Department of State

Jerry Israel and

David L. Anderson

Upon his resignation in 1792, Henry Remsen, the first chief clerk of the Department of State, left the following instructions:

Such of the Foreign Letters as are not filed away in the cases, are for the present put on my desk in two pigeon holes at the right hand side. The Consular returns are at the bottom of said desk right hand side … the drafts of foreign proceedings … are filed in said desk left hand pigeon hole. The letters from our ministers and charge des affaires now in commission Mr. Jefferson keeps…. A little attention will be necessary inseparating the foreign from the domestic letters, as they are sent to the Office by Mr. Jefferson to be filed. My rule in making the separation was by reading them. The domestic letters to be filed in the Office down stairs, the foreign letters in the Office up stairs.

Nearly two centuries later, commenting on the move from "Old State" to headquarters in "New State" (1947) and finally, "New, New State"(1961), the diplomat Henry Serrano Villard wrote:

Even this fantastically outside complex is inadequate. Spilling over into nine rented buildings, using nearly 1.5 million square feet of space, the State Department premises are already too small; if AID [Agency for International Development], ACDA [Arms Control and Disarmament Agency] and USIA [United States Information Agency] are added, the total is twenty buildings with 2,547,377 square feet. Offices are overcrowded, tenants must double up, conference rooms must be lopped off, new outlets sought.

The irony of these comparisons of simple and complex styles is that Villard's larger department was if anything less rather than more involved in the making of American foreign policy, the State Department's primary responsibility. Along these lines, in modern times, especially since World War II, one notes the competitive foreign policies of departments such as Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor, Treasury, Interior, and Health and Human Services, plus the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Reserve Bank, not to mention semiofficial business, scientific, cultural, and journalistic groups. By the mid-1960s, only one-fourth of federal personnel in U.S. embassies were employees of the State Department. In addition, there is the superior and sometimes competitive power of the president and groups or individuals on the White House staff and otherwise outside the State Department that the president may especially empower.

Henry A. Kissinger noted the paradox of an increasingly specialized, bureaucratized society having negative consequences for American policy and policymakers. Calling for a return to the individual and intellectual approach to problems and policy, not uncharacteristic of the formative age of Jefferson and Remsen, Kissinger writes of policy "fragmented into a series of ad hoc decisions which make it difficult to achieve a sense of direction or even to profit from experience. Substantive problems are transformed into administrative ones. Innovation is subjected to 'objective' tests which deprive it of spontaneity. 'Policy planning' becomes the projection of familiar problems into the future. Momentum is confused with purpose. There is greater concern with how things are than with which things matter." As Richard Nixon's national security adviser and then as secretary of state, Kissinger waged his own assault against the inertia of bureaucratized foreign policy.

Borrowing from the example of Remsen and the explanation of Kissinger, it is possible to observe—at least until the mid-twentieth century—that amidst efforts to institutionalize the apparatus of the State Department, what machinery there was rested on a precious few long-lived cogwheels. Working backward not quite all the way from Kissinger to Remsen, one traces a remarkable continuity within the careers of just three men: Wilbur J. Carr, with forty-five years of service (1892–1937); Alvey A. Adee, with forty-six years in Washington (1878–1924) and seven before that for the Department of State in Madrid; and William Hunter, with fifty-seven years (1829–1886) as chief of bureau, chief clerk, and second assistant secretary (the latter two being key administrative posts held also by Carr and Adee).

As late as 1929, the Department of State was small and its central leadership even more scant. When Henry L. Stimson took office as Herbert C. Hoover's secretary of state, there were—including everybody from the secretary to chauffeurs, clerks, stenographers, and janitors—six hundred people. Yet Stimson, not unusually for the department, surrounded himself with an able, tight-knit group of assistants including Carr, Joseph Cotton, Francis White, and Nelson T. Johnson. Like Cotton, some assistants were new to foreign policy; others, like Carr and Johnson, had seen extended service in the consular and diplomatic corps. They blended together, however, to advise the secretary and the president on critical policy matters in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

The history of the State Department until the mid-twentieth century was tied, it appears, to the history of the few men who had served as secretary of state or to their staffs. The role of the individual has since, however, become increasingly institutionalized, and with that change has come a State Department larger and yet often less effective than it was in its humbler days.

