By PHK
Brandon Grove’s “Behind Embassy Walls: the Life and Times of an American Diplomat” is an autobiography that intertwines the professional, the personal and the instructional. This book is special not only because it includes all three elements, but also because of the uniqueness of Grove’s diplomatic career. A warning: Grove’s experience in no way resembles the career patterns of today’s, or even yesterday’s aspiring American Foreign Service Officers. Not only are those years and times long gone, but also the Foreign Service – its rules, regulations and attitudes towards its employees as well as their attitudes towards it - are sadly different from what they once were.
Grove writes of his experiences in the service of his country at home and abroad over a 35 year span that took place, for the most part, during the Cold War. He entered the career service in the mid-1950s – in the shadow of McCarthyism which had torn the service apart. He left in 1994 soon after the Cold War ended and shortly before the career Foreign Service was hammered again - this time through a series of budget-directed cut-backs as a result of an un-traveled and foreign affairs ignorant Republican Congress dominated by the isolationist Jesse Helms as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Clinton White House with other priorities. Grove is lucky. He never had to experience a 28 percent budget cut and a 25 percent reduction of personnel in a single year. He left just in time.
Grove’s era is, of course, past. But the lessons learned and general observations about the Foreign Service and the State Department that he shares with readers - for the most part – remain valid.
East Germany and Jerusalem
His chapters on East Germany and Jerusalem compel me most. As the Israeli army continues its Lebanon onslaught and Hezbollah returns fire, Grove’s experiences as Consul General in Jerusalem in 1982 when an Israeli-designed peace that threw the PLO out of southern Lebanon and opened the gates to the creation of the far more radical Hamas and Hezbollah remain significant history our current policy makers and the Israelis should take to heart. Right now. Grove’s is a balanced, nuanced view, written through the eyes and pragmatic experience of a professional diplomat not through those of the political protagonists who mangle American foreign policy today and keep the Middle East in flames.
His chapter on East Germany is a far different story from the one on Jerusalem because the former now represents a by-gone era, a non-existent state, and a problem for today’s Germans to resolve - not one that can turn the world upside down. Grove’s relationship with Germany – one that began when he was a schoolboy in Hamburg in the 1930s and covers assignments in the West as well as the East – is core to his being. In the broader context, of course, the U.S.-German relationship during the Cold War anchored American foreign policy in Europe. He describes both.
The story Grove tells about East Germans returning books to the America Haus library in Berlin after a 50 year hiatus due to the erection of the wall in between remains etched in my brain. I will never forget that story originally described even more eloquently in a letter from the USIS officer in charge of the center at the time.
Oh, the people you meet and the places you go
Grove had an illustrious diplomatic career and he worked for, and with, a litany of illustrious and not so illustrious people. Some – like Robert Kennedy – are household, almost iconic, figures. Others – like Ambassadors Lawrence Eagleburger, Philip Habib, Phyllis and Robert Oakley – are well known career diplomats. They are highly respected in the U.S. foreign affairs community and the countries in which they served. I won’t go into the not so illustrious category: you have to read the book to find out who they are and what Grove thinks of them and why.
But rather than delve further into Grove’s star-studded galaxy of friends and acquaintances, I thought I would conclude this review essay with comments on a few of his observations about the State Department’s approach to a career foreign service that attempts to make our foreign policies work.
The problems
Grove is right when he criticizes the current generation of American diplomats as more “self-centered, self promoting and with sharper elbows” than in previous times. I don’t, however, think these unflattering characteristics should be confined to the present: I faced this problem throughout my own career from 1970-1998. The infighting over promotions and assignments grew ever nastier as the number of promotion opportunities declined. The wholesale downgrading and elimination of positions, the increasing bureaucratic requirements, the never-ending reductions of benefits and the longer and longer hours made Foreign Service life ever less appealing.
Perhaps I just wasn’t good at self-promotion or my elbows weren’t sharp enough. Or maybe th real reason was that I never really strove to reach the top.
Tit-for-tat? Loyalty works both ways
I agree with Grove’s observation that “too few of this generation” see “the Foreign Service as a shared institution requiring sacrifice, nourishment and loyalty.” But where we disagree is in the reasons why. Grove blames class action law suits brought by women and minorities and a department unwilling to foster attitudinal change through its own training institute, the Foreign Service Institute which Grove directed at the end of his career.
He’s also right about the inadequacy of leadership and management training as a major impediment in making the U.S. Foreign Service what it could be. As he says, the Foreign Service is less than the sum of its parts. When Colin Powell was Secretary of State, he understood this problem and began to turn things around. But I don’t think Powell’s reforms are lasting beyond him. Powell, as a popular commanding general, understood that loyalty works both ways. I’m not sure, however, that any other Secretary of State understood, or that the current one understands, this basic principle in managing State's incredible human capital - the department’s chief resource.
From my perspective, those law suits came about because of how the Foreign Service treated people. I was never a party to any of them, but I know people who were. It was under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the late1960s that women became welcome as Foreign Service professionals. But the very rigid, old-boy, right-college attitudes of the service failed most women and minorities and the system’s attitude towards women and tandem couples played officers off against each other time and time again.
I also think much of the “me-first, sharp-elbows” attitude resulted from the system’s own brutal up-or out system which lopped careers off in mid-stream and forced some of our most linguistically skilled officers out at the height of their careers. That’s the major reason the department doesn’t have enough officers who speak fluent Arabic as well as a number of other languages. Just read Ambassador Monteagle Stearns’ book “Talking to Strangers.” He tells it like it is.
I think, however, that there is at least one other reason as well: the ever larger spoils system which rewards ever more of the financially and politically faithful. Far too many also happen to be incompetent and woefully unskilled at diplomacy. Diplomacy requires skills that are learned by doing; they don’t happen over night. This system acts to the detriment of the professionals. It also acts to the detriment of our well being abroad. America’s current policies in the Middle East are just the latest example of the fruits of this bankrupt system. To avoid messes such as these is the reason the career professional service was created decades ago. It’s way past time to stop the politicals from undermining our national interests even further.
I bought Grove’s book as an interesting summer read – a time to step back from the heavier policy tracks that were consuming much of my time. It is readable. It provides a window into a previous – and in retrospect - happier time. As you can tell from my observations above, Grove does not gild the lily – he tells it like he sees it. For that reason alone I think anyone thinking of a diplomatic career would do well to read “Behind Embassy Walls.” But so, for that matter, should those who just want to learn how the “sausage is ground” and what it means to the people who grind it.
Brandon Grove, “Behind Embassy Walls: The Life and Times of an American Diplomat,” Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005. An ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826215734/sr=1-1/qid=1153968428/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6190637-8062360?ie=UTF8&s=books
Monteagle Stearns, “Talking to Strangers: Improving American Diplomacy at Home and Abroad,” Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691007454/sr=1-2/qid=1153968576/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-6190637-8062360?ie=UTF8&s=books