Yvonne Thayer probably could write the book on what it is like to be a Foreign Service wife: It is a way of life that she's seen from every angle.
Then, in the mid-1970s, Thayer was accepted into the Foreign Service herself and became half of what the State Department calls a "tandem couple." For 10 years, she grappled with the conflicting demands of pursuing a career while seeking assignments that would take her to the same places as her husband and allow time out to have and care for two children.
Now the cycle has come full circle for Thayer. Her husband is one of many career diplomats who failed to cross the new hurdles into the Senior Foreign Service and are being forced into retirement. While Reed ponders the problems of developing a new career, Thayer, at 39, is a Foreign Service officer with a dependent spouse.
"It's not the kind of situation where you're thinking about becoming an ambassador or even about less ambitious career moves," said Thayer, who currently works on Central American refugee problems. "My husband's pension annuity is not all that great, and right now our plans involve more immediate matters: making sure that I keep working so that we have an income."
George E. Moose, 42, has spent the last 20 years -- his entire adult life -- in the Foreign Service. This is unusual in an organization in which blacks like Moose normally do not stay long. Even more unusual is the fact that Moose has been an ambassador. It was only a beginner's posting to the tiny West African state of Benin, but his colleagues seem certain that Moose is destined to hold big-time ambassadorships and senior State Department posts in the years ahead.
"George has been marked as a winner; he's on his way," said Donald F. McHenry, who served as ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter administration.
Moose is understandably reluctant to discuss his situation. But he did say that many of the breaks that came his way have been denied to other blacks "not because of any conscious racism but by the natural workings of a system that is instinctively clubby for people of similar backgrounds and simultaneously so competitive that it doesn't dispose them to be generous or concerned for people outside their little group."
"It's a system that makes blacks feel like outsiders -- like they are being isolated and looked down upon," he said. "So it should come as no surprise when so many blacks finally say, 'This is costing me too much in terms of the wear and tear on my psyche. I'd rather go elsewhere.' "
Finding ways to satisfy the professional needs of women and minorities is an enormous challenge to the Foreign Service, one it has only begun to try to meet. Senior diplomats -- products of simpler times, when most women had limited career ambitions and minorities were rarely members of the Foreign Service -- have had a difficult time taking the challenge seriously, according to many younger diplomats.
The case of Eleanor Hicks, 44, is instructive. She walked away from a promising Foreign Service career -- a surprise and disappointment to many who remember that only a short time ago Hicks seemed a living recruitment poster for a new type of American diplomat: an attractive, charming and brainy person who also was a woman and a black.
In the 1970s, while serving as U.S. consul in Nice, she became a celebrity. She was cultivated by the local establishment and doted on by the French news media, which ran countless reports about every aspect of her life from her fluency in languages to her after-hours fondness for singing with local rock groups.
Yet, in 1983, after 17 years in the Foreign Service, Hicks quit. She did so, she said, partly for personal reasons. But, she added, she also was influenced by a feeling that "political and philosophical differences were impinging on evaluations of my work -- that the perceptions I brought to some subjects as a woman and a black clashed with the preconceived notions of some of my superiors."
"I can't say that I was discriminated against because I was a woman or black, but perhaps the publicity that I received in Europe caused some people to regard me as not a serious person," she said. In any case, having decided that she was at a dead end, Hicks went back to her home town of Cincinnati, where, as associate professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, she has discovered that "there is life after the Foreign Service."
For most of this century, the Foreign Service was the province of what historians of U.S. diplomacy called "aristocratic amateurs" -- socially well-connected people with the independent incomes that were necessary to supplement the service's parsimonious salaries and travel allowances. Gradually, a more professional approach took hold, but as late as the eve of World War II, the Foreign Service was dominated by people who shared the narrow caste attitudes of the Protestant monied class.
The tendency of its members to regard the sevice as a "gentlemen's club" was evident in the way in which the oral exam taken by all candidates for admission was used for years as a device for screening out applicants regarded as socially unacceptable. It was applied with particular vigor to bar the entry of Jews.
Anti-Semitism was such a pervasively undisguised force in the Foreign Service during the prewar years that several historians have ascribed part of the blame for the Holocaust to the State Department's wartime soft-pedaling of rumors about Nazi atrocities and its opposition to permitting Jewish refugees to enter the United States in sizable numbers.