THE CALIBER OF LEADERSHIP

It is tempting to start at the very beginning with Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and the Virginia dynasty. Indeed, it must be noted that these Founders and "systems builders" used the State Department's highest official, not the vice president, as counselor and successor. Yet it remained for one of the second generation of American revolutionaries, John Quincy Adams, to achieve the golden age of American diplomacy and thereby establish the model, perhaps yet unequaled, of a great secretary of state. Adams dominated events in which the United States signed the Treaty of Ghent (1814), which concluded the War of 1812; issued the Monroe Doctrine; and strengthened American maritime power by agreeing with England to clear the Great Lakes of warships and by obtaining rights to fish off Labrador and Newfoundland. Under Adams's leadership at State, the United States extended its landed empire by annexing Florida, removing Russia from the west coast of North America, settling the Canadian boundary from the Great Lakes to the Rockies, and claiming, for the first time, the Pacific coast. Even amidst Adams's successes, however, the State Department and its secretary retained the highly personal and political character developed under the Virginia dynasty.

Adams himself dangled the post of secretary of state in front of Henry Clay in 1824 in what their political rivals, the Jacksonians, called a "corrupt bargain." While personally worlds apart, Adams and Clay were closer together in support of an "American system" of economic regulation and internal improvements than has been generally noted. Nonetheless, a pattern of granting political favors or rewarding factions with high office in the State Department was well established and would continue into the twentieth century with the appointments of William Jennings Bryan (by Woodrow Wilson in 1913) and Cordell Hull (by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933). Perhaps no period was more replete with political partisanship in the State Department than the years between Adams and the Civil War. First used by the followers of Andrew Jackson as patronage rewards, or the spoils of victory, the department's leadership positions were given— especially in the administrations of James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan—to proponents of southern slave expansion who styled themselves "Young Americans."

By 1860, and certainly after the Civil War, the rapid advance of the industrial economy of the United States and the transfer of power from planters to industrialists and financiers was closely mirrored in the composition of State Department leadership. In fact, resisting the divisive trends of the Young Americans, some department leaders such as Daniel Webster and William Learned Marcy had begun in the 1840s to develop interest in a new wave of expansionism directed toward California, Hawaii, and Asia. Foremost among postwar figures was William Henry Seward, next to Adams the greatest secretary of state of the nineteenth century.

Seward, like John Quincy Adams, was also an intellectual. He had read widely and well in the classics and contemporary works. His ties to Adams were as strong a link as was the more mundane relationship between Hunter and Adee, whose careers overlapped those of their more famous superiors. After Adams's death in 1848, Seward mourned, "I have lost a patron, a guide, a counsellor, and a friend—one whom I loved scarcely less than the dearest relations, and venerated above all that was mortal among men."

Seward's State Department years saw the out-line developed for a vast, coordinated American worldwide empire with its great continental base producing goods for the consumers of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. While Seward's master plan was not fulfilled during his tenure in office, it was followed carefully by such capable, if less visible, successors as William M. Evarts and Hamilton Fish.

With Evarts, in particular, the State Department began to take on its modern cast as an organization intent, in its own way, on "the fostering, the developing, and the directing of … commerce by the government." In October 1880, under Evarts's supervision, the State Department received congressional approval and appropriations for the publication of monthly consular reports, a step urged by local chambers of commerce throughout the country. Also characteristic of the years ahead, Evarts was a lawyer. Indeed, like many future secretaries of state, he was a dominant figure in the American bar at the time—a profession gaining increased significance in modern American business and government.

THE LEGAL MIND

A list of the secretaries and undersecretaries of state of the twentieth century reads like a hall of fame of attorneys: Elihu Root, Philander C. Knox, Robert Lansing, Charles Evans Hughes, Henry L. Stimson, Edward R. Stettinius, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, William P. Rogers, Cyrus R. Vance, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, and Warren M. Christopher, not to mention Huntington Wilson, William Phillips, Joseph C. Grew, Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, and Elliot L. Richardson. Indeed, a number of these men served both at the State and the Justice departments, and the number of secretaries of state who have also been attorney general is significant. The modern business flavor; cross-examining perception; studied, organized knowledge; attention to detail; and developed cynicism of the legal mind—as found, for example, in a Root or a Stimson—are important to note as traits common to the personnel of the Department of State. More precisely, those in leadership positions at State have often been Ivy League–trained, Wall Street lawyers whose careers have paralleled the growth of the American industrial system and policy. Such lawyers have been uniquely prepared to deal on a large scale with the organization of railroads, banks, and other developing enterprises at home and abroad.

Dulles's law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was involved in the making of American foreign policy as early as the Panamanian revolution of 1903, in part engineered in a New York City hotel room by Phillip Cromwell. Stimson's clients included the Continental Rubber Company, the United States Printing Company, the National Sugar Refining Company, the Bank of North America, the Mutual Life Insurance Company, and the Astoria Power and Light Company. In such representations, Stimson, like his colleagues, was accustomed to high finance. In foreign policy matters, once in the service of State, a Stimson, Root, Dulles, or Christopher would easily fall into the conditions and attitudes emerging from a successful legal practice. Such men could easily talk as though they had the will and power to arrange a set of conditions for society. They were concerned, as always, with the important things: money, boundaries, goods, and, perhaps for the first time, guns.

