Undiplomatic Reforms

Charles W. Thomas was a desperate man. A lawyer and a career diplomat, Thomas, 45, had been "selected out" of the Foreign Service. Reason: he had not been promoted from the Class 4 level to Class 3 within the mandatory eight years. He was dismissed with only one year's salary and $323 a month (money he had himself put into a retirement fund) to support a wife and two children. In nearly three dispiriting years Thomas endured nearly 2,000 job rejection letters; he was "too old" or "too qualified," and anyway, he had been fired by the State Department. Finally on an April afternoon in Washington, Charles Thomas took up a gun and shot himself to death.

There is a Kafkaesque cast to the Thomas tragedy. Try as he might, Thomas could not get his day in court to determine whether his selection-out was based on the fact that he had received poor performance ratings or that the State Department had somehow failed to consider his highly favorable ratings. In fact, it was the latter. Thomas had carved a distinguished career in posts such as Tangier, Port-au-Prince and Mexico City, where he became a specialist in Mexican radical politics. Indeed, he had high marks from his superiors and colleagues alike; the explicit blemish on his record was an observation by a Mexico City superior that Thomas did not exercise proper "control" over his secretary.

In contrast, a laudatory report from the Foreign Service Inspector, Ambassador Robert McClintock, was accidentally misfiled under the name of another Charles W. Thomas, then Consul General in Antwerp. The report was eventually logged into its proper place, two days after Thomas had been turned down by the promotion board. The board deemed it too much bother to reopen the case.

Fang and Claw. The Thomas affair is certainly the most shocking to occur within the labyrinth of Foggy Bottom personnel practices, but it is by no means the only one of its kind. Willard Brown, a Class 2 officer, discovered after his selection-out that the State Department had lost all of his personnel records and that consequently his name had not been considered for promotion for several years. Nor are good men being passed over just for clerical errors. The selection process in the department has traditionally been the last word in Darwinistic elitism. McClintock, although a highly regarded professional, had a reputation for sending overly favorable reports on many officers. With little negative to go on, promotion boards used the tiniest criticisms as justification for passing over a candidate. Hence Thomas' dismissal.

There are 3,000 field officers and aides serving in the Foreign Service, and around 100 are weeded out every year. Two hundred more resign annually. The process follows a fundamental Government pattern. Every man is rated at least once a year by his superior, who then passes his reports on to a departmental reviewing officer, who in turn presents his recommendations to the reviewing boards. While no one in the department argues that incompetents should not be winnowed out, the feeling is that the rating system has deteriorated into an endless round of pettifoggeries and petty jealousies, where too frequently the men who do not play up to their superiors' vanities wind up on the short end.

This fang-and-claw attitude has prompted a thorough reappraisal of the State Department's personnel system. Rather belatedly, Deputy Under Secretary William Macomber Jr., the department's top administrative officer, called in Thomas' widow Cynthia and offered her virtually any job she wanted. More broadly, the selection-out rules have been changed to prevent the flagrant injustice in the systems. Now an officer who achieves Class 5 cannot be fired until he has reached age 50 or served 20 years. This way, at least, he is entitled to retirement pay.

Scornful. Further, the State Department has set up new, formidably titled Interim Grievance Procedures, the first major amendment to the Foreign Service Act since it was passed in 1946. These procedures are to last until employee-management relations are reformed under a plan projected by President Nixon. However, many officers are scornful of Macomber's new measures, since they stipulate that an employee must first take up his grievance with his superior--against whom the grievance is usually brought in the first place--and can only appeal to a board picked by the department. Says one legal official at State: "I don't care if a grievance panel is headed by Charles Evans Hughes or Jesus Christ, it still remains an in-house procedure without any chance of outside appeal."

Help is forthcoming from the outside. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week refused to report the confirmation of Howard P. Mace, 55, as U.S. Ambassador to Sierra Leone, which is tantamount to defeat of his nomination. As director of personnel for four years, Mace was the source of much of the department's interior turbulence. He was known behind his back as the "executioner," the man primarily responsible for the selecting-out process. Officers also noted that under his aegis men with high diplomatic potential were often bypassed for plush jobs in favor of men little experienced in diplomacy from his department. Congress is also taking more direct measures. There are two bills pending before Congress that would overhaul and codify the grievance system.

Concerned DOS officers are seizing their own initiative. A group has banded together to launch a class action against the Secretary of State; to raise money for this expensive exercise, they have instituted the Charles W. Thomas Fund. One junior officer invoked a more primitive grievance procedure. Furious over what he considered an unfair performance rating, he stopped his superior in a corridor of the State Department and cut loose a smacking right cross to the nose.

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