The Foreign Service Journal, May 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2023 45 Asia (office director, deputy assistant secretary, and ambas- sador). Countless numbers of experts in the field emerged from the exhibit guide ranks. A number of us have long discussed the value of a conference that would bring together generations of guides to explore further lessons learned. Although this has never materialized, a number of books have examined the history of the exhibits, the Carnegie Institution held a conference in Moscow in 2007, and Ambassador (ret.) Ian Kelly undertook an interview project of former guides in Diplomatic Training on the Exhibit Floor John Beyrle Photography USA / Ufa, Novosibirsk, Moscow / 1977 2008. Such a conference still ought to be held; but in the meantime, thanks to the FSJ for this look at a major U.S. success story in public diplomacy. Ambassador (ret.) Laura Kennedy, a career FSO, served as chief of mission in Turkmenistan, ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna. She currently serves on various boards, including Foreign Policy for America and the Arms Control Association, and is a member of the Secretary’s Interna- tional Security Advisory Board. I served as a guide on the Photography USA exhibit in 1977, when I was 23. For Americans studying Russian language, literature, or history during the Cold War, working on an exhibit in the Soviet Union for six months—and getting paid for it, even at the GS equivalent of minimumwage—was the dream job everyone wanted. For many of us, it opened the door to a career in the U.S. Foreign Service that we might otherwise have missed. For all of us, it was singular experi- ence of an intellectual and emotional intensity that we can still feel vividly, even 50 or 60 years later. The whole point of the exhibits programwas to offer a counternarrative to Soviet propaganda and disinforma- tion about “the West” in general, and the U.S. in particular, through direct personal interaction with ordinary people in the USSR. Everything, from the name and design of each exhibition down to the glossy brochure given out at the exit, was designed to encourage visitors to question the Soviet view of the world, or to reinforce the doubts about the storyline that we knewmany of them already had. But the 25-30 guides—the centerpiece of each exhibit—were not trained polemicists. We were young adults in our mid-20s, many fresh out of college, of varied backgrounds, and with unpredictable political views. How could the U.S. Informa- tion Agency be sure that we would be persuasive in “telling America’s story,” as a USIAmotto put it? And to what extent should our interactions with Soviet visitors follow a script, even a rough one? Exhibit guides John Beyrle and Kathleen Rose on the stand at Photography USA in Novosibirsk, 1977. “The awestruck kid looking at the Polaroid photo Beyrle had just taken really conveys the fascination that so many had,” says Kathleen Rose. PAULSCHOELLHAMER By 1977, when I joined the program, USIA had been design- ing and sending exhibits to the USSR for nearly 20 years. My exhibit, Photography USA, was the 15th in that series. Recent archival research has uncovered files showing that in the early years of the programduring the 1960s, there was internal debate among USIA, the State Department, and other