Prof. Scott Lucas
“Public diplomacy” has been a recurrent mantra in discussions of US foreign policy since 11 September 2001. Charlotte Beers, the advertising executive who was appointed Assistant Secretary of State less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, proclaimed, “We promote U.S. interests not only through our policies but also in our beliefs and values. Never have these intangibles been more important than right now.”[ii] In August 2004, the challenge remained: US National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice who asserted, “We must work to dispel destructive myths about American society and about American policy”, and five months after that Secretary-of- State-designate Rice promised at her confirmation hearings “to do much more to confront hateful propaganda, dispel dangerous myths, and get out the truth”.[iii]