I hope by now I may have persuaded you that public diplomacy has an important place in foreign affairs in today’s world. Now I intend to describe how public diplomacy programs are conducted, drawing on my own experience as an American practitioner. Other countries with energetic public diplomacy programs, which most of the major powers have, would offer interesting variations, and I certainly invite you to examine them.

I will start with information programs and proceed to cultural and educational activities. Information programs concentrate on the fast-moving actions and decisions of government and aim dissemination of materials to international journalists, government officials, and those academics and other opinion-shapers who follow the daily agenda of world affairs. For the U.S. this includes the following efforts:

• In Washington at our headquarters we gather all the speeches, public position papers, transcripts of press conferences or other public pronouncements of the U.S. government that could possibly be of interest to audiences anywhere in the world.

• Within hours of these materials becoming available, we compile them and send them electronically to each U.S. embassy. We also mount them on our Website so that the overseas public has direct and immediate access to them. Additionally, we translate many of these materials into world languages - French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, with recent additions of Chinese and Portuguese. We do all this centrally because it saves time.

• Also centrally, we develop strategies on how best to convey U.S. positions on issues of global concern. The U.S. position on NATO expansion, for example, was explained and clarified in a number of countries simultaneously, thanks to materials formulated in Washington.

• At our embassies overseas, we have people like me in London or, here in Malta, like Keith Peterson, who manage the dissemination locally of all this material coming from Washington. We also absorb it so that we can explain it in person, ideally with sensitivity to local issues and concerns and by means of using the local language with some fluency. In large media centers like London, we have a larger staff, of course, with several American officers each specializing in, say, broadcast or print media, and with locally hired experts to assist them.

• Our embassy operations in large media centers also become adept at handling the press-related requirements of VIP visits. In London, where the number of visiting U.S. officials is overwhelming, we can and do very frequently put on press conferences and set up facilities for the traveling White House or State Department press. In the last couple of months, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met frequently in London with Cook, Netanyahu and Arafat, and each time she held a press conference afterward, thus confirming the observation that the public side of diplomacy is at least as important as the private side. Actually, in Malta I should not neglect the fact that high-visibility events come to small countries, too: remember that it was off Malta that Bush and Gorbachev held an important meeting one stormy December. The press arrangements were just as crucial and considerably more challenging than if they had met in London.

• The information side of public diplomacy also includes the writing of speeches, either for senior officers of the embassy or oneself. Our Ambassador in London, for example, is asked to give far more public statements than any one person could generate alone, if he intended also to keep time aside for such other tasks as running the embassy, acting as liaison between the two governments or staying abreast of policy developments. So my office provides him with background information, research and other materials on which to draw.

• Finally, but by no means least, a government information program also must respond in some fashion to public inquiries about one’s country. In a large embassy, this means acting as the information front-end of the U.S. government by responding to hundreds of phone calls, letters and research inquiries each week. The questions run the gamut from a British tourist asking "What’s the temperature in Florida when I’m going on vacation?" to a Member of Parliament requesting detailed information about Wisconsin’s welfare reforms, which will be useful input to the debate on welfare reform in the U.K. Our offerings must run this same gamut: from a London-based Website that has answers to frequently asked questions, to a sophisticated electronic retrieval system that accesses legislative databases in the U.S.

It might be useful to illustrate how information programs can work in an environment other than London, and I’m going to choose examples from my previous posts that intentionally convey a very key point: public diplomacy must be based on honesty, openness and trust in order to be successful. I gave a talk once at the diplomatic training school of a country in which I was serving, and my subject was "How to be a Press Attaché." I had a long recitation of "do’s" and "don’ts" that was heavy on recommendations about never lying, always returning reporters’ phone calls, and telling as much as you could. At the end of what I thought was a very persuasive presentation, one of the junior diplomats in the audience said, "Yes, but what we really want to know is how to control the press." Well, my view is that you can’t and you shouldn’t try. No amount of "spinning" is going to change the facts. What you can do, though, is present and explain the facts accurately, persuasively and fast.

When I was in Indonesia, we had a very contentious trade dispute that involved obscure U.S. regulations governing how much market share certain imports into the U.S. could acquire and how U.S. customs taxes could be reduced for certain developing countries under certain circumstances. The Indonesian press and public initially were outraged at what they assumed was an action on the part of the U.S. that unfairly targeted their country and protected U.S. domestic industries. Fortunately for both countries, this initial assumption was faulty. By first grasping and then explaining the facts of the U.S. law, we were able to show that the same regulations applied to all countries, that the U.S. tariffs for imports were already among the lowest in the world even before any preferential reductions, and that the planned action wouldn’t hurt anyone very much anyway. Thus a fast, fact-driven campaign was able to prevent a nasty dispute and preserve what were quite harmonious overall relations.

At another time I lived through what is probably a Press Attaché’s worst nightmare: something incontrovertibly bad happened and there was no explaining it away with the truth. An American employee of the Embassy was caught red-handed selling drugs in "commercial quantities." There was an immediate firestorm of protest that only escalated when he was removed from the country for trial in the U.S. Denying that this happened or trying to minimize its negative character were not options. We gave out as much information as the law allowed, we expressed our heartfelt regret, and we were especially careful to explain that the military court martial the man faced in the U.S. would leave no room for escape from justice by the guilty. Fortunately for public perceptions - and justice - the suspect was found guilty and incarcerated. U.S. law officials also cooperated with local police to move related aspects of the case into local courts. The outcome in the public view ended up being neutral for the U.S., which was a distinct gain over the disaster it would have been for us had we not released any information.

