the foreign service journal, december 1959
TRANSCRIPT
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The Foreign Service Journal is the professional journal of the American For¬ eign Service and is published by the American Foreign Service Association, a non¬ profit private organization. Material appearing herein represents the opinions of the writers and is not intended to indicate the official views of the Department of State or of the Foreign Service as a whole.
AMERICAN FOREIGN SERVICE ASSOCIATION
G. FREDERICK REINHARDT, President J. GRAHAM PARSONS, Vice President DAVID MCK. KEY, General Manager BARBARA P. CHALMERS, Executive Secretary
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
THOMAS S. ESTES, Chairman WILLIAM L. BLUE, Vice Chairman STEPHEN WINSHIP, Secretary-Treasurer MELISSA E. FOELSCH, Ass’t. Secretary-Treasurer CHARLES W. ADAIR, JR.
WALDEMAR J. GALLMAN
SAMUEL R. GAMMON
MAX V. KREBS
DAVID H. MCCABE
JOHN H. STUTESMAN, JR.
The AMERICAN FOREIGN SERVICE ASSOCIATION is an unofficial and voluntary association of the members, active and retired, of The Foreign Service of the United States and the Department of State. The As¬ sociation was formed for the purpose of fostering esprit de corps among members of the Foreign Service and to establish a center around which might be grouped the united efforts of its members for the improvement of the Service.
JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARD
W. T. M. BEALE, JR., Chairman JOHN H. BHRNS
CHARLES F. KNOX, JR.
HENRY C. RAMSEY
JAMES CARSON
PHILIP H. CHADBOURN, JR.
RICHARD T. DAVIES
RICHARD FDNKHOUSER
H. FREEMAN MATTHEWS, JR.
JAMES F. O’CONNOR, JR.
GWEN BARROWS, Managing Editor DAVID MCK. KEY, General Manager JANE D. FISHBDRNE, Editorial and Adv. Asst. WINIFRED B. TURNER, Circulation Manager
The Editorial Board of the FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL will consider all articles submitted. If accepted, the author will be paid one cent a word at time of publication. Photo¬ graphs accompanying articles will, if accepted, be purchased at one dollar each. Five dollars is paid for cover and full page pictures. Nega¬ tives and color transparencies are not accepta¬ ble. Photos should be black and white glossies, measuring approximately 7x9 inches, and should be mailed between extra heavy card¬ board. No photos are returned.
Copyright, 1959, by the American Foreign Service Association.
Issued monthly at the rate of $4.00 a year, 50 cents a copy, by the American Foreign Service Association. 1908 G Street, N. W., Washington, D. 0. Second- class postage paid at Washington, D. C.
Printed in U.S.A. by Monumental Printing Com¬ pany, Baltimore.
CONTENTS DECEMBER, 1959
Volume 36, Number 12
page
8 MR. MURPHY ON THE FOREIGN SERVICE
21 Two DIPLOMATISTS
by Harry Raymond Turkel
24 THE TALE OF THE BUREAUCRAT
by Richard Funkhouser
30 FROM A MEMBER OF 1959’S SELECTION BOARDS:
40 NEW AFSA OFFICERS
42 LETTER FROM KAMPALA
by Peter Hooper, Jr.
50 THIS CHANGED AND CHANGING WORLD
by Walter Lippmann
54 PACKING AND STORAGE OF PERSONAL EFFECTS
departments
4 APPOINTMENTS AND DESIGNATIONS
14 TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
by James B. Stetvart
27 EDITORIAL PAGE
28 WASHINGTON LETTER
by Gwen Barrows
34 THE BOOKSHELF
36 SERVICE GLIMPSES
56 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
COVER PHOTO
“Boys and Snow” by Paul Child
Mr. Child, currently Cultural Attache at Oslo, writes us: “These children could be in New England, or Norway,
but actually they were in Germany at Plittersdorferaue, near Bonn.
“It was February, 1956, and one of the coldest months in memory. The Rhine, half-seen on the right, was already choked with ice, and shortly afterward froze solid. That was a rough winter for grown-ups, but wonderful for children——and these two snow-lovers probably wished it would last forever.”
INDEX TO ADVERTISERS
Please mention the Foreign Service Journal when writing to advertisers.
Alban Towers
American Foreign Service Protective Association
American Motors Corporation
American Security and Trust Company American Storage Company
Arista Trading Company
Arlington Realty Company
Barclay, The Beam, James B., Distilling Company
Bell, W., and Company Bowling Green Storage and Van Company
Brewood, Engravers Calvert School, The
Chase Manhattan Bank, The „ Chatel, Milliccnt—Realtor
Circle Florists
Container Transport International, Inc. DACOR
Diplomatic Appliance Corporation Firestone Tire and Rubber Company - ..
First National City Bank of New York Ford International
Francis Scott Key Apartment Hotel General Electronics Incorporated
General Motors Corporation Glenmore Distilleries Company Grace Line 16 Greenbelt Pharmacy „ _ __ 54
Groth, Edward M. Hilltop House, Incorporated 54
Intercontinental Hotels Corporation 7 Kellogg, The M. W., Company 9
Mayflower, The 49 McLachlen Banking Corporation 48
Merchants Transfer and Storage Company _ 6 Miller, R. William, Jr. 52 National Capital Storage and Moving Company, Inc. 10 National Distillers Products Company 13, 33, 41 Neptune World-Wide Moving 17 Park Central Hotel 1 52 Paxton Van Lines 44 Radin, Rhea—Realtor 54 Schenley Industries—Overseas .. II Cover Seagram Distillers Corporation 20 Security Storage Company 31 Service Investment Corporation 10 Simmons Properties 45 Smith’s Transfer and Storage Company 14 State Department Federal Credit Union 53 Studebaker-Packard Corporation 5 Swartz, Walter H., Company 1 Terry, Louise M. Realtor 32 United Services Automobile Association 18 United Services Officers’ Insurance Association 45 United States Lines .... 45 Waldorf-Astoria, The IV Cover Zenith Radio Corporation 2
PHOTO AND ART CREDITS FOR DECEMBER
Paul Child, The Cover: “Boys and Snow”
Jacques Callot, “View of the Villa Borghese,” from the exhibi¬ tion of French Drawings from American Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, p. 23
Gustaf Tenggren in “Golden Tales from the Arabian Nights,” Golden Press, Inc., p. 24
(from Tenggren’s “Golden Tales from the Arabian Nights.” Told by Margaret Soifer and Irwin Shapiro. Illustrated by Gustaf Teng¬ gren. Copyright 1957 by Golden Press, Inc. and Artists & Writers Guild, Inc. Printed in U.S.A.)
“The Feast of Herod,” from the important exhibit of Nor¬ wegian Tapestries, organized by the Norwegian Govern¬ ment and circulated hv the Smithsonian Institution, p. 28
Ivan Payne, “Queen Street, Speightstown,” prizewinner in Alcoa contest, p. 28
“The Magi and the Adoration,” from the exhibition of Nor¬ wegian Tapestries, organized by the Norwegian Govern¬ ment and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution, p. 29
“The Complete Journal of Townsend Harris,” book jacket illustration, (Charles E. Tuttle Co., Tokyo), p. 35
Kampala photographs, pp. 42, 43, 49
Jan van Goyen, “A Group of Farmhouses,” from the exhibi¬ tion of “Dutch Master Drawings,” organized by the Smithsonian Institution, p. 55
Appointments and Designations
AMBASSADORS
DOWLING, WALTER C. to Germany SESSIONS, EDSON O. to Finland SNOW, WILLIAM P. to Burma
HOWLAND, Harold E. JOHNSON, Norman F.
LANDRY, George A.
KEMP, Henry W. KUSHNER, Harry
SIAFACAS, Spiros A.
ADAMS, Frances L. BALASHOVA, Ethel
ANDERSON, David ARMSTRONG, Rodney E.
BLACK, Donald P. BOWEN, Richard L. BROWN, Thomas Gordon, BUCHE, John Allen CONNELY, John B. CRAWFORD, John P. HARWOOD, Douglas James HUMPHREYS, Marvin W. KAUFMAN, Robert E. KUHZE, Kenneth A. LAASE, Paul L.
To Class 2
MINTZES, Joseph
To Class 3
TAYLOR, Barney B.
To Class 4
PETERS, T. Howard
To Class 5
SUMMERS, Thomas E.
To Class 6
WHARTON, Anita R.
To Class 7
PROVENCHER, Roger A.
To Class 8
LEDOGAR, Stephen J. LODEESEN, Jon S. NEF, Edward V. PERRY, Jack R.
Jr. REMMEY, Paul B., Jr. SCHALLER, Charles W. STELK, Lincoln F. THOMAS, Charles H., II TWIN AM, Joseph W. WALSH, Thomas H. WENDT, E. Allan WILLIAMS, A. Norman
FSO to be Consul General
COOTES, Merritt N.
FSO to be Consul
PAPPAS, Chris C., Jr.
FSR to be Consul General
TAFT, William Howard, III
FSR’s to be Consuls
BLACQUE, Valentin E. COLLINS, ROSS L. FLITCROFT, Daren J. HENNIG, Albert W. NEFF, Eric
Pavlyak, Michael PERKEY, John B., Jr. POTTER, Philip B. K. STRONG, William H.
FSR to be Consul and Secretary
COHEN, Alex A.
FSR’s
BAKER, Charles J. BALLOU, Christopher H. CLARK, Robert B. CONNELLY, James R.
be Vice Consuls
SHEA, James F. SHERMAN, Joseph P. TAYLOR, Robert L.
FSR to be Vice Consul and Secretary
BROWN, William T.
FSR’s
APPLEWHITE, Edgar J. BROWN, Edward P. BURRIS, Dudley R. CAMPRELL, Laughlin A.
CLOSE, Raymond H.
to be Secretaries
ILYIN, Boris JENSEN, Hans J. LAUDER, George V. LEISERSOHN, Lawrence G. LONG, Richard M.
4
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Designations (Continued)
F.S.O. Appointment
Recognize him? Sure you do.
You made him coflee that cold December morning
back in the States when he packed up your
whole Georgetown apartment and moved it to
Bangkok without breaking a single martini glass.
He’s the man from Merchants. A regular FSO
these days because the State Department said so.
Officially. Merchants is one of the firms Officially
Approved to move or store the personal
effects of Foreign Service Personnel.
And at Merchants nowadays that’s what FSO
means: Foreign Service, Officially! We’re not
surprised, really. We’ve been unofficially Official
for seventy years.
EXECUTIVE 3-7770 CABLE ADDRESS: REMOVALS
MEMBERS: National Furniture Warehouseman’s Assoc. Canadian Warehouseman’s Assoc. British Assoc, of Overseas Furn. Removers F.I.D.I. (Federation Internationale des Demenageurs internationaux)
DIBBLE, Philo EMMONS, Virginia H. FOSTER, John S. GOODWIN, Joseph C. GOUGELMANN, Tucker P. E. HALL, Charles C., Jr. HICKS, John J. HORVATH, Leo J.
LYNCH, Edward S.
MINOTT, Joseph A., Jr. MONTESANO, Nicholas A. PURCELL, Duncan REDFORD, Ralph H. SPLAIN, Edward H. TURNER, John M. WELLS, Frederick U.
FSS’s to be Consuls BERG, K. Marshall MCCULLOUGH, Ellen I. JOHNSON, Edmund R.
AWARD The ICA Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest
award bestowed by ICA, was presented to Assistant Deputy Director for Operations ELMER N. HOLMGREEN at a special ceremony honoring him on the occasion of his retirement.
BIRTHS GWYNN. A second daughter, Rosemary Elizabeth, born to Mr. and
Mrs. Robert P. Gwynn, July 22, in Langdale, Alabama. LEAHY. A son, Richard George, born to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P.
Leahy, September 4, in Melbourne.
MARRIAGES RIUDLEBERGER-STEARNS. Antonia Riddleberger, daughter of ICA Direc¬
tor and Mrs. James W. Riddleberger, and FSO Monteagle Stearns were married, September 25, at St. Andrews Church, Athens. After a short honeymoon in Greece the couple will reside in Athens where Mr. Stearns is Second Secretary at the Embassy.
VARELA-KESSLER. Martha F. Varela and FSO Earl A. Kessler were married, October 2, in Mexico City. Mr. Kessler has since been transferred to Baghdad.
DEATHS BROWN. Stanton Brown, former Foreign Service Staff officer, died
October 15, in Washington. Mr. Brown entered the Service in 1952 and served at Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. He resigned in 1957.
DIGGINS. Harriet Diggins, wife of FSO John Diggins, died October 10, at the West Haven Veterans Hospital, West Haven, Connec¬ ticut. Mr. Diggins is currently assigned to Paris.
FYFE. Howard Fyfe, who served for twenty-eight years as United States Despatch Agent in New York, died October 23, in Brook¬ lyn. Mr. Fyfe entered the State Department in 1911, at the age of fifteen, and was appointed Despatch Agent in New York in 1930. He retired on June 30, 1958.
GILLESPIE. Joan Gillespie, a former Foreign Service Officer, died October 13, in Tunis. Miss Gillespie entered the Service in 1955. In October 1958, she resigned to do free lance writing. Her book, “Algeria: Rebellion and Revolution,” is scheduled for publica¬ tion this winter.
NAGOSKI. Joseph Patrick Nagoski, Foreign Service Officer, died October 23, at Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, where he was assigned as Consul. Mr. Nagoski entered the Service in 1946 and served at St. John, N. B., Reykjavik, Marseille, and Leopold¬ ville.
CHANGES IN ADDRESS
Please help us keep our mailing list up-to-date by in¬ dicating to the Circulation Manager of the JOURNAL changes in address, in advance when possible. APO or FPO address should be mentioned if applicable. It is no longer possible to replace copies undelivered because of their being sent to the old address.
6
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7
BEAM serves world markets
wherever in the world you’re stationed, the entire Beam line of famous products is available to you . . . including the same fine sour mash bourbons Americans have respected for more than 164 years!
JIM BEAM, 86 Proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon; BEAM BOTTLED IN BOND, 100 Proof; BEAM’S CHOICE Charcoal Filtered 90 Proof, 6 years old—sour mash; BEAM’S PIN BOTTLE, 86.8 Proof, 8 years old.
and don't forget Baranof Vodka and Chateaux Brand Cordials, Brandies,
Liqueurs and Fruit Flavored Vodkas.
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DISTILLERY & BOTTLING PLANT #1, CLERMONT, KY.
DISTILLERY #2, BEAM, KENTUCKY
Robert Murphy on the Service
THE ASSOCIATION graciously permitted me to speak at a luncheon just about five years ago. I am sure that during
that five-year interval the Department and the Foreign Service have progressed in the right direction. I find that they have gained tremendously in standing with the American public and with the press and with the Congress. In trips around the coun¬ try I find an enormously improved understanding of our prob¬ lems, the reasons for our existence, and a desire to be helpful and not merely critical or even contemptuous as has been true in isolated instances.
Since the college recruitment program was begun in 1955 and the entrance examination revised under Loy Henderson’s able leadership, there has been a tremendous increase in applica¬ tions to enter the Service through competitive examination. Only twelve hundred and sixty-one applied in 1954. The last time the exams were given in December 1957, 6,094 persons applied. Because no examination was given in 1958. applica¬ tions this year are more difficult to predict, but between 6,500 and 8,000 are expected. I was fascinated to discover that almost a third of the officers in the Service today—1,051—have entered as FSO’s-8 or 6 since September 1954. The Service is renewing itself at a rapid rate and attracting exceptionally able young men.
We have also become more energetic about presenting to the country at large the story of Foreign Service work abroad. Since 1954 the number of our speakers who have addressed civic and professional groups of all kinds around the country has increased by 70%; this year we had 1,400 speakers, in forty-eight states. rT'1
HE PERIPATETIC Congressman may evoke criticism in some quarters, but the Service can only be grateful for the in¬
creasing frequency with which Senators and Representatives travel abroad. On these trips they have met a wide range of our officers, often under most trying conditions, and the verdict they have pronounced upon the capabilities of our officers gives us cause for great satisfaction. It is to be regretted that such a distorted book as “The Ugly American” could appear and achieve some notoriety, but it is significant that one of the most crushing refutations of the book came from Senator Fulbright. His remarks were supported by a number of our other friends in the Senate.
One of the most effective answers to “The Ugly American’s” thesis is provided by the cold statistics of the Foreign Service Institute on language training. The Foreign Service Institute is now teaching 300 students full time in twenty-five different languages. Overseas it is administering 45 part-time language courses at 169 posts with 3,000 officers and staff enrolled.
A greater measure of support and understanding in Congress has also resulted in improvements in legislation affecting us, such as the extension of medical benefits to our dependents, the provision of an education allowance where local facilities are inadequate, and the removal of the bar to FSO’s receiving hardship post differentials.
The new bill just passed by the Senate and due to go to the House in January continues this whole evolution.
