Strategic International Information Operations
From 1776 to 1945 the U.S. system of government managed to survive in a
world comprising many types of government without setting up its own
propaganda and agitational forces. Propaganda through most of the
twentieth century was pretty clearly limited by the U.S. conception of
propaganda as a weapon auxiliary to war. "Psychological warfare" became
proper, in conventional American terms, only when there was a war to be
won. With the coming of peace in 1945 there was considerable uncertainty
as to whether the United States should have a propaganda establishment
at all.
Even at the time of writing (1954) there is still some doubt as to
whether the United States needs propaganda facilities. The William
Jackson report of July 1953 indicated that the terms _propaganda_ and
_psychological warfare_ were unsatisfactory. Of course they were. They
still are. The world itself is unsatisfactory--in terms of the
traditional, humane, rational U.S. point of view.
The story of U.S. "peacetime" propaganda since the end of World War II
is a very complicated one. Quantity, direction, purpose, and quality
have shifted with the various turns of the international situation. The
subject has become much more difficult to write about since the time the
first edition of this book was written in 1946.
In the first place, governmental secrecy has been very sharply restored.
Even very routine State Department operations for putting across the
U.S. point of view have been shrouded in masses of classified documents.
For reasons not always evident to the outside observer, the assumption
has become prevalent that the normal operations of the United States
Government should be kept confidential, secret, or even top secret.
Often it would seem that the attempt to maintain secrecy in
non-sensitive functions is not worth the security effort at all or,
contrariwise, may even reassure the antagonists of the United States by
not letting them realize how serious and how unfriendly our plans or
policies with respect to them may be. (This is not the time or place to
discuss the problem of secrecy as a protection against domestic
criticism--which secrecy, of course, has often become, to the detriment
of both the government and the citizens of the United States.)
In the second place, not only have information activities become more
hush-hush: they have also become more complicated. It is difficult to do
justice to an intricate moving panorama of activities, some of which may
not be mentioned or described under existing law.
=Demobilization and Remobilization.= The ending of the OWI and the
installation of the International Information Service, mentioned above
on page 184, in turn changed into the information activities of the
Department of State. These were headed from 1945 to 1953 by an Assistant
Secretary of State for Public Affairs. In 1953 a Director of the United
States Information Agency, _not_ under the Department of State but
mysteriously attached to the National Security Council, was inaugurated.
The overseas operating component of USIA remained the United States
Information Service (USIS), transferred from State Department control.
In other words, there were eight years in which the Department of State
had primary responsibility for the conduct of peacetime propaganda of
the United States. This was the first and only time that the United
States Government had in a period of relative peace undertaken a
sustained propaganda effort.
The effort had ups and downs because neither the citizenry nor the
officials knew whether the country was in a condition of peace or at war
and, if at war, at war with _whom_. To some the enemy was Communism, the
ideology; to others, Communism the movement; to still others, the USSR;
to others, the Korean Communists, but not the Chinese Communists; to
others, the Chinese Communists in Korea, but not the Chinese Communists
in China; and so on, _ad infinitum_.
The general history of these eight years was, by and large, a first
phase in which the United States demobilized or destroyed propaganda
facilities which had been built up with great skill and at great cost
during World War II, and a second phase in which those facilities were
partially rebuilt and the skills rediscovered. The low point in this
development was probably the winter of 1947-48.
For a while, the rumor went around Washington that the Secretary of
Defense, Louis Johnson, would not tolerate the utterance of the words
_propaganda_ or _psychological warfare_, and that the Secretary of the
Army, Kenneth C. Royall, refused to have the topic mentioned to him.
That may be the exaggeration characteristic of newspapermen, but it
epitomized the spirit of that time.
While "psychological warfare" almost disappeared from the Department of
Defense and the three services during this low point, the State
Department never quite demobilized. For one thing, the State Department
had inherited the OWI facilities and the Army facilities in the occupied
countries--Austria, Germany, Korea, and Japan. As the heir to
substantial informational facilities the State Department kept a
certain minimum activity going. Facilities such as American Broadcasting
Station in Europe (ABSIE), Radio in the American Sector--of
Berlin--(RIAS), the Information Control Commands in the American Sector
of Germany, Information and Education (I&E) Section of the General
Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in
Japan--these (though sometimes renamed) represented going propaganda
concerns which required a Washington command post.
