Information Wars. Richard Stengel
I almost never heard anyone at a meeting at State say something was going badly. At worst, people would say it was “moving along” or “progressing.” Delivering bad news was avoided, and in fact, people often prefaced their remarks by saying, “And some good news from …” Two sentences I never heard uttered at a State Department meeting: “Let’s make it bigger.” “Let’s do it faster.”
The Foreign Service
State is an observational culture. In 1775, when the forerunner of the department was created as a committee of Congress, it was set up to watch and report the goings-on of the world. That original mission is still in the DNA of the Building. At State, people were good at monitoring things. Almost everything was retrospective. Every meeting recounted something that had already happened, and then every subsequent meeting recounted that recounting. And then there were the “summary of conclusions” memos, even if there were no conclusions. At Time, we used to have meetings about what we were doing that day, but we also had weekly and monthly planning meetings to plot out the quarter or the year. Early on, I asked my acting chief of staff when all the planning meetings were. She didn’t know what I meant. There weren’t any.
At State and elsewhere in Washington, there was a lot of admiring the problem. We’d look at an issue—say, the concern that the Mosul Dam in Iraq was about to collapse—and examine it from every possible angle. Then memos were written covering each theory of the case. New memos were then signed off on and circulated. Then task forces were formed that spurred another round of memos. Then meetings of higher-ups were convened to examine the task forces’ findings. The problem wasn’t solved, but the bureaucracy was satisfied.
State was also a passive, risk-averse culture. There was safety in inaction. It was always easier and safer to say no than yes. A no never got you in trouble the way a yes could. It was the opposite of entrepreneurial. Consensus was prized above initiative. People did things the way they had been done before. At an early meeting, I asked my staff if they could name one public diplomacy program that had been discontinued. As hard as it was to start something new at State, it was almost impossible to end something old. When I arrived, the two countries that received the most public diplomacy money were Japan and Germany—a continuing legacy of World War II. As one longtime foreign service officer once told me, diplomacy is an 18th-century profession, managed by a 19th-century bureaucracy, using 20th-century technology.
The dominance of the assistant secretaries at the 9:15 reflected something else: the permanence of the foreign service and the temporariness of political appointees like me. Under Secretaries are almost all political appointees, while about half the assistant secretaries were foreign service officers. The perception of the foreign service was that political appointees come and go, while the foreign service abideth forever.
While there have been ambassadors and consuls from the earliest days of the republic, the foreign service was created only in 1924. Today, to become a foreign service officer, you have to pass the foreign service officer test, a 3-hour exam, and then go through a rigorous interview and vetting process.4 Only a few hundred people are selected a year out of more than 15,000 applicants.5 The foreign service likes to boast that it has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. The old joke was that the foreign service was “pale, male, and Yale.” But the lone example of that species I saw at the department was John Kerry. To a person, foreign service officers were decent and diligent; they were devout internationalists, who generally much preferred to be in the field than in Washington, D.C. They cared deeply about their work and America’s role in the world.
In a deep and unshakable way, the culture of the foreign service was the culture of the State Department. It was a culture of gatherers, not hunters. They didn’t like to make mistakes, or ever appear not to know something. I remember when I was going on a trip to Peru; every single foreign service officer I spoke to said the same thing to me: “Great ceviche.”
Like officers in the military, everyone in the foreign service changes jobs every two or three years. Because most jobs were two or three years in length, foreign service officers were not particularly beholden to their current boss. A year into a two-year rotation in Washington and they were already foraging for their next assignment. Sometimes they would spend two years at the Foreign Service Institute learning a language and then only two years at the post where they would need to speak that language. And then they might come back and study a different language! I remember thinking, If I spent two years training a correspondent to speak Mandarin, I’d want that darn reporter to spend more than three years in Shanghai.
Foreign service officers were not political. That is true in the sense that they are not appointed, but it is also true in the sense that I never knew who might be a Republican or a Democrat. It just wasn’t evident in any way and didn’t matter. For them, politics really did stop at the water’s edge. Part of the reason is that they were all members of one party: the foreign service party. They were loyal to two main things: the idea that international affairs mattered and the foreign service itself. The foreign service did many things well, but what it did best was inculcate loyalty and belief in the foreign service.
Coming from the media world in New York, I found the culture of the State Department to be unfamiliar. I thought that I had experienced bureaucracy at Time Inc. when I ran Time magazine, but that operation was astonishingly lean compared with the State Department. People often said to me, Oh, you come from a big international business, so this must seem like small potatoes to you. In fact, my editorial budget at Time was under $100 million a year when I became editor in 2006. My annual budget at State was $1.1 billion. Yes, that’s b for “billion.” I found that people in government often had no real concept of the vast amounts of money they had and how it dwarfed the sums available in the private sector. Foreign service officers always complained about how little money they had in their budgets and were often demoralized when it was cut by 2 or 3 percent. “How can I do what I did last year if my budget is cut by 3 percent?” Very rarely did anyone think, Maybe I shouldn’t be doing exactly what I did last year.
I wouldn’t call Time a glamorous place, but it felt glamorous compared with the State Department. In fact, the State Department of 2014 felt more like the Time magazine of the 1980s. Among foreign service officers, there were lots of boxy, out-of-fashion suits and bad haircuts. But the thing that always made me laugh was how many mustaches there were. You could be at a meeting with 10 men sitting at the table and 5 of them had mustaches. And the varieties! Handlebars, lampshades, chevrons, and even the occasional Fu Manchu. These looked like mustaches they had grown in the ’80s and never shaved off.
The department was very hierarchical in terms of structure, but in some ways, that was deceiving. What I found confounding was that when a senior leader made a decision, the counterforces of those who disagreed with it were mobilized. In the Building, the phrase for this was “anti-bodies,” as in, “There are a lot of anti-bodies to that policy in the Building.” I found that when people disagreed with a decision, they began their response with, “I think that’s exactly right, but …” Nobody would openly oppose something, but then people would work behind the scenes to undermine it. Sometimes you discovered that actions you had signed off on were still not done months or years later.
Meetings Are Action
When the 9:15 was over, people filed out, chattering, and headed back to their offices. When I first started, my then chief of staff had a daily meeting at 4:30 p.m., known as “vespers,” to go over everything that happened that day. Lots of offices at State had vespers. What I found was that by 4:30, I’d pretty much forgotten what had happened at the 8:30 and the comms meeting and the 9:15 as I went pell-mell through my day. After a month or so, I decided we should move vespers to 10 a.m., when I had everything fresh in my mind from the morning meetings.
So after the 9:15 ended, I would head back downstairs exactly the way I had come. And there, waiting in my office, in a U shape at the north end of my office, was my front office staff. I mentioned having four special assistants, but I also had two traditional assistants—one did my schedule and one did logistics and travel. I had a chief of staff. And the chief of staff