How Public Diplomacy Worked in Practice

Editor's Note: How American public diplomacy was practiced in Germany over the course of three decades is the subject of this essay by a distinguished retired senior public diplomacy officer. In Communicating with the World: US. Public Diplomacy Overseas (1) I included four case studies on the practice of public diplomacy--in the Soviet Union, Germany and Brazil. In this essay I explain how public diplomacy was actually planned and carried out in three cities in Germany--in Frankfurt in the early fifties, in Berlin in the late sixties and in Bonn in the early eighties.