Meanwhile, it became standing operating procedure in the U.S. diplomatic
establishment to attach some kind of an informational facility to every
diplomatic establishment and to most of the major consulates.
Since there were always advocates of complete propaganda dismantlement,
as well as enthusiasts for the maintenance of information programs, the
issue of remaining in the propaganda business or getting out was always
more or less in doubt. The economy and the demobilization phases of 1947
and 1948 were stimulated by evidence of Soviet bad faith in Europe
during 1949 and brought into sharp focus by the outbreak of the Korean
semi-war in 1950.
It is not possible to do justice to all these different systems in a
single phrase. Even as late as the present, it is sometimes difficult to
determine why the U.S. need have an information program operating in
such entirely friendly countries as Cuba, Haiti, Ireland, or Australia.
There is some point to the argument set forth by ultraconservatives that
what was good enough for Theodore Roosevelt ought to be good enough
today; that, in other words, the United States should be known for what
it is and not by what a few hired promoters can say about it.
As in so many other fields of activities, however, the past is
irrecoverable. The United States can no more return to the pre-atomic
age in propaganda matters than it can in defense matters. The world we
have built is with us and the only alternative to survival seems death.
With respect to the specific field of propaganda, this leads to
occasional curious political alliances. Sometimes the conservatives in
U.S. politics are so conservative they want no propaganda at all; at
other times these same conservatives are so anti-Communist that they
want more propaganda. On occasions the Left within the USA has viewed
U.S. propaganda with alarm and at other times has demanded that there be
more of it and that more of the content be Left.
=Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.= The Assistant
Secretary of State for Public Affairs has been the principal officer of
government responsible for the conduct of U.S. propaganda during
1945-53. His successor, the Director of the United States Information
Agency, faces very closely related problems. Fortunately, one of these
Assistant Secretaries of State has written an excellent book relating
his experiences and the problems of his office in detail. Edward W.
Barrett in his _Truth is Our Weapon_ (New York, 1953), describes his own
experiences with two years in that position. The Assistant Secretary had
the help of an interdepartmental committee which, under various labels
and with various degrees of secrecy, attempted to coordinate the foreign
informational activities of the various departments of the United States
Government to common goals.
Later, as will be described, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public
Affairs was supplemented by a Psychological Strategy Board outside of
the Department of State and still later by a White House assistant in
charge of informational policies at the highest level.
What can be said of this first U.S. peacetime performance in the
propaganda field?
The Assistant Secretaries themselves have been men of varied capacities
and interests. Mr. Barrett was an OWI veteran and a journalist of high
standing. George Allen was a tough-minded career diplomat. Howland
Sargeant was a distinguished government official. William Benton was the
founder of the most successful "canned" music system for restaurants and
the most vigorous promoter which the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ ever had;
later he became a Senator. Men such as these can scarcely be called
tight-lipped fanatics emerging from the hidden recesses of a U.S.
"Politburo." They and their colleagues did a surprisingly good job.
American travelers overseas were often amazed to find that the U.S.
propaganda effort was far more polished and purposeful than an observer
within the United States could expect it to be. The activities of the
Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs consisted of supervising
the domestic origination of broadcasts directed to the Soviet Union, the
satellite countries, neutrals, and friends. The radio system was
generally known as the Voice of America. To this degree he had charge of
a propaganda system operated within the United States by Americans, but
speaking to foreigners, sometimes by transmitters located within the USA
and more often with relay transmitters which picked up programs
originating in the continental United States and rebroadcast overseas.
One echelon removed, there were installations attached to the
diplomatic and consular establishments of the United States which were
usually known as USIS although in some particular cases quasi-private
facilities were sponsored instead. In each foreign country there was at
the embassy or legation level a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) who was the
information specialist for the diplomatic mission and--in theory at
least--in charge of all U.S. propaganda or informational activities,
whichever one preferred to call them, in the country to which he was
accredited.
