The Psychological Strategy Board.
William Jackson Report.
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.
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.