The World - News from April 17, 1986

U.S. ambassadors spend too much time on “traditional diplomacy behind closed doors” and too little on efforts to sell U.S. policies to the ordinary people of foreign nations, a presidential commission said. In an annual study overseeing the work of the U.S. Information Agency, the panel said that “it’s as important for an ambassador to know how to conduct a television interview as it is how to write a fitness report or an embassy budget. In some respects, the ambassador has to be a campaign manager for the United States.”