knowledge and changing requirements-to redefine its self-image and take steps to give reality to a new one-may lead to a slow and agonizing decline in its control over and its influence upon the arena in which it operates.

It certainly may. It certainly has. It hasn't been all that slow. But the agony part is right on the nose.

The Department and the Missions

President Kennedy's famous directive to the ambassadors defining their authorities told them they were in charge of the entire United States Mission in the countries to which they were accredited. Only military forces operating in the field were excepted from this order, and it did not exempt military aid and military intelligence from the ambassador's supervision. The directive was greeted with feverish inac- tion. One member of the Department, accord-

ing to Mosher and Harr, later described the situation in these words:

. . .they [the ambassadors] did not really want to exercise the kind of broad management that the President was trying to give them and we were trying to implement by CCPS and other means. Most ambassadors, both career and political, were content if their leadership was unchallenged in the political arena and if a new economic and military programs were implemented which most directly sup- ported their own political evaluations. They really didn't want to have to decide whether they needed another Agricultural Attache, or that the Legal Attache was less useful to the fulfillment of U.S. policy than another Cultural Attache. They never really, on the whole, identified themselves with the President and his goals and his responsibilities. They continued to see themselves and be seen by other agencies as a grandiose State Department representa- tive. . . . They didn't want to lead, didn't lead, and fought very successfully against being made to lead.

One may reasonably ask whether, even if the ambassadors had possessed the moral and intellectual qualities necessary for Mission leadership, the energy for the job, and the loyalty to the President, they would in most countries have been able to lead? They were the visible, exposed heads of a part of the aggregate representation-the diplomatic mission- which had an unbeatable reputation for managerial inadequacy and a known nil capacity for

planning and programming. They were deal-

ing with heads of other parts of the Mission-AID, USIA, military-whose operations had for years been based on country plans. Almost from the beginning of the for-

eign economic assistance program ECA insti- tuted country planning, and by the middle 1950's some very highly sophisticated analytical methods were being used in development programming. USIA likewise began systematic country planning early in its history. Military intelligence had always operated under some-

thing resembling general operational plans, which are tied to activities at the country level.

Military assistance country plans are quite elaborate, and constitute an important part of the work of the MAAG's. In this fairly stiff

game the ambassador, representing the Depart- ment, holds no high cards.

The government, as Herbert Emmerich has

pointed out, is the last refuge of free competi- tion. And administrators in the field are no

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more likely than their counterparts in Wash- ington to accept advice and direction about how to run their businesses from a man who has demonstrated no identifiable aptitude for running his own. It is undoubtedly true that the ambassadors had no intention of respond- ing to the Kennedy directive or the Rusk exhortations. But they would have failed even if they had tried.

This raises the question whether the same factors that limit the effectiveness of the Depart- ment's coordinative capacity in Washington do not operate in somewhat the same way to limit the coordinative potential of the ambassador in the field, and consequently to restrict the legiti- mate expectations of the Secretary and the President with respect to what an ambassador is able to do. It is true, of course, that the ambassador, unlike the Secretary, is dealing with men whose main concern is commensur- ate with, rather than peripheral to, his own. The men from AID, USIA, the military, and the Peace Corps are all primarily interested in their programs in the country to which they are accredited. But each operates under quite different authorizing legislation, and each has quite different authorities and delegations. Their local budgets, lacking integrated country PPB-and perhaps even in the presence of it, have only the most casual sort of relationship, if indeed they have any relationship at all. Their agency interests and loyalties take precedence over anything as abstract as the Mis- sion or the Foreign Service, which even in the embassy has never been anything more than words on the letterheads used by the ambassador.

The effect of a unified personnel system on such a disparate aggregation of people is hard to predict. It could in no case cover more than embassy, AID, and USIA employees. No military man would put up with State's allowances; no congressional committee would extend military allowances to civilian agencies. Membership in the civil service does not pro- duce any notable sense of common loyalty in Washington, and the cohesiveness of the For- eign Service, small as it is, is greatly exaggerated. In Asunci6n and Accra, and probably in Zanzibar as well, the American official family is fairly chummy as it is. In London, Paris,

Rome, and New Delhi, as in Washington, ultimate reality tends to center not in the agency, and certainly not in the Mission, but in the car pool, or at most in the office. This is likely to be so no matter what is done about the personnel system.

