American Public Diplomacy in the Cold War
Review by John H. Brown
Wilson P. Dizard, Jr. Inventing Public
Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information
Agency, Boulder: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 2004, 255 pp., $49.95.
Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the
Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain, University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2003, 249 pp., $37.95.
Public diplomacy—the art of engaging,
informing, and influencing key international
audiences—is back on Washington’s
radar screen. Gone is public diplomacy’s
post-Cold War obscurity, when many
considered it irrelevant after the dissolution
of the USSR. Today, with a so-called
war on terror, government officials,
media pundits, and commentators from
both left and right have revived public
diplomacy as a tool to win the U.S. gov
ernment’s battle for the “hearts and
minds” of the Muslim world. There are
calls, in Congress and elsewhere, for
increased funding for public diplomacy
programs, as well as numerous proposals
to make it a more effective tool of U.S.
foreign policy in the post-9/11 world.
The two books under review shed light
on the role of U.S. public diplomacy
during the Cold War, a global conflict
during which military strength was only
one of many ways to overcome forces
hostile to the United States. These works
do not pretend to be the definitive studies
on the topic, but they are nonetheless
timely and significant contributions to
an understanding of the past and the
lessons it can give for the future. Wilson
Dizard’s Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of
the U.S. Information Agency and Yale
Richmond’s Cultural Exchange and the Cold
War: Raising the Iron Curtain are must-reads
for policymakers, scholars, and general
readers concerned with the United
States’s international role today.
Apart from their choice of subject
matter, the books have much in com
mon. Both were written by distinguished
Foreign Service officers who have spent a
total of nearly sixty years carrying out
U.S. educational, cultural, and informational
programs aimed at overseas audiences.
They are based on the authors’
personal experiences, observations by
public diplomacy practitioners and program
participants, secondary sources,
and some primary sources. The authors
avoid theory and write in clear, jargonfree
prose.
The differences between the books
stem from the authors’ divergent view
points. Dizard is most concerned with
the information side of public diploma
cy, although he does not overlook its
educational and cultural aspects. He
deals with his subject chronologically,
globally, and institutionally and focuses
on how the United States Information
Agency (USIA), created in 1953 as an
anti-Soviet propaganda agency, evolved
by gradually increasing its activities in the
Third World and adapting its programs
to changing global circumstances. He
ends USIA’s story in 1999, when it was
consolidated into the State Department,
but considers “The Future of Public
Diplomacy” in the final chapter.
Conversely, Richmond focuses solely
on cultural and educational exchanges
with the Soviet Union. He discusses vari
ous governmental and non-governmen
tal programs—many of them not handled
by USIA—that had an impact on the
USSR. He does not use the term “public
diplomacy” to describe these programs,
preferring “cultural exchange.” His
treatment of information programs is
limited to a two-page chapter on foreign
broadcasts to the Soviet Union.