I have always believed that Foreign Service careers should be carefully planned. There is little doubt that like any other pro¬ fession the results should be best from the point of view of the Government, one’s associates and the officer himself. Now that personnel management is so much more efficient and the facilities for training and career counseling are available, there is really little excuse for the officer not to take advantage
(Continued on page 39)
Excerpts from Under Secretary Robert Murphy’s talk before the Foreign Service luncheon Sept. 24, 1959. Mr. Murphy is retiring from the Service after his overseas trip with President Eisenlioiver this month.
8
KELLOGG ENGINEERING
BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN PROCESS AND PLANT
For many firms with promising processing ideas, Kellogg engineers have helped develop theoretically possible techniques into commer¬ cially successful plants.
Such was the case recently with a process for using natural gas in place of coke blast furnaces to get iron from iron ore. This original devel¬ opment of Hojalata y Lamina, now brought to perfection and known as the Hyl Process, is currently producing 200 tons of sponge iron daily at the Fierro Esponja plant in Monterrey, Mexico.
The M. W. Kellogg Company made signifi¬ cant technical contributions both to the HyL Process and to the construction of the plant. It is now building a second HyL Plant in Mexico —with a 500 ton/day capacity.
As engineers and builders of process plants for all basic industries, Kellogg can contribute many improvements in processing and con¬ struction techniques. For a description of Kel¬ logg’s integrated and cost-cutting engineering- procurement-erection services, write for bro¬ chure, “Planning the New Plant for Profits.”
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Offices of Kellogg subsidiary companies are in Toronto, London, Paris,
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10
NEW 1960
Meet Ford’s beautiful new way to say “Economy!” The 1960 Ford Falcon blends the best of cars big and small to create a new class of car. Inside it is as big as a standard sized sedan, yet all waste length and weight
has been trimmed away for easy handling in city driving. Its simplified, 6-cylinder economy engine will put money in your pocket. Here is all the car most people could want. See it at your authorized Dealer’s.
Your ZCoifcoxx- can be waiting when you get to the U.S.A.!
Order here for delivery there—save time and moneyl
• Here’s how it works: You .order the car you want with the equipment you want. It will be delivered to you at savings at any of 8 convenient U.S.A. official factory delivery points.
• A Service Policy allows you to have your car serviced at any authorized Dealer in the U.S.A. or abroad.
• You are given a 1000-mile free inspection certificate that is honored by any authorized Ford Dealer.
For full details on how you can select your car and place your order, consult your Embassy’s or Consulate’s Adminis¬ trative Officer’s Personal Purchase File, or write: Diplomatic Sales, Ford International Division, 34 Exchange Place, Jersey City 2, New Jersey.
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II
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12
OLD CROW
\ 80 ■PH OOF
Mark Twain holds forth at Klaproth's Tavern
Wit flashed when Mark Twain spoke and his favorite Kentucky bourbon, Old Crow, flowed during convivial evenings at the famed Elmira, N.Y. tavern. According to an intimate biography, the
beloved humorist once ordered 25 barrels of Old Crow to assure his supply at Klaproth’s.
Taste the Greatness of
‘CXTUCKY STR*'0"! WHIR**
America’s Preferred Bourbon
It is rare for any product to be as singled out for public praise as Old Crow has been for 124 years. In every generation great Americans have praised it by name.
Today, Kentucky’s Old Crow is the most preferred in all America...
because from the day it was born it has been the perfect bourbon.
‘cM Cyi/wnw jn, c ffiom'/mi
THE OLD CROW DISTILLERY CO., FRANKFORT, KY., DISTRIBUTED BY NATIONAL DISTILLERS PRODUCTS CO.
LIGHT • MILD • 86 PROOF KENTUCKY BOURBON
DECEMBER, 1934
PACKED WITH PRIDE . ... for PALLET VAULT Storage at SMITH'S
or World Wide Don't make a move-
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SMITH’S STORAGE
NO 7-3343 WASHINGTON AGENT FOR
AMERICAN EXPRESS
ears ago by JAMES B. STEWART
London Embassy Anecdotes
EMILY BAX* in “My Recollections of John Ridgely Carter” (one time Counselor of Embassy, London, and Minister
to Rumania, 1909-1911) in the December 1934 JOURNAL
writes: “I suppose it is mean of me to remind you of the day when, all dressed up in a grey frock coat, light grey tall hat, buttonhole, spats and light gloves, on your way to Ascot, you stopped in to the office to be sure that everything was right, and carrying—the only discordant note in the utter perfection of your attire—a most disreputable old umbrella! And in answer to my horrified question you said, ‘Last year at Ascot someone took my new one and left me this. So I am taking it back and if I am lucky will get my own again—or maybe a better one.’ ”
Miss Bax refers to Mark Twain as follows: “Do you re¬ member when Mark Twain came over, and arrived in Lon¬ don the very day the Ascot Gold Cup was stolen? The papers announced ‘Mark Twain arrives—Ascot gold cup stolen,’ and of course the great man began every speech by announcing that he had stolen it.”
In referring to Mr. Frank Hodson, the Mr. Fixit and General Factotum for many years in the London Embassy, Miss Bax writes: “. . . His speech was interlarded with the phrases that run in and out of diplomatic correspondence. ‘Modus vivendi,’ ‘laissez faire,’ ‘laissez aller’ and many others rolled off his tongue, though I doubt whether he knew the meaning of them.”
Stone-Whelchel. Married on September 19, 1934, John F. Stone and Miss Mary Garland Whelchel. Mr. Stone is American Vice Con¬ sul at Warsaw.
Kuniholm-Robellet. Mr. Bertel E. Kuniholm and Miss Berthe E. Robellet were married at Leningrad, U.S.S.R., on August 27, 1934.
Mr. Kuniholm is Third Secretary of Embassy at Moscow.
^ Born at Bucharest on November 3, 1934, twin daughters, Linda Dekum and Mary
_ Francesca, to Vice Consul and Mrs. Sheldon T. Mills.
Comment, 1959: Linda (Mrs. Dudley G. Sipprelle) has a son, Dwight Dudley Sipprelle, who was born on February 21, 1958. Linda and family are living in Pomona, Cali¬ fornia this fall where her husband is teaching in high school. Mary (Mrs. James M. Presby) and her husband are living in San Francisco. Sheila, the eldest daughter, and her husband, Marcel Kessle Richter, live in Minneapolis. “Ket” is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Uni¬ versity of Minnesota. Parents, Sheldon and Francesca Mills, are now in Amman, where Shelly is Ambassador.
4Private secretary at the London Embassy from 1902-1914.
14
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Tyler adds: “Have just returned from a three weeks’ canoe trip in the Canadian sub-Arctic. I have fallen in with a bad lot in Ottawa, which has resulted in my going on three canoe trips which have covered over 1,000 miles of the old fur trade routes. This year’s trip ended at Norman Wells on the Mackenzie River not far from the Arctic Circle. We take no guides and seem to spend most of our time carrying the canoes and packs on our backs rather than paddling. Al¬ though the trips are fascinating, they are really much too strenuous for a middle-aged character.”
Harold Nicolson on Diplomacy
“The essential to good diplomacy is precision. The main enemy of good diplomacy is imprecision.
“It is for this reason that I have endeavored in this book to convey an impression of the horrors of vagueness. The old diplomacy may have possessed grave faults. Yet they were venal in comparison to the menaces which confront the new diplomacy. These menaces can be defined under two separate headings. The first is open versus secret diplomacy. In other words a democratic versus an expert conduct of international affairs. Amateurishness, in all such matters, leads to improvisation. Openness, in all such matters, leads to imprecision. No statesman is prepared in advance and in the open to bind himself to a precise policy. An imprecise policy means no policy at all. It means aspira¬ tion only. We all have our expectations.
“Diplomacy is the art of negotiating documents in a ratifiable and therefore dependable form. It is by no means the art of conversation.
“Diplomacy, if it is ever to be effective, should be a dis¬ agreeable business. And one recorded in hard print.”
From the Dec. 1934 JOURNAL. Reprinted from “Peace¬ making, 1919,” by Harold Nicolson. Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston & New York.
And More Recently:
Nostalgic lines from FSO Bill Cochran: “I wish someone could write a nostalgic article for the JOURNAL on how Washington is changing, especially the disappearance of landmarks. It hit me the other day when I went in Henry Goodman’s clothing store on Pennsylvania Avenue just above 17th—you remember, where we could buy tropical clothing in January (when nobody else anywhere had it) and get cheerful credit? Goodman died six years ago. The store is coming down to make way for another office build¬ ing, and is closing out. Similarly, the Tally-Ho restaurant (near 17th and H) has just closed, after twenty-nine years, for the same reason. Speaking of restaurants, Hall’s, the seafood place on 7th St. S.W. is also due to disappear for a new speed highway. It used to be one of the best, with a real oldtime, Gay Nineties atmosphere. So it goes.”
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Two Diplomatists
i THE EVENING of December 28, 1943, beginning with the moment I stepped into the courier jeep of the Ninth Fighter Command, was one of the saddest
of my life. Ninth Fighter Command Headquarters were in a group of ugly, mustard-colored buildings set in the hills of an English village with the wildly improbable name of Middle Wallop—lying between the villages of Upper Wallop and Nether Wallop.
On the pine folding table which constituted Squadron headquarters I saw the long-awaited batch of mail. Seated next to a portable American coke stove, still glowing red hot in the deserted office, I read my wife’s letter first.
“My dear,” she wrote, “the children have been much bet¬ ter, although William ...” and so on to the end where she appended a note.
“You will be sad to learn of the death of Sydney Yost Smith.” I read the letter a second and a third time, then sat staring at the glowing stove for a long, long time. To me, it was the end of an era.
II
When I entered the Department of State in July of 1929, Sydney Yost Smith was already the grand old man of the Department. He was a heavy-set man of medium height with bald head, bristling white eyebrows and long, droop¬ ing mustaches stained yellow in the middle by his ever¬ present pipe. He generally wore salt-and-pepper suits and his trousers had an elephantic droop. Mr. Smith was then over seventy years old and had been in the Department nearly fifty years. He had been Chief of the Diplomatic Bureau through the Spanish American War and to the end of World War I. He had been a member of the examining boards which had admitted the great career ambassadors of two decades ago: William Phillips, Joe Grew, Norman Armour, Hugh Wilson, and Hugh Gibson. These were “his boys.”
By 1929, Mr. Smith had been relegated to the post of Senior Drafting Officer in the new Treaty Division and was in charge of formalities of treaty signatures, transmittal of treaties to the Senate, and treaty correspondence generally.
By Harry Raymond Turkel
His office overlooked 17th Street, the Corcoran Art Gallery and the land sloping down to the Mall. The room had an ornate black marble fireplace filled with gilt, and Mr. Smith presided over a desk littered with seals, ribbons, silver candlestick and sealing wax. It was my great good fortune, as a newly appointed assistant drafting officer in the Treaty Division, to be given work relating to Mr. Smith’s duties, to have an adjoining office, and above all, to become some¬ thing of a favorite of his.
The reason was simple. Washington, then, was a sleepy, Southern town and in the lofty rooms, behind the slatted doors, there was a leisurely pace to the work, particularly in the summer when the Congress had recessed. In conse¬ quence, we had ample time for anagrams, which Mr. Smith loved. We drew squares, five blocks across and five blocks down. Each of us put in a letter, and the person making a three-letter word scored three points, a four-letter word was four points and five letters earned five points. The morning or afternoon was rare in which I did not see his bald head peek around the door and his walrus mustaches waggle as he whispered hoarsely,
“Hey, son; time for a game?” On the other hand, I had the benefit of Mr. Smith’s en¬
cyclopedic knowledge and his mastery of diplomatic phrase¬ ology. He taught me how to draft both diplomatic corres¬ pondence and treaties. I had to learn all over again how to read. He taught me to read slowly, examining every word and punctuation mark. The process of evaluation was particularly important.
“Hear this, son,” he would say and then, after reading the stilted 18th century language of an incoming note, he would slap the heavily embossed coat of arms with the back of his hand, rustle the thick paper and say, “Now this is what the rascal REALLY means . . .” He showed me the hair¬ line between the suppressio veri and the suggestio falsi. He taught me how to use language to conceal or reveal a thought, and also how to lay bare a hidden thought en¬ closed in waxy words. In treaty drafting, which was very different from diplomatic correspondence, the ideal was not merely to draft so that the intent might be understood. The ideal was to draft so that the thought could not pos¬ sibly be misunderstood.
21
TWO DIPLOMATISTS
These were merely technical accomplishments which I learned from the ex-Chief of the Diplomatic Bureau. Per¬ haps the most valuable thing I received from Mr. Smith was the sense of tradition, of belonging to an organization which, throughout United States history, has been dedi¬ cated to the service of the American people. His service in the Department had covered a large portion of the history of the United States, and thus his stories had an immediacy and cogency which could not be derived from the pages of a history book.
Sydney Yost Smith was born in Washington in 1857 but was taken at an early age to Petersburg, Virginia. His father was a Union sympathizer and when Smith was either five or six years of age his parents received a laissez-passer to return to Washington. They all came in a carriage, en¬ tering the Union lines south of Alexandria.
Mr. Smith had little formal schooling, though in the style of his day he did “go to the Academy,” and he did have private tutors. “What did you study?” I asked. “Why, penmanship, Shakespeare and the Bible, of course,” he answered.
From 1879 to 1881, Mr. Smith was a shorthand reporter in the House of Representatives. Even when he was nearing eighty, the speed of his “pothooks,” as he called them, was as outstanding as the elegance and accuracy of his drafting.
At the age of twenty-three, that is, at the beginning of the fiscal year in 1881, he received a temporary appointment in the Department of State at $900 per annum. The ap¬ pointment was destined to last for fifty-eight years. When he was appointed, Rutherford B. Hayes had been out of the White House only three months, and James A. Garfield was President.
On September 19, 1881, Mr. Smith answered the tele¬ phone. These instruments had just been installed in the new State-War-Navy Building.
“Hello, who’s there?” he roared with his mustaches pressed to the mouthpiece. He always held the earpiece in his left hand with fingers forward while he kept his right forefinger plugged in his right ear.
“Of course,” he said in an injured tone, “I didn’t believe it when it said that President Garfield had been shot. But he was.”
Mr. Smith lived in a red brick Victorian bay house down¬ town on G Street, between 7th and 9th. He came back for a two-hour lunch from 17th and Pennsylvania every day, and if he didn’t use the horse cars, he would drive his own buggy.
“We young fellers,” he would say, “used to stand around the street corners and watch the young ladies step into the horse cars.” The swirl of petticoats above a pretty ankle must have been a rare treat, for at the recollection, his right arm went into a sudden uppercut.
“My boy,” he roared, peering out from under enormous eyebrows and dropping the polished diction, “the steps was mighty HIGH in them days.”
Mr. Smith’s favorite amusement was going to the theatre; he was particularly fond of Shakespeare. In our office he would give long declamations in the style of Edwin Booth,
striding up and down, his battered pipe waving in the air, his free elbow pressed to his side. Often he would challenge me to cap his quotations, and if the play were Hamlet or Macbeth, I might be able to do it, but if it were Henry V or one of the Richards, I would fail miserably. Mr. Smith was a walking “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” forever try¬ ing to stump me.
Just one year before the declaration of war with Spain, Mr. Smith’s star was really in the ascendancy. He was not quite forty years old; he had married the daughter of an Assistant Secretary of State; he had just been appointed Chief of the Diplomatic Bureau, succeeding his friend, the fabulous Alvey A. Adee.
Sydney Smith was one of the senior Departmental offi¬ cers who went to Paris in 1899 to negotiate the treaty of peace with Spain. Somehow, he never talked much about it and I suspect that what happened was that Professor John Bassett Moore, secretary and counsel of the Commis¬ sion, carried the principal load.
Once I saw a picture of these early notables of the De¬ partment, many of whom were still in the Department in the late twenties. They were portly men with handlebar mustaches and wore gartered sleeves and high stiff collars. Round gas chandeliers with curlycues were suspended from the ceiling, and the wood fireplace worked; derby hats were on the rack and mahogany roll top desks filled the back¬ ground. Among these men were Bill McNeir, John Russ, Miles Shand, Dave Salmon and John Griffin (Tom’s father). John Russ, for example, whom I knew as a thin old man in charge of the stenographic pool, appeared in the photo as a fresh-faced boy. The gracious spirit in the Department was still evident in the 1920’s. On my first two days of service I was taken around to make calls on nearly all of the sixty officers of the Department who were senior to me.
World War I burst like a bombshell on an unprepared Department. Sydney Smith lasted as Chief of the Diplo¬ matic Bureau to the very end of the war, but three weeks after the Armistice he was relieved as Chief. He went to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, but had less real influ¬ ence than at the peace conference in that city just twenty years earlier. He became careless of his dress, smoked and let the sparks fly on his vest. Something went out of the Department when Colonel House’s people snatched the peace-making from the regular officers; Mr. Smith’s career went with it.
