THE CULTURE OF BUREAUCRACY Rooting for the Other Team: Clientism in the Foreign Service

...We may disagree about whether or how the U. S. should ever intervene in cases of starvation, slaughter, or rebellion, but we should be able to agree to make those policy choices with all the logic and clearheadedness we can muster...

...Yet, ironically, State may also be the bureaucracy with the greatest potential for responding to the public interest...

...There were disputes in Washington over whether the U. S. should play an intermediary role in trying to end the conflict, but no apparent question that the United States should make some humanitarian response to the starving children of the Nigerian civil war...

...In this they are unlike all their colleagues except, perhaps, those in South Africa...

...To business or bureaucracy trail lines of interest from nearly every corner of the world, at once an index of our colossal power yet a mass of potential inhibitions on the independent and principled use of that power...

...To his New Delhi appointment, say several sources, Bowles brought an abiding determination to shield U. S.-Indian relations from the biases experienced...

...And nearly every other bureaucracy has felt recently the cleansing light of exposure in the era of public interest research...

...While Henry Kissinger flits dramatically from Georgetown to Peking, most American diplomats in a hundred other capitals are locked in tedious, obscure, and rarely meaningful work...

...It is Answer to October puzzle: what the Foreign Service prizes as access,” the ability to hear and to be heard, which many career officers regard as the essence of their profession...

...Economic pressure on left-wing regimes, coupled with a steady relationship with the colonels in the wings, helped to produce less troublesomc client regimes in both countries, albeit again at a cost in human rights enormous in Indonesia and yet to be counted in Chile...

...How long can you kick a cow in the udders and still expect it to give milk...

...It flourishes, like other dubious practices, in the guild mentality of the State Department, in an elaborate career system that rewards caution, compliance, and evasion while punishing dissent or “mistakes...

...Melady impressed upon the Burundian regime “the necessity of avoiding undue bloodshed” (as distinct from bloodshed due...

...For that official and others in the State Department’s regional bureaus, relations smooth or strained with an entire region can be the daily reality of work, much as one client government can absorb the allegiance of an embassy abroad...

...In the United States embassy in Lagos, ardently committed to its Nigerian clients, it was a different world...

...Painfully aware of what had brought down his predecessors,” as one of his colleagues put it, Melady set about energetically to overcome his client’s fears...

...worried about clients, this time their own, among the other African states...

...Not necessarily, for cliency distorts the way we make decisions more than it imposes any clear direction on our foreign policy...

...Presidents watching some of the absurdities and distortions of State’s efforts to protect their clients have been further confirmed in their accumulation of power in the White House...

...Behind the relief policy was an extraordinary outpouring of public concern and bipartisan congressional support across the political spectrum...

...Staffed predominantly by Foreign Service officers bearing career pressures and marked -by a parochialism similar to that felt abroad, the Department often sees its role as protecting its clients from the special perils that American democracy holds for traditional diplomacy-public naivete (“emotion” over Biafra), a meddling press, an uninformed or partisan Congress...

...Or so it seemed...

...The speaker was a United States military attache talking to a visitor to Pakistan in 1967...

...One source recalls that the CIA even sent an investigator to Lagos to discover why the embassy’s intelligence was so different from all accounts of the war in the media and from other governments...

...All the major American religious relief agencies wcre involved in aiding Biafra, along with the International Committee of the Red Cross and several private European relief groups...

...In his earlier experience in Congress and the executive branch, Bowles had observed the anti-Indian prejudice that dominated parts of the government...

...the clients are always there...

...Rusk once asked with Georgian earthiness in an “eyes only” telegram to Bowles...

...But none of this is new...

...The view of Washington as ignorant and distracted, as the source of perhaps dangerous meddling for transient reasons, can give the career officialdom of a U. S. embassy a common zeal, sometimes a fervid sense of mission, in representing the position of another government...

...Officials tell of recurrent attempts to alter or altogether suppress reports to Washington unfavorable to Nigeria, including eyewitness accounts of Nigcrian atrocities...

...That perspective, too, can be personal as well as bureaucratic...

...If there is direct official involvement with the country, such as an aid program or arms sales, there may naturally develop close working relationships with the recipients...

...The answer to the many problems of cliency surely starts with the opening of the foreign policy processmuch as the habits of government are under challenge domestically...

...Some months later, an equally earnest Air Force attache used home leave in Washington to warn a White House aide “unofficially” that he believed the “enemy” was “up to something” around Kashmir...

...Almost as soon as the 1967 decision was made, the United States embassy in Pakistan urged our government to circumvent the embargo by selling the Pakistanis United States-made tanks from some third country...

