The Cold War at Home and Abroad

Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy since 1945

Andrew L. Johns, Mitchell B. Lerner, Andrew L. Johns, Mitchell B. Lerner

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813175737
• eBook ISBN: 9780813175744
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

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Fact Givers or Fact Makers?

The Dilemma of Information-Making in the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs during the Truman Administration

Autumn Lass

In 2012 Congress updated the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which prohibited domestic propaganda, by passing House Resolution 5736, or the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. It “authorized the domestic dissemination of information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences.”¹ The act gave the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency responsible for broadcasting American messages to international audiences, access to the American public.² While the BBG’s primary target remains international listeners, the agency can now seek to influence the American public as well. In its own FAQs page, the BBG addressed the question of whether its content is news or propaganda by stating that it presents “accurate and objective news and information” to the American people.³ According to BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil, the rationale behind the modernization of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was to provide taxpayers with access to the messages the agency uses to champion the United States and to combat terrorism abroad.⁴

The revision of the Smith-Mundt Act did not create domestic political turmoil for Congress, the State Department, or the Obama administration. It received very little coverage in the national media and resulted in almost zero public outcry.⁵ Why? The modernized version of the Smith-Mundt Act claims that the government provides the American people with access to accurate information on US foreign policy. It does not make propaganda—it releases news. Americans have become accustomed to this official description of state-sponsored information. This definition has been used for years to mask domestic propaganda. By looking at the history of this process, we can understand how the federal government has used “truth” and “news” as a way to influence the American people.⁶ While the origins of this process date back to the Wilson administration, it was the Truman administration and the Department of State’s Office of Public Affairs (PA) that relied solely on “news” and “truth” as their method of influencing the American people. Unlike early information institutions that used overt methods to pressure the public, the PA’s sole purpose was to create an educated and supportive public through less conspicuous methods.

The PA’s mission was to foster domestic support by teaching Americans about the “true” nature of the United States’ place in the world and the administration’s foreign policies. It provided Americans with the “facts” so that they could come to the “right” conclusions about Truman’s foreign policies. The PA served as both teacher and persuader, and its dual nature made its job complicated. On the one hand, the PA was simply providing the American public with facts about Truman’s foreign policies. On the other hand, those facts were meant to create domestic support for the president’s policies. Not all facts would accomplish this goal—only a select few would do so. Therefore, the PA chose the “right” set of facts to teach Americans the “truth” about US foreign policy in order to win their support.

The PA’s approach to disseminating information marked a turning point in twentieth-century domestic propaganda. Previously, the government had used high-pressure propaganda methods to sell foreign policy to the American public. During the Truman administration, the PA adopted low-pressure techniques or “soft-selling” strategies meant to covertly influence its audience.⁷ “Soft-selling” propaganda was a clear alternative to tactics used by agencies such as the Committee for Public Information during World War I or the Office of Wartime Information during World War II—the sole purpose of which was to influence the American public with overt pressure. Even though these institutions used “truth” and “fact,” their methods of dissemination included blatant pressure techniques such as posters, leaflets, and radio or film broadcasting. For example, the Committee for Public Information aggressively promoted World War I and Wilson’s foreign policies to the American public through the use of Four-Minute Men; these speakers, working at behest of the Wilson administration, traveled throughout the United States publicly espousing Wilson’s foreign policy agenda.⁸ In contrast, the PA used less aggressive tactics—carefully selecting facts to influence its audience through banal presentations or third-party distributions—to subtly influence public opinion. It relied on the distribution of educational materials, publications, and relations with national organizations and the media to spread its truth to the American public. These types of soft-selling techniques were meant to allow the American people to believe that they were coming to their own conclusions.

The Office of Public Affairs frequently differentiated between “high-pressure” and “low-pressure” information techniques. For example, it considered the Voice of America, the overseas broadcasting arm of the State Department, a high-pressure operation because its information and tactics were clearly meant to influence. The PA described its own messages as “low-pressure” because it only provided Americans with information—it did not openly try to pressure or influence them. This difference was key to the PA, which equated high-pressure propaganda to “peddling wares or policies,” while low-pressure propaganda allowed Americans to feel as though they had reached “their own conclusions.”⁹ This self-made distinction illustrates the complex identity of the Office of Public Affairs: it needed to have the effect, but could not have the appearance, of high-pressure propaganda.

This distinction between low- and high-pressure propaganda illustrates the link between public opinion and foreign policymaking. The PA needed to steer the public into supporting Truman’s foreign policies without making them feel as if they had been coerced into that decision. Otherwise, it risked losing public support completely. The PA’s job was to control and manage the relationship between the American public and foreign policy. It was crucial for the Truman administration’s global agenda to have public consensus with regard to its foreign policies. If the public did not support Truman’s global vision, it would be incredibly difficult for the administration to turn its global ambitions into realities.¹⁰

