Reviewed by David Krugler

Reviewed by David Krugler

University of Wisconsin, Platteville

Wilson P. Dizard Jr., Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency.Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004. 255 pp. $49.95.

Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars have examined the role of propaganda and public diplomacy in the Cold War. In Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), historian Walter L. Hixson explains how the United States was able to make a favorable impression on citizens in the Soviet bloc by deemphasizing psychological warfare methods in favor of news, cultural exhibitions, and music. Propaganda had domestic influences too. In The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945–1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), Shawn J. Parry-Giles explains how Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower used peacetime propaganda programs to shape political discourse at home. Other subjects that have received considerable attention include the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring art festivals, Europeans' ambivalent acceptance of American culture, and the U.S. government's eagerness to use private organizations such as the Advertising Council to mold public opinion beyond U.S. borders. Collectively, these studies show that a challenge issued by Hixson has not gone unmet: "Any comprehensive explanation for the end of the East-West struggle will require serious analysis of the role played by Western cultural infiltration" (p. xv).

Given the surge of interest in the role of propaganda and public diplomacy in U.S. foreign policy after 1945, it is surprising that no one has yet written a complete history of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the executive agency primarily responsible for the U.S. government's public diplomacy (also called cultural diplomacy) and propaganda during and after the Cold War. Thankfully, Wilson P. Dizard Jr. has filled this lacuna. Dizard is eminently qualified to write a history of USIA. His career as a public diplomat spans several decades. In 1951, he arrived in Istanbul to work for the predecessor to USIA, the State Department's U.S. Information Service. In subsequent postings, whether mingling with Pakistani dignitaries, driving a jeep loaded with films and books down a rough Burmese road, or working in USIA's Washington headquarters, Dizard helped tell America's story to the world. Dizard has also written several earlier books about public diplomacy. His first book, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service, appeared in 1961, just eight years after Dwight Eisenhower created the USIA. We might consider The Strategy of Truth a prequel in which a young but seasoned public diplomat set out to describe the fledgling agency's shift from shrill propaganda to the content, tone, and programs that Walter Hixson later found to be effective. Dizard, like Dean Acheson, was present at the creation, and he has drawn on a half-century of experience to produce an important work. In addition to reviewing the antecedents of USIA, Dizard assesses the agency's "contribution to the United States' worldwide ideological impact" (p. xiv) and the agency's sometimes difficult collaboration with American commercial media, cultural groups, and exporters. Dizard's definitive history closes with a chapter offering thoughts about the future of public diplomacy. Counseling against "crash-project solutions" (p. 226), Dizard recommends that the U.S. government adapt public diplomacy to the new information age, particularly the Internet, to explain its foreign policy and support its commitment to the unimpeded flow of information and culture.

USIA had a troubled beginning, to say the least. In early 1953 the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who was anxious to sever information and cultural programs from the State Department, stood aside as Senator Joseph McCarthy staged televised hearings in which former and current employees of Voice of America (VOA) dished out sensational if bewildering stories. The accusers claimed, among other things, that the head of religious programming was an atheist and that someone on the French desk was recruiting members for a "free-love" commune. McCarthy spun these false allegations into "evidence" of Communist subversion and dispatched Roy Cohn, the counsel for the permanent subcommittee on investigations, and his assistant, David Schine, to Europe to scour USIA library shelves and remove any works by Communists. Dulles got his wish, as the VOA and other programs were removed from the State Department. McCarthy's battering also resulted in resignations, firings, and plummeting morale, and not even a pep talk from President Eisenhower himself could heal the bruises.

Dizard, a survivor of the "black days of spring 1953" (p. 56), treats this episode within the broader context of American ambivalence toward government-sponsored international information and cultural programs. Despite the widening East-West schism and precedents such as the Office of War Information, advocates of public diplomacy struggled to gain support from skeptical legislators and policymakers. Had it not been for the proposed Marshall Plan, Congress might well have canceled the public diplomacy programs in 1947, but a growing number of legislators recognized the need to persuade Europeans of the purposes and virtues of the Marshall Plan. Three years later, Truman declared the Campaign of Truth, and VOA, in particular, began churning out stridently anti-Soviet programming. Even so, the relative novelty and unproven results of the broadcasts gave McCarthy a convenient target to aim at as he sought to enhance his reputation as America's leading anti-Communist. If 1953 was a low point, however, it was also a turning point. Soon thereafter, USIA was rebounding while McCarthy was facing censure.

