Word: knights
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...most of her life, Frances Knight has been a Women's Liberation movement unto herself. By 1955, she had battled her way up through the undergrowths of Washington's civil service to the directorship of the State Department's Passport Office. She rules that fiefdom with a combination of efficiency and truculent passion rare in any bureaucracy...
...most distinctive qualities is her relish for a good fight. A conservative with such influential friends as J. Edgar Hoover and Arkansas' Senator John McClellan, Frances Knight has left in her wake a trail of smoking Congressmen and State Department administrators. They call her the "ogress," and it has been suggested that she used to leak State Department information to Senator Joe McCarthy-a charge she firmly denies. In her most celebrated battle, she faced down Abba Schwartz, the liberal head of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. Schwartz, in an effort to ease...
Charging the State Department with sex discrimination, Frances Knight has hired lawyers and threatens to file a grievance against Secretary of State William Rogers, take her case before the Civil Service Commission, and demand formal hearings. Among other things, she points out that the head of the Visa Office, an equivalent agency in the same bureau of the State Department, has a foreign-service grade corresponding to the top civil-service rank. That official, of course...
...promotion fight is merely one more front in Passport Director Knight's longer, wider war. A Christmas card she mailed out last winter was a two-page tirade against her Foggy Bottom enemies. There has been no Secretary of State of whom she has thoroughly approved since John Foster Dulles, who picked her for her present post. "The State Department," she says, "is a cesspool of intrigue, political assassination and character assassination-it permeates the department...
Miles to Go. Few doubt that Frances Knight has been an aggressive and effective head at Passport, which under her tenure has had to expand its business more than 300% to meet the growing demands of international travel. But her efforts to extend her domain further sometimes bring on undiplomatic responses from her superiors...