MODERNIZE THE STATE DEPARTMENT

...The State Department itself is badly housed, wretchedly organized, under-staffed, without adequate clerks and stenographers, or even the tools of the trade...

...Roosevelt's habit of appointing admirals or generals as ambassadors, whether they had any special fitness or not, was another source of demoralization...

...I found one minister in Europe in '39 who told me that he had been cabling from two to seven dispatches every day giving the latest news and telling what he was doing...

...But when I think of men like Alexander Kirk, now the ambassador in Rome, whom I found acting as Charge d'Affairs in Berlin, George A. Gordon, who was Minister to Holland, and George Messersmith, whose superb work as Consul General in Berlin rightly resulted in his promotion to the position of Minister to Austria, I can forget the minority of misfits and still maintain that our service is superior to any other, and especially to that of Great Britain which the British Government is now trying to reinvigorate and democratize...

...If two diplomats in China have been working against the State Department and the ambassador, that means that the State Department is not controlling its officials and keeps itself in ignorance of what is being done in its name...

...IALSO wrote that I was the happier to write this favorable comment because my memory went back so far...

...Roosevelt was his own State Department, constantly ignored the Department in Washington which was frequently in ignorance of what was going on, and dealt directly with diplomats, like Robert Murphy and Ambassador Bullitt...

...In any service of this kind there are bound to be some stupid or inefficient and lazy people...

...It is very hard to prevent their appearance in armies or navies or diplomatic services or Washington bureaus...

...Then, after years of hard work, they may find themselves jumped by men from the outside who do not know the first thing about the diplomatic service and methods...

...The Department has never adjusted its allowances in accord with the different living conditions in different countries...

...But if those specially selected men are Presidential favorites, or just political appointees, they are a danger and sometimes a disgrace, and their work has to be done for them by men under them who do not get the credit they deserve...

...That was enough to wreck the morale of a department, and so is the appointment of a man like Pat Hurley when there are a number of perfectly competent career men capable of doing the job...

...Some of them disgraced us...

...I know that our foreign service is as good, if not better, than any other with which I have been brought into contact...

...Should he, however, be able to substantiate his charge at some later time it would reflect much more upon the men higher up in the State Department than those he accused, and on the general organization and methods of doing business of the State Department...

...If this sensational assault should bring about the changes in the State Department that are so badly needed, the General will certainly have rendered a real public service...

...The war had then been on over two months and he had not up to that time received a single reply to any of his messages—not a word of commendation nor of fault-finding, nor of instruction and direction...

...OF course there is danger of bureaucratic methods and dry rot creeping into a classified service...

...I have found them courteous, considerate, eager to help, and always waving aside any thanks on the ground that they are there to be of service...

...Under the last four Presidents there has been a marked tendency of Cabinet members, heads of departments, chairmen of commissions, and other officials, to make public addresses and take positions which constantly have to be disavowed or forgotten as rapidly as possible, with private rebukes for the officials involved...

...Today the career men are facing the fact that the Government is threatening to take into the permanent career perhaps 1,000 of the temporary wartime appointees, so enormously has the business of the Department increased—it has been called upon since V-J Day to liquidate the 0 WI and the Foreign Economic Administration, in addition to assuming other functions which it was never intended to operate...

...Today the career men one finds are usually officials of high grade intelligence and ability who have profited by service in various countries...

...Now I am willing to admit that in the past there have been some routinized diplomats and too many of the old-school-tie type...

...But I have never joined in the hue and cry that now and then comes to the fore for the reason, perhaps, that I have traveled abroad so much and seen so many of them at work...

...Actually that man was doing the outstanding work in the diplomatic corps in the capital in which he was, but it was never allowed to be known to the general public and the press...

...Is it surprising that good men are steadily resigning...

...ONE of the worst offenders in this respect is Admiral Land of the Maritime Commission, whose "authoritative" statements about our future maritime policy have caused considerable uneasiness in other countries, and have never seemed warranted by his position, since, in the final analysis, the size of our future merchant fleet and its status will be determined not by him and his fellow members of the Maritime Commission, but by the President and the Congress...