Corporation lawyers derived their power from their relationship to the developing corporate economy they helped to construct. They had the power of expertise in legal matters. They also had the power of individuals who had a broader perspective of the total system and could thereby give advice to those functioning in narrower channels. By controlling various scientific, educational, and cultural projects through foundations and associations, they also could dramatically influence opinion and events in noneconomic aspects of American life. They served, in particular, as key people in educating persons who were going to be decision makers in foreign policy matters, which were less directly tied than domestic concerns to political and congressional sanctions. By taking the leadership at State and other departments (for example, Treasury), corporation lawyers came to dominate American foreign policy by the beginning of the twentieth century. They moved comfortably within expansionist objectives outlined by Seward. The primary concern of State Department officials became the articulation of a managed, professional structure by which to achieve this well-defined strategy.

MANAGEMENT EFFICIENCY

Developed—like all cabinet-level executive departments of the federal government—along the lines of precedent and personality rather than constitutional or legislative sanction, the State Department until the twentieth century had little organizational rhyme or reason. From Jefferson and Remsen through to Evarts and Adee, the department functioned by tradition, and often did so rather poorly. For example, in 1906 an inspector of American consulates in Asia found two consuls who were decrepit; two otherwise unfit for duty; one morally suspect; one charged with coercing a sultan into paying a debt for which he, the consul, was collector; one charged with drunkenness and the issuance of fraudulent papers; and one, "a coarse and brutal type," against whom eighty-two complaints were registered. Pressure to restructure the consular service, the branch of the department charged directly with the responsibility of looking after American citizens and business interests abroad, came, in great part, from those business interests themselves. Nearly a decade of lobbying went into the executive order of November 1905 and the passage in April 1906 of a consular reorganization bill. The purpose of the pressure and the proposals produced by it was the same, "in a word, to put the entire diplomatic system on a business basis, and to manage it in the future in accordance with the principles of sound common sense." Such principles included more effective training programs. Selective language training in the foreign service began in 1895 through the assignment of officers as "student interpreters" to the American legations in Persia, Korea, and Siam. In 1902 ten student interpreter posts were created at Peking (Beijing) for Chinese language training.

Training in consular responsibilities dates from 1907, when seven new consuls were given thirty-day courses of instruction. The purpose was "to give novitiates in the consular service some practical training in the running of a consular office before sending them off to their posts." In 1924 additional training for diplomatic and consular officers began with the establishment of a foreign service school, which sent new officers to divisions of the department for several months before their assignment abroad. In the 1930s the renamed Foreign Service Officers' Training School provided junior officers with training in consular and commercial work after their two-year probationary tour abroad.

Increasingly, some officers were also sent to universities for graduate study. While all training was suspended during World War II, it was resumed after the war with the establishment of the Foreign Service Institute. In theory, the intention was to copy a business model by creating the most efficient system with the most efficient people. Such changes included revised entrance examinations and consular associations, in addition to the foreign service schools.

The reforms were perhaps best represented in the internal system of ratings and inspections used to rule on promotions. Forms, which eventually swelled to some 212 questions by the 1920s, and departmental retention and promotion rating codes were used to provide uniform standards for personnel decisions. The most significant concern expressed by the forms and rating codes was to be a measuring device of the "efficiency of the individual." It was hoped that such evaluations would purge the "decrepit, unfit, morally suspect, drunken and coarse and brutal types, etc. " from the consular service.

Deeply felt personal, status, and career differences separated the department's consular service from the diplomatic, which officially represented the government of the United States in international relations. Diplomats often considered themselves professional policymakers and were more bound to State Department traditions. Managers and planners, usually emerging, like Carr, from the consular side, were held in low esteem. One diplomat observed those "administrative types who inflate themselves with all sorts of rich and resonant titles like Career Evaluators, and General Services Specialists, and even Ministers of Embassy for Administrative Affairs. These glorified janitors, supply clerks, and pants-pressers yearn to get their fingers in the foreign affairs pie, and when they do, the diplomatic furniture often gets marked with gummy thumbprints."

It must be noted, however, that truly significant organizational reform in the Department of State did not stop at the consular-diplomatic demarcation. Diplomats such as Phillips and Grew remarked at how much of their work concerned the same business interests and pressures directed at the consuls. New departures were taken with a view to improving the efficiency of the State Department, not just one part of it.

Of most direct contact with the business-consular developments of the early twentieth century were modifications in the preparations of commercial reports. The Bureau of Statistics, a province of influential geopoliticians such as O. P. Austin, was renamed the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Although control of it was shifted to the Commerce and Labor Department in 1903, a corollary agency, the Bureau of Trade Relations, was immediately established. The State Department advanced this effort to collect and analyze business data with the creation of the Office of the Economic Adviser in 1921. This position came to be held by important advisers such as Herbert Feis.

