Information Wars. Richard Stengel

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СКАЧАТЬ generally sat between J (Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights) and T (Arms Control and International Security). Some of the assistant secretaries sat at the end of the table, but most stood against the wall opposite where the Secretary sat. The 9:15 was the most communal of the department’s meetings. In the minutes before S arrived (yes, that’s the initial used for the Secretary), you could hear the hum of chatter and gossip. (Gossip was the lingua franca of the foreign service.) When he strode in, everyone got quiet. He usually began with a folksy hello. Because this was a more public meeting, the Secretary’s demeanor was both more upbeat and more formal than it was at the 8:30. He usually mentioned the same concerns he’d had at the 8:30, but typically in a shorter, sanitized version, along with a handful of announcements. He also regularly delivered what the department referred to as “attaboys” to individuals or departments that had done something positive.

      This meeting was less for the Secretary than for the workhorses of the department: the regional assistant secretaries. The State Department was divided between functional bureaus—like mine, arms control, and international security—and regional bureaus, like Europe and Eurasian Affairs, African Affairs, and Near Eastern Affairs. Geography was power at the State Department, and the regional bureaus were the powerhouses in the Building. Dean Acheson compared them to the barons at a feudal court.³ The analogy was still apt. At State, it was important to own territory. And people protected it fiercely. If you tried to launch a program in one of the assistant secretary’s regions and she objected, it went nowhere. State was a Jeffersonian culture in the sense that the institution seemed to believe that the regions knew better than the center.

      The Secretary would go around the room and call on the assistant secretaries. Yes, they were the workhorses, but there was definitely a show-horse aspect to this meeting, as the assistant secretaries gave a kind of bravura tour of their own areas with names and details designed to impress everyone with the depth and the reach of their knowledge. The assistant secretary for Africa might say, “Mr. Secretary, there was a coup in the Congo, and I’ve been in touch with our embassy. No danger to any U.S. personnel. You’re going to meet with the president of Nigeria next week and the trip is coming along well. I spoke to him yesterday, and I sent up a read-ahead memo on the trip this morning.”

      At these meetings, you realize pretty quickly that there is no such thing as “the foreign policy of the United States.” We talk about it all the time, and the media writes about it, but it’s an invented idea. If you walked into the State Department and said, “I’d like a copy of the foreign policy of the United States,” no one would know what you were talking about. There is no such document. The foreign policy of the United States is mostly what the President and the National Security Council signal is our policy, and then folks at the State Department interpret it according to their own lights. People react to what is urgent and important, and figure out a way forward. Oftentimes, foreign policy seemed to be made by whoever made a convincing case—because often no one else had a case to make.

      In government in general and at State in particular, meetings are not preparation for work, they are the work. People prepared for meetings, they participated in them, and then they summarized what had happened for another meeting. In government, meetings are the product. People judged how they had done that day by how the meetings had gone. My specials would sometimes say, “We crushed that meeting, Sir.” When a meeting didn’t go so well, people plotted about how to make the follow-up go better. I almost never heard anyone at a meeting at State say something was going badly. At worst, people would say it was “moving along” or “progressing.” Delivering bad news was avoided, and in fact, people often prefaced their remarks by saying, “And some good news from …” Two sentences I never heard uttered at a State Department meeting: “Let’s make it bigger.” “Let’s do it faster.”

      The Foreign Service

      State is an observational culture. In 1775, when the forerunner of the department was created as a committee of Congress, it was set up to watch and report the goings-on of the world. That original mission is still in the DNA of the Building. At State, people were good at monitoring things. Almost everything was retrospective. Every meeting recounted something that had already happened, and then every subsequent meeting recounted that recounting. And then there were the “summary of conclusions” memos, even if there were no conclusions. At Time, we used to have meetings about what we were doing that day, but we also had weekly and monthly planning meetings to plot out the quarter or the year. Early on, I asked my acting chief of staff when all the planning meetings were. She didn’t know what I meant. There weren’t any.

      At State and elsewhere in Washington, there was a lot of admiring the problem. We’d look at an issue—say, the concern that the Mosul Dam in Iraq was about to collapse—and examine it from every possible angle. Then memos were written covering each theory of the case. New memos were then signed off on and circulated. Then task forces were formed that spurred another round of memos. Then meetings of higher-ups were convened to examine the task forces’ findings. The problem wasn’t solved, but the bureaucracy was satisfied.

      State was also a passive, risk-averse culture. There was safety in inaction. It was always easier and safer to say no than yes. A no never got you in trouble the way a yes could. It was the opposite of entrepreneurial. Consensus was prized above initiative. People did things the way they had been done before. At an early meeting, I asked my staff if they could name one public diplomacy program that had been discontinued. As hard as it was to start something new at State, it was almost impossible to end something old. When I arrived, the two countries that received the most public diplomacy money were Japan and Germany—a continuing legacy of World War II. As one longtime foreign service officer once told me, diplomacy is an 18th-century profession, managed by a 19th-century bureaucracy, using 20th-century technology.

      The dominance of the assistant secretaries at the 9:15 reflected something else: the permanence of the foreign service and the temporariness of political appointees like me. Under Secretaries are almost all political appointees, while about half the assistant secretaries were foreign service officers. The perception of the foreign service was that political appointees come and go, while the foreign service abideth forever.

      While there have been ambassadors and consuls from the earliest days of the republic, the foreign service was created only in 1924. Today, to become a foreign service officer, you have to pass the foreign service officer test, a 3-hour exam, and then go through a rigorous interview and vetting process.⁴ Only a few hundred people are selected a year out of more than 15,000 applicants.⁵ The foreign service likes to boast that it has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. The old joke was that the foreign service was “pale, male, and Yale.” But the lone example of that species I saw at the department was John Kerry. To a person, foreign service officers were decent and diligent; they were devout internationalists, who generally much preferred to be in the field than in Washington, D.C. They cared deeply about their work and America’s role in the world.

      In a deep and unshakable way, the culture of the foreign service was the culture of the State Department. It was a culture of gatherers, not hunters. They didn’t like to make mistakes, or ever appear not to know something. I remember when I was going on a trip to Peru; every single foreign service officer I spoke to said the same thing to me: “Great ceviche.”

      Like officers in the military, everyone in the foreign service changes jobs every two or three years. Because most jobs were two or three years in length, foreign service officers were not particularly beholden to their current boss. A year into a two-year rotation in Washington and they were already foraging for their next assignment. Sometimes they would spend two years at the Foreign Service Institute learning a language and then only two years at the post where they would need to speak that language. And then they might come back and study a different language! I remember thinking, If I spent two years training a correspondent to speak Mandarin, I’d want that darn reporter СКАЧАТЬ