To Senator Joseph McCarthy, the diplomatic corps was infested with Communists who should be hounded out of public life; to John F. Kennedy, the Department of State was a "bowl of jelly." To the American public and to Congress, State has often been an object of scorn, the refuge of striped-pants snobs devoted to balancing teacups. Last week the department looked at itself and concurred with many of the less shrill opinions of its longtime critics. It was a self-examination as candid as has ever emerged from the federal bureaucracy.
"Diplomacy for the 70s," a 610-page report compiled by 13 task forces drawn from all levels of the department's bureaucracy, charged the Foreign Service with timidity, inflexibility and lack of creativity. Most of the department's time, said the study, has been "devoted to applying the principles of the late forties in an increasingly rigid way to international conditions that were constantly changing." The authors were equally forthright in assigning causes: "The intellectual atrophy of the department was a compound of presidential dissatisfaction, political reaction, departmental conservatism, bureaucratic proliferation."
Failure of Nerve. As an antidote, the report suggested the cultivation of specialists and men trained in the management of people, paper and budgets. In this respect, the report is a decade-later application of Robert McNamara's Whiz Kids techniques to the nation's oldest executive agency. In the past, the Foreign Service has prided itself on producing diplomat-generalists, but the complexity of foreign relations in recent years has shown the need for developing diplomats with more concentrated skills in technical areas.
The most significant of the suggested reforms, which numbered more than 500, dealt with the development of creativity and dissenting viewpoints within the department. Quite simply, the report asked that innovation be viewed as the norm rather than the exception, proposing the creation of adversary procedures that would routinely challenge policy shibboleths. It coupled this recommendation with a suggestion urging voluntary retirement after 20 years' service−regardless of age−thus opening up the ranks to younger officers presently stymied by the overinflated bureaucracy.