THE STATE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF STATE

MULLING over the governmental structure of the newborn United States, Thomas Jefferson went on record as favoring "little or no diplomatic establishment." That wistful measure of the proper size for the U.S. State Department prevailed for more than a century. At the time when Secretary of State William Seward was boldly buying Alaska, he was head of an office with two assistants and 60 clerks. Secretary John Hay negotiated the Panama treaty and otherwise carried out Teddy Roosevelt's active diplomacy on a departmental budget of less than $190,000 a year. Before World War II, Cordell Hull used to sit in the draft of a somnolent fan for two or three hours of lonely reflection, then file a guideline dispatch to a dozen or so ambassadors and about 40 other men holding the now-almost-forgotten rank of minister as heads of the now-almost-forgotten kind of post called legation.

State is still no giant among bureaucracies--it is the second smallest department in personnel (after Labor) and budget (after Justice)--but it is now quite large enough to flabbergast Thomas Jefferson. From the seventh floor of a granite building of fluorescent-glaring corridors and scarred desks, Dean Rusk rules over 24,200 employees (down a bit from 1950) and a budget of $383,948,000. State has 110 embassies, two legations (Hungary and Bulgaria), 68 consulates general and 84 consulates. Reporting to Rusk are two Under Secretaries, George Ball and Tom Mann, two deputy Under Secretaries, and no less than 16 Assistant Secretaries charged with varying responsibilities.

In the view of many, this far-flung organization works admirably. A top diplomat at Paris' Quai d'Orsay says: "The State Department functions better than the Quai. It is a well-oiled machine. The right things go to the right places." U.S. consulates are widely praised for courtesy and efficiency. "If you want to know what's going on anywhere in Africa, ask at the American embassy," says a veteran European newsman who covers that continent. The American Legion, once prone to find State "soft on Communism," last year investigated and concluded that "the nation can place much confidence" in the department. State's people savor such compliments--because they have been accustomed to hearing memorably vivid criticism.

It was F.D.R.'s Harry Hopkins who pronounced State's men to be "cookie-pushers, pansies--and usually isolationists to boot." From a somewhat different point of view, Joe McCarthy called State "a nest of Communist traitors and Communist sympathizers." More recently, the department has been metaphorically denounced as a "bowl of jelly" (President Kennedy), drowning not only in its "booze allowance" (Congressman John Rooney) but under a flood of paper work springing from "the bureaucratic necessity that everyone has to write so much to justify his existence" (Ambassador to Kenya William Attwood), while working under an overall policy based on "the lowest anti-Communist denominator" (Professor Hans Morgenthau) with a surplus of "pedestrian people" (former Ambassador James Gavin) headed by a Secretary with an "irrevocably conventional mind" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.).

Some of these are well-aimed jabs, others petulant protests. Almost all are born of the frustrations inevitable to a nation that has undertaken a role of world leadership unprecedented in human history. State's performance must be measured against that role in all its immensity and complexity, at a time when the dramatic diplomatic breakthrough is a thing of history, when success is forged from months and years of patient effort, when egregious failure could bring down the sky. It must be examined in the context of a nation that is history's most powerful, yet is still reluctant to use its power. So, too, must State's performance be considered in the light of its assigned functions, which are: representing the nation abroad, reporting to Washington, formulating policy and presenting it, with alternatives, to the President--the one man who has the actual power, and indeed the duty, of major decisionmaking.

The Foreign Service Elite

In its representational function, the State Department by general consensus rates high. Its ambassadors are able. Three-fourths of them are careermen, and of the political appointees, none are like the blundering, bottom-pinching misfits who have sometimes embarrassed the U.S. in the past. With the revolution of transportation and communication, ambassadors enjoy almost instant backup from Washington, which sometimes cuts into their freedom of action but also relieves them of weighty decision-making beyond their official competence. More often than an ambassador may like, someone senior to him (including the Secretary) may jet practically into his embassy's backyard. And when he picks up his phone, that voice on the other end may come across in a familiar Texas drawl.

The career ambassadors are the elite of the elite that is the U.S. Foreign Service, which has 3,750 officers chosen upon entry by tough oral, written, physical and psychological tests. About one-third hold advanced degrees. State makes an effort to get applicants from all over the U.S.; nonetheless, about three-fourths come from the Northeastern colleges in the blue blood tradition that in other years enlisted such foreign service pros as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Outerbridge Horsey and Ambassador to Ecuador Wymberley DeRenne Coerr. The average FSO is 42 years old, earns $13,000 a year, has served two-thirds of his career abroad, can speak at least one foreign language fluently.