...YOU know what the enemy has...

...But bureaucrats may also find anti-Marxist dictators, especially the efficient martial variety, easier to deal with as clients than unruly democrats like the Indians...

...U. S. diplomats in Moscow and on the Soviet desk in Foggy Bottom are expected to be habitually aloof from their clients...

...State Department desk officers now call it “localitis,” certain that it afflicts only their colleagues in the “field...

...Even in Washington they seldom encounter the people they are supposed to represent...

...When numberless Biafran children, dying of protein deficiency, their hair turned rust color, became symbols to the world of the war’s wanton suffering, United States embassy officers in Lagos somberly explained to visitors that the clever rebels had found an obscure red-haired tribc, starved its infants, and put them on display...

...Unlike his Lagos counterparts, Bowles was not imagining antagonism in Washington...

...Then on May 25, amid evidence that men, women, and children were being murdered at the rate of a thousand a day, in what one intelligence officer called Burundi’s “final solution,” Thomas Melady routinely left the country for a new assignment as ambassdor to Uganda...

...U. S. diplomats of every rank depend on the regime and the elites around it for much of the information and influence by which their performance is measured...

...The results of this “cliency,” which makes diplomats align their interests with those of their hosts, are sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic...

...Then, too, the Department of State and its officers are still peculiarly isolated among the great agencies of government...

...you here and Bowles out there...

...The Pentagon, CIA, AID, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture all crowd upon the scene in Washington and abroad with programs, bureaucratic prerogatives, various clear-cut views of the national interest, and, of course, foreign clients...

...But the dishonesty, the zeal, the secrecy, the ambitions and fears that drove us on belong in large measure to such bureaucratic politics...

...The OAU Council of Ministers, in fact, sent the Burundian regime a message in June, 1972, which amounted to support of the repression...

...Their reaction is too often a weary cynicism...

...The U. S. embassy in Burundi initiated a joint letter to the government from several members of the diplomatic corps...

...In an environment where advance depends on conforming to habit, it is perhaps the most common habit of all...

...But those efforts soon gave way to a weary resignation and State’s own growing reluctance to offend victorious Nigeria as Biafra’s collapse became imminent...

...The Tutsi’s chronic worry was that the United States would take sides with the suppressed Hutu...

...Former aides say Bowles was often privately frustrated with the Indians but usually concealed his criticism in reporting to Washington in the belief that long-run United States interests in India were more important than any single clash that might resurrect old hostilities...

...The assistant legal advisor who wrote the unheeded memorandum on human rights during the murders in Burundi personally carried a copy to each policy-maker in the African bureau, skeptical that it would ever reach them by regular staff channels...

...We don’t have an interest in Burundi that justifies taking that kind of flack...

...Only they can ensure that the real clients of American foreign policy are the people beyond governmentspeople at home and abroad who must pay the flesh-and-blood costs of our decisions...

...Ensnared in a parochial view of the national interest, some officials come to resist almost instinctively any policy that threatens to rub the client regimes they deal with the wrong way...

...The OAU didn’t see it that way,” said an official...

...peculiarly insular culture of their bureaucracy-to defend or at least acquiesce in those views...

...The Russian attitude may all be changing, however, with the latest detente...

...Dissent, according to many accounts, was severcly punished by unfavorable performance ratings...

...LBJ and Dean Rusk fell into annual rages when Madame Gandhi sent birthday cables to Ho Chi Minh...

...Only weeks after the outbreak of the war, the wife of an American embassy official in Lagos startled her Nigerian dinner guests with a toast to “the destruction of Biafra...

...In 1969 Thomas Melady, a non-career ambassador but an author of books on Africa, was appointed ambassador to Burundi, a tiny and obscure Central African state with a history of savage tribal disputes between the Tutsi, the dominant minority, and the Hutu, who made up 85 per cent of the country’s population but had been effectively denied political and economic power...

...There was visible irritation with the embassy back in Washington, where Nigerian policy was guided by career officers who had served in the country earlier...

...But State continues to govern by inertia and default, in camera, unaccountable except to bureaucratic self-interest...

...At the time, however, the legal advisor’s office was never asked to prepare an opinion on whether events in Burundi constitutcd a violation of human rights...

...Ideology has also explained one of the few consistent exceptions to cliency-our relations with the USSR...

...From there it’s a short step to the added conviction that good relations with a particular regime, are, or ought to be anyway, urgent national business...

...Once the Africans had reacted, the U. S. State Department had its policy...

...The Department’s African bureau seems to have been equally *The Burundi policy is documented in a recent Carnegie Endowment study directed by the author, Passing By: The U. S. and Genocide in Burundi, 1972...

