ABSTRACT
Every academic discipline has its certainties, and in the small field of public diplomacy studies it is a truth universally acknowledged that the term “public diplomacy” was coined in 1965 by Edmund Gullion, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a distinguished retired foreign service officer, when he established an Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy. The earliest use of the phrase “public diplomacy” to surface is actually not American at all but in a leader piece from the London Times in January 1856. During the Great War the phrase “public diplomacy” was widely used to describe a cluster of new diplomatic practices. The phrase “public diplomacy” endured in its idealistic Wilsonian open covenants’ sense throughout the interwar years in the rhetoric of the internationalists like James Shotwell and Clarence Streit, and in similarly inclined editorials in the pages of the Christian Science Monitor.
