By Patricia H. Kushlis
On January 30, 1973, Barbara Tuchman gave a speech in honor of John (Jack) Service, one of America’s most experienced State Department China-hands. Service had years earlier lost his career – along with several colleagues – because of their accurate reports from the ground in 1940s China.
Their crime?
Service, Ambassador Clarence Gauss, Counselor George Atcheson and other China specialists in the war torn country at the time – or on the China Desk at the State Department - had the temerity to report to Washington higher ups that Chiang Kai-shek was losing the war and Mao Zedung and the Communists were going to take over the vast country.
For their candor, careers were lost, reputations destroyed and these hapless messengers persecuted at home. They were, in Tuchman’s words “hounded because able and honest performance of their profession collided with the hysterics of the cold war manipulated by a man so absolutely without principles as to be sinister like the man without a shadow.”
In response to an earlier post here on WhirledView, a friend told me about and then sent me a copy of Tuchman’s speech. I’m not going to repeat it in its entirety – it was her speech after all. But it's clear that many of her observations remain relevant today.
I’ve summarized them below in regular type face. Mine follow in italics.
• Foreign Service Officers are employed to advise policy-makers of actual conditions on which to base a realistic policy. Let’s get real: the State Department still needs skilled professional political and economic reporting officers in its embassies overseas and its bureaus in Foggy Bottom. Gaining such expertise does not happen overnight it demands a variety of skills gained on the job, through academic study and in specialized State Department training: twenty years with the Department and in service overseas is more like it.
• The expert reports are too often ignored because policy is formed by preconceptions and long implanted biases. The mental fix of President McKinley got this country into an ill-conceived and bloody war of oppression in 1898 in the Philippines because of his ignorance of the country and its people especially his failure to take into account the tenacity of the indigenous Filipino resistance. President Roosevelt’s favor of the progressive discounted and discouraged US Embassy Moscow reporting in the 1930s of the Stalinist purges. Right on both counts.
• Foreign policy obeys Newton’s law of Inertia: it keeps on doing what it is doing unless acted on by an irresistible force. The desire not to listen to unhappy truths . . . is only human and widely shared by chiefs of state. This also results all too often in cabinet ministers and secretaries and other top advisers refusing to bring a leader unpleasant news. This bubble-effect produces a policy-maker who lives in a fantasy world and consequently makes disastrous decisions based on false information he or she is fed by trusted, but not necessarily wise advisers.
• Embassy reporting must pass through a screen of psychological factors at the receiving end: temperament, or private ambitions, or the fear of not appearing masterful, or a ruler’s inner sense that his manhood is at stake. . . . A male problem which fortunately doesn’t trouble women and perhaps a reason for having a woman in high office. I would add that reporting also needs to wend its way through the overly hierarchical State Department bureaucracy which is not only stove-piped but also suppresses its middle and lower ranks by overly cautious higher-level bureaucrats and political appointees afraid to “rock the boat.”
• But of all the barriers that Embassy reporting must hammer against, the most impenetrable is the capacity of policy-makers to disbelieve what they do not want to believe. Despite intelligence of the impending German invasion, the Soviets ignored the warning: the very fear of an invasion happening caused Moscow not to believe it. Throughout the 1940s, America's China hands like Service reported the impending collapse of the Kuomintang (KMT) but nothing could persuade Washington to loosen its ties to Chiang Kai-shek or arouse policy makers from, in Service’s words, their “indolent short-term expediency.” Right.
• National myths are another impediment to realistic foreign policy and the CAN DO myth is a major American barrier of this sort. As Stewart Alsop observed in The New York Times Book Review Section at the time “American Presidents since Roosevelt have disliked the State Department and leaned heavily on the military because of its tendency to be brisk can-do problem solvers while senior Foreign Service Officers tend to be ‘skeptical examiners of difficulties’ who worry that presidents will prefer positive to negative advice. I agree, Presidents do prefer positive advice, so do other higher-ups, the problem is how to provide accurate field reporting and intelligent analysis without the reporters and analysts punished and ostracized - as happened to the China hands during the McCarthy era. Or brushed aside - like State's Iraq analysts before the 2003 invasion.
• The rise of air power relates to an enormous attraction to the easy solution – the idea that a horrid problem can be solved by fiat from the air, without contact, without getting mixed up on a long dirty business on the ground. Unfortunately, nothing’s changed here, has it?
• Activism, the great force in American history, has had positive results when it operates in a geographic sphere we can control. This is not the case in Asia. It would help if the US would learn occasionally to leave things alone and let the people themselves seek an indigenous solution. Yup.
• The most baneful myth was that of the Communist monolith. This was never true but it was a powerful reflection of fears and prejudices for the 50 years of the Cold War. Not only did the Sino-Soviet “split” begin to change attitudes, understanding and hence US policies but so did internal changes in the Soviet Union which the US began to recognize only after relations and contacts had become more open.
• The best guide to a useful foreign policy is the conduct of relations and exercise of influence in the service of an enlightened self-interest. Sure is and an excellent definition to boot.
• What needs to be done to narrow the gap between information from the field and policy-making at home? First,in Tuchman’s words, it remains essential to maintain the integrity of foreign service reporting. . .. to provide the basis for a change of policy when the demand becomes imperative. And second, means need to be found that demand periodic testing of preconceived biases against the evidence as a way of recalibrating and changing course if need be. Agree. But how can this begin to happen if the State Department attempts to transform its officers into USAID field officers while US foreign policy is still foremost conducted by a “Can Do” Pentagon? Who will do the political and economic reporting or the critical analysis?
Barbara Tuchman, Why Policy Makers Do Not Listen, American Foreign Service Association Luncheon, January 30, 1973, Washington, D.C. The speech also appeared in the Foreign Service Journal, March 1973 and is found in pdf format online at US Diplomacy.org.