Ill
IT WILL serve to illustrate the spirit of the times at the be¬ ginning °f the thirties if I compare Sydney Yost Smith
with another great diplomatist, Dr. James Brown Scott. Both had considerable influence on my thinking and development, although both were quite different. James Brown Scott was a famous international lawyer who had been Solicitor of the Department from 1906 to 1910; Sydney Smith was at that time Chief of the Diplomatic Bureau. Dr. Brown had had real influence at the Paris Peace Conference for he had been associated with Colonel House in the early days of the “Peace Inquiry” and in 1919 served as legal adviser of the
22
American delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Ver¬ sailles.
Shortly after the war he became trustee of the Carnegie Endowment, and as its head, paid for the first year of my education at Oxford. He was quite fond of me and asked me to call him Uncle Jim, which I sometimes did. Dr. Scott introduced me to his friends as his godson, which was certainly not true. When I objected, he justified it by say¬ ing that he was my godfather in the profession.
Uncle Jim would take me to the Metropolitan Club for lunch and say:
“Sit by the window7 facing the door so I can tell you who people are as they come in.” Many of the famous and pow¬ erful people of the Department and of the country were members of the Metropolitan Club and it w7as a liberal edu¬ cation to hear about them.
One day we were having lunch with Charles Warren, who was also a great international lawyer and former ambassa¬ dor. Both he and James Brown Scott looked like John Bull. The only difference was that Mr. Warren wore a red bow tie, while Dr. Scott w7as smaller and wore a correct four in hand.
“Jim,” said Mr. Warren, “do you know how John Foster got to be Secretary of State to President Harrison? ’
“Why, of course,” said Uncle Jim, “he was in the cavalry with General Grant at Fort Donelson.”
One day in Greece I told John Foster Dulles the story and with an unamused stare the Secretary said: “That wasn’t so at all. He became Secretary of State because he had been Republican National Committeeman from Indiana.”
Sydney Yost Smith and James Scott Brown were both in the direct American tradition. Both felt keenly and person¬ ally about the issues of the Civil War—or the War Between the States.
Both were superb draftsmen, but where Mr. Smith was earthy, Uncle Jim was high-minded and moral. Mr. Smith was strictly a positivist in international law; Dr. James Brown Scott believed with all his soul in natural law as the basis of international law. Mr. Smith believed in diplomacy of the Teddy Roosevelt variety. I remember Mr. Smith re¬ peating the dictum of Secretary Olney, pounding his desk as he did so—“The fiat of the United States is law upon this continent.” At that moment the U. S. still had marines in Haiti and Nicaragua, and maintained the Platt Amend¬ ment in Cuba.
by Harry Raymond Turkel
Dr. Scott, on the other hand, was the darling of the Latin Americans. Brown Scott, as they called him, had been a delegate of the U. S. at many inter-American conferences. He was a translator of early Spanish writers of internation¬ al law. He believed in the rights of man and was willing to accord to others the dignity he insisted on for himself.
I received from Dr. Scott a very special fondness for Latin Americans, and he carefully fostered that feeling. Whenever I went abroad, he insisted that I carry letters of introduction. On my first mission abroad, I carried his letters to the Secretary of State of Cuba, and to Dr. Busta¬ mante, Cuba’s famed international lawyer.
In their attitudes toward me, Dr. Scott and Mr. Smith differed greatly. Mr. Smith had an easy Southern way about him, as relaxed and soft as the elastic-sided kid shoes he always wore. Uncle Jim, on the other hand, was a Har¬ vard man with a high stiff collar and crisp white piping on his vest. He would often slam me down for the brashness I then exhibited, while Mr. Smith was indulgent.
One day in 1930, I must have goaded Dr. Scott to fuiy. The London Naval Treaty had been signed in the spring, and in the fall it had come up for ratification. My duties were to report the press reaction to Secretary of State Stim- son every morning and Senator Hiram Johnson was giving the Secretary a very bad time. I must have said something to Dr. Scott which was critical of the Senate for he turned on me, red-faced with rage, his blue eyes snapping, his false teeth clicking and slushing as he snarled:
“Six months in the Department and perfectly depart¬ mentalized already! Harry, as long as you live, let me never hear you speak that way about the Senate of the United States of America!”
Over the thirty years since the incident happened, I have often sat at my desk and pondered: What does THE De¬ partment expect?
I close my eyes and think of Uncle Jim and of his high- minded idealism. I can see him again, angry, red jowls quivering and I feel the lash of his scorn—“Six months in the Department and perfectly departmentalized already.” It is a spur to think through the basic merits of a problem.
Then I think of Mr. Smith, slouched in a chair, bald head gleaming, shaggy eyebrows drawn together and curved pipe bobbing between his drooping mustaches as he mut¬ ters, “Pshaw, this is what the rascal really means. . . .”
I open my eyes, draw up the block of yellow paper and confidently begin to draft.
The Tale of the Bureaucrat By RICHARD FUNKHOUSER
Now, in accordance with her plan to prevent King Shahryar from striking off her head as he had done to all brides before her, Shahrazad opened her eyes and signaled to her sister Dunyazad who sat up . and said, “Allah upon thee, 0 my sister, recite to me some new story, delightsome and delectable, wherewith to while away the waking hours of our latter night.”
“With joy and goodly glee,” answered Shahrazad, “if this noble and auspicious King permits me.”
“Tell on,” quoth King Shahryar, who chanced to be sleep¬ less and restless, and, therefore, was pleased at the prospect of hearing her story. So Shahrazad rejoiced; and thus, on the first night of the Thousand Nights and a Night, she began with
The Tale of the Bureaucrat
T T HATH reached me, 0 auspicious King, that there was once in times of yore and ages long gone before, a great
and puissant King, of the Kings of the descendants of the
Assyrians, who was mighty in war but weak in peace. In
dire times, when surrounded by enemy hordes, the Assyrian
armies wielding magnificent weapons behind impenetrable
defenses successfully subdued all threats to their Kingdom.
But with peace, the King found that the end of trouble be¬
came the beginning and the settled became unsettled until
uprisings began anew, ending with fire, sword and the loss of his youngest, bravest and strongest subjects.
24
As the good King neared the end of his days and re¬ flected on the repetitious history of uncertain peace and life and certain war and death, he reached the conclusion that his name would live forever if perpetual peace could be brought to his land. So he sent messengers to the four comers of the earth bearing an offer of his fairest daughters to the seer or magician, skilled in contriving, versed in the knowledge of occult truths and perfect in mysteries and sub¬ tleties, who could end the succession of catastrophic wars.
To eliminate rogues and charlatans, however, the King placed two conditions on his offer: the first condition was that the total cost of the solution could not exceed l/500th part of the yearly receipts of the Royal Treasury. This con¬ dition was explained on grounds that his unconquerable warriors must be retained in a state of readiness and his harem well provided for.
The second condition was death on failure.
NOW FOR many days there were none to answer the chal¬ lenge until finally there came to the palace one Farsi of
gilded tongue and hawk-like visage, a cunning artificer and past master of all manner of craft and inventions. Prostrat¬ ing himself before the King, the Farsi wished him joy and laid before him a scheme fitting his dignity and dreams, say¬ ing, “Your strength in arms is like the dinosaur which lives no more. This beast was built to crush all living things, only to die imprisoned in the mud, an eternal grave made by the weight of his own armor, ft had not the adaptability to change with the times. Your Kingdom will suffer the same fate if you depend on the weight of your armor. And here is my secret truth: use Brain, not Brawn. The dinosaur had a brain the size of a wheat grain, a small wheat grain. For the everlasting life of your Kingdom, you must depend on man’s greatest and most versatile weapon, his wit.”
Before the intrigued King could interrupt, the Farsi hastily continued:
“To avoid costly wars, you must select a group of your wisest subjects, arm them with good and kindly words, and promises of your noble intentions, add perchance such largesse and gifts as you deem fitting, and send embassies to all neighboring states and their neighbors as well, thus to disarm future enemies and to persuade them to cease from conflict and to avoid disaster to themselves and to all men.”
“But can this be done for l/500th of the receipts of my Royal Treasury?” queried the incredulous King.
“The expenses of your Ambassadors should cost no more than this, my Lord; the gifts something more but no more than you wish. Some of your loyal Nabobs and Grandees have indeed the wherewithal to support themselves in fitting fashion. The others you must select purely for their devotion and loyalty and perhaps their curiosity about foreign lands, since their reward must largely rest with Allah.”
Now the King marvelled at such a wondrous and ingenious plan and cried, “By Allah, 0 sage, and this thy word be true, 1 will grant thee thy wish and thy desire.”
And forthwith the King set about to make trial of the ingenious plan, granting a year and a day for the test. He selected, after many searching trials of different kinds, the
wisest, most loyal and richest of his Chamberlains, Viceroys, Wazirs, and Emirs, armed them with words of sincerity, imagination, and a touch of guile, added such largesse and gifts as appropriate, and sent them forth to all parts of the earth where trouble might brew.
For many months, his Ambassadors indeed performed miracles. Foreign potentates were in turn flattered by the attentions and gifts and impressed by the logic, wisdom and sincerity of the words.
But as the trial period neared the close a strange develop¬ ment occurred which the Farsi had not foreseen and which threatened the success of his plan. With peace had come new demands on the embassies from the merchants who saw a means to increase their trade, from the farmers who sought new markets, and indeed from the palace, the judges, coun¬ selors, chamberlains, ulemas and princes, each of whom had important tasks to be accomplished, all in the name and best interest of the King.
Now it was apparent that with these increased tasks, order in the small missions gave way to chaos. Ambassador after Ambassador sent courier after courier to the King pleading for new instructions and new resources.
Stricken with dismay the King sent for the seer and said, “0 thou false prophet, verily all of this turmoil is thy doing. Your plan fails. Amend this confusion or die!”
Hastily and with heavy sweat, the Farsi pleaded, “0 most magnanimous liege Lord, thine own officials are responsible for the ruin of the plan. All was well until their intercession. Let them pursue their noble tasks and worthy deeds in foreign lands with their own emissaries and missions, not with mine, er . . . a . . . thine. Relieve your own ambassadors of these miscellaneous Operations, free them for pure thoughts and the single-minded pursuit of their first objec¬ tive. Leave to each specialist the thing each does best; thus, all will be happy and act with full zest. The key to this riddle is “SEPARATE, SEPARATE, SEPARATE!”
THE KING much marvelled at this facile reply and bizarre incantation, and the black became light before his sight.
Forthwith, he summoned all members of his High Council and informed them that the representatives of Agriculture, of Commerce, of the Royal Treasury and all special interests and operations must henceforth separate from the King’s embassies and establish their own missions abroad, thus allowing his personal Ambassadors to carry out the original purpose and policy of their diplomacy within the original sums granted.
And it was so done. Many embassies went abroad and appeared successively before the same foreign potentates. But all went well for only a brief period as from all parts of the world a greater confusion than before threatened to plunge the King into conflict with innumerable and united enemies. It appeared that in lieu of being pleased by the attentions of the King’s Ambassadors, foreign potentates were confused and angered by the multiplicity of the emis¬ saries and the conflict of their messages. Equally confused and angered became the emissaries, the Court and, above all. the King himself, who now faced both the threat of war and the peacetime depletion of his Treasury.
25
TALE OF THE BUREAUCRAT by Richard Funkhonser
The incensed King summoned the Farsi, who prostrated himself in abject terror. “Woe unto thee, 0 charlatan. By Allah, you are no mighty magician or Marid of the Jinn or devil. What mischief hast thou wreaked? My Ambassadors are confused and speak different things with many tongues while my enemies multiply and my gold divides. Speak or forever be silenced!”
In panic the Farsi seized the first thought which came into his head. “0 my Lord, the answer is clear. Make all missions one! In each foreign land, therefore, there will be only one voice! Great economies will be also realized thereby! In the words of the Great Swami, ‘One for all, and all for one. AMALGAMATE, AMALGAMATE, AMALGAMATE!’”
For the briefest moment a cloud of doubt passed the old King’s brow. His keen senses transported the ingenious thought from quick Perception into the channels of wise Reflection and then precipitously to Action.
The action was the unsheathed scimitar! “Death, 0 jackass, charlatan, dog! Do you take me for
an idiot? Would not my rudest subject see that what you now propose differs in no wit from what you first proposed. This cure is but a return to the origin of the disease. I started with one Ambassador in each country, with one unified embassy and with united emissaries. Because they were unable to do all things required of them, you devised Separation, separate missions which now too have created so many dilemmas. And now you have the temerity to pro¬ pose to return to this vicious, empty and sterile circle, doubt¬ less thinking I had forgot where it would lead. Off with your head, false prophet, vile reorganizer, bureaucrat!”
The King was as a raging lion.
U A MALGAMATE, Separate. Separate, Amalgamate! These X\.are poor cures for real ills. I shall try your scheme on
you to see if you work better: first, a Separation of your head from your body as you advised me to do with my embassies. Your head can plan Policy while your body is engrossed in its essential Operations. Next, if that fails to improve your total performance, we shall endeavor to put you back to¬ gether again. You may bear a few scars from the Separation and lack a certain coordination from the Amalgamation but we can prune and graft ad nauseam until the best combina¬ tion is found. Surely this is better than taking you as you imperfectly are, trying to improve your performance, both in mind and body, by means of the ancient methods: normal growth, guidance and experience. As a delicate and subtle touch since you proposed a Separation of Intelligence from diplomacy, we shall cut out your Memory to see if you func¬ tion better, as perchance you may in your role as master reorganizer where Memory can be a handicap. Guards, bastinado this scoundrel, bash me his neck, quarter his quarters!”
In mortal pallor the Farsi cried, “0 King of the Ages, I have yet to reveal all of my most tested devices which never fail to cure ills of all Kingdoms. One comes from the Land of the Genii and is called the Executive Order which makes
men with words. Then, there is always the injection of new Wisdom at the top known as . . .”
But the swift scimitar of the enraged King had already found the clear-cut solution to the problem at hand. The Farsi’s head tumbled onto the rich Bokharas which muffled his last word which sounded like “Superstructure” as it fell.
The King of the Ages laid down his trusted weapon which so often had rescued him from tyranny and injustice, evil and falsehood.
“Was there an answer to the riddle?” the weary King thought to himself “With small resources my small missions cannot possibly accomplish all objectives of my Kingdom well. Three things must happen:
UT7 IRST, THE embassies can try to perform all tasks. If F they try to do everything with limited resources, noth¬
ing will be done well. I can expect mediocrity at best. This is unbearable.
“Second, the embassies can do their primary tasks well and their secondary tasks badly. In such circumstances I have no alternative but to assign the work which is badly done to other emissaries. This separates my missions, and the resultant cost and confusion will soon become intolerable.
“Third, the embassies can do their primary tasks badly and their secondary tasks well. This is the worst of all. It forces me to take the most important work away from my Ambassadors, go abroad myself, or assign it to other Ambas¬ sadors, or to other special missions. This defeats the original purpose of the embassies and again leads to unbearable cost and confusion.
“Thus, I am in a sterile circle leading nowhere but to false illusions. No combination is demonstratably better than any other and the abrupt changes in organization only make things worse, since basic issues are thereby lost, avoided or forgotten.”
The King scratched the royal pate, paused and then ex¬ claimed, “Clearly, I must do one of two things: Limit my Objectives or Increase my Resources. Since my Objectives continue to expand, so must my Resources, my men and my money.
“As to men, I must always find the best and the wisest! This is the sine qua non!
“As to money,” and here the King paused, “Perhaps the conditions I imposed on the Farsi were too onerous? Per¬ haps all that has to be done cannot be done by even the best men for l/500th of my income or 120 million dinars in Salaries and Expenses for the next Fiscal Year! Would 1/1 Oth of my income be more sensible? I wonder? What are the objectives really worth? What was it the Farsi said about comparing the present defenses of my Kingdom to the unadaptable, brawny dinosaur with a pea-size brain? Ex¬ tinction in the mud? . . .”
Shahrazad paused; King Shahryar was snoring. Dunyazad made a mental note to warn her sister to compose better stories or she’d never keep her head for the next Thousand Nights.
26
EDITORIAL PAGE
Walter Lippmann Addresses AFSA
THE ASSOCIATION’S October 22 luncheon, at which Walter Lippmann was the honored guest and speaker, was a
memorable occasion on several scores. It brought together for the first time the acknowledged dean of American com¬ mentators—perhaps the most respected of our commentators abroad—and the largest turnout yet recorded for an Ameri¬ can Foreign Service luncheon. It thus permitted the Service to add its tribute to the many others which have crowned Mr. Lippmann’s seventieth year and to honor a dedicated journalist who, by serving his public well, has also been of great service to his Government and to the Foreign Service.