...Any of these influences may blur that critical boundary between the U. S. national interest, or simply what is right, and the bureaucratic or private interests of American officials abroad...

...The war was essentially a battle for power between post-colonial elites...

...One wonders what new clients we may acquire when Chase Manhattan invests in Siberia...

...Indonesia and Chile arc cases in point...

...A country can do no more for its client states, after all, than fight their wars for them...

...In any event, to be without live clients, right or left, in or near power, is often to be bureaucratically impotent either in a mission abroad or in Was hi ng t on . officials assigned to forgotten arenas like the UN are seldom a bureaucratic match for their colleagues whose clients are actual governments with the real power...

...This time the “enemy” was Pakistan...

...If we’d involved ourselves in this,” said a policy-maker, “we’d be creamed by every country in Africa for butting into an African state’s internal affairs...

...These were “a reality, not just theoretical language,” the memo said...

...An early casualty of the Washington bureaucracy under President Kennedy, he was to prove the most humane policy-maker of the glittering lot...

...today we have strained relations with one fifth of Africa because of the focus on relief...

...These steps are endlessly discussed, and the outlook for real change is still bleak...

...He was never to speak out on the horror he had seen, his “access’’ to his Burundian clients presumably still intact...

...Congressional distaste for India’s neutrality was clear...

...For the American mission as a whole, these programs represent a tangible investment of time and reputation, a call on Washington’s resources, and thus further proof of the mission’s importanceall bureaucratic assets to be nurtured and protected, and all assuming continuing cooperation from the clients...

...Though the United States purchased the bulk of Burundi’s coffee, which accounts for 65 per cent of the country’s export earnings, American bureaucrats dismissed out of hand a proposal to suspend the coffee trade, if only to dissociate the U. S. from the murders...

...Under both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, United States policy toward the conflict was a combination of political neutrality, including an arms embargo, and a major commitment, over $100 million, to the international relief efforts operating on both sides...

...Cliency seems both a cause and effect of the larger malaise enveloping the State Department and Foreign Service...

...the “enemy,” of course, was India...

...If the African countries don’t want to get involved, where do we get off putting our nose in,” demanded another U. S. diplomat...

...Cliency-in-Waiting The most dependable clients for all these purposes are not always actually in power...

...Letters, then official visitors, were sent to urge more complete reporting...

...But the same mission in New Delhi which saw the wisdom of denying Pakistani generals their weapons in 1967 found no reason at all to recommend withholding food aid as a means of persuading a venal Indian bureau cracy to sustain long-overdue agricultural reforms...

...Looking back on the Biafran tragedy, a ranking State Department officer made a similar judgment: “My regret is that there was such emotion generated in this country...

...THE CULTURE OF BUREAUCRACY: Rooting for the Other Team: Clientism in the Foreign Service by Roger Morris “Tell Madamn Ghandhi how lucky she is,” Lyndon Johnson called after a startled Indian ambassador as he left a White House meeting in 1968...

...Cliency has become a major occupational disease of modern American diplomacy...

...That distance from Washington gives a U. S. mission abroad its strongest single impulse toward identifying with the interests of its hosts...

...Nearly every other bureaucracy must face some public constituency-welfare mothers at HEW, rent strikers at HUD, truckers at Transportation...

...And people who spend most of their adult lives dealing with other bureaucrats in remote places tend to persuade themselves, sooner or later, that dealing with other bureaucrats in remote places is pretty important...

...The Red-Headed League In the summer of 1967, after a sequence of political intrigues and tribal massacres, civil war brokc out between Nigeria and its secessionist Eastern Region, which became Biafra...

...Over a desk or at a dinner party, the U. S. diplomat feels the importance of these citizens (a reflection of his own), their ardor, their wrath or approval at firsthandrealities which may be scarcely appreciated in distant Washington, though they loom large from Athens to Jakarta, from Rio to Lagos...

...In many countries their universe is peopled largely by distinct groups-politicians who are sensitive to slight or interference, landowners who abhor economic reform, police who see conspiracy, and not the least, the ubiquitous colonels who exude authority and grow impatient with democracies...

...It was a low-key thing,” explained one witness, “saying we were concerned with their difficulties...

...As it was, his beleaguered, self-righteous cliency tended to provoke the very forces in Washington he hoped to disarm...

...Even without major program to dispense and husband, American missions in most countries are likely to acquire a strong collective tendency toward agreeable relations with the host government...

...The State Department is not alone in steering our foreign relations around obstacles to clear thought...

...Special State Department offices responsible for international law, environmental matters, refugees, or population control may create an organizational illusion of authority, but none acts without the veto of the regional bureaus, whose clients generally frown on such concerns...

...The hungry children come and go from public sight...

...Foreign Service officers know that their p seudo-eli t ism, their parochialism, their penchant for cliency are all a malignant waste of individual talent and of the Department’s potential role...

...Ideology certainly plays a role in these decisions, which are customarily made in the White House...

...They know more than any critic that an honest and sophisticated cliency-as a sensitive appreciation of other societies-is the heart of diplomacy...

...Those who represent America in the world could usefully spend at least half their careers in the country that pays their salaries, in more than token positions on congressional staffs, on newspapers, in what State Department bureaucrats call with nervous sarcasm “the real world” of people and perspectives beyond the encapsulated worlds of embassies and bureaus...

...Creamed Over the Coffee Trade Melady, it turned out, need not have worried so much that the State Department would react against the genocide...

...The problem is not only that diplomats spend years out of the country...

...It wasn’t the American embassy that needed modern armor, but the Pakistani Army...

...In a sense, it was a return to the medieval practice of cliency...

...Do Biafra and Burundi mean that cliency has kept us from intervening as often as we should...

...We need a modern tank here...

...The U. S. simply has no real interest in Burundi other than moral indignation and that’s not enough...

...Then suddenly in May, 1972, the country was plunged into a frenzy of killing, with the Tutsi regime presiding over systematic murder of as many as a quarter million Hutu...

...He wouldn’t sacrifice the relations he’d built up,” concluded several sources...

...The British used to mourn the victims of this parochialism as being “too long in the East...

...Controlling its abuses probably begins with the long-needed reform of that bureaucracy...

...The extreme example of the interplay of bureaucracy and cliency, as of much else, is obviously Vietnam...

...But subtle intervention, a kind of cliency-in-waiting, can help put them there...

...They could accept more easily a complete reversal of objectives or grand strategic design than a revision of their own roles,” reflected a veteran of the bureaucratic battles both in Washington and Saigon...

...But to the bureaucracies in Washington and their proconsuls in Saigon, the war was often only another arena for the jousting of power and interests...

...Although many American diplomats refuse to yield to its impulse, even at the expense of their careers, cliency influences much of what the United States does or does not do in the world-from its failure to speak out against genocide in Africa to the multiple tragedies of Vietnam...

...The mission’s zeal was not always so overt...

...This and other disputes between the mission and Washington, leaving President Johnson to doubt if he had an ambassador to India, illustrate the pernicious character of cliency...

...Some individual careers and bureaucratic prestige become inevitably linked to the “success” of programs which, in turn, may depend on U. S. influence with the foreign regime...

...But the Johnson sarcasm, an epitaph on years of bureaucratic battles, struck at a complex problem in the bureaucratic politics of foreign policy...

...To that end, American diplomats may cultivate their contacts literally day and night...

...The Melady Lingers On The reluctance of an American diplomat to break with his client can be less a matter of the size and importance of the country than of the official’s personal investment...

...He told them every chance he got,” remembered an official who read Melady’s telegrams, “that the United States was absolutely impartial as between Tutsi and Hutu, that their relations were their own affair, and he apparently got through to them...

...Foreign Service reform may resemble nothing so much as the reforms of tsarist Russiaagreed necessary for survival, much heralded, never quite taken before it was too late...

...More often, missions inflict their bias through long battles of bureaucratic attrition...

...It is ironic too that cliency, as a product of this isolation, has only served to deepen the eclipse of the State Department in the making of foreign policy...

...Convinced that the public, Congress, the White House, and the State Department were either duped by Biafran propaganda or else were conspiring to dismember an important client, the Lagos embassy largely followed its own foreign policy for the duration of the war...

...Moreover, career officers who are assigned to clientless duties like legal affairs know that the promotion system of the Foreign Service follows bureaucratic power, and that it rarely rewards such “marginal” work...

...Who indeed is the expert on the scene...

...Did you ever know any official,” asked a young diplomat, “whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights...

...To the end, the Lagos mission resisted the awful rcality of Biafra’s starvation, refusing to support the present at ion by Nigerian relief authorities of vital scientific data on the famine developed by U. S. public health experts...

...She’s got two ambassadors workin’ for her...

...Charged to understand and interpret the views of other governments, U. S. diplomats are sometimes drawn on by career or conviction-by the Roger Morris, who has worked in the State Department and National Security Council staff and is a legislative assistant in the Senate, is writing a book about humanitarian problems in joreign policy...

...Another official remembered the letter as “tactful...

