FOREIGN RELATIONS: Broad-Picture Man

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Empires & Operators. By the folklore of Washington, the man who manages the operational functions of an organization will mold its policy in the long run. This has come to be an accepted law of administrative life, as solid as Newton's laws of motion. Consequently, career State Department officials respected Dean Acheson's concern with operational details. They could not at first understand John Foster Dulles, the broad-picture man, who believed that the State Department had been distracted from its policymaking job by its preoccupation with miscellaneous operating functions—foreign aid, technical aid, propaganda, etc. When Dulles, soon after he took office, divested State of as many operating functions as possible, the bureaucrats were convinced that he had surrendered much of his control over U.S. policy.

To their intense surprise, it turned out that Dulles had done nothing of the sort. Harold Stassen, whose Foreign Operations Administration took over the aid programs formerly under the State Department, set himself to carry out Policymaker Dulles' plans, responded promptly when State asked for $45 million for Iran and $385 million for the Indo-China war.

State Department men found that they could give foreign-aid administrators policy guidance on a long-term basis; they would check a few months later and find their guidance still controlling Stassen's operation. This is one of the most amazing, and perhaps the most important, facts of Eisenhower's Washington. Operations are necessarily conducted by specialists after the work has been broken into parts. Policy made at the operational level is apt to be fragmentary, uncoordinated, contradictory. Between them, Dulles and Stassen are demonstrating that what Washington for 20 years thought was a law of administrative life was really a symptom of administrative illness.

Breakfast & the Payoff. Dulles also followed the broad-picture approach in his campaign to restore confidence in the State Department. Foreign policy, he argued, must not only be concrete enough to work, it must also be coherent enough for the people to understand. In his congressional relations, he was careful to avoid Acheson's chief personality defect-—contempt for the ignorant. During his first seven months in office Dulles gut in 32 appearances before congressional committees, held 58 unofficial meetings with congressional groups.

Predictably, the Dulles approach to Congressional relations frequently paid off. Assistant Secretary of State Thruston Morton still recalls with admiration a breakfast at which Dulles briefed freshmen Congressmen and Senators shortly before the MSA appropriation was to be voted on last May. "That group for the most part stood like rocks when the vote came up in the House," says Morton. "They told me afterwards, many of them, that they had no intention of supporting the Administration's foreign-aid program until they heard Dulles explain it."