When Diplomacy's Reputation Needs Tending: Some Advice from the Past.

• Author: Weisbrode, Ken
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Title: When Diplomacy's Reputation Needs Tending: Some Advice from the Past

Author: Ken Weisbrode

Text:

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo raised a few eyebrows in August when he spoke, on foreign soil, to the Republican National Convention. Cabinet members, especially the Secretary of State, are held to a high standard in politics because they are meant to be custodians of the nation's image. Many people regard party politics as tarnish on that image.

Yet, Americans have long championed a gift for image-making. Related to that has been a less cynical belief, even faith, in the appeal of the American way of life, the American dream, a "decent respect for the opinions of mankind," and similar truths taught to every American schoolchild.

Today's national mood and reputation challenge those norms in ways that do not bear repeating. The lamentations are omnipresent in print, on radio, on television, and online. What has been missing until only very recently has been the moral call to arms that usually accompanies such moments in American history.

Two such calls to arms--one from the 1920s and another from the 1950s--are worth revisiting, for they show that diplomacy plays an important role in repairing the country's reputation, and that diplomacy's own reputation needs constant, professional tending. The first took place when, following the disruption of the Great War, an influenza pandemic, and a terrible recession (sometimes called the forgotten Depression), Americans posed questions about how they wanted the world to see their country, and proceeded to lay the foundations for what would become known as the American century.

The Rogers Act

One of those foundations was the nation's diplomatic corps. Today's foreign service came into existence in 1924 with the Rogers Act. The Act merged the hitherto separate consular and diplomatic services--the latter being known as a dumping ground for political and other undesirables--and established a competitive entrance examination and other professional standards.

The legislation was not widely popular. Consular officers, for example, resented being lumped in with so many "morons, fairies and neurotics... feeble sons of distinguished fathers," as Ambassador William Bullitt once called his fellow diplomats (Bullitt was a political appointee).

The State Department's final Third Assistant Secretary (the title disappeared after passage of the Rogers Act) was a man named J. Butler Wright. He had served in...