Georgetown forum; Developing the diplomat

Developing the diplomat a topic for the eleven hundred and sixty first consecutive broadcast of the Georgetown University radio forum. Another in a series of educational and informative programs from Washington D.C. The Georgetown forum was founded in 1946. This is Wallace Fanning speaking to you by transcription from the Raymond Rice studio on the campus of Georgetown University historic Jesuit seat of learning in the nation's capital. Today's discussion will be developing the diplomat participating are the honorable George B. Allen former U.S. ambassador and former director of the Foreign Service Institute of the department of state and ambassador in residence at the George Washington University. Dr. Jessie a man dean of the Monday Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Dr. Richard but well director of the Business Council of International Understanding and executive training program and a

professor of the Southeast Asian affairs at the School of International Service of the American University 50 years ago when American diplomacy was in its bureaucratic infancy. Georgetown University established its School of Foreign Service the nation's first. In the past half century of crowded history the State Department has grown to enormous responsibility power and size. Similarly the School of Foreign Service which taught only a handful of students in the beginning now instructs a student body of nearly 1000 As America faces complex and changing issues in international affairs. The nature of education for diplomacy takes on a new importance as concerned Americans we might ask our diplomats born or made. Can our earlier methods of training that diplomats serve our country's interests in the space age.

As a recent book about State Department puts it state finds itself with fires in the in-basket every day. Can we train young Americans to help put out such fires to consider these and related matters we have with us today on the Georgetown forum a former director of a federal institution of diplomatic training and representatives of two schools of government. We're going to launch the conversation by asking Ambassador Allen's opinion. Are diplomats born or made by laws they are made exceptions of course outstanding exceptions but when you say are they on anybody no matter what his talent is as to develop it and prove it whether he is in ought is doable. Engineer what it is and there are people who are born with great diplomatic

talent because Benjamin Franklin is the outstanding one but we've got good Giants today of diplomacy. People like David Bruce in London who's the only American who's ever been American ambassador to France Germany and Great Britain. You know in history he's a giant of the all time foreign service. He did not have a great deal of formal training in diplomacy although he was a young man in the Foreign Service for some 10 years in his early days. But by and large of the thirty five hundred foreign service officers that were serving the United States around the world today. And my answer is very definitely that they are that they are made they're not just geniuses born with a great talent. Thank you Ambassador on the Dr. Mann. What do you look for. And I pointing diplomat.

Mr. Fanning I thinking on your question and it occurs to me that the training which up until perhaps 15 years ago was a specialized training of a semiprofessional character for a small group will indeed be the model of all so-called liberal education in the future. I think that the recent developments in communication make it an essential for every university in United States to educate its students in an international way. In other words I believe that as strange as it may have sounded to Father Walsh whom we celebrate today what was then especially in 1999 will be an absolute requirement because as we know all of our children are growing up with an awareness of all the problems of the world through the news media which reach them every day. So I look simply for a method

of mastery by the students of the kinds of problems that they have picked up really in their bloodstream through the experience of every day of their living. Do you find that there's any shortage of qualified students today. No. We have about a thousand students and I'm happy to say that these students are superb students they are wonderfully equipped we have a great many bilingual students we have a great many students who come to us with other gifts and capacities. Dr. Barber I think in the case of the students we have nothing to complain about. And I would of course accept our own institutions because I think our security orientation in this field in our Washington location partly accounts for a difference. But if anything I think our students are much more internationally oriented than the curricular of most of our colleges and universities up and down the land. And I think one problem here is to distinguish who you mean by the diplomats. If you mean someone who is

balm for the foreign service with a capital F and S. It is perhaps somewhat easy to provide him with adequate training because he's made a kind of career selection in the choice of the school he'll go to the person who bothers me is the economist or the agronomist. Some other technical specialist who may have no idea at all he's going oversee but may find himself in a Vietnam in a Congo someplace else in the years ahead having to apply his specialized competency in a culture for which he is not ideally prepared I think this places tremendous emphasis on what Dean Mann has said providing an education that is totally International for the largest number of persons. Dr. Burke Well you've suggested that curriculum curricula have not kept up with it with our progress in this area. We're undergoing change in this respect and I would estimate probably no nation in history has changed more rapid in this regard. But for example our attention to Latin America to