...When Biafra collapsed more than two years later, hundreds of thousands were dead, the vast majority from starvation caused when Nigeria blockaded rebel-held territory...

...Among diplomats who escort junketing congressmen and watch the steady shrinkage of their aid appropriations, who see departments recurrently placed under the direction of a new set of “amateurs” and ever hostage to politics or fickle public moods, there grows the conviction that one of the major burdens of career foreign service is to protect U. S. relations with other regimes from the excesses of Washington...

...Those officials at the same time recall Melady late at night in his embassy office temporizing in sending the first reports of genocide to Washington, afraid that the State Department would somehow “overreact” and destroy his carefully nurtured relationship...

...And of the many reforms that would mean for the Foreign Service, the most vital are genuine provision for internal dissent and a wider exposure of American diplomats to their own society . Diplomacy can be a career truly open to talent, its ranks refreshed at all levels by the infusion of short-term officers from outside government, men and women chosen precisely for their independence and unorthodox and critical views of policy...

...Officials remember trucks loaded with corpses passing the U. S. embassy in the night, bound for bull-dozed graves outside the capital...

...The malady probably begins with the need to rationalize against the realities of foreign service, whatever the venue...

...And it has taken a heavy toll on government-in honesty and objectivity, in time and energy sapped by bureaucratic conflict, in idealism, in enormous human costs abroad that might have becn lessened, and in the further erosion -of public trust in foreign policy...

...Bowles must have felt the same way himself at times, and if only he had posed that same question to Washington, he might have been taken more seriously by other policymakers...

...Sources that served in the Lagos embassy during the early months of the war recall a pervasive suspicion in the form of official restrictions on the contacts of junior officers lest they acquire rcbcl sympathies...

...United States-Burundi relations were never better...

...Behind the lines and sometimes on them were the endless jurisdictional disputes-CIA operatives, generals, deputy ambassadors, AID administrators, each with Vietnamese clients on whom lie was somehow dependent for success, each suspicious that his colleagues would expand their domain and advance their clients at his expense...

...This device, predictably enough, was anathema to the American embassy in India...

...There are also human commitmen ts no institutional factor quite explains-an intense loyalty some diplomats cultivate for a country or region, a matching of personalities and views that may leave an American official feeling more comfortable with a Pakistani general than with many of his own colleagues, the prejudices and emotions released by being witness to dramatic events such as civil wars...

...Cliency seems almost inherent in the psychology and sociology of diplomatic work abroad...

...Foreign Service officers are free of the huge programs and special domestic interests that so often freeze their colleagues in other agencies...

...But only the career service can perform that essential role with integrity, unafraid of career or bureaucratic loss...

...The war, to be sure, was more complex than this single dimension...

...Bureaucratic and career interests reinforce this sense of priorities...

...Not that the President doubted the national loyalty of Chester Bowles or the U. S. embassy in India...

...Neither side would subordinate its political or military goals to relieve the enormous human cost...

...Our Friends the Enemy Cliency is seldom so bizarre or concentrated as the Lagos example...

...and it got no real response...

...By the same reasoning, officials ignored an internal Department legal memorandum pointing out that the U. s. had obligations under international law and treaties in the face of human rights abuses...

...No government, however willful, can rationally dispense with that observation and interpretaion, least of all in this incendiary age...

...The Organization of African Unity (OAU) refused to take action on Burundi, all its members haunted by their own problcms of tribalism and sensitive to any precedent for outside interfercnce in the continent...

...When army units ran out of ammunition they used hammers and nails to continue the slaughter...

...Added to the personal stake and convictions of career officers there is a host of other concerns (domestic clients) that may put a premium on access with foreign regimes-from the munitions industry to Iowa farmers to ITT and Wall Street...

...And whatever the merits of the issue, he was probably right...

...Chester Bowles was then on his second tour as ambassador in Delhi...

...And nowhere have the campaigns been longer than on the South Asian subcontinent, where India and Pakistan-and the United States embassies in each country-are historic rivals...

...Frequently, the United States missions in both countries seem to have believed there were also “enemies” in Washington-the New Delhi mission when the United States began to arm Pakistan in the early fifties, and Rawalpindi when congressional pressure forced a United States arms embargo against Pakistan during the 1965 war with India, and more permanently in 1967...

...In the remorse and internal division that followed in the State Department when the U. S. government stood by silently throughout the carnage, there were differences over some individual motives, but little doubt about Melady’s...

...Who, after all, spends his life defending the national interest on these frontiers...

...After reading the cables from Delhi and hearing in person Bowles’ spirited defense of the Indians, LBJ seems to have become convinced that if he didn’t insist on Indian reforms, his embassy never would...