Like his fellow Foreign Service officers, he built bridges across oceans and cultures, and was deeply invested in the international cooperation that the United Nations represents.
WHITEHOUSE: Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly
He quickly took advantage of a State Department offer to pay for graduate study in Europe for Foreign Service officers who agreed to achieve fluency in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian.
And they saw our troops, along with Provincial Reconstruction Teams that include Foreign Service Officers and other skilled public servants, coming in to ensure that improved security was followed by improvements in daily life.
Meanwhile, I think all Americans should give thanks to the heroic work that's being done by our foreign service officers and the men and women serving in our embassies and consulates around the world.
The by now well-known statistic that there are more musicians in U.S. military bands than American Foreign Service Officers speaks volumes about the disproportionate government funding of a U.S. military still overly oriented to superpower warfare.
This has been particularly true of the Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) , an organization staffed by Foreign Service officers and civil servants who do tours of duty in INR between rotations to overseas and other assignments.
This cautionary note is all the more worrying insofar as a number of the top jobs in the U.S. intelligence community - newly created in response to warnings that there has been too-much "group-think" in those circles - have now been entrusted to career Foreign Service Officers.
Tom Timberman, who heads one of the reconstruction teams, is based 40 miles south of Baghdad, where the State Department has set up a sort of "mini Green Zone" a large, heavily fortified regional embassy that houses foreign service officers charged with overseeing development in the key regions of Babil, Najaf and Karbala.
Worse yet, he put a coterie of fellow foreign-service officers, like Tom Fingar, in key leadership positions.
As he describes the Clinton team's evolution from relative impotence in Bosnia during its early months to dynamic involvement in 1995, Mr Halberstam gives a sympathetic hearing to the foreign-service officers who protested strongly because America seemed to be condoning Serb atrocities, about which the United States, with its signal and satellite intelligence, was uniquely well informed.
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