“The One Word the Kremlin Fears”: C. D. Jackson, Cold War “Liberation,” and American Political-Economic Adventurism

Abstract

This essay considers how C. D. Jackson, an associate of Eisenhower and political warfare specialist, worked in the 1950s to give compelling public form to a grand strategy of “liberation” in the Cold War. Jackson worked to ally liberation with U.S. political-economic adventures abroad rather than martial exploits. In so doing, he sought not only to disassociate liberation from catastrophic war with the Soviets, but also to win the Cold War by working to liberalize the world. Jackson’s approach thus sought to reconcile structural and contingent perspectives on Cold War strategy.

In the summer of 1963, John Steele, Washington bureau chief for Henry Luce’s Time magazine, received a distressed letter from Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson, the publisher of Luce’s Life magazine. Jackson vented that he was worried that the Kennedy administration had given up on “liberation” and that they were ready to “sell the Eastern European satellite countries down the river.”¹ Steele looked into the matter and wrote back, sounding more like an administration spokesperson than a journalistic sleuth: “The Kennedy Administration in no sense of the word has consciously written off Eastern Europe,” he insisted. “Its policy, to use an abused phrase, is ‘eventual, peaceful liberation.’” Citing private interviews he had with Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, George Ball, and others in the Kennedy administration, Steele swore that liberation “does represent what the current Administration—for better or for worse—is up to.” Rostow, who was working on economic development programs for Kennedy, had asked Steele to relay to Jackson, “the SOBs who fought C. D. and I (in the 1950s) are at their weakest point ever.” Steele reminded Jackson of what Kennedy himself had said in West Berlin: “The right of free choice is no special privilege claimed by the Germans alone. It is an elemental requirement of human justice. So this is our goal, and it is a goal which may be attainable most readily in the context of the reconstitution of the larger Europe on both sides of the harsh line which now divides it.” The administration, Steele concluded, “DOES . . . believe in the possibility of such change.”² Liberation was its policy.

As Valur Ingimundarson has argued, in early Cold War America, liberation represented one of “two conflicting impulses” in strategic circles—an “aggressive” and “offensive” policy over and against the “defensive” containment approach.³ To be sure, liberation had forceful resonances, conjoining religious and secular narratives into a single, if not unequivocal, strategic concept. Its connotations were both biblical—“to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed”⁴—and liberal—representing freedom from moral, intellectual, and political dominance. Moreover, in the early years of the Cold War the experience was still recent of thousands upon thousands of American, British, and other Allied troops dying in World War II in the name of liberation. It is not surprising, then, that liberation represented a hotly contested symbolic front in the global Cold War, not only as a word that America wanted to own, but as a central term in anticolonial struggles and in communist-led political activities.⁵ To be sure, liberation was a “keyword” in the global Cold War.⁶

Yet liberation’s connotations in Cold War America were not unambiguously positive. In 1957, George F. Kennan, a principal architect of the containment policy during the Truman years, warned a friend abroad,

The talk in this country of “liberation,” as an alternative to the approach I have just indicated, has seemed to me to be simply childish. All this talk has envisaged, so far as I have been able to see, action either by political agitation or by war. Political agitation, I was convinced, could only make more difficult, rather than facilitate, the withdrawal of Soviet power from the area in question. As to war, I have decisively rejected at every stage the suggestion that the conditions of Europe could be in any way bettered by a third holocaust of this nature, following the two that have already occurred within the present century. . . . It seems to me that the American liberationists . . . actually hope for a third world war, but are unwilling to say so.⁷

Liberation was thus a fighting word, and for Kennan a dangerous word. All in all, therefore, it was a word in crisis. As the intensity of the back-and-forth between Jackson and Steele and the vigor of Kennan’s protest suggested, liberation was at the heart of a predicament in U.S. policy circles: could America pursue liberation without great peril and without violating its professed commitment to world peace and stability? Yet, could America, caught in a conflict with the Soviets having a sharp ideological edge, give up the idea of liberation without giving up its ideological soul? Indeed, liberation threatened to expose the strong tensions, even contradictions, of America’s Cold War policies. Clearly, the notion of “eventual, peaceful liberation”—the approach Steele cited—represented one potentially effective answer to these questions, and could pacify, if not eliminate, America’s foreign policy tensions. But “eventual, peaceful liberation” also threatened to so pacify liberation as to make it politically meaningless, a mere token acknowledgment of a national creed. For how could a notion so qualified as “eventual, peaceful liberation” still preserve the powerful biblical, liberal, and martial connotations of the core idea? The content of “liberation,” if it was to be politically meaningful, required a more compelling form.

