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USIA’S TOP GUNS
NOV 29, 2005 - 10:33PM PDT
by Alvin Snyder

Karen Hughes is America's Top Gun communicator. But how will her job performance be rated 25 or even 50 years from now by her team in the State Department, elsewhere around the world and in the many politico-history books that will be written about her?

Of course it's too early to tell, as she is just finding her way as the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. But does she have the qualities that helped raise some former directors of the defunct U.S. Information Agency to legendary status?

There were more than a dozen USIA directors during the agency's almost half-century existence before it disbanded in 1999. Worldcasting asked professionals who served under some of them who was their favorite and why.

This is not a run at nostalgia, but rather an attempt to focus on the very real problem of communicating America's story abroad and to examine what type of person it will take to fix the problems. More than six years have passed since the effort has had a powerful figure that was not only himself great, but also inspired others to greatness. The common thread among employees' memories of their directors is that the most revered leaders had an uncanny ability to make young and low-ranking USIA officials feel like integral cogs in the public diplomacy mission.

Ambassador Jock Shirley, a veteran counselor to USIA directors, told Worldcasting the director he knew best was Jim Keogh, who is "no longer a young man now, but as spry as ever."

Director Keogh had previously been the chief White House speechwriter for President Nixon and the executive editor of Time magazine.

Jock Shirley, a USIA icon himself, believes "Jim Keogh's successes lay in his clear understanding of [three things]: USIA's role in the Cold War as it was being contested during his tenure, how best to use our skills in the struggle to contain and weaken the Soviet Union, and the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women of USIA and how to put those strengths to efficient use."

Shirley continued, "Jim Keogh knew that a smoothly functioning Washington bureaucracy was the sine qua non for success in the field, but he knew also that it was the men and women scattered around the world on whom our usefulness ultimately depended. To them he devoted his greatest focus, traveling to every corner of the globe, visiting every major post in the world, and getting to know hundreds of our colleagues, from senior public affairs officers to junior trainees." Shirley observed after hundreds of hours with Keogh that the director's "insights into our operations were incisive, and his memory for people and judgment on where and how to assign them, phenomenal."

But what Shirley remembers best was the warmth and affection Jim Keogh and his wife, Verna, showed to the USIA support staff. "Wherever they went morale soared. After long days of meetings, inspections, not-always-easy conversations with this or that ambassador or PAO [Public Affairs Officer], Jim and Verna Keogh loved nothing better than an evening of laughter and easy companionship surrounded by the men and women of the post."

Others give former USIA director and ambassador Frank Shakespeare high marks.

When Bob Wozniak was Public Affairs Officer in Cyprus in the early 1970s, Shakespeare planned a three-day trip there.

"What does one do with the Agency director for so long a time on so small an island?" Wozniak asked himself. "More to the point, unlike what came to be practice with his successors traveling with support staff, area directors, security types...Frank came alone."

Wozniak recalls that Shakespeare performed well in an hour-long interview on Cyprus state television, "an unprecedented opportunity for projecting the U.S. and its policies on neutral Cyprus' airwaves."

But what most impressed Wozniak was the USIA director's graciousness to "an essential non-entity in the USIA hierarchy. My small staff and I were on razor's edge wondering if what we had arranged and were doing would meet expectations and requirements. Evidently they did." A promotion to Foreign Service Officer-3 came for Wozniak the following year.

Public Affairs Officer Paul Blackburn also gave Shakespeare the highest marks, especially for his interest in getting the best from young people.

"I had great respect for the leadership skills and personal sensitivity of Frank Shakespeare, a man whose political views were considerably to the right of my own," Blackburn told Worldcasting.

"As Director during the traumatic Vietnam War years, Shakespeare gave unequalled attention to the morale of younger Foreign Service Officers [FSOs] and Civil Service personnel throughout the Agency...On one memorable occasion he met with us shortly after the U.S. 'incursion' into Cambodia...During that session he candidly shared our collective deep pain over both that legally and morally dubious action and also its effect on USIA's efforts to sustain America's standing in the world. Later Shakespeare paid this 34-year-old [Foreign Service Information Officer] the extraordinary compliment by taking a direct interest in my 1972 assignment" as Director of the Tokyo American Center.

Professor Nancy Snow at California State University, Fullerton ranks Joseph Duffey, who presided over the demise of the USIA in the Clinton administration, at the head of the class. "Duffey was tasked with a no-winner," said Snow. A Cultural Affairs and Academic Exchange Specialist in the "E" Bureau, Snow said that while it was "clear to me that although [Duffey] had a strong commitment to cultural diplomacy and international exchange, the writing was on the wall that the USIA was going to lose its independent status. I appreciated the personal affability that Duffey displayed to his staff, including this lowly Presidential Management Fellow."

It would be a pity if Karen Hughes is summoned back to the White House, where it is suspected she may wind up, to help calm the communication waters over there.

She is desperately needed where she is - at the center of a broken U.S. public diplomacy effort - so she can jump start future generations of public diplomacy officers who need someone to admire.

 
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