My last example in support of the open approach derives from Indonesia in the fall of 1994, when Jakarta hosted the APEC summit and eighteen heads of state, including our President and most of his senior staff. It was, needless to say, a busy time for press relations, as nearly 4,000 journalists were in town, most notably for us the celebrities of the White House press corps. A few hours before the arrival of the President, twenty-some East Timorese protesters vaulted the walls of the U.S. Embassy, determined to stage a sit-in that would, they hoped, involve the U.S. in supporting their position regarding the future of Indonesia’s troubled province of East Timor. They achieved one objective, which was to draw global media attention to their cause. What sort of public diplomacy should be attempted under these circumstances? We opted for openness. We answered every one of thousands of press inquiries, we gave live radio interviews from the embassy, we told callers what we were feeding the demonstrators, how we were handling one who needed medical attention, what our position was and why, and we did nothing to stop journalists from interviewing the protesters through the embassy fence. At the same time, negotiations were being conducted privately on what happened to the protesters, which succeeded in the Red Cross helping them depart for a third country. The U.S. came in for no serious criticism from the press or the local government and indeed earned some praise for its handling of this potentially explosive incident; I am convinced that our openness to the press was a very large contributing factor.

Now I will move to a description of cultural and educational programs, which are a significant and often underappreciated component of a successful public diplomacy program. These longer-term programs provide the context and deeper understanding of a country’s society, values, institutions and motives for forming the positions it takes. You could think, perhaps, of information programs as being the newspapers of a country’s foreign affairs, and cultural and educational programs as being its literature. You can make do with the newspapers alone, but they will mean far more if you have read the literature.

For the U.S., cultural and educational programs start with the renowned Fulbright academic exchange program, which enables graduate students, researchers and professors to travel on programs of several months or more between the U.S. and most countries in the world. The aim is to increase mutual understanding and prevent the kinds of misunderstandings that lead to war. After Senator Fulbright founded this program immediately after World War II, a number of other countries and private institutions established similar programs, so that now we have a fairly thick and, I believe, very helpful web of scholars with international experience. The U.S. also has several programs that bring professionals in various fields related to public policy to the U.S. for meetings with their counterparts. These programs also strengthen bonds of understanding by providing firsthand experience of the U.S.

We find that many people form very definite opinions about the U.S. that they base not on personal experience but just on our movies, popular music, TV programs, or other forms of popular culture. These opinions are quite often pretty negative, or at best inaccurate and incomplete. We find that people who go to the U.S. and form opinions as a result of actual experience and observation usually come away with a much more realistic basis for whatever views they may hold or actions they may take. When they go on a U.S. government-sponsored program, we make no attempt to show them only the good sides of the American coin. If they want to see slums, we make sure they can see slums, but we show them what some communities are doing about slums, too. I know a number of other countries have similar programs. Few, perhaps, are battling as much popular-culture-induced myth as we are, however.

I will add that public diplomacy used to mean additionally the organizing and financing of performing and visual arts programs, particularly in societies where American culture was underrepresented or unappreciated. We spent quite a lot of money sending wonderful arts programs to the Soviet Union, for example, and we are told that these programs kept alive for many Russians a positive impression of the West despite a great deal of negative propaganda to the contrary. Now, however, that we are not engaged in the superpower struggle, our funding has been cut and we have eliminated most cultural programming. We do assist American arts events that are financed privately, however, and in a place like London where there is a wealth of American talent on display, we provide an official presence and facilitative assistance to major events.

We also are able to undertake the supervision of programs that help build democratic institutions in areas where such efforts need sustenance. I know the European Union is active in this work as well, and some other countries are too. In the new countries of the NIS, for example, we have helped the organs of the free press get started through the provision of equipment and expert advice. In Northern Ireland, programs run from my London office support conflict resolution workshops and foster the formation of small businesses in an attempt to mitigate the poverty that is one of the roots of the troubles.

Other tools of public diplomacy I will mention in passing, as they may not be applicable to all national efforts. We and several other major powers support international radio broadcasting, beaming news and other programs overseas in dozens of languages. We also run a parallel television service, which provides ready-to-use public affairs programming to overseas stations that wish it. We additionally conduct public opinion polling overseas for the U.S. government and we compile and analyze what the foreign press is saying about the main themes of U.S. policy. This information is useful for policy-makers in Washington, who need to be aware of reactions and perceptions of foreign publics as they craft U.S. policy.

Before I leave the "how to do it" section of this talk, I want to touch on audiences and technology. A public diplomacy practitioner has to choose his audiences carefully, unless unlimited financial resources are at his disposal. They never are, so we leave appeals to mass audiences basically to our radio, television and now Website programming, and we concentrate everything else on the people who shape opinions. I have defined these before as journalists, government officials, academics, and I will add think-tank and non-governmental organization workers and leaders of business, the arts and society. We also have to assign resources of funding and personnel according to an analysis of which countries matter the most to us and in which countries can we make an important difference that serves our national interest. Every nation’s Foreign Ministry will have to make such an analysis, and for each it will, of course, be different. Given the paradigm I mentioned earlier, we examine and adjust resource allocations each year, because each year our relations shift somewhat.