01 June 2008
Murrow in the Public Interest: From Press Affairs to Public Diplomacy
(The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State publication, Edward R. Murrow: Journalism at Its Best.)
By Crocker Snow, Jr.
Edward R. Murrow was a man of multiple means. And ends. He was an educator, a journalist, an internationalist, a broadcaster, a celebrity, and, in his last chapter, a public servant and diplomat.
Appointed by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to head the United States Information Agency (USIA), he was the New Frontier's highest profile foreign policy interpreter until resigning in ill health three years later. He became in effect the first personification of the then still-to-be-named field of public diplomacy.
The term "public diplomacy" was coined in 1965 at about the time of Murrow's death by Edmund A. Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a former foreign service officer, in these terms:
"deals with the influence of public attitudes on the formation and execution of foreign policies … encompasses dimensions of foreign relations beyond traditional diplomacy, the cultivation by governments of public opinion in other countries; the interaction of private groups and interests in one country with those of another; the reporting of foreign affairs and its impact on policy; communication between those whose job is communication, as between diplomats and foreign correspondents; and the process of intercultural communications. Central to public diplomacy is the transformational flow of information and ideas."
With this language, Ed Gullion had his friend Ed Murrow very much in mind. Murrow's prime contribution to government was bringing his credibility and a clear-eyed approach to the most vexing foreign policy issues of the day. Gullion had convinced Murrow to settle at Fletcher following government service.
Having witnessed and studied officialdom throughout his career, Murrow had requested that as head of the USIA he attend meetings of the National Security Council. He was the first and only USIA director to do so regularly. Later, when tasked with dealing with the ill-advised 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, he famously said, "If they want me in on the crash landings, I better d___ well be in on the take-offs."
Murrow's tenure as head of the USIA was a sweet and sour one. He had access and was given audience to prominent statesmen around the world. Ever the journalist, he used this to both gather information and to impart it. He defined his government role as operating "on the basis of truth" and "using words, not weapons" to make U.S. foreign policies "everywhere intelligible and wherever possible palatable." He pushed for realistic full disclosure and accuracy for Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America.
The administration's trusted historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., later reported that, after a shaky start, Murrow enjoyed President Kennedy's full confidence, and reveled in it. "No government information chief had been so close to a president," he wrote. "Under Ed Murrow, the Voice of America became the voice, not of American self-righteousness, but of American democracy."
From his seat on the National Security Council, Murrow weighed in early on discussions about Vietnam, protesting plans for the first use of defoliants to expose Viet Cong sanctuaries in Vietnam's Phu Yen province. He didn't win the argument, but went on record that this would eventually rebound against the United States in the court of international public opinion.
Not surprisingly, the man who coveted his independence as a journalist experienced some unfamiliar frustrations as a government official. He was troubled by the difficulty of changing established procedures and by being just outside the president's inner foreign policy team of Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and Robert Kennedy.
In the final analysis, Ed Murrow probably contributed more to the Kennedy administration by the fact of his presence than to its actual accomplishments. He never fully mastered the bureaucracy of public diplomacy. Nor was he able usefully to distinguish credible public diplomacy from discredited propaganda. Yet serving during the height of the Cold War, at the time of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his stature and integrity brought to the government itself a valued form of full faith and credit.
[Crocker Snow Jr., former foreign editor of the Boston Globe and founding editor of The WorldPaper, is director of the Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, where Murrow's professional papers are archived.]
