Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XXX, Public Diplomacy

120. Address by the Director of the United States Information Agency (Reinhardt)¹

Washington, February 6, 1978

As this reorganization has been discussed over the past few months, almost a year now, I think I’ve made more speeches than I’ve ever made in my life, more than I ever hope to make in the rest of my life. For it seemed to me that there was room for a great deal of misunderstanding, but probably more accurately, there was a great deal of ignorance among the people about something called ICA.

There’s no question that in the past, only the most sophisticated people knew anything about something called CU or something called USIA. Everybody, of course, knew about the Department of State, and the sophisticated people knew that there were certain exchange programs operated out of the Department of State.

In an effort, perhaps a vain one, to overcome this problem, I set out a couple of months ago on a speaking tour on the West Coast. Some of you have heard me tell this story before, and I apologize for your having to listen again. But it illustrates, it seems to me, some of the problems and opportunities.

Before I went to Los Angeles, I received a little brochure that the head of the World Affairs Council had sent to me, announcing my coming. Actually, it was a brochure designed to persuade the members of the Council to attend a luncheon, at which I was to speak. It was a very, very good job—good, slick paper, good printing, excellent reproduction of my photograph. It announced the subject, announced the cost of your lunch—twelve dollars and a half. And I was very proud of it, for them. It seemed to me that it was quite worthy of the best reproduction facilities in USIA.

And I thought that I would make a little personal hay with this, so I decided to send it to my father, who’s 87 years old, lives in Tennessee. Nobody in Tennessee ever pays twelve dollars and a half for lunch.

And I was sure I could make a few points. And I put it in an envelope and wrote out the appropriate sentences that could be summarized by saying, “look what I’m doing these days.” And I got a prompt response. He said, “I don’t know a thing about this subject that you propose to speak on, Public Diplomacy, Necessity or Luxury. But I do know one thing: There is nothing that you could say on any subject that’s worth twelve dollars and a half.”

I was properly chastened, but I still had to go on and make this speech on public diplomacy, necessity or luxury. It started me to thinking about USIA activities in the past, and CU activities in the past. Neither organization can be sure that we’ve been well known, that we’ve even been understood. There are good historic reasons for this. Over the years, Americans as a people have stayed away from these kinds of bureaucracies that could be construed by someone, at least, to be a kind of ministry of information.

And this has done something, I think, to both organizations, and something that can be overcome to a great extent by ICA. In the first place, it’s made us awfully defensive. We’ve spent a great deal of our time as government servants simply defending our turf in an effort to prove that what we were doing was worthwhile. We were always convinced ourselves, but we were afraid that others in American society may not be convinced.

I won’t try to illustrate this from CU’s point of view, where I’ve never worked, but I think I can illustrate it perfectly from USIA’s point of view.

One of our very important functions is libraries, 180-odd over the world. And we as an agency have done a great deal of work trying to justify libraries to ourselves, not realizing, it seems, that a library is a library is a library wherever you find one, and the peoples around the world must know what a library is.

We’ve become defensive on this subject. We have tried to suggest that libraries are institutions that are designed to attract prime ministers and cabinet ministers and other members of what we’d call primary audiences. When they haven’t come in, we haven’t been quite sure what to do with the libraries. So the debate—the internal debate—goes on, rather than our accepting that this is a powerful instrument of communication, that it will naturally attract certain members of the society, and it won’t attract many others. We may take the contents of the library to other members of the society, but that’s all.

We’ve also put a great deal of emphasis on day-to-day communication problems, and indeed, this has become one of the real problems in reorganizing these activities, as some people have asserted. They say that one of the organizations that has been proposed as an entity in ICA, has been interested in the short-range, the day-to-day. The other one has been interested in the long-range. And the opponents of reorganization, at least, have said the two won’t mix.

Well, if you put it that way, probably they won’t. But it seems to me that one thing that we have learned over the years in USIA—you’ve always known it in CU—is that very little that we have done in the past 25 years has solved problems overnight. To the extent that we have been successful, we have been far more successful on long-range activities than we have on the short-range activities. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t short-range problems, or that some of the short-range problems don’t require attention.

When you look at any one of the great problems in the world, in the last 25 years, we would be bold indeed if we suggested that, as a result of what we’ve done on a short-range basis, we have turned these problems around or solved them.

So long-range activities, long-range results, almost by definition grow from the whole field of communication. There is a cumulative result over a period of time. The reorganization, I would hope, will help us to consider, to plan, to reflect on activities that we are agreed on, and to eliminate some of what I have perceived, at least, to be our overdefensiveness.

What I want to talk about mainly is the organizational structure of the new agency. We’ve had all kinds of input. We’ve had individual letter writers, we’ve had people who call us, we have had task forces which completed their work in the middle of December, as you will recall.² And then it finally came to the point that we had to take all of these excellent suggestions and options and recommendations and put together a structure which we hope will serve the new agency well.

We do not claim that we have organized for eternity. We think that the structure is completely defensible. Six months after the agency begins on April 1, if we’ve made a mistake or if it simply doesn’t work as we have designed it, we won’t hesitate to change it. Obviously, those who follow us won’t hesitate to change it.

What we have sought is a structure in accordance with some basic principles that we think should govern the new agency. In the first place, we have sought a structure that is consistent with the Presidential principles announced in the President’s letter, and approved by the Congress. If you go back and read the covering message that the President sent to the Hill with the reorganization plan, he made some points.³ He made very clear what it is that the new agency should do, not too specifically, but there’s no question about the general principles he stated.