We should at least consider the possibility that the diplomatic missions can never function as local instrumentalities for securing com- plaince with a departmental, or even a White House, responsibility for coordinated policy planning. Commissary orders may represent the optimum limits of their coordinative effectiveness, and that only because they are in the hands of administrators traveling incognito in the ambassador's pants.

Ambassadors as Administrators

Ambassadors not only will not administer, they will not be administered. Their pretensions of administrative untouchability, indeed, carry "diplomatic freedom" to a point that makes academic freedom look like a species of indenture. If ambassadorial notions in this matter ever become known to the AAUP, and are taken up seriously in the academic world, the professoriate will become utterly intolera- ble, instead of merely impossible.

The Department, conscious of the fact that, as Mosher puts it, "the bulk of activity at the upper levels of any given organization is managerial, not technical or professional," has for many years attempted to backstop the palpable weakness of the diplomatic missions with administrative support. With the eruption of other agencies, better acquainted with the managerial arts and sciences, into foreign affairs, and with inceasing concern of the Pres- ident and his staff agencies with the quality of overseas administration, the ambassadors have encountered a new breed which they do not understand but which they fear, not without reason, to be dangerous to their personal com- fort and tranquillity. Harr put it this way:

Special dislike is reserved for "professional administrators," a somewhat vague term covering virtually all those who seem intent on changing the character of the diplomatic corps. Included are administrators within the foreign service, senior administrative officials of the Department of State, members of special study groups, and administrators elsewhere in

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the federal government, particularly in the Bureau of the Budget and the Civil Service Commission. Briggs refers to the "administrative types" as "glorified janitors, supply clerks, and pants-pressers" who "yearn to get their fingers into the foreign affairs pie, and when they do, the diplomatic furniture often gets marked with gummy thumbprints."

He quotes Thayer in these kindly sentiments:

"They seem to forget," one Foreign Service officer said, loud enough to be heard by the new men, "that they are essentially valets. Instead of pressing our pants, they are trying to wear them." Tactless though the remark may have been, it was not unjustified. The newcomers, many of them graduates of schools of government administration, were unfamiliar with the objectives, problems and methods of diplomacy. Yet, instead of confining their efforts to administrative problems, they rashly injected themselves into the substantive work of diplomacy.

And Villard writes sadly:

In the State Department, the administrators are no longer the servants of the policy makers-they are rapidly becoming the masters.

These ambassadors are confronted with a very real dilemma, which only they can solve, and which they are apparently unwilling and unable to confront:

1. The problems at the top of the mission are managerial, to which the professional mystique of substantive diplomacy provides no answers. 2. Management involves the making of decisions, firmly and promptly; the turnaround time on proposed policy changes is frequently short, and decisions at the mission level cannot afford the leisurely processes of suspended judgment to which the diplomatic milieu is accustomed. 3. The ambassador cannot be bothered with the problems of glorified janitors, supply clerks, and pants-pressers. 4. The decision is made by the administra- tor. 5. The administrative decision is found to affect diplomatic operations; administrative decisions always affect substantive work, and important decisions affect it fundamentally. 6. The ambassador's diplomatic tail is caught in the administrative crack of the decision he did not bother to make or try to influence.

7. He yelps. Many solutions have been advanced for this

problem. President Kennedy's was the most direct. He told them if they couldn't stand the heat, to get out of the kitchen. But they merely continued to sit, even more quietly than before, and think cool thoughts about the beauty of their upcoming pensions. A group of six mid-career officers in the Department pre- pared a memorandum which Harr quotes in part as follows:

If the proper role of the Foreign Service officer corps is to provide creative direction in the multi- agency field of foreign affairs, then the duties of Foreign Service officers should prepare them to play this role-instead of the many roles the Foreign Service officer is now asked to fill. The Foreign Serv- ice officer must be recruited, assigned, trained and developed with the sole end of fitting him to serve in positions of executive responsibility requiring great creativity and rigorous analytical capabilities.

