Cultural Diplomats

“What do you do, Mr. Brown?” curious foreigners often asked the highly regarded US Cultural Attaché John L. Brown 50 years ago. This chapter discusses his entertaining answer and the views of others in a practitioner community rooted in the educational, artistic, and cosmopolitan impulses of American society—never fully integrated into public diplomacy, never completely independent. Cultural diplomacy serves governance and public interests through international exchanges of people, ideas, and the arts. It is rooted in the appetite of universities and foundations for government funding in the 1930s, the State Department’s early support, Senator J. William Fulbright’s scholarships, and what cultural diplomat Charles Frankel called “a tangle of purposes.” It is narrower than cross-cultural internationalism, a domain that, in historian Akira Iriye’s classic distinction, advances social and private interests in global networks of cognitive and material connections. The chapter examines US cultural diplomacy’s dependence on civil society partners, its strengths and limitations, and the modus operandi of a practitioner community in which values, power, and the goal of mutual understanding are connected.