The book begins with the transition from history to memoir--a transition it never fully realizes--when Arndt made the jump from the academy to the foreign service in 1961. First, there is a synthetic history of the various institutional attempts at a public diplomacy. Then, the author historicizes his personal experiences his long career. He discusses the tensions arising during WWI and after between "unidirectional informationists" interested in spreading "truth" about American values and the proponents of reciprocal educational and cultural exchanges to build bridges of international understanding (p. 53).

1. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin 8/27/2012
A GLIMPSE AT RICHARD T. ARNDT’S HALF A
CENTURY OF US CD:
.THE FIRST RESORT OF KINGS: AMERICAN
CULTURAL DIPLOMACY IN THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY.
Abdeslam Badre
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2. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
OUTLINE: Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
1. The Author
2. The Book
3. Itinerary of US CD
1. Department division for cultural exchange: 1938
2. Postwar Decade
3. Dwight D. Eisenhower & USIA in 1953
4. Grandest hero: Senator J. William Fulbright
5. CAOs& the US "golden age" of CD
6. 1974 & Decline of US CD
4. The book's most significant contribution to CD
5. Downfalls of the Book
6. References
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3. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
1. THE AUTHOR Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
 Richard T. Arndt's relationship with U.S. cultural diplomacy has
spanned more than a half-century. His book is the culmination of
those decades of observing, practicing, contemplating, and, above
all, believing in the "art of cultural diplomacy" (p. 550).
 In 1949,he became part of the initial wave of Fulbrighters to benefit
from a pioneering program in international cultural exchange
 He spent the years 1961-85 serving in an official capacity with the
Department of State and the United States Information Agency
(USIA).
 He got professional training in French literature, and spent time as a
CAO in locations as diverse as Beirut, Sri Lanka, and Tehran.
 In 1985, he returned from whence he came--the academy--to
contemplate his experiences and use them to educate others.
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4. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
2. THE BOOK Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
 The book begins with the transition from history to memoir,
starting from when Arndt made the jump from the academy to the
foreign service in 1961.
 The first is a synthetic history of the various institutional attempts
at a public diplomacy.
 The second historicizes his personal experiences his long career.
 He discusses the tensions arising during WWI and after between
"unidirectional informationists" interested in spreading "truth"
about American values and the proponents of reciprocal
educational and cultural exchanges to build bridges of
international understanding (p. 53).
 From WWI until 1938, the U.S. government handled the task of
information, while the culture-for-culture's-sake idea developed
primarily in the world of private philanthropy.
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5. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
3. FIRST STATE DEPARTMENT DIVISION FOR CULTURAL
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
EXCHANGE: 1938
 Secretary of State Cordell Hull, impressed with
Pan-American commitments to cultural
exchange at a 1936 Buenos Aires conference,
established in 1938 the first State Department
division dedicated to globalizing U.S. cultural
exchange.
 Informationists and uncultured bureaucrats
continually defile the culturalist purity of the
founders' vision.
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6. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
SUMNER WELLES & ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
 Two heroes of Arndt's story--Sumner Welles and
Archibald MacLeish--headed the division
consecutively from its founding until the end of
World War II.
 For Arndt, MacLeish defined the office's
imperatives better than any of his successors:
"In a divided world in which the real issue of
division is the cultural issue, cultural relations
are not irrelevancies. They are everything" (p.
61).
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7. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
4. POSTWAR DECADE
 The first postwar decade witnessed increased
attention to the possibilities that public diplomacy
presented.
 State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
(abbreviated CU) struggled for an identity trapped
between the informationists and the culturalists.
 Prominent politicians like Nelson Rockefeller sought
to blur the lines between unidirectional information
(i.e., propaganda) and open and honest cultural
exchange.
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8. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
5. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER & USIA IN 1953
 The creation of the USIA in 1953 aimed at correcting the balance,
but the lines between the CU's and USIA's functions were never
clearly articulated, generating decades of tensions between the
two camps.
 Established by Dwight D. Eisenhower, "in a spirit of nationalist
renewal, as a separate agency for nonmilitary psychological
warfare," USIA effectively defeated the hopes of culturalists' intent
on conducting a public diplomacy divorced from narrow
geopolitical interests (p. 237).
 Arndt painstakingly details decades of bureaucratic and
congressional debate over the ends and means of cultural
diplomacy.
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9. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
6. GRANDEST HERO: SENATOR J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT
 Arndt believes that stage is Senator J. William Fulbright to be the progenitor of
U.S. public diplomacy and his program to be the most successful and
sustainable program.
 Arndt sees the program as the one unequivocal triumph of U.S. public diplomacy
in the postwar era, because it did what good public diplomacy should do
 The U.S. government facilitated and stimulated exchanges and then it got out of
the way.
 "just wanted to educate these goddam ignorant Americans!" (p. 178).
