Adam Powell, Seen and Unseen, by Joe Johnson


By accident I came across a new Substack column by Adam Clayton Powell III, Director of the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and a past president of the Public Diplomacy Council. We worked together building up the Council, one of the legacy organizations of PDCA, but in Adam’s Substack entries I found so much that I didn’t know about his background: his illustrious parents and his early adventures as a CBS correspondent, with telling details about how programs were made in the golden era of U.S. television news. (At left, Powell chats with CBS Anchor Walter Cronkite.) So I asked Adam about why he had set about writing these memoirs.

Adam told me, “For years - no, decades - friends and colleagues have been asking me to write an autobiography.  I don't have time to write a book, I would always answer.” Years ago, an editor with Simon and Shuster suggested he begin with “vignettes.”

“Now, with Substack, who needs Simon and Shuster to get started?”

The title is "Seen and Unseen," he continued, because, as my father asked in 1964 when I first joined CBS News as an intern, "You're not going to tell them what goes on, are you?" He always believed that if you want to hide something, put it in plain sight, and no one will see it. And of course with my mother (Hazel Scott) in show business, I learned that what the audience sees has little resemblance to what performers are really doing.”

Adam made a point about the value of listening to folks who are unnoticed. “Growing up in the Black church - and I am old enough to remember people coming from the South arriving in New York with just enough money to take the NYC subway to our church - I would hear every Sunday what the church members, who were lowly servants, would share about what ‘white people’ do; their employers had no idea how much their new employees were observing.

“And last, again growing up, I quickly learned who really knew what was happening on the streets: the cops, the wise guys, the people who collect the garbage — and I never met any of them who had ever met or spoken to a New York Times reporter. But they gave me the best tips. My favorite, from a cop at 5 am on a Friday morning in 1974, gave us a scoop that was so big we gave it continuous coverage and canceled all commercials for nine hours.

“Yes, that big. And because I talk to cops on the beat. But that's in an upcoming chapter.”

Powell’s involvement in public diplomacy will also be treated in later chapters. But he counsels PD practitioners to pay attention to the unseen people.

“Is it the same Overseas? Sure: Even now when I travel and meet with ministers and other senior officials, I always talk to the people who really know what's going on. They are always amazed: ‘Why are you talking to me?’”

(Photo: Adam and his father Adam Clayton Powell Jr. listen to his mother, Hazel Scott, at the piano.)

Powell’s Substack column is free for reading and subscription at https://adampowell3.substack.com/. His favorite fellow Substack writers include former CBS News colleagues including Marvin Kalb, Peter Herford and Bernie Goldberg.
 
Joe Johnson is a veteran public diplomacy officer who served until 2023 as an instructor in public diplomacy at the Foreign Service Institute, where he pioneered training workshops on strategic planning for public diplomacy. He met Adam Powell through the Public Diplomacy Council, a predecessor of the PDCA.