TABLE TALK
Matters of State
DENIS BROGAN
It is possibly important in the history of the Department of State that the first full-time Secretary, Thomas Jefferson, did not take over the job until Alexander Hamilton, Sec- retary of the Treasury in the brand new government, had already dug himself in. By the time Jefferson came to Philadelphia to take over the Department of State, it had already been upstaged in some important ways by the Department of the Treasury, and althought Mr Jefferson influenced the foreign policy of the United States, he in- fluenced the general policy much less than did his savagely ambitious colleague Alex- ander Hamilton, milled by his resentful rival, Vice-President John Adams, 'the bastard son of a Scotch pedlar'.
The history of the State Department is very largely the history of its secretaries, and that has meant that, in many instances, the State Department for all practical purposes didn't exist.The history of American foreign policy, in fact, has been a series of occulta- tions, to use the astronomical term, inter- rupted from time to time by the flashing across the Washington sky of brilliant meteors, some of which finally crashed in political ruin.
There have, of course, been some great Secretaries of State, of whom the greatest, in my opinion, was John Quincy Adamsi There have been others who combined a good deal of diplomatic talent with the lin., portant political talent which John Quincy Adams notably lacked. For example, Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, although cap- able of gaffes, was also capable of saving Lincoln from some gaffes of his own and was a great deal more sagacious and trust- worthy than people like Chase and Stanton. Men of great ability have been stranded in this Department because the United States didn't have, and probably didn't need, a foreign policy at all. Secretary Evarts under Hayes was one of the ablest men who have
ever been Secretary of State, but it was very hard to have a foreign policy in that drab period of American history, especially as Mr Hayes forbade the serving of any alcoholic fluids at official dinners. All that Evarts could do was jest, 'water flows like wine' at White House parties.
Then there have been Presidents who have practically reduced their Secretaries to being mere high-class clerks. Such was Woodrow Wilson's treatment of Lansing, who was deliberately chosen because the President didn't want a Secretary with ideas of his own. Lansing had ideas of his own, not all of them admirable, but he was un- able to carry them out since even the para- lysed Wilson could at least stop the foreign policy of the United States if he could no longer control it. Another celebrated and rather sad case is that of Cordell Hull, who was very often deprived of all authority by Franklin D. Roosevelt's passion for giving the same job to several people at the same time. Hull was able finally to knife his able and very aggressive Under-Secretary Sum- ner Welles, but that, although it ended WeIles's career, did not give the Secretary much authority. Harry Hopkins, Averill Harriman and, for a brief moment, Raymond Moley had more than the formal head of the Department.
Sometimes, of course, the partnership be- tween the President and the Secretary of State has been close and fruitful. Such was the partnership between Harry Truman and his two great Secretaries of State, General Marshall and Dean Acheson. Mr Truman admired the General just 'this side idol- atry', and completely trusted Mr Acheson even when, as occasionally happened, Mr Ache- son's famous or notorious temper was a handicap to the President. After all, Mr Truman's own temper was not always under control.
In my opinion, the most tiresome; to put
it mildly, of modern Secretaries of State was John Foster Dulles, a view which I think is shared by Mr Dulles's predecessor, Mr Ache. son. But President Eisenhower occasionally, and almost always wisely, interfered in his more bold adventures, and although I don't think the Dulles regime did much good, it did less harm than it would have done if Ike had been as torpid as he seemed to be. General Eisenhower was a wiser man than Secretary Dulles, and perhaps (only per. haps) the United States could afford a fainéant President to offset an over-active Secretary of State.
One of the saddest Secretaries of State of modern times was Mr Dean Rusk, a very distinguished Rhodes scholar and a public servant of great intelligence and probity; he never got the confidence of President Ken. nedy or of President Johnson. (Whether anybody got the confidence of President Johnson is a matter for speculation.)
There is no doubt that in the last generat. ion the prestige of the Department of State has gone down, although it has probably more competent servants than ever before in its history. It suffered terribly from the McCarthy campaign, in which Mr Secretary Dulles notoriously and disgracefully did not defend the Department as Mr Acheson had done. President Kennedy tended to ignore his Secretary of State. In any case, in his first phase in the White House he was very much given to interfering with the day-to- day running of the Department although he got over this later. And since Wilson's time there has been a tradition of employing amateurs and outsiders not only as ambas- sadors but as secret counsellors. You had Joe Kennedy on one side and Colonel House on the other, each a nuisance in his own way.
Since Mr Nixon has come into office, the Department, now lodged in the vast, ugly fortress of Foggy Bottom, has not been happy. for power has been transferred in many ways to the Pentagon, and to coun- sellors like Mr Kissinger. This is to be re- gretted. I have no blind admiration for professional diplomats, even though some of Britain's professional diplomats were taught, or mistaught, by me. But I prefer them to military diplomats, unless the mil- itary diplomat is a really great man like Gen- eral George Marshall. Therefore I have not been reassured by the role of outsiders like Mr Kissinger, even if I thought that the German background was a good training for the job of being the chief adviser of the head of the most powerul state in the world. There was, of course, Bismarck, but Bis- marck always boasted that he was not a German but a Wend; and although Mr Kissinger is Jewish, there is a good deal of Germanity in his approach to problems that require a great deal of doigte.
Therefore I am delighted to see that the first real diplomatic success of Mr Nixon's administration has fallen to the Secretary of State. Mr Rogers ,is not a professional diplomat; he is a very eminent lawyer. But he has great patience, tenacity, and perhaps a kind of sagacity which comes from advis- ing very great American corporations. I hope that Mr Rogers's initiatives in the Middle East and in Moscow pay off. It may be that a great diplomatic success achieved by the official head of American diplomacy will do a good deal to restore the morale of the State Department. To have a successful foreign policy for which the credit must go to the official head of the State Department would be a gratifying novelty and, politically speaking, a great boon for the United States,
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