[49] Problematical in all such attempts of working officers to define "victory" is the serious intellectual issue of avoiding means which by themselves defeat the ends which are sought. If the means are "dangerous" or "immoral" by the standards of the society which applies them, their value becomes low indeed. For the covert side of U.S. operations, see the breezy and popular volumes on OSS: Lt. Col. Corey Ford and Major Alastair MacBain, Cloak and Dagger: The Secret Story of OSS (New York, 1946); Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden, Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage (New York, 1946); and the most vividly concrete narration of the group, Elizabeth P. MacDonald, Undercover Girl (New York, 1947). For an astonishing work which seems to violate security on every page, see Commander Roy Olin Stratton, SACO—The Rice Paddy Navy (Pleasantville, N. Y., 1950); this is the description of a Navy group in China which the author shows to be more covert than OSS itself. A dry, German view of Anglo-American espionage in Holland is given in that superb, true-life adventure story, H. J. Giskes, London Calling North Pole (London and New York, 1953).
[50] See the works of Freda Utley, Herbert Feis, the Linebarger-Djang-Burks political science text (New York, 1954), and others, not to mention the contributions by Mao, Liu Shao-ch'i, and other Communist leaders.
[51] The author himself pleads guilty to having criticized the French unduly without accepting a reasonable share of U.S. responsibility for the situation in Indochina (Paul M. A. Linebarger, "Indochina: The Bleeding War," Combat Forces Journal, March 1951), and was deservedly rebuked from some French readers for his denigration of French imperialism. The author cannot endorse as wise, shrewd, or kind the French political decisions in Indochina, hut he can say that the Americans who made (or failed to make) basic policy concerning that area have been as irresponsible and foolish as the French. He trusts that, by the time this note reaches print, a more effectual Franco-American understanding will have replaced the previous difficulties.
[52] Psychological warfare is, of course, neither very psychological nor is it necessarily warfare. Indeed, within the context of a rigidly purist and scholastic definition, psychological warfare is not psychological, in that most of its operations are very definitely not a part of present-day scientific psychology. Neither is it warfare because it can be operated before war, during war, after war, or contemporaneously with and apart from war. As pointed out above, war involves the inescapable content of public lawful violence. It is hard to ascribe violence to a short-wave broadcast or to a leaflet. In Korea in 1951 the author heard that a Chinese soldier was found dead—mashed by a leaflet bomb which had failed to explode at the proper altitude. If this story is true, that particular soldier was one of the few genuine war victims of military or strategic propaganda both so pretentiously called "psychological warfare" by Americans of the mid-twentieth century.
Anthony Leviero, who summarized American PsyWar in The New York Times in a series of articles between 9 December and 14 December 1951, is both an experienced general staff officer and a first-class newspaper man. His comment in 1953 on the new Operations Coordinating Board was encouraging or ominous. He stated in his Times dispatch of 4 September 1953 that the William Jackson committee had found that "psychological warfare did not exist as such." If this meant that the new OCB was to sweep aside the limitations of top-secret pedantic definitions and move toward a refreshingly concrete manipulation of the world scene, the news was encouraging indeed. If the new Board was, however, to be dedicated to the manufacture of new, complicated and secret definitions of its own, the news was bad. Given the time-lag on the declassification of Government materials, it may be twenty-five years, or 1978, before the precise definitions of 1953 are available to the public. The tendency of the Board to succeed or to fail will be evident by the time this material is in print; given the personalities involved, the prognosis appeared optimistic.
[53] This kind of issue has not been neglected in our public discussions or our schools. Two sides of one famous case are given in Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander (New York, 1951) and the bitterly anti-Lattimore book by John T. Flynn, The Lattimore Story (New York, 1953). A serious intelligent attempt to answer some of the problems posed by PsyWar and the resulting loyalty issues within a democracy are the works of Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History (Washington, 1950), and The Battle Against Disloyalty (New York, 1951). A formidable presentation of what the Communists are doing is offered in Ralph de Toledano, Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats (New York and Boston, 1952) and in Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy (New York, 1952). The kind of round-table often intellectually conceived and executed within American schools is well portrayed in the special issue of Columbia Journal of International Affairs (New York, spring, 1951), in which the entire issue is given to a synthesis of international problems in the propaganda field under the heading "Propaganda and World Politics." Stefan Possony's magistral A Century of Conflict (Chicago, 1953) provides an excellent general framework.
[54] Nothing in previous U.S. experience prepared Americans for the invasion of the individual personality which has long been accomplished by the Communists but which was first publicized in adequate fashion after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950. The pioneer book in this field, and still the best, is Edward Hunter's Brain-Washing in Red China (New York, 1951). This author has known Mr. Hunter for twenty-odd years and can vouch for him as a man with a sober respect for fact, though he does have a vivid taste in adjectives; he has seen not only Mr. Hunter but has gone over some of the raw material which Hunter used and can testify to the reality and sympathy with which Hunter portrays this rather gruesome process. On a different scale, Wilbur Schramm has given a description of what happens when The Reds Take a City (New Brunswick, 1951), in a book of that name written jointly with John W. Riley.
[55] A sharp contrast between the old politics and the new is shown by the unfortunate book prepared in the Department of State and now hastily, even guiltily, allowed to go out of print by the United States Government Printing Office because it showed that some Americans were guilty or naïve enough to try to love and trust the Soviet state within the same system as our own. One does not know whether to laugh or to weep at the spectacle of men lamenting the fact that they were once innocent and hopeful. The book, prepared by the late Harley Notter and others, is Department of State Publication 3580, General Policy Series 15, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation (Washington, 1949). That not all was innocence, even when things so seemed, is amply attested by Freda Utley's controversial but brilliant summary, The China Story (Chicago, 1951).
[56] The function of decision-making has been brilliantly though solemnly explored in Richard C. Snyder, H. W. Bruck and Burton Sapin, Decision-making as an Approach to the Study of International Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1954.)
[57] For a contrary point of view, see Tensions That Lead to War, edited by Hadley Cantril (Princeton, 1950).