This essay examines how the Department of State’s Office of Public Affairs defined its identity during the Truman administration. Was it just a fact giver, or was it also a fact maker for the administration? Could it be both? I analyze the PA’s identity dilemma in two different situations. First, I examine how the PA grappled internally with its official and unofficial purpose. These internal debates demonstrate that even within the State Department there was confusion over the PA’s domestic information program. Second, I illustrate how the PA’s identity dilemma manifested in its “domestic publicity” tactics. It struggled to maintain its self-made distinction between simple information and propaganda when creating information programs for the public.¹¹ Finally, I argue that this identity dilemma sprang from the complex relationship between public opinion and foreign policy. The PA had to do its part in influencing public opinion because public consensus was so important to early Cold War policies. But it could not exert too much pressure for fear of being linked to the kind of domestic propaganda operations found in the Soviet Union. Dean Acheson aptly described the PA’s information-making dilemma: “If we have a program for giving out information, we are propagandizing. If we don’t give our information promptly and systematically we are cynically denying your right as citizens to know what is going on behind those musty old walls. Servicing the public with facts is apparently a dangerous business. The Department is damned if it does and it’s damned if it doesn’t.”¹² Ultimately, the PA was damned. It struggled to accomplish its mission because it could not effectively manage that relationship between public opinion and foreign policy while attempting to balance its fact-giving and fact-making identities.

A Brief History of the Office of Public Affairs

The PA’s origins can be traced back to 1943 when Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius created the Office of Public Liaison to establish a relationship between the Department of State and the public.¹³ By January 1944 the State Department had created a larger office called the Office of Public Information (OPI), which included the Public Liaison Office. The office had two basic tasks: study public opinion and give the public information about US foreign policy and the Department of State.¹⁴ In its early days the OPI mostly utilized its relations with the press, organizing press meetings and issuing press releases regarding US foreign policy. However, in the fall of 1944 Secretary of State Cordell Hull fully embraced the notion of managing public opinion.¹⁵ Hull began to look for ways to increase the State Department’s interaction with the general public and utilize the American people’s newfound interest in foreign policy.¹⁶ To reflect this new direction, the OPI changed its name to the Office of Public Affairs.¹⁷ This name change reflected the dilemma the PA would face throughout its stint as information maker for the Truman administration.¹⁸ It needed to avoid any connection to propaganda or information-making while making it clear that the State Department was truly interested in connecting with the American public. Therefore, the office adopted the title “public affairs” as a way to free itself from the stigma of information-making while still emphasizing its new mission of public interaction.¹⁹

The Office of Public Affairs was officially “responsible for the formulation and coordination of policy and action concerning domestic informational aspects of foreign relations.”²⁰ The new PA director, Francis Russell, argued that the Department of State needed to engage in a domestic information program to fulfill its duty of providing Americans with the “facts concerning international affairs and to explain current American foreign policies.”²¹ Its job was to create domestic support and manage that support to establish a public consensus for Truman’s foreign policies. To measure its success and create consensus, the Public Studies Division within the PA polled the American public and worked with other major polling centers to gauge public reception. It worked constantly to provide detailed studies and reports about public opinion.²² This information was then used to update and alter the PA’s information programs to ensure that they were addressing specific public concerns. Russell explained that the PA operated as the “middleman” between the Department of State and the American public. He also firmly believed that Americans needed to “entrust to the State Department the discretion” to make the right decisions about what information it provided to the public about US foreign policy.²³ It was in these decisions about what to reveal to the American people and what to keep confidential that the PA crossed the line between being merely a “fact giver” and becoming a “fact maker.”

Almost immediately, the new Office of Public Affairs was put to work creating and managing public opinion about US foreign policies. The Cold War presented the Truman administration with a different challenge in winning public support. Because the Cold War did not originally appear to be a “life-or-death” type of conflict to the American people, the administration had to convince them to support the Cold War without an obvious reason for urgency.²⁴ Creating a consensus at home was pivotal for the Truman administration’s ability to wage the Cold War and to win it, which was considered vital for world security and for the protection of American international interests.²⁵ It was the PA’s responsibility to convince the American public of this. The relationship between the American public and policymakers only intensified as the Cold War continued; therefore, the PA’s task of managing this volatile relationship only grew more important and more complicated.

Internal Debates over Identity

Francis Russell was asked later in life whether he was confident his work with the Office of Public Affairs had not crossed the propaganda line. He answered, “You couldn’t be—different people inevitably would draw the line at different poi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction. Janus, Tocqueville, and the World: The Nexus of Domestic Politics and US Foreign Policy
• 1. Fact Givers or Fact Makers? The Dilemma of Information-Making in the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs during the Truman Administration
• 2. From Hawk to Dawk: Congressman Melvin Laird and the Vietnam War, 1952–1968
• 3. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the Intersection between Domestic Politics and Foreign Relations in the Postwar Era
• 4. Religious Pluralism, Domestic Politics, and the Emerging Jewish-Evangelical Coalition on Israel, 1960–1980
• 5. Subtraction by Addition: The Nixon Administration and the Domestic Politics of Arms Control
• 6. “One Picture May Not Be Worth Ten Thousand Words, but the White House Is Betting It’s Worth Ten Thousand Votes”: Richard Nixon and Diplomacy as Spectacle
• 7. Creating an Ethnic Lobby: Ronald Reagan, Jorge Mas Canosa, and the Birth of the Cuban American National Foundation
• 8. Forging Consensus on Vietnamese Reeducation Camp Detainees: The Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association and US-Vietnam Normalization
• 9. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus and the Plight of the Refuseniks
• 10. Peace through Austerity: The Reagan Defense Buildup in the “Age of Inequality”
• 11. The Domestic Politics of Superpower Rapprochement: Foreign Policy and the 1984 Presidential Election
• Conclusion. Politics, Diplomacy, and the State of the Field
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index