By Patricia Lee Sharpe
My father retired to a small city in Florida and got involved in local politics. Soon he was mayor. As mayor, he insisted on opening public business to public scrutiny, despite the previous addiction to wheeling and dealing behind closed doors. He was in tune with the times. Florida, like many states, had a brand new Sunshine Law. Federal and State governments had also passed freedom of information legislation: the people had a right to know the people’s business. The days of political connivance and secrecy were over, we thought.
The existence of such FOIA and Sunshine laws—and their fairly strict enforcement—made it easy to conduct public diplomacy when I worked for USIA abroad. In those days not so long ago, advocating democracy was straightforward, uncomplicated. It wasn’t naive to believe that U.S. leaders, for all their differences and occasional lapses, were committed to a representative government of healthily functioning checks and balances, to unbought open governance, to pluralism, to federalism, to the Bill of Rights, to continued reductions in the power of privilege. No wonder secrecy wasn’t considered necessary. The need to hide things was minimal.
Nor, when promoting particular policies, did we public diplomacy practitioners have to worry about staying minutely “on message,” like contempt-worthy dolls with pull strings. We were professionals. Our special skill lay in analyzing a policy and finding a way to make it understandable, justifiable and even supportable in different linguistic, cultural and political contexts. Sometimes a particular policy encountered honest, equally understandable disagreement. Allies, too, might have their own ideas. But in those days policy debates took place in the context of bilateral relations firmly grounded in the reality of a well-respected America.
Above all, we never (or seldom) suffered the embarrassment of playing “do as I say, not as I do.” We didn’t have to explain serious, persistent, systemic erosions in commitment to the democratic process: repeated uncounted votes in state after state, fox-in-the-henhouse regulatory agencies, the oligarchic drift of ever more concentrated corporate and individual wealth and its effect on legislation.
Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice has spoken frequently of the importance of public diplomacy since her confirmation. I wonder if she understands the implications for public diplomacy of increasingly secret government in Washington, of communications reduced to press guidance for idiots, of curtailed debate in Congress, of a president’s pattern of interacting only with rigorously screened supporters. These are signs of retreat from confident, open government. They are signs that our leadership fears the robust substantive debate and interaction that make for vibrant democracy and mark a healthy interaction with foreign publics. Public diplomacy, like democracy itself, requires conversation, interaction, respect for the other.
The glory days for representing America began before I joined the Foreign Service. For some time after World War II, the US was indeed the magical kingdom, attracting flocks of admirers, as immigrants, as students, as tourists, all as full of awe as kids at Disneyland. But there was a crucial difference. Disneyland was fantasyland. That prosperous middle-class America was real.
America was a land of creativity, freedom, fair play and opportunity. Science, the pathway to progress, flourished. American chemists, physicists and doctors received Nobel after Nobel. Nobel prizes flowed to American economists, too, those guides to our—to anyone’s—prosperity. Doors were opening to Afro-Americans and women. Even the disabled were guaranteed a ramp for access to restaurants, theaters, government offices. Home ownership was soaring. Life was lengthening. The ambitious dreamed of jumping into our melting pot. The rest of the world clamored to see American movies, hear American music, write like Ernest Hemingway.
Of course, the US wasn’t perfect, and we who joined USIA considerably later never said so. We admitted to remnants of racism and sexism and poverty. We couldn’t totally ignore what we came to know of the fate of Patrice Lumumba and the deceptions of Tonkin Gulf, which prolonged the Viet Nam debacle. But the trend, we actually believed, was strong, real, good. And we got some credit for confronting a dedicated ideological adversary, perhaps even an evil empire. Communist reality was, after all, far more divorced from its ideals than we were from ours.
Those were thrilling days for public diplomacy. No other country dared to wash dirty linen in public, but America did (it wasn't that dirty), to the wonder and admiration of the countries we worked in. The key to understanding the magical kingdom is that there was no key and no lock; it was open to the sunshine. Document declassification accelerated. The records of government were available to the citizenry, with astonishingly few exceptions. This, we told our contacts in the countries to which we were posted, is what we want to share with you. This is something to aspire to.
USIA invited government spokespersons to address our foreign audiences. We also invited dissenting academics and politicians. We filled our libraries with books representing the whole gamut of American opinion, and we opened those libraries to young people with fresh curious minds. Those students, the leaders of the next generation, caught the excitement as we reveled, like Whitman, in the variousness of voices that make up a real democracy.
In fact, only open societies can practice public diplomacy effectively. The more this administration constricts or overscripts the flow of information, the more its communication efforts will be taken as mere propaganda, to be heard but unheard, like muzak, like commercials on tv.
The Reporters’ Committee for the Freedom of the Press reports that 2004 saw “a spate of subpoenas served upon reporters that eclipses even the dark, turbulent days of the Nixon Justice Department.” Every subpoena represents an effort by the government to stop the flow of information by punishing journalists who refuse to divulge their sources, thus intimidating those not yet indicted. (www.refp.org) . Meanwhile, the Bush administration floods the news media with partisan materials masquerading as news, insisting, in its usual hair-splitting way, that the term “covert propaganda” does not apply “simply because an agency’s role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed.” So wrote Joshua Bolton, Director of the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget, in a memo for executive department staffers on March 11, 2005.
Like John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton worked magic on foreign publics. I saw Clinton in action in Uganda and India, two very different contexts, and each visit provided a huge boost to our public diplomacy efforts. After four years of George W. Bush's style of communication, trust and good will are non-existent abroad; the magic is gone. The US is no longer the country of everyone’s dreams. To some it’s an evil empire.
Well, the US is neither perfect nor evil. But public diplomacy is not a matter of shuttling minions around to deliver sound bite slogans for those who’ve passed muster with a shibboleth. It’s a core diplomatic competency in a democratizing world, and it thrives in the sunshine.