CHAPTER 15
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.
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.