F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

udget of $3.5 million, and a professional
budget process.
AFSA is now the equivalent of a
mid-size company. And that requires
us to be serious about managing our
finances so that we don’t do silly
things with our members’ dues and
contributions. Our Finances and
Audit Committee has a mix of members
with private sector and NGO
experience who know what they’re
talking about. The committee is
independent, making decisions about
investments and expenditures on
their merits, without being influenced
by the fads of the moment or
the enthusiasms of AFSA officers. As
a result, our financial portfolio has
taken off and we’re in good shape.
FSJ: The third element you identified
as key to success is institutional
strength. What do you mean by that?
TDB: The first element of institutional
strength is unity. AFSA and 10
other organizations are all together in
the Foreign Affairs Council. Second is
money: You can’t do anything without
money and committed people, and we
have both. And third, which has been
very important, of course, was AFSA’s
becoming the legally recognized
exclusive employee representative for
Foreign Service personnel. That was
the basis for everything.
FSJ: That’s a good segue for us to
talk a bit more about the “Young
Turks” movement you helped lead.
Our June 2003 issue celebrating the
30th anniversary of AFSA’s becoming
a union, to which you contributed an
article, gives a lot of the historical
details. But to set the stage, would it
be fair to say that AFSA was more a
social club than an advocacy group at
that time?
TDB: Yes, but the real problem
was that the same people who had the
senior positions in the State Department
— the under secretary for political
affairs, the director general, many
16 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JULY-AUGUST 2008
“Forming a union was
the only way to gain
some degree of control
over our destiny and
bring equity and
transparency to the
whole process.”
of the assistant secretaries and so on
— were also officers in AFSA. That
struck many of us as a huge conflict of
interest, when what we needed was
an independent voice.
Each of the Young Turks had
something they wanted: Tex Harris
wanted a grievance system; Charlie
Bray wanted a linkage of resources to
policy; and I wanted co-determination
of personnel policies and procedures.
We had these very discrete elements
of change, but when you put them all
together, they added up to more than
the sum of the parts. And so the question
was, how do you get that? You
have to have a base, and the only base
we saw was AFSA.
When the time came to elect the
new AFSA Governing Board, we realized
that there are more mid-level
and junior officers than seniors, so we
could win an election. We put up a
slate and we won (with some support
from senior officers, I should add).
That gave us an organizational base of
people paying dues, and a magazine
with which you’re familiar that
allowed us to do outreach — a propaganda
arm, if you will.
That happened in the late 1960s.
Then, very early in the 1970s,
President Nixon signed the executive
order bringing white-collar unions
into the Civil Service. There was a big
fight over what the structure of that
would be, which we won. Then we
got a showing of interest and we persuaded
the Foreign Service itself that
we had to unionize — even though
that was a dirty word for a lot of people.
But we made the argument that
forming a union was the only way to
gain some degree of control over our
destiny, and bring equity and transparency
to the whole process.
We won the internal struggle for
the soul of the Service, and then beat
the American Federation of Government
Employees in elections to
become the exclusive employee representative
for the people of the
Foreign Service in 1973 — not just at
State but at USAID and all the other
foreign affairs agencies. And we
developed huge momentum that is
still growing.
FSJ: Let’s talk about your Foreign
Service career now. You entered the
Service in 1959, right after three years
in the Air Force. What drew you to
pursue a diplomatic career?
TDB: I had an epiphany during
my studies at the Woodrow Wilson
School at Princeton. In that program,
you participate in a policy conference
every semester. In the spring policy
conference of my junior year, in 1953,
the subject was Puerto Rico and the
focus was economic development.
For the first time in its history,
Princeton kicked in airline tickets for
the conference participants to travel
there and see for themselves how
economic development was being
achieved on that small island. My fellow
travelers to Puerto Rico included
Ralph Nader, by the way.
Inspired by the brio of all that, I
decided then and there that I wanted
to be in the Foreign Service, and I
switched from the domestic to the
international side of the Wilson
School. I went on to the international
affairs graduate school at Fletcher,