The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune reviewed Harry Kopp’s book,The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association at 100, on the history of the Foreign Service, The review said:
The origins of the State Department were inauspicious. Headed by Thomas Jefferson, it comprised a small diplomatic establishment that epitomized George Washington’s oft-cited warning in his Farewell Address against entangling alliances. (More apt for contemporary Americans might be Washington’s adjurations in that address against the “insidious wiles” of foreign influence).
In 1889 the New York Sun deemed the State Department “a costly humbug and sham.” The Washington Post agreed: “There is no longer any need for men of affairs in one Foreign Service, and it had better be abolished.”
Instead, President Calvin Coolidge signed in 1924 the Rogers Act, a sweeping reform bill that created today’s Foreign Service of the United States.
The Rogers Act, Kopp explains, was the brainchild of a pertinacious civil servant named Wilbur J. Carr who was intent upon improving the consular service and who served in the State Department from 1892 to 1939, when he retired as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. According to Kopp, the bill unified the consular and diplomatic corps and ensured that the “Foreign Service would control its own recruitment, hiring, assignments, and promotions, but ultimate authority would rest with the Secretary of State.” The union of consuls and diplomats prompted the American Consular Association to authorize its executive committee to establish a new organization–the American Foreign Service Association.
The State Department began to come into its own during the postwar era, when President Harry S Truman signed a new effort at reform–the Foreign Service Act of 1946. The act created an officer corps, a staff corps of officers and employees, and a reserve. In addition, Kopp writes, the act served as the foundation for the American Foreign Service Association to promote further reforms in coming decades.
As the State Department gained new influence, it became a lightning rod for attacks from the right. The exposure of former senior State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, the fall of China and the Russian explosion of an atomic bomb created a wave of panic about the communist threat, both internal and external. The department became synonymous, at least on the right, with communist appeasers. Senator Joseph McCarthy announced before a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950 that he had acquired a list of “205 individuals that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
The Foreign Service Act of 1980 preserved the historic separateness of the service and codified its bargaining rights. According to Kopp, “The Foreign Service Act of 1980 marked a coming of age.” Membership in the association grew and its finances strengthened. It sought to protect its members from political assaults and became, writes Kopp, “an authoritative source of advice and guidance for Foreign Service employees regarding agency regulations.”
Morale plummeted. During the George W. Bush administration, the State Department experienced difficulties in filling positions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fresh travails arrived with the Trump administration. Kopp quickly dispatches the sad episode of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a Texas oilman who was convinced that he could revamp and streamline the department with management plans. Chaos ensued. President Donald Trump fired Tillerson. Matters improved only slightly with his replacement by former congressman and CIA Director Mike Pompeo.
Kopp concludes on an optimistic note. He declares that when the American Foreign Service Association and State Department management collaborate to “educate the public, the administration, and Congress about American diplomacy and the need to support it, they carry weight. The more people know about the Foreign Service, the more favorably they see it.” He goes on to opine “That kind of cooperation was impossible during the Trump administration.”
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