canceled, and the Chinese remained, so we thought, uninterested.
Our shared assessments found Sino-Soviet relations congealed in a state of guerre demi-froide (half–cold war), and the situation inside China remained a stalemate between pragmatists picking up the pieces in the provinces and radicals in Beijing huddled around an aging Chairman Mao. Japan continued to grow in economic strength but seemed unwilling, our London colleagues agreed, to exercise political influence in Southeast Asia.
This trip was my last major duty in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. My two-year assignment was coming to an end, and I was ripe for a change. I had done nothing but China for ten years. The fascination of the country and its growing importance to U.S. policy notwithstanding, I was stale and burned out. The mere mention of Mao made me feel ill. I needed to learn more about the practice of diplomacy in general and requested a job that would provide the broadest possible overview of the Department of State and its operations.
Personnel obliged by assigning me to the Secretariat Staff (S/S-S), the office that manages the daily affairs and travels of the secretary of state, where I would serve during the next two years. The move, by pure serendipity, would lead to my participation in President Nixon’s historic China trip and, later, to assignment at the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, developments of which I had then not the faintest inkling.
7
Office Manager for the Secretary of State
Birth of a Bureaucrat
I had to switch gears in a hurry. My new job was to move paper and manage people, rather than to think, write, and explain. Putting words on paper was less important than telling other people by phone to perform specific tasks, and fast. I was office manager of the Secretariat staff, or “the Line” in State Department slang, after its original layout along the hallway next to the secretary’s own rooms. Our goal, simply put, was to get the secretary through his day. We determined the briefing documents and talking papers he needed for his meetings, set deadlines and standards for the bureaus writing them, then tracked any decisions that emerged. Each “Line officer ” rode herd on a cluster of bureaus, imposed discipline, urged promptness, rejected sloppy work, and insured that all interested parties had cleared every paper sent up. The Secretariat sits astride all official lines of communication between the State Department, the White House, and the other government agencies. Its staff is central, respected, feared, and, at times, loathed by those working under its lash in the bureaus.
The young Line officers, as spirited as they were competent, had to be tracked and guided. I was the bareback rider in this circus, standing precariously on top of my staff horses, guiding them in the same direction with toes and fingertips. If papers the secretary needed did not arrive on time, or were sloppy, I was the one who took the heat from our front office. The executive secretary, Theodore Eliot, was himself directly answerable to Secretary William P. Rogers. Smart and good-humored, Ted did not have the time to stay mad for long.
The pace of the secretary’s life in Washington was intense and the pressure high; the heat came from below as well as above, as action officers and assistant secretaries complained about the demands of the Secretariat. Our work covered all the issues of interest to the secretary, from disputes over Ecuador ’s fishing rights and the importation of Polish golf carts to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Having once been responsible for knowing everything about China, I now needed to know just a little about everything else, enough to judge whether a paper about a given topic was intelligible to a decision maker pressed for time.
Managing the secretary’s travels was another important function of the Secretariat. The challenge while on the move was to replicate an office that would perform our services at home, making sure at each stop that the boss was ready for all his meetings, had received his telegrams from other parts of the world, and was in touch with Washington. Once the plane arrived at our destination, our job was to get an office running immediately, usually in the hotel where the party was staying. Normally, we sent officers on ahead to be ready when we arrived. We learned a lot about the tricks of working without much sleep. One ploy, when everything was quiet for a while was to slip into your hotel room, get into your pajamas, sleep an hour or two, get up, take a shower, and brush your teeth as if you were waking to a new day. The idea was to fake your body into thinking it had had a full night’s sleep. Your body could be fooled, but not all the time.
All this was new to me, but I found I liked being a bureaucrat and was good at it. My immediate boss, James Carson, a dedicated and experienced tutor, showed me that a touch of irreverence and wicked humor actually improved the rate of speed and the quality of performance required to get things done. When asked a question he could not answer, a Secretariat officer always looked up, not down, Jim taught.
Carson also hammered home the most important lesson anyone trying to influence policy makers needed to know: No matter how sound and elegantly argued your recommendations might be, they were worthless if they did not get to the decision makers on time and in a concise form that could be absorbed quickly. Knowledge of the pace and complexity of policy makers’ lives was crucial to making an impact. Understanding the machinery that moves decisions was as important as the actual substance itself. At the same time, those who operated the machinery could not function without a grasp of the substance.
I developed and used an entirely different set of muscles in the Secretariat. As an analyst, I knew my subject and what should be reported, but I had no idea how wide the readership was or what I might do to make my work hit home. Now I understood the mechanics, how to make things happen, and how important my earlier work had been in relation to the other issues facing the secretary of state.
I also learned that the most effective Foreign Service officers were both diplomats and bureaucrats. As diplomats abroad, we learned difficult languages and lived in different cultures, interpreting these to our own government and ours to theirs. We are supposed to lubricate relationships, smoothing the sharp edges between presidents, chairmen, premiers, and kings. As bureaucrats in Washington, we are tasked to herd a gangling, often obtuse, foreign affairs community, pounding our shoes on countless staff-meeting room tables in an effort to get our way with representatives from the State Department, Pentagon, Treasury, Commerce Department, and intelligence community. This, I later found out, is what ambassadors do, too.
Philippine Foreign Minister Carlos P. Romulo, a legendary raconteur, described the difference this way in one of his famous stories. “When confronted with an ugly woman, the bureaucrat will say, ‘You have a face that would stop a clock!’ The diplomat will say, ‘When I look into your eyes, time stands still.’” The Secretariat taught us both approaches, and when to use them.
Kissinger’s Secret Trip
The early months of my work in the Secretariat involved practically no China content. Generally speaking, State Department relations with the White House were terrible. Both President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger distrusted the ability of our institution to keep secrets and kept from it the information needed to do its work. They regularly undercut Secretary Rogers, to follow. Fortunately, Brigadier General Alexander Haig, Kissinger ’s deputy, was a brilliant Pentagon-trained bureaucrat and knew how to translate these often peremptory orders into language with which we could work.
Ironically, White House mistrust did not apply to individual Foreign Service professionals like my old boss, John Holdridge, and INR colleague Richard Smyser, who were brought to the NSC and relied upon for expert advice. We continued to meet with them, although, like all good pros, they guarded their principals’ secrets tightly.
As a result, President Nixon’s announcement on July 15, 1971, of Henry Kissinger ’s secret trip to Beijing and his own