Africa to the Middle East or Asia is still modest compared to our concern for Western Europe we are still an Atlantic oriented community I'm not suggesting for a moment a diminishing of training and education exposure in that area from which we developed our own culture. I am suggesting it's perhaps lamentable the extent to which most of our institutions neglect some of the other geographical areas. And may I just make this additional point. Not only in terms of developing the diplomatic but developing that woman whoever she may be who turns out to be the diplomats wife or the ID specialist wife who never by her own career aspirations and to support is she going to be in some quite different perhaps exotic type of country. Would you have her trained to. I would have her trained in the kind of internationally oriented liberal curriculum that I think D-man was speaking of in his remarks. Well now I'm not quite sure I understand and possibly our listeners don't just how broad a curriculum you're talking about.

What would you have the foreign service school at Georgetown for example. Teach people agronomy or something of that nature. I'm not so sure I would prescribe for the Foreign Service school at Georgetown I would certainly for the school of the National Service an American university where perhaps I have a right more to prescribe. Now I'm thinking of the agronomist or the economists for example the engineer to suggest that he needs one exposure for example to different currents of religious thought that he needs exposure to different ways of organizing a society politically that he should be familiar with different ot norms in our world. You know obviously one can build a model here that is so impossible to achieve it will never be fulfilled. But this is the kind of thing I'm thinking about that he has an awareness of other cultures in his own and maybe it's only necessary for example that he gain this training with respect to one culture area and if he can do this then he develops a kind of frame of reference that makes a transition to

some other the easier to accomplish in man. Would you care to call I'm saying you're reflecting on a fact but beside me as ambassador Allen who has a lifetime of experience. In actual operation if that's a correct word as a diplomat the great distinction and I I would be very interested in hearing his own evaluation of education. Well I think it should be emphasized that there are two aspects of training for our foreign service of any kind whether it's in a private cooperation academic world business and government. That is the training that one gets before one enters this field and the training after he enters or in service type of training. Now the Department of State and other agencies of the U.S. government. Have a maintain

they Foreign Service Institute which is an in service type of operation. In other words we used to get their letters often from people in India and Iran in various places. Please give me your catalog and how I came into the Foreign Service Institute. Well the answer is that you got to enter the US government very soon because it's only for people who are already employed by the US government then oftentimes you have to go do it you don't have any choice. It is a young foreign service officer who is starts right off going to the Foreign Service Institute. It will probably amaze most people to lie and that the Foreign Service aims to do with strange people from the State Department us a D military and 26 different government agencies last year had 19 team thousand registrations. About half of those were in languages. So when you talk about current drivers one of the key

things that one always has to remember is the that in most of the places in the world you got to speak to use a foreign language in order to really communicate with the people broadly so in-service training is a very important aspect. Alvar any foreign service type of activity on the other hand a better college and university training a bison has before he starts and the body gets along on the in-service training type. After you get a master on you I understand were personally acquainted with Father Walsh the fact that I had the great pleasure of knowing Father Walsh. As early as nineteen thirty eight I think when I came back from Egypt and was in the Near Eastern Division of the State Department the first time I met father was he had just come back from a trip to Baghdad where he was.

I had been helping a Jesuit school in Baghdad get on its beat and improve its situation greatly. Father Well it was a it was a great individual and also a great exponent of training of foreign service because his activity in establishing and maintaining the Georgetown School of Foreign Service is a type of pre actual service training that I referred to and these graduates have been a great embellishment to the foreign service of the United States where your career spans how many years. Thirty eight. Well next month it will be thirty nine years since I entered the Foreign Service in April 1930. And how would you compare the training and the men that are being turned up today. Well many American universities today have departments of Foreign Service and the area specialties there are China

Institute's there are Russian Institute's there are faculties which specialize in the Near East and the Far East and Europe. No an infinite larger number than they were thirty eight years ago. Because thirty eight years ago the United States could take foreign affairs or leave it. It didn't matter very much to us. And during that generation that has passed. The situation is changed 180 degrees. The United States is in the midst of foreign affairs all over the world oftentimes much more than we'd like. But we are there. So the call for training both in service training and pre-service training are all 100 times greater than they were thirty eight years ago. We sometimes name ambassadors who have not had

necessarily a background in foreign service. How do you regard that practice. If they are good ones I think it's fine. For example when we had well I used the name David Bruce once already when when David Bruce was in Paris and Jack McCloy and Bon and I guess Lou Douglas in London at the time or when Doug Dillon was in Paris. People of that sort we had is as able and fine a representation as any nation in the world. And they didn't have formal training. On the other hand if people are appointed purely for some political activity or just to enable them to enjoy a.

