The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2006

The Coombs Legacy The Journal ’s obituary of Philip Coombs (May) prompts reflection. My book, First Resort of Kings (Poto- mac Books, 2005), devotes an entire chapter to his contribution to cultural diplomacy in his 700 frustrating days in State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (1961 to 1963). Coombs was enticed to State by President John Kennedy. Friends like Chester Bowles, Dean Rusk, John Gardner and Ed Murrow, among oth- ers, believed that this human-resource economist, staffer for the monumental Morrill Report (Universities and World Affairs, 1959), could help focus the role of the university world in for- eign policy, pull together the scattered efforts of a dozen U.S. agencies, and bring consensus to a few hundred dis- tracted members of Congress. Along with Sen. William Fulbright, D-Ark., he stood for a benign, engagemental, cooperative, mutually-advantageous and coordinated public-private ap- proach to exchanges of intellect, schol- arship and research. Coombs’ staff of 300 was discour- aged by two decades of congressional whipsawing. Eight years of USIA ambivalence did not help: the mes- sage-driven agency that controlled the cultural affairs field staff saw little con- tradiction between education and pro- paganda. His energy was impressive. He persuaded the president to establish a blue-chip advisory commission head- ed by Gardner, with its far-seeing manifesto Beacon of Hope . He brought outstanding scholars to Fulbright’s supervisory Board of For- eign Scholarships. He pressed for intellectual-ambassadors like Reisch- auer and Galbraith. He helped re- cruit academic cultural officers for embassies like Brazil, Egypt, France, India, Japan and the U.K. He shep- herded the mission-defining Ful- bright-Hays Act of 1963 through Congress, pulling fragmented legisla- tion together. He pressed the overseas educational arms of a dozen federal agencies to work together. He con- vinced universities, foundations and NGOs that they had a friend in State. And he led a dozen interlinked study- groups involving 500 high-caliber Americans in redesigning cultural out- reach. Then it was over. One attack came from USIA, headed but not entirely led by his friend Murrow; its un- abashed propagandists considered education a minor tool and saw L E T T E R S J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 9