The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond

By Hannah Gurman

Beginning with the Cold War and concluding with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hannah Gurman explores the overlooked opposition of U.S. diplomats to American foreign policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. During America's reign as a dominant world power, U.S. presidents and senior foreign policy officials largely ignored or rejected the reports, memos, and telegrams of their diplomats, especially when they challenged key policies regarding the Cold War, China, and wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The Dissent Papers recovers the invaluable perspective of these individuals and their commitment to the transformative power of diplomatic writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231530354

Book preview

THE DISSENT PAPERS

HANNAH GURMAN

THE DISSENT PAPERS:

The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

New York  Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-15872-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gurman, Hannah.

The dissent papers : the voices of diplomats in the Cold War and beyond / Hannah Gurman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15872-5 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-231-53035-4 (e-book)

1. United States--Foreign relations--1945-1989. 2. Cold War--Diplomatic history. 3. Diplomats--United States--History--20th century. I. Title.

E840.G87 2012

327.73009′04--dc23                                                                  2011024506

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents

Acknowledgment

INTRODUCTION

one

THE PEN AS SWORD:

George Kennan and the Politics of Authorship in the Early Cold War

two

LEARN TO WRITE WELL:

The China Hands and the Communist-ification of Diplomatic Reporting

three

REVISING THE VIETNAM BALANCE SHEET:

The Rhetorical Logic of Escalation Versus George Ball’s Writerly Logic of Diplomacy

four

THE OTHER PLUMBERS UNIT:

The Dissent Channel of the U.S. State Department

Conclusion

THE LIFE AFTER:

From Internal Dissenter to Public Prophet

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I have accrued many debts of gratitude over the course of writing this book, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge some of them here.

This book would not have been possible without the inspiration, guidance, and support of my doctoral advisors at Columbia University. I am grateful first to Ann Douglas for opening up the world of the Cold War to me, inspiring me to know the facts of Cold War history, and scribbling all over the drafts of my seminar papers and dissertation chapters with substantial critique, generous praise, and always, of course, suggestions for further reading. I thank Bruce Robbins for giving me a reason to continue after my first semester at Columbia, inspiring me with his scholarship and writing, forcing me to clarify and deepen my own thinking and writing, and encouraging me to take intellectual risks. Before I knew what my dissertation was really about, Anders Stephanson pointed out the few interesting snippets of an otherwise tortured paper I had written about George Kennan. These snippets became the basis of my dissertation. I thank him for his keen and clarifying insights into the nature and direction of my project, for teaching me how to think and research as a diplomatic historian, and for believing that I could offer something to the scholarship of U.S. foreign relations. Ezra Tawil taught me how to craft scholarly arguments, write a dissertation, and turn it into a book. I am grateful to him for guiding me through the art of scholarly writing and for giving me moral as well as intellectual support in good times and in occasionally uncertain ones. My time at Columbia would not have been nearly as valuable as it was without my confreres in the English Department. Thanks to Kairos, Karen, Adela and Chris, Greg and Kim, Ellen and David, Patricia and Manu, Eugene, Felicity, and Michele for the many hours of eating, drinking, and library camaraderie over the years. Y muchísimas gracias á José Ángel por tu amistad.

I would also like to thank the Bancroft dissertation committee and Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for the 2008 award that provided me with intellectual encouragement and supported the publication of this book.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Philip Leventhal, who read my manuscript with a keen and understanding eye and gave it a home at Columbia University Press. I thank him for seeing the project’s potential, for believing in the importance of its arguments about writing, and for helping me to hone the manuscript into a more coherent whole. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript for Columbia University Press, identified its strengths and weaknesses, and offered insightful, incisive, and detailed comments and suggestions that proved invaluable in the revision process.

Several other people read and reviewed the whole or parts of this book at various stages of its development. I would like to thank Marilyn Young for reading and commenting on the project at the dissertation stage and for all her support and guidance since I have been at NYU. I am thankful to Nick Thompson, Fred Logevall, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Diplomatic History and the Journal of Contemporary History for reading and commenting on earlier versions of various chapters. A version of chapter 4 was published in Diplomatic History, volume 35, issue 2, April 2011, and a version of chapter 2 was published in the Journal for Contemporary History, volume 45, issue 2, April 2010 by SAGE Publications Ltd./SAGE Publications, Inc. I am grateful to Robert Newman for his engaging correspondence, for sharing his work on the China hands, and for sending me the cassettes of his interviews with Jack Service and John Davies. Thanks as well to the family of Jack Service, especially John McCormick, for their interest in this project and my work more generally. And thanks to Dan Linke at the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library for our conversations about Kennan and his willingness to assist whenever help or support was needed.