After the war, the Foreign Service increased its size and professionalism in response to America's new superpower status. Jews and other ethnic Americans began coming in, and recruiters started looking beyond the Ivy League in their search for new talent. But, while the base was broadened, it remained essentially a white male bastion -- one that as recently as the early 1970s was gripped by a major internal debate about whether a dependent wife's social graces should be noted on her husband's efficiency reports.
Phyllis Oakley, now the State Department's deputy spokeswoman, joined the service in 1957, but after marrying a fellow officer, she recalled, "I unquestioningly followed the unwritten rule that said I had to resign." It was not until the 1970s when this practice had been discarded that she was able to come back "as one of the oldest junior officers in captivity." Oakley said her "wilderness years" experiences in teaching and working with the YMCA "may have made me a better-rounded person, but they certainly didn't enhance my ability to compete with men who spent those years gaining firsthand experience as diplomats."Recruitment: a Lack of Follow-Through
Beginning with blacks in the 1960s and women in the 1970s, the service has been struggling to break free of its ingrained old attitudes and make these groups feel welcome and useful to the practice of U.S. diplomacy. But, despite a resort to a number of special recruitment programs aimed at minorities and women, everyone involved says that the results have been disappointing.
The record is especially poor with respect to blacks, who are substantially underrepresented at all levels of the service and who account for a disproportionate number of the officers who fail to achieve tenure after completing their probationary early years or who stand at the bottom of each promotion class. According to the most recent available figures, only 12 blacks are among the 670 members of the Senior Foreign Service.
The situation recently prompted Ronald I. Spiers, undersecretary of state for management, and George S. Vest, director general of the Foreign Service, to announce plans for more vigorous recruiting and "the application of real affirmative action in the assignment process."
Black officers, many of whom are reluctant to be identified, counter that they have heard it all before. As one put it, "Every few years there is a reinventing of the wheel that concludes more has to be done about the special problems of blacks. It's all well-intentioned and sincere, but because managers and administrations change so frequently, there never seems to be a sustained follow-through."
The sense of alienation among black Foreign Service officers is so strong that several recently filed a class-action suit charging the State Department with systematic racial discrimination. The suit voiced complaints that white officers tend to denigrate the skills of black subordinates because many of them entered the Foreign Service under the relaxed rules of special recruitment programs; that blacks are ghettoized by being assigned primarily to Africa and Latin American countries with large black populations; that they are denied postings to other regions such as the Middle East because of a feeling that "blacks are not effective there," and that, in domestic assignments, they are pushed by subtle discrimination patterns into jobs and bureaus that offer the fewest chances for advancement.
Many note that the few blacks who have attained important foreign policy positions usually came from the outside rather than rising through the ranks. The most notable case was McHenry, who began as a Foreign Service officer but who quit for a career as a think-tank scholar before being sent to the United Nations by President Jimmy Carter.
McHenry, now a professor at Georgetown University, said his experience illustrates "the need to teach young blacks how to build political alliances if they're going to be on the outside and how to maneuver successfully within the bureaucracy if they're going to work from within."
"Too many blacks go to African affairs, either because they're interested in it or because the system pigeonholes them there," he said. "But it's the bottom priority. You may be a world-beater. But no one in authority sees you and gets to know your abilities."
Citing his Foreign Service background and that of younger, rising black officers such as Moose, McHenry said: "There is a classic success route in the Foreign Service. The way you get breaks is to be assigned while a young officer as a staff assistant to someone high up who will be sensitive to your talents. That happened to me. It happened to George Moose {who became an aide to Undersecretary of State Philip C. Habib}. It happened to almost all the successful white officers, and steps must be taken to assure that the opportunity is made available to a lot more blacks than just the occasional Don McHenry."
For all its difficulties, the department's minority problem seems relatively simple in comparison to the complications of regearing U.S. diplomatic practice to the changing situation of women, whether they are wives, Foreign Service officers or both.
There are the spouses of older officers who married when Foreign Service wives were expected to further their husband's careers by being gracious, well-spoken hostesses and charity workers. Now, these women have seen the rules abruptly changed in ways that make them feel scorned and unappreciated.
Their resentment has forced the State Department to explore ways of finding employment abroad for dependent spouses and to suggest that the government pay them a stipend for work formerly contributed on a volunteer basis. However, such ideas have evoked little sympathy from a Congress preoccupied with budgetary austerity or a public unwilling to pay people for participating in what it sees as the glamorous, black-tie whirl of diplomacy.