Thus, any organizational structure must take these principles into consideration. Also, in the course of talking about the new structure, the new ICA, I have likened it to a conglomerate, as some of you have heard me say. It is not an exact anaology by a long shot, but it is an instructive one, nevertheless. A business conglomerate has many entities, some of them seemingly disparate entities. They make motion pictures, they explore for oil, they make clothing, they engage in any number of other activities.

Some of these activities may be dominant. If you’re exploring for oil and you hit oil, you’re probably going to get more money. The conglomerate is going to get more money from that entity than it can possibly get from publishing books.

Still, businessmen in their wisdom have seen fit to bring together these seeming disparate entities in an effort, obviously, to make a profit. It is possible to look at all of the entities in the new ICA and say that some of them are quite unlike others. Again, those who have not been fond of the reorganization have pointed up this fact. An organizing structure such as we have presented today, we hope, will help overcome this seeming separateness of some of the entities.

We have been determined that there should be, perhaps as never before, a core management in the new organization, not a core management to be concerned with the tactical programs on a day-to-day basis. We couldn’t follow these if we wanted to, because we’re too widely dispersed as an organization.

On the other hand, there should be a management that is concerned with the general strategic purposes and objectives of the new organization, to set them without any hesitancy, and to make certain that they are carried out in some way, carried out efficiently.

This core management grows out of the reorganization plan sent to the Congress. It consists of a Director, a Deputy Director and four Associate Directors, who will meet frequently and who will be concerned with the overall strategic planning of the organization.

I have frequently used the words centrality of purpose and it’s a phrase that’s been misunderstood. I should at least tell you what I mean by it.

By centrality of purpose, I mean little more than that all our activities should have a purpose and should have some simple connection with the overall objectives of the ICA. I do not mean by this that around the world, in 184 places, we are going to have 184 posts doing exactly the same thing at the same time. I do not mean by this that there is a kind of lasso on entities of the organizations overseas and that they must do the same thing at the same time.

I mean only that whatever they’re doing should meet certain strategic standards that we will set, and that we can be knowledgeable about it.

Finally, in the course of these generalities, I’ve said that the organization must have two forces in it, two dominant forces, one centrifugal and one centripetal. The organization must have a clear-cut statement of purposes, objectives and strategies. These will flow out from core management. But there must also be flowing into core management, principally from the field, ideas, plans, purposes in the light of the communications problems and opportunities that exist overseas, whether it is a cultural exchange program, or a motion picture, or something going from the print media. Brazil is still different from Indonesia, and we can only know what the problems and opportunities are in each insofar as we have flowing into the organization the ideas as they are seen from the field.

Some of this will be a repetition of what I have said. But since these are the principles that have guided us, I thought that we should go through them, one at a time.

The new structure must provide—as I’ve just said—a core management group responsible for establishing broad agency policies and securing their effective execution. The agency must have a sense of strategic purpose consistent with overall U.S. policy goals—almost a repetition of what the President has already set for us.

The agency structure, as you will see shortly, should provide clear lines of authority and accountability at every level. Overlapping responsibilities and operations should be reduced to the absolute minimum. We hope that we have done this in setting up the structure. We of course cannot be sure until the agency begins its work.

Inflation of job titles should be reversed. There’s a long congressional history of questions on this subject which has helped us make up our minds on it.

The number of nonrelated staffs reporting to principal officers in core management should be reduced to the minimum.

The organizational structure itself must enhance the integrity of the academic exchange programs and the news operation of the Voice of America, mandated by the President and the Congress. In the case of the Voice of America, notice that it says the news operation of the Voice of America. A great deal of the Voice of America programming has little or nothing to do with news.

There should be a central point of reference for relations with field posts. By the same token, field perspectives must suffuse the entire agency, for still, a great deal of the work of ICA, as has been the case with both USIA and CU, is overseas. We all have gotten the message about the two-way dialogue, about the mutuality of activities, about intercultural relations, about the bringing of American people together with foreign people in various ways.

Nevertheless, a great part of the agency’s work will still be physically overseas.

The structure of the organization should call for new patterns of thought and afford opportunities for creative initiative.

These are principles that we thought about a great deal. We have recorded them because they have guided us in the designing of the structure.

[Omitted here is Reinhardt’s explanation of ICA’s organizational structure.]

QUESTION: John, how do you see the relationship of the ICA Director to the Secretary of State?

Mr. Reinhardt: The Secretary of State, under ICA, as under USIA, will be responsible for policy guidance, both tactical and strategic, to the Director of ICA. This will be the principal relationship. The other relationships between the two will be collegial and, depending on the issue at hand at any one time, close, we hope.

The two functions of public and traditional diplomacy are different functions, as agreed by all. The public diplomacy function supports, in its long-range effects, the efforts of traditional diplomacy. The two functions are both necessary to the national interest.

1. Source: National Archives, RG 306, USIA Historical Collection, Subject Files, 1953–2000, Entry A–1 1066, Box 43, United States International Communication Agency, Reorganization, 1977–1981. No classification marking. Reinhardt made these remarks before senior agency officials. The transcript was distributed to agency employees under an undated cover page entitled “Announcement of Structure of International Communication Agency.”
2. See footnote 5, Document 114.
3. See Document 93.