The Foreign Service Journal, December 2006

ing and experience to perfect public diplomacy skills — and there are more than a few senior Foreign Service officers outside of the PD cone who may be superb in their conal area, but don’t have a clue about PD. (And that goes both ways — I admit I don’t have a clue about eco- nomics, but then no one is going around saying “every officer is an eco- nomic officer.”) What is true is that every Foreign Service officer can and should be doing public outreach — but that is not public diplomacy. Public diplo- macy is a well-thought-out plan, developed by the public affairs officer and his or her staff at post, and approved by the ambassador or prin- cipal officer, to influence and inform foreign publics, using a full range of public diplomacy tools. Public out- reach by mission officers is only one tool of many in the kit — and a public diplomacy officer’s expertise is required to decide when and where to best use that particular tool. It is time for senior officials to stop denigrating public diplomacy officers and start treating us as the well- trained professionals that we are — not to mention commending us when we do a good job, and giving us assur- ances that hard work and training in PD will lead to career advancement. Anne E. Grimes Public Diplomacy Officer Washington, D.C. The Missing Face of PD Under Secretary Karen Hughes’ wariness of the Foreign Service (“Damage Control,” FSJ , October) comes close to echoing the cold eval- uation expressed more than once by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Secretary Rice was no sooner set- tled into the seventh floor than she began to question the Foreign Service assignment procedures and issued her pronouncement that offi- cers should line up to learn Arabic and other tough languages for what she deemed the really important FS assignments in the world’s trouble spots. Then, as noted in the Sep- tember AFSA News report of her meeting with AFSA, she called for the Foreign Service to be more ‘expeditionary,’ with the implication that some cadre or cadres of officers ought to be groomed and ready to go anywhere on super-short notice to do anything. If U/S Hughes is the face of public diplomacy at State, the face is not much on view. In fact, Journal read- ers in Austin, Texas, are relieved to learn from your excellent October issue that she is actually on the job (sort of). Having heard next to noth- ing about what Hughes was up to since leaving Austin to rejoin the gov- ernment, we rather equated her ap- pointment to the high public diplo- macy post at State with Elizabeth Dole’s election to the U.S. Senate: Neither has ever been much heard from since. We now learn that U/S Hughes has spent a lot of energy pushing her ‘five Es’ talking points (far too pithy to repeat here) instead of effectively using the inside-administration mus- cle she clearly used to have. The diplomatic world would have taken clear note had she pushed for restora- tion of the true and once-reliable face of American diplomacy, the U.S. Information Agency, to official and independent status. Public diplomacy took a real hit seven years ago when USIA/USIS was dispersed into varied State bureaus and those weird, unco- ordinated media outlets. Administra- 8 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 6 L E T T E R S