THE ADMINISTRATION: A Concentrated Drive

For three months the weaknesses and disunity of the U.S. Foreign Service have been under sharp scrutiny by the Secretary of State’s Public Committee on Personnel, headed by Brown University’s President Henry M. Wriston. Last week John Foster Dulles 1) published the Wriston Report, 2), ordered its recom mendations put into effect, and 3) appointed Charles Eskridge Saltzman, a Wriston committee member,* Under Secretary for Administration, with full authority to revamp the Foreign Service along the lines laid out by the committee.

Altered Outlook. The most glaring trouble in the State Department’s personnel system, according to the Wriston committee, is its division into a departmental service (officials who work only in Washington) and a Foreign Service.

Career Foreign Service men have long resisted plans to merge the two systems.

Among the points made in the report: ¶Although Foreign Service officers are supposed to have regular tours of duty in Washington, many have been committed to “comparative isolation in official exile,” and “only 2% of the home desks are presently occupied by them.” One man with 43 years of service has had only 13 months of home duty. Said the report: “Men immersed continuously in other societies inevitably tend to lose touch with the circumstances and attitudes that shape national policy at home. Their outlook, their judgment of changing factors of national concern, and finally their sense of urgency … cannot escape being altered.” ¶”Absence of strong administrative leadership” is the key reason for “sinking morale” at State.

¶State’s “management of its human resources has been irresolute and unimaginative.” ¶The Foreign Service Act of 1946 authorized accelerated promotion for exceptionally meritorious work. Charged the committee: “No such promotion has been made since the passage of the act.” New Blood. Then the committee turned to the critical problem of recruitment. The Foreign Service has been retarded, said the Wriston group, “by a persistent belief that promotion from the bottom is the only true incentive,” although private business has found that “late starters of high ability often enrich the base and bring fresh incentive into the jaded middle years.”

Calling for a “direct infusion of needed talents from outside,” the committee disparaged the old policy that all diplomats should be “generalists.” Again it cited the example of private enterprise, which now “emphasizes the development of an individual around his specialty, with the gen-eralism coming later.”

The 1946 act set up a system of “lateral entry” of departmental officers and specialists into the Foreign Service’s middle ranks. But only 51 out of 2,378 applicants for lateral entry have been transferred into the Foreign Service.

The Foreign Service has also lagged in recruitment at the bottom rung. In two years not a single new junior officer has been hired, although in 1952 applications were invited and 2,701 were received.

The committee criticized the Foreign Service’s examination system as failing to meet “seed-corn needs.” The system discriminates against candidates who lack private means, first by making them travel to Washington at their own expense “on speculation” for final screening, and then by making them wait two years or more before being appointed.

Besides urging that these ills be corrected, the Wriston group offered two basic remedies:

1) Enlarge the Foreign Service officer corps from its present 1,285 to 3,900. About 1,450 of the new officers should be departmental men now in jobs to be designated as Foreign Service posts. This would give old Foreign Service men more time in Washington, and the departmental men a chance to broaden their outlook by serving in other capitals. The rest would come from the Foreign Service reserve and staff corps, and from stepped-up recruitment.

2) Set up a scholarship program along the lines of the Navy R.O.T.C. Under it as many as 750 college students a year would receive $900 in their junior and senior years, and would be committed to spend six years in the Foreign Service. By insuring that the State Department would get the best available talent, the annual cost of $2,000,000, the committee implied, would be a bargain.

United Action. Last week newly appointed Under Secretary Saltzman, 50, promised a “concentrated drive” to carry out the Wriston Plan. Charlie Saltzman, a West Pointer (’25) and Rhodes scholar, goes to Washington well prepared. Leaving the Army in 1930, he worked for the New York Telephone Co. as a commercial engineer, five years later switched to the New York Stock Exchange, where he became a vice president. In World War II Saltzman joined General Mark Clark’s staff in Morocco, won the Distinguished Service Medal in Italy, rose to brigadier general. From 1947 to 1949 he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Occupied Areas.

The proposed scholarship program will have to wait at least until next year for the approval of Congress, but most of the Wriston Plan needs no legislation. “Now is the time for action,” declared Secretary Dulles. The report told why action is overdue: “Foreign policy will be dynamic or inert, steadfast or aimless, in proportion to the character and unity of those who serve it.”

* The others: Norman Armour, retired career ambassador, onetime (1947-48) Assistant Secretary of State; John A. McCone, onetime (1950-51) Air Force Under Secretary; Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary of State; Morehead Patterson, chairman and president of the American Machine & Foundry Co., now U.S. representative at the London U.N. talks on disarmament; Donald Russell, president of the University of South Carolina, onetime (1945-47) Assistant Secretary of State; John Hay Whitney, senior partner of J. H. Whitney & Co., Manhattan investment house.