The Washington Post recently ran an editorial masquerading as news which started on page one and consumed an entire inside page. “Appointing Loyalists as Envoys” was the title, and the reader’s attention was attracted because it was illustrated with a picture of the American Flag.
The gist of this mammoth piece of editorial advocacy was a complaint that the Reagan Administration is doing something “abusive,” “unfair,” and “disturbing” in making political appointments to the posts of U.S. ambassadors to foreign countries. The Post argued that our ambassadors should all be taken from those who hold government jobs in the Foreign Service.
To support this position, the Post tried to paint Reagan’s political ambassadors as crooks or boobs, but Foreign Service ambassadors as qualified and deserving. The only crook the article cited never served as an ambassador, and the evidence about boobs was a mishmash of gossip unworthy of the front page of a respectable newspaper.
Consider the innuendo dripping from this patronizing sentence. “Not all of Reagan’s political ambassadors have been embarrassments, of course. Some have performed competently.”
The bias of the Post became clear later in the article. The Post admires the political ambassadors appointed by liberal Presidents, such as W. Averell Harriman, Ellsworth Bunker, Edwin O. Reischauer, and George F. Kennan. It’s only Reagan’s political ambassadors who are held up to scorn, even when they are eminently qualified and speak the language of the country to which they are sent (such as John A. Gavin, Reagan’s Ambassador to Mexico).
Somebody should explain the constitutional and political facts of life to the State Department and the Foreign Service. The Constitution gives the power over foreign policy and appointments to the President, not to the Secretary of State or the Foreign Service.
The President is responsible to the voters, not to the State Department. In most elections, foreign policy (and the mishandling thereof) is a political issue, and the voters expect the President to change the foreign policies of which the voters disapprove.
Changing our foreign policies necessarily involves changing the personnel who carry them out. The people who elected and reelected Ronald Reagan certainly expect him to appoint ambassadors who will carry out the Reagan foreign policies. They cannot be effectively carried out by Carter holdovers.
The Post thinks it is terrible that the Foreign Service has lost a number of persons who spent a lifetime preparing for senior appointments, only to see those prospects dissolve at the last minute.
The argument that Foreign Service employees are somehow entitled to be ambassadors because they’ve accumulated seniority in a government job is really intolerable.
They were enjoying salary, perks, and vacations all those years. That doesn’t entitle them to be ambassadors any more than 20 years’ service in the bureaucracy entitles anyone to be in the President’s Cabinet.
On the other hand, most of the political ambassadors have given years of service as volunteers, both in the political process and in civic and community causes. If there is an “entitlement” to a policy-making position, the preference should be given to those who have donated their talents and resources to our country, rather than to those who have been fully compensated year by year along the way.
However, the appointment of ambassadors is not an “entitlement” of anybody. It’s a matter of policy. The President has a constitutional right and duty to appoint ambassadors who support his policies. If Ronald Reagan is to be faulted in this area, it is that he has appointed only 40 percent of the ambassadors, while allowing the Foreign Service to dictate 60 percent.
As an example of to what ridiculous lengths the Foreign Service staff goes in its impudent attempt to control our foreign policy, the Post article quoted a complaint that Ambassador Faith Ryan Whittlesey wouldn’t deliver her speeches exactly as her staff wrote them. Her staff complained that she’d go over every line. Imagine the nerve of her — wanting to edit, or even write, her own speeches!
The Post article made the additional complaint that Reagan’s appointees are not the old eastern establishment Republicans with which the Foreign Service has been accustomed to working, but people with a radical distrust of the eastern establishment and of the Foreign Service.
Maybe someday the Post will figure out that one of the major reasons why Ronald Reagan was elected was because we do, indeed, distrust the eastern establishment and the Foreign Service. Our only complaint against Reagan is that he hasn’t cleaned out enough of the liberal holdovers in the State Department and the Foreign Service.
