Outdated Diplomacy

...no doubt we will still be occupied in Vietnam and elsewhere some years after Dean Rusk...

...To those possessed by such a vision it is hardly believable that most of our Foreign Service officers lead lives as commonplace and dull as corporation vice presidents and insurance salesmen...

...Perhaps it is the nature of the job that it is filled by hawks rather than doves...

...Simpson thinks so...

...The long, unbroken series of American involvements abroad owes much, if not all, to the militant interventionists who have been Secretaries of State without interruption since 1945...

...the rotation and training and briefing procedures are faulty...

...One can infer from his remarks about "the new breed" of career men that they are more democratic in class background, attitudes, and manner than the old guard foreign service officers who were apt to be rich snobs and aristocrats...

...Since the author's heroes include George Marshall, Ache-son, and above all Rusk—the latter is described as "modest, sincere, highly intelligent, with an enormous capacity for lucid analysis"—it is doubtful that he intends the apple pickers to join up with the guerrillas in Latin America, or even to say a kind word for the Vietcong...

...I think not...

...One can recall a number of high officials who were McCarthyites years before the late Senator from Wisconsin made his historic speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, and almost innumerable examples of the Department's failure to perceive accurately, much less to understand, the revolutionary forces shaping so much of the modern world...

...Reviewed by Arnold A. Rogow There can be few undergraduate majors in political science who have not conceived a desire, however temporary, to join the Foreign Service...

...But unless the State Department comes to terms with the social revolution in a large part of the world, unless it understands that movements that arise from poverty cannot be put down by military means, is there any point in tinkering with the machinery...

...While it is not clear that "picking apples" represents a gain over, say, picking olives out of martini glasses, except in terms of health, presumably Simpson means to imply that the "new breed" is closer to the peasants and workers of the world than was the old timer who much preferred the Crillon to any apple orchard...

...It was the first major government agency to enlist itself wholeheartedly in the Cold War, and clearly it will be the last to recognize an armistice, if and when Armistice Day ever arrives...

...It is too easy to forget that "brinkmanship" was developed, if not perfected as a concept, some years before John Foster Dulles...

...These criticisms and others are illustrated with pointed anecdotes, although it is doubtful that these stories are as naughty or scandalous as he thinks...

...I was one such undergraduate about twenty-five years ago, and I have never had cause to regret the fact that my dream of serving in Tangier or Singapore was shattered by World War II and other career interruptions...

...Their image of the Service is likely to be a romantic one—embassy posts in exotic countries, excitement, mystery, dealings in high places, midnight dispatches, spies, secret missions, and amour...

...there is bad coordination within the Department...

...relations between the Department and Congress are not what they should be...

...whatever the case, contrasted with the Achesons, Dulleses, and Rusks of the State Department, most of our Defense Secretaries appear almost dove-like...

...Unfortunately, Smith Simpson's book is not concerned with policy appraisals, much less with the kind of searching analysis that the State Department deserves...

...Outdated Diplomacy Anatomy of the State Department, by Smith Simpson...

...Indeed, in a good many consular outposts a comparison between the daily routine of a typical officer and the daily routine of a typical commuter on the 5:24 to Tarrytown would be much in favor of the commuter...

...Simpson, at best, can offer us only Establishment criticism: there is too much mediocrity and blandness...

...On balance, Simpson is hopeful that the Department will finally get itself in shape for the complex job of advising the President and Congress on foreign policy, but he does not indicate what policy changes, if any, might follow from organizational improvements...

...Smith Simpson to the contrary notwithstanding, one can think of few instances during the past two decades— certainly very few since 1952—when the State Department has acquitted itself, either at home or abroad, with conspicuous intelligence, or imagination, or courage, or integrity...

...But, again, is this likely to make a real difference in policy areas where the State Department has traditionally been conservative, anti-socialist as well as anti-Communist, and not infrequently allied with the most reactionary local elements...

...On home leave in the United States they are less inclined than their seniors to gather in familiar haunts and more inclined to get jobs reporting for smalltown newspapers or picking apples in Virginia...

...According to Simpson, the "new breed" are "men who can mix with fishermen as well ,as financiers, with bricklayers as well as bankers...