A special thanks to my colleagues at Gallatin, who have become my mentors as well as my friends. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with such wonderful people, who have made the last few years such an intellectually and personally rich experience for me. And to my students at Gallatin, who have enthusiastically joined in the debate, intelligently weighing the legacies of dissenting diplomats, as well as larger questions about the U.S. foreign policy establishment and the role of the United States in the world.

I owe the greatest debt to my parents, Benjamin and Gail Gurman, who instilled a love of books, history, and learning in me. I have no doubt that the seeds of my current endeavors were planted at the kitchen table, where I was introduced to pressing social, political, and cultural debates. I also thank the Nikolic and Beadle families—Sarah, Sasha, Rachel, Peter, Nathan, Noah, Isaac, Jacob, and Esther. The commotion and conversation of Friday night dinners at your homes over the last decade have been a welcome reprieve from long, quiet days of writing. In addition to their support, the Alban family has given me a whole new set of kitchen table debates as well as fluffy friends to distract us from them. Thank you, Hedy, Rachel, and Pearl, and of course, Lewis, who is greatly missed but fondly remembered.

Last but certainly not least, I thank Joe, who, more than anyone else, has shared in the occasional highs and lows and everything in between that goes along with writing a book. Joe has swung with the highs, buffered the lows, and engaged the everyday preoccupations of this project. He has listened and contributed to my evolving thoughts on just about every aspect of this book on an almost daily basis. More importantly, it is with him that I continue to learn about and experience the world. I dedicate this book to Joe.

INTRODUCTION

ON NOVEMBER 28, 2010, a date that some called the September eleventh of diplomacy, the Internet whistleblower organization WikiLeaks dropped its latest bombshell of classified information—251,287 State Department cables, mostly written in the last three years, exchanged between U.S. embassies and Washington. Cablegate, as WikiLeaks called it, constituted the biggest leak of classified information in history. Hundreds of the leaked documents were posted immediately on the WikiLeaks Web site, and the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, promised to post them all in the course of the ensuing days and weeks. Unlike the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released in previous months, this collection of documents contained reports from around the globe and promised to reveal a much broader glimpse into the secret world of U.S. foreign policy.

Over the next several weeks, as the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El Pais published and reported on dozens of the leaked cables, the public gained access to some illuminating, if not altogether shocking, information. The cables revealed that, behind closed doors, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states had been pressuring the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Yemen’s president had taken responsibility for U.S. drone attacks on al Qaeda in that country, the State Department had directed diplomats to obtain financial and biometric data on foreign officials at the United Nations, and the United States had offered deals to countries in exchange for taking Guantánamo Bay prisoners.¹

The cables also offered glimpses into the personalities and antics of foreign leaders. One report, for example, described Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fear of flying over water and dependency on a blond Ukrainian nurse. Others characterized French president Nicolas Sarkozy as thin-skinned and authoritarian, mockingly dubbed Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin Batman, and called Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader. More than mere gossip, these profiles helped to shed light on the broad outlook of these leaders as well as the prospects and limits of specific negotiations. For example, a February 9, 2009, report from the Kabul embassy detailing a meeting with Kandahar Provincial Council chief Ahmed Wali Karzai, known as AWK in official circles, revealed not only AWK’s attempts to charm U.S. officials into funding large infrastructure projects in the region, but also Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s awareness of AWK’s manipulations. The problem, as Eikenberry concluded, was how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government, when the key government officials are themselves corrupt.²

As the news analysis increasingly shifted from the content of the cables to the fate of those who leaked and posted them, a less sensational, albeit equally illuminating revelation of Cablegate made a brief appearance in the world of political punditry and radio reportage. Blogging for Salon, Christopher Beam noted that the leaks had given the public a glimpse into the art of cable writing itself. At their best, Beam observed, these cables read like their own literary genre in which diplomats employ elements of sociology and travel writing to paint a picture for senior policymakers. Somewhere within the diplomatic corps lurks literary genius, declared Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank. When asked on NPR’s Morning Edition whether and how the leaked documents changed his view of U.S. foreign policy, historian Timothy Garton Ash said, It revises upward my personal opinion of the State Department. In other words, what I’ve seen about how they report and how they operate is really quite impressive. If the WikiLeaks cables are any indicator, Beam similarly concluded, this job is in capable hands. Writing for the New York Times, Mark Landler characterized the world’s praise for the quality and style of the leaked reports as the silver lining to the WikiLeaks scandal. In form, as well as content, the State Department cables seemed to offer something of positive value that counterbalanced the leaks’ unseemly portrait of U.S. foreign policy.³

