The piece on Moorhead Kennedy Jr. ’52 in “Lives Lived & Lost” contains an arresting paradox drawn from his hostage experience in Iran: “Captivity freed me of the necessity to think like a Foreign Service officer.” And what exactly, I asked myself as a former Foreign Service officer, did he liberate himself from? His fine memoir, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, supplies the answer: moral arrogance, cultural insularity, the poor understanding of “the power of religion as a political force,” the confusion about the difference between Westernization and modernization of other countries.
His warnings remain useful in today’s diplomacy. And as I discovered during my tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Kennedy Paradox still applies to U.S. foreign policy in the sense that transcendent insight can sometimes be extracted from systematic failure — and, sadly, sometimes only that way. Kennedy would recognize many of the features of today’s Foreign Service he found so distasteful: the careerist maneuvering of individuals, the bureaucratic infighting of agencies, the parochial outlook of embassies. All still evident, all very much lamentable — and not a one unique to the U.S. diplomatic corps.
The piece on Moorhead Kennedy Jr. ’52 in “Lives Lived & Lost” contains an arresting paradox drawn from his hostage experience in Iran: “Captivity freed me of the necessity to think like a Foreign Service officer.” And what exactly, I asked myself as a former Foreign Service officer, did he liberate himself from? His fine memoir, The Ayatollah in the Cathedral, supplies the answer: moral arrogance, cultural insularity, the poor understanding of “the power of religion as a political force,” the confusion about the difference between Westernization and modernization of other countries.
His warnings remain useful in today’s diplomacy. And as I discovered during my tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Kennedy Paradox still applies to U.S. foreign policy in the sense that transcendent insight can sometimes be extracted from systematic failure — and, sadly, sometimes only that way. Kennedy would recognize many of the features of today’s Foreign Service he found so distasteful: the careerist maneuvering of individuals, the bureaucratic infighting of agencies, the parochial outlook of embassies. All still evident, all very much lamentable — and not a one unique to the U.S. diplomatic corps.