Remembering Bob Beecham, by Bruce Gregory
Charles Robert “Bob” Beecham was a leader in the generation of accomplished professionals who joined the US Information Agency when it was founded in 1953. He died on April 17, 2025, at the age of 102. He is survived by his wife Jane Taylor Beecham who served with distinction for many years in USIA’s public liaison office. His Washington Post obituary is here.
Bob’s Foreign Service career began with a six-year assignment in Tokyo, followed by an academic year at Stanford University, after which he was posted for six years in Thailand during the Vietnam War. In Washington, he served as an editor at the Voice of America and director of USIA’s Press and Publications Service from 1974 until his retirement in 1979.
Bob stands out for his skills as a field officer, his managerial abilities, and his deep commitment to building understanding and support in the United States for the practice of public diplomacy.
We crossed paths occasionally as allies in efforts to maintain USIA’s independence during reorganization battles in the 1970s. But I came to know him best after his retirement when for five years he published the Chronicle of International Communication, a newsletter intended, in his words, to cultivate constituencies and coalitions in support of “public diplomacy, information strategy, cross-cultural education, and training.”
The Chronicle was published by International Communications Projects, Inc., a nonprofit that Bob created, and in cooperation with Temple University’s School of Communication & Theater.
In 1983, Bob and M. William “Bill” Haratunian, another talented USIA Foreign Service officer, launched the prototype of a journal, Portfolio of International Communications. Its design was the work of Ray Komai, USIA’s globally acclaimed graphics and exhibits designer. The journal was planned as a bimonthly compendium of opinions and analytical assessments of “international information and communication questions” for readers in the US and worldwide.
Although the journal did not prosper, its goals were laudable. High quality articles and book reviews by credible experts in academic, corporate, media, government, and public policy domains. Timely content on a broad cross section of topics: effective public diplomacy tools and methods, technology and telecommunication trends, and fostering international exchanges, academic study, and research.
In 2017 Bob published a novel, Dire Road to the Untold: A Soldier of Fortune Meets His Match, available here. Readers will find an underlying public diplomacy narrative that portrays his views on USIA’s origins story, the State Department as a “world unto itself,” VOA’s struggles with policymakers, tensions in field / headquarters dynamics and between generalists and specialists, and much more.
Bob looked at diplomacy in whole-of-government and whole-of-society terms. His work demonstrated the value of mid-career professional education. He was an outstanding practitioner and a manager who displayed loyalty down as well as loyalty up. He was an exemplar of a generation that collectively changed the practice of American diplomacy.
Bruce Gregory is an affiliate scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. He is the author of American Diplomacy’s Public Dimension: Practitioners as Change Agents in Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).