In this essay I consider how one offensive-minded thinker in the Cold War, C. D. Jackson, worked in the 1950s to give compelling public form to liberation. Called at one time by the Communists “chief of the cold war,” Jackson worked to ally liberation with U.S. political-economic adventures abroad rather than with martial exploits.⁸ In so doing, I argue, he sought not only to disassociate liberation from grave dangers, such as a catastrophic war with the Soviets, but also to win the Cold War by working to liberalize the world. This intervention was important because it promised (even if it would not ultimately so deliver) a means of preserving America’s ideological soul vis-à-vis liberation while addressing the objections of more defensively minded thinkers who worried that aggressive American actions risked fostering further world instability, even World War III. Jackson addressed these concerns by rhetorically reconciling “structural” and “contingent” perspectives on Cold War strategy, the former asserting the primacy of structures of power in world affairs and the latter arguing for the primacy of opportune political action. Culminating in his advocacy of a World Economic Plan, Jackson envisioned forms of opportune American action that could remake the structures of world power to “expand the area of freedom,” thus overcoming the “conflicting impulses” of American Cold War policy.

To explore Jackson’s rhetorical reconstruction of liberation as political-economic adventure, I proceed in four sections. First, I examine the backdrop to the conflicting impulses of U.S. policy by looking at the outlines of a broad debate over grand strategy in the Truman years, represented by the opposing ideas of Kennan and James Burnham. I argue that the contrasting approaches of Kennan and Burnham disclose not only different Cold War strategies but, more fundamentally, different geopolitical visions, the former principally structural and the latter strongly contingent. In the second section of the essay, I turn to the strategic discourse of the Eisenhower administration, arguing that its emphasis on America’s “peaceful” intentions together with its stress on economic vitality was integral to Jackson’s envisioning liberation as political-economic adventure. Then, in the third section of this essay, I show how Jackson adapted the thought of Henry Luce and Walt Rostow to form a vision of liberation as political-economic adventure, and in the fourth section I consider the culmination of this policy outlook in a proposal for a World Economic Plan. Finally, in the conclusion to the essay, I examine the implications Jackson’s vision of liberation as political-economic adventure might have had for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.

Containment or Liberation?

“Containment”—a term coined by Kennan representing a strategy that sought to strengthen nations seemingly threatened by Soviet aggression, reduce Soviet power, and eventually bring the Soviets into more “normal” relations with the rest of the world—was at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy under the Truman administration.⁹ Under its auspices programs like U.S. aid to Turkey and Greece (under the Truman Doctrine) and the European Recovery Program (or Marshall Plan) were pursued, and whatever successes they were credited with were also credited to the policy of containment.¹⁰ Nevertheless, in Truman’s second term—especially in the wake of the “loss” of China to the communists and the shock of the advent of Soviet atomic power—containment was widely interpreted by opponents of the administration as a “defensive,” “static,” “passive,” even “defeatist” approach. A particularly eloquent example of this accusation came in the pages of James Burnham’s 1952 Containment or Liberation?, which appeared on book shelves in the United States as the 1952 presidential campaign came to a close.

