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INTERVIEW: HODDING CARTER III WITH PHILIP GEYELIN For the first six months of the hostage crisis in Iran, when public attention was fixed most intensely on the situation, the voice ofAmerican foreign policy was Hodding Carter III, the Mississippi-born son and namesake ofa famous southern newspaper editor. A graduate ofPrinceton , a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, editor of the family newspaper in Greenville (Mississippi) for 12 years, and a Nieman fellow, Carter was appointedAssistantSecretary ofStateforPublicAffairs (and Spokesman for the State Department) by President Jimmy Carter (no relation) after having worked in Atlanta for the Carter campaign. His nightly appearances on television, infilm clips from his noon briefings on the hostages, made him, almost overnight, the second best-known Carter in the country. Celebrity-status aside, his three-and-a-halfyears in the business ofhandlingpublic relations for the Department ofState (he left his post immediately after the resignation of former Secretary Cyrus Vance) also made him one ofthe nation's leading authorities on the role ofcommunications in the foreign policymaking process. In the following interview with Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Geyelin, syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group and Editor in Residence at SAIS, Carter talks about his experiences on the job, the background he brought to it, and whathe learnedfrom it about the importance ofpublic opinion in the conduct offoreign policy. GEYELIN: Whenyou came to the StateDepartment, how much exposure had you had to the sort of things you were going to be dealing with? CARTER: Essentially not very much. I'd been to the Soviet Union a couple oftimes and South Africa several times, and Europe a number of times. I'd gone to the Woodrow Wilson School with the idea ofgoing into the Foreign Service, but I wound up back in Greenville running the family newspaper instead. Things that sort of semi-qualified me were being a member of the Atlantic Association of Young Political Leaders and the American Council of Young Political Leaders. GEYELIN: What made you pick thejob at State? 33 34 SAIS REVIEW CARTER: It was the only one of three I was interested in that was finally available—I wanted to do African affairs, out ofa long-standing interest, but that was not one that Cy Vance, who didn't know me from Adam, was willing to trust to an unknown. What really interested me was the decision to put the role of spokesman and the position of assistant secretary back together again as onejob; they'd been split apart for some years. GEYELIN: What's the big advantage in that—does it really matter? CARTER: Absolutely. It's essential. The job of assistant secretary for public affairs is essentially the "American Desk" in the State Department . That is, it has the role not only oftrying to explain to the American people what the policy is, but also ofexplaining back to the department what the American reaction is to the policy. To do that, access for the assistant secretary for public affairs to the secretary of state is invaluable. The spokesman for the department has virtually unlimited access to the secretary just by the nature of the job. But the assistant secretary, without the combination ofbeing spokesman, doesn't have it in the same way at all—it becomesjust another bureaucratic assistant secretary position, with the same chain of command as all the others. GEYELIN: Leaving aside the attitude of any particular secretary of state, what is the feeling in the department, lefs say the regular career people, about the importance ofpublic refations? CARTER: That building is far more aware today than it was 15 years ago of the need for dealing with American public opinion. But I would have to say that, nonetheless, it has a lot of old habits which weigh against doing it. GEYELIN: What is the cause of this heightened awareness—just the overwhelming impact of television making the public more conscious of whafs going on in the world? CARTER: That may be part of it, but I think there's much more to it. It really begins with the collapse of the foreign policy consensus that was forged in the late forties, the bipartisanship. That...

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