Foreign Service—Transforming Diplomacy, 1970–1990

Foreign Service practitioners in the 1970s debated the tools and methods of their profession. Drawing on oral interviews, private papers, and contemporaneous reports, this chapter shows how diplomats Barbara White, Walter Roberts, and a group of talented young officers in Japan set the table for two decades of practice. White’s interviews with field officers emphasized “listening more,” face-to-face communication, opinion research, and advising ambassadors and policymakers. Alan Carter and his Japan team established audience record systems, state-of-the-art American resource centers, and country plan procedures. Walter Roberts led a failed attempt to divide public diplomacy into categories of “policy information,” “general information,” and “broadcasting” based on a “European” organizational model. Most USIA practitioners rejected Roberts’ views. They successfully defended a holistic “American” organizational model. Their pragmatism and disputes strengthened their modus operandi. Diplomacy’s “rebels,” they were builders of a mature community of Foreign Service practice.