The State Department's approach to filing and record keeping, somewhat more detailed than in Remsen's day, was reworked several times in the twentieth century to provide greater systemization. Thus were created in turn the Numerical Files of 1906–1910 and the more comprehensive and efficient Decimal Files in 1910. In the 1960s began a subject-numeric system, and in the 1970s the department's central file was computerized. The Division of Information, created in 1909, took responsibility for preserving the depart-ment's data and publishing selected annual excerpts in the already established House of Representatives publication series, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). This series entered what has been called its "modern era" in 1921, under the supervision of Gaillard Hunt and another agency he headed called the Division of Publications. During and after World War II, tremendous growth in the number of pages of files and the widespread practice of stamping documents with secret classifications slowed release of FRUS volumes. In 1989 more than thirty years separated the publication of official correspondence from its original date, and Congress set a statutory goal of a thirty-year maximum elapsed time for issuing the volumes.

Of greatest precedence on the diplomatic side was the creation in March 1908 of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs and the structuring of the whole State Department into a number of similar geographically grouped "divisions" in the years that followed. Before World War II, when the Department of State still numbered well below one thousand employees in all, these regional divisions were small, usually manned by only a few "desk officers" dealing with American embassies and legations overseas. Their purpose was to provide better machinery for the coordination of policy at all levels. In time, the five regional divisions (Europe, East Asia, Near East and South Asia, Inter-American, African) and a sixth desk, the Bureau of International Organization Affairs (responsible for relations with the American mission to the United Nations), grew dramatically in size and complexity. An assistant secretary headed each bureau and supervised the close contact with American embassies in the respective areas of responsibility. Below the assistant secretary were office directors, each responsible for a small group of countries. The country desk officer was the "low man on the totem pole," concerned with policy toward a single foreign nation.

The culmination of all these administrative changes came in two efforts to make the various components of the State Department into "inter-changeable" parts. First was the Rogers (Foreign Service) Act of 1924 and second was the movement known as "Wristonization" in the 1950s. The pressures and reasoning producing the Rogers Act, which merged the consular and diplomatic services into a single foreign service, were similar to those that resulted in the previously mentioned separate and more piecemeal reforms on both sides of the department. As Representative John Rogers remarked, business forces were united and once again exerting influence. He noted that "practically every chamber of commerce and trade organization in the United States and many of the American chambers and trade organizations functioning in other parts of the world have gone on record as favoring this particular reorganization of our foreign service." Rather than a radical departure, the Rogers Act was a culmination of the well-defined premises of efficient control and a transition to still further forms of administrative systemization. In place of the separation and distinction between the broadly separated categories of political interest in the diplomatic service and commercial interest in the consular service, there would be one unified Department of State.

With the increased size of the department, a movement had developed by the 1950s to merge still further the civil service staff of the State Department with the foreign service. With a shortage of personnel for positions, especially within the training programs, and a distrust between the "line" desk officers and the "staff" administrators, a committee was charged by Dulles with the task of additional State Department reorganization. The chairman of the committee was Henry M. Wriston, president of Brown University, and hence the merger of the two staffs became known as Wristonization.

This reform was not only another in a series; it also gave the first real evidence that the similar ones that had preceded it might not, after all, have been effective. Throughout the century, optimism had prevailed. Thus, Huntington Wilson had boasted in 1908, "I am happy to tell you that one of my pet hobbies, the politico-geographical division, has at last received final recognition by the creation of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs … so I now have much better machinery for my direction of the Far Eastern business." Or after the Rogers Act, Grew felt the State Department had "a new order … established, a new machine developed." But the Wriston committee described well the catalog of State Department problems after a half century of such administrative reforms. In sum, there was a marked decline in public confidence in the State Department; a similar decline in morale in the diplomatic ranks; and failure to carry through on various legislative mandates such as the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which provided for inducting officers into all levels of the foreign service so as to make it more flexible and successful.

Although Wristonization itself was another management panacea, it drew attention to the fact that the State Department's "management of human resources has been irresolute and unimaginative." Even though the question of personnel management had been under repeated study, "substantially nothing has been accomplished." The committee remarked that "all modern personnel management organizations utilize machines to facilitate the mechanical tasks of keeping personnel records; the Department however has not effectively utilized such a system." In particular, Wriston's committee criticized the "occasional tinkering" and "token" programs of recruitment and training. Congress had intended the Foreign Service Institute to be "for the State Department, what the Naval War College, the Army War College, and the National War College are for the Armed Services—an advanced training ground for officers destined for high command." But since the institute had been given little attention by the department, it did not provide the kind of educational leadership and scholarship that had been intended. Such was characteristic of the State Department's general lack of a clear concept of training requirements, career planning, and development.

