Nicholas J. Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at USC.
His research and teaching interests are broad and inter-disciplinary, and focus on the the role of culture, information, news and propaganda in foreign policy. He is the author of the Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 (Cambridge 2008). His first book, Selling War, published by OUP New York in 1995, was a study of British information work in the United States before Pearl Harbor, and was named by Choice magazine as one of the ten best academic books of that year. He is the co-editor (with David Culbert and David Welch) of Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-Present (2003) which was one of Booklist magazine's reference books of the year, and co-editor with David Carrasco of Alambrista and the U.S.-Mexico Border: Film, Music, and Stories of Undocumented Immigrants (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004). He has published numerous articles on the theme of propaganda and media history. He is an active film historian who has been part of the movement to include film and other media within the mainstream of historical sources.
He is President of the International Association for Media and History, a member of the Public Diplomacy Council and has worked closely with the British Council's Counterpoint Think Tank.
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USIA: Gone but not Forgotten
Vol. I Issue 6, October 2009
By Dr. Nicholas Cull, Professor of Public Diplomacy and Director of the Masters Program in Public Diplomacy at USC
2009 is a year of significant anniversaries for America's public diplomacy. It is forty years since America surged ahead in its image race with the Soviet Union by landing on the moon; thirty years since the Iranian revolution and the opening of a new chapter of misunderstanding and tension with the Middle East; twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and great on-rush of Eastern European democratization.
It is also ten years since the United States Information Agency, the body that presided over American public diplomacy for most of the Cold War, met an inglorious end by being absorbed into the State Department. America's public diplomacy has not been the same since.
USIA was born out of chaos and crisis in 1953. The incoming president – Dwight D. Eisenhower – had learned the value of the psychological dimension in conflict on the battlefields of World War Two and while still a candidate had pledged to rationalize the alphabet soup of agencies through which Americans spoke to the world. USIA's bailiwick included Voice of America (VOA) radio and a host of other international media operations from press conferences, through exhibitions and documentary films and exchanges. It was not perfect, but the agency's achievements were numerous. It introduced America's heroes to the world – the Kennedys and Kings – and turned its difficulties – its Watergates – into 'teachable moments,' showing the strength of the American system.
Its openness stood in contrast to the manipulations of its Soviet adversary. The people of the East never forgot who informed them about the disaster at Chernobyl and who preferred to hide the news, contemptuous of public health. USIA played an obvious role in carrying American culture and ideas into the Eastern Bloc, and deserves as much credit as any Western agency – private or public – for the great changes of 1989. Ironically, these successes were USIA's doom.
The agency had always sold itself as a necessity of the Cold War. Once the Cold War was over it became an obvious candidate to be cut by Senators eager for a peace dividend. An un-holy alliance between Secretary of State Madeline Albright and Senator Jesse Helms sealed the deal on 1 October 2009 USIA's staff and functions passed to the Department of State. In theory, the whole State Department was to have been infused with USIA's outlook.
In practice, the public dimension was placed onto the back burner. The past ten years have seen a succession of unfortunate Under Secretaries for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs struggling with a system that insulated them from public diplomats in the field. Evelyn Lieberman for Clinton; Charlotte Beers, Margaret D. Tutwiler and Karen Hughes for Bush. The last Bush incumbent – James K. Glassman – somehow struck a formula to move forward, placing especial emphasis on technology and new media. However, his tenure was too short to address the question of flawed machinery (or flawed policies).
The Fall of 2008 saw a flurry of interests in reforming U.S. public diplomacy. The Brookings Institution, the pressure group Business for Diplomatic Action, the Defense Science Board and others called for a major reform. The American Academy of Diplomacy produced an especially interesting report called Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future: Fixing a Hollow Service, which called for a substantial investment not just in public diplomacy but in the civilian mechanisms of foreign policy as a whole. Various legislative initiatives began on Capitol Hill. The election of President Obama seemed like the perfect launching pad for a new beginning in U.S. public diplomacy and the president proved to be every bit as inspiring to international audiences as he had been to Americans on the campaign trail.
But public diplomacy goes beyond the president, and the skills needed to win an election campaign are not the same as those needed to project a complex nation to the world. Observers have waited in vain for the expected restructuring of American public diplomacy or any particularly innovative initiative. Key personnel have been slow to move forward – and great initiatives from the Glassman-era have languished in limbo. An opportunity to act is drifting away.
In 2008, I published The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: the first volume of a history of U.S. public diplomacy, which is to appear shortly in an inexpensive paperback edition. In this book, I tracked the evolution of American public diplomacy from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. I concluded with seven clear lessons:
1) Public Diplomacy does not exist in a vacuum.