Burnham, a former Trotskyite turned conservative intellectual (and lecturer at the Naval War College, Air War College, and National War College during Truman’s second term), lambasted containment as the product of America’s cosmopolitan liberal elite. He argued that the policy, especially as articulated by Kennan, was not only weak-kneed, “purely defensive,” and “a policy of indefinite stalemate,” but poisoned by “metaphysics” and based upon an outdated conception of state sovereignty.¹¹ The accusation of metaphysics was aimed at the suggestion in Kennan’s 1947 “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” and 1951 American Diplomacy (as interpreted by Burnham) that in the long haul, if America and its allies could but restrain Soviet expansion, the “free world” would ultimately prevail.¹² This mentality, Burnham complained, meant that the United States could operate as if there were “no emergency,” “no hurry,” and “no reason to fear general war in the discernable future.”¹³ Kennan’s approach, Burnham argued, rested on a fundamental misstep—that Soviet power was merely another form of imperial statism. To the contrary, Burnham insisted that containing Soviet power was impossible: “In the most profound sense there is no Soviet border,” he wrote.¹⁴ Communism was an ideology exerting religious-like fervor in its adherents.¹⁵ Burnham thus argued that the old “balance of powers” idea based on the primacy of nation states in geopolitics, which he rightly discerned was a presupposition of Kennan’s containment, was inapplicable to the new Communist phenomenon. Communism, more than the Soviet state, was the problem. What was needed was therefore the antithesis of containment, “the policy of liberation,” led by an aggressive “political warfare” and very likely including conventional warfare, to “achieve the opponent’s overthrow—the liquidation of the Soviet regime.”¹⁶ Only through timely and urgent American action, he argued, could both the ideology and apparatus of world communism be defeated.¹⁷

To be sure, had Burnham access to the papers of Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff (PPS) in the Truman years, he would have seen that Kennan did not see containment as irreconcilable with at least one understanding of liberation. NSC 58/1 (September 1949), a PPS draft policy concerning the Eastern European satellites widely circulated in the administration, argued that the United States could foster “a heretical drifting-away process on the part of the satellite states” without going to war.¹⁸ In this vein, President Truman publicly told an audience three years later in West Virginia,

Remember that in 1941 it was President Roosevelt who refused to recognize the brutal Soviet seizure of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. We have never accepted that aggressive act. Remember, too, that on Navy Day in 1945, and at the opening of Congress in 1946, and many, many times since, I have stated that America will always work for the return of freedom and independence to the people who have been deprived of them by force or by subversion.¹⁹

Yet, the vision of liberation in NSC 58/1 was plainly distinct from Burnham’s: whereas it urged a variety of “measures short of war”—overt and covert, informational, diplomatic, and economic—all aimed at undermining the “anatomy of Soviet power” in the satellite states, it advocated anti-Kremlin, but not specifically anti-Communist, policies.²⁰ NSC 58/1 envisioned the United States fostering the replication of Titoism in the other satellite states (the year before, Tito’s Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet-led Cominform, thus solidifying its independence from the Soviet regime while remaining Communist), but not the immanent and absolute winning of the Eastern European states for the “free world.” In essence NSC 58/1 and its successor NSC 58/2 (the latter final version approved by Truman in December 1949)—like the more general Cold War policy platform of NSC 20/4 (November 1948) and its more verbose draft policy, NSC 20/1 (August 1948)—advocated a policy of fragmentation in Eastern Europe more than one of liberation. Its tactics were principally destructive, subversive, and disruptive, and its perspective long term.²¹ They were not aimed, as a matter of near-term policy, at anything approximating total victory over the USSR, nor even the political-economic alliance of Eastern Europe with the “free world,” but rather at reducing Soviet state power—and eventually bringing the USSR into more or less “normal” relations with the rest of the world—by fragmenting the satellites from the Soviet empire. Indeed, relative to Burnham’s “policy of liberation,” the policy of containment could appear “a policy of indefinite stalemate.” As Kennan said before the Armed Services Committee in 1948:

Of course, we should also hope that some day the countries they have already subjugated—the satellite countries of eastern and central Europe—might also be liberated and restored to normal self-government. But that is rather a long-term objective. Today we must recognize that we tacitly acquiesced, as part of the whole conclusion of the war, in the Red Army advance into those countries and in the establishment of Soviet political control in the wake of the Red Army.²²

