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 You are in: Bureaus/Offices Reporting Directly to the Secretary > Policy Planning Staff > Secretary's Open Forum > About the Open Forum > Messages from Secretaries of State 

Secretary Alexander Haig

A Message from Secretary of State Alexander Haig
July 2, 1981

The Secretary's Open Forum offers each of you an opportunity to participate more directly in our own foreign policy process--to suggest new policies or to offer a responsible alternative when dissenting from an existing one. Discussion and debate are essential to our goal of forging an effective foreign policy consensus.

Our decisions should reflect an awareness of all sides of the issues. Precisely because it is "in-house," the Open Forum can operate independently of political and bureaucratic constraints to facilitate a full hearing of all viewpoints.

As professionals, your use of the Open Forum, the Dissent Channel, or any other internal mechanism to promote a free exchange of policy views is considered very important to me. I am depending upon your personal input to help insure that creative thinking and intellectual integrity remain fundamentally part of our policy making process.

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