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“MILESTONE OF U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E2021-E2022 on Oct. 4, 1999.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
MILESTONE OF U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY
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HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH
of new jersey
in the house of representatives
Monday, October 4, 1999
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to mark a milestone in the conduct of America's foreign relations and diplomacy--
the end of an era, if you will. This past Friday, October 1, 1999, the people and programs of the United States Information Agency formally joined the Department of State. After 56 years, America's public diplomacy will begin a new chapter. As the Agency joins the Department, I want to express a deep and profound appreciation for the work of USIA since 1953, and to salute the many members of the Foreign Service and the Civil Service who are engaged in its vital work.
The Cold War
American ``public diplomacy'' began before World War II with the establishment of American centers in libraries in Latin America. During World War II, the Voice of America and the Office of War Information gave the people of occupied Europe and Asia the truth about the conduct of the war. Public diplomacy gained momentum after the war's end, when American libraries and cultural centers were established as part of postwar reconstruction, when Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, and when the Fulbright program began the postwar exchange of students and scholars to advance international understanding. In 1953, these elements of public diplomacy were gathered by President Eisenhower into the United States Information Agency.
When USIA was formed, the Cold War divided the world and its peoples. The brutal subjugation of the nations of Eastern Europe as Soviet satellites was a fresh memory. The Korean war was drawing to a close, and the Soviets were propagating yet one more of their ``big lies'': that the United Sates had introduced germ warfare in the conflict there. Three years later they would lie that the people of Hungary--
then being killed by tanks in the streets of Budapest--welcomed the Soviet army.
The Cold War was more than a political, economic, and military contest. The Soviets and their surrogates worked hard to demonize the United States, to discredit American ideals, to support ``national liberation'' movements, and to inflame vast areas of the world with anti-American propaganda. Their broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, state-controlled wire services, and publishing houses spread some amazing fictions.
Fiction: The communist parties stood for the equality of all people. Truth: the communists, once in power, became a grasping and arrogant elite--a new class--that garnered the privileges of society while ordinary people lived in grim poverty, and their lives grew shorter.
Fiction: Communism and central planning would create a new industrial bounty. Truth: Except for their armaments and armies, the socialist nations had Third World economies.
Soviet propaganda went beyond words to embrace the use of forged documents and disinformation: that experiments in American laboratories had gone awry and spawned the AIDS virus, that Americans kidnaped Central American children for body parts, and that Americans developed weapons that would decimate the nonwhite peoples of the world, to name a few.
Facing such fevered attempts to turn nations of the world against us, USIA over the years developed scores of programs to ``tell America's story to the world.'' For USIA's work to be credible, it had to be accurate and truthful. Edward R. Murrow described USIA's spirit of candor as the telling of America's story ``warts and all.''
USIA's American libraries overseas offered a wealth of knowledge and gave witness to important principles of democracy: that an educated public is the foundation of a democratic society, and that the free exchange of information and opinions is also a necessary element of liberty and prosperity.
In the early days, USIA's American libraries and centers also exhibited art and hosted authors and poets. In societies that had been only a few years beforehand devastated by war, these modest and aboveboard efforts to restore the cultural life of other nations were deeply welcomed and appreciated.
World's fairs and international exhibitions were important gatherings in the postwar period. It was USIA that managed American pavilions and hired young Americans who spoke the world's languages to describe our way of life and the benefits of freedom, markets, enterprise, and democracy.
In less developed areas of the world, USIA officers sometimes led small convoys of vehicles with motion picture projectors and generators, showing documentaries and other American films in small towns and villages.
USIA magazines such as America Illustrated, Dialog, World Today, Trends, Topic, Economic Impact, English Teaching Forum, and Problems of Communism won awards for content and design as they communicated American views in many languages to readers across the globe. USIA films such as ``Years of Lightning, Days of Drums'' and ``The Harvest'' were similarly lauded.
Americans who spoke abroad under USIA auspices--at foreign universities, policy institutes, and other places where students and intellectuals gathered--addressed topics in politics, economics, the environment, culture, and foreign policy. Among these speakers were American judges and lawyers introducing and explaining the idea of the Rule of Law.
International visitors sent to the United States under USIA auspices had the opportunity to meet counterparts in the United States on four week visits. For many, it was their first visit to the United States, and they encountered a society far different from the images they had grown up with. This kind of people-to-people program would not have been possible without the help of thousands of ordinary Americans affiliated with local councils for international visitors. They opened their homes, volunteered their time, and won friends for our country.
USIA administered the Fulbright program which placed American professors in foreign universities and brought professors from other countries to enrich our own faculties. Fulbright professors shared their knowledge and their syllabuses, and they were a key element in establishing American Studies associations, programs, and majors of universities abroad.
USIA's information officers organized tens of thousands of press conferences that allowed journalists to hear directly from our nation's officials, from visiting members of Congress, and from other distinguished Americans.
The distribution of USIA's daily Wireless File (now the Washington file) gave government officials and opinion leaders the full texts of speeches, congressional testimonies and hearings, and documents so that they could have a full understanding of the United States' position on the issues, not simply react to a few quotes, out of context, in a brief article or broadcast.
When USIA was established, some Embassies and consulates received the Wireless File by Morse code. There were the years of punched tape and radio teletype--sending the File through both sunspot interference and Soviet jamming. Teletype yielded to computer transmission in the eighties, and to the internet and web pages in the nineties. All along USIA's writers were aided by a corps of able technicians who harnessed each new development in communications technology.
They mastered video technology as well. The telepress conference over telephone lines was followed by the televised Worldnet Dialog using TVRO technology. The State Department will continue USIA's program to equip American embassies with Digital Video Conference equipment.