Even as segments of the public who actually read some of the cables expressed appreciation for the documents’ analytical value, the State Department went out of its way to underscore the leaked reports’ lack of influence on policy. I want to make clear that our official foreign policy is not set in these messages, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her initial comments to the press.⁴ Though Clinton intended to resolve the obvious diplomatic problems created by the leak, she inadvertently revealed another, less obvious problem—the gap between what diplomats had been reporting accurately and insightfully from the field and the policies the United States had actually adopted.

Cablegate thus raised important but largely unexplored questions about the role of the diplomatic establishment and, more specifically, the nature, purpose, and influence of diplomatic writing, even or especially when that writing runs against the grain of official policy. As the coverage of the leaks exemplifies, these questions have only temporarily and sporadically made it into the national and international debates on U.S. foreign policy. This book is an attempt to put them at the center of the story of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Second World War—to show the place and evolution of diplomatic dissent writing in the larger arc of the American century.

~

The success or failure of a country’s foreign policy and its ability to preserve peace will depend upon the reliability of the diplomat’s reports. So declared Hans Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations, the classic theory of international relations written in the aftermath of the Second World War.⁵ When Morgenthau wrote these lines, the memory of the years leading up to the war was still fresh in his mind. It had been only eleven years since Morgenthau left Germany for Spain, after being told that because he was Jewish, he would not get a position in the German university. It had been only eight years since he left Spain for America after his apartment was bombed and his bank account confiscated in the civil war there. Intellectually rooted in the old world, Morgenthau had been a reluctant émigré to the United States. Entering New York Harbor on the SS Königstein in 1937, he did not entertain the stereotypical American dream, but rather brooded over the question of whether the United States was ready to deal with the harsh realities of the brewing international conflict.⁶

The next decade would be as fateful and formative for the United States as the previous one had been for Morgenthau. Before the war, the United States had been a rising power, but still walked in Europe’s shadow. At the end of the war, with Europe in physical and financial ruin and the Soviet Union still reeling from its twenty million dead, the United States was the strongest nation in the world. Against the backdrop of the newly established United Nations, with its vision of world peace, Morgenthau wanted to make sure that American leaders understood the realities of international power politics. In addition to a manifesto, Politics Among Nations was intended as a primer for the statesmen of Morgenthau’s adopted country. In the book, Morgenthau stressed the need for diplomacy, even or especially in a world formally guided by international law. More important than the abstract idea of diplomacy were actual diplomats, who, he believed, understood international conflicts from the ground up as well as from a conceptual grounding in a realistic view of international affairs. The reports and analyses of the diplomatic corps were thus critical to the future of America’s international relations. Diplomats, wrote Morgenthau, ought to be the fingertips of foreign policy.⁷

Politics Among Nations became an instant sensation in international relations and political science theory, paving the way for its author’s occasional role as advisor to the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In the coming years, however, Morgenthau would become frustrated by the contradictions between his theories of international relations and the practice of U.S. foreign policy. In American foreign relations, he lamented, there was no room for traditional methods of diplomacy, nor for the peculiar finesse and subtlety of mind of the diplomat.⁸

The odds were against anyone who believed that diplomatic writing might actually influence the course of U.S. foreign policy. Though the last sixty years have been especially trying for the diplomatic establishment, the longer history of the State Department is threaded with the frustrations of diplomats who felt ignored or undervalued. The first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, resigned in frustration over his inability to undo America’s preferential trade policies with Britain. John Adams, who served as minister to England for three years, wrote from his post: I am as insignificant here as you can imagine. In the ensuing decades, diplomats would experience a more systematic form of marginalization that reflected the nature of U.S. foreign policy in this period, as well as broad presidential and popular distrust of the diplomatic establishment.⁹

