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Cultural Diplomacy from the Bronze Age to World War I

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Cultural Diplomacy from the Bronze Age to World War I THE FIRST RESORT OF KINGS ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:22 PS PAGE i RELATED TITLES FROM POTOMAC BOOKS Envoy to the Terror: Gouverneur Morris and the French Revolution by Melanie R. Miller Napoleon’s Troublesome Americans: Franco-American Relations, 1804–1815 by Peter P. Hill The Open Society Paradox: Why the Twenty-First Century Calls for More Openness—Not Less by Dennis Bailey ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:23 PS PAGE ii ● ● THE FIRST RESORT OF KINGS A MERICAN C ULTURAL D IPLOMACY IN THE T WENTIETH C ENTURY ● ● RICHARD T. ARNDT Potomac Books, Inc. Washington, D.C. ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:24 PS PAGE iii First paperback edition published 2006 Copyright ᭧ 2005 by Potomac Books, Inc. Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. (formerly Brassey’s, Inc.). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arndt, Richard T., 1928– The first resort of kings : American cultural diplomacy in the twentieth century / Richard T. Arndt. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57488-587-1 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Relations. 2. Cultural relations—History—20th century. 3. Diplomats—United States—History—20th century. 4. United States. Dept. of State—History—20th century. 5. United States Information Agency— History—20th century. 6. Educational exchanges—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. E744.5.A82 2005 327.73Ј009Ј04—dc22 2004060190 ISBN 1-57488-587-1 (hardcover) ISBN 1-57488-004-2 (paperback) Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard. Potomac Books, Inc. 22841 Quicksilver Drive Dulles, Virginia 20166 First Edition 10987654321 ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:24 PS PAGE iv Dedicated to the memory of Carl Bode, Cleanth Brooks, Phillips Brooks, Robert R. R. Brooks, Frank E. Brown, John L. Brown, Jacob Canter, Martin C. Carroll, John K. Fairbank, Wilma Fairbank, Albert Giesecke, Albert Harkness, Charles Rufus Morey, Howard Lee Nostrand, Leon Picon, Lois W. Roth, John Slocum, Frank M. Snowden, Theodore A. Wertime, Wayne A. Wilcox , Robin W. Winks, Laurence Wylie, T. Cuyler Young, and scores of other departed CAO colleagues who, in tend- ing the orchards of American education and culture abroad, managed once, in another country, to convey a little of the national style, grace, and genius. ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:24 PS PAGE v ................. 11169$ $$FM 06-09-06 09:46:24 PS PAGE vi CONTENTS Introduction: An Academic Mole . ix CHAPTER 1: Cultural Diplomacy from the Bronze Age to World War I .......................... 1 CHAPTER 2: Total War and Its Aftershocks, 1917–1932 ...... 24 CHAPTER 3: Designing Cultural Relations, 1932–1940 ...... 49 CHAPTER 4: Nelson Rockefeller and Other New Boys, 1940–1945 ........................... 75 CHAPTER 5: MacLeish’s Moment, Spring, 1945 ............ 98 CHAPTER 6: Early Field Staffing: The Point of Contact ....... 121 CHAPTER 7: Two Classic Cultural Products: Architecture and Libraries .......................... 142 CHAPTER 8: Benton, Fulbright, Smith, and Mundt ......... 161 CHAPTER 9: English Products and People: Books, and Two Visionaries ........................... 187 CHAPTER 10: Postwar Losses and Fulbright’s Gift ........... 213 CHAPTER 11: Reorienting Enemies, Campaigning for Truth .... 237 CHAPTER 12: The Birth of USIA ....................... 264 CHAPTER 13: George Allen in the Middle ................ 288 CHAPTER 14: New Frontiers for Old: Murrow and Coombs .... 314 CHAPTER 15: Battle’s Rescue and the Birth of the Peace Corps . 338 CHAPTER 16: The Arts of Vision ...................... 360 CHAPTER 17: The Ordeal of Charles Frankel .............. 380 CHAPTER 18: The Arts of Performance .................. 398 CHAPTER 19: Intellect, Government, and Fulbright Drift ...... 418 CHAPTER 20: Nixon and Ford, Shakespeare and Richardson . 437 CHAPTER 21: Six Intellectual CAOs .................... 458 CHAPTER 22: Stanton’s Challenge: Status Quo or Change? ..... 480 CHAPTER 23: Paved with Good Intentions: Carter’s Reorganization ........................ 499 vii ................. 11169$ CNTS 06-09-06 09:46:27 PS PAGE vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER 24: Two Decades of Decline .................. 520 AFTERWORD: Sunset or New Dawn? .................... 544 Notes . 557 Bibliography . 583 Index . 593 ................. 