In looking back at the Cold War, there were some moments of excitement--and victory--as well as the steady years of information programs and education and cultural exchanges. The international information campaign to explain the deployment of Pershing missiles to Europe in the face of resolute Soviet opposition was an important accomplishment. So too was the effort to show the world how the Soviet Air Force downed KAL 007, killing among its passengers a member of this House. The sound and video portrayal of the attack put together by USIA riveted the United Nations and the world.
Attaining America's Goals in the World
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were some who said that the work of America's ``Cold War propaganda agency'' was finished, and USIA could be ``pensioned off.''
The end of the Cold War did not, however, end the challenges facing the United States. Our armed forces have fought wars. Drugs, terrorism, and proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons remain grave threats to our security. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic are only two of the thugs whose rule is buttressed by domestic press controls and by vigorous external propaganda. There are still national wire services, radio programs, and television broadcasts whose central mission is to lie about the United States.
USIA's programs aimed to counter propaganda with truth. The means of advocacy and persuasion were democratic--the conversation, the seminar, the op-ed, the open press conference. Americans from all walks of life, with many points of view, cooperated in USIA's work. These were not, then, programs tailored only to win the Cold War. Programs established on these enduring democratic concepts--solid foundations that reflect our nation's values--have proven as appropriate and effective in the new international environment as the old.
President Eisenhower's order forming USIA, still, I submit, expresses the values embedded in America's public diplomacy--``to submit to the people of other nations by means of communications techniques that the objectives and policies of the United States are in harmony with and will advance their legitimate aspirations for freedom, progress, and peace.''
USIA's People
USIA's buildings are only a few blocks from this House. Over the years our nation has benefitted from the Agency's committed assembly of talents in many fields.
The Civil Service provided writers, television producers, film makers, exhibition planners, magazine designers, photographers, communications specialists, and of course the executives and administrators and support staff who helped the others get the job done.
USIA's Foreign Service Officers planned and directed the information and cultural programs at Embassies, consulates, and American centers. It was they who took America's message ``the last three feet'' as they met government officials and opinion leaders and spoke to them in their own languages. The Foreign Service also included specialists in libraries, English instruction, student counseling, printing, and other skills.
We must also salute the local employees at USIA's posts around the world. On every continent USIA's American personnel worked together with Foreign Service National employees to plan and carry out programs. Programs conceived and run only by Americans would have had limited effectiveness. But in an everyday working partnership, Americans and local colleagues together hammered out effective presentations.
On occasions when there has been tension between the United States and another country, USIA's local employees were sometimes charged, even by friends and neighbors, with disloyalty or ``selling out to the Americans.'' Their fidelity to USIA's work has given eloquent testimony that they are also committed to partnership, dialogue, and harmony between the goals of the United States and their own society. They deserve an extra measure of gratitude and recognition.
Principles for Public Diplomacy
As we make this organizational change in American public diplomacy, Mr. Speaker, we should mark well some principles that should endure as these programs and people move into the Department of State.
The first is to affirm that American foreign policy needs public diplomacy more than ever. The world has been forever changed by the communications revolution and by the democratic revolution. The first of those revolutions now allows broad access to information about foreign policy and how it affects people and societies. The second revolution engages citizens in the decisions made by their governments.
What we might call traditional diplomacy--between professional diplomats, conducting business away from the public eye--thus gives way to a larger conversation between peoples. At one time public diplomacy may have been considered a complement, a support function perhaps, for traditional diplomacy. In the age of democracy and the age of the Internet, it increasingly moves to the center.
The second principle is that the U.S. Government needs a dedicated public diplomacy arm. Occasionally one hears that in the age of CNN our nation has not need for diplomats. The commercial networks and wire services, however, cannot do the whole work of communicating American foreign policy, much less American values. They play an important role--an indispensable role--in reporting the news and informing the public. But members of the Fourth Estate themselves admit that news and public affairs budgets are always right. They recognize that broadcast news generalizes, simplifies, and dramatizes events in a direction that may be unhelpful to diplomacy. And there is the matter of editorial direction. The U.S. Government needs international information programs and activities--beyond the public affairs programs and activities already conducted by the Department of State, which are focused primarily on domestic audiences--so that the facts and the values that underlie the American system can be communicated fully, directly, and in context.
The third is that American public diplomacy must continue to be balanced. A vital principle of America's public diplomacy, international broadcasting programs, and exchanges has been that they present American society--and the making of foreign policy--as a whole.
It is true that public diplomacy programs sometimes report on and explain official government policies--but only as one component of a broader and more important mission. American public diplomacy has always included the discussion of responsible alternative viewpoints, the coverage of debates, and other information that makes clear that what is being communicated is the enduring American consensus, not just the policy du jour of a particular Administration or a particular Department. Without evenhanded coverage--such as is explicitly required by the charter of the Voice of America--bipartisan support in Congress for public diplomacy and exchanges would, I fear, be impaired.
Finally, Mr. Speaker, America's public diplomacy must continue to address the keystone issues of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Increasingly we realize that the fundamental remedies for what we once defined as development problems or as economic problems are to make governments democratic, responsive, honest, and respectful of human rights.
Mr. Speaker, when Thomas Jefferson wrote of America's commitment to certain self-evident truths--among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--he did so to express the new American nation's ``decent respect to the opinions of mankind.'' The men and women of the United States Information Agency have possessed the same commitment. Their calling has been to explain the United States--its foreign policy, its form of government, its society, and its ideals--to the people of other countries. They did so with honor for fifty-six years. They now move into the Department of State. I know I speak for many other members of this body when I express the nation's thanks for their service--and the hope that their programs, their talents, and their commitment will continue to prosper.
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