Senior Foreign Service Officer George Vest : Discreet Exit After 41 Years as Diplomat

For America’s senior diplomat, it was strictly deja vu. A new secretary of state--this time, James A. Baker III--was coming into office with his own set of top aides. And the advice of partisan supporters was ringing in their ears: “Don’t let the Foreign Service take you over.”

As George Vest--a 41-year veteran of the service--lamented in a recent interview, the State Department’s new management always takes the advice. Convinced that the career Foreign Service wants to pursue its own agenda regardless of the new President’s foreign policy, the new bosses try to distance themselves from the diplomats who had served the previous Administration.

Fortunately, Vest said, their resolve lasts only “until they run into problems. As challenges come up and they need the knowledge, it tends to break down the barriers. It is a natural evolution they have to go through.”

This time, Vest will not be around to see the drama play itself all the way out. At 70, he will step down soon from his post as director general of the Foreign Service. The exact date of his retirement has not been set because Baker has not yet named a successor.

Vest’s career has spanned virtually the entire era of post-World War II diplomacy. He joined the Foreign Service in 1947 as a consular employee in Bermuda, a holiday island but diplomatic backwater.

In the ensuing 41 years, Vest became a top expert on Europe, holding jobs that included chief U.S. representative at the conference that produced the historic Helsinki Accords on human rights in 1975 and assistant secretary of state for European policy. He also served a brief--and, he admits, often unhappy--stint as chief spokesman for Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

“I’ve been around longer than all of the others,” Vest said. “I don’t know that antiquity is necessarily a virtue. But it is a distinction.”

In today’s State Department, a 41-year career is nothing short of amazing. An increasingly stringent “up-or-out” policy is forcing most professional diplomats to the sidelines long before their 65th birthdays, often after 20 years or less in the service.

It seems certain that some of Vest’s career Foreign Service colleagues, now in the top ranks of the State Department, will join him in retirement in the coming weeks because Baker will have no jobs for them in the new Administration. But, for the most part, they do not yet know who they are because the incoming secretary has been moving very slowly in filling the department’s key jobs.

‘Orderly Disorder’

Vest described the transition to the Baker State Department as “orderly disorder.” It is orderly, he said, because the new Administration is waiting until the Senate confirms an official before naming his subordinates. It is disorderly because it is slow and many important jobs have not yet been filled.

“Even the ones of us that are going to be replaced are dedicated professionals,” Vest said. “We are really foreign policy junkies. We want to see the job done well.”

For the last four years, Vest has held the State Department’s top personnel post, handling the assignments for the nation’s professional diplomats except for the handful who receive presidential appointments. It is a job that sometimes has tested the even temper and unflappable courtliness that have become his trademark.

“I get every month something called the ‘sin report’ for the Foreign Service,” he said. “I dole out the punishment. I had no idea of the endless variety of sin until I took this job.”

Very few of the violations of discipline, he said, involve hard drugs, even though there are many opportunities for diplomats to dabble in narcotics smuggling. Diplomats have access to the diplomatic pouch, which is not subject to customs inspection as it carries letters and goods across national borders, and they often serve in areas where drugs are readily available.

Lonely Life

“Drugs have never been a problem in the Foreign Service, although liquor has been,” Vest said. “We have had trouble with alcoholism. It can be a lonely life.

“Of course there are a lot of opportunities to drink at diplomatic functions,” he said. “But the problem comes when they get home and are alone. The largest problem with alcoholism is with single people overseas.

“We say to them that it is a disease and we don’t hold it against them,” he added. “We send them home without prejudice and send them to a place to work on the problem.”

Looking back at his own career, Vest said that his only truly bad assignment was his first one at the consulate in Bermuda, a self-governing British possession.

“I hated the consul (his boss), and he deserved all my hatred,” he said. “I was not a success.”

Despite the friction with his superior, Vest was given a second chance, at the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador. He fared better there, even though the ambassador--after reviewing the personnel reports he had received in Bermuda--told him: “You have the worst file of any junior officer I’ve ever known.”

After Ecuador, Vest was ticketed for the Dominican Republic. After he spent most of his savings on warm-weather clothing, he was transferred to Ottawa, the Canadian city that claims to be the second coldest capital in the world.

Problems with his wardrobe aside, the switch proved to be a fortunate one. The State Department, responding far more to history and culture than geography, includes Canada in its European bureau, and Vest’s assignment there focused most of the rest of his career on Europe.

He said that his most satisfying assignment was chief of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Helsinki conference, which ratified the postwar boundaries of the continent and--probably far more significantly--established new standards for human rights in the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe.

“I think we began something that is quite important, a way of legitimizing the aspirations of the people of Eastern Europe,” he said. “It has become a beacon light to (Eastern European dissidents). They could believe they were not alone.”

He said that the Helsinki conference may have loosened the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe in a way that John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s hard-line secretary of state, had been unable to do with a diplomacy that he once described as “bringing the world to the brink of war.”

“If you were to put it in the terms that John Foster Dulles used,” Vest said, “you could say we may be seeing a peaceful rollback of Soviet power.”