In June 1970, the Marine Corps Gazette published the text of a talk, “Effective Press Relations,” given to students at the Command and Staff College earlier that year by legendary USIA officer Barry Zorthian. As Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, he set up the Joint United States…
A ceasefire in Yemen’s civil conflict, now in its fifth year, now appears, at last, to be coming into view. The conflict has cost tens of thousands of lives and been described by U.N. officials as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” “If the fighting continues through 2022,” a U.N. development report released October 10 said,…
When you’re my age, twenty years pass in the blink of an eye. On an autumn day in 1999, I was standing by a bank of elevators watching office furniture exiting the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) building in Southwest Washington, enroute to its new location in the State Department. I was deputy director of USIA’s…
October heralds the formation of a new management team overseeing the nation’s five taxpayer-funded networks that reach an estimated unduplicated 345 million users online, TV and radio listeners each week. The networks are the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE-RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), The Middle East Broadcast Network (NBN) in Arabic.…
Lou was one of the most thoughtful, dedicated, and politically savvy public diplomacy professionals of his generation. Louis T. Olom (1917-2019), a career civil servant, will be remembered for his many contributions to public diplomacy during the years in which it was gradually gaining acceptance as a field of professional practice in US diplomacy. Lou’s…
In 1988, the U.S. Information Agency’s Division for the Study of the United States published An Early American Reader for scholars outside the U.S. It was compiled and edited by Professor J. A. Leo Lemay (1935-2008), the du Pont Winterthur Professor at the University of Delaware. Lemay — also known as the “Ambassador of Early…
That will be the question tomorrow when the senior public diplomacy official, Michelle Giuda, appears before the Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy to discuss the ongoing merger of two bureaus under her aegis. The Council is co-hosting this event with the Advisory Commission at at George Washington University Elliott School’s Lindner Family Commons, 1957 E…
Ayaan Hirsi Ali published a long essay, “A Problem From Heaven: Why the United States Should Back Islam’s Reformation,” in a 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs. Her article opened a window on the dilemmas faced by Public Diplomacy policymakers after 9/11 and the judgment calls by two Under Secretaries for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs,…
Boxing great Muhammad Ali traveled to Africa in early 1980. President Carter asked him to persuade African leaders to boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Ambassador Lannon Walker was abruptly pulled from negotiations in Angola to accompany The Champ as his diplomatic advisor. This was more than sports…
As the director of a VOA bureau in Cairo, I can remember hearing Israel’s opening salvo of bombing on airfields just outside the Egyptian capital. It marked the start, at 10 a.m. that sweltering Monday morning of June 5, 1967, of the six-day Arab-Israeli war whose scars even today endanger yet another generation in the perpetually…