11169$ CNTS 06-09-06 09:46:27 PS PAGE viii Introduction: An Academic Mole I know of no profession which must more sorely try the souls of its practitioners than yours. —George Kennan, to a Cultural Attache´, 19821 IN 1961, HUNDREDS OF YOUNG PEOPLE left comfortable careers to see what they could do for their country. I was one of them. An academic late- bloomer on track to a life as a tweedy academic focused on French litera- ture of the eighteenth century, I took leave from Columbia University to join the US Information Agency (USIA), almost as a lark. Of USIA I knew only that John F. Kennedy had appointed national media hero Ed Mur- row as director. My colleagues teased me about joining the Foreign Le- gion. They were as ignorant as I about the scores of university figures who, beginning in 1942, had leapt from their campuses to jump-start a formal American diplomacy of cultures, improvising yet succeeding be- yond all reasonable expectations and thereby helping shape the image of the U.S. abroad for generations to come. My case turned out differently. I fell in love—the only phrase that fits—with cultural diplomacy and stayed with the practice for a quarter of a century, clinging to my identity and style as a university don and returning to other campuses after retirement. This book reports, among other things, on those years. Beyond the romance of foreign service and the murky word ‘‘informa- tion’’ buried in USIA’s name, I had no idea what I was joining. Following an accidental path, I had stumbled onto one of the better-kept secrets of American life, already in 1961 obscured by much smoke and not a few mirrors. I was assigned apprentice-style to the cultural office of the US embassy in Beirut, in ancient Phoenicia, adjoining the great missionary- founded American University, the AUB. There I encountered the diplo- matic world and discovered within it a lesser-known underworld, dedi- cated solely to the educational and cultural dimensions of relations between nations. Without realizing it, I was a product of that underworld. In the first contingents of Fulbright students going to France, Italy, and Britain in 1949, I received a letter signed by Eleanor Roosevelt appointing us all ‘‘ambassadors for America.’’ In Dijon, I began explaining inexplicable America to others. After Dijon, where I courted a Burgundian wife, I taught American students at Columbia the joys of discovering a foreign ix ................. 11169$ INTR 06-09-06 09:46:30 PS PAGE ix x INTRODUCTION: AN ACADEMIC MOLE language and culture, forged links between my university and France, shepherded French visitors around New York, and fathered two bilingual children. The Fulbright program, my French-born and French-trained teachers at Princeton and Columbia, my international students, my con- tributions to overseas university relations, and my thirst for things French—it never crossed my mind that all this was part of the Franco- American cultural relations that had begun with Ben Franklin in Paris and were abetted by more formal means beginning in 1923. Dozens of US bilateral cultural links had been forged, in a cooperative public- private US effort, supporting broadly defined and very long-range foreign policy objectives. Beguiled by the challenge, delighted by the daily dis- coveries of learning a new language and culture, intrigued by exotic life- styles, curious about the functioning of embassies, I suddenly found myself apprenticed to the guild of cultural diplomats. Forty-odd years later, I am still learning, as this book will show. Certainly I kept one foot in the university world, assuming imminent return. As it seems in retrospect, I had become a self-appointed but un- witting mole, burrowing into government service, a spy for the university world, embedded with the cultural services of US diplomacy. Tunneling deep, I kept and added to my university friends. Unlike most moles, I did without the perks: there were no secret bank accounts, no handler to tell me what to do, nor anyone who seemed much interested in anything I learned. But there it was: for twenty-four years, I managed to maintain an academic persona, approximately true to the abiding values of univer- sities, while working within the bureaucracy of USIA and the State De- partment. Only in early 1986 did I return, earlier than planned, to a campus. It was a profession few Americans encounter. Quietly, invisibly, indi- rectly, my cultural colleagues and I spent our lives representing American education and intellect, art and thought, setting foreign ideas about America into deeper contexts, helping others understand the workings of the peculiar US version of democracy, combatting anti-Americanism at its taproots, linking Americans and foreign counterparts, helping the best Americans and foreign students study somewhere else—in short, project- ing America, warts and all. Our work as cultural diplomats was carried out in a natural and free- flowing style that, without its being altogether clear to us, sought to ex- tend the natural outreach of a highly communicative and friendly nation and a remarkably successful democracy in the culture of which education played a central role. Americans had assumed since the early decades of their republic that sharing with others was a fundamental duty; the idea flowed from the distinctive American idea of stewardship, fed mainly by churches of all persuasions. With perhaps too little thought to the ulti- mate results, we cultural officers were opening thousands of tiny win- dows into other societies, in some cases piercing thick walls.
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