...I was so impressed with what I saw that I wrote an article which was reprinted in the February, 1940, issue of The American Foreign Service Journal, the spokesman and reporter of the career diplomats...

...Plainly, if his charges are true, they would reflect not so much on the individuals involved as upon the system which would permit a man in a great department of the Government to play a different hand from that ordered by the President of the United States and the Secretary of State, It is not to be denied, however, that looseness of this kind has existed, and does exist, in the Government...

...Somehow or other this constant turning over of the personnel in the higher jobs must be stopped if we are to have efficiency, loyalty to the President, and a contented, effective, and keen professional service of younger men bent on making it a life's career and determined to serve their country as well and as selflessly as is the bulk of our career men today...

...That others are highly indignant at the prospect that the Government will break its faith with them and inject into the permanent service, even in the upper grades, men who have been paid from the start of their service more than the feulk of the career men...

...They were all of them political appointees...

...Diplomats being sent abroad today are not given an adequate per diem allowance...

...I am strongly of the opinion that, despite the tremendous stratn under which they are working, they have preserved their tempers and their human qualities and that there is less red-tape than is to be found elsewhere...

...Most of them were wholly incompetent or uninterested in their work, regarding their jobs merely as a means for existence...

...Again, I want to point out in reply to the charges that the career men are usually conservative, hidebound, reactionary, and hostile to new trends, especially the charges from the Left, that in the vast majority of cases the laying down of the policies is done by the State Department, or the President—Mr...

...They have to rely upon their secretaries and their clerks...

...What has been even worse has been the inefficiency of the State Department machine in dealing with its own men in the field...

...They are serious students of trade conditions and of political happenings, and their reports are often of the greatest value and should be published far more widely than has been the case...

...When this war came our diplomats often forgot regulations to do everything they possibly could to help Americans and others to escape from the hell that Europe was beginning to be from the first day of this war, I do not deny that some kept rigidly to their office hours and went home when there were long lines of eager and despairing people waiting to see them...

...SO the next time you feel like throwing stones at our professional diplomats give a thought to their condition, what they are facing, and don't blame them altogether if they occasionally take the wrong direction,, Think what it would mean to you if you were a member of a department which had seen in the last few years a constant procession of Secretaries of State, Undersecretaries, Assistant Secretaries, Special Assistants, etc., etc.—Hull, Stettinius, Byrnes, Welles, Berle, MacLeish, Rockefeller, Acheson, Paslovsky, Grew, and many others, and now Dunn, Clayton, Benton, Russell, etc., etc., some experienced and trained, many of them utterly ignorant of their jobs and incapable administrators...

...Modernize The State Department By OSWALD G. VILLARD AMBASSADOR-GENERAL Pat Hurley's explosive, self-advertising attack upon the career diplomats in the State Department seems, at this writing, to be falling absolutely flat...

...He said that he could only assume that he must be satisfying the Department—if anybody read his cables —otherwise he presumed that he would have been rapped over the knuckles...

...In that article I made the following statement: "I have returned full of admiration for the manner in which our representatives abroad whom I have seen at work, and especially those in Holland and Germany, are buckling to their tasks under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, working day and night, Saturdays and Sundays without thought of self until they are ready to drop...

...Thus, I was the first newspaper man to go from London to Berlin, via Holland, travel for a month in Germany and then return via Holland to London after the beginning of the war in 1939...

...Unfortunately, the facts as to the unfavorable features of our present diplomatic service have been so obvious and have been known and written about so long that I, for one, have very little hope that we shall owe anything to Pat Hurley's explosive appearance upon the first pages...

...Finally, the men in the field are never adequately paid...

...Just after I was graduated from Harvard I traveled for nine months through the Mediterranean countries, Northern Africa, Egypt, Turkey and the Balkans, and as I was traveling with my distinguished father I met through him the ministers and consuls in the various countries—we had no ambassadors there then...

...I gladly admit that there are times when the diplomatic service profits by the appointment of men to some higher positions without previous diplomatic training...

...As an American I have been proud of those whom I have met...