Nevertheless, as important as the disjunction between “containment or liberation” was, it belied divergent conceptions of geopolitics that were more fundamental than the opposition between these terms suggested—more fundamental differences that would become important in C. D. Jackson’s rhetorical reconstruction of liberation in the 1950s. What divided Kennan from Burnham was not so much containment versus liberation, but rather a structural versus a contingent perspective on geopolitical power, and thus on Cold War strategy. Kennan’s policy positions were aimed at restoring to the world a balance of powers. He saw world stability as resting on a system of nation-states and drew attention to the role of structures of state power in world events. Kennan’s main concern in the Cold War was the disproportionate power of the Soviet state and its potential appetite for more power in light of the eviscerated economies of Europe and Asia, rather than the insidiousness of communist ideology per se.²³ Therefore, in the build-up to the European Recovery Program, Kennan stressed, “The most important and urgent element in foreign policy planning is the question of restoration of hope and confidence in Western Europe and the early rehabilitation of the economies of that area.”²⁴ A strong Europe, he held, would deter Soviet aggression in the area. Within the Soviet sphere itself, NSC 20/1, under Kennan’s guidance, stressed actions aimed at putting “the greatest possible strain on the structure of relationships” between Russia and the satellites, even as it urged an approach that, if possible, preserved “the prestige of the Soviet state.”²⁵ NSC 20/1 went so far, in its only explicit mention of “liberation,” to say the United States might pursue “a liberation of the satellite countries in ways which do not create any unanswerable challenge to Soviet prestige.”²⁶ To undermine the prestige of the Soviet state, the document suggested, would be to undermine the basis upon which international peace and stability might be achieved, namely the legitimacy of the nation state.²⁷

Burnham, on the other hand, held that Soviet communism represented the triumph of the “political” in world politics, by which he meant political will, judgment, organization, and above all, action. Lambasting the idea that “communism is the product of adverse economic conditions”—thinking which, he said, gave rise to the Marshall Plan, Point Four, and other foreign aid programs costing “tens of billions of American dollars”—Burnham retorted: “It [communism] is a power, that is, a political, apparatus. Communism does not mysteriously ‘arise’ in this or that nation, class or individual. It is brought by the agents and influence of this dynamic enterprise.”²⁸ Political conditions, not economic ones, determine the vulnerability of a people to communism. “[T]he major condition for communist success is a wishy-washy government,” rather than “underdevelopment.”²⁹ Generalizing from the apparent success of the Soviet “political” way, Burnham—who had written a decade earlier a book extolling a Machiavellian ruling class as “defenders of freedom”—concluded: “Our age is the age of the primacy of politics. Without correct policy, money and arms are nothing. Equipped with an adequate policy, with a political goal and the political will to pursue it, men will find—or take—the money and arms.”³⁰ A policy of liberation, because it required willpower, sacrifice, savvy, and skill, was for Burnham the only kind of Cold War policy that would take seriously “the primacy of politics.”

Burnham’s Containment or Liberation? left open the door to full-scale war with the Soviets, but not widely so. Its focus was squarely on “political warfare,” claiming, “If the political offensive is long delayed, it will be too late for bombs.”³¹ Nevertheless, its attitude was warlike. Whereas NSC 20/1 and 20/4, desiring a restoration of a balance of powers, did not aim to undermine what it considered the legitimate aspects of Soviet power and had urged U.S. Cold War objectives that would be sought as much as possible through “methods short of war,” Burnham, because he rejected NSC 20’s presuppositions and held that national will would be the most decisive element in the Cold War, urged a consistent warlike approach, whether the methods were “peaceful” or not.³² A “policy of liberation” was the corollary of this warlike attitude. “What this means,” Burnham wrote in the conclusion to his book, “is that liberation is the only defense against a Soviet world victory.”³³ “[T]he policy of containment, even if 100% successful, is a formula for Soviet victory.”³⁴ In this way Burnham concluded the United States must act aggressively or die.

Indeed, in the second term of the Truman administration, especially after the crises in China, the rise of Soviet atomic power, and finally the North Korean invasion of South Korea—all events that seem to suggest that the Communists were winning the Cold War—the sense that the United States needed a more vigorous effort was widely shared. NSC 68 (April 1950), composed after Kennan left the PPS and which succeeded NSC 20/4 as the Truman administration’s guiding policy document, reflected this sentiment (even though it was drafted before the outbreak of the Korean war). Portraying a stark ideological conflict between “the idea of freedom under a government of laws, and the idea of slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin,” it presented the world situation as one of bleak and urgent crisis: the Soviets, it argued, were rapidly rising in world power relative to the “free world” and therefore massive increases in conventional defense and other forms of national security spending were needed in the immediate future.³⁵ In light of the crisis it portrayed, it argued for “renewed initiative in the cold war.”³⁶ Yet, in NSC 68 this initiative was far more focused on efforts “to build up the strength, in the broadest sense, of the United States and the rest of the free world” rather than directly disrupting, weakening, or destroying the structure of Soviet power.³⁷