A complex hierarchy of officials routed, relayed, screened, and
coordinated programs from headquarters to the PAOs in the field and
proposals or requests from the PAOs back to headquarters.
=Other U.S. Facilities.= A complicated element in the State Department's
conduct of propaganda was the fact that at no time did the State
Department enjoy even a monopoly of the _governmental_ mass
communications of the United States abroad. (It goes without saying that
at no time did the State Department achieve or seek control of private
U.S. mass communications such as the international editions of _Time_
and _Newsweek_, the circulation of American books and magazines on a
commercial basis, commercial American-owned publications abroad, or the
like.) At the very least level of competition the State Department had
the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) broadcasting to most of the
countries in which the State Department was active--often broadcasting
in quite a different tone of voice and with very different content. In
many instances, foreigners who understood English preferred to listen to
the lively radio programs transmitted for the edification of U.S.
service personnel stationed abroad, rather than to listen to "canned"
programs made up for the benefit of themselves as a foreign target. (The
author has seen Chinese shopkeepers in Singapore listen very seriously
to a sergeant giving the news of the day at dictation speed from an
armed services transmitter somewhere in the Pacific Ocean area.) In 1948
there was virtually no coordination between the armed services and the
Department of State. As time went on, the two sets of U.S. broadcasts
took a certain amount of note of each other. Coordination was not as
easy as it might seem on paper.
After all, what is one to do? Is it valid to "propagandize" our
innocently cherubic service personnel abroad whom so many domestic
purity leagues and local pressure groups are anxious to defend? After
all, these service people possess fearful weapons. Each has a
Congressman to whom he might write. But if service personnel in a
foreign country are to be given nonpropaganda materials, how can the
same area be given propaganda materials for the benefit of the
indigenous personnel? The propaganda from the United States Government
must not be too much at variance with the "nonpropaganda" of the United
States Government. If the two extremes of communication were too far
apart, the United States Government might look like an ass. That would
be most unhappy.
Over and above the contradictions and difficulties involved in the
operation of at least two governmental systems and many private systems
of U.S. news communication and dissemination systems in foreign areas,
there is the further problem of additional U.S. facilities. Sources such
as _The Washington Post_, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, and other
well-informed Washington journalists often hinted gloomily and darkly
that U.S. cloak-and-dagger operations are still going on; Dorothy
Thompson was often troubled by what she regarded as the feckless
successors of the wartime OSS. Many times Americans resident in local
areas concerned seemed never to have heard of the hush-hush operations
in their own overseas homes, operations which were denounced with purple
prose in Washington; we can say that covert operations, when they have
been really uncovered, as in the case of the _Time_ story about
overzealous U.S. support of a German nationalist resistance group, turn
out to be much more pale than the lurid columnists or inside stories
from Washington would lead one to believe.
More serious have been the duplication, and triplication, and occasional
quadruplication of _official_ informational activities. The overseas
economic and military aid program, known successively as Economic
Cooperation Administration (ECA), Mutual Security Administration (MSA)
and Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) has not only supplemented
the existing leaflet, broadcast, and other informational activities of
the State Department and the armed forces with a third set of
information programs; it has itself had a fourth rival in the Point Four
administration, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which
was both a part of State and not a part of State, depending upon the
particular situation overseas.
=Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.= Over and above the Government's
operations in this field there have been the quasi-private undertakings
of the Committee for a Free Europe and the Committee for a Free Asia.
These have been privately sponsored and privately financed by altruistic
organizations dedicated to broadcasting those things which the State
Department finds it impolitic to put on the air. The degree of
governmental contribution or participation is not known, although it is
often touched upon in the U.S. press; that the organizations are to a
definite extent private is evident in their ability to broadcast local
and controversial news to particular Iron Curtain countries and by the
fund drives which they have waged with little contribution boxes inside
the USA.
