The Ambassadorial Issue: Professionals or Amateurs?

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APUBLIC controversy has arisen concerning the conduct of our foreign affairs, namely whether amateurs or professionals should be appointed to head our embassies abroad. If we are to examine the issue seriously, we must agree not to prejudge it by using the terms "professional" or "amateur" in any deprecatory or pejorative sense, such as equating them with "cookie-pushing" and "pin-striped pants" on the one hand or "bungling" and "political payoffs" on the other. Amateurs are frequently called upon to wear pin-striped pants and professionals have been known to bungle; and in the intramural politics of the State Department, no less than "on the Hill," there have also been "political payoffs." If the issue is valid, we must discuss the merits of the amateur ambassador as opposed to the merits of the professional.

Certainly it will readily be agreed that a man who has made the practice of diplomacy his life work, his only career, can be called a "professional." We can also agree that the term "amateur" may then be used to designate a man who has come into diplomacy from any other walk of life, and who does not intend to pursue it as his profession or career. We may further agree that an "amateur," that is to say a non-career man, who has worked closely with professionals over a period of years--who has, for example, served in the State Department, the non-career missions attached to our embassies, or other branches of government where he has acquired a wide and practical knowledge of foreign affairs--might fairly be classed as a semi-professional, or in the language in which the professionals themselves classify him, as a "foreign expert." Defined in these terms, the issue of "amateur versus professional" is a relatively new one, for the reason that a realistic choice between the professional and the amateur ambassador has existed only in recent times...