The task of the foreign-service officer, and particularly of the ambassador, is complicated by the fact that U.S. embassies serve as headquarters for representatives from a multitude of other governmental agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency, AID, the Peace Corps, the U.S. Information Service and the military departments, to name only a few. As of last spring, 46,179 Americans were employed at overseas State Department posts; of these, 39,884 worked for agencies other than State. Forty-four different agencies are represented in the London embassy. Of 700 civilians in New Delhi last year, only 100 actually belonged to State. The ambassador is somehow supposed to coordinate the activities of all those within his mission. But often the agencies, as in the case of AID and the Peace Corps, have conflicting ideas about how to do the same job. The covert nature of the CIA makes morale problems; in many embassies, staffers rightly or wrongly believe that one out of every three fellow workers is not what he purports to be.

The proliferation of other agency representatives irks State Department careermen. Says former Ambassador Ellis Briggs: "They clutter up the premises. In theory, the American ambassador is the captain of this team of untamed sportsmen. But it is not much use unless the captain has control over the players." Yet the numbers simply reflect the essential interests that the U.S. has in the rest of the world, and State might just as well settle down with the situation. To the foreign-policy decisions that the President must make, the ingredients furnished by the Pentagon, the CIA, the economic cooperation agencies and others are often vital.

Good representation is more than official contact, of course. "Tenez bonne table et soignez les femmes," Napoleon instructed his ambassador to London, and modern American diplomats also try to set a good table--with American wine, by order of L.B.J.--and to cultivate the ladies. The cocktail party, which all diplomats profess to hate from the bottom of their livers, is, "the milieu in which you must meet foreign colleagues," says former Careerman Charles Thayer. Many parties, though, turn out to be ingrown gatherings of the embassy staff and local Americans.

A perennial embassy dilemma is how much its staffers should "get out"--travel the hinterlands, meet political figures (including those who oppose the U.S. position), businessmen and common people. The bureaucratic tradition against such activity is strong: the political officer of one African embassy forbids his four-man staff to leave the capital on the grounds that "there is too much to do in the office." But--particularly in Southeast Asia--there is an increasing amount of diplomacy by Jeep, in which younger officers travel to villages, eat fried lizard, learn languages and customs, and represent the U.S. directly to the people.

A Flood of Reporting

"Ambassadors are the eyes and ears of states," says the classic definition. This calls to mind some Rembrandtian statesman returning from a foreign court to whisper a few words of intelligence into the ear of a king. As expanded by the State Department, the job of reporting has thousands of bevested young officers obsessively sending millions of words to Washington. With his tongue only barely tucked in his cheek, Thomas A. Donovan, former U.S. consul in Iran, writes: "Background studies on such live topics as Recurrent Themes in the Bulgarian Press Treatment of the Black Sea as a Sea of Peace or Whither Thuringia: the Principality's Progress Under the New Course are considered useful for filling the files at home." In Paris, an embassy labor attache, leaving after four years, remarked ruefully that he doubted if anyone anywhere had really read one of his reports. The result is that communications break down under sheer volume. "We think the Americans here are in touch with reality and are accurately reporting our attitudes," says an African leader. "But somehow we have a feeling that the message is not being delivered to the men at the top."

Many a message does not get through simply because of obscure writing. The literary quality of State Department reports drove that lover of lucid language, John Kennedy, to distraction. A few ambassadors, it is true, are notable for their style, among them Ambassador to Britain David Bruce, Ambassador to Laos William Sullivan, and Ambassador to Kenya Attwood. "Their reports are so good," says a member of the Policy Planning Council, "that people in the State Department look forward to reading them, and pass their cables around. As you would expect, their reports get action commensurate with the attention they get." Attwood, a longtime professional journalist, was recently asked to write, for distribution within the department, a memo on how to write. "The best incentive for drafting a readable report," it said, "is to assume that your readers are not terribly interested in what you have to say, and that you have to tell your story in such a way that they won't be inclined to shove it aside."

