Appointing Political Friends to Be Ambassadors

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/us/appointing-political-friends-to-be-ambassadors.html

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WASHINGTON — Charles H. Rivkin has had quite a ride, going in four years from an Obama fund-raiser and Hollywood media honcho to ambassador to Paris and now a nominee as an assistant secretary of state.

In almost no other democracy could this happen. Diplomats are nearly always career professionals, products of intense competition and intensive training, with successive foreign rotations for posts deemed to require in-depth knowledge of a region, culture and language — not just political connections.

And so the question arises: Can a political appointee’s real-world experience, management savvy, influential contacts and even sheer star power compensate for a dearth of hard-earned familiarity with a host country’s realities?

There are success stories and embarrassments on both sides.

Consider Mr. Rivkin: While he was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Obama as well as John Kerry, who has been his boss at the State Department, he is hardly without qualifications. He studied international relations at Yale and business at Harvard, ran a major company and speaks fluent French. In Paris, he drew high marks for a creative use of social media, vigorous minority outreach and promotion of American green technology. A State Department inspector general called him a “visionary non-career ambassador.”

Plenty of Mr. Obama’s political picks have done well.

But others have been harshly criticized as ill-prepared or temperamentally unsuited for the work. Inspector general reports described one such ambassadorial selection, an Obama fund-raiser, as “aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating”; another, a former Obama confidant, was ranked last for interpersonal relations among 80 mission chiefs surveyed recently, no great distinction for a diplomat. Both have resigned.

This sort of thing is not new. In the 1980s, one senator colorfully dismissed several political nominees as “ticking time bombs moving all over the world.”

The White House insists that its recruitment practices comport with those of past administrations, and that it seeks a diverse selection of highly qualified people. “Being a donor does not get you a job in this administration, nor does it preclude you from getting one,” said Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman.

Yet, ever since President Jimmy Carter, who limited political ambassadorships to about 25 percent of the total, their number has grown. It now stands at 36 percent, according to the American Foreign Service Association. And the number of senior State Department jobs going to non-career diplomats has risen sharply. (Mr. Rivkin would be the first non-career country ambassador to lead the Economic and Business Bureau.)

Ronald E. Neumann heads the American Academy of Diplomacy, whose members have held top embassy or State Department jobs. He notes that there have been many successful non-career envoys, starting with “the progenitor of American diplomacy, Benjamin Franklin.”

“I think there’s room for that,” he said. “But there’s no particular reason to use ambassadorships for domestic political reward without regard to qualification.”

Marc Grossman, a former undersecretary of state who has worked with the department committee that screens ambassadorial nominees — agreed that political appointees, carefully chosen, make excellent ambassadors.

“I would not be in favor of zero political appointees,” said Mr. Grossman, who is now with the Cohen Group, a Washington consultancy. “What a great appointment to make Pamela Harriman ambassador to France. What a great thing to send John Kenneth Galbraith to India.”

Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, are said to prefer an American ambassador with political clout; others, like Japan, seem to favor star quality. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy has received something of a rock-star reception there.

François Heisbourg, special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said Mr. Rivkin did well in France — better than many political appointees.

“It works once out of twice,” he said. “It takes real curiosity, empathy, an ability to understand people who are different from those you may have had to deal with when drilling for oil in Oklahoma. Some of them do it extremely well; others are bozos.”

The State Department tends to assign particularly strong deputies to ambassadors who need it, he said.

All in all, he said, “The system works better than it should.”