Position in their local community for having so represented the United States overseas it's often tragic and in modern times it didn't matter that much when when the United States did matter in foreign affairs. But if a person is just deported for to pay off a political debt with no comparable ability to carry on his job and the people of the United States are not well served nor the people of the other country all the world in bust How is it possible to look at this question of developing the diplomat from the perspective of how and why is it different to develop a diplomat than say the international businessman. In an age for example when we have such a large American economic presence for example in Europe it is not what we are really aiming for in our educational processes at least the kind of international man that he could serve in a public position yes well it was just an education I was just thinking is you speaking that they arent any

outstanding differences between training a person to go into the government service overseas on private servers overseas the same characteristics of understanding foreign cultures foreign languages history economics. Sociology if you wish. All those problems all those considerations are it seems to me the same for a person who not only is if he lives abroad as a businessman or a government official or an academician research an archaeologist but is a tourist for that matter. Mr. Ambassador this brings up something I've heard you comment on before at another on another occasion. The Peace Corps has been a form of international experience which many thousands of young Americans have had. I myself have had some experience of a brief kind directing Peace Corps training programs. It always became clear at a certain point in those

programs that the Peace Corps volunteer was surely not to think of himself as in any sense a formal diplomatic representative of his country. And I wonder if you would comment a little bit on the necessity for that and on the road of the Peace Corps in comparison with the role of the former I could take I bring up a very interesting subject with regard to training because I was at Stanford University a few months ago and a professor at Stanford started off the questioning period by saying that a young graduate from Stanford had gone into the beach gone. He served two years in the Peace Corps and then he's decided to go on the Foreign Service. Which is it one of the best training on a recruiting grounds that we have for the foreign service of the Peace Corps because those who do well at it have already demonstrated their ability to adjust themselves to foreign conditions and do enjoy and unusual experiences and living outside their own means

and capacity to adjust to it. But this professor said that when this young man had entered the Peace Corps he was told that he was to sympathize with the local point of view to the maximum extent possible in the country to which he was to serve to immerse himself into their life to live as they did. Do I think is they thought to understand their problems and sympathize with them and get along. It's awful. Immediately when he came into the Foreign Service the U.S. Department of State. So this young man said he was told 180 degrees opposite. Never forget he was said only said with one minute that you are an American and only an American. And this is the festival at Stanford as very much the same question.

You're implying What's the difference now between a person in the Peace Corps and a person in the Foreign Service. Well the difference is not is startling as this presentation of this young man made it out but there is a difference. And I let's take for example a piece cooperation is usually a one shot operation the person is going to Pakistan or the South Sea Islands or Nigeria or Senegal or somewhere else. If he goes into the Foreign Service he's going in for a career of 30 or 35 years perhaps. He's got to serve in a lot of countries. If he breaks his heart every country that he goes into out of the problems of that country take Pakistan and India you may serve one time in Pakistan and the next time in India. On the Arab-Israeli question she may be in an Arab state he may be in Israel. If he breaks his heart over the local problems of that particular area and just goes overboard and in sympathizing and trying to understand and reflect the point of

view of the people of that area he's going to have a pretty broken heart before he's in the Foreign Service very long. So it does take a much a good deal more detached. Point of View now. Some people don't like that. They say that sounds nationalistic could sound you've got a chip on your shoulder about your Americanism but that's a fact of life that a person has to judge when he decides to go into the Foreign Service. He is a Korean man and representing the American government. And while he can should be as International a mind it is as he possibly can be. Nevertheless he cannot to the same extent as a Peace Corps volunteer undertake to immerse himself so deeply in the problems of one area that he loses a general objectivity and best album one of the advantages of the Peace Corps is the fact that it does expose the young American to someone else's culture

