To hear its founders tell it, the Ben Franklin Fellowship began as a scrappy, outsider effort to get conservatives their own cafeteria table at the very progressive, and very cliquey, Department of State. “There were a lot of these affinity groups,” recalled Simon Hankinson, a former longtime diplomat. There were groups for Black foreign service officers, gay officers, for women, and for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Each had a kind of unofficial status, Hankinson said, but was allowed to use official conference rooms during the workday. “The one internal group that didn’t have that,” he noted, “were conservatives.”