Document: Smith Simpson ‘State Magazine’ Article

Smith Simpson on Diplomacy

By Carl Goodman 

(PDF version can be found here)

It is a fine spring day in the land of Jefferson, and the patio seems an appropriate enough setting to talk about diplomacy. The person talking, Smith Simpson, 92, has been concerned about the state of diplomacy during much of this century and remains concerned about its health in the next. 

At an age when most people are preoccupied with the state of their own health, Mr. Simpson speaks softly yet firmly of his long-standing interest in diplomacy and Americans’ need to better understand it. He is still inspired by the nation’s first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, whose home is just across the Rivanna Valley from the hillside bungalow Mr. Simpson has shared with his wife since their move from Northern Virginia to Charlottesville, Va., in 1992. 

He made his personal commitment to diplomacy in his teens. After laying a wreath on an ancestor’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, he studied the hundreds of tombstones attesting to lives shattered by war. World War I, in fact, was still raging in Europe, and there would be many more tombstones. He vowed then to work toward international understanding, good will and peace. 

That opportunity came a quarter century later. After graduating from the University of Virginia, where he took the one pioneering course in international relations, he headed north to study law-primarily to gain access to politics. But by the time he graduated from Cornell Law School and took the Virginia bar exam, he concluded that he and the law were not suited for a lifetime relationship. Fortunately, a fellowship from Columbia University enabled him to pursue full-time studies in international relations, organizations and law. 

He spent the summer of 1933, at the dawn of Roosevelt’s New Deal, in Geneva. While there, he fell for a strikingly beautiful secretary, Henriette Lannie, at the International Labor Organization, and it wasn’t long before he proposed marriage. She accepted his proposal. 

 From Geneva, he reported to Washington, D.C., as a labor adviser for the National Recovery Administration. Soon afterwards, the asphalt shingle and roofing industry lured him to New York to help administer its fair competition code. With his NRA experience, he admitted giving “the industry a hard time because I felt it was getting entirely too close to what the anti-trust laws prohibited.” 

Meanwhile, he began to worry about whether his fiancée could be happy in so noisy a city, after quiet, lakebound Geneva, her hometown. He suggested she first visit New York and possibly get a job there to see how she liked it. She replied, “I am not marrying New York. I’m marrying you.” As a testament to this, they will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary this November in Williamsburg, Va., with their two daughters, three granddaughters and two great-granddaughters. 

The Supreme Court’s decision that the National Industrial Recovery Act was unconstitutional cut short the Simpsons’ stay in New York. When he was offered an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, they moved to Philadelphia, and he was soon advising that state’s government on unemployment and co-authoring its first unemployment compensation act.

 The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Shipping Administration called. Labor problems were delaying convoys, and Mr. Simpson’s help was needed. Later, when the State Department began drafting postwar labor and social questions for a United Nations Charter, State pried him loose from War Shipping to conduct the necessary studies. 

When the Dumbarton Oaks Conference approved the U.S. draft of a U.N. charter, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles authorized the creation of a Division of Labor Relations in the Department and a labor attaché program in the Foreign Service Auxiliary. Enlisted to help organize the division, Mr. Simpson became chief of its International Labor Organizations branch. 

The new category of labor attaché was in for some “rocky” times in the embassies. Boasted one veteran Foreign Service officer: “I’ve never met a Socialist (read ‘labor leader’) and I never expect to.” There was no one with Foreign Service experience in the new labor division. Convinced that the experience was necessary, Mr. Simpson volunteered as a pioneer labor attaché to Brussels. Reluctant to lose someone familiar with international labor problems, the division head agreed on the condition that he return after a tour of two years. The two years lasted 18. 

He joined the Foreign Service, serving both in embassies and, at his request, in consular posts, large and small, as first secretary in Athens and Mexico City, as deputy principal officer in Bombay and as consul general in Mozambique. After a detail to the labor Department and a stint on the Board of Examiners, Mr. Simpson retired to wage a public campaign for instruction in diplomacy on the college-university level and then, hopefully, to move it into secondary and even primary schools. 

 His first book was in the proofreading stage when William J. Crockett, State’s deputy under secretary for Administration, invited him to lunch. He had been reading some of Mr. Simpson’s articles in the Foreign Service Journal and The Nation. He considered them “on the beam,” and he wanted someone with Foreign Service experience to invigorate what he was trying to do. 

So back to State Mr. Simpson went-this time as a contractor. When the year ended, his book, “Anatomy of the State Department,” was published, and he returned to his campaign on diplomacy, insisting, as he had in his book, that “Diplomacy is our principal alternative to war. Upon it and its quality rest the lives of all of us.” 

Besides organizing conferences on the study of diplomacy at the Wharton School and the University of Virginia, Mr. Simpson taught a one-semester course on Diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, satisfying longtime dean Peter Krogh that diplomacy could indeed be taught. Instruction at Georgetown followed. Mr. Simpson also organized an Institute for the Study of Diplomacy there to generate materials needed for instructional purposes and distribution to the public. Then followed a Centre for the Study of Diplomacy at the U.K. University of Leicester, England, adding an international dimension to his campaign. 

Dean Krogh, who stepped down as dean but still teaches, has praised the retired “scholar-diplomat” for being “indefatigable” in trying to popularize diplomacy. 

More than anything, Mr. Simpson would like to see a Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Diplomacy established at the university Jefferson founded. “How appropriate a memorial it would be to an early diplomat of the country and, arguably, the first modern one,” he mused. 

There is no better view than the one of Monticello when the sun’s angle is just right. It is his hope that diplomacy, too, will have its day in the sun.

(reproduction of State Maganize, Oct. 1999 article-a publication of the United States Department of State)