ABSTRACT
It was in a serendipitous moment of frustration that Edward R. Murrow, the legendary American broadcaster and one-time lead figure for American public diplomacy as the director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), uttered a powerful lamentation of his plight in trying to manage the American image and reputation in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs gambit in early 1961. Having learned of the ploy only after it had been launched and sensing the damage control he would soon be undertaking he grumbled, “If they want me in on the crash landings, I’d better damn well be in on the take-offs.”1 In so doing, Murrow had inadvertently sketched the borderlines within which public diplomacy becomes salient in the planning and execution of foreign policy: the “take-offs” represent participation in the genesis and planned articulation of policy, and “crash landings” the attempt to manage policy failures. For the study of public diplomacy, the statement is so serendipitous because it neatly symbolizes two opposing interpretations of the proper role for practitioners, albeit in a very general way. That is, any scholar or practitioner will acknowledge that there is much more to the public diplomacy process than origins and outcomes.