In Europe, the profession of diplomacy evolved alongside the commitment to a system of strategic alliances that were the centerpiece of what would come to be known as a classical realist approach to international relations. Forged and maintained by diplomats, these alliances were designed to balance and temper the struggle for power between states. While intellectually influenced by this worldview, U.S. diplomats were beholden to America’s avowed desire to avoid permanent alliances. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, the American foreign policy establishment remained extremely small. While the number of diplomatic missions grew in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in 1861 there were still only thirty-four, almost all in Europe.¹⁰

As in Europe, the U.S. diplomatic establishment remained exclusive and exclusionary. The diplomats who occupied the highest posts in the diplomatic corps hailed almost entirely from the white male aristocratic elite. They were generally handpicked by the president or secretary of state to serve on temporary missions, which they often funded themselves. This elite class of diplomatists contributed to the perception of the diplomatic establishment as clubby, cosmopolitan, and more in tune with their European colleagues than with ordinary Americans.¹¹

As the diplomatic establishment grew over the course of the nineteenth century, a new layer of career diplomats emerged. If high-level State Department officers had limited influence on the great international power struggles of the day, these rank-and-file officers had even less. Under the spoils system, high posts were typically filled by political cronies who lacked professional expertise in foreign affairs. This left the careerists to function more as clerks than as foreign policy advisors. As historian Robert Schulzinger describes, rank-and-file diplomats in the mid-nineteenth century copied dispatches into large volumes for their chancery’s archives, while dreaming of doing important political work. At the end of the century, the department was, according to its own secretary, John Hay, an antiquated, feeble organization, enslaved by precedents and routine inherited from another century and burdened with tasks that could only be described as drudgery.¹²

By this time, Europe’s diplomatic establishments had already embarked on the process of transforming themselves into modern bureaucracies. Voices outside the diplomatic establishment highlighted the need for similar reforms in the United States. In his lectures, Max Weber, the seminal theorist of bureaucracy, pointed to America’s preference for cronyism as a symptom of its almost childlike resistance to the inevitability of modern organizational structures. Henry James argued that the lack of a professionalized Foreign Service in the United States reflected America’s naiveté and unsuitability for membership in the circle of major world powers.¹³

Efforts to reform the diplomatic establishment had already begun in the 1880s as part of a larger project to rein in the spoils system, create a more modern civil service, and build a diplomatic corps that matched the growing power and importance of the United States on the world stage. In 1883, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform, or Pendleton Act, which took steps toward transforming the federal government into a modern merit-based bureaucracy. In the ensuing years, under the leadership of Wilbur Carr, who headed the consular bureau from 1902 to 1924, the State Department moved decisively in this direction. Between 1905 and 1909, the department established regional divisions and a modern filing system for organizing the increasing flow of information from abroad. The department expanded further in World War One, after which the position of undersecretary of state was established. In 1924, at the behest of Massachusetts congressman John Jacob Rogers, Congress passed the Rogers Act, which streamlined the formerly separate consular and diplomatic services and established the modern Foreign Service, with its merit-based entrance exam, as well as regular pay and a promotion schedule. This period marked the transition from a department of political appointees to one of careerists.

Attempts to democratize the diplomatic corps and modernize the diplomatic establishment were only partially successful. Especially at the high ranks, the Foreign Service was still mostly composed of the social elite. As in other elite institutions that claimed to be merit-based, undesirables, including Jews, Catholics, and women, were typically weeded out in the oral interview. Despite its holdover elitism, the department continued to grow. By January 1936, it had 33 divisions, offices, and bureaus and 750 officers. Expansion took place at an even faster pace during the Second World War, at the end of which the department had more than 50 divisions. As one Department of State historian noted,1944 marked the dividing line between the old Department of State and the present agency. The 1946 Foreign Service Act created a stronger administration arm to manage the expanded agency.¹⁴

However uneven, the bureaucratization of the State Department was premised on the idea that a modernized diplomatic establishment would have more influence over the shape of U.S. foreign policy. But the promise of greater influence remained mostly that. In fact, the opposite happened. As the State Department grew and bureaucratized, tensions and distance between the diplomatic establishment and both the White House and Congress also grew. During the period between World War One and World War Two, as careerist Charles Chip Bohlen would later recall, when diplomats wanted to express their views on a specific foreign policy, they were typically told, Don’t get involved. A combination of presidential hostility toward the diplomatic corps, congressional isolationism, and economic disaster made the late 1920s and 1930s an especially low moment in the morale of the Foreign Service.¹⁵ The department continued to grow throughout the Second World War, but remained largely subordinate to the military offices and personnel in charge of the war effort. After the war, the State Department had to compete with the new organizations that gave rise to the national security state—including the Defense Department, the National Security Council (NSC), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Between 1950 and 1960, as the budgets of these agencies skyrocketed, the State Department budget actually declined. In 1960, while $40 billion were allocated to the Defense Department, only $246 million were allocated to State.¹⁶

