ABSTRACT
One morning in March 1994, telex machines in U.S. State Department offices around the world ignited with a decidedly undiplomatic cable from W. Lewis Anselem, political counselor in the embassy to Bolivia. Anselem’s incendiary subject was not U.S. policy toward Bolivia or any other nation. Rather, it was an attack on affirmative action within the ranks of the State Department. Anselem derided “diversity” programs as “contradictory, deceptive, condescending in the extreme.” He called dark-skinned State Department workers “unscrupulous race and ethnic jumpers” trying to “con” their way to the top. Attempting to correct racial and gender imbalance, he said, is “repugnant and potentially dangerous.”
