Nixon wanted to ruin the foreign service. (CNN)

The reforms Nixon wanted to implement, with the goal of "ruin[ing] it -- the old Foreign Service -- and to build a new one," have been replaced with gradual change in the Service, so that in many ways the current Foreign Service bears less and less resemblance to the old elitist and male-dominated corps of the past.

At the moment, a third of the U.S. foreign service is women, but women make up 50% of incoming classes. First hand I have seen women's disproportionately greater interest in the service, which leads to my prediction that women will make up more than half of incoming classes in the future.