GWEN IFILL:

The Foreign Service Association says it plans to make recommendations this month on setting qualification requirements for future nominees.

For more on this, I'm joined now by Nicholas Burns, a career Foreign Service officer and former ambassador to NATO, and Walter Russell Mead, editor at large of the "American Interest" magazine and a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College.

Nick Burns, I believe I can call you by your former title, Ambassador Burns. Are people purchasing ambassadorships?

NICHOLAS BURNS, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs: Well, I think, in recent decades, the big question at that White Houses of both parties have asked is, how much did this person raise for my campaign? Were they bundlers? Did they raise money from other people?

And it seems that that is now one of the major criterion to select ambassadors. Our presidents have done best when they have asked another question: Is this person qualified? Do they have some experience in the country? Do they speak the language of the country? Have they done business in that country?

And there are plenty of very good political ambassadors in the past, from Averell Harriman, who was FDR's link to Stalin as ambassador to the Soviet Union, Edwin O. Reischauer, the great Japan expert at Harvard whom President Kennedy appointed to be ambassador to Japan.

We have tremendously qualified people in our country, but we ought to be looking at the skills required to be successful in the job. And that's language and experience and a deep knowledge of history and economics. And that increasingly is not the question that a lot of our presidents are asking.