The advantage of the RFE and RFA type of operation is that by giving
voice to independent nongovernmental resistance to Communism it has
often been possible to go far beyond the limits which intergovernmental
protocol would impose upon U.S. official broadcasts. That is, the United
States can scarcely describe a deputy minister in the Rumanian
Government as a scoundrel, thief, pervert, or renegade; Rumanian exiles
allowed access to Radio Free Europe stations need have no such
limitations. On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Radio Free
Europe, because of its U.S.-based finance and management might lend an
unnecessary U.S. sponsorship to genuinely independent anti-Communist
undertakings. Here again, as in the case of the reconciliation of the
State Department and Defense broadcasts, it is impossible to draw a
doctrinal rule which would prescribe on one hand that all propaganda
broadcasts should be unofficial or that they should all be official. One
cannot even say that they should all be coordinated.
=The Psychological Strategy Board.= Coordination was nevertheless
attempted--at least for the governmental side. In 1951 President Truman
created the Psychological Strategy Board, bringing the versatile and
judicious Gordon Gray back to Washington for the purpose. The prescribed
role of the Board was to coordinate, plan, and phase all United States
information policies so as to achieve maximum effect from the
governmental effort; not once did the Board dare reach out for a penny's
worth of jurisdiction over private U.S. facilities. The Psychological
Strategy Board was only originally under the chairmanship of the
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, then General Walter Bedell
Smith, with the members of the Board consisting of the Under Secretary
of State, the Under Secretary of Defense, and the Deputy Director of
what was at the time known as ECA, later MSA. The Board had a series of
able staff directors and small staffs detailed from other Government
departments on a permanent basis to serve as a working secretariat. The
precise operations of the Board were cloaked in extraordinary secrecy.
It cannot be said that U.S. propaganda worsened in the two years
following the establishment of the Board; neither can it be said that
U.S. PsyWar operations scored any coups so striking as to deserve a
position in the annals of international affairs.
=William Jackson Report.= After the Republicans came into office in
1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower moved to overhaul the information
establishment. He appointed a committee under the chairmanship of
William Jackson, a former OSS official and investment banker, and under
the secretaryship of Abbott Washburn, who had headed the superlatively
successful advertising department of General Mills, Inc., which had
successfully given away millions of prizes for millions of box tops from
cereals consumed by American youth or flours relished by the American
housewife. Some of the liberal press commentators eyed the committee
gloomily as it went to work. Nevertheless, that portion of its report
which was made public turned out to be a document of remarkable finesse
and sophistication.
The report, released in July 1953, pointed out the Psychological
Strategy Board had erred in trying to plan informational activities in
its own light instead of considering the _informational aspects_ of
every single U.S. Government activity possessing international
significance. The report recommended the replacement of the
Psychological Strategy Board by a more realistic policy-coordinating
organization which would coordinate not merely propaganda policies, but
all policies and, having coordinated all policies, would then resolve
upon maximum psychological exploitation of the policies which had been
decided.
In a sense this is rather like saying that the United States should have
a President, since the powerful chief executive of this government has,
since 1789, been the final arbiter of executive matters, both foreign
and domestic. In another sense it can be interpreted to mean that the
responsibilities of the Presidency are so great that no one man could
perform in his head all the staff work necessary to see through the
opinion-reactions which might develop abroad to U.S. executive decisions
made here at home. If the latter supposition is true, it means that the
United States is saddled with one more intricate governmental process
made necessary by the closeness, dangerousness, and importance of
international affairs in the lives of Americans and their government.
=Operations Coordinating Board.= On 3 September 1953 President
Eisenhower, then at Denver, Colorado, issued an Executive Order
abolishing the Psychological Strategy Board and creating the Operations
Coordinating Board. According to informed press comment at the time, it
was the intention of the White House to carry out the recommendation to
this effect made by the President's Committee on International
Information Activities. The new Board was located immediately under the
National Security Council. C. D. Jackson was a significant member of the
Board, but not as chairman; the chairman was Walter Bedell Smith.
Besides General Smith, then Under Secretary of State, the Board included
Harold E. Stassen, Director of the Foreign Operations Administration;
Allen W. Dulles, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Roger
M. Kyes, Deputy Secretary of Defense. The President also directed that
Theodore C. Streibert, Director of the U.S. Information Service, make
himself available.