The Policy Function

By pouch, cable and phone, the reports pour into Washington; State's "copy and distribute" section makes 70,000 copies a day. Some ambassadorial reports shoot right through to Secretary Rusk, like neutrons through a brick wall. Some are pigeonholed, perhaps to be of use to businessmen or scholars. The bulk of the reporting is supposed to help, in small measure or large, to form U.S. foreign policy.

To this end the reports, often considerably hedged by their writers, are put through a process called "layering." First, each goes to the appropriate "country desk," made up of men whose business it is to know intimately the affairs of a given foreign nation. The country-desk men, followed by officers in higher echelons--regional, area, assistant secretarial, under secretarial--must successively judge whether the reported information is worth passing upward. The reports may at any level be edited, rewritten or combined into what George Kennan says is often "a hodgepodge inferior to any of the individual views of which it was brewed." Other Government departments, most notably the Pentagon and the CIA, are drawn in. Great deliberation prevails; John Kennedy (as quoted by Schlesinger) complained that he and McGeorge Bundy could "get more done in one day at the

White House than they do in six months in the State Department." Even Dean Rusk, while describing his administrative problems to be those "of any large organization," fears that the system "leaves dangling vetoes all over town."

When State's distilling process works as it should, the best of the reporting lands on Rusk's desk, and thereby reaches the top of the department's globally based pyramid. His responsibility at this point is much misunderstood. Columnist James Reston, for example, took the department to task because it "has not developed for the President any guiding strategy of foreign policy or any order of priorities in that field." To such criticism, Rusk says: "While Mr. Truman's remark that 'the President makes foreign policy' is not the whole story, it serves very well if one wishes to deal with the matter in five words." Rusk thinks it sufficient for him to call vital matters to Lyndon Johnson's attention, to proffer alternatives, and to let the President decide.

The Man at the Top

Such a role precisely fits Dean Rusk's personality. He has a quiet charm, exercised mostly in private; few find him brilliant, but on occasion, before an audience he deems especially congenial or knowledgeable, he is remarkably illuminating. He gives the impression of being bland, and many of his admirers just wish he would lose his temper once in a while. He is a student of foreign affairs, not an innovator; a reflective man allowed little time for reflection by the pace of his present position.

"Sometimes," Rusk has said, "it is better to do nothing than to do something simply for the sake of doing something." He believes that U.S. foreign policy should stress reliability, not experimentation. "The United States has too much mass and momentum to be a hummingbird, darting in and out of alluring blossoms to see what nectar can be had for the whims of the moment," he argues. "We owe it to ourselves as well as to the rest of the world to remain steady on course."

Thus Rusk is a cautious man, and caution is king throughout the State Department. Rusk did not create the condition, he has merely compounded it. John Foster Dulles was a notable exception to the rule that a Secretary of State does not "make" foreign policy; with President Eisenhower's approval, Dulles often acted out of his own mind and experience, and woe to the State Department underling who went against him. What Dulles personalized, Rusk has institutionalized; and the most common complaint within and without the State Department is that there is little room for the original thinker, the daring or dissenting mind.

Rusk's Policy Planning Council, headed by a Kennedy favorite, Walt Whitman Rostow, has little influence. Of all major segments of U.S. foreign policy, only one can really be said to have been spawned by State--and that is the foundering plan for a multilateral nuclear force (MLF). When thrust into such crises as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile confrontation and the whole Vietnamese war, State has played a relatively passive part.

Moreover, there is a feeling throughout the State Department that boldness earns an excessive penalty if it miscarries. "The thing to do," says a careerman in Leopoldville, "is fill the norm, do as you're told, and above all, don't make waves." Veteran Diplomat W. Averell Harriman sums up the possible cost of such caution: "I have seen men's careers set back and, in fact, busted because they held the right views at the wrong time, or for accurately reporting facts which were not popular at the time."

To its activist critics, State undoubtedly is answerable to the charge of hewing too closely to Talleyrand's imperative: "Above all, not too much zeal." But considering the stakes involved, and the fine line between zealousness and foolhardiness, the men in the U.S. Department of State come rather close to the definition offered by Britain's Sir Harold Nicolson. "The worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers," he wrote, and certainly the U.S. has few of those. "The best kind," he went on, "are reasonable and humane skeptics." State's men stay reasonable and skeptical of hummingbird nectar.

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