The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

O C T O B E R 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 39 urrent memory tends to attribute the creation of formal government cultural relations to counter-propaganda aimed at Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. In fact it originated as outreach to Latin America, implementing FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, and was designed to reverse decades of a paternalist U.S. stance toward the Southern Hemi- sphere. In 1938, Latin Americanist Sumner Welles, deputy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, convinced the Department of State and President Roosevelt to open a Division of Cultural Relations in State, later tagged CU for the first two letters of “culture.” To reassure fellow diplomats and Congress, he and Secretary Hull insisted that the division would do only 5 percent of the work, leaving the rest to the private and academic sector. Over the six preceding years, internal grousing by Foreign Service veterans had ranged from Loy Henderson and Ellis Briggs to Dean Acheson and future-participant George V. Allen. In the debate about the division, no subject was more controversial than the idea of outsider field representa- tives — cultural attachés — in embassies. Some argued that American embassy cultural offices would be per- ceived as cover for intelligence, tainting the idea beyond repair. Speaking for the spit-and-polish traditionalists, Assistant Secretary George Messersmith insisted that the Foreign Service already represented the best in American culture, and hence needed no specialists. Posted later to Mexico, Messersmith admitted underes- timating the time demands a decent cultural diplomacy entails. The first field specialists, virtually all from the acade- mic world, were not deployed until 1942, when the war took hold. The decision was carried out swiftly, at a high level of quality. To Chungking went future Harvard Sinologist John King Fairbank; and to Tehran, future Princeton Middle East scholar T. Cuyler Young. In Lima, the nod went to Albert Giesecke, longtime Ameri- F O C U S O N P U B L I C D I P L O M A C Y R EBUILDING A MERICA ’ S C ULTURAL D IPLOMACY S INCE THE END OF THE C OLD W AR , THE U.S. HAS UNWISELY LEFT CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL DIPLOMACY TO THE TOUGH MERCIES OF THE MARKETPLACE . . B Y R ICHARD T. A RNDT C Dr. Richard T. Arndt spent 24 years with USIA and State as a cultural diplomat, with overseas postings in Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Iran, Italy and France. Since retirement in 1985, he has taught at the University of Virginia and The George Washington University and chaired the American Fulbright Association of alumni, the National Peace Foundation, the citizen-support group Americans for UNESCO and an endowment honoring FSO Lois W. Roth. His book The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Potomac, 2005), now in paperback, is a critical and comparative history of U.S. cultural outreach since World War I.