The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

(popularly known as the Stanton Re- port). That panel recommended the fate that would ultimately befall the U.S. Information Agency nearly 25 years later: absorption into the State Department. Picking up on that theme, Cull titles his penultimate chapter “Epilogue, Vic- tory and the Strange Death of USIA, 1989-1999,” and comments: “U.S. pub- lic diplomacy had been an important tool for minimizing disasters like Wa- tergate, managing relationships with al- lies, blocking the enemy’s ability to win, and holding the imagination of the de- veloping and nonaligned world until the American system had decisively passed the Soviet.” He then concludes the book with a set of seven useful les- sons for those who practice public diplomacy today. Cull is now completing a sequel to bring the story up to the present. Readers of this account will surely look forward to that volume. Allen C. Hansen, a 32-year Foreign Service veteran of the U.S. Information Agency, is the author of USIA: Public Diplomacy in the Computer Age (Praeger, 1989) and Nine Lives: A For- eign Service Odyssey (New Academia, 2007). Only Connect! Encounters: A Lifetime Spent Crossing Cultural Frontiers Nancy Keeney Forster, Wind Shadow Press, 2009, $15.95, paperback, 380 pages. R EVIEWED BY D AVID I. H ITCHCOCK A carefree child of expatriate par- ents at age 10, a prisoner of the Japan- ese at 17, and a valued source of intelligence to the U.S. military at 19, Clifton Forster became a fervent ad- vocate of public diplomacy in his 34- year career in the Foreign Service (nearly half of it in Japan). His wife, Nancy, shared Clifton’s adventures and absorbed his stories for nearly six decades, while pursuing her own career as an educator who helped to launch the widely respected Inter- national Baccalaureate program. In 2007, a year after her husband’s death at 82, she began to sort through the papers Clifton had tucked away in a Japanese tea chest. She also re-exam- ined her own memories and writings to compose this delightful memoir. It is pleasantly written and well-organized (though a few more dates would have helped). She eloquently expounds her hus- band’s views of what United States In- formation Agency programs should accomplish; how policy-loaded they should be; and what the proper mix was between short-term public affairs and longer-range educational ex- changes. But this memoir is neither a dry history of public diplomacy nor merely a set of entertaining travel sto- ries from her husband’s postings. Rather, she uses his activities and notes to illuminate these larger professional debates. The author begins by describing Japan’s 1942 takeover of the Philip- pines, and tells us what happened when — much later — her husband met the daughter of the Japanese gen- eral who had defeated Douglas MacArthur, but failed to catch him. She paints a grim portrait of all that this young son of the American Red Cross representative in Manila endured alongside other interned civilians, and recounts how his painfully acquired knowledge of detention camps, the Mindanao and Luzon coastlines, and key local personalities earned him a personal commendation from Navy Secretary James Forrestal. Here are just a few of the many sto- ries Mrs. Forster cites from her hus- band’s Foreign Service career: Back in the Philippines for his first Foreign Service assignment in 1949, Forster brought American books and movies to Davao, achieving good will in a poor region of communist-led Huk rebels. Soon his mobile units were showing slides to help farmers fight the disease that was infesting their hemp crop. Five years later, protests in Fukuoka against U.S.-Japan security coopera- tion turned him from traditional cul- tural programming to cultivating con- tacts with socialist professors and left- leaning unionists, many of whom he in- vited to visit the “imperialist” United States. In 1957, while running a cultural center in Rangoon, Forster encour- aged neutral Burma to resist Soviet blandishments — a task made easier when his Russian counterpart defected in the center’s library! Growing American public criticism of Israeli actions toward the Palestini- ans in 1971 led Tel Aviv journalists to suspect that the U.S. commitment to USIA employees will relish seeing the names of old friends and acquaintances in these pages. 56 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 B O O K S