U.S. Department of State
U.S. cabinet department responsible for foreign affairs (founded 1789)
Also known as: State Department, U.S. State Department, Department of State, Foggy Bottom
The Department of State is the U.S. cabinet department responsible for the conduct of foreign relations, established by the First Congress in 1789. Quigley treats the State Department in Tragedy and Hope as the principal institutional context in which the American end of the Anglo-American foreign-policy apparatus operated through both world wars and the Cold War. His focus is less on the Department's bureaucratic structure than on the personnel pipeline that ran from the Eastern Establishment (Yale, Harvard, Princeton; the CFR; the Wall Street law firms) through the senior State Department positions and back into private practice and the foundation world.
The Inquiry, the Peace Conference, and the Establishment's Capture
Quigley's institutional history of the modern State Department begins with Colonel House's wartime Inquiry of 1917–1918 — the body of academic and Wall Street experts assembled to prepare American positions for the Paris Peace Conference. The personnel who emerged from the Inquiry and from the American delegation at Paris populated the inter-war State Department and the new Council on Foreign Relations: "the experts on the American delegation to the Peace Conference who were most closely associated with J. P. Morgan and Company" (AAE 158). The pattern of staffing the Department from a narrow Ivy League–Wall Street–Foundation network became, in Quigley's reading, the structural fact of twentieth-century American foreign policy.
The Quigley Framing: The Establishment in Office
Tragedy and Hope names the State Department repeatedly as the institutional terminus of what Quigley calls "the American Establishment" (T&H 951). The roster of post-1945 senior State personnel reads, in Quigley's account, as a directory of the same Establishment: Henry Stimson, Robert Lovett, John J. McCloy, the Dulles brothers, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, Christian Herter. "Dean Rusk, Secretary of State after 1961, formerly president of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1931-1933), is as much a member of this nexus as Alger Hiss, the Dulles brothers, Jerome Greene, James T. Shotwell, John W. Davis" (T&H 951). The pattern Quigley documents is not a single conspiracy but a self-reproducing network: the same families, schools, clubs, and firms supplied the senior personnel of the Department for nearly half a century.
McCarthy, the China Hands, and the Politics of the Department
Tragedy and Hope's detailed treatment of the State Department is in the McCarthy-era chapters (chs. 18–19). McCarthy's February 1950 speech naming "205 known Communists" in the Department was, in Quigley's flat verdict, "a fraud and a hoax" (T&H 946). But the underlying political contest — between an Eastern-Establishment foreign-policy elite and a Midwestern-Republican domestic-isolationist coalition — was real. The destruction of the Department's China specialists (John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies, John Service, O. Edmund Clubb), the parallel destruction of the IPR, and the more general purge of Far East expertise across 1950–1953 left the Department, on Quigley's reading, structurally weakened in precisely the region in which the next two decades of American war-fighting would occur.
The Cold War Department: Dulles, Acheson, Rusk
Quigley's discussion of the State Department through the Cold War is organized around the three dominant Secretaries: Acheson (1949–1953), Dulles (1953–1959), and Rusk (1961–1969). Acheson's tenure produced the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Korean intervention; Dulles's tenure produced the alliance system in Asia (SEATO, the Japan Treaty, the Taiwan Strait commitments), the doctrine of massive retaliation, and the early-Cold-War interventions in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954); Rusk's tenure was dominated by Vietnam. Quigley's verdict on Dulles is harsh — Tragedy and Hope treats his "brinksmanship" doctrine as the formalization of nuclear bluff as foreign policy. On Rusk and Vietnam, Quigley is more measured, treating the war as the catastrophe of an Establishment institutional culture which had lost the area expertise destroyed by McCarthyism and which therefore could not correct its early misjudgments.
Department Structure: Bureaus, Embassies, and the Foreign Service
Beyond the prosopography, Quigley describes the Department's organizational structure briefly: the Office of the Secretary; the regional bureaus (European, Far Eastern, Near Eastern, African, Inter-American); the functional bureaus (Economic, Public Affairs, Intelligence and Research); the embassies in the field staffed by the Foreign Service. The career Foreign Service Officers — Quigley notes — were sociologically more diverse than the senior political appointees, and the chronic tension between the political-appointee top and the FSO career bureaucracy is a recurring feature of his account. The Department's relationship to other foreign-policy agencies — the CIA (created 1947), the National Security Council (1947), the Department of Defense (1947), the Treasury — was reshaped continuously across the post-war decades by the National Security Act and its amendments; Quigley treats the rise of the NSC under Kennedy and the subsequent eclipse of State by the White House staff (especially under Nixon and Kissinger) as the structural endpoint of the Department's pre-eminence.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 834 Quigley
Truman's iron curtain of secrecy… 81 cases, identified by numbers without names… many had never been employed by the State Department or even by the government.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 945 Quigley
many had never been employed by the State Department or even by the government.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 951 Quigley
Dean Rusk, Secretary of State after 1961, formerly president of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1931-1933), is as much a member of this nexus as Alger Hiss, the Dulles brothers.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 990 Quigley
A powerful attack was built up against Secretary of State Acheson, against NATO and other American commitments in Europe.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1000 Quigley
Chiang 'unleashed' by Eisenhower, 1000-1.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 158 Quigley
the experts on the American delegation to the Peace Conference who were most closely associated with J. P. Morgan and Company.