The Wriston committee missed the perhaps larger significance of the protracted failure of management reforms and put all its faith in a still bigger and, it hoped, better structure. While many civil servants had been seriously involved in foreign affairs and thus would benefit themselves and the State Department by merger with the foreign service officers, a larger number of straight administrative employees (office personnel, for example) were trapped by the move into being diplomatic officers, for which they had neither ambition nor preparation.

The career uncertainty that these bureaucratic reforms injected into the department coincided with the chilling effect on creativity and responsiveness caused by McCarthyism's assault on the foreign service. Unfounded allegations of communist sympathies cost many veteran diplomats their jobs in the 1950s. McCarthyism was a grotesque extreme of a problem that had plagued State in the past and would burden it in the future, namely the tension between careerists and politicians. Foreign service officers were trained to suppress their personal views, but political appointees to posts in the department or partisan leaders outside often put pressure on careerists for political or ideological loyalty. Caution and conformity became the order of the day in the diplomatic service, with a resultant weakening of State's leadership role in foreign policy.

Forgetting, or perhaps choosing not to remember, that organizational reform enthusiasm similar to Wristonization had failed to deter and might be blamed for the bad situation now at hand, the brightest people in and out of the Department of State continued to talk of what could be done to increase management efficiency and policy effectiveness. Thus, one had come almost full circle from Remsen to Kissinger. The larger and more complex the State Department and the world became, the less important was the role of the department in making foreign policy. Instead of individual advice, the department became expert in institutional adjustments and its influence shrunk proportionally. A Rand Corporation think-tank study, United States Policy and the Third World (1967), never once mentioned the State Department.

As State's structure grew and its power vanished in the mid-twentieth century, its once high and mighty place became almost laughable. Thus, satires of departmental memoranda about such things as waste-power removal were not uncommon, nor were genuine titles such as chief of the administrative management and personnel division of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. While some flirted with participative management and Dean Rusk instituted a department suggestion box, few shared the Kissinger or Villard view that perhaps the goal might once again be "top-notch organization in which the human equation is not sacrificed to the Moloch of bureaucracy."

LEADERSHIP OR MANAGEMENT?

In the 1780s, Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic dispatches from France sometimes took months to cross the Atlantic. Two centuries later, flash cables or secure e-mail messages could be in the hands of the secretary of state within moments. Can, in short, the modern secretary of state, however talented and qualified, break free as Kissinger suggested from the management ethos?

The obstacles to such freedom were rather clear in duties and responsibilities of the secretary of state at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The secretary was a senior personal adviser to the president and the only cabinet officer primarily charged with looking at the nation as a whole in its relations with the outside world. The secretary of state was also the ranking diplomat in dealing with foreign governments at the same time that he served as an administration spokesman on American foreign policy to Congress, the country, and abroad. As chief of the State Department, the secretary was responsible to the president and accountable to Congress. Finally, the secretary was also in direct line to presidential succession. The modern secretary of state was thus adviser, negotiator, reporter of trouble, spokesperson, manager, and coordinator. One thinks of days filled with calls, conferences, talks with senators, ambassadors, delegations of private citizens, journalists, and bankers, not to mention the increasingly frequent global troubleshooting, all the time while running a department.

Secretary Stimson's biographer reports on one day, even in the more serene pre–World War II world, as follows:

A conference at ten o'clock with Silas Strawn, the United States delegate to a conference at Peking on Chinese tariffs. At 10:30 a press conference followed at 10:45 by an appointment with Dr. McClaren of the Williamstown Institute. Between 11:00 and 12:00 receiving the Spanish Ambassador and a representative from the Bolivian delegation. They were followed by Senator Howell at 12:00, Congressman Keyes at 12:40 and General Allen at 12:55. After lunch at 2:30 he began to sign the official mail, a task he had finished by 3:30 when Congressmen Robinson, Thatcher, Walker, Newhill, Kendall and Blackburn called upon him and talked for an hour. Elihu Root, Jr., appeared at 4:30 and remained until 5:00. Just before going home the Secretary called James M. Beck, then a congressman, in New York. That evening he attended a dinner given by the Chilean Ambassador in honor of the Chilean Minister of Finance.

How against these activities does one formulate the basic strategies and plans of action required? Even if time and attention are found, more myriad problems await in terms of the delegation of authority to bureaus that distrust each other's prerogatives or to individuals anxious for good assignments and promotions. Each bureau, each office within a bureau, each officer, is improvising from day-to-day, unaware, unprepared, or uninspired in the work of partners, neighbors, and colleagues.

