An Inside Look at State Department Staffing
Author’s Notes: After telling my story following to a
few close friends and family, I was urged to publish it for a wider
audience. At first, I
resisted this notion because I didn’t want to sound like I was crying “sour
grapes”. While I could easily be
identified by the information given in this article, I have felt it better to
pen this anonymously, not out of fear of retaliation, but because what I
experienced and others whom I talked to leads me to believe my experience is
more typical of State Department operating procedure rather than unique to my
particular case. I would welcome
comments by e-mail to paydgs@yahoo.com
or otherwise in the space given on this particular web page.
In view of the events of September 11, I
believe it is not only wise but also absolutely necessary for our diplomatic
corps to start thinking about protecting American interests before engaging in
politically correct public relations. Bringing a pit bull into a home to young children so
they can experience interacting with an interesting animal is as foolish as
routinely issuing visas to militant Islamists and other overseas visitors who
harbor hostile feelings toward America.
Likewise, forbidding your children to interact with a gentle guinea pig
because you don’t want to discriminate against or racially profile the pit bull
is as foolish as confiscating knitting needles from grandmothers boarding
airplanes because we have to “treat everybody equally.” Of course people are not animals and
many may find this analogy objectionable.
But the average American can understand why the procedure to issue a
young lady from Japan a visa to study English should be different from the
procedure to issue a young man from the Saudi Arabia a visa to study
flying. It is past time that our
State Department understood the same thing.
About this time last year, I took the Foreign Service
qualifying test. I was told that
the test was extremely difficult and only a small number of people passed and
went on to the next step of screening interviews. What would motivate a businessperson in mid career to do
such a foolish thing? Even if
successful, the pay would be less than I’m making now. There is a good chance I would be
assigned to some armpit country of the world such as Pakistan rather than a
pleasant garden spot such as Japan where I am now. It didn’t make sense either economically or from a career
advancement viewpoint. However, an
unmistakable force pushed me to try out. Even now, I can’t say for sure what it was other than
an inner feeling of loyalty and sense of duty.
Much of the information I had gotten both from people
who've I'd known who worked in the Foreign Service as well as secondary sources
indicated that a large number of mid-level people were quitting the foreign
service for reasons ranging from better opportunities in the private sector to
demoralization resulting from eight years of control by Clintonista party hacks
who put their career advancement ahead of American interests.
Having lived over half my adult life in Japan (including
the last 12 years), worked in business in a variety of fields where the State
Department indicated need of my particular skills, and being encouraged by my
wife -- “You are always complaining about what goes on inside our government,
why don’t you try to help out from the inside”-- I decided to register for the exam and spend $15 or so on
the study guide. She also said
this could well be my chance to move as, no matter how the election turned out,
I wouldn’t be working under a Clinton administration. While we hoped for a clean break with that sorry
administration, I told her I wouldn’t start a government career under his
protégée, Al Gore, even if I passed the test and, further, unless I scored in
the top 5%, I wouldn’t pursue it either.
In mid-September the study guide arrived and I took to
reading it on the train to and from work. Some of the questions required me to dust off some long
unused facts stored in my brain since my college days, but most of it for a
news and history junkie like myself was fairly easy. The first Saturday in November, I took the train to
the nearest U.S. Consulate to take a daylong exam with 20 some other
hopefuls. After checking our
identification and letting us in, the exam was passed out in various
parts—essays, profiles, multiple choice (fill in the oval) type questions on
history, geography, economics, international issues and a very few quantative
type questions which were amazingly light-weight. The only parts of the exam I was pressed to finish
were the profile portion and essay portion, both of which I was probably too
thorough and introspectively honest about. In fact, most of the exam was so lightweight that I
left remembering the three questions out of hundreds that I may have
missed. Two of them I still
remembered long enough when I got home two hours later to look up—Who designed
the Vietnam Memorial ?(Maya Lin) and What are the Maghreb States?
So, I figured I had passed the test, but couldn’t
guarantee to my wife it was in the top 5%. During lunch and after the exam several examinees
mentioned they had taken the test several times and were still looking to pass,
so I figured I had probably done well enough to be close. While my wife was quite excited
when I told her about the test, I tried to pour cold water on her enthusiasm. She always dreamed about having an 8 to
5 working husband who’d come home by 6:30 p.m. every evening, rather than one
who considered 8 p.m. early.
