Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the US Information Agency (review)

Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the US Information Agency is a well-written and meticulously researched book describing the history of the US Information Agency (USIA). The term public diplomacy in the title entered the American lexicon only some forty years ago and since has been used for the most part by practitioners. Until a couple of years ago it was rarely seen in the print media or heard in broadcasts.

What is called public diplomacy today was previously known as international information and cultural exchange programs, of which the Voice of America (VOA) and the Fulbright Scholarship program were the best known: in other words, programs whose purpose has been to understand and influence foreign publics by familiarizing them with America and its policies, institutions, and people.

As the information revolution proceeded and more and more people around the world were able to access information media, it became obvious to many governments that in addition to influencing other governments—traditional diplomacy—influencing foreign publics through public diplomacy was vital to the national interest. For even in autocratic countries the vox populi has become a major factor.

Dizard writes in his preface, "This book is an overview of the information agency's record—its origin, purposes, and day-to-day activities, including its successes and failures. My aim is to identify USIA's contribution to the United States' worldwide ideological impact in the postwar decades. Its role was to portray the United States through the prism of national strategic interests. In a phrase, the agency was a propaganda operation, replicating similar programs of other governments, both friendly and hostile."

Propaganda operation? Well, yes, if one uses the word propaganda in its literal sense and not as it is viewed today. The term's origin is Latin. The Catholic Church has used it to propagate, or spread, its doctrine. It was also used in politics and by public relations firms and was a perfectly benign word until the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. They established a propaganda ministry, and its output was soon known to be full of distortions and lies. Thus the word assumed an odious connotation that even to this day it has not shed.

Dizard identified the year 1940 as the beginning of an American information effort overseas (although there were exchange programs with Latin America in the 1930s and had been a cultural division in the State Department since 1938) and provides two names as instrumental in establishing this effort: Nelson Rockefeller and William Donovan. Between World War I and the thirties, the US government had rejected all ideas to project America abroad. In 1940, a year before the United States entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became persuaded that more efforts were required, and the Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs was established to counter Nazi propaganda in Latin America. Rockefeller became its director. Also in 1940, Roosevelt established the office of the coordinator of information (COI) and put Donovan in charge. In view of Donovan's intelligence background, the COI emphasized these activities. However, it also included a Foreign Information Service (FIS) headed by playwright Robert Sherwood, which became the nucleus of future information operations.

After the United States entered the war, the FIS worked overtime, and within ten weeks the Voice of America started broadcasts in German, English, French, and Italian. Soon it became apparent that the intelligence and information operations had to be separated, and so in the summer of 1942, the COI was split into the Office of Strategic Services with Donovan as its head and the Office of War Information (OWI) with newsman Elmer Davis as its director. Upon the end of World War II, OWI was abolished, and certain of its information operations, including VOA, were transferred to the Department of State, where they remained for eight years. Meanwhile, in 1946, an educational exchange program was...