For more than three decades Yale Richmond served with USIA, both abroad as a cultural affairs officer and in the headquarters in Washington, DC as a planner and coordinator. Following his retirement from USIA he spent most of the 1980s working with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), continuing the goals of his government work in the private sector. He has already contributed a great deal to the history of US public diplomacy through his earlier studies on the practice of dialogue and exchange with the Soviet Union (Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain and Soviet–American Cultural Exchanges: Ripoff or Payoff?). He has now compiled his memoirs into a lighthearted but nonetheless highly engaging volume that allows us to follow his career from postwar Germany through Laos, Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, and various high-level posts in the United States. In doing so he adds to other valuable public diplomacy memoirs from Hans Tuch and others who have given us an insider's view on the theory and practice, successes and failures of US information and cultural policy.

Considering that the practice of US Cold War public diplomacy is often seen in a positive light compared to what has happened since, and considering that the debate on how the United States can best propagate its ideas and values abroad continues to rage in the wake of the Bush presidency, Richmond's contribution is both fitting and timely. As the preface (by former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock) and the rest of the book remind us, the politicizing of public diplomacy – its treatment as little more than a glorified form of propaganda – fundamentally undermines what this field of activity is all about. Richmond emphasizes throughout that when serving in posts abroad the level of guidance from Washington was minimal, and each US embassy's country team had a lot of leeway to develop their own approaches and tactics within the broad strategy sent out from headquarters. The contrast with the centralized public diplomacy apparatus under Bush, where all foreign service posts were expected to do little more than propagate official policy, is striking.

Richmond's freewheeling approach to public diplomacy also produced many memorable moments. When serving in Schweinfurt in 1950–51 he attended a local Communist Party meeting and ended up being implicated in condemning the United States for spreading the destructive potato beetle across the Soviet Zone. In Poland he gained unauthorized access to a Soviet military base by accident. Within a week of his arrival in Moscow in June 1967 he got caught up in an anti-American demonstration, much to the bemusement of his US embassy colleagues who could see him in the crowd outside the building. And having been granted entrance to the Moscow press club, otherwise closed to Westerners, one night he found himself celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet News agency TASS, his mixing with the Soviet top brass fuelled by plenty of vodka.

However, Richmond's career provides far more than comical anecdotes. From his time in Poland (1958–61) onwards, he was closely involved with various forms of exchange with the Eastern bloc, and it is on this subject that he is most knowledgeable. As he freely admits, the goals of cultural exchange in this context were ambitious: “the political objective was to broaden communication in the hope of encouraging constructive change in the Soviet Union that would lead to more cooperation and less confrontation, and a relationship in which we would work together to resolve differences and avoid nuclear war” (74). Exchanges could, gradually, wear down Soviet isolationism and build up multilateral contacts across a broad range of fields, changing dominions along the way. Charting his way through the acronyms of the exchange programme apparatus (Comex, IREX), Richmond gives an insider's account of the practice of exchanges, particularly his time in the 1970s as, successively, director of the Office of International Visitor Programs, director of the Office of Soviet and East European Exchanges (both with the State Department), and, lastly, deputy assistant director for Europe/Exchanges (with USIA). Richmond looks back on this experience, and his later time with NED, convinced that the value of public diplomacy comes from its mobilization of the private sector in alliance with broad government objectives. But this will only be successful, he rightly points out, if policymakers are aware of the effect of their actions on public opinion – both at home and abroad. Richmond's memoir is therefore not just an entertaining chronicle of the Cold War, but also a rich source of comment on issues that continue to plague US public diplomacy today.