In so far as this development represented an attempt to coordinate the
framing of U.S. Government policy in such a manner as to achieve maximum
impact on the rest of the world, it represented a major step forward.
The de-emphasis of "psychological warfare" or "psychological strategy"
as operations which could somehow or other be efficacious _without_ a
context of material support through the real-life behavior of the
Government issuing the propaganda was a healthy sign indeed.
_Psychological warfare_ is at best a cumbersome and pretentious label
for an important modern political and military weapon, the use of mass
communication. The definition of empirical "psychological warfare" given
in Chapter 3, and reproduced as it was originally written in 1946, makes
it perfectly plain that the term acquires specificity which is made
plain by the particular individualities involved undertaking the
operation at any given time: psychological warfare is not an ancient
term which is so well defined by the usage of centuries that modern men
would be ill advised to redefine it or to sweep it aside.[52]
Indeed, the basic weakness of the term _psychological warfare_ is its
pretentiousness within American civilization of the 1900s. No one now
knows whether the United States of the 1960s will turn out to be
dynamic, forward-looking, insistent upon its own view of the world. It
is difficult in the 1950s to see how the next decade or so could bring
forth anything as explosive or violent in the social and political field
as the atomic bomb has been in the field of fission. The United States
certainly does not seem to be on the threshold of a new Islam. For
better or for worse, the U.S. strengths are the strengths of sobriety,
calmness, health. They are the strengths of _living_ as opposed to the
strengths of _revolution_. Revolution may be strong; it may even be
pleasurable to some persons involved, but as Denis W. Brogan has pointed
out in his _The Price of Revolution_ (Boston, 1952), revolution has a
cost factor which must be weighed against the results expected from it.
In the context of mid-twentieth century affairs it is almost pitiable
and endearing to see us Americans of this time, who are so little given
to the drama of fanaticism or the salvation of the world through
cruelty, attempting to dramatize our own modest and reasonable
operations by giving them melodramatic and pretentious labels. If the
Communists torment us long enough they may make us into alert brutes;
this seems doubtful now. It seems probable that we will continue to be
brave without becoming fiendish in combat, strong without becoming
ferocious in peace.
Varying definitions of PsyWar are adopted by official agencies from time
to time. The current (1953) Joint Chiefs of Staff definition runs as
follows:
"Psychological warfare comprises the planned use of propaganda and
related informational measures designed to influence the opinions,
emotions, attitudes, and behavior of enemy or other foreign groups in
such a way as to support the accomplishment of national policies and
aims, or a military mission."
This definition differs from the one given in Chapter 3 in the following
important respects: it stresses the _planned_ character of PsyWar; it
restricts the pertinent measures to those of an _informational_
character; and it makes clear the operational goals. It is not clear why
it is necessary to stress the element of planning of PsyWar as
distinguished from other sorts of war, unless it is a homily to the
PsyWar operator to keep his functions in line with those of other
national activities. The question of restriction to informational
character is more serious; it excludes the interpretation that in
essence, psychological warfare depends upon warfare psychologically
waged. Thus, substantive operations of a noninformational character,
adopted and executed primarily for their psychological effect, could
properly be called PsyWar. Finally, the specification of goals is
chiefly important for the control of the function, and can largely be
taken for granted. Therefore, to preserve an inclusive view of the
function which will comprise the range of variation in official
definitions--including those of one's enemies--the author stands by the
definition stated in 1946.
=Limitations of the American Originators.= There are illusions about
psychological warfare--illusions spread, in many cases, by the
overenthusiastic friends of this kind of operation. Excessive claims
have been made for the efficacy of propaganda. Sometimes psychological
warfare has even been offered as a substitute for war or for diplomacy.
On other occasions Americans have asked that their government do "as
well as" this or that foreign government in the propaganda field,
forgetting that the United States is a republic and a democracy, and
therefore subject to the sharp limitations which republican, democratic
governments possess.[53]
A republic cannot impose a purpose upon mankind.
A democracy cannot enounce a policy and then stick to it for years and
decades.
