This book provides an exhaustive account of America's public diplomacy during the Cold War.

Public diplomacy - the uncertain art of winning public support abroad for one's government and its foreign policies - constitutes a critical instrument of U.S. policy in the wake of the Bush administration's recent military interventions and its renunciation of widely accepted international accords. Wilson Dizard Jr. offers the first comprehensive account of public diplomacy's evolution within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, ranging from World War II to the present. Dizard focuses on the U.S. Information Agency and its precursor, the Office of War Information. Tracing the political ups and downs determining the agency's trajectory, he highlights its instrumental role in creating the policy and programs underpinning today's public diplomacy, as well as the people involved. The USIA was shut down in 1999, but it left an important legacy of what works and what doesn't in presenting U.S. policies and values to the rest of the world. Inventing Public Diplomacy is an unparalleled history of U.S. efforts at organized international propaganda.

Using newly declassified archives and interviews with practitioners, Nicholas J. Cull has pieced together the story of the final decade in the life of the United States Information Agency, revealing the decisions and actions that brought the United States' apparatus for public diplomacy into disarray.

By intelligence officials for intelligent people

Inside a U.S. Embassy is widely recognized as the essential guide to the Foreign Service. This all-new third edition takes readers to more than fifty U.S. missions around the world, introducing Foreign Service professionals and providing detailed descriptions of their jobs and firsthand accounts of diplomacy in action. In addition to profiles of diplomats and specialists around the world-from the ambassador to the consular officer, the public diplomacy officer to the security specialist-is a selection from more than twenty countries of day-in-the-life accounts, each describing an actual day on.