It cannot be separated from policy. Public Diplomacy works best when it is fully factored into the policy making process, ensuring that foreign publics are considered before policy decisions are taken.
2) The term Public Diplomacy has historical context.
The term 'public diplomacy' was the product of a specific time and place. It fitted the need of the Cold War United States to have a way of speaking about international information that sidestepped the dreaded word 'propaganda.' The historical meaning of the term should not limit its future. Today we speak of 'the New Public Diplomacy' and should look to a practice which is less about a single government bureaucracy and rather looks to build relationships between like-minded partners in the international conversation. The future of public diplomacy will look very different from its past.
3) The constituent elements of public diplomacy are often incompatible.
USIA combined advocacy, broadcasting, listening, and cultural diplomacy elements which regularly clashed. VOA journalists strained against any advocacy role; the cultural diplomats sought to distance themselves from information work, the listening/research elements clamored for a hearing and USIA directors labored to draw the whole apparatus into line with policy priorities. USIA wasted too much energy on internal arguments. Any future apparatus of U.S. public diplomacy should look to allow each element to flourish in its own terms with its own source of credibility. Today it makes very little sense to house U.S. cultural diplomacy inside the Department of State. It is surely time to create an arms-length cultural diplomacy agency of the sort found in all major European countries and in many Asian countries also. Britain's British Council, or Germany's Goethe Institute are fine models.
4) The U.S. is at its heart a skeptical participant in public diplomacy.
The American public dislikes a government role in communication. Public diplomacy has been justified only in an emergency. Practitioners should avoid arguments for public diplomacy solely based on the needs of the moment. There is no substitute for a serious and sustained debate over the role of public diplomacy in international relations, and for scholarship and civic engagement to support this debate. The concerned citizen has a role to play in raising awareness of the need for a better American public diplomacy.
5) U.S. public diplomacy is especially dependent on its leader.
Public diplomacy bureaucracies around the world have generally suffered as newcomers to their local bureaucratic hierarchy. They start from a position of weakness in the scramble for resources and influence. USIA only really prospered when its leader had a direct link to and personal connection with the president. In the present U.S. system even a superbly connected leader like Karen Hughes is frustrated by the flawed system at State. The president not only needs to select the right person but also to devise a system so that that person's influence can be transmitted to his/her personnel in the field.
6) Public Diplomacy is a specialist pursuit.
USIA employed a highly professional staff with a remarkable range of skills, including the linguistic and cultural fluency to reach out to opinion makers and audiences around the world. Any rebuilding of the U.S. public diplomacy capacity will require intense professional development in the field, supporting educational programs in leading U.S. universities, and a cultural shift amongst colleagues in the Department of State.
7) Public Diplomacy is everyone's business.
The dedicated public diplomacy structure created by Eisenhower suited a world in which foreign relations were the monopoly of a relatively small group within any society. Such is not the case today. The behavior of one American – whether a tourist, businessman, or service person overseas or a waitress, motorist or passer-by encountering a foreigner at home – plays a part in U.S. public diplomacy. The small kindnesses that are the currency of American life can make a big difference while thoughtlessness and arrogance can destroy much. All Americans are – at some point in their daily lives – at the front line of public diplomacy.
These are the lessons. Ten years on from the demolition of USIA we need to do more than commemorate or mourn. The think-tanks have reported. The authors have published and the analysts have spoken. Now is the time to act to rebuild America's capacity in the field of public diplomacy so that the future of America's foreign policy will be more closely attuned to the currents of international opinion than its past. There is a world to gain. There is a world to lose.
Comments:
Hans N. Tuch
Nick, an excellent piece, not to be forgotten!
A couple of observations:
You write that "the Agency had always sold itself as a necessity of the Cold War." Unfortunately true, but incorrect in practice. Duringthe early 1950s, when I served in Germany as a CAO (director of theAmerica house in Frankfurt), the Cold War was not a major concern of ours. Our entire concentration was on the reorientation and reeducation of the German people. ("The Department has recognized that the task of educating the German people away from authoritarianism and aggression and toward democracy and peace remain the hardest and
longest of all our responsibilities in Germany and, in the long run, the most decisive." "Communicating with the World..." p. 17). My only brush with anti-Communism was when Sen. McCarthy accused us of the opposite--i.e. pro-Communism--and I had my encounter with Cohn and Schine as described in "Communicating with the World" and in a piecein the New York Times (August 17, 1986).