Americans are not Messiahs. The limitations of American civilization
over and above our specific political institutions are such as to make
it impossible for Americans to lead a fanatical counter-crusade against
Communism, or to guarantee to the human race at large that Americans of
1955 promise that Americans of 1975 will perform this or that specific
action.[54]
_American_ propaganda is always limited precisely because it is
_American_. Even in an age of atomic weapons, to be _American_ means, to
some degree at least, to be _free_. The people of this country, or at
the very least an awful lot of them, _do_ have something to do with
operating the government. A new election and a hostile House of
Representatives can cut off the funds for any project no matter what its
merits may be in the eyes of the top-secret planners. The outside world
knows this even if Washington politicians and bureaucrats sometimes
forget. One can even contradict the title of Archibald MacLeish's famous
poem, _America Was Promises_, and state categorically that in the
propaganda field, America certainly is not promises. The promise of a
tsar or a dictator is usually good for his lifetime, whereas the promise
of the United States is good only within the letter of the law--a
specific treaty, a definite commercial agreement, a very sharp and very
narrow commitment.
There is an American strength in international affairs. This strength
does not lie in a propaganda capacity to promise, to threaten, or to
commit the United States Government to future courses of action. It
lies, rather, in the immense probabilities of American life, in the
virtual certainty that the American people will react in such and such a
fashion to a new aggression, that the American people will (if attacked)
in all probability destroy their attackers, whoever those attackers may
be, and that the American people, despite their occasional shortcomings
in matters of racial tolerance, political freedom, and economic
injustice, will in the long run be solidly ranged behind whatever
policies seem to promise equality, prosperity, and freedom for all
mankind.
The limitations of the United States as a source of propaganda are
sharp. There is no U.S. party line; it is virtually impossible to
imagine that within our civilization as we now know it there could be
one. There might be an official U.S. line, unanimous and binding upon
all federal departments, but the federal government itself is, after
all, only one among the forty-nine separate governments operating within
the continental USA. The state governments, the cities within them, and
the people at large are free to contradict what the federal government
may say at any given point.
American strength cannot be sought in unanimity. U.S. propaganda is
incapable of pulling the Sudeten rabbit out of a Munich hat. Short of an
intimate and extreme danger of war itself, the U.S. Government cannot
threaten a foreign government very successfully; too many U.S. citizens
would immediately shout at one another, at their own government, and to
the foreigners concerned: "Those Washington officials don't really mean
it! We don't want war. We're not going to go through with it." If the
USA moved against Spain, there are friends of Franco in Washington who
would tell him to sit tight; if the USA moved too rapidly against the
Communist world, there are plenty of Americans, both in and out of
government, who would say privately, through the press, or by letters
that the Indian Government or some other should assure Moscow and
Peip'ing that the U.S. would not dare carry through.
Exploitation of U.S. propaganda strength must therefore always be
developed from _the probable or apparent "center" of American opinion at
that moment_. It is impossible to find a U.S. policy which can be made
compulsory and unanimous upon all Americans both public and private. It
is not impossible through an adroit combination of the skills of
leadership, foresight, and a keen awareness of intra-U.S. politics to
devise foreign-policy programs which will command the decisive assent of
the American people.
=War and Unanimity.= The less peaceful the world is, the more effective
a peacetime information program can be. The attack of the Communist
aggressors in Korea, which involved the U.S. armed forces, pushed the
U.S. public into line behind the U.S. Government in a way which no
degree of propaganda manipulation from Washington could have contrived.
In times of danger the American people stick together. In times of
relaxation they scatter about. One should not plan a crusade for the
American people to carry out unless one is sure that someone on the
outside will goad the American people with repeated stings of danger or
trouble.
Once war breaks out, the American people have in the past shown a very
good capacity to unite in winning and finishing the war. There is no
reason to suppose that the situation will be different in the future.
What is perplexing, and for the present insoluble, is this: how can the
American people, short of getting involved in war, become so purposeful,
so decisive, so nearly unanimous, as to take actions which will prevent
a war? The situation in the early 1950s is on the Communist side a major
crusade against what the Reds regarded, or pretended to regard, as
"aggressive" U.S. capitalist power.