Somewhat surprisingly, given the document’s endorsement of the policies of NSC 20/4, NSC 68 paid relatively little attention to the fragmentation, let alone the liberation, of the Eastern European satellites through “political warfare.” In fact, as John Lewis Gaddis argues, when compared with Kennan’s earlier thought NSC 68 seemed to see the fragmentation of the satellite states as “a more remote possibility, too problematic to affect existing configurations of power.”³⁸ Furthermore, NSC 68 poignantly suggested that a “war of liberation” might be an oxymoronic concept, declaring, “Resort to war is not only a last resort for a free society, but it is also an act which cannot definitively end the fundamental conflict in the realm of ideas. The idea of slavery can only be overcome by the timely and persistent demonstration of the superiority of the idea of freedom.”³⁹ Nevertheless, it was under the auspices of NSC 68 that “the Truman administration orchestrated a vast and provocative anticommunist psychological warfare program to break up the Soviet bloc by encouraging revolution behind the Iron Curtain.”⁴⁰ Integral to this was Truman’s establishment of the Psychological Strategy Board in April 1951, which would be the forerunner to Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinating Board. It was also under the auspices of NSC 68 that the United States entered the war in Korea, at least in public discourse, as a “war of liberation.” As the New York Times told its readers, “Like the war that ended in 1945, this also is a war of liberation.”⁴¹ NSC 68, of course, would not have satisfied Burnham, but it did represent the Truman administration’s effort toward a renewed initiative in the Cold War.

However, liberation still lacked cohesive and consistent form. On the one hand, a weak form of “liberation,” fragmentation, had been envisioned within the Truman administration, one that limited itself to “measures short of war.” On the other hand, Korea was presented in the press as a “war of liberation,” and when, in September 1950, MacArthur succeeded in taking Seoul, Truman congratulated the general for the city’s “liberation.”⁴² To be sure, as Burnham’s book would make clear, a strong form of liberation was a war policy as well as a policy that risked war. Yet, NSC 68 exposed the paradoxical nature of a “war of liberation,” for if freedom from tyranny ultimately entailed the embrace of liberal freedom, it was indeed hard to see how this could be done simply through war.

Nevertheless, these tensions within the concept of liberation did not keep the 1952 Eisenhower presidential campaign from making use of it. An important part of the Republican platform was the notion of “peaceful liberation,” a concept, however strategically unclear, that packed political punch inasmuch as it appeared to reconcile an activist mode with purportedly pacific means in the Cold War. The “peaceful” means, according to the campaign, would be “psychological” or “political” warfare—echoing the approach of the Truman administration, but presented by Eisenhower as if it would be a new initiative. This approach promised to win the Cold War without having actually to fight it with troops and bombs. As Eisenhower took office, one of his key political warriors, C. D. Jackson, made it his task to give peaceful liberation cohesive and consistent form.

Jackson and the Strategic Context of “Peaceful Liberation”

To give form to content is a rhetorical task. Moreover, to give form to content is often to alter the content. When Jackson took up the cause of liberation—first as part of the burgeoning and ideologically driven state-private network in the late 1940s (including organizations such as the National Committee for a Free Europe and the Advertising Council), then in association with the Eisenhower campaign, and eventually as a consultant to the president involved in speechwriting and the work of the Psychological Strategy Board (later the Operations Coordinating Board) he changed both the form and content of liberation.⁴³ His rhetorical reconstruction of liberation represented an attempt to reconcile contingent and structural approaches to Cold War policy, devising an offensive on the structures of world power and so “expanding the area of freedom.” ⁴⁴ Culminating in a proposal for a World Economic Plan, Jackson rhetorically achieved this reconciliation by bringing liberation into close association with liberalization: he projected the nation as a political-economic, rather than militant, adventurer that could remake through opportune action the “balance of powers.” The Eisenhower administration’s emphasis on the appearance of peaceful means in the Cold War and its stress on the importance of economic matters helped set the tone for this new approach to liberation as political-economic adventure—even as it would ultimately be frustrated by Eisenhower.