Second, your statement, "U.S. public diplomacy is especially dependenton its leaders" is, in my experience, certainly correct, as alsodocumented in "Communicating with the World." The two most pertinentexamples were Frank Shakespeare and Charlie Wick. Shakespeare'sideological baggage was a fervent, almost visceral opposition to Communism, and his overriding mission as USIA director was to defeat Soviet aggression. USIA was his tool in this task. In practical
terms this meant that his PAOs better list "the defeat of the Communist menace" as the first Country plan objective or else they would hear from him immediately. (In my case, in Brazil, then an anti-Communist military dictatorship, I learned to list "The defeat of Soviet Imperialism" always as my first Country Plan objective, to theconsternation of my USIS colleagues. Having done so, I could list ourother objectives which we then worked on diligently with the encomium of the front office.)
The other prime example was Charlie Wick who felt that his and hisagency's primary objective was to build the image of President Reaganaround the world. We were able to take advantage of this predilectionby suggesting that Charlie put a feather into the President's cap by
having him announce USIA's world-wide youth exchange initiative at theBig-Six summit in Williamsburg in 1962, an initiative that we felt was vital to our country program.
I believe one reason why USIA directors were able to exert suchpersonal influence on the Agency agenda, unlike permanent department heads--Commerce, Agriculture, Interior--was that USIA directors had no domestic constituencies to contend with and were regarded in the
Congress and administrations as heads of a still temporary agency thatdid not require the political oversight that other regular agencieswere exposed to. (Secretary Kissinger for one never paid anyattention to what Frank Shakespeare was up to.)
Enough said. This is much longer than it should be. In any case, itshows that your essay found a very positive response. Regards, Tom.
Pat Kushlis
Nick: I also read USIA: Gone but Not Forgotten and a few of the early comments. Nice article. Kudos.
But I too had a queasy feeling about your observation that "the Agency had always sold itself as a necessity of the Cold War." It did - and did more so under certain directors - as Tom points out. I, for one, thought it was a sensible short term strategy for obtaining funding but not a sensible one for the long term good of the "temporary" agency. This proved to be the case after the Soviet Union fell apart.
But USIA was, in reality, always about more than simply about fighting Communism. This was particularly true with respect to educational and cultural programs. Those of us who disagreed with the fervent anti-Communists at the helm could revert to a posting on the cultural/educational side. That's what I did when Reagan/Wick entered the picture.
Didn't help much with promotions - on the other hand, it was a way of not being low ranked for insubordination or lack of zeal.
Bill Rugh
Thanks for your very interesting essay "Gone but not forgotten'. I willhave my Fletcherstudents read it. As Tom Tuch and Pat Kushlisalready noted, you are absolutely right that the Agency leadership sold it as a cold war instrument, but not all of us followed in lock-step to do that. Washington staff who had to testify before Congress used the cold war argument to get funding but those of us in the field shaped our program depending on local circumstances and those varied widely.
When I was PAO in Saudi Arabia the cold war issue was useful, but when I was PAO in Egypt, it was not at all useful since Nasser had close ties with Moscow and we needed another approach. So you are absolutely right to say practitioners should avoid arguments based on needs of the moment.
Moreover, in both the Saudi and Egyptian situations, we found that local issues, both national and regional, usually were far more important to our public diplomacy programs than any global issues perceived in Washington as our highest priority, such as the Cold War. In both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for our target audience members, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the U.S. position on it, not the Cold War, was clearly the most important issue affecting their perception of the United States. This issue colored everything we tried to do that no amount of talk about the Cold War could change. Those of us who worked in the Middle East at the time remember, for example, an exchange between the PAO in Jidda and USIA Washington in which Washington asked him what the Saudis thought about the Berlin blockade that was going on at the time, and the suffering of the West Berliners. He responded, "The Saudis aren’t thinking about the West Berliners at all. What are the Berliners thinking about the suffering of the Palestinians?" The point is: for PAOs, "all politics is local", no matter what Washington thinks.
As for the constituent elements of public diplomacy being incompatible, I actually think there is a strong argument for combining them in the field, where the PAO needs to have all the tools he or she can muster to deal with local concerns. Some PAOs need education and culture more than others, especially where the media are tightly controlled and the government is hostile, so it does not make sense to me to try to separate that element out. How education and culture is managed in Washington is less important, as we have seen when it was under State for years after USIA was created, and the PAO always, before and after USIA, has been able to use ECA assets as part of an integrated program. It is a myth that policy advocacy spoils other aspects of PD because they all can be managed as part of a comprehensive program in the field.
Hans N. Tuch
I agree completely with Bill Rugh's contention that the combination of information activities and cultural/exchange activities are indispensable for effective public diplomacy operations: we need the long-term cultural/exchange activities to bring about basic understanding of our society and ideas, and that understanding is necessary for foreign publics to comprehend and accept our short terminterests and policies.