 By any measure the senator was successful: in its first dozen years the Fulbright
Program could already count fifty thousand U.S. and foreign alumni
 It consumed half of CU's annual budget.
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10. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
7. CAOS& THE US “GOLDEN AGE" OF CD
 The exceptionally high quality of CAOs in the
first two postwar decades made that period a
"golden age" of public diplomacy.
 Arndt stresses that CU and USIA once valued
placing uniquely talented intellectuals in the
official service of cultural diplomacy.
 "Super-CAOs" Figures were intellectuals like the
imperial historian Robin Winks and the political
scientist Wayne Wilcox (p. 421).
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11. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
8. 1974 & DECLINE OF US CD Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
 With 1974’s USIA's decision to hire only "generalists," whom Arndt sees as cultural
"apparatchiks" sufficiently competent at touting the party line but intellectually
undistinguished (p. 457).
 It eliminated the "one constant of U.S. cultural diplomacy: its occasional and repeated
capacity to put marvelous people in the field and let them do amazing things" (p. 458).
 In an act of misplaced idealism, the Jimmy Carter administration merged the functions of
CU and USIA in 1978, granting the new union the title of International Communications
Agency.
 By phasing out the super-CAOs, USIA effectively bureaucratized cultural diplomacy.
 USIA's 1974 decision marked the beginning of a decades-long decline in attention to public
diplomacy that would ultimately result in Congress' dissolution of the agency in 1999
 The twenty-five-year struggle between the informationists in USIA and the culturalists in CU
ended with USIA victory and the death knell for an independent cultural diplomacy.
 Arndt's disillusion with the end of the golden age remains palpable throughout the book.
Arndt is skeptical of the "revolution" swept into government by Ronald Reagan's election.
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12. 9. THE BOOK'S MOSTAbdeslamDiplomacy 2012of Cultural 8/27/2012
SIGNIFICANTBerlin
Badre Institute
-
CONTRIBUTION
TO CD
 The book's most significant contribution to new understanding of public diplomacy is in its
detailing of the daily lives and activities of cultural affairs officers (CAOs).
 As Arndt writes, "The life of a CAO is a well-kept American secret" (p. 301).
 Generally CAOs were not stationed where their experience applied, nor did they stay in
any one location for more than a few years; the idea was to prevent the development of
affinities that might cloud rational assessments of U.S. national interest.
 He matches his personal recollections with published and unpublished memoirs of fellow
CAOs, along with his memories of countless conversations over a lifetime.
 The result is a unique glance into public diplomacy at the "point of contact," where
"talented" CAOs were always making remarkable connections with local populations
but rarely received credit (p. 281).
 The final chapter summarizes the lessons of public diplomacy's history for an era when the
U.S. government has shunned it in favor of aggressive unilateralism.
 Arndt's prescriptions include rebuilding the sort of CAO corps of talented intellectuals
drawn from university life that dominated U.S. cultural diplomacy from WWII until the late
1960s.
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13. 10. DOWNFALLS OF THE BOOK
Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
 The book's primary weakness through all the talk of culture is that it
fails to interrogate how culture's meaning changed dramatically in
the postwar era.
 Arndt writes at the outset that "thoughtful cultural diplomats" use the
term in the "anthropological" sense to "denote the complex factors of
the mind and values which define a country or group, especially
those factors transmitted by the processes of intellect" (p. xviii). Most
no longer view it as so deterministic.
 Even so, culture still unfortunately functions throughout the book not
as culture-as-determinant but in the even older sense of culture-as-
art.
 for Arndt's CAOs, culture was the realm of great white men who
dedicated themselves to the "life of the mind." He also overlooked
the fact that CAOs lived in one world of culture while much of the
rest of the world lived in another.
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14. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
10. DOWNFALLS OF THE BOOK…
 The sort of culture in which the CAOs were interested was the
kind they learned in classrooms at Harvard and Yale in the first
half of the twentieth century.
 In fact, Arndt's description of the CAO profession occasionally
reads like nostalgia; when he describes fresh faces in CU as
"new boys" (p. 75).
 He even disparages the Clinton administration's attempt to bring
the U.S. cultural diversity to cultural diplomacy by hiring women
and minorities, "which created a stress on appearance over
excellence" (p. 539).
 The occasional impression in this otherwise highly informative
text is that culture should remain the privileged domain of the
cultured.
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15. Abdeslam Badre Institute of Cultural 8/27/2012
Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
REFERENCES
 Richard T. Arndt.The First Resort of Kings:
American Cultural Diplomacy in the
Twentieth Century. C.: Potomac Books, 2005
 Drew McKevitt, Cultural Diplomacy's True
Believer(Department of History, Temple
University)Publishedon H-Diplo
(August,2008)
 Virginia Palm, personal review notes
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Diplomacy 2012 - Berlin
THANK YOU!
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