Clash by Knight

For 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.

One of her 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 political restrictions on the issuance of passports, tried to force her to resign. In the end, it was Schwartz who resigned from the department.

Christmas Tirade. The ash-blonde, blue-eyed bureaucrat has found a new crusade. Having spent 15 years in her present civil service rank, G.S. 17, she has decided that she should be promoted to the highest grade, G.S. 18. Money is hardly the consideration, since the change would add only $695 to her current salary of $34,810. Besides, she is married to Millionaire Wayne Parrish, a former publisher. She says she would donate any salary increase to the Washington Animal Rescue League. "I'm fighting for a principle," she says. "Not so much for what it will do for me, but for my staff and a lot of women in lower-level jobs."

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, is a man.

The 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.

Deputy Under Secretary William Macomber says that the passport director's job is ninth on the list for upgrading; he has no intention of pushing it ahead of the others merely to escape the wrath of Frances Knight. "She attacks the department," says another official, "and then wants to be promoted ahead of everyone else." In any case, the State Department can look forward to five more years of her services. She has no intention of quitting before the mandatory retirement age of 70. "I still have a lot of mileage left in me," she warns.

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