Leon Fuerth Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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After your university training, you felt the Foreign Service would be the place to work toward an answer to that or to do something about making peace happen?
In those days, if you were interested in international affairs, the Foreign Service was one of the few games in town. Today, there are many other ways that some young person who wants to do these things can engage, but not then. Also, my feeling about government service, like so many others, was strongly influenced by Kennedy, and the call to public service. So these things melded in my mind.
What sort of postings did you get in the Foreign Service?
Oh, very inside out. Normally, what would happen is that a junior FSO would be shipped out at once. Well, the U.S. government was having a balance-of-payments problem, and in those days it actually worried about it. One of the consequences was that all of the married officers were kept in the United States for a time, while all the unmarried officers were shipped off to the CORDS [Civil Operation and Revolutionary Development Support] program in Vietnam. So I wound up in the one place that I had elected to visit during a field trip from the Foreign Service Institute, which was the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. When I picked it, I thought, "Well, that sounds interesting," and I said, "Hello, how are you?" and discovered that they said, "Hmm, there is someone that we will have work for us." But it turned out to be just one of those accidental, just-right events. My first year was spent correcting the commas in everything that any analyst in the bureau wrote, which gave me a huge education, and, besides, I found my first mentor, who would come out of his office with a thin, little blue pencil, sit down with me and show me the stuff that I had missed that was really of the essence in making sure that the message was clean and the logic was straight. So I learned a lot from that.
Who was that?
Alan Evans, who is long since deceased. He had an exquisite sense for language. He used to collect things called "horrors." Now, "horrors" were descriptions of logical or syntactical abominations. And the thing is that they were written in a Haiku-like form, accidentally. So when he retired, I collected them, organized them by chapters and gave them to him as a small book. He was a great guy.
So it sounds like he was a great editor, in addition.
He was both a great editor but, in particular, he understood the craft of intelligence. And better than that, he simply understood what it is to think clearly.
My second assignment was in a place that hardly anybody else in the Foreign Service knew about. It was in a vault in a four-man team -- I was the fourth man in the team -- that was the Department of State's link to strategic intelligence. So at a very early stage, I was the Department of State's voting officer on interagency panels that made decisions or judgments about intelligence on chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. I was also the alternate on the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee. So by accident of assignment, I got an immediate and profound grounding in intelligence analysis and in strategic intelligence. Not something that I had planned, but it happened and it became one of the starting points. It fed my interest in arms control and gave me tools for approaching the subject that hardly anybody had.
This would have been what years?
I was afraid you were going to ask that. The first, second, and third years of my career, how about that?
We'll look that up after the interview.
I'll have to count on my fingers to give you the exact dates.
So this experience gave you the training and pointed you in the direction that your career would go.
You were asking me where I was posted. Two years in that bureau was exotic to begin with, and atypical, because it was in Washington and not out. So my next assignment was out, and I was a consular officer. I was a consul at the U.S. Consulate General in Zagreb in then-Yugoslavia, which gave me something that turned out to be durable material for the rest of the my career, seeing as how the collapse of Yugoslavia became a major issue by the time of the Clinton administration.
After that, I returned to Washington to the Political Military Bureau. What was happening is that I began, frankly, to manipulate the system. There were people who wanted me and offices I wanted. What I wanted to do was to understand how things fit together. My colleagues, for the most part, wanted to go abroad, and they wanted to become regional specialists. I wanted to understand how things connected across the top. So I had, fortunately, a series of assignments that gave me that kind of overview and allowed me, gradually, to fill in what I didn't have when I got out of graduate school, which was a framework for understanding complex events that occur over very large parts of the globe.
So the big picture, which is not something that is easy to find when you're in the halls of government.
Very often if you're in government, you get assigned a piece of the picture through a narrow aperture, and that's where you're supposed to stay. I had the good fortune to have the whole ball of wax. It was very interesting because [later] in the White House, when I interviewed people, uniformed officers, who were coming over from the Department of Defense to be on the Vice President's national security staff, one refrain that kept on popping up as to "Why do you want to do this?" was: "I want to see how everything connects. I only get to see a certain range of things in the job that I do, and I want to take this job because it'll finally show me what is going on at the national level."
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