Hallvard Notaker - Reasserting America in the 1970s: U.S. Public Diplomacy and the Rebuilding of Americas Image Abroad

Key Studies in Diplomacy

Series Editors: J. Simon Rofe Giles Scott-Smith

Emeritus Editor: Lorna Lloyd

This innovative series of books examines the procedures and processes of diplomacy, focusing on the interaction between states through their accredited representatives, that is, diplomats. Volumes in the series focus on factors affecting foreign policy and the ways in which it is implemented through the diplomatic system in both bilateral and multilateral contexts. They examine how diplomats can shape not just the presentation, but the substance of their states foreign policy. Since the diplomatic system is global, each book aims to contribute to an understanding of the nature of diplomacy. Authors comprise both scholarly experts and former diplomats, able to emphasize the actual practice of diplomacy and to analyse it in a clear and accessible manner. The series offers essential primary reading for beginning practitioners and advanced level university students.

Previously published by Bloomsbury:

21st Century Diplomacy: A Practitioners Guide by Kishan S. Rana

A Cornerstone of Modern Diplomacy: Britain and the Negotiation of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by Kai Bruns

David Bruce and Diplomatic Practice: An American Ambassador in London, 19619 by John W. Young

Embassies in Armed Conflict by G.R. Berridge

Published by Manchester University Press:

Human rights and humanitarian diplomacy: negotiating for human rights protection and humanitarian access by Kelly-Kate Pease

The editors would like to thank the following for their support, both in terms of the research workshop held at the Nobel Institute on 12 November and the Digital Diplomacy symposium at the Fritt Ord Foundation in Oslo on 31 October 2013, and the ensuing book project: the Walker Institute at the University of South Carolina; the U.S. Embassy, Oslo; the Norwegian Nobel Institute; the Norwegian Board of Technology; the Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands; the Fritt Ord Foundation, Oslo; and the University of Oslo. The editors are also grateful for the added intellectual contributions of USIA veteran and Director of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Michael Schneider. Special mention should also go to the following: Asle Toje, Geir Lundestad, Bjrn Vangen, Helge Pharo, Tore Tenne, Erik Rudeng, Tim Moore, and Kim Dubois.

Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder

What was it about the 1970s that required the reassertion of America, as we claim in the title of this book, then as now the single most powerful nation in the world? The period under discussion overflows that of a simple ten-year decadethe long 1970s is now a common termand it was deeply felt emotionally, psychologically, financially, and politically by those who lived through it. For this book, the 70s covers 19651980, what we can refer to as Americas post-confidence era. The 70s encompasses, emphatically, the dawning consciousness in the United States and around the world that the Vietnam War was a watershed of major proportions, encompassing the conviction that the war demonstrated the limits of American power (though not of American hubris). The 70s marks the disappointing end to the hopeful period of civil rights gains for African Americans that had begun years earlier, as well as the still very uncertain outcome of the feminist battle for womens rights. It symbolizes a new era of American economic vulnerability in the world. Finally, the 70s is a shorthand for the deepening political mistrust that reached its peak in the convulsions of Watergate, but which also includes the increasingly desperate dissembling of the Johnson administration at the opening of the era and the apparent fecklessness of the Carter administration at the close, each bookending the underhand menaces of the Nixon administration. It was, as the opening essay by Thomas Zeiler makes clear, a time of FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Symbols of American decline seemed to be everywhere in the 70s. Inspiring political leaders were gunned down in public, as if law and order itself were evaporating. Strange new vocabulary entered the American lexicon: urban guerilla, stagflation, and gas guzzler among them, all heralding a shocking and unexpected end to certainties that had seemed to define the postwar generation since 1945. In this era of cultural pessimism, Americans turned inward, to the family, to a rapidly coalescing preoccupation with morality as a cause of the decline, and to cultural escapism via disco music, Saturday Night Live, and increasingly insipid television sit-coms.

For many Americans, it seemed as if overnight the United States had lost its way. Gone were the triumphant days of apparently easy American foreign policy successes, from the

In that earlier postwar period, American culture seemed to reign supreme. The images and habits of American mass culture were everywhere, or at least to many foreign observers, appeared to be everywhere. Who did not know James Dean and Marilyn Monroe? Who had not considered, and perhaps even pined for, the luxuries of the American grocery store and the opulence of the American kitchen? Several European nations found it necessary to enact prohibitive import quotas on Hollywood films lest American cinema swamp their domestic film industries.

This easy confidence found its way into the work of the cultural relations officials in the State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Voice of America, the Economic Cooperation Administration, and the other agencies of what would later be called American public diplomacy. The 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s appear as a golden age of American culture as millions of foreigners, especially young people, hungered for the music, film, and fashion of the United States. During and after World War II, American information and cultural programs rested on a broad consensus that promoting American culture, and explaining American intentions, was an essential aspect of U.S. diplomatic practice. U.S. economic hegemony and cultural leadership helped legitimize the extension of military power, especially in areas traditionally suspicious of American culture. Misgivings and protest against American cultural exports only indicated that the message needed to be amplified, not adapted.

Yet the message was not universally accepted at the receiving end, and by the 70s the forces of rejection appeared to gain strength and combine into a more threatening cultural movement, often working in tandem with domestic U.S. criticism. European skepticism towards

This volume explores this environment along two tracks which give organizing shape to our narrative. Firstly, the problems of projection. How did American cultural and information officials approach their work in the new 1970s era of fear, uncertainty, and doubt? What could they say about a nation now apparently no longer confident of its own righteousness? How did public diplomacy function when its claims of progress through the 1950s and 1960s no longer squared with the political, military, and economic limitations of the 1970s? Secondly, the encounters at the receiving end. How were public diplomacy programs received in various parts of the world, each often undergoing their own historic convulsions? How did global publics perceive the United States in an era when many Americans themselves were deeply pessimistic about their countrys performance and future? How far did U.S. propagandists reshape or reframe their methods and messages to deal with this new critical environment? In short, how did U.S. public diplomats sell America to an increasingly skeptical global public?