Those 473 members of AFSA who attended heard Mr. Lippmann expound his own distinctions between the respon¬ sibilities of the journalist and the diplomatist, and witnessed a provocative interpretation of history which was spiced with intimacies recalled from the speaker’s own early essay in diplomacy as a member of Colonel House’s organization known as “The Inquiry.” Mr. Lippmann’s address is printed elsewhere in this issue for the benefit of those who were un¬ able to hear it.
We agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Lippmann’s claim of cousinship between journalist and diplomatist, since each is primarily concerned with the reporting and interpreting of events. We would not disagree with his conclusion that the journalist’s primary responsibility is to the public whereas that of the Service is to the government.
But in an era of increasingly “open diplomacy,” where the shaping of public opinion can be crucial to major diplo¬ matic moves intended to influence the course of events, we suggest that the journalist should share the diplomatist’s re¬ sponsibility to his government and that the diplomatist must accept greater responsibility toward the public than he has traditionally. Both now play greater roles than at any time in the past—and at a time of unprecedented involve¬ ment of their government in the forces of change at work throughout the world—in projecting the public image of the United States and in interpreting with understanding the sensitivities and problems of foreign neighbors to a formerly isolationist public.
We in the Service acknowledge our cousinship with the gentlemen of the press and must, in pursuing our primary
responsibilities, develop this natural relationship into an en¬ during and rewarding bond of mutual endeavor both at home and abroad. Mr. Lippmann’s distinguished record of responsible interpretation establishes a benchmark for the influence which journalism can bring to bear on public af¬ fairs. It was especially appropriate, therefore, that he should have been introduced by his friend, Ambassador Robert Murphy who will culminate his memorable career by acting as ranking Diplomatic Advisor on the Presidential good will visit this month. On that visit for the first time, the Presi¬ dent will visit areas of Free Asia whose importance Mr. Lippmann emphasized in his analysis of the necessary dif¬ fusion of power eastward from the Atlantic Community.
Howard Fyfe
AFTER twenty-eight years as Despatch Agent in New York, k, Howard Fyfe retired in June of last year, and closed
the book on more than thirty-eight years of service in the United States Government. This past October he died.
It seems hard to believe now, but there was a time—and not too long ago—when Howard Fyfe, out of his own pocket, was taking care of the interim financing of personal ship¬ ments of the FSO. Three years ago the JOURNAL under the title of “Howard Fyfe, U. S. Despatch Agent” said:
Elephants and eye-droppers, parrots and pianos, in a stag¬ gering parade have all passed calmly through customs under the careful supervision of the U. S. Despatch Agent and been received intact. Now the old order must change . . . and personal shipments must be arranged for directly by the FSO ... Few public servants have earned such wide¬ spread appreciation from the Foreign Service as Howard Fyfe. All who have benefited (and who has not) by Mr. Fyfe’s unstinting service will echo our appreciation.
The attitude of Howard Fyfe was never one which needed sustaining by expressions of gratitude or praise. His unnum¬ bered kindnesses extended over the years to Foreign Service Officers, most of whom he had known only through corre¬ spondence. He was a selfless public servant and for many years there will be officers around who will speak of him with warm remembrance. This, of course, is the best of all memorials.
27
WASHINQTON LETTER by Given BARROWS
November was a month full of surprises:
WITH Robert Mur¬ phy’s announced re¬ tirement from the Service after thirty- nine years, with Washington being turned down for the 1964 World’s Fair site, with the “far side of the moon” showing its pock¬ marked face in Rus¬ sian photos, and with the published announcement of hope for a Club
“The Feast of Herod”; From Smithsonian’s Center for Foreign Tapestries exhibit, opening gervice officers in
Washington. The Center, in particular, had the air crackling around
1908 “G” Street, where we have our attic hide-out. For years this idea of a Club Center had been discussed by FSO’s working in Washington, and recently an AFSA com¬ mittee headed by Hendrick Van Oss and David McK. Key had had it under discussion. Now with Myron Cowen inter¬ esting himself in it, and gathering vital support for it from all quarters, the idea is gaining considerable momentum and may well take shape in a million-dollar establishment.
But whatever its size the club is expected to provide head¬ quarters for hospitality and entertainment, with dues mod¬ est enough so that junior foreign service officers from all countries will be able to join and use its facilities regularly.
With ninety embassies in Washington, in addition to American Foreign Service personnel, with numerous inter¬ national organizations such as the International Bank and OAS, the Center could well provide an invaluable meeting place in the Nation’s Capital, within easy walking distance of New State.
Think of the cuisine one can expect to be set up and available, with snacks both simple and profound. These we would expect to be balanced by sports facilities ranging from boule to jai-alai to ping pong, chess and pachisi. In another part of the building one would find an extensive record collection able to accommodate the tastes of both Orient and Occident, and a Reading Room with periodicals and books from the ninety nations. The decor would em¬ phasize spacious proportions, as we see it, and would be representative of the art and the crafts of all the nations— perhaps arranged for by gifts from the countries as was done at the UN building in New York. The building itself, with gardens and outdoor statuary, and an indoor swimming pool, should be a beautiful structure to house the varied
facilities and should be designed by architect Edward Dur- rell Stone.
As you may have gathered, now is the time for all with ideas—and what reader of the JOURNAL is without ideas— now is the moment to play Walter Mitty long enough to dream up a club worthy of our imagination. These ideas can be addressed to the JOURNAL or sent direct to Myron Cowen; they may well result in giving tangible shape to a most welcome new Foreign Service Center.
“With Smiling Faces” Before we entirely leave the subject of gentle sociabilities
—one of our former Board members has sent us a clipping from a newspaper in a far-away town where we have a Consulate General, and we should like to publish it just as translated, deleting only the place names. It describes a party we have all attended, and not only once:
The American Consulate General gave a reception yesterday on the occasion of the visit of the American Ambassador from the national capital. The party started at seven a.m. (sic) and ended at 9 p.m., and was attended by more than 200 persons from the city- including official personalities, industrialists, business men, farmers, writers, and members of the diplomatic corps.
The party was elegant and extravagant, and the hosts, starting with the American Consul General and his Vice Consuls to the smallest employee of the Consulate, served their guests, offering them different kinds of food and drink with smiling faces, and entertaining them with good conversation.
New Inventions The number of new inventions that are daily coming to
the fore continue to delight and stagger us. Now a machine has been developed to read handwriting. We’d like to try
it out on some examples of handwriting we’ve seen around (including, at times, our own). There is a machine, too, that will transmit our letters across the country in two or three minutes. (It doesn’t make one happy to think that the answer can be returned just as quickly.) At Kyoto a ma¬ chine has been invented that will take dictation and even type it up afterwards. And there’s a new camera that takes 355 degree photographs in a single instantaneous exposure. Even a better mousetrap has been invented during this busy autumn of ’59.
10,000 Strong
As we go to print more than 10,000 applications for the Foreign Service written examination for appointment to FSO-8 have been received by the Department. This month the examination will be given in cities and in towns through¬ out the United States.
We had hoped to be able to print one of the examinations so our readers might test themselves, but apparently it is not possible to get the necessary reprint permission from the firm which makes them up. We do have word, however, that a handful of experienced FSO’s, including an FSO-1, have volunteered to take the exam, and we hope to be able to report on their reactions to it. Today’s Service may well produce a more elite corps than ever before—certainly a wider background than ever before is needed to cope with today’s problems, and this year’s response from the country —10,000 strong—should provide excellent material. One can’t but be impressed with the excellence of many of our junior officers, many of whom have had to wait a substantial interval between the examination and the appointment. Their solutions to the waiting period have been as varied as the individual: of two we talked with recently, one had had a tour in the Navy and the other had received a fellow¬ ship for study in Germany.
It is interesting to note that recruitment and selection for the Foreign Service today is a problem engaging official attention not only in the United States. Peter¬ borough in his column in the (London) DAILY TELEGRAPH
recently discussed the problem of recruitment in the British Foreign Service. There have been many criticisms that the British Foreign Service does not recruit from the “red¬ brick” universities, he said, and four members of the For¬ eign Office have accordingly been making an extensive tour of the provincial universities in order to get at the difficulty: “Figures for a recent decade suggest that about 94 percent of recruits come from Oxford or Cambridge. A total of 272 candidates from other universities in this period proved unsuccessful.”
AFSA Luncheon One of the remarks we liked best at the historic Lippmann
luncheon was Mr. Murphy’s suggestion, in introducing Wal¬ ter Lippmann, that perhaps Summitry could be best served today if Mr. Lippmann would get together with his col¬ umnist counterparts from the other three countries con¬ cerned to discuss vital problems and arrive at solutions that would ease the international tensions.
Obstacle Races
With the opening of the Cafeteria and Lounge in State last month, the completion of the new State building draws near and one can’t but wonder at the effect on people and whole divisions who have been safely separated by sheer dis¬
tance. Will the net result be even more pieces of paper to record conversations, for instance? There is even a question as to what effect the nearness and availability will have on the health of the individual, who hitherto had often to run a good race when the boss beckoned from afar.
“The Magi and the Adoration”: From the Norwegian Tapes¬ tries exhibit, opening this month at the Smithsonian.
To illustrate this briefly—not too long ago a memo circu¬ lated in E gave consideration to these necessary races against time, and suggested that a suitable trophy for the winner of an annual obstacle race between SA-20 and New State be instigated.
It proposed that a par figure for the course be set as to the time allotted for the trip from SA-20 to New State, based on a competition between divisions.
Handicaps, it indicated, might be assigned, such as: heavy rain, 30 seconds; Office Director rank, 50 seconds; FSO-8, minus 20 seconds; Deputy Assistant Secretaries minus 5 seconds; processions on Constitution Avenue, 30 seconds.
Perhaps this athletic prowess, so well exercised and developed in the comparatively short run from SA-20, will be given even greater challenges in the near-Pentagon maze of enlarged New State. Trophy donors will be welcomed once the building is completed and the courses set.
“Total Industry”
For months we’ve treasured a line in a letter Robert P. Skinner wrote concerning Charles Eberhardt, on the occa¬ sion of the latter’s birthday: “rejoicing that he is with us and hoping that for long years to come he may continue to preach the gospel of total industry in whatever we may be engaged, as the surest means of finding contentment in this busy world.”
Howard Fyfe Scholarship Fund
As reported in the press recently, one of the scholarships awarded annually by the American Foreign Service Asso¬ ciation is to be named in memory of Howard Fyfe, Des¬ patch Agent. AFSA has already begun to receive some checks for this scholarship, is most appreciative, and asks that the checks be made out to the Association’s Scholar¬ ship Fund.
29
A Letter and Some Comments
From a Member of 1959’s Selection Boards:
Dear Joe:
I’ve been busy now since early September on Selection Board C. The details of our operations were very well de¬ scribed by Jack McFall in the September 1958 issue of the JOURNAL. YOU might, however, be interested in some im¬ pressions and notions which have occurred to me since we started work last month.
The experience is one of the most interesting and, at the same time, most monotonous I’ve had during my Foreign Service career. Reading file after file, day after day, in cramped quarters and uncomfortable chairs is hard on the eyes and several other parts, but the constant parade of performance and personality going by is stimulating and rewarding. If there is any monotony in that aspect, it comes from the conspicuously high level of service and personal qualification which feature the vast majority of Class 3 officers.
To distinguish between these officers is exceedingly diffi¬ cult. I often feel as if I were blindfolded in a lapidary shop where different gems, already carefully selected for quality, were being described to me one by one by a series of in¬ spectors using different terminologies and their own subjec¬ tive standards in order that I might declare, without use of my own senses, which is best, next best, and so on. As a re¬ sult, the problems inherent in our promotion system have taken on real dimensions and have stimulated me to specu¬ late on how they might better be met. Many, I’m sure, are already being tackled by the Department. However, I’m convinced that each of us can contribute toward solutions, so you are welcome to pass this letter around to the other folks in the Embassy to help get as many as possible think¬ ing on the subject. My own thoughts are very preliminary, and are somewhat narrowly based because they arise purely from my experience with Class 3 performance files. I do know that my colleagues on the C Board are likewise specu¬ lating on the same sorts of problems, though they, of course, each have their individual approaches to them.
Probably the major problem I see arises out of the con¬ cept that fine performance in itself should be rewarded by promotion. This is reflected almost universally in the effi¬ ciency reports. I was just as prone to accept it as anyone before I worked on the Board, but now I’m convinced it is neither possible nor desirable. To me the key phrase of the Selection Board precepts is that which I’ve italicized in the following quotation: “In the final analysis, promotion must be earned through a demonstration, within the framework of opportunities afforded, of the relative quality and accu¬ mulated value of the officer’s performance, with due con¬ sideration being given as to whether he has the basic quali¬
fications for performing the duties of an officer in the next higher class.” Even though almost all officers in Class 3 are convincingly reported as meeting more than basic require¬ ments, and the vast majority are rated as superior, there are many whose records do not show them to be fully up to Class 2 responsibilities. Beyond this, simple arithmetic shows that probable promotion rates into Class 2 over the next few years won’t permit the advancement of anywhere near all of the effective and efficient people already in class, plus those entering by promotion and lateral entry, before the time-in-class limitation or the sixty-year retirement rule removes a lot of them from the Service.
To meet this situation, I think we need to take immediate steps to dignify the departure of officers who must leave the Service because they have served the maximum time in class. At present the atmosphere is one of skulking out the back door in disgrace. An officer who has served honorably, per¬ formed well enough to survive the annual weeding out of the lowest ranking, and rendered what must be accepted as a full career of faithful service, is entitled to the diplomatic counterpart of a few guns and ruffles when he leaves. No one looks askance at the Colonel or the Captain when he has served his time and retired because he wasn’t tapped for higher duty. No one is entitled to view a Foreign Service Officer in similar situation any differently. Having deliv¬ ered his best, he merits graceful retirement from a grateful Service.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY of rewarding all faithful and efficient service by promotion also raises the problem of main¬
taining morale by demonstrating that individual services are appreciated while they are still being rendered. The annual within-grade salary increase is designed to that purpose, but at present it is accepted so much as a matter of course that its morale building effect is slight. Furthermore, the limited number of increases provided for by law brings their termi¬ nation at just the period when their morale building effect is most needed—after the officer has already missed promotion more times than he feels he should. Maybe we need some additional system of recognition. Because a Service struc¬ ture with more classes allows for more promotions from start to peak of career, and for shorter waits between them, perhaps the possibility of expansion beyond the present eight classes should get serious consideration.
The mechanical aspect of the Selection Board process is another factor which requires serious thought. While every one of us on Board C is devoting long hours daily to the most conscientious study of the relative merits of each mem¬ ber of Class 3, the size of the job, with almost 460 eligible officers, added to its innately subjective character, requires
30
In harmony with
This festive time
We think of friends
Both far and near.
And so we voice
This simple rhyme
To wish you well
And much good cheer.
AMERICAN SECURITY AND TRUST COMPANY
15th St. & Pennsylvania Ave., N. W.
Washington, D. C.
Robert C. Baker, President
MEMBER FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORP.
MEMBER FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM
"Washington’s Popular Banking Institution”
I ideate ©n €artf) I <©oob Mill^o Jtten
Therefore the Lord himself shall give
you a sign; Behold a virgin shall conceive,
and bear a son, and shall call his name
Immanuel. Isaiah 7:14
And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel
was sent from God unto a city of Galilee,
named Nazareth.
To a virgin espoused to a man whose
name was Joseph, of the House of David;
and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And the angel said unto her, Fear not
Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.
And behold thou shalt conceive in thy
womb and bring forth a son, and shall call
his name JESUS. He shall be great, and
shall be called the Son of the Highest; and
the Lord God shall give unto him the throne
of his father David: and he shall reign over
the house of Jacob for ever, and of his
kingdom there shall be no end.
Luke 1 : 26-27, 30-33
^rurila ^forage (Jompans of I0ashtogi*on
Established 1890 as the Safe Deposit and Storage Department American Security and Trust Company
General Office and Principal Depository
1140 Fifteenth Street, N.W.
Suburban Depository: 5140 River Road, Bethesda, Md.
Telephone: All Locations District 7-4040
Cable Address: STORAGE
C. A. Aspinwall, Chairman Philip Larner Core, President
4
really tremendous extra effort before we can rest assured we have everybody in just the right order.
The last thing I would want, however, would he reduction in the amount of material available on each officer. Rather, the urgent need is for more, primarily in the form of clearer and more illustrative narrative descriptions of officers’ per¬ sonalities and performance, which are the real keys to judg¬ ing an officer. If the number of officers we had to rate were less, we could also be better assured of doing a precision job. Increasing the number of classes would do this. So would increasing the time in class before promotion eligi¬ bility. This latter would reduce the number of eligibles and provide a longer record of performance in Class 3 on which to base judgment of the most junior members of the class.
