At least when applied to the most important of the US exchange schemes of the post-World War II period, the Department of State's Foreign Leader Program, the word “exchange” seems a misnomer. The point clearly was not reciprocity, the equal trading of citizens and, thereby, cultural and political influence. Rather, it was to expose foreign leaders to personal experience of the US in the hope that they would be converted into advocates of the American way of life and supporters of the Western alliance in the Cold War. In other words, the program was not intended mainly to promote “mutual understanding,” as its promoters sometimes claimed, but rather to buttress American international dominance.

Yet, as Giles Scott-Smith's well-researched and balanced book shows, this was not the whole story. The program was voluntary, after all, and individuals chose to take part for reasons of their own, including the personal prestige that came with the designation “leader” by a foreign power. In the case of the Netherlands, the main focus of Scott-Smith's attention, there was also a strong sense of ideological sympathy between the chief beneficiaries of the Foreign Leader Program, leaders of the Dutch Labour Party and trade union movement, and liberal American elites, based on such spontaneously shared values as anti-Communism, Atlanticism, and the “politics of productivity.” Indeed, the US's Dutch allies would prove strategically important conductors of American influence to the European “non-Communist left,” a bridge function on which this study sheds valuable light. That said, not all exchangees behaved so cooperatively: Scott-Smith tells the story of the celebrity Dutch journalist and self-declared “dear friend of the USA” Mary Vos, who exasperated program officers by explaining that her pro-American attitudes might change if she was not granted immediate interviews with President Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover.

Similar themes of unintended consequences and exchangee agency emerge in briefer case studies of the Foreign Leader Program's operation in France, where participants typically absorbed American technical lessons while rejecting US political leadership, and Britain, whose leaders tended to use exchanges as an opportunity to assert the self-interested notion of an Anglo-American “special relationship.” Still, Scott-Smith is careful not to overstate the significance of these factors. As in his earlier monograph on the CIA front organization the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he sees such responses as part of a larger picture of “informal empire” in which US elites recruited like-minded Europeans in order to create an “Atlantic community” which was also an American hegemony in the Gramscian sense; that is, an alliance mediating the power of the hegemon. In short, the Foreign Leader Program was “simultaneously magnanimous and manipulative.”

This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on US public diplomacy which should serve well as a model for future studies of the operation of exchange programs in regions beyond north-western Europe.