The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

can rector of the university in Cuzco (and then-director of Peruvian education). He joined the embassy in 1931, the first de facto U.S. cultural attaché (1931- 1958) after George Creel’s half- hearted experiments with his Committee on Public Infor- mation in 1917-1918. By 1943, campus-recruited cultural officers graced every U.S. embassy in Latin America and worked in a dozen other nations not yet overrun by war. In the rare cases where embassy officers, like W. Tapley Bennett in the Dominican Republic, added cultural duties to their other tasks, conflicting priorities and overwork set in. The new academic cultural officers and their staffs were funded by any available source: Nelson Rockefeller as Coordinator for Latin America, Elmer Davis and his Office of War Information, William Donovan and his Office of Strategic Services, State itself and local American business. The Semantics of Public Diplomacy Today, after two centuries of informal practice and six decades of formal U.S. cultural diplomacy, even close American observers have forgotten what was once in place, so faded has it become. The libraries have been closed; fine-arts and performing-arts traffic has all but ceased; direct English-teaching has been dropped; and U.S. and foreign field cultural staffs have been dismantled. With few exceptions, our cultural diplomacy has gone mute and deaf. To foreign audi- ences, it seems as though the U.S., having exploited culture for Cold War purposes, has left cultural and educational diplomacy to the tough mercies of the marketplace and to others who find it useful. After 9/11, Americans noticed the loss. Since that sad date, well over 30 studies of public diplomacy have been tracked by the office of Under Secretary Karen Hughes, as well as quieter statements on the diploma- cy of cultures, attracting less attention. These studies involved media experts and communications theorists; if they mention culture at all, it is as a PD tool. Meanwhile, scholars like Samuel Huntington and Joseph Nye have been warning for 15 years that the deep issues in today’s world are cultural in nature. Four decades as a cultural diplomat teach skepticism about the claims of public diplomacy practitioners, just as Americans learn to mistrust the self-promo- tions of advertising and PR. Most of the recent PD studies concur in nostalgia for good old USIA. The PD practitioners, focused on answers, seem to have over- looked the hard questions of function and definition. Understandably, the meaning of “public diplomacy” has been opaque, even among its practitioners. Only in 1967 did ex-diplomat Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, coin the term as a name for his new Edward R. Murrow Center. It was a polite euphemism for “propaganda,” replacing “information” — which Creel had chosen for the CPI, Woodrow Wilson’s acknowledged World War I propaganda agency. The studies overlook definitions but agree that PD is indispensable. For the general public, PD at its very best is public relations or advertising, lightly dusted with Wilson’s idea of open covenants. Those nostalgic for USIA wave the PD banner in the battle to restore it. PD becomes a bit clearer if analyzed as a set of func- tions, distinct actions that State and USIA carried out in the last half-century — an approach I have undertaken elsewhere. From that angle, it looks like an all-too- American mix of informational and cultural diplomacy, run by the info-prop specialists — an odd merger of the New York Times and Harvard, managed by a small-time ad agency. Culture’s Poor Cousins While cultural officers created U.S. cultural diplo- matic practice and did much of USIA’s field work, they were second-class citizens within both USIA and State. For one thing, they were overworked; for another, few saw the political relevance of their work; and they had responsibilities to other masters, like the universities. Until 1977, even after 24 years of USIA supervision, cul- tural affairs — including the flagship Fulbright exchanges — were administered by a separate and sometimes adversarial office, State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. USIA hired, assigned and managed the F O C U S 40 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 6 The creation of formal U.S. government cultural relations originated in 1938 as outreach to Latin America, implementing FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy.