Capturing, preserving, and sharing the experiences of America’s diplomats. ADST’s maxim perfectly encapsulates the diverse nature of a Foreign Service career that arguably makes every officer’s professional journey unique. And yet, underlying the idiosyncratic nature of these experiences are undoubtedly core values and challenges that unite most—if not all—individuals in this particular field. This is not to say that there is a uniform set of reactions towards them, but it should nevertheless be considered paramount for us to acknowledge this base uniformity in order to truly understand the fundamental roots of a given matter and properly address it.
To Educate or Not to Educate:
Q: Would you come to any conclusions about this field as to what type of background is, from your point of view, best for a labor officer? We have had successes and failures from the labor movement, from academia and failures, from those with a Labor Department background, et cetera. How would you construct the ideal labor attaché or labor officer?
KINNEY: Well, it is hard and pretentious to describe this from a personal point of view. One thing is that I don’t think academic training as such is half as important as individual aptitude, one’s capacity to understand other people, and to try to figure out what their problems are and what they want.
Q: I think I get it.
KINNEY: Social consciousness, do you remember that old word?
Q: Right.
KINNEY: That’s number one, of course.
. . .
KINNEY: He said, “Look, you are going to be going overseas as a labor type fellow.” He said, “You are going to find that there are a couple of things, and this is particularly true because you will be over there, and attitudes here in Washington, in the AFL, and in the AFL-CIO, that are going to be a little different. What the Embassy sees as the right thing to do in a given situation or a right policy to have toward a certain country or its elements is going to be, you will find, very often quite different from what the AFL thinks should be done because the AFL has its own point of view. Your political officers, the Ambassador, and so forth, are going to have a broader point of view in which everything is much more balanced if they do their job right. It is going to be perplexing for you and what you do about it. You will learn as best you can what to do about it.”
This gets down to something which is fairly basic: in the average embassy, unless you have some pretty sophisticated officers, senior officers, who have had a lot of experience with labor attachés and why they are there in the first place, will tend to regard a labor attaché as someone thrust upon them either with their consent or because it is politic for the government to do this. And if the labor officer seems to be doing whatever the AFL-CIO wants him to do, and that is his automatic impulse, it’s going to make his position even more difficult.
It’s dangerous, of course, to generalize. I say there are these tendencies to look upon someone as a stranger from another outfit—and not even a government outfit at that—as doubly suspicious. However, the political, economic, and central officers in the embassy, who have had a good experience with labor officers in situations where they proved their value, usually tend to be more encouraging to the new guy and more inclined to see his role as important to the embassy and its work. I think that certainly in the last ten years that I was in the business and in the trade that was more and more evident; there was a widening acceptance. On the other hand, Henri Sokolove used to say in the 1960s that there was a lot of disillusionment with the labor attaché program on the part of the State Department leadership in the field and in Washington. There had been a sort of magic at first, as though they were really going to open the gates for the United States’ acceptance in broader and broader areas of people in their organizations in various countries; there was a tendency, and I think perhaps he’s right to get a little more cynical about it and to think that this is just another sort of reward system for loyal friends of the AFL-CIO or various unions therein. In that respect, perhaps, he’s right to a degree.
Q: But that could be dissipated in individual cases occurring in the embassy in which a positive contribution was made.
KINNEY: Exactly. By your deeds are you known.
Q: Or your contacts. The fact that I was a friend of the President of India because he happened to be a trade unionist thereby enabled me to get some things that might otherwise not have been available. Boy, that meant something. And what I found was in training labor attachés and responding at conferences was that the guy who thought of his operation as a separate labor operation unrelated to the objectives of the post was less successful than the guy who said to the ambassador, “Now, what are you trying to do, and what is the labor aspect of that that I can make a contribution to?” That is a difficult thing to do. Let me ask you in that respect within the embassy, at what point were you a member of the country team? What were the disadvantages of not being a member? What were the results of your membership in the country team? Were you a member of the country team?
KINNEY: Well, the country’s team is made up normally of the officers of AID, the principal officer of USIS, the Information Service—
Q: The military attaché, agricultural, et cetera.
KINNEY: —the military attaché, the agency that shall not be named, and the commercial attaché sometimes.
Q: The section heads…
KINNEY: Right.
Q: Where does the labor attaché fit in?
KINNEY: The labor attaché in most posts I’ve been in was allowed or rather asked to be a member of the country team or to sit in the meetings at the table. [They were given the] same status as somebody else, not sitting in the background.
TABLE OF CONTENTS HIGHLIGHTS
Background
Works Progress Administration Writers’ Project ~1935–1941
Washington, D.C.—National CIO War Relief Committee ~1943–1950
Entered the State Department 1951
Manila, Philippines—U.S. Embassy, Labor Attaché 1952–1957
Jakarta, Indonesia—U.S. Embassy, Labor Attaché 1957–1960
Washington, D.C.—Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Labor Advisor 1961–1964
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—U.S. Embassy, Labor-Political Officer 1966–1968
Retired from the Foreign Service 1973