In addressing the Selection Boards the day we were con¬ vened, Mr. Henderson remarked on the tendency of many rating officers to employ freely the next-to-highest over-all rating, defined on the Efficiency Report form as, “Perform¬ ance in every important respect is superior and there is no weakness in any material respect.” After reading as many re¬ ports as 1 have already, I have some reservations whether the rating has been correctly given in each case, but there is no question but that it is an accurate description of the func¬ tioning of a very large number of officers. However, as a means of distinguishing between the relative performances of so many, it has now lost most of its meaning. We rely more upon the many individual factor ratings on such things as, for instance, judgment, initiative, decisiveness, power and accuracy of observation, etc. (which I find far more helpful than I had realized I would) and upon the very important narrative descriptions, which range in qual¬ ity from the superb to the dismal.
Over-all rating could and should play an important part, which it can’t as it is now being used. I’ve pondered over remedies for this without finding anything which satisfies me yet. At the moment I’m tempted to advocate changing the over-all rating definitions every three or four years. This on the theory that when a new system is first announced, raters pretty well try to follow the rules. As it continues in use, an inflationary process distorts it and a new standard is required. I suspect that only the extreme wording of our top rating “Performance in every respect is outstanding and there is no weakness in any respect” has kept it from being abused almost as much as the next-to-top one is now. Yet, I fear that some of the officers who most closely approach that peak of perfection do not get the rating because their supervisors aren’t convinced there has been anyone worthy of that description since 33 A.D.
Before I close, here are a couple of other notions you might think about. Should the Selection Boards be fur¬ nished with information on prospective vacancies, by func¬ tion, in the class ahead so they can recommend for promo¬ tion appropriate numbers of specialists to fit the vacancies? Should the Boards have access to the rating lists of previous Boards, so they can spot the “always a bridesmaid but never a bride” types who consistently just miss promotion, and take this into consideration in weighing relative merit for advancement?
I’ll look forward to hearing any comments you may have on these thoughts, not to mention your own proposals.
Sincerely, Bill
32
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33
THE BOOKSHELF
mM.
*■
Disarmament Reviewed, by ROBERT W. RINDEN
DISARMAMENT, Secretary Herter recently observed, is “a subject to which all of us should be turning a very
large part of our attention.’’ Those who wish to follow knowledgeably disarmament
discussions in the active phase near at hand will be much helped by Mr. Nutting’s concise review of negotiations be¬ tween the Western Powers and the Soviet Union since 1945. As Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1951 to 1954 and as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1954 to 1956, he was closely con¬ cerned with those “long, frustrated exchanges.” He writes with authority (and most readably) regarding the debates on the extent of disarmament, conventional and atomic, and provisions for its inspection and control.
“DISARMAMENT—AN OUTLINE OF THE NEGOTIATIONS by Anthony Nutting. Oxford Universty Press, New York. 52 pp. $1.40.
New Books About Japan Reviewed by MARTIN F. HERZ
BY THE MIDDLE of the 13th century, the Mongols had conquered half of China, had crossed the Yalu river into
Korea and forced that kingdom to submit to Mongol suzerainty. Korea, writes Sir George Sansom*, “was now a weak and unhappy state, impoverished by its desperate re¬ sistance. Its very weakness was dangerous, since any great power that established itself in China tended to expand into Manchuria and Korea and thus to threaten Japan.”
The Japanese were well aware of the danger. Too late they realized that an independent Korea had been their shield against the powers of the Mainland. Now Khubilai Khan sent envoys to Japan demanding the Emperor’s sub¬ mission on pain of invasion. When the first invasion at¬ tempt in 1274 was beaten off, the Khan established an “Office for the Chastisement of Japan” and after completing the conquest of China turned once more against the island
kingdom. How that second Mongol invasion, in 1281, was defeated by extraordinary valor combined with historical accident is described in the next to last chapter of Sir George’s great new historical monograph.
Sir George Sansom is the finest product of specialization in a foreign service. A member of the original British “Ja¬ pan Consular Service,” he spent altogether 36 years in Japan and the Japanese empire. He was commercial counselor in Tokyo when he wrote his great and indispensable standard work, “Japan: A Short Cultural History.” Those, of course, were days when diplomatic and consular work went forward at a leisurely pace, when there was no mass of required routine work and an officer could concentrate on the task of becoming acquainted with the soul, with the real essence of a country.
Sir George has penetrated to that essence. His new history, of which the present volume is the first of three, will carry Japan’s story up to 1854 where it will connect with his al¬ ready published “The Western World and Japan.” His books are exceptional combinations of scholarly research into primary source material, with lucidity and simplicity of style. In other words, he is not only a fine historian but also a fine writer.
When Townsend Harris came to Japan, the way had been well prepared for him by Commodore Perry but the task of establishing diplomatic relations lay still ahead. One year of arduous preliminary negotiation was required before he was able to leave Shimoda and travel to Edo where he conducted the actual treaty negotiations. The year of wait¬ ing in Shimoda was not an idyllic interlude but a period of learning, of adaptation, of frustrations, of illness and. above all, of acute observation.
The observations of Townsend Harris, first about Siam where he negotiated a treaty of commerce, and later about japan and his negotiations with the Japanese, are set forth in great detail in his “Complete Journal”* which is, as a matter of fact, so complete that the actual negotations are sometirifes obscured by extraneous details. But shining forth is the character of a remarkable man.
Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II has written a brief preface to the Complete Journal. He once remarked that in his own negotiations with the Japanese Government he had profited from reading Townsend Harris’ journals. Although the Ambassador did not indicate the passages that contained parallels with the present, there are quite a few scattered throughout the book that have contemporary rele¬ vance, notably the frequent references to the need for coordi¬ nation within the Japanese Government. A typical entry, for instance, reads:
Friday, March 6, 1857. Met the Governors at the usual place. T asked them if they were prepared to give me answers to the points remaining unsettled, and soon found they were anything but ready. They said these were important matters and must be calmly considered; that the Japanese took a great while to consider every question; that in this respect they differed from the Americans, who decided promptly on all questions.
It must be remembered that Townsend Harris, the first American Consul General in Japan, was able to “decide promptly on all questions” because he had full powers to
* A HISTORY OF JAPAN TO 1334, by George Sansom. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif. 487 pp. $8.50.
* THE COMPLETE JOURNAL OF TOWNSEND HARRIS. Charles Tuttle & Co., Rutland, Vt. 589 pp. $7.50.
34
send Harris” (Charles Tuttle, Tokyo)
negotiate a treaty and would have required at least half a year to receive instructions or replies from Washington. Indeed, for long, wretched periods he was completely cut off from communication with the outside world. Under the circumstances when he had determined the right course of action he could take it immediately. While one can sym¬ pathize with his sufferings, there is also cause for a bit of envy.
The late Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu wrote his memoirs* during a period of enforced idleness in Sugamo prison. As Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, later as Am¬ bassador to the Soviet Union and to Great Britain, and then, after Japan’s entry into the war, for two years as Foreign Minister, he saw the origins of the great war and describes his own (modest) efforts to prevent it. His account of the negotiations preceding Pearl Harbor is important collateral reading, joining somewhat belatedly the mass of documentary material already available on that period.
Missing from this condensed version of Mr. Shigemitsu’s hook is the hulk of his chapter entitled “Attitude of the U. S. Towards the Problem of East Asia” in which he set forth his understanding of the forces motivating American policy. It was written, of course, after the war; its publication immediately before the war, when it would have been more profitable, was of course unthinkable. But the power of the United States was not ignored by the policy¬ makers of 1941. There is, for instance, this poignant para¬ graph about the Emperor’s reaction to the Japanese war plan:
“The Navy plans, based on the decision of July 2nd, were communi¬ cated to the Emperor on July 31st by Nagano, Chief of the Naval General Stall. His Imperial Highness was extremely perturbed by the plan of campaign against the U. S. contained therein. He inquired, in a tone of reproof, whether war with the U. S. could really be contem¬ plated. Nagano replied that war with the Americans could not be conducted longer than one year and a half with any prospect of suc¬ cess and that Japan’s leaders did not actually desire it.”
The controversy whether the war in the Pacific was avoid¬ able will long occupy historians. Mr. Shigemitsu’s book, in laying bare some of the moves and countermoves as observed from the Japanese side, furnishes arguments to those who hold the war to have been inevitable in view of the policies of the two countries. Yet the material presented also sup¬ ports those who feel that the opposing policies might yet have been influenced, and modified, by a better working of conventional diplomacy.
* JAP AN AND HER DESTINY—MY STRUGGLE FOR PEACE, by Mamoru Shigemitsu. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. 381 pp. $6.50.
Look Southward, Uncle. By Edward Tomlinson. Devin- Adair Company, New York: 369 pp. $6.00.
Reviewed by HENRY C. RAMSEY
SHORTLY before his death, Cordell Hull confided to his friend Edward Tomlinson that “The fellows down there
(in the Department) don’t seem to be giving as much atten¬ tion to these countries (Latin America) as ‘we’ used to. Uncle Sam must look southward more and more, because the Americas need one another.” Mr. Tomlinson’s back¬ ground of more than thirty years as correspondent and com¬ mentator on Latin American affairs is distilled into this com¬ pelling justification of “the Judge’s” dictum. His book is not intended for the specialist though it can be read by him with profit. It is aimed rather at the general public and the hemispheric layman in an effort to induce greater under¬ standing of the importance of hemispheric solidarity. Its sweep is both comprehensive and instructive. Latin Amer¬ ica, past and present, is presented in historical and psycho¬ logical depth and the parameters of socio-economic ferment at work are admirably sketched. The reader leaves the book with a conviction that Mr. Hull was right, that Mr. Tomlin¬ son has succeeded in his purpose of pleading for more un¬ derstanding bases of the interdependence of the Americas, and that this general presentation of a highly important sub¬ ject deserves a wide and sympathetic audience.
“Cuba, Island of Paradox,” by R. Hart Phillips. Mc¬ Dowell, Obolensky, New York. 434 pp. $4.95.
Reviewed by ANNE H. O’NEALL
WHEN Ruby Hart Phillips, now NEW YORK TIMES cor¬ respondent to Cuba, arrived in the island republic
in mid-1931 the stage was being set for a series of political developments which in less than three decades would place Cuba high on the list of Latin American trouble spots. The tumultuous course of Cuban politics during these years has run the course of tyrannical dictatorships, representa¬ tive government, and voluntary popular submission to the rule of a mystic leader. Mrs. Phillips’ book recounts in interesting detail many of the major events in Cuba’s na¬ tional and international political growth and refers to parallel economic and sociological developments within the country. The major portion of the book is devoted to the rise to power and rule of one-time Sergeant and later Gen¬ eral Fulgencio Batista, who is described as a “born poli¬ tician ... a man who managed Cuba by means of counter¬ point, sometimes in the interest of the nation and sometimes to perpetuate his own regime.” Approximately a third of the book traces the emergence of the lawyer Fidel Castro.
The pleasure of reading Mrs. Phillips’ book lies not only in what she has to say but in the way she says it.
Although Mrs. Phillips’ book does not pretend to evaluate Cuba’s political history, her work leaves the reader wishing that such a long-time observer of Cuban politics had ana¬ lyzed more deeply the fundamental causes of political in¬ stability in Cuba. Aspects of the Cuban national psychology are only touched on. For example, the peculiar appeal of symbolism to the Cuban masses is mentioned but briefly; and the paradox of the conduct of the Cuban people after the overthrow of the dictators Machado and Batista is spoken of but not developed.
35
1. Greenwich, Conn. At their wedding reception on June 29, Lieut, j.g., USNR, and Mrs. John Brayton Redecker with Lieut. Redecker’s parents, FSO-retired and Mrs. Sydney Brayton Redecker.
2. Belgrade. Secretary of Agriculture Benson and Presi¬ dent Tito enjoy a walk in the garden of President Tito’s resi¬ dence. Accompanying them are Ambassador Karl L. Rankin, Yugoslav Secretary of Agriculture Slavko Komar, and Mr. Olson, an assistant to Secretary Benson.
3. Fukuoka, Japan. Consul Richard M. Herndon receives a “Mach Buster” certificate for having exceeded the sound barrier with Lt. Colonel J. Griffin as pilot of the aircraft. Consul Herndon went along as a passenger in the F-100 F from the USAF Itazuke Air Base.
4. Washington. Talking it over after the opening ceremonies of the new cafeteria and lounge, November 2, at State are (seated) : Mrs. Elizabeth Haliagan, Secretary Christian A. Her- ter. Director of USIA George V. Allen, (standing) Fernleigh R. Graninger, Deputy Under Secretary Henderson, Commis¬ sioner Wallace of GSA, Thomas S. Estes, Joseph C. Satter- thwaite, and William H. G. Fitzgerald of ICA.
5. Okinawa. Among those who gathered at the local club last year to hear the shortwave radio broadcast of the Army-Navy game were Consul General and Mrs. Olcott H. Deming, Lieu¬ tenant General Donald P. Booth (left), Rear Admiral F. N. Kivette, and a goat. During the half. Consul General Deming, as the neutral civilian guest among the two rival services, walked the goat across the room from the Navy side to the Army side.
6. Washington. Sir Harold Caccia, Ambassador from Great Britain (receiving the trophy from Assistant Secretary Sat- terthwaite) and C. Alfonso Smith from State were winners in the Ninth Annual Tennis Tournament. The losers (left) were Lt. Col. Subroto Kusmardjo of Indonesia and William Hussey of State. Sir Harold Caccia is the first Ambassador to share in this championship. Twenty-eight nations entered teams.
7. New Delhi. Pictured as they leave the new Embassy building are: Mr. Mohan Singh, Prime Minister Nehru, Am¬ bassador Bunker, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and Mrs. Bunker.
FOREIGN and DOMESTIC REMOVALS in safe steel lift vans, wooden vans or cases.
STORAGE of household effects,
Works of Art, furniture, office
Washington Representative:
FEDERAL STORAGE COMPANY
1701 Florida Avenue, N.W. ADams 4-5600
Shakespeare and Company, by Sylvia Beach. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. 199 pp. $4.50.
Reviewed by MORRILL CODY
THIS IS a fascinating book for those who knew Paris in the Twenties or those who have a lively interest in this
period when the literary arts flourished in Montparnasse, spreading a glow which was reflected around the world.
A pivotal point for the young English, American and French writers of the epoch was the Left Bank bookshop called Shakespeare and Company run by Sylvia Beach, a minister’s daughter from Princeton, New Jersey. Here Hem¬ ingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Gide, Valery and dozens of others gathered to talk, browse or sometimes simply to pick up their mail. Miss Beach knew them all and in her book recounts their personal foibles and eccentricities much as though she were telling it to you face to face.
“Shakespeare and Company” is not a book about the literature of the period, but about the people who wrote it. It is especially rich in anecdotes of James Joyce, whose “Ulysses” she published when it was banned in both Eng¬ land and the United States. She sacrificed everything for Joyce—time and money—and she gave him a personal devotion which few writers are lucky enough to experience. In the end he behaved rather shabbily toward her.
Among the amusing items in the book is a letter from Bernard Shaw in answer to a prospectus suggesting that he might wish to buy a copy of “Ulysses.” Shaw ends his letter as follows: “I must add, as the prospectus implies an invitation to purchase, that I am an elderly Irish gentleman and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen.” Miss Beach also tells in her book how Ernest Hemingway “liberated” Shakespeare and Company as the Germans marched out of Paris in 1945, and then rushed from there to liberate the Ritz bar.
Miss Beach still lives at 12 rue de l’Odeon above what was formerly her bookshop and here in an ancient apart¬ ment she retains hundreds of books, letters, photographs, manuscripts which she has gathered in her long residence in Paris which began in 1917. Many famous writers whom she knew in their youth still make pilgrimages to the rue de l’Odeon and recreate with her incidents of the Twenties.
Last spring, as the jacket announces, USIS Paris per¬ suaded Miss Beach to lend her intriguing collection for an exhibit in its Youth Center on the rue du Dragon. Here the books, photographs and manuscripts were tastefully dis¬ played and at one end of the exhibit hall a Montparnasse atmosphere was created with photo murals from the period, old cafe tables and a mechanical piano which played George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique. Among those who attended the opening day were Thornton Wilder, Alice B. Toklas, Alexander Calder and others who still live in Paris.
As time goes on, the importance of the American enclave in Paris in the Twenties grows greater in the literary history of the United States. It had begun in Greenwich Village at an earlier period and then moved to Paris because young writers from all parts of the world were gathered there. There was also the desire on the part of the Americans to escape from the puritanism of prohibition, and the moraliz¬ ing of the older generation. A not unimportant factor, too, was the very low cost of living in France at that time.
Miss Beach has not written the final book on the literary and artistic aspects of the Twenties, but she has given us a most readable and colorful picture of the period.
38
MR. MURPHY on the FOREIGN SERVICE (from page 8)
of present opportunities. Of course in the past career develop¬ ment may have been a hit more haphazard. If I may mention my own experience I fear it may sound like a series of coinci¬ dences. I never planned to enter the Foreign Service. I in¬ tended to be a lawyer, and I was attending law school in Wash¬ ington when World War I broke upon us. Due to an elevator accident I had suffered a leg injury which kept me out of mili¬ tary service. A classmate was on the staff of Secretary of State Lansing, and he suggested the Foreign Service needed code clerks and provided interesting war work.