Burnham’s provocation, “containment or liberation?,” was in fact a central theme of the 1952 presidential election campaigns, leaving both Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson at different times on the defensive and exposing a tension between a “dynamic” and “dangerous” Cold War strategy. In a radio debate with John Foster Dulles in the run-up to the election, Democrat William Averell Harriman withstood Dulles’s lambasting containment as an “immoral policy” for purportedly being unconcerned about people behind the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, Harriman defended the Democrats by claiming, “containment has never been the Administration’s policy.” Rather, he argued, “we have had a dynamic policy, which has rolled Communism back in many areas of the world.”⁴⁵ Yet, even as Democrats sometimes publicly recoiled from containment in this way, Republicans had to fend off accusations of warmongering in their talk of liberation. As Truman reproached them, “talk of liberation under present circumstances is war talk.”⁴⁶ Republicans were more than sensitive to the accusation, Dulles not the least, publicly qualifying his “rollback” approach: “No responsible person that I know of has advocated a war of liberation or an effort now to stir up the captive peoples to violent revolt. I myself have categorically rejected that idea.”⁴⁷ Instead, he argued that he and other Republicans advocated “peaceful liberation.”

“Peaceful liberation” was tied to the Eisenhower campaign’s call for an emphasis on “psychological warfare.” In an October 8, 1952, campaign speech written by C. D. Jackson, Eisenhower pledged that if elected he would place “a man of exceptional qualifications” who had “the full confidence of, and direct access to, the Chief Executive” over America’s psychological warfare operations. The first of such men in the Eisenhower administration would be Jackson himself. His mandate, according to the campaign speech, was to ensure that “[e]very significant act of government should be so timed and so directed at a principal target and so related to other governmental actions that it will produce maximum effect.” Anticipating themes in “Chance for Peace,” “Atoms for Peace,” and Jackson’s World Economic Plan, the speech placed economic assistance among a set of psychological warfare tactics—also including propaganda, travel, and sports—that could “gain a victory without causalities.”⁴⁸

Chris Tudda argues that this emphasis on psychological warfare frequently put Eisenhower in a position where his public words contradicted more privately deliberated policy, not the least with liberation.⁴⁹ Although this is true, Eisenhower’s talk of psychological warfare did faithfully reflect an aspiration toward a centralized and organized “cold war” effort. Indeed, as Shawn Parry-Giles has shown, when Eisenhower took office, he oversaw the “centralizing” and “militarizing” of propaganda in the White House.⁵⁰ This centralizing—seen, for example, in the September 1953 creation of the Operations Coordinating Board, which oversaw and coordinated the implementation of policy—went much further than propaganda operations per se. As Kenneth Osgood writes, Eisenhower’s notion of psychological warfare “extended beyond the official propaganda agencies of the American government to embrace any word or deed that affected the hearts and minds of the world’s peoples.”⁵¹ As a pivotal member of the committee of Eisenhower’s President’s Committee on International Information Activities, Jackson embraced and sought to refine this vision. Indeed, the committee was itself in part the product of a pre-election secret conference on psychological warfare at Princeton that had been organized by Jackson. The 1953 President’s Committee Report to Eisenhower, informally known as the “Jackson Report” after its chair William Jackson, urged a unified approach to psychological warfare: “Psychological activity is not a field of endeavor separable from the main body of diplomatic, economic, and military measures by which the United States seeks to achieve its national objectives.⁵² It is an ingredient of such measures.”⁵³ This “orchestrated” approach, as C. D. Jackson habitually referred to it, was retained as an ideal, if not always as a practice, well into the Eisenhower years.⁵⁴

If NSC 68 accentuated a sense of “cold war” as “real war,”⁵⁵ Eisenhower helped engender a sense of “cold war” as “total war,” contributing to what Robert Ivie describes as a culture-wide transformation in America toward the institutionalization of an “age of peril.”⁵⁶ Thus eventually references to “psychological warfare” in the Eisenhower administration were largely displaced by “political warfare,” which was seen as a more comprehensive term. “Words like ‘propaganda’ and ‘psychological warfare,’” warned one statement of the day, “have apparently obscured from American view the fact and significance of political warfare.”