and develop. What do you think of the use of shall we call it an interned ship for in a sense providing some of the same values of Peace Corps service and yet retaining this American identity a perspective which you just spoke and are in step by in the barn's I vision mean something that somehow brings the young American preparing for the foreign service into an overseas situation that gives him some partial respond we have no shortage of internship programs in our nation's capital and many of our foreign corporations and banks have such programs or is foreign policy a sufficiently delicate matter that one doesn't want to have an in our in. No quite the contrary I think an internship program would be excellent. It's costly and it did send people over for three months in the summer or something like that. That takes a good deal of appropriations. If you can afford it if you can get the get the funds it's an excellent way to test out a person's add

just ability to do foreign circumstances some people are just allergic to. Too much too long the barn has a maid. Take a trip. But after Make go home and but Judge children choose rules in foreign countries and to cope with foreign languages and foreign customs as it is it takes a certain acted to lead in the type of individual an internship with can do. To that extent to show a person and they people were looking at this person an indication of whether he's good thought forms of his life. Mr. Ambassador would you comment on this in connection with that response in Peace Corps and elsewhere. There has been some suggestion that the best educational process for young men who come to our schools is to confront them with direct experience rather than vicarious experience it's being suggested that it is now possible for an urban

university to send many of their students into the inner city there to observe many things not only the condition of poor people but even the way businesses operate to confront store owners and property owners and to come back and report on those experiences not necessarily in a term paper perhaps in a film perhaps in a tape recorded interview. The theory here is that direct experience is re-entering. The educational process. Do you have any thoughts on that yourself. Yes I do I think. And your illustration of direct experience within the United States is very apt. I may comment this on this subject though that I talk with a man the other day who had been a do years in the Peace Corps and then when he came back he was assigned to apple each year on a Vista program or something like that. Anyway he said that he has two years

in the Peace Corps were as simple and easy as compared with the problems that the finding accept ability in the Appalachians. He said that the people there were didn't want him to come in and try to tell him how to improve their crops or their health or their standards of living or the education or anything else their general attitude he said was Just give us your money and go away. He found much more acceptable at the in the center gone. Sidney Garland Im gonna And you found it in many many localities and Appalachian I think both experiences are useful as many people as possible to have I would like to turn back to were doctors man and well and I ask them if in this era of. Student dissatisfaction as it's being expressed on the campuses across the nation

there is a reflection of that too in the foreign service schools. Well yes I think that there is a reflection in the Foreign Service school that is certainly characteristic of the same phenomenon in all other schools I do not think it's unique I do not think it's more intense there. But I think it relates itself to some of the things we talked about at the beginning of the program namely as the world becomes more international and more of our children know it is international and feel it is international. This has an effect on institutions which are merely national and which are therefore a little bit less complete for these growing needs of our children our young people I think our young people are being young in a time when cultural institutions are developing very very quickly. So I really see much of our present unrest as a function of this. And I think we're going to have this continue for quite a while and we will simply have to live with it until

we develop a means of coping. There's an advantage I think also to this on rest in the sense that it is causing now I'll call it a process of negotiation between faculty and students student and administration and I think this this process of negotiation develop certain skills and I think it also and I don't I know this was not in Boston Alan's point but I think you'd be developing what he said that is the returning Peace Corps men had to learn to adapt to Appalachian. Also the foreign service officer spends a great deal of his own time in his career negotiating with other Americans among agencies and so forth and I don't regard this unrest as unfortunate in that perspective. Thank you gentleman. The subject developing the diplomat I thanks to the Honorable George Allen former U.S. ambassador to several nations and former director of the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State. Ambassador in residence at the George Washington University. To Dr. Jesse a man dean of the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service Georgetown University and

to Dr. Richard but well the director of the Business Council of International Understanding and executive training program and professor of Southeast Asian affairs at the School of International Service of the American University. You have attended the weekly discussion program the Georgetown University radio forum broadcaster which was transcribed in the Raymond Rice studio on the campus of historic Georgetown University in Washington D.C. next week you will hear discussed federal funds to campus militance. That's a question our panel at that time will consist of four Georgetown University students from the fellow Demick debating society. We welcome your comments and suggestions of just the station to which you are listening. This program has been presented in the interest of public education by Georgetown University. Your moderator. WALLACE fanning this program was distributed by the national educational radio network.