Today, Edward R. Murrow’s name is synonymous with integrity in journalism. He reported from the frontlines during World War II and took on Joe McCarthy’s communist witchhunt in the 1950s. But what’s less well known to Americans today is his role as the country’s leading propagandist in the early 1960s. A new book by Gregory M. Tomlin called "Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration" seeks to remedy that.

What is public diplomacy, quite often mentioned in the news? And how has it — and its variants/related terms — changed the nature of traditional diplomacy, if at all? Dictionaries define traditional diplomacy as “ the profession, activity, or skill of managing international relations, typically by a country’s representatives abroad“ or “the art and practice of conducting negotiations between nations.”

John E. Reinhardt, who in 1971 became the first black U.S. ambassador to Nigeria and in 1977 the first career diplomat to lead the U.S. Information Agency, died Feb. 18 at a retirement community in Silver Spring, Md. He was 95. [...] Mr. Reinhardt led a transition for the organization, which had been renamed the International Communication Agency and included Voice of America broadcasts in addition to public-diplomacy outreach programs.