Political warfare may be defined as “coordinated governmental action in the international field in time of cold war.” Political warfare is an alternative, not a preliminary, to armed warfare. It is the sum of the activities in which a government engages for the attainment of its objectives without unleashing armed warfare. But it is a description which applies to none of those activities when each of them is carried on independently of the others. In that case they become “mere” diplomacy, intelligence, propaganda, economic negotiation, armament production, and so on. The essence of political warfare is that it is planned and the means employed to carry it on are coordinated.⁵⁷

Political warfare was an “alternative” to armed warfare with respect to means, not ends. As such, it purportedly could resolve a tension within the notion of “peaceful liberation” as it signified the possibility of an aggressive Cold War offensive that would not depend on large-scale armed offensives.

“Peaceful liberation” was therefore more than a slogan of the Republican’s 1952 campaign. It indicated, as “liberation” did with Burnham, a foreign policy attitude and a strategic orientation. It brought together what otherwise might be kept apart, representing the conflation of all forms of American international action and intervention into the act of war—albeit now unconventional war.⁵⁸ The turn to “peaceful liberation” gave activists within the administration like Jackson a framework for a more aggressive Cold War policy, and yet it did this in a way that could at least claim exemption from “warmongering” and pacify anxieties about risking general war or overspending on conventional defense. For although in many ways the United States was not at all pacific under Eisenhower’s leadership—CIA activities in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), for example, and the U.S. role in the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Berlin Crisis (1958)—the administration did seek to avoid anything approximating large-scale war. “Eisenhower’s aim,” Gaddis writes of national security policy at the time, “it seems clear now, was to avoid all wars, not simply to deter nuclear war.” Eisenhower wanted to steer clear of any substantial armed conflict that might escalate out of control into a nuclear war.⁵⁹ His emphasis on “political warfare” stemmed, at least in part, from this commitment. “Peaceful liberation” in this sense represented the delicate attempt of the Eisenhower administration to avoid general war even as the United States pursued a “bold” and “dynamic” Cold War policy.

It was the subject of political warfare that C. D. Jackson (then sitting atop Fortune magazine), Abbott Washburn, and Arthur Page addressed at a private meeting with over twenty other men in Princeton in May of 1952. Attendees included representatives from the State Department, the CIA, Radio Free Europe, the Psychological Strategy Board, Princeton University, and MIT, and included Walt Rostow. Steered by Jackson, conversation at the secret meeting centered on liberation via political warfare. “[N]o clear statement had been made by the President or the Secretary of State,” Jackson complained of the Truman administration, “to the effect that it is the policy of the nation ‘that the 100,000,000 people enslaved by the Russian Communist regime behind the Iron Curtain shall be free.’”⁶⁰ America, Jackson argued, had simply failed to seize opportunities for political warfare on behalf of liberation. “What we are here for,” he concluded, “is to determine whether or not an American will to engage in political warfare can be stimulated; if it can, the objectives and the means will be forthcoming without too much difficulty.”

Despite this expression of confidence in the relative ease of political warfare itself, Jackson and others at the conference knew that “peaceful liberation” could be very complicated. Charles Bohlen, representing Truman’s State Department, decried Jackson’s call for the United States to announce an explicit policy of liberation: “If you say that as the Government, you say your policy is the overthrow of the Soviet regime.” Robert Joyce, of Truman’s Policy Planning Staff, retorted that the question of armed conflict was not merely one Americans were worried about. Europeans “were troubled by American lack of patience, fearful that we may pull the trigger, unsure that we are ‘politically mature enough’ to attain our aims without war.” A political war of liberation, he suggested, required a level of political discipline and virtue that the United States had yet to display effectively. Even Allen Dulles, already working with the CIA on covert Cold War operations, felt the need to remind the conference participants, “We should clearly state that peaceful means are envisaged.” The question remained, then, how the nation could go about liberation or talk of liberation without inaugurating another world war. And even as this question was tossed about, Rostow further complicated the matter: liberation in Eastern Europe, he argued, was about seeing “that part of the world move without war towards a shape which is in the American interest.” “Liberation,” therefore, had to result in freed nations ready to comply with American interests—not a given, not at all.

In this way, the 1952 Princeton conference contemplated a template of American Cold War grand strategy that was (a) