American Statecraft: The Story of the U.S. Foreign Service by Moskin J. Robert

Author:Moskin, J. Robert [Moskin, J. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

OTHER DISCRIMINATED GROUPS

It also took time to tear down official barriers against other groups that were discriminated against. The first Hispanic to become a Foreign Service ambassador was Joseph John Jova, a Dartmouth graduate who was appointed to Honduras in 1965. By 1992, only seven Hispanics had served as chiefs of mission.

The first Asian-American ambassadors were Julia Chang Bloch (Nepal in 1989) and William H. Itoh (Thailand in 1996). Bloch had been born in China and brought to San Francisco when she was nine. She could not become a Foreign Service officer, because when she graduated from college one had to be a citizen for nine years before joining the Foreign Service. “I saw no one who remotely looked like me in the Foreign Service, let alone in positions as ambassadors.” Instead, she entered diplomacy through the Peace Corps. When she returned to Washington, she said she still found every interview began with “How fast can you type?” She concluded, “My experience has taught me that diplomacy is still very much a man’s world.”

Gays and lesbians, the physically handicapped, and members of various other groups have been accepted slowly. A dramatic change was the admission of blind persons to the Foreign Service in 1989. The National Federation of the Blind credits Ambassador Edward J. Perkins, then Director General of the Foreign Service, for reversing the State Department’s historic attitude of excluding the blind and others.

Homosexuals had a difficult time during the security alarm that accompanied the Cold War and the McCarthy era. Although information here tends to be less transparent than that related to most other areas of discrimination, the State Department dismissed ninety-plus homosexual employees at the beginning of that period as security risks vulnerable to blackmail. Persecution intensified until gays and lesbians turned to the courts, and by the mid-1970s homosexuality was no longer a cause for dismissal.

As recently as 2007, Ambassador Michael E. Guest, a veteran of twenty-six years in the Foreign Service, resigned in protest against rules that discriminated against same-sex partners. He said the Foreign Service gave them fewer benefits than it did family pets. After serving as ambassador to Romania, Guest had worked in Washington to change the rules that deprived same-sex married partners and heterosexual unmarried partners of evacuation rights, foreign language training, diplomatic passports, and medical care. In 2006, he received the Christian A. Herter Award for constructive dissent from the AFSA, but he finally resigned.

Eugene Sweeney, consul general in Lisbon, believed things were changing because in 2009 same-sex partners finally won housing and travel coverage. But health care and pensions were not yet covered. The Foreign Service has certainly moved a significant distance toward reflecting the varieties and diversities of American society, but it still has battles to fight.

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