Pat Kushlis
Bill: I completely agree with you that separating out education/culture from information does not work well in the field. Not only for the reasons you state but also because America Centers are ipso facto loci for both. The best arrangement I worked in was in the Philippines where the America Center with its library, reference service and program room, the CAO staff and the Fulbright Commission were in the same building accessible to the public. This meant, as CAO I could supervise them all - and as a member of the board also coordinate daily with our excellent Fulbright Director.
There were important information elements in our cultural section activities - from providing reference support to journalists and politicians to hosting lunches and dinners and accompanying visiting American foreign policy speakers to events elsewhere. I had done the latter as IO in Helsinki. The IV program which we ran in Manila (based on the Yugoslav selection model), included journalists as well as political scientists, environmentalists and artists.
An aside, our open library of 30,000 volumes was packed six days a week. Today's remnants (an RSC) in the embassy are a joke. As the university political science faculties began to open to official Americans again in 1992 - once the bases were gone - I focused on them and downplayed the arts aspects as PAO Mort Smith asked me to do. This was easy because I had a PhD in political science and many Filipino academics also have higher degrees from the US. Bottom line: this was just one example of program juggling to meet the local needs and changing times that Bill - you stressed.
I also, however, think it is far easier to coordinate efforts and resources abroad if the institutional backing at home is not fragmented as it is today. It is also normally easier to help a PAO, IO or CAO coordinate programs in the field if the desk officer is not so over burdened with so many countries that the person can focus on none (this happened in USIA in the mid-1990s), and if the desk officer understands how the other pieces of the institution operate and has good professional relations with key individuals in them. I have to wonder how anything can get coordinated now that there are no PD area offices and at least some PD officers in State geographic bureaus seem to do other tasks as well.
It's also much harder ifa specific pd function in DC is located in a separate agency. I don't know how one would deal with, for instance, the results of the fragmentation of BBG - it must be a nightmare - but it was possible to do so with the VOA language services.
I personally found no problems dealing with State or being included in weekly EUR/SE staff meetings. I attended the appropriate ones and I also worked with State desk officers to resolve the few USIS related problems in the field that plagued us all.
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Nick, an excellent piece, not to be forgotten!
A couple of observations:
You write that "the Agency had always sold itself as a necessity of the Cold War." Unfortunately true, but incorrect in practice. Duringthe early 1950s, when I served in Germany as a CAO (director of theAmerica house in Frankfurt), the Cold War was not a major concern of ours. Our entire concentration was on the reorientation and reeducation of the German people. ("The Department has recognized that the task of educating the German people away from authoritarianism and aggression and toward democracy and peace remain the hardest and
longest of all our responsibilities in Germany and, in the long run, the most decisive." "Communicating with the World..." p. 17). My only brush with anti-Communism was when Sen. McCarthy accused us of the opposite--i.e. pro-Communism--and I had my encounter with Cohn and Schine as described in "Communicating with the World" and in a piecein the New York Times (August 17, 1986).
Second, your statement, "U.S. public diplomacy is especially dependenton its leaders" is, in my experience, certainly correct, as alsodocumented in "Communicating with the World." The two most pertinentexamples were Frank Shakespeare and Charlie Wick. Shakespeare'sideological baggage was a fervent, almost visceral opposition to Communism, and his overriding mission as USIA director was to defeat Soviet aggression. USIA was his tool in this task. In practical
terms this meant that his PAOs better list "the defeat of the Communist menace" as the first Country plan objective or else they would hear from him immediately. (In my case, in Brazil, then an anti-Communist military dictatorship, I learned to list "The defeat of Soviet Imperialism" always as my first Country Plan objective, to theconsternation of my USIS colleagues. Having done so, I could list ourother objectives which we then worked on diligently with the encomium of the front office.)
The other prime example was Charlie Wick who felt that his and hisagency's primary objective was to build the image of President Reaganaround the world. We were able to take advantage of this predilectionby suggesting that Charlie put a feather into the President's cap by
having him announce USIA's world-wide youth exchange initiative at theBig-Six summit in Williamsburg in 1962, an initiative that we felt was vital to our country program.
I believe one reason why USIA directors were able to exert suchpersonal influence on the Agency agenda, unlike permanent department heads--Commerce, Agriculture, Interior--was that USIA directors had no domestic constituencies to contend with and were regarded in the
Congress and administrations as heads of a still temporary agency thatdid not require the political oversight that other regular agencieswere exposed to. (Secretary Kissinger for one never paid anyattention to what Frank Shakespeare was up to.)
Enough said. This is much longer than it should be. In any case, itshows that your essay found a very positive response. Regards, Tom.