Then there are the female Foreign Service officers who, unlike blacks, have responded to the department's recruiting campaigns in large numbers. This has forced the department to deal with the same problems -- equal advancement opportunities, sexual harassment and allegations of male chauvinism -- that have become common personnel issues in business and the professions.Problems of 'Tandem Couples'
But there also are situations unique to the service, such as accommodating the needs of tandem couples. As Yvonne Thayer noted:
"When problems or conflicts result, there still is an innate tendency to expect that the women will make the sacrifices. Everyone says they are all in favor of women having careers as diplomats. But when the kids get sick, it's automatically assumed that it's the wife and not the husband who will stay home and take care of them."
As couples rise in rank, it becomes much harder to match them with jobs commensurate with their grade and experience. To give them automatic preferences for job openings evokes charges of reverse discrimination from other aspirants. And, when one member of the couple achieves managerial rank, such as an ambassador or deputy chief of mission, federal laws and rules against nepotism bar their spouses from working under their control.
"The solutions that we can offer aren't very satisfactory," Vest said. "About all we can do in most cases is offer the couple assignments in adjoining countries or strike a deal where if one takes a leave of absence, he or she will be the one that gets first preference on the couple's next assignments."
Until now, most tandem couples have settled for such arrangements. When it sent Carleton Coon to Nepal and Jane Coon to Bangladesh, the Reagan administration was able to boast that it had set the precedent of the first husband-and-wife ambassadors from the career ranks to serve in neighboring countries.
But this approach is encountering increasing resistance from younger couples, who are more reluctant to endure forced separations or make choices about whether to place marriage above career. Many say privately that if they find their advancement blocked by the need for one or the other to endure an involuntary leave, they will leave the service.
"There is no perfect answer for two people wanting interesting and mobile careers," said Sharon Weiner, who is beginning an assignment as Libya desk officer. "You always have to be willing to make compromises and to think a few moves ahead."
She and her husband have been doing that since they joined the service in 1978. She has a doctorate in international relations. He is a lawyer with a special interest in labor law. "We joined because we thought that diplomatic work would allow us to pursue our special interests and our desire to travel better than if he had gone into a law firm and I had stayed with my original intention to be a university teacher and researcher," she said.
"We have had no separations or situations where one of us had to take leave without pay," she said. "We expect that eventually there will come a time when we and the system will clash. But up to now, we haven't had to face it."
The most difficult personnel problem facing the Foreign Service, though, involves the growing number of wives who want to pursue careers outside the Foreign Service but who find they cannot make much of a career in the private sector if they must take frequent leaves of absence to accompany their husbands on assignments abroad. The increasing reluctance of working wives to follow their husbands abroad applies not only to undesirable Third World countries but also to once-coveted postings to the glamor capitals of Europe or key posts like Moscow and Peking.
In some cases, this has meant late-career problems for officers who have invested many years in the Foreign Service. James S. Landberg, 50, who has been deputy director of the office of Mexican affairs, must retire because he was not promoted into the Senior Foreign Service. He believes that his chances were hurt because he took several extensions of his service in Washington in order to accommodate his wife's career in real estate and local politics.
"I had several overseas opportunities that might have improved my promotion chances substantially," he said. "But I knew that my wife had become frustrated by living overseas where she couldn't work. In the early years of our marriage, she accommodated to my job needs. I felt that now I owed her the same. It came down to a question of whether my career or my marriage was more important."
Lawrence B. Lesser, 46, another of the group that did not win promotion, also found domestic problems clashing with his career aspirations. During his last assignment as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh, his wife remained here.
"When we were married in the 1960s, she encouraged me to join the service," he said. "But over the years, our interests diverged. She is a painter and a teacher and wants to establish herself in the Washington area. So when I went to Dacca, she didn't accompany me. Now we are separated."
The specter of separation or divorce looms as an even bigger problem among younger officers who have grown up in an atmosphere in which the two-career marriage has become the accepted norm. This raises the stakes to the point at which the Foreign Service soon might find itself severely curtailed in its ability to recruit and retain the coming generation of potential diplomats. As one who asked not to be identified described the situation:
"My wife is a lawyer. Her attitude is that she didn't go to school for seven years to sit around in Quito or La Paz letting her skills go unused. The other wives, who have invested years in getting an MBA or an architecture degree or whatever, feel the same way. For me and for many other officers of my generation, it means that we very likely will have to choose between our marriage and our career -- and we'll have to make that choice very soon while there's still time to do something else."
