Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Yale Richmond’s latest book is aptly titled Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey. This short, readable volume is a treasure trove of sound advice wrapped in the recollections of one of America’s leading public diplomacy practitioners and top Soviet hands whose lengthy US government career spanned 44 years. Richmond’s career began in 1947 with the US Army, encompassed 30 years in the Foreign Service, and concluded with three years as a staff consultant to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the US Congress’s Cold War human rights watchdog which ended in 1984. An initial 30 day stint as a consultant at the quasi-NGO Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy that immediately followed ultimately lasted eight years.

From engineering student to diplomat

Richmond’s professional life started fresh out of Syracuse University with a degree in electrical engineering when the US military recruited him to become a Military Government Officer in West Germany in 1947. This shortly after that war-torn country had been divided into four zones and the US occupied the south and a sector of Berlin.

His transition from two years as a civilian with the US Military Government then five with the State Department High Commission in Germany occurred with remarkable smoothness: an oral exam and “abracadabra,” Richmond had joined the Foreign Service. He next exchanged woolens for a civilian wardrobe suitable to the tropics and departed for a remote corner of Indochina. A far simpler and faster transition to diplomatic life, I might add, then than now. Or, for that matter, when I joined the Foreign Service in 1970.

Aside from that early State Department assignment to Laos – a chapter that provides a bit of comic relief but also presages the storm clouds of an ever increasing US military involvement in Vietnam, most of Richmond’s public diplomacy career took place in Europe and or working on Soviet or Eastern European affairs in Washington, DC. This region and its peoples became his forté.

“An eye for an eye, if not always a truth for a truth”

Richmond knew the Soviet Union like few other American diplomats. This was undoubtedly because so much of his lengthy career was devoted to US-Soviet relations although in truth, he recalls that an early assignment at a happier time in his life to Poland was his favorite. It’s also because, in my experience, cultural officers and exhibit guides, in particular, had much greater opportunities to get to know the Soviet Union, its societies and its peoples than most others who worked in the U.S. Mission there during the Cold War. Richmond grasped this opportunity well - as so many of his anecdotes indicate.

Richmond’s relationship with the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” began in 1967 when he first studied Russian. It concluded in 1980 as chief US negotiator for the renewed US-Soviet Cultural Agreement. The agreement itself fell to pieces when it was 97% completed because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan over the Christmas/New Year’s break and the U.S. government torpedoed - among other things - the almost finished cultural negotiations in retaliation. I remember this all too vividly as the most junior member of the delegation.

In Moscow's Cold War chill, cultural work was also political

Richmond explains well how politics influenced cultural exchange and that the work of cultural officers in the Soviet Union – of which I was one – was often as much political as it was cultural. He also recognized that cultural exchange was a two way street because through “cultural exchange we learned much about each other.” And he stressed that “while the immediate objective may have been improved mutual understanding, the long-range objective was a more stable relationship between the two countries.”

Rome was not built in a day and the Cold War lasted decades

Richmond concludes his “Afterword” by asking whether public diplomacy practices learned during the Cold War could “serve as a model for defeating terrorism and anti-Americanism in the world we live in today.” His nuanced answer - in which he emphasizes the need for patience – as well as the necessity for policy makers to be “aware of the public opinion consequences of their decisions” is far more “yes” than “no.”

Yet Richmond also cautions that those who are “expected to practice public diplomacy should also have some input into the decisions” that govern its implementation and that increased funding and a larger public diplomacy staff will not alone win support for American policies. I agree.

Yale Richmond, Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008.

John Brown’s review of Practicing Public Diplomacy is here.

Comments

[Courtenay Barnett]

What stands in marked contast here today - is a debased civil service where more political functionaries are in place than professionally trained, experienced and qualiified persons in public life.What a contrast under Bush.

[Alex Calata]

Pat, Thanks for bringing the book to my attention. I hope the government has the ability--and the willingness--to understand the experience and wisdom of diplomats like Yale Richardson. The lesson is still to be learned: steadfast relations between nations come more from the work of those patient cultural officers than the political ideologues who come and go at State.