Then follows one of the most magnificent non sequiturs to be found in a debate notable for the casualness of the connections between diagnoses and therapy. Harr tells us:

On this conclusion, the authors based their pro- posal for the addition of a "third" track to the For- eign Service system, one composed of officers capable of fulfilling the executive role in foreign affairs. Only officers in this track would be FSOs; all others would be in the FSS category. The other two tracks, presumably all their members being in the FSS category, would be composed of administrative support personnel, on the one hand, and officers engaged in the traditional and "technical" diplomatic functions on the other hand. No one would be allowed into the third track of executives who had not "demonstrated unusual competence in the technical functions of classic and modern diplomacy." The authors went on to recommend training for the third track in "the areas of economics, mathematics, and the management of large, complex organizations."

I don't know many of them any more, but I can count on my two thumbs the number of FSO's I do know who meet the entrance requirements for track three. A liberal estimate of the number of large, complex organizations in the foreign service requiring track three man- agers over the next 25 years may be as many as 10. The annual recruitment volume could not exceed 1.125. It hardly seems worth while to lay track for this sort of traffic flow. In addition, the eliteness of such a group would be quite unbearable.

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A solution of the administrative problem so simple it could not possibly receive considera- tion would be to turn the management of the Missions over to civil service characters, move the ambassador off the top floor and make him the local Grover Whalen, suspend recruitment directly to the foreign service and add staff as required from mature persons with relevant interests and qualifications who had succeeded elsewhere in the government on lateral entrance. It worked well for the British Treas- ury. It might work for us.

The Foreign Service

A few years ago the late Mohammad Ali Bogra, sometime Pakistani Prime Minister and then in his second tour of duty as Ambas- sador to the United States, and I were lunch- ing together at a Washington club frequented, but not notably graced, by a diplomatic clien- tele. Near the end of the meal the Ambassa- dor's attention was distracted temporarily by the entrance of one of the more tightly stuffed shirts of the Foreign Service on departmental assignment, who nodded superciliously in our direction, filled his plate at the buffet, and wandered aimlessly, as in all things, to the other end of the dining room. The Ambassa- dor turned to me. "Professor," he said (he called me "Professor" only when he was on the verge of a Statement of Social Signifi- cance), "why is it that the Foreign Service of the United States of America and the Civil Service of Pakistan, with histories so little alike, with traditions so profoundly different, with functions so completely dissimilar, based on cultures which have almost nothing in common, should now be so very much alike in their more deplorable characteristics?" The question, obviously rhetorical, required no answer but since he returned to his food and said no more I felt obligated to fill the silence. "I think, sir, it has something to do with small, closed societies which for the members are important vehicles of upward social mobility, and that have no internal facilities for continu- ing self-criticism. More immediately, it poses the problem of the horrible mutations that occur when snobbery goes unsnubbed. The strong point of the British civil and foreign

services, and of British society in general, is the admirable provision for the regular, periodic snubbing of snobs right to the top. I suppose the Queen herself is the only one ulti- mately unsnubbable." The Ambassador consid- ered this trifle momentarily. "What you say about closed societies I find a bit exotic, but the snubbing of snobs part may have some useful applications. Shall we take coffee in the hall and look at the possibilities?"

Since then I have had occasion from time to time to ponder the things I wrote about the Civil Service of Pakistan, the things I said and did not write, and the things I thought and did not say. I have read and reread what Braibanti wrote, what Gladieux wrote, what Goodnow wrote, and what many others, including many Pakistanis, have written about the CSP. The Ambassador was right; the Foreign Service and the CSP, so different in most ways, are remarkably alike in their more deplorable characteristics. What are they? This will do for openers: alienation from the people and purposes they are supposed to serve, pretensions of eliteness which the facts do not justify, intellectual arrogance which history does not sustain, a feudalistic pride of place and preoccupation with precedence in a world increas- ingly egalitarian; imperviousness or hostility to new analytical methods which may involve reconsideration of the "generalist" mystique- in short, a tendency to draw their inspiration almost altogether from looking in the mirror. It is understood, of course, it is only when they run in packs that these characteristics are exhibited. Individually, some of our best friends may be FSO's or CSP's.

