The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

and-coming young foreign leaders here for a first-hand look at American society. The trick was to spot them early. It didn’t always work, but when it did it was effec- tive. In the early 1980s, the embassy in Kabul proposed a relatively unknown young journalist, Hamid Karzai, for a grant. It was a good hunch, given Karzai’s later promi- nence as the interim president of Afghanistan following the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Other leader grantees included Britain’s Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. During the USIA years, over 40 other leader grantees became heads of government or chiefs of state. The pattern of their visits varied. Tours usually lasted about a month, involving a personalized itinerary. Given the shortness of time, most grantees traveled by plane. An excep- tion was Eleni Vlachou, publisher of a leading Athens newspaper, Kath- imerini. She asked for a Greyhound bus ticket and then crossed the coun- try meeting with mayors, editors and ordinary citizens before returning to Greece where, years later, she played an important role in helping bring down an authoritarian government in the 1970s. Assessing USIA How effective were USIA pro- grams? Television reporter Edward R. Murrow, the best known of the agency’s directors, famously told a congressional committee that no cash register rang when someone overseas changed his or her opinion as a result of a USIA program. The agency had a large research opera- tion to track overseas public opin- ion in general and the impact of USIA operations in particular. When polling focused on specific short-term opinion trends, it was often helpful as a measure of local attitudes. At other times, the results were less useful. One exam- ple was a poll that sought to mea- sure international opinion on which country was the greatest threat to world peace. The expectation was that the Soviet Union would head the list. In Bolivia, the local polling response was loud and clear: the greatest threat to world peace came from Paraguay. What are USIA’s lessons for today’s more complex public diplo- macy tasks? Despite some mishaps and bad judgment calls, its media and cultural operations clearly had an impact. The agency’s most obvi- ous failure, despite its best efforts, was its inability to establish itself firmly as a strong influence in the formation of key foreign policy deci- sions. Ed Murrow identified this shortcoming 40 years ago when he said that USIA should be in on the takeoffs as well as the landings in such decisions. The agency’s influence on policy was strongest at the embassy level. Good ambassadors listened to their USIS staff and factored in local pub- lic attitudes when making policy rec- ommendations to the State Depart- ment. This still happens, but public diplomacy concerns tend to get diluted in the mix of other interests back in Washington. There is no formulaic solution for this problem. If anything, diploma- cy is more complex than ever today, given the fact that policy decisions increasingly involve dealing with shadowy international forces that are immune to conventional appeals. The answer does not lie in resurrect- ing old USIA practices; changes in global information and cultural pat- terns have outmoded many of them. Yet it is undeniable that USIA set a standard of imaginative nimbleness in projecting American ideas abroad that continues to have relevance today. ■ J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61