A week later I was enroute to Bern as a code clerk and found Allen Dulles there as third secretary. Bern was a center of wartime espionage and diplomatic activity in the classic tradi¬ tion. I never dreamt of continuing in it and came back after the War to finish law school. Taking the bar examination here I learned that a consular service examination was being held and took it just to see whether I could pass.
OBVIOUSLY they needed people badly because I did pass and then took an appointment to Zurich thinking I would return
to practice law a little later. There were no training courses then and the thirty day instruction period conducted by an amiable inspector consisted of advice to get around the Depart¬ ment and meet people and study the volume of regulations he handed me. He was kind enough to grant me two weeks leave for my wedding trip on my promise to take the copy of the Consular Regulations along with me. I was deeply touched by this mark of confidence and studied that portion of the Regula¬ tions relating to the issuance of marriage certificates.
I never got near any post for which I expressed a preference. One assignment was sheer accident. I was in the Department on assignment and the Chief of Personnel, Homer Byington, Sr., walked into my office saying. “Look, your time is about up. If I should ask you whether you would prefer Bremen, Shanghai or Paris, what would you say?” I was startled and asked “Well, Homer, what would you say?” He replied, “That’s all I wanted to know,” and the next day I was assigned to Paris. World War II came upon us there and then a whole series of unexpected events transpired in which career planning was rather noticeable by its absence. I knew practically nothing of military affairs and never had been inside the then War Depart¬ ment. Yet for about eight years I was closely associated with various military events and operations. How I have envied fellow officers who have enjoyed the War College course. It would have made some things much easier. I must confess that my career in the Service was not as carefully planned as it should have been. I hope you younger officers will be more careful. . . .
I believe every Foreign Service Officer should try to develop a practical, working knowledge of two foreign languages. I know this is not easy, but it is a lot easier than was the case- some years ago because of the training facilities provided. I don’t believe in this talk about special aptitude for languages. There is just no substitute for slugging away at it and using the language every day. One of my chiefs, Bill Dawson, fol¬ lowed the practice of talking to his subordinates in the office on official business in German, Spanish or French, depending on their knowledge. I know he always talked to me in German, in which he was extremely fluent. I have always been grateful to him. He also had the slick system of making the vice con¬ suls type their letters. I resigned twice, but I learned.
Then there is the financial aspect ... I remember the case of my first chief who was press attache at Bern, a really lovable man who, with a family of four, had been in debt for years. In those days on a transfer the Government paid for the officer but not for his family or effects. When he was consul at Magde¬ burg he desperately needed about a thousand dollars. His loyal vice consul went to a small bank which did that kind of busi¬
ness and asked for the loan. He said he had no collateral but the American Consul, his Chief, who needed the money, would be glad to endorse the vice consul’s note. So that immediate crisis was overcome. There was no group insurance or retire¬ ment provision in those days and lots of times the end of the career was not entirely a happy one.
I’m an optimist about the Service’s future. A few years ago it did not seem to me to offer as much because of public misunder¬ standing and certain antagonisms which you know about. I believe the Service has emerged from those trials stronger and more solid. We have many friends in Congress and in the country at large. We have a President who knows and supports the Foreign Service and a Secretary of State and an Under Secretary both of whom I regard really as members of our Service. Our press actually is fair to us and I believe most of us have many good friends among the correspondents who are usually inclined to give us a break when we stumble and a kind word if we rate it.
Perhaps I could be bold enough to offer a word of advice to younger officers. The worst thing that could happen to us is complacency. We just can’t afford it. No matter how good we might believe ourselves to be, this should be left to the other fellow to discover. I think that applies especially to members of Congress and the Press. Let them find out for themselves how good you are. Compared with some professions, ours has a few more cloistered features and it is possible to become a bit ingrown. We shouldn’t confuse a good esprit de corps with clannishness. . . .
I would like also to say a word about the distaff side of our Service. I think this Service career can be pretty rough at times, both on wives and children. Again, I recommend to the younger officers to try to understand the wife’s problems. Don’t forget that official contact you consider so important and want to entertain may be just another pain in the neck to your wife. Don’t load her up and expect the impossible. . . .
I DON’T WANT to abandon too easily this rare opportunity of meeting with so large a Service group without just a word
about current American foreign policy. Again, I am optimistic. Never in our history have we been exposed as a nation to the impact of tougher competition. Out of this highly competitive situation has developed one crisis after another. World values before our eyes have been passing through a rapid evolutionary process. The consistent pressures of the international Commu¬ nist movement, the successive waves of nationalism in several world areas, the awakening of backward peoples and the effervescence of the underdeveloped areas provide a volume of problems which the most imaginative of our predecessors did not foresee.
The recent visit to this country of Chairman Khrushchev in a way epitomizes the measure of the field in which we operate and its range of problems, from the orthodox political, financial, and economic to the realms of science and nuclear energy, global defense problems, and outer space. I certainly do not know of a moment in our history which offers more solid prospects for the Department of State and the Foreign Service and to your individual careers than the present. I am sure that you will continue to make a major contribution both to the development of substantive policies as well as in their execution. In that task you certainly can find cause for encouragement in the leadership of a Secretary of State whose grasp and direc¬ tion of policy are not only an inspiration but a good omen for the future. The fact that he couples with that ability and wisdom an intricate knowledge of the Foreign Service, and I think I can say a real affection for the members of the Service, is in the nature of a stock dividend for which the Service has reason to be congratulated.
39
AFSA ♦ New Officers for 1959-1960
GJ. FREDERICK Reinhardt, President '• of AFSA, received his A.B. de¬
gree from the Univ. of Calif, in 1933 and M.A. from Cornell in 1935. Mr. Reinhardt joined the Foreign Service in 1937 and served in Vienna, Tallinn, Riga and Moscow. During World War If he was a political officer in the Mediterranean and European theaters of operations. In 1955 he was ap¬ pointed Ambassador to Vietnam. Mr. Reinhardt is currently Counselor of the Department of State.
VV ILLIAM L. Blue was horn at Mem- * ' phis, Tennessee, where he attend¬
ed school through college. He re< eived M.A. degrees from Vanderbilt in 1937 and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1939. lie entered the Foreign Service in 1911 and served at Niagara Falls, Ciudad Bolivar, Naples, Kuala Lumpur, and New Delhi. He was assigned to the NATO Defense College in Paris in 1955-56. He served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Bern be¬ fore his transfer to the Dept, in 1958 to assume the duties of Executive Di¬ rector of the Bureau of European Affairs.
C1 HARLES W. Adair. Jr., entered the ^ Foreign Service in 194-0 and served
in Mexico, India, Brazil and Belgium in between Washington assignments as India Desk Officer, NATO Advisor and more recently Chief of Trade Agree¬ ments Division and Director of OFD. Study assignments have included ad¬ vanced economic training at Princeton and the 1951-52 session of the Nation¬ al War College. He is currently serv¬ ing as Acting Deputy Assistant Secre¬ tary for Economic Affairs.
f GRAHAM Parsons, Vice President ** • of AFSA. one of the most active members of the Association, served as Chairman of the Board of Directors last vear. Mr. Parsons was graduated from Yale in 1929 and N.Y.U School of Bus. Adm. in 1932. He went to Japan as secretary to Ambassador Grew and remained there until 1936. His posts include Mukden, Rome, New Delhi and in 1956 he was appointed Ambassador to Laos. Currently he is Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs.
STEPHEN Winship served on the Hoard from 1931 lo 1934. He
was reared in New England and during World War II was a Naval aviator. In 1947 he entered the FS, served as Vice Consul, Kingston; Third Secretary, Buenos Aires. As a destitute FSO-5 (old-style) in the Dept., he says he became a management type for three years. Later as principal officer at Perth, Western Australia, he enjoyed being 1800 miles away from the near¬ est U. S. Govt, employee. Currently he is EUR Staff Assistant.
'Y\T ALDEMAR J. Gallman was born ^ * in New York state and was gradu¬
ated from Cornell Univ. in 1921. He entered the Foreign Service in 1922 and served at Habana, San Jose, Quito, Riga, Warsaw, Danzig, and London. In 1948 he was appointed Ambassador to Poland and in 1930 Deputy Com¬ mandant of the National War College. In 1951 he was appointed Ambassador to the Union of South Africa and in 1954 Ambassador to Iraq. At present Mr. Gallman is serving as Director General of the Foreign Service.
rp HOMAS S. Estes, Chairman of A AFSA, has served on its Board of Directors since 1956, two years as Secretary-Treasurer, one year as Vice- Chairman of the Board. He served as Liaison Director with the Club Com¬ mittee, working to obtain suitable quar¬ ters for Association activities, includ¬ ing transient facilities. He is also Vice President of the American Foreign Service Protective Association. Mr. Estes is currently Deputy Assistant Sec¬ retary of State for Operations.
]\.| ELISSA E. Foelsch was born in Tallinn, Estonia. Her family came
to the U. S. in 1936 and settled in Pacific Palisades, Calif. She graduated from the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown Univ. in 1956, and is now in the process of completing graduate studies at Georgetown. Prior to her appointment as FS0-8 in September, 1958. she was a secretary to the Bolivian Ambassador in Washington. At present she is assigned to INR/REU.
SAMUEL R. Gammon entered the Foreign Service in May, 1954 after
a brief teaching career while awaiting appointment. He served in Palermo in the RRP for one year and in Milan as Administrative Officer and Economic Officer for three years. He is now on duty as Area Personnel Officer for Western Europe in POD. Mr. Gammon was appointed from Texas where he still maintains his home leave address, and is living in Georgetown, within walking distance of the office when the humidity permits.
MAX V. Krebs was born in Cincin¬ nati ami was graduated from
Princeton in 1937. During World War II he served in the Army from 1941 until 1946. Sinee entering the Foreign Service in 1947 Mr. Krebs has held posts at Montevideo, Bogota, Antwerp, and in the Dept., where he was Train¬ ing Assignments Officer, 1955-1957, and Special Assistant to the Under Secretary, 1957-1959. lie is currently Special Assistant to the Secretary.
AVID H. McCabe received his A.B. " from Georgetown Univ. He was a Special Agent, Naval Intelligence, for two years then entered the Foreign Service in 1952. He has served as Se¬ curity Officer at Athens, Singapore and Djakarta, and for the past year has been assigned to the Office of Security in Washington. Mr. McCabe is mar¬ ried, has a year-old son, and is cur¬ rently studying for an M.A. degree at Georgetown Univ.
JOHN Hale Statesman, Jr., was horn in Washington, D. C. and raised as
an Army “brat.” He received his A.B. degree from Princeton in 1942. After serving in Africa and Italy during World War II he entered the Foreign Service in 1946 and has served at Shanghai, Tehran and Paris. In the Department he has served as Iranian Desk Officer and as a member of the Executive Secretariat. He is at present a Special Assistant to Loy W. Header-
No matter where you go . . .
“The world agrees on ‘Gilbey's please”
Gilbey’s Gin
NATIONAL DISTILLERS PRODUCTS COMPANY
°4«t 99 Park Avenue, New York 16, N. Y. 94U
UGANDA today is a rich and colorful blend of the old and the new: a gigantic elephant by the roadside; an attractive new college
library; naked Karamojong tribesmen living as hunters and cowherds and existing on a diet of blood and milk; alert students at work in the laboratory of a modern technical school; the crude, colorful up-country marketplace; the car-jammed commercial section of Kampala; the Madi dancers of northwestern Uganda in ostrich plumes, leopard skins and ankle bells; the enthusiastic African audience at a Makerere College concert of Western music; a thrilling ride in a modern motor craft along the ancient Nile still dotted with floating grass islands and alive with crocodiles; the well-groomed golf course where a lie may be re¬ moved from a hippo hoof-print without penalty; the textile-mill, copper- smelter skyline of Jinja; the old hunter with a spear looking quizzically at a new upcountry gasoline station—everywhere the age-old and the modern intermingling, inter-acting and revealing the fact that Uganda, like all Africa, is racing with the speed of a cheetah through a course of development and change that the Western world had time to inch through tortoise-fashion over the past three centuries.
Observing, learning about, and attempting to interpret the conse¬ quences of all this change as Uganda’s quest for unity and independ¬ ence enters a critical stage has been a most fascinating experience to me in the more than two years since I went out to open the new Kam¬ pala Consulate in April 1957.
Uganda is a British Protectorate located astride the equator in East Africa, bounded in the north by Sudan, in the east by Kenya, in the south by Tanganyika, Lake Victoria and Ruanda-Urundi, and in the west by the Belgian Congo. It is a country of lakes, rolling hills and luxuriant green vegetation with extensive areas abounding in wild life. The elevation is approximately 4,000 feet, affording a comfortable 65° to 85° variation in temperature year round. Kampala ranks as the principal town and commercial center with a population of 60,000. At Jinja, a second town on the Lake, the Nile begins its 3,850 mile course to the Mediterranean.
The first explorers, Speke and Stanley, had come to this part of the “dark continent” less than a century ago. Europeans who followed came to know a very advanced tribe called the Baganda which had a highly developed system of government and a King or Kabaka descend¬ ed from a royal lineage of over five hundred years. In addition to the present Kabaka of Buganda, there are hereditary rulers over three other tribes in Uganda and several additional tribes with elected chiefs. In this little land, about the size of the British Isles or West Germany, eight different tribal languages and numerous additional dialects are spoken by the six million African inhabitants. Through an extensive system of education started by the missionaries and expanded and raised to university level by the British at Makerere College in Kampala, Eng¬ lish is becoming the common language destined to help unite the coun¬ try. Of the 7,000 whites resident in Uganda less than 200 are Americans.
1. His Highness the Kabaka of Buganda, Mutcsa II.
2. The Kabaka and the Consul in conference.
3. A Muganda mother and her child.
4. Fishermen on Lake George, Toro, Uganda.
By PETER HOOPER, JR.
For political, commercial, and strategic reasons, however, it was important that the United States should come to know more about these people who in the not too distant future would join the ranks of the new independent African na¬ tions. Our advance contingent was a small one—one Con¬ sul and one clerk-stenographer (Jacquelyn Bamberger from Chicago). For a few weeks we read widely, got extensive briefings in the Department and talked to everyone we could find who had been in or near Uganda. Having made all the initial arrangements we could about office equipment, fur¬ niture, manuals and supplies, we finally took off from Wash¬ ington National Airport in mid-April 1957.
The DC-3 which took us on the last leg of our flight in from Nairobi climbed down rapidly, skimmed over a sandy beach at lake’s edge and then leveled immediately to land on the fine, long concrete runway of Entebbe airport. It was hard to.believe that with this smooth, modern approach we had actually reached our destination in the heart of Africa. Official greetings and the formalities of immigration and customs were quickly and pleasantly accomplished and we soon left the tiny administrative capital town of Entebbe behind. We were now on the very last stretch—the twenty- one mile drive to Kampala. The road was narrow and wind¬ ing, but tarmac. The brilliant green of the hilly countryside was dotted with trees bearing vivid blossoms of yellow, red and violet hues. Towering pointed ant hills, rising five to ten feet out of the elephant grass here and there along the edge of the road, gave evidence of the brick-red color of Uganda’s soil. African houses were on separate plots and gardens, rather than in circular clusters, and they appeared much more prosperous-looking than huts we had seen in Kenya. They were square or oblong in plan and constructed of solid-looking earthen walls or concrete blocks. Nearly as many had galvanized iron roofs as had the older thatch va¬ riety. Many were hard to make out because of the inevi¬ table grove of banana trees surrounding and extending from each dwelling.
These bananas were “matoke,” the most common of the many varieties of banana and plantain grown here and the staple food of the Bantu tribes in southern Uganda. They are picked green, sold in gigantic stalks, and steamed for eating much the same way as we would eat mashed potato or cooked squash.
The Baganda people along the road looked healthy and quite well-dressed. The women stood proudly erect in bright, multi-colored Mother Hubbard dresses—a standard design introduced early by missionaries to eliminate all vestiges of nakedness and accepted happily by the Asian merchant be¬ cause of the extensive yardage of the cotton material in-
An African farmer with his coffee. Uganda farmers are prosperous.
A Muhima herdsman with his Ankole longhorn cattle.
Makerere College, the University College of East Africa at Kampala.
Matoke market at Katwe, Kampala. Matoke (a type of banana) is tl staple diet of Africans in Uganda.
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volved. The Baganda facial features are attractive, and “buxom” is the synonym for “female beauty.” How the women manage gigantic bundles of wash or stalks of matoke on their heads while gayly swinging their padded hips in an exaggerated wiggle often mystifies the visitor.