One of the tragedies that repeatedly comes to the fore in the diplomatic biographies, which Harr deals with gently and perceptively, is the nostalgia of old men for a foreign service that never was. And their dreams, symbolic perhaps of the dimensions of their spiritual poverty, seem invariably to have been of the "eliteness" of the service in which they spent their lives. This sort of eliteness is a pure wisp of the imagination, and it is almost impossible to get a firm hold of it. Eliteness is not con- ferred by a degree from an Ivy League college. It is not attested by the grade on an examination paper. It is not consolidated by the con-

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gregation of the self-anointed daily at 10, 2, and 4 to tell themselves and each other they are, in the slang of my (and many of their) generation, the "cat's meow." An Eagle Scout at age 14 is a member of an elite group; if 20 years later the winning of his Eagle Scout badge is still the most important thing that has

happened to him, one may assume a certain deterioration of the eliteness. As former Assistant Secretary Crockett said, without con- vincing Hickenlooper and Pell, "Some people grow. Some people don't grow." From the biographies it is difficult to know whether the authors didn't grow at all, or merely shrank in their anecdotage. But the only kind of eliteness this government can afford is that which is won, rewon, and won again, day-in and day- out, month by month, year by year. There are no tenure appointments to elite status.

Like Warren Ilchman in his Professional Diplomacy, Harr is impressed by the role of the Ivy League big three as recruitment sources for the foreign service, and they both seem to think this has something to do with eliteness. But what does one prove by pointing out that 30 per cent of the FSO's attended Harvard, Princeton, or Yale? If this confers eliteness, then the Rogers Act was a great mistake, since, as Ilchman shows, out of the total

pre-1924 foreign service, H-P-Y produced 63.8 per cent, which declined to 36 per cent of the recruits from 1926-30, 40 per cent of those from 1931-35, 26 per cent of those from 1936-39, and 15 per cent of those from 1957-62. The Rogers Act was a great mistake, but not for this reason. About all one can demonstrate in this not very profitable line of

inquiry is that the same sort of person who would consider the foreign service as a career would go to H-P-Y if he could get in. That sort of person, as Harr's Survey of the Diplo- matic Profession clearly indicates, is primarily concerned with upward social mobility. H-P-Y are the finest and speediest vehicles of upward social mobility which have been devised since the invention of money. It would be very odd if a young man on the make did not recognize an express elevator when he saw one. Now if Harr and Ilchman could demonstrate that 30 per cent of the FSO's received their secondary education at Groton or Philips-Andover, they

would be saying something about eliteness. They would be saying that FSO's are recruited mainly from the elite of established wealth, which-the decayed gentlefolk of the Confed- eracy to the contrary notwithstanding-is the only kind of eliteness this country has ever recognized. But most FSO's go to Podunk High School. Podunk should bus.

Deeply embedded in the mythology of its own eliteness to which the foreign service

clings with the desperation of an aging courte- san is the mystique of the "generalist" function in diplomacy. Out of the mouths of babes and

sucklings we are told:

A man skilled in Foreign languages, representation, negotiation and the like is still worth ten to a hundred times as much as AID technicians who are unable to communicate with foreigners, peace corps types who want to change a world which has resisted

change for centuries, and press agents who attempt to peddle our civilization like soap.

The old men do no better. A retired ambassador and dreamer in the dust extraordinary and plenipotentiary is quoted by Harr as follows:

. . In the same way that specialists in different branches of medicine are elbowing out the old-fash- ioned family physician, the specialists in the Foreign Service are displacing the old-time generalists.

As this process goes on, the ambassador fears, the generalists will disappear and with them will be gone "the assets of perceptiveness, sound judgment, panoramic understanding, and intuition tempered in the fires of practical experience."