Morgenthau may have overstated his case on behalf of diplomats, but he did not overstate the degree to which, since the end of the Second World War, presidents and senior policymakers undervalued, if not outright rejected, the analyses and recommendations of rank-and-file State Department officers, further diminishing the role of the diplomatic establishment in the formulation of policy. While each administration had its own reasons for marginalizing the diplomatic establishment, these generally included a combination of substantial disagreement over the direction of major policies and distrust of the State Department as a bureaucracy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who presided over the rise of the United States to world eminence, was content to write off the Foreign Service as a bunch of striped-pants boys. Truman, in whose term the State Department has been seen by many to be at its zenith, fantasized about firing the whole bunch. As a result of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations against the State Department in 1950, he and Eisenhower did fire dozens of them, albeit reluctantly. Though he attempted to revitalize the department, Kennedy quickly came to the conclusion that it was just a bowl of jello. For Nixon, the State Department did not merit even a derogatory metaphor. It was, quite simply, filled with sons of bitches. While a few presidents in this period empowered their secretaries of state, they almost universally belittled and alienated the diplomatic establishment as a whole.¹⁷

Through most of the pivotal foreign policy decisions of the American century, diplomats largely accepted their marginalized status. This tendency reflected the longer history of the State Department as well as the structure and culture of the institution as it evolved in the twentieth century. As the State Department grew and bureaucratized, it increasingly policed itself through a culture of restraint and passivity, which was reinforced by new bureaucratic layers and checkpoints. Promotions and careers depended on playing by the rules, not flouting them. Dissent posed a social risk, and dissenters were less likely to be welcomed by the in crowd.¹⁸ The only alternative option, which few careerists chose to exercise, was to leave the State Department altogether.

But there were exceptions. In his classic 1970 study of declining organizations, Albert Hirschman used the term voice to describe the actions of the few bureaucrats who decide to express their opinions rather than resign or resign themselves to the status quo. China hand John Paton Davies expressed the sentiments of such internal dissenters in a 1945 letter home to his family. To get out of it and speak the truth would be a refreshing experience. On the other hand, somebody has to carry on with the job. We can stay on hoping that things will be better, that our experience can be productive of some good.¹⁹

This book highlights the experience of Davies and other diplomats who attempted to voice their opposition to the status quo. While my title is inspired by the more illustrious and scandalous Pentagon Papers, there are important differences between The Dissent Papers and the forty-seven-volume, top-secret study of U.S. policy in Vietnam leaked to the press in 1971. Unlike The Pentagon Papers, the dissent papers, as I collectively refer to the documents I analyze in this book, are not currently classified nor do they pertain to a single foreign policy. While The Pentagon Papers tells the story of U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam primarily through documents that reflected the status quo, my analysis of the dissent papers tells the story of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Second World War through documents that critiqued the reigning logic. As individuals, and as a group, the diplomats whose stories are told in this book have not been the fingertips of foreign policy so much as in-house authors of dissent.²⁰

Often, the main purpose of stories about dissent is to heroize the dissenter and increase awareness of alternative perspectives that might have been but were not adopted—in short, to bring some neglected wisdom to the fore. The reports, memos, and telegrams in The Dissent Papers do indeed contain a good deal of neglected wisdom. In its own complicated way, the very act of internal dissent is heroic and deserves some attention as such.

That said, The Dissent Papers is decidedly not an ode to the ever wise and always tragic voice of American diplomats. In addition to the fact that not everything the authors of the dissent papers wrote was wise, not all of it was entirely rejected. In the majority of cases, diplomats had only a limited influence on the final decisions of policy. In several of the most pivotal policies of the period, however, dissenting diplomats played a key role in the debates leading up to and following the moment of decision.

