Public Diplomacy Reality-Check -- Quotation for the Day

"I have had no instructions as yet as to what I am supposed to do. In reality, I suspect that my task will consist of talking with people."

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--Diplomat Dr. John Lackey Brown, re his assignment in Paris as Director-General of the USIA Bicentennial exhibit (May 17-July 19, 1975), "The World of Franklin and Jefferson," in a letter (November 14, 1974) to a distinguished U.S. Embassy Paris employee, to which the employee not much later (unofficially, in a handwritten blue-ink note) responded:

autour de cette expo., les crabes commencent à remuer leurs pattes et leur pinces."

--From the John L. Brown Papers (Box 46, folder 46/18/277) at Georgetown University.