More than that, she thought I would be well motivated to help clean
house in Washington and overseas.
I reminded her it was a long shot and the presidential election could
indicate the country was satisfied with the last eight years of scandal and
ignoring traditional allies such as Japan to cultivate politically expedient
regimes such as China. My
words nearly proved prophetic in the 6 weeks which followed the election in
which I predicted Bush would end up with the short straw because his people
would play by the rules—so forget about me pursuing the opportunity even if I
scored in the top 5%. At
length, she made me promise that if Bush pulled it out and I scored in the top
5%, I would go for the interviews
In early February, the test results came showing I’d
scored in the top 1% in the job knowledge portion of the test. There was also a form to fill out
return answering whether to accept an oral exam on April 2, decline or
reschedule. Well, since April is
the start of the new fiscal year in Japan and not a good time for someone in
business to be away from the office, I asked to reschedule in June, when I would
take my daughter to attend summer school in the U.S. While my wife said they wouldn’t like this and I should go
in April, I reminded her all travel was on our nickel and it would be a
worthwhile test of interest to see if they would reschedule. A couple of weeks passed and
there was no word on my rescheduling request. I called the number they gave, only to get a recording that
the scheduling person was away on vacation. ‘How typical of Washington, ‘ I thought, ‘to schedule
a vacation to coincide with the season of your responsibilities.’ But finally, after some
persistent pursuit, we got a rescheduled date close to our request.
We went a couple days early both to get over jetlag and
show my daughter around Washington.
When the test date came, I got up early and went to the evaluation office
not far from the Foggy Bottom Metro stop in plenty of time for the 7 a.m.
strict deadline to report.
After waiting around until about 6:59 a.m., we were finally allowed to
go through the metal detector, have our identification checked and bags examined
and get a badge for the day. We
all raced for the office figuring 7 a.m. was not far off. As we walked in and had our names
checked off, we were invited to sit down and help ourselves to coffee. By 7:30, the room filled with the dozen
people to have the big interview.
The secretary broke the silence by telling us we were the quietest group
she ever had and we weren’t competing against each other but against a
standard, so we might as well get acquainted. We introduced ourselves—an interesting group but not
particularly diverse. There were
two ladies and ten white guys.
While I’m technically a minority, I can pass for a white guy, so I’ve
never played the race card. The
ladies appeared to be both of Asian extraction (Chinese and India, I’d guess from
the names). There were two
veterans—one who’d come from Florida and one from Iowa who worked at the
Pentagon. While I’m
technically a partial cripple but got in early enough to hide my cane in the
closet and refuse to claim it— there was also nobody with a visible
disability, so it didn’t appear our group would get a lot of diversity
points. There was even less
diversity on educational background—everyone was a college graduate and only
three were from outside the northeast and non-Ivy League—the two veterans and
myself.
So for the 45 minutes or so before we were called into the
first exam, we exchanged quite a bit of banter. While I was not one to flaunt my political opinions, it soon
became clear from the cracks about the president’s intelligence and whether
Colin Powell could pass the same security clearance we were required to pass
that most of the group were from the left end of the spectrum. The only ones who clearly didn’t fit
this mold were—surprise—the two veterans, myself and a gentleman from
Connecticut.
What was billed as a grueling day of
exams and oral evaluations turned out to be, for the most part, light and
fluffy. For every 30 minutes of
work such as role playing, interviews and such, there were at least 60 minutes
of break, including a staggered 2.5 to 3 hour lunch period. The three conservatives and one
moderate (from Connecticut) in the group ended up having our lunchtime
coincide, so we shared a table. A
salad, cottage cheese and a vegetable drink in the State Department cafeteria
set me back eight bucks—about what I generally paid for a full restaurant meal
in Japan. We kidded the vet
from Florida in the group that he would probably get the “Veteran’s quota”
since he had experience working in PR with the military. We also remarked about how the four of
us seemed not only the oldest in the group, but the most politically
balanced. The guy from
Connecticut laughed and said the rest of the group was pretty typical of the
know-it-alls you find in the Ivy League.