In the following pages, I examine diplomatic dissent in four pivotal moments in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. Chapter 1 traces George Kennan’s opposition to the militarization of the Cold War after he helped to formulate the policy of containment that initially defined the conflict. Chapter 2 examines the critique of U.S.-China relations in the 1940s articulated by John Stewart Service and John Paton Davies, who were later accused of losing China to the communists. Chapter 3 analyzes George Ball’s dissent against the escalation of the war in Vietnam within the close circle of President Johnson and his advisors. And chapter 4 details the creation of an official Dissent Channel in the State Department in 1971, its role in the Watergate-era politics, and its use in the opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Broadly speaking, the arc from Kennan to Service and Davies to Ball and more recent dissenting diplomats reveals the temporary rise of the State Department’s influence on foreign policy in the immediate postwar period and its subsequent decline in the ensuing decades.

Considered separately, the foreign policies that these diplomats challenged had a specific context and logic, which I examine in this book. Collectively, however, they reflect the overarching logic of the national security state that emerged at the end of the Second World War, crystallized in the Cold War, and continues to structure U.S. foreign policy today. While dynamic and complex, this logic encompasses a set of broad tendencies that characterize policy in this period, including the tendency to: frame international conflict in terms of ideology rather than power, understand foreign policy in the context of domestic politics, empower the defense establishment, and solve conflicts through military rather than diplomatic means.²¹

Just as each policy had its own contours and context, so did the authors of the dissent papers have their specific views, which were shaped by where and when they served, their position in the State Department, and their individual backgrounds and personalities. While their specific views differed, Kennan, Service, Davies, Ball, and other diplomats featured in this book shared a general concern about the long-standing impotence of the State Department and its continued decline over the course of the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, they resisted the logic of the national security state and believed in the foundational tenets of diplomacy, in which power matters more than ideology, foreign policy and domestic politics are considered mutually exclusive, and diplomats, rather than the military, forge and maintain a stable international order.

~

This book is as much an account of the tradition of diplomatic writing as it is one of dissenting diplomats. More specifically, it examines the tradition of writing in the diplomatic establishment and traces the evolving promise, practice, and limits of dissent within that tradition, from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to that of George W. Bush. How did diplomatic writing change over the course of this period? How did those changes both reflect and contribute to the prospects for dissent within the diplomatic establishment? And how might the evolution of diplomatic dissent writing shed light on the logic and formulation of U.S. foreign policy in this period?

As the arc of The Dissent Papers suggests, the evolution of diplomatic writing is directly related to both the ongoing process of bureaucratization and the evolving relationship between the diplomatic establishment and the White House in a given administration. State Department writing was most influential in the years immediately following the Second World War. However, as I examine in the context of Kennan’s official writings, career diplomats in this period not only shaped but also responded to institutional, political, and cultural pressures to represent the emerging Cold War as an ideological clash of good versus evil, rational versus irrational, and capitalism versus Marxism-Leninism. Generally speaking, the tradition of diplomatic writing and its influence on policy decreased over the course of the Cold War. As chapter 2, on the dissent and fate of the China hands, shows, the power and influence of diplomatic dissent writing was radically diminished in the 1950s. This was the result, in large part, of the McCarthyist attacks on the State Department, which punished diplomats whose reports transgressed the ideological framework of the Cold War, a framework that, ironically, diplomats like Kennan had helped foster just a few years earlier. Under Eisenhower, in order to survive, would-be dissenters in the State Department engaged in a culture of self-censorship, which continued into the 1960s. Characterized by vague bureaucratic prose, diplomatic writing of the early 1960s reflected the repressed culture and thinking of the diplomatic establishment in this period and contributed to President Kennedy’s frustrations with the State Department. The lack of bold diplomatic reportage and analysis in this period both reflected and contributed to the weaknesses of U.S. policy, especially in Southeast Asia. The vexed style and repressed substance of diplomatic dissent continued under Lyndon Johnson. Thus, George Ball, a political appointee, wrote his dissent memos on Vietnam against the backdrop of a particularly low moment in the quality and candor of writing in the diplomatic establishment. As chapter 4 shows, paralleling popular disenchantment with the war, diplomatic writing became bolder and more outspoken toward the end of the Johnson administration. Nixon effectively thwarted and contained its potential power, by implementing an official Dissent Channel, which remained in use for the duration of the Cold War and is still in existence today. One effect of the Dissent Channel was to ensure that diplomatic dissent writing