A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review

This week the Summer 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was vetoed by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

Mr. Precht is a charming gentleman who has visited our seminar in the past. Unfortunately for us, he spends his summers in Maine.

Glenn Fellows visit SCOTUS

Yesterday the Glenn Fellows visited the Supreme Court of the United States. Afterwards, they had a conversation with a reporter who covers the Court, Lawrence Hurley of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Here is a link to Lawrence's blog, Washington Briefs: http://washingtonbriefs.com/

During the seminar, we talked about Mann and Ornstein's indictment of Congress, The Broken Branch. And we welcomed Stacy Rastauskas, OSU's Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations, who aregued that lobbying is a noble profession. (Last quarter's speaker on this subject, Jane Hoover, formerly of Proctor & Gamble, said that she always thought of herself as being in the "education" business.) Coincidentally, Roll Call ran a piece today about lobbying that included a table listing the twenty biggest spenders during the first half of 2010. The listing reveals, not surprisingly, that intense lobbying activity, much as Madison anticipated, is a largely defensive maneuver on the part of threatened minority interests. The American Beverage Association, for example, is in ninth place on Roll Call's 2010 list. A year ago, before there was much talk about taxing sugary drinks, the American Beverage Association ranked 212th.

Escalator Outages

First-time visitors to our nation’s capital, including many Glenn Fellows, routinely fall in love with the Washington Metro. It happened to me when I first rode the embryonic subway system in 1976. In those days Metro consisted of just a handful of stops on the Red and Blue Lines. But it was clean and fast, and it seemed to bespeak confidence in the public sector. With its classical allusions, Metro seemed a natural extension of L’Enfant’s ambitious city plan.

I was an aficionado in the early days. No more. The quirks that once seemed so charming gradually became annoying—and, ultimately, infuriating. Every regular Metro rider has his or her pet peeve.

For me, it’s the chronic problem of out-of-service escalators. Escalators are absolutely essential to Metro’s basic design, and yet they have been unreliable from Day One. We know this thanks to Zachary M. Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), the authoritative history of the Washington Metro. Let Schrag pick up the story here:

Harry Weese [Metro’s chief architect] and his team had originally planned all vertical movement by escalator. In the course of the 1970s cost-cutting, some escalators were replaced with granite stairs, but every station entrance and mezzanine had at least two escalators. . . .

The fundamental problem with the escalators is . . . that they are complicated machines with hundreds of moving parts, run for nineteen hours a day and stepped on by their users. Like helicopters and photocopiers, they are inherently maintenance-intensive. As the architects planned the stations, the nation’s leading escalator manufacturers warned them to expect each escalator to be out of service for a ten- to twelve-day stretch each year. Based on this advice, the architects made room for three escalators at most street entrances, so that two could provide down and up service while the third was repaired. But a spare escalator cannot guarantee adequate maintenance. WMATA has struggled to find enough skilled mechanics to work twenty-four-hour shifts, and it has lacked funds to overhaul aging escalators according to schedule. Unsurprisingly, deferred maintenance has resulted in breakdowns, with up to one out of every five escalators out of service on any given day (Schrag, pp. 246-247).

Your faithful blogger respectfully disputes Schrag’s one-in-five estimate. I have been silently documenting Metro’s escalator performance for 25 years and have found that roughly one in three escalators are out of service on any given day.

Schrag is right that repair of a Metro escalator is a major undertaking. At Braddock Road, the Metro station in Alexandria that I know best, there are two escalators, one elevator, and no staircases. A few years ago the escalators—first one, then the other—underwent a complete overhaul. The job was supposed to take six months for each escalator. It took seven months, in fact, which meant that for a total of fourteen months riders had to endure two-way foot traffic twice a day on the escalator not then undergoing repair. You can build a McMansion is less time. Hell, the Phoenix Project that rebuilt the Pentagon after the attack of September 11, 2001, was faster than that.

Rationality and Public Policy Making (encore, 09/29/2009)

It's week 4, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books contains a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

So here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Ohio in the Pacific

I don't ordinarily pay any attention to Yahoo as a news source, but this morning the site is running an intriguing piece about Ohio-class submarines being dispatched to the Pacific, where one can imagine any number of ways that they might be deployed. One would love to know something about the decision-making process that led to this result.

KC-X Tanker Contract Inspires Intense Lobbying Effort

You've probably heard the old joke about university faculty politics. Question: "Why are academic politics so vicious? Answer: "Because the stakes are so low."

It's funny, to be sure, but anybody who really believes that the most vicious kind of politics is to be found in university faculty clubs should be following the story that will be unfolding this Friday at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Here's a link to the story, "Defense Firms Strafe Each Other," by Bennett Roth in today's Roll Call.

Pictured above is the KC-135 refueling tanker, a vestige of the Eisenhower era that is due to be replaced by either Boeing or the European Aeronautic and Space Company, the owner of Airbus.

Historian W. Roger Louis to Lecture on European Colonial Empires in Asia and Africa

Glenn Fellows and others interested in international affairs might want to consider attending a lecture on Monday, July 12, by the eminent historian W. Roger Louis, the U.S. scholar who serves as editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire.

For details, see the Library of Congress's announcement here.

Pictured above is the Gandhi statue in front of the Embassy of India on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.