Against this setting, some post–World War II secretaries of state have stood out in the effort to orchestrate the department's activities. Most notably mentioned by those in the State Department, George C. Marshall, accustomed to command, and Dean Acheson, experienced on the Hoover Commission for government reorganization, brought about a sense of planning amidst the chaos. Most secretaries of state since World War II, however, have been less engaged with the department itself and more in touch with the White House. Some, such as Dulles, Kissinger, and Christopher, were out of town a lot. Baker was George H. W. Bush's closest personal friend. Shultz stayed in the post for seven years in part because he was a better organization man than most, but he often clashed with Ronald Reagan's conservative loyalists, who thought Shultz was too close to foreign service liberals.

The task for secretaries of state has been difficult because the role of the State Department is, in the last analysis, so weak. Primacy in coordinating foreign policy itself, the lifeblood of the State Department's leadership in the days of Adams and Seward, has been challenged and the counterattack has had few bases for claims to legitimacy. The Constitution says nothing of the State Department and refers only to "executive" and "presidential" responsibilities. Congress has never helped. The original legislation setting up the State Department also recognized the president as supreme. Even when granting power to the secretary of state, it has always been under-stood that he or she "shall act under the direction of the President." Such direction has wandered from giving State considerable room to those who have wanted State out of foreign affairs.

Some analysts of American diplomacy go even further to suggest that the State Department, while it never had a constitutional or legislative claim to primacy, did, at one time in the nineteenth century, come to hold such a position by tradition and that the department itself gradually allowed such power to erode. One of the first four departments to be established (along with War, Treasury, and Justice), the State Department came to view itself as the first among equals. This, in turn, led to an attitude of general superiority in the federal establishment—an attitude that, regardless of ability, the State Department had a special dispensation to control foreign policy. If other valid interests arose in other departments, the State Department worked for too long not to foster them but to cut them off. Thus began a movement to place control of foreign policy in more reasonable and responsive hands. Also, the "legal mind" and "administrative efficiency" movement made State more introspective and took it further from the center of integrated policy.

As the State Department failed to keep abreast and federal agencies multiplied, new voices emerged to decide, negotiate, and implement foreign policy. When the State Department cried "foul" but showed little aptitude, foreign policymaking moved elsewhere. The emergency experience of World War II, in particular, put personal presidential policy in the forefront. Self-defensively, the State Department took to eulogizing its establishment, and the American people had to be reminded frequently after the war that "the Department of State, under the direction of the President, in cooperation with Congress is responsible for the advancement of our foreign policy objectives."

In reality, however, such leadership moved most directly to the National Security Council. Created by the National Security Act of 1947 (the same statute that established the Central Intelligence Agency), the National Security Council was, in fact, charged with the responsibility of "effectively coordinating the policies and functions of the departments and agencies of the Government relating to the national security." It was provided with a staff and set about operating, close to the White House, as an interdepartmental committee with functions most immediately related to questions of foreign policy. Thus was created what the State Department had once been, a coordinating, orchestrating mechanism for the various elements of policy at the highest level. The State Department, at least in the contemporary United States, was not a part of the primary machinery by which the nation would set about to meet the demands of increased world leadership.

In the competitive world of Washington's bureaucratic politics, the State Department is one of the smallest players. Its annual budget and number of employees are dwarfed by such behemoths as Defense and Health and Human Services. Although the total amount is secret, the annual funds for the CIA far exceed those of State. With a lack of resources and an increasing centralization of foreign policymaking in the White House, it is not surprising that other departments and agencies in Washington often have more influence in shaping U.S. foreign policy than does the State Department.

Despite these challenges, the State Department has made various efforts to revitalize its headquarters' operations in the somewhat aptly named Foggy Bottom section of Washington. The program Diplomacy for the 1970s, embarked on by Secretary of State William P. Rogers and his chief assistant, Elliot L. Richardson, was one of the most publicized and professional. Yet it must be noted that when one scratches underneath the rhetoric of the program, it was, in short, still another management reform package, not unlike in design, if not in definition, the earlier programs that had failed and, in part, led to disaster for the department.

The Rogers-Richardson proposals at least incorporated the knowledge, which had begun with Wristonization, that structural reforms were not universally productive. Indeed, they noted, "substance can suffer at the hands of technique; spirit can be alienated from operation." The lessons of the participative managers, more serious than the mere superficiality of a suggestion box, were also deeply ingrained. A prime focus of Diplomacy for the 1970s was a new era in management-employee relations. Openness and creativity were encouraged. There was even concern, for the first time, for ensuring equal employment opportunities and new openings for women. The role of the foreign service wife was redefined, giving her more training and staff support for her unique position as an unofficial representative of the United States.