Harr sums it up in words that give us a pic- ture of something close to the ultimate of a

bureaucracy in which internal gamesmanship has almost completely superseded purpose:

The highest-status field, the one that most young persons join the Foreign Service to engage in, is the

poltical field. The economic field has been rising steadily in status over the years, although it includes a number of highly specialized subfields (civil avia- tion, atomic energy, international finance, petroleum, fisheries, minerals) which are regarded by many FSOs as potential dead ends for career purposes. Taken together the political and general economic fields are referred to by FSOs as the "substantive" fields of diplomacy, as contrasted to administration, by which is meant low-level support of other activities, not management....

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BOOK REVIEWS

The political and economic fields, in the parlance of FSOs, constitute the "mainstream" of a Foreign Service career. They are closer to policy considera- tions and are better rewarded in the promotion system, thus providing the most direct track to the top. Being deficient in this regard, the other fields are less prestigious, outside of the "mainstream." They are more narrowly specialized; once assigned to them, many officers believe, it is difficult to get out.

Therefore the rule for the young examination-entry officer has been either to avoid assignment to the low-status fields altogether or to serve in one of them early in one's career and rotate into the political and economic areas as soon as possible. This is the classic generalist pattern, although the terms generalist and specialist do not have very precise mean- ings in the Foreign Service context. An officer may be just as specialized in the political field as in the consular or administrative fields. An important ele- ment of the generalist-specialist debate over the years in the FSO corps is status-high-status versus low- status fields.

In short, the proper concerns of a young FSO headed for a career ambassadorship are poli- tics-which, the way they do it in the foreign service, is an exercise without standards, refer- ents, or testing, in fact a sort of soliloquy-and general economics-which requires no knowledge of the subject and does not involve one in arguments with people who know what they are talking about. This is one way for an elite person to remain unsnubbed.

L'Envoi

Fifty years ago the favorite occupation of the political pundits was forecasting the date of the collapse of the British Empire. Its demise was predicted with monotonous regu- larity, and when Nelson failed to fall off his pedestal on the appointed date there was much explaining to be done. People eventually became bored with the game. Then one day the Empire did collapse. A little later it became clear that even the Commonwealth was an optical illusion.The reality was Little England.

The Department of State has served something of the same purpose in the United States. It has been on its last legs certainly ever since the end of World War II. It has been sub- jected to vast injections of unwashed and

unwanted personnel. It has been rolled in the mud by McCarthy of Wisconsin. It has been Wristonized, and lived. And with its head bloody but unbowed, it is still with us.

Whether CCPS failed or was slugged in the alley, whether the Foreign Service is an aggregation of snobbish nincompoops or of knights on white chargers, in and of themselves are not of very great importance. What is important is the cumulative impact of a long succes- sion of failures-of the mounting body of evidence that somehow nothing ever goes right in the Department or the Foreign Service. Why? The Department, to be sure, is an administrative madhouse, but so are some other depart- ments, including some very prosperous ones. There are a lot of social climbers in the For- eign Service, but so are there in the Army, the FBI, and for all I know in the Peace Corps; if there are none in the Civil Service it is because they have abandoned all hope.

The Department fights many rear-guard actions. Most of the time it loses. Its jurisdiction has been eroded. Its influence has all but vanished. Its status has deteriorated to the point that not even the upwardly mobile young men from H-P-Y are interested in it as a career. Attrition in the Foreign Service at all ranks, and especially among its abler members, is a problem of the first magnitude.

There are stirrings in the Department that give cheer to some. It is good to see Young Turks take over the Foreign Service Associa- tion; whether this is a token of things to come in the reform of the Service, or mere public muscle-flexing by young men whom the system has not yet brought to heel remains to be seen. The Journal is, on occasion, a great joy to well-wishers of the Service in their quest for internal improvement, but two, or even a few, swallows do not make a summer. The progres- sive attitude adopted by some of the nobler career men, at the end of their careers, is encouraging, but deathbed repentences are not the greatest evidence in the world. Why didn't they say it 20 years ago?

My optimism about the Department and the Service is under control. So is my optimism about the White House.

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ashes to ashes-dust to dust

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