The men seemed to prefer the white shirt, even down to its last tattered remnants, to the Hawaiian variety. Bicycles were everywhere under propulsion of the male Muganda, and we encountered quite a number of motorcycles and sec¬ ond-hand cars in various stages of dilapidation. (I should explain here that the people of Buganda, the kingdom em¬ bracing south central Uganda where Kampala is located, are collectively called Baganda, singularly Muganda, speak a Bantu language called Luganda and are extremely proud of their customs which are referred to as Kiganda.)
Along the road we saw occasional groups of smiling school children in all-blue, all-pink or all-green simple uni¬ forms. They are used to walking as much as six or seven miles to and from school. Little wonder that Uganda has developed some good track athletes.
A CLOSER LOOK at the individual farm plots or shcimbas along the way disclosed the shiny, dark green leaf of the
coffee bush, the cash-crop secret of much of the relative prosperity of this country. TW
TO or three times a year the
Muganda picks and dries his coffee and takes it to a buyer, a hullery or a factory for direct cash sale. The man on the small shamba often delegates all of the agricultural aches and pains to his wife and commutes to town himself to work in an office, a garage, a small factory, or as a driver, mes¬ senger or domestic. This ingrained habit of one foot on the soil and the other foot in town, is the African’s substitute for social security. Despite housing and other enticements, he is reluctant to urbanize. If he wrorks up a dislike for his job or his boss, he can quite happily retire to his banana grove and vegetate until he needs a new shirt or bicycle tire. His food grows beside him all year round and the rigors of cold weather are unknown. This all goes a long way toward explaining his adherence to custom, despite accumulating trappings of modernity. This and much more belong to the story of the Entebbe road which we have tra¬ versed hundreds of times since that first late morning in April, 1957.
We were pleasantly surprised by our first view of the sweeping perimeter of Kampala. An undulating semicircle of green hills studded with white buildings, many more than W'e had expected, stretched before us. We circled the mod¬ ern clock tower and turned into the line of traffic along the divided highway leading uphill to the main road which em¬ braces downtown Kampala in a long crescent. Off to the right we spotted the picturesque Kibuli Mosque with its twin towers glistening white in the noon-day sun atop one of the seven prominent hills of the city. Suddenly there seemed to be almost as many whites and Asians about as African peo¬ ple. The turn onto Kampala Road revealed a long line of modern shops, banks, and office buildings, some three or more stories high. From this we swung uphill past the post office, turned a corner and came to a stop before our first home in Africa, a low rambling yellow stucco structure,
44
by Peter Hooper, Jr.
fronted by a long verandah looking across to an attractive park, and bearing the inscription “Speke Hotel.”
The Speke was in fact “home” for five weeks. Housing proved difficult to find. Locating a consular residence, ob¬ taining temporary furnishings and renting a car were among many of the things to be done in spare moments. But offi¬ cial duties could not wait. The next day I called on the Governor, the Chief Secretary and a number of the Ministers in the Protectorate Government. Sir Frederick Crawford, Governor of Uganda, is an able Colonial official with many years of East African experience behind him. His welcome was pleasant; his bearing, purposeful and sincere, bespeak¬ ing the friendly relationship which subsequently unfolded during the Consulate’s first two years in Uganda. He and his subordinates rightfully expressed pride in the extraordi¬ nary achievements of British administration in little more than a half century in Uganda. Education, health, develop¬ ment of cash crops, the railway, roads, electrification, ani¬ mal husbandry, fisheries, small industry, advancement of the African in trade, training in democratic government, estab¬ lishment of a judicial system and promotion of tourism are some of the many fields of endeavor in which great progress has been made.
Next I called on the Kabaka of Buganda, Frederic Mu- tesa II, who is a gracious, dapper, Oxford-educated man in his early thirties. His palace is located on the traditional hill-top site of past Buganda kings in Mengo just south of the municipal boundary of Kampala. The palace lawn, where the Kabaka frequently entertains in the early eve¬ ning with colored lights, royal drummers and musicians in the background, is beautifully landscaped with magnificent tall trees and flowering shrubs. He received me in the office wing of bis palace. As all of his tribal subjects do, the Kabaka’s private secretary who saw me in went down on his knees and bowed low several times as a sign of respect. He remained kneeling according to custom during the entire interview. The Kabaka, following an affable greeting, ex¬ pressed appreciation over the fact that the United States had shown recognition of the growing importance of Uganda by opening a Consulate here. He evinced keen interest in America and listened attentively to my response to his query regarding the sort of work we would be doing in the Kam¬ pala Consulate. That day he was dressed in a grey, Euro- pean-style business suit.
FOLLOWING CALLS on these people and courtesy calls on my consular colleagues representing the Sudan, Belgium,
France, Holland and Portugal, I had to turn my energies to the many tasks of getting our new Consulate open and run¬ ning. Our Consul General at Nairobi had lined up office space for us in advance in a new building nearing comple¬ tion. For a week our informal place of business was per¬ force the telephone at one end of the counter in the Speke Hotel lobby. When the great day came for plasterers and painters to move out and us to move in, we took possession of our spacious office rooms on the second floor of Udyam House with one table, two chairs, a rented typewriter and a vanity table bench borrowed from the Hotei for the visit¬ ing public to sit on.
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The Uganda national parliament, called the Legislative Council, had debated an interesting motion on our third day in Kampala calling for independence in 1958. It was clear that a little political reporting was in order. But much as we might have liked to settle down to a secluded report¬ ing routine until we were better equipped to face the pub¬ lic, this proved to be but a shattered dream from the very first day. A notice in the UGANDA ARGUS that the American Consul had arrived was all that was needed. From there the African “grape-vine” took over and quickly located us, first at the Speke and then at Udyam House.
A seemingly endless trail of job-seekers and students wanting to go to the States pounded on the door and bound¬ ed in. We soon realized that the most-needed official form during those early days was the DSP-33 (employment ap¬ plication) . There were mad times when deliverers of sup¬ plies, haulers of furniture, electricians and telephone in¬ stallers arrived in rapid succession while we were knee-deep in job applicants claiming to have all kinds of clerical and diplomatic qualifications. At such times a quick dealing out of DSP-33’s with the instruction to “fill-em out, send- em in, and wait till you hear from us” was virtually the only way to clear the decks for other pressing administra¬ tive action.
There were less active days when frustratingly enough nothing happened that was supposed to. And then the weather seemed particularly sticky. During the less hectic moments we found relaxation in reading some of the job application letters. Many were intelligently written and well- expressed, but every now and then letters like the following would arrive in our mail:
“I have been working very smartly at my present job for ten months. But I am living at least fifteen miles away and I have to cycle about thirty miles a day, which is really very unprofitable towards my life.”
x * *
“I have studied as a chemist, but now I am more interested in diplomatic work and specially working in the U.S.A. Consulate.”
XXX
“I beg applying for vacancy in your office as a dark and know how to tipe. Sir waiting for reply. Eged 20 years. I am Sir, your obiadunt.”
xxx
“Sir, for chances work in your office I grately throw myself at your honorable big feet.”
With time came order and accomplishment and re-enforce¬ ments. A bright and energetic vice consul and a keen and resourceful public affairs officer were welcome additions. By then we were reasonably well equipped in the office, though still camping in at home. From the host of appli¬ cants we had hired and commenced training the nucleus of a good local staff.
We were pleased to discover that the United States is very popular with the Ugandan. His high regard for things American was something of a mixed blessing, however, be¬ cause with it often came the naive assumption that the opening of the American Consulate automatically brought with it boundless opportunity for him to visit, and particu¬ larly to study in. the United States. There supposedly was
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a time when colonial administrators had to prod the Afri¬ can to attend school. How far the pendulum had swung in the direction of intense desire to seek every opportunity for advanced education was made clear to us by dozens of let¬ ters and visits each week from young men and women wanting scholarships in America.
Occasionally this demand for higher learning went to riotous extremes. Perhaps the most dramatic was that of the boy who failed last year to get admitted to Makerere College in Kampala where his brother was studying. He conducted a one-man siege of the College by mounting the roof of the main hall late one afternoon and commencing to dismantle it tile by tile. He was discovered by a professor whose car suffered a near miss by one of the flying terra cotta missiles. Efforts were made first by faculty, then by police, to haul him down. But he refused and his aim with these large and costly tiles imported years ago from India was devastatingly accurate.
Police soon abandoned the idea of attempting to climb up after him and the Kampala Fire Department was called out in force. Police and faculty went through the building and up into the open bell tower above the roof from which vantage point the)7 continued their futile efforts to employ persuasion. A fire truck stopped in front of the building to look for a hydrant connection. The first volley of tiles rang the fire truck bell and hit the Fire Chief squarely on his helmet. The truck moved on. Finally a hose was connected. The Chief at the business end of the hose took aim and signalled with a vengeful gesture for the water to be cut on. Nothing happened.
Doubly angry and frustrated, the Chief dropped the hose to go investigate.
Then it happened. Alive and dancing with full jet of water, the hose soaked
everyone in the vicinity except the miscreant, including the Fire Chief and the stolid representatives of law, order and good education standing defenseless in the bell tower.
Once the Fire Department had recovered and regrouped for attack, it was discovered that so many roof tiles had already been removed that water was splashing into the offices and lecture rooms below, doing more damage than good. With that and approaching darkness, the assembled multitude of authorities retreated and allowed the deter¬ mined demolisher to continue undisturbed. Around 9 p.m., after a four-hour stand, he came quietly down and was taken into custody. The saga ended two weeks later when experts concluded after close observation that “nothing was wrong with this boy except for his strong desire to go to college.”
Fortunately neither the Consulate nor the USIS has an exposed tile roof. Nor have we been singled out for any similar approach despite the fact that our limited budget has permitted us to assist only the tiniest fraction of the large number of capable and worthy African students look¬ ing for a chance to study in the United States.
Heightened interest between Africa and the United States is at work in the other direction too. We were not long set¬ tled before it became clear how actively Americans were
48
by Peter Hooper, Jr.
rediscovering Africa these days. Remote as we thought we were, countless visitors from the States found their way to Kampala.
During all these hectic early months our work was by no means limited to administrative, consular, public affairs and assistance-to-visiting-Americans activities. We had to inaugurate commercial, agricultural, labor and economic reporting in what is a very active though still primarily agricultural economy. Significant problems relating to world marketing of cotton and coffee arose in which we played our role in seeking harmonious adjustment of the interests of the United States and Uganda. A new ICFTU Labor College was opened in Kampala for the training of African labor unionists from many parts of the continent. This heightened the interest in and demands upon our labor re¬ porting. Applications for technical assistance and DLF loans were forthcoming and our advice and assistance were sought by both the Protectorate Government and respective agen¬ cies in Washington.
Last, but certainly among the most important functions, was the task of threading our way into better understanding of the complicated political situation in Uganda. The first Uganda-wide direct elections to the Legislative Council were held in October 1958. The Council, while still under British control, already contains a majority of African members. It is the British plan to make this legislature the basis for the future parliamentary self-government in Ugan¬ da. The next stage of constitutional advance is now being discussed and planned. However, the Kabaka’s Buganda Government—the most powerful and most nearly autono¬ mous tribal government within Uganda today—is currently refusing to participate in this development of the Legisla¬ tive Council. It is seeking more authority on its own behalf and a different, apparently more rapid, transition to Ugan¬ dan independence. Some African political parties with vary¬ ing degrees of reservation support the progressive build-up of African authority through the Legislative Council. Others joined together in the Uganda National Movement, which was recently banned because of its commercial boycott ac¬ tivities threatening violence, support the opposite view.
Thus, like many other African areas, Uganda has two key problems: (1) fashioning a generally acceptable plan for political unity and (2) achieving a sufficient level of tech¬ nical and professional skill in the short time left to assure stability after independence. Comprehending the various as¬ pects of these problems and assisting where we can in their solution will continue to be an absorbing and significant task for us.
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49
This Changed and Changing Hybrid
By Walter Lippmann
I NEVER accept an invitation to make a speech if I can think of a decent excuse, or even a plausible lie, to
avoid it. But when Ambassador Murphy telephoned me, somehow or other f found that I did not want an excuse. I accepted, feeling that in talking to members of the Foreign Service, I would, as a journalist, be talking shop.
For our two professions, if that is the right name for them, are cousins. On one side of your activities you are, as news¬ paper men are, concerned with the business of reporting and interpreting events, and of writing commentaries in con¬ temporary history. Your works live on forever—that is in the archives of the United States. Our works live on until the next edition. But whatever happens to our works, they are concerned with reporting and interpreting.
Here our kinship ends. As journalists, unless we are afflicted with delusions of grandeur—which can and does occasionally happen to us, I must confess—as journalists I say we do not engage in the business of administering and of operating and of negotiating the foreign policy of the United States.
As long as you are in official life your responsibility is to be the faithful servants of the government. You can think what you like, I might almost say you may again think what you like, but when the decisions are taken you must carry them out. Our responsibility as journalists is not to the government. It is to the public which is the master of the government and our task is not to serve the government’s policies but to contribute what we can to a true understand¬ ing by the public of the situations in which you operate.
I can speak with some sympathy and understanding of the relationship between our two professions. There was a time during the First World War when I worked on the other side of the street. I was engaged in what would now be called, I suppose, policy planning. My boss was Colonel House, who filled a role which no one fills today. He was the President’s chief adviser, and he was the President’s principal diplomatic agent. Yet he was not the Secretary of State. As a matter of fact, he did not even live in Washington. He lived in New York. Thus, it was not necessary for him to become involved in daily staff meetings and interdepartmental conferences. I suppose you can see the advantages of that.
When the President, on Colonel House’s advice, decided to set up an organization to prepare for the making of peace at the end of the First World War, he decided that the organization should be set up in New York City. This was done partly for the personal convenience of Colonel House. But it was done also because the President wanted the opera-
From a speech delivered before the American Foreign Service Association luncheon meeting October 22, 1959.
tion to be quite secret, lest the news that we were thinking about peace would distract the people from the business of fighting the war. In those old days it was widely supposed that nothing, except scientific information which reporters could not understand, could long he a secret in Washington. I don’t think this has greatly changed.
The code name of the organization was “The Inquiry,” and to this organization we brought the best specialists we could find on each of the problems—territorial and other— which were likely to be discussed at the peace conference. It was in this organization that the memoranda were drafted which became the basis of the President’s Fourteen Points.
These memoranda, or points, were not dreamed up by The Inquiry which was, I do not deny it, an organization of professors, experts and eggheads. The memoranda were ad¬ dressed to the specific object of presenting a substitute, which would be acceptable to Western democratic public opinion, for the secret treaties which had been made by the Allies and by Imperial Russia before the Bolshevik Revolu¬ tion of 1917.
These treaties had been published to the world by the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1917, and they had caused deep dismay and demoralization in the Allied camp.
In order to stop the rot of Allied morale and to rally the people to see the war through to the end, President Wilson made his speech announcing the Fourteen Points. The speech was delivered in January of 1918. Each of the Fourteen Points which deals with a specific territorial problem was a reply to some one of the secret treaties.
AT THAT time, you will have noted, the State Department L had no active part in the big business of policy plan¬
ning. This was done by the President and Colonel House. They communicated with each other by letter, telephone, and by Colonel House’s visits to Washington. The Inquiry was the expert staff for planning the work of the peacemak¬ ing. We had, of course, a liaison with the State Department. I did some of the liaison work at the lower technical level, and I have never quite gotten over some of the things I learned while doing it. I learned at firsthand, for example, what American isolation had really meant when you got down to the details.
One day, I remember, I was called down to Washington to see Secretary Lansing. He wanted to know what The In¬ quiry was doing about a settlement in the Balkans. I told him that I could explain what our experts were advising if I could point it out to him on a map. To this he agreed. He said that he always understood things better if he could see them on a map. Now there was a large apparatus of wall
50
maps in his office. They were rolled up, and after a little searching among them, he pulled down the map for the Balkans. This was, mind you, early in 1918 and we were engaged in a world war, and an American army was prepar¬ ing to land in Europe. The map in the Secretary of State’s office showed the boundaries of the Balkans as they were in October 1912, before the two Balkan Wars had expelled Turkey from all but a strip of land in Europe. No Secretary of State, it would seem, had had occasion to think about the territorial divisions of the Balkans in the live years before a world war began in the Balkans. That was a fair measure of how deeply isolated was our state of mind.
I remember, too, visiting the State Department’s man who dealt with what was then called the Near East. I can’t re¬ member what his name was, but I do remember that he was a lone individual in a large room filled with lots of other people doing all sorts of other things, and that the Near Eastern Department consisted of him and of two drawers of a filing cabinet. There were at this time in the Depart¬ ment no ethnographical maps of Central and Eastern Europe, and in The Inquiry up in New York at the American Geo¬ graphical Society we had to begin at the beginning and to make a large series of maps for the use of our delegation to the Peace Conference. I might add that in 1918 when the Germans offered to surrender on the basis of Wilson’s Four¬ teen Points, the American Embassy in Paris did not have a copy of the Fourteen Points.
BUT THAT is enough reminiscence, which, I warn you, is a sure sign of old age.