After discussing the USIA's antecedents, Dizard offers a crisply written account of the USIA's institutional development, the personalities and accomplishments of important officials, and relations with similar government programs and commercial media. One of the many contributions of this narrative history is Dizard's explanation of the extensive work of the Defense Department in the information and cultural field, a topic that has received little attention. The Armed Forces Network (AFN), for example, had foreign listeners in addition to its intended audience of U.S. military personnel, thus making the AFN a rival of VOA. Another strength of Inventing Public Diplomacy is its running account of USIA's output, activities, and challenges, from its founding to its dissolution in 1999. (That year, in an act that surely would have displeased Dulles, Congress moved all USIA programs except for the VOA back into the State Department.) During the 1960s, as decolonization swept across Africa, USIA more than doubled the number of posts it had on the continent. For coverage of the Apollo XI mission to the moon, USIA secured live satellite transmissions for foreign television stations. VOA even had an exciting part in the failure of the August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow that preceded the demise of the Soviet Union. To learn what was happening, millions of Soviet citizens tuned into VOA—something that would have been harder to do just a few years earlier, when the Soviet government was still relentlessly jamming the broadcasts. Although triumphs such as the moon landing offered great propaganda potential, USIA did not shirk from covering topics that were less flattering to the United States. The Watergate scandal, for example, received balanced coverage. The Wall Street Journal at the time even featured a headline declaring "At Voice of America, There's No Cover-up on Watergate News" (p. 109). The same could not be said, however, about operations in Vietnam. The USIA post there essentially "became a surrogate propaganda ministry for the [South] Vietnamese government" (pp. 97–98).

Dizard also describes the USIA's perennial failure to find full acceptance and support within the executive branch and on Capitol Hill. Despite the success of U.S. exhibits in the Soviet Union—the first of these, the American National Exhibition held in 1959, drew 2.7 million visitors—senior officials in the Eisenhower administration still favored psychological and secret operations, and they excluded USIA officials from policymaking. The CIA, in particular, enjoyed almost total freedom to carry out (or secretly back) its own psychological operations, propaganda, and public diplomacy, and not just during Eisenhower's presidency. These "gray" operations, which "at times paralleled USIA's public programs" (p. 140), essentially created a Doppelgänger of the USIA. For decades, the CIA carefully concealed the ties between itself and its media surrogates, notably Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, and freely spent sums much larger than those allotted to the USIA's media operations. A notable exception to USIA's outsider status came during the relatively short but productive directorship of the venerable newsman Edward R. Murrow in the early 1960s. Despite being hospitalized with pneumonia in October 1962, Murrow ensured that USIA was represented on the Executive Committee (the core deliberative body headed by President John Kennedy) during the Cuban missile crisis. Through radio, print media, and television (including the live transmission, via satellite, of Kennedy's speech on 22 October announcing discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba), USIA globally disseminated credible evidence of the Soviet deployments. By laying out facts and by building international support for the U.S. position, USIA proved its ability to provide operational support, especially during a crisis. Observes Dizard, "This had never happened before at such a direct level nor, regrettably, since" (p. 89).

Dizard could have given this ostracism additional scrutiny. The systematic exclusion of USIA from policymaking and the priority given to the CIA's secretly sponsored programs suggest that the popularity of USIA libraries and of Willis Conover's jazz program on VOA meant little to the national security elite in administrations from Truman to Ronald Reagan, even though Cold War scholars are finding more and more evidence of USIA's effectiveness. Did the CIA, for example, view USIA as a mere decoy for its covert endeavors? It is telling that soon after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, the Defense Department set up the Office of Strategic Influence and authorized it to carry out global disinformation projects. Widespread criticism quickly led to the office's demise, but the fact that the Defense Department so eagerly embraced this sort of approach is significant. As Dizard shows throughout his excellent book, the United States best serves itself when it sponsors international cultural operations and news programs that earn the trust of listeners and viewers. Why, then, do psychological warfare and covert propaganda still hold such allure for national security planners?