In other words, the Communists of the world had a crusade against the
USA. The USA had a crusade against no one. A prominent Washington
official long displayed the sign in his office: I Ain't Mad at Nobody.
In a very real sense this epitomized one of the very real moods of the
American people. How do we defend ourselves against a crusade,
especially if we have no desire to have part in a counter-crusade?
U.S. propagandists sometimes forget that they are not speaking for a
mere nation, but are the representatives of something which is far
bigger than any single nationality--they are the spokesmen, whether they
like it or not, for a way of life which is new in the world, for a kind
of freedom which, though coarse, is real. Characteristic American
strengths have been, are, and will be the strengths of patience,
endurance, versatility, and curiosity. It is foolish to ask Americans to
be strong in bitterness, strong in hatred, strong in a cruel or proud
self-righteousness. We are not Japanese, or Prussians, or Russians; we
are not Irish, or English, or French; we are mostly European and yet
un-European. Our propaganda will be effective only if it springs from
the simplest and strongest aspects of our life at home. Our material
prosperity is beyond doubt; what is not so evident to the outside world
is the frugality, the kindliness, and the humble foresight which drove
so much of that prosperity into being.
=The Propaganda of Friendship.= U.S. limitations are nowhere more
evident in peacetime propaganda than in the oft-repeated phrase of
"winning friends for America." The desire for having a friend is a deep
necessity amid the crowded loneliness of U.S. urban society. The
necessity to "be liked" leads to grotesquely exaggerated inferences as
to what "being liked" may involve. Americans in and out of government
often argue that America should "make friends" on the naïve assumption
that "friends" are useful to nations in time of trouble.
This is, of course, not true.
The Swedes were very good friends of the Norwegians. Nevertheless, the
Swedes saved their Swedish skins by sitting back when the Nazis overran
Norway.
Did Lithuania have an enemy? Did Latvia have an enemy? Did Estonia have
an enemy? These countries were the good friends of all the Western
powers. These countries have disappeared.
The United States was a friend of China, a friendship boastfully and
sentimentally proclaimed for more than a hundred years, from the days of
Daniel Webster to the finale of George C. Marshall. What use was it to
the Chinese to have the United States as a friend? When they fell upon
trouble, a U.S. Secretary of State denounced their government as corrupt
and told the Chinese how good the United States was.
Friendship does not usually lead to war or peace. War and peace depend
upon survival. Any veteran will remember men whom he disliked intensely
in his own wartime outfits: he never day-dreamed of turning them over to
the enemy just because he was personally antagonistic to them. _A common
danger from something_--more complicatedly, _a common interest in
something_--is a far more potent assurance of future strength and
strategic action than is friendship.
Friendship operates between individuals, not between the overgrown
corporate fictions which are called nations.
If you were a West German, and if you were absolutely positive that all
Americans were lovely people, you would be wise to join the Soviet side.
That way, if the Russians win, you will have appeased the enigmatic and
implacable Muscovites. On the other hand, if the Americans win and you
are sure they are lovely people as well as good friends of yours, they
will not _really_ mind your having joined the other side as a matter of
temporary factual necessity. If a man is your best friend he may jump
into the river to rescue you, should you fall in; unfortunately, he
might prefer to telephone a rescue squad. But if he is handcuffed to
you, you are reasonably sure that if you fall in he will be with you.
Call it propaganda, call it information, call it international
communication--under any name the major point remains: _Americans can
find trustworthy future allies through commitment to common interest or
common danger_. Friendship is pleasant, but not of the essence. In some
cases it might be desirable for leaders or key groups in important
foreign areas to realize that the United States could be a _worse enemy_
than the Soviet Union, rather than to realize that the U.S. is a friend.
If the French were sure of this--that is, that a Soviet-occupied France
would get sixty-five hydrogen bombs dropped on it while a U.S.-occupied
France would get only three--they might prefer the Americans whether
they liked them or not.
Is this kind of communication consistent with American ideals? Perhaps
not. Yet _honesty_ has always been one of the American ideals and
perhaps honesty may take us in the future to a stronger and a wiser
position than friendliness has taken us in the past.