[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 132 (Monday, October 4, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2021-E2022]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           MILESTONE OF U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS AND DIPLOMACY

                                 ______
                                 

                       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.

[[Page E2022]]

  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.

                          ____________________