I would like to say a few words about our common task, which is to report and interpret the world as it is today. In doing that it is a delusion to suppose that we can or should observe events with an open and empty mind. Like anyone who does research, be it in the natural sciences or in the history of mankind, the raw facts are what William James used to call a blooming, buzzing confusion until we approach them with an hypothesis, with a conceptual framework into which they may fit.
What I should like to note is how in my own experience the hypothesis has changed with which we interpret our relations with the rest of the world.
Until very recently, very recently indeed, our views of American foreign policy were controlled by the underlying conception of the Nineteenth Century—the conception that this is one world whose political center is in the North Atlantic region of the globe. This conception has underlain our thinking in foreign affairs not only throughout the Nine¬ teenth Century but down through both of the world wars of this century.
Thus in the First World War we were drawn in when Britain and her ally France were threatened with defeat. We were no longer able to remain isolated from Europe and unentangled in the wars of Europe, as we had been able during the Nineteenth Century. But how were we drawn into the First World War? We were drawn in to reinforce Great Britain and France. We were the auxiliaries and the re¬ serves. We called ourselves an associated power and our troops fought in Europe under a supreme commander who was a French General, while our Navy was under the over¬ all command of the British Admiralty.
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When the war ended in 1918, we hoped and believed that we had won a victory for the idea that the principles and ideals of our western society are universal. Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a world order. It was a world order based on our western principles and ideals. Moreover, it was to be an order in which the nations of the North Atlantic region would continue to be the political leaders of mankind.
In 1918 there was on the surface much to justify this optimistic view. The North Atlantic Community had won a smashing military victory, and the United States had emerged as a new and powerful member of the western society. Russia was still a primitive and backward country in the throes of a deep social revolution. China was a feeble and backward country, divided up among foreign powers. India was still under British rule; North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia were under British or French imperial dominion. On the surface, in Woodrow Wilson’s time, it looked as if Britain and France, reinforced by the United States and Canada, would prolong indefinitely the world order that had existed in the Nineteenth Century.
We now know that this was a brilliant illusion. Both Franee and Britain were profoundly weakened by their fear¬ ful losses in the First World War. As representatives of the western philosophy, they were challenged as imperialists over all of Asia and of Africa. We did not know this in 1918. We took it for granted that with American military and fi¬ nancial help the world-wide predominance of the Atlantic Community would continue.
In the Second World War, the role played by the United States was no longer that of an associated power bringing up the reinforcements and the reserves. But before Pearl Harbor and before we actually entered the Second World War, we still thought of ourselves in terms of the First World War. We used to talk, you will remember, about aiding the Allies to defend America. In fact, however, it was soon plain that we must take up the whole burden of the war in the Pacific, including the defense of Australia and of New Zealand. In Europe the French Army had been de¬ feated and Great Britain was under violent assault and strained to the limit. We had not only to supply the weapons and the other economic necessities but we had to raise a great army ourselves.
The difference between the two world wars is marked by the fact that in the second, as distinguished from the first, the supreme commanders on sea and on land were Ameri¬ cans. Nevertheless, until World War II ended we could still believe—perhaps I should say we still tried to believe—that as and when Britain and France and Western Europe re¬ covered from the damages of the war, the North Atlantic Community would still be the political center of the world.
I venture to believe that in the last analysis this was the underlying assumption in the minds of both Churchill and Roosevelt at the close of the war. They believed that with Britain and America acting as partners, they could handle Russia and have the deciding voice in the postwar settle¬ ment. They were mistaken. The fact of the matter is that Churchill himself was so big that he made the British power look bigger than it was. It soon appeared that Britain, though it was a great power by the old standards, was not like the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., a super power. It was soon evident that in the postwar world the Atlantic Community,
52
by Walter Lippmann
with the British-American partnership at its core, was no longer the paramount power in the world.
Since the war, we have found ourselves in a position dif¬ ferent from anything in our whole previous experience. We are no longer members of a world order which is accepted by mankind as being universal. There are other world orders which challenge ours and which compete with it. What is more, throughout our history as a nation the center of world power has been in the North Atlantic region of the globe and the fundamental decisions of our foreign policy have had to do with our relations in the North Atlantic, particularly with our relations with Great Britain.
We achieved our independence amidst the rivalry in the Eighteenth Century of the North Atlantic powers. We de¬ veloped the continent in security behind the supremacy of the British power. We fought the First World War as an auxili¬ ary of the Atlantic powers. We fought the Second World War as the leading power of the Atlantic Community. Now this situation is fundamentally altered. The greatest powers with which we have to concern ourselves are no longer in the North Atlantic region. They are in Eastern Europe and in Asia. While the welfare of the Atlantic Community is a close and vital interest of the United States, the Atlantic Com¬ munity is no longer the political center of the world. We are living in the midst of the decline of Britain as one of the leading powers of the world and we find ourselves without a powerful ally in the face of the new powers of Eastern Europe and of Asia and of Africa.
To dramatize the rapid changes in the past hundred years, we might say that throughout most of the Nineteenth Cen¬ tury the world capital was London. After the first world war the world capitals were London and Washington. After the second world war, the world capitals were Washington, Moscow and London. Now, as the postwar period comes to an end, the world capitals are Washington, Moscow, London, Peking, New Delhi, and who knows, perhaps eventually, also Cairo.
I said earlier and I must say again, that we are in a wholly new situation. It is not a clearly visible situation, with all its landmarks and features well defined. There are no reliable maps. This is in part because so much of the world is hidden by censorship and obscured by propaganda. But there is another reason, and perhaps a more compelling reason why there are no reliable maps. It is that so much of the world is in the midst of revolutionary changes of which we can¬ not now foresee the outcome.
I am sorry I cannot finish with a neat, useful conclusion. The task of reporting and interpreting this changed and changing world is a very difficult one. We have to find our way across rough seas and through uncharted forests. But that is what makes our lives interesting. And that is why, once we have been bitten by the bug, as are the best men in our two professions, we never get over it.
NEW YEAR, 1960
To start their INew Year right—and lighten your correspond¬ ence throughout 1960—give them a Journal subscription. Members of AFSA may enter gift subscriptions to the Journal for their friends at the very special rate of $3.50 per year. Write: Circ. Mgr., FSJ, 1908 G St., N.W., Washington 6, D. C.
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53
Members of the American Foreign Service can depend upon this firm promptly to fill orders for Engraved cards, Invitations,
Stationery, etc.
‘BRe<0<a>D ENGRAVERS
to Washington s Most Distinguished Residents
Reasonable Prices
1217 G STREET : WASHINGTON. D. C.
Packing and Storage
Of Personal Effects
ry HE Department’s new method of obtaining packing and storage services in the Washington area for personnel being
assigned overseas, referred to last month in the JOURNAL’S
columns, is the result of more than two years of study. The study was conducted by Foreign Service personnel, assisted by others who have had many years of experience in packing and storage problems. The new method was reviewed by senior Foreign Service officers in the Department and officers of other civilian agencies, including the General Accounting Office whose overseas personnel will participate in the new method.
The principal object of the study was to develop a system by which the Department could hold firms accountable for pro¬ viding quality service, and to obtain such service at competitive prices.
The timeliness of the study is indicated by the fact that last year the General Accounting Office on behalf of the House Com¬ mittee on Appropriations conducted an investigation of the Department’s procedure for obtaining these services. Officers of the Department were closely examined during this year’s appropriations hearings regarding this procedure, and were directed to reduce costs related to transportation.
The Department was able subsequently to show that good quality export packing, which may be more expensive, can re¬ duce over-all costs, particularly for ocean freight which is often the major expense involved. Ocean freight is generally charged according to volume, and hence the smaller the volume, consistent with good protection for effects, the lower the freight cost and the more an individual’s allowance can be used for his effects rather than for unnecessary packing materials.
Under the previous system, however, the Department and its personnel were dependent in large measure on the experience and fairness of a packing firm to provide both quality and economical service. The Department usually paid the within allowance packing and freight costs, and the individual paid any excess over this allowance.
Under the new method, participating firms have agreed to render quality service and to keep volume to a minimum as specified, at competitive prices which are firm for one year except for reductions which the firms may offer each quarter.
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54
Right of Selection
As to the individual’s right to select his own packer, we are informed that Section 6a (h) of Title 41, U. S. Code, grants to the Department an exemption from obtaining bids in advance for handling the effects of Foreign Service personnel. The statute does not grant this exemption to individuals. The Comp¬ troller General has ruled, however, that advertising waivers do not relieve responsible officials of the obligation to obtain the most economical arrangement consistent with the conditions surrounding the transaction.
Thus the Department’s responsible officials, those who super¬ vise the issuance of packing or storage orders obligating the Department to expend funds (not the individual whose effects are involved), were faced with the problem of meeting both the statutory and GAO requirements, while at the same time allow¬ ing an element of personal selection. This obviously required a predetermined price structure.
Previous experience in issuing packing orders on the basis of three or more bids, obtained by each individual, or under a contract in which individuals could still select a non-contract packer, did not ensure both quality and economy.
It is believed that the new method fully protects the individual and his effects, and at the same time provides for a competitive predetermined price which allows for individual selection among several firms.
Procedure
All the major packing firms in the area were invited to sub¬ mit their prices for providing specified services under specified conditions which would require quality packing and minimum
volume. Fifteen replied to the invitation, including the largest and most experienced firms which have handled effects for Foreign Service personnel for many years.
Following an investigation to ensure their ability to provide quality service, the proposals of six of the firms initially sub¬ mitting the lowest combined prices for all services were ac¬ cepted. Any one of these may be selected by a traveller. In the absence of a preference, the Department or participating agency will select the one with the lowest price and available capacity.
On the same basis, the proposals of the other nine firms were approved for limited services, primarily when the services relate to handling of personal effects when part or all of them are held by one of the nine firms.
Should the traveller wish to select a firm not among the fifteen (or one among those approved for limited services, even though no effects are in storage) he may do so, but he may incur some personal expense, depending on whether he is charged a price higher than those charged by the lowest priced group of firms for comparable services.
Liability
Regarding liability, the Department’s officials have pointed out that under Interstate Commerce Commission regulations, packing firms are limited to a liability of 301* per net hundred pounds of personal effects. Since this is manifestly insufficient, it is common practice for travellers to obtain additional cover¬ age.
The Department’s officials have said that they see no likeli¬ hood of increased insurance costs under the new method; none of the policies heretofore available to personnel has required that any particular packer be used.
55
Pseudonymns may be used only if the original letter includes
the writer’s correct name. Anonymous letters are neither pub¬
lished nor read. All letters are subject to condensation. The
opinions of the writers are not intended to indicate the official
views of the Department of State, or of the Foreign Service
as a whole
Language Clas
THERE HAS been an obvious stress on foreign language capability in the
Service in the last few years, and it seems likely that we are already be¬ ginning to derive some benefits from this. Much time and effort are now going into this phase of work, but it seems possible that even greater results could be achieved if certain additions to the program in Washington were made.
At present, aside from the full-time language study being pursued, there are some part-time courses in the world languages being offered. However, these seem to be available only at the FSI building in Arlington, and only at 7:30 a.m. Those who live in Maryland and the District find that they have to be at New State by 7:15 a.m. in order to make it in time. Would it not be useful to schedule some classes in New State at 7:45 or even 8:00 a.m.? While it is true that some of the offices in New State are in use at that time, this is not true of all offices. Furthermore, a case can be made for the use of some office time for language instruction. Some of those now proceeding overseas are being given sixteen weeks of intensive instruc¬ tion prior to departure. If we assume that an 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. class takes an hour and a quarter of govern¬ ment time each week, it would take nearly ten years of such instruction to
“Status in
Two ITEMS in the October 1959 issue of the JOURNAL strike me as unfor¬
tunate from the standpoint of Service morale and prestige.
One item is the exchange of corre¬ spondence between Senator Mansfield and Mr. Satterthwaite. I was shocked to learn that a Senator had to take the initiative to obtain support of the Asso¬ ciation for the Foreign Service legisla¬ tive program. The essence of this ac¬ tion must raise a question in every For¬ eign Service Officer’s mind, that if our own organization fails to press vigor¬ ously the interests of the Service before the Congress, how can we expect the Senators and Congressmen to do it for us? I hope that in the future the Asso¬ ciation will not be found napping on such important matters.
The second item is the article “Status in State.” While an FSO may laugh at himself, and even admire Miss Mit- ford’s style of trenchant wit, it is such an image (real or fanciful) as “Status in State” describes which lends cred¬ ence to the popular American belief that the Foreign Service is dominated
at New State?
make up the sixteen-week course now being offered full-time.
In another direction, the FSI might inaugurate a series of part-time classes in languages other than those classified as world languages. This would have several purposes. The first would be to provide a sound linguistic foundation in, say, Polish for those who are going to Warsaw. The ability to ask directions and to make small purchases would be useful to the Foreign Service personnel on their arrival, and would probably make a good impression upon the for¬ eign nationals with whom they would come in contact. The second purpose would be to provide an opportunity for the many people in the Department and the Foreign Service to bring back their rusty Finnish and Amharic from a 0 level to a 2 or 3. The third purpose would be to provide an opportunity for those people in Washington who are working on, say, Arab affairs, to learn enough Arabic to be able to identify different Arab publications and read the headlines and table of contents.
Furthermore, with political changes occurring as rapidly as they do now, it would seem desirable for the Depart¬ ment to have also a reservoir of people with some capability in the obscure lan¬ guages to draw upon.
HUGH O’NEILL
Washington
State”
by a clique of currish characters. To a great number of people, including many Senators and Congressmen, this kind of article merely confirms their impres¬ sion that an “Inner Club” governs the Foreign Service Officer corps. I sug¬ gest that we let ESQUIRE and the NEW YORKER publish such high wit as “Sta¬ tus in State” and that the JOURNAL en¬ deavor to print something which will be understood and appreciated by the “little fellow” who helps foot our finan¬ cial bill on the fifteenth of April each year.
Yours for some wide awakeness in the Association, and a little more per¬ spicacity on the part of the JOURNAL’S
editors. Washington HAROLD SIMS
Editor’s Note: Actually the Association was not “found
napping.” It had presented a report to the Department some months previous to re¬ ceipt of the Senator’s letter. The Associa¬ tion’s charter does not permit lobbying on behalf of the Service, nor could its status as a non-profit organization permit it to engage in lobbying. It can, of course, respond to inquiries.
Lost and Found
SOME YEARS AGO I found in packing materials which were brought to my
house a very pretty smoky cocktail glass. It must have been part of a set, and the owner must have regretted its loss at the time. Some time ago, too, I lost, in the unpacking of my things, a rather small crystal liqueur glass with the initials SMG on it. I still have the twin of it, and often wish that someone had found it and would return it.
Could you establish a lost and found department in your magazine? For in¬ stance, we have a camera of some value which was found by my husband in his own office in Ankara, and which we still have. We could never find an owner. Some traveling USIA-er, no doubt, left it.
ROWENA ADAMSON
(Mrs. Keith Adamson) McLean, Va.
AFSA Book Discounts
T3 EFERRING to the October issue of the JOURNAL and the discounts offered
to members on books, members of AFSA are entitled to discounts on text books also.
GEORGE M. CARPENTER
Overseas Club in NYC?
THREE former Foreign Service em¬ ployees are planning to organize a
social club in New York City, offering membership to those who at one time or another have served with the State Department or any other Government agency abroad.
A similar club has been in existence for the last three or four years in San Francisco and is operating with great success.
We would like to discover whether there are enough people living in and around New York City who would be interested and eligible for membership in such a club. I can be reached eve¬ nings at ELdorado 5-6529.
(MRS.) VERONICA BECSEY
330 East 52nd St. New York 22
Wordy?
RE: “Writing for the High and the McKnighty”: Use “prolixity” not
“wordy,” for “wordy” is “dirdy.” S. T.
Washington
56
The AMERICAN FOREIQN SERVICE
PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
♦
The group insurance program offered by the Protective Association is a long term plan that includes three insurance coverages. Croup life insurance, accidental death and dismem¬ berment insurance, and hospital surgical major medical expense insurance are included in the program.
There are advantages for young members, for those with many years of service, and for members who have retired on an immediate annuity.
A detailed description of the program is given in the booklet “Croup Insurance Program, The American Foreign Service Protective Association, Inc., June, 1959.” Application forms are included in the booklet.
The Directors of the Protective Association are continuing their study of possible changes in the insurance program that may be made desirable because of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Act of 1959. A circular on the subject will be mailed to members as soon as possible.
Those eligible to participate in this group insurance program are American nationals under 60 years of age who come within one of the following categories:
Foreign Service Officers, Department of State Foreign Service Staff, Department of State Foreign Service Reserve Officers, Department of State Permanent American Employees, Foreign Service, Department of State FSR and FSS of the International Cooperation Administration FSR and FSS of the United States Information Agency
Address applications and inquiries to:
THE AMERICAN FOREIGN SERVICE PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
c/o Department of State, Washington 25, D.C., or
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