We asked him how he managed to keep his head screwed on straight coming
out of such a background. He
remarked it was probably just real world experience.
During the long breaks, I and most of the examinees took
turns going over a large three ring file with laminated profiles of the various
examiners. Again, we couldn’t find
much diversity—unless one counts M&M’s style diversity (different colors
outside, same content inside).
What few examiners were not from Ivy League colleges, were either from
those one tier removed in the northeast or former journalists who had worked in
various foreign countries (more than a few of these likely naturalized citizens
judging from their names and birthplaces). There was one—exactly one—examiner in the profile pages who
had worked in private industry outside journalism—he had a brief stint in the
Peace Corps (which was not uncommon on other profiles) and then a couple of
years teaching English in Japan.
The questions we got overwhelmingly reflected this jaded eye view of the
world and, when my turn came, I did my best not to show any hostility though I
did challenge some of their assumptions reflected in their standardized views
that America’s duty overseas was to promote the D’s—democracy, development and
diversity. I pointed out
that among the countries in Asia which most consistently supported American
interests, one (Singapore) was not particularly democratic and two (Japan and
Korea) were not particularly diverse, smiling when I said it.
For the most part, though, I tried to maintain a low
profile like most of the group, speaking out when we were supposed to defend
our position in the various role plays and keeping quiet when it was someone
else’s turn to speak. The
final “test” took place shortly after lunch where we were asked to write a memo
based on our role playing earlier in the day—and where I found an important
page of my notes (from which we were to prepare the memo) was missing. Of course, nobody knew anything about
it, so I prepared the memo the best I could without it, figuring (rightly as it
turned out) that most of the decisions were already made and this was merely a
smokescreen.
After filling out an evaluation form on what we thought
about the validity of their lightweight tests and softball interview questions,
we were all thanked and told to go back to the big room to wait. The guy from Connecticut was
upset saying he had “blown it.”
I told him to relax because most of the day was more than likely just
window dressing to cover decisions the examiners had already made before lunch
or even before the evaluation started. From what I could observe, everyone in the room who
had made it to that point was intelligent and qualified to be there. It would all boil down to the personal
preferences of the examiners. By
now it was 3 p.m. and the examiners begin calling in people before we had
waited 30 minutes, hardly a proper time to carefully check or evaluate much of
anything.
The first three called in were myself, the vet from Iowa
who worked at the Pentagon and the guy from Connecticut. We each went to individual
rooms. I was handed my evaluation
score that showed I had missed their 5.25-point requirement by 0.35
points. They tried to put a
happy face on it telling me how few people made it to that point and how close
I’d come. I suspect everyone in
that room was within half a point either above or below that magic number given
what had happened that day with long breaks, softball questions and little tests
of much of anything beyond the superficial. With my daughter alone in the hotel and more of Washington
to see, I wasn’t in much of a mood to listen to their bulls*** and they offered
little to justify their reasoning.
I thanked them politely and asked whether it was worth trying the
process in the future, more out of curiosity to their reaction than any
interest. “Oh,” they said,
“some candidates try several times before they are accepted into the Foreign
Service.” ‘Screw it,’ I
thought, ‘I’m not going to make a career out of trying to brownnose a bunch of
petty little bureaucrats from Ivy League academia with such shallow real world
experience that won’t accept such experience if it is offered to them on a
silver platter.’
On
my way out, the vet from Iowa and I noticed the vet from Florida was still in
the room and not in the second shift of people being blown off. We gave him the thumbs up sign as we
walked out and headed to the Metro stop, comparing notes along the way. Our conclusion was mutual—with
such a homogeneous group of people representing U.S. interests overseas and
selecting their successors, we would be unlikely to accomplish much even if we
got in and even if the administration had changed for the better. We were better off staying in our
respective real worlds of Defense and business and hoping that an occasional
guy like our new friend from Florida could slip through the political
correctness net on the veteran’s quota to ensure that at least somebody in the
State Department might represent America’s interests instead of those of the
Globalists with their own warped interpretation of the 3 D’s.
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