Still, characteristically, the new proposals clung to the same brass rings. First was the commitment to a belief that this was the only real, significant reform where all the acknowledged previous attempts were specious and superficial. All previous reformers of management guidelines had believed similarly about their proposals, from Huntington Wilson's geopolitical divisions through Wriston's merger. Second was a still-unshattered faith in techniques, no matter what the preamble, to solve problems. Demonstrating this faith was a program called Policy Analysis and Resource Allocation (PARA), under the aegis of the secretary's Planning and Coordination Staff (S/PC). One of the tasks of the program was to provide a structural way back into the top echelons of decision making for the department by writing annual reviews designed to serve as common denominators for discussion in the department, the Inter-Agency Group of the National Security Council, and the White House. In turn, Policy Analysis and Resource Allocation was to feed into an even more centralized executive council known as the Secretariat. The authors of Diplomacy for the 1970s proudly acclaimed this Secretariat, at the "heartbeat" of department operations, as "thoroughly modernized" and ready with "up-to-date techniques and equipment for high-speed telecommunications and automated information handling." Thus, Secretary Rogers urged development of a new operations center and improved information management known as Secretariat Automated Data Indexing System (SADI).

Into this nerve center of the Department of State in 1973 moved Kissinger, who had challenged the hegemony of efficiency while an outsider. It is difficult to perceive how a Kissinger or certainly a Remsen, Adams, Seward, Adee, or Evarts could function in the kingdom of PARA and SADI, that is, an environment where "substantive problems are transformed into administrative ones." What was the remaining role of leadership and policy in a department that could issue forth Airgram 5399, concerning the use of the title "Ms."? The message read in part: "The Department has added 'Ms.' to the personnel title codes … maintained in the automated master personnel file. All documents which access these codes and which are printed by the computer may now employ this form of address."

The "Ms." example reveals not only a preoccupation with management details but also a diversity problem in State. For the department specifically charged with representing the United States to the various peoples of the world, the career officers in State had always been remarkably homogeneous. In the 1970s the department made great strides to catch up with other government offices in the area of diversity. The number of new female foreign service officers doubled during the decade, and by the end of the decade the department was actively recruiting African-American candidates. As a result, by the end of the century the number of female and African-American ambassadors had noticeably increased even before the nation had its first woman as secretary of state with Madeleine Albright and its first African-American secretary of state with Colin Powell.

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the State Department continued its parade of re-reorganizations that had begun with creation of the first geographic division in 1908 and the professionalization of the foreign service with the Rogers Act of 1924. The Foreign Service Officers Act of 1980 aimed to make career officers more effective through reform of the promotion and recognition system. The bureaucratic pyramid of functional and geographic divisions was continually readjusted, but the process of getting a policy recommendation through this maze of specialists remained time-consuming and an obstacle to policy innovation. During the Clinton administration a new undersecretary of state for global issues was added to make the department more responsive to contemporary world problems, such as the environment and population growth. One of the most significant changes of the 1990s was to bring the previously independent U.S. Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency into the department to save costs and enhance management efficiency.

The explanation of the shifting power of the secretary of state and the department itself since World War II was not in internal organization, or in major historical events like the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War, or in scandals like Iran-Contra. The key was in the growth of power and complexity of the modern presidency, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt and continuing thereafter. Much public discussion focused on the relative balance of power between the National Security Council after its creation in 1947 and the State Department. During the Johnson years, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and national security advisers McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow were seen as overshadowing Dean Rusk. Under Nixon, Kissinger dominated the policy process through his NSC staff and his direct access to the president within the White House. Reagan claimed that George Shultz would restore the primacy of the State Department, but Shultz was often in conflict with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and later the NSC staff over dealings with Iran and Central America. With the end of the Cold War, Bill Clinton elevated another player in the policy game, the secretary of commerce, as he gave priority to economic competitiveness. The determining consideration in all of these cases was how the president chose to exercise his executive prerogatives.

Despite efforts to improve its own organization, the State Department was unable to reclaim the leadership and coordination of foreign policy of which it had once been able to boast. The centralization of policymaking in the White House that had begun during World War II and increased during the Cold War remained. The National Security Council staff had the advantages of greater access to the president, more rapid response to changing situations, and more domestic political awareness than State. Indeed, bureaucratic battles between the department and the NSC staff at times—such as in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s—wrecked the policy process. No national security adviser after Kissinger ever equaled his level of control over decisions, but policy unity was always difficult. The Defense Department, CIA, NSC, and other departments often had as much or more input into foreign policy than did the State Department.

