The hostage crises in Tehran and Bogotá occurred at a time when the morale of the U.S. Foreign Service was already flagging for a number of unrelated reasons. Chief among them, in addition to a growing concern over personal safety: inadequate pay and perks in a period of worldwide inflation, insufficient opportunities for working wives (or in a few cases husbands) and a sense that in an age of instantaneous communication the scene of the real action in American diplomacy has shifted from the embassies to Washington. "We used to avoid home assignments like the plague," says a diplomat at the...
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