38 JULY-AUGUST 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Modern diplomats are keeping Benjamin Franklin’s legacy alive, as the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training’s oral history archives show. BY TOM SELINGER Tom Selinger is a recently retired Foreign Service officer currently serving as a project manager at the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST). During his 27-year career, he served in five countries across three continents. The Invention of U.S. Diplomacy Today’s diplomats walk in Benjamin Franklin’s footsteps every day, building on his achievements and echoing his tactics, perhaps without even knowing it. With this in mind, in 2012 the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) adopted “Cool Ben”—a portrait of America’s first diplomat sporting shades—as an emblem of the organization and its mission: capturing, preserving, and sharing the experiences of America’s diplomats. (Note that Cool Ben and ADST have no affiliation with the more recently created Ben Franklin Fellowship.) ADST’s oral history collection now includes interviews with more than 3,000 diplomats and covers a century of U.S. foreign relations. An independent, nonprofit, educational organization, ADST has honored Benjamin Franklin throughout its 40-year history as the model for a kind of diplomacy that values strong alliances, promotes cultural understanding, and leverages mutual interests in international relations. Famous for countless inventions, from bifocals to lightning rods, Benjamin Franklin was equally brilliant as the inventor of U.S. diplomacy. Dispatched to Paris by the Continental Congress and its Committee of Secret Correspondence as America’s first official envoy to a foreign government, Franklin crossed the Atlantic with few instructions and even fewer resources. His task was simply to secure outside assistance for the Revolution. The result was, as the celebrated biographer Stacy Schiff called it, “a great improvisation.” At age 70, Franklin was famous around the world for his writings and experiments with electricity. He found Paris enamored with Enlightenment ideas yet still trapped in monarchical traditions. Walking into Versailles in simple suit and fur cap rather than court dress and powdered wig, Franklin became a sensation as the representative American—a frontier philosopher who has shed the burden of European excess. Without democratic republics to serve as role models for his diplomacy, Franklin followed his instincts over the course of nearly nine years in France and created something new. Rather than representation of a monarch, Franklin’s diplomacy encompassed the full spectrum of our new nation’s interests FOCUS ON THE U.S. IN THE WORLD AT 250
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=