The juxtaposition of Airgram 5399 about the use of "Ms." and Remsen's original instructions put one in mind of a debate between two diplomatic historians about the utility of speedy publication of foreign policy files by the Department of State. While both scholars supported such a policy, their reasons differed dramatically. The first argued the administratively defensible position that quick access to such documents and the resulting historical monographs, sure to follow, would teach contemporary diplomats how to do a better job. More reflectively, the second historian suggested that while scholarship and research demanded quick access, better policy would emerge not from monographs, but from "wisdom."

Leadership, the quality of greatness inherent in the work of an Adams or a Seward, is still possible. The Department of State is not beyond its grasp. Yet one must conclude that its achievement slips further and further out of reach in the wake of those variables the department has come to identify as progress since the mid-twentieth century: complexity, bigness, and accelerated change.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bemis, Samuel Flagg. John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy. 2 vols. New York, 1949. A good biography of a great secretary of state.

Bemis, Samuel Flagg, ed. American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy. Vols. 1–10. New York, 1928–1958. Good, short sketches.

Bemis, Samuel Flagg, and Robert Ferrell, eds. American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy. New series. Vols. 11–19. New York, 1963–1980. Continues the older Bemis series with the same title.

Crane, Katherine E. Mr. Carr of State. New York, 1960. Gives a favorable view of a key middle manager.

DeConde, Alexander. The American Secretary of State. New York, 1962. Contains useful analyses.

Elder, Robert E. The Policy Machine: The Department of State and American Foreign Policy. Syracuse, N.Y., 1960. A landmark political science study.

Graebner, Norman A., ed. An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1961. One of the most used sources for general, interpretive information.

Hartmann, Frederick H., and Robert L. Wendzel. America's Foreign Policy in a Changing World. New York, 1994. Describes how policy is made in Washington, D.C.

Heinrichs, Waldo. American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition. Boston, 1966. Besides being a biography of an important man, it traces the evolution of foreign policy implementation.

Ilchman, Frederick. Professional Diplomacy in the United States, 1779–1939. Chicago, 1961. A careful and documented study.

Kegley, Charles W., and Eugene R. Wittkopf. American Foreign Policy: Pattern and Process. 3d ed. New York, 1987. Discusses State's relationship to other departments.

McCamy, James. Conduct of the New Diplomacy. New York, 1964. A revision of the author's previous volume, The Administration of American Foreign Affairs (New York, 1950), based on the intervening decade.

Morison, Elting E. Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson. Boston, 1960.

Plischke, Elmer. Conduct of American Diplomacy. Princeton, N.J., 1950. A standard work.

Rubin, Barry M. Secrets of State: The State Department and the Struggle over U.S. Foreign Policy. New York, 1985. Analyzes the decline of State with regard to the National Security Council.

Schulzinger, Robert D. Henry Kissinger: Doctor of Diplomacy. New York, 1989. Examines Kissinger's significant role in shaping the policy process.

Stuart, Graham H. The Department of State: A History of Its Organization, Procedure, and Personnel. New York, 1949. An older source of itemized changes.

Villard, Henry S. Affairs at State. New York, 1965.

White, Leonard. The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History. New York, 1948.

See also Decision Making; Department of Defense; Doctrines; National Security Council; Presidential Advisers; Presidential Power .

A TALE OF TWO SPEECHES

In early 1950, two speeches, one by Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the other by Senator Joseph McCarthy, illustrated the tension between pragmatism and politics in the modern State Department. Acheson's 12 January address to the National Press Club, "Crisis in Asia," was a model of pragmatic policy analysis. Also known as the "defense perimeter speech," because it placed Korea beyond America's line of defense in the Pacific, this talk was quite perceptive. Noting "bewilderment" in the American reaction to the communist victory in China in 1949, Acheson detected "a failure to understand [the] basic revolutionary force which is loose in Asia" and explained that "the communists did not create this but they were shrewd and cunning enough to … ride this thing into victory and power." Such sophisticated, accurate, and timely analysis was precisely what State Department bureaucrats needed to provide to policymakers.

McCarthy's 9 February speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, advanced a strikingly different interpretation of what he labeled the "impotency" of U.S. policy. He charged that the United States had failed to prevent communist successes "because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation…. This is glaringlytrue in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous." In the senator's inflammatory rhetoric, the department's elitist past remained to haunt it in the frightening uncertainty of the early Cold War.

The staff analysis that went into the Press Club speech demonstrated State's bureaucratic expertise. Contrary to partisan complaints based upon distorted or nonexistent evidence, the level of patriotism, competence, and strategic toughness within the department was high, as exemplified by its shaping of NSC 68, the April 1950 program for militarized containment of global communism. State remained at the center of foreign policymaking in the 1950s, but damage to the department's credibility from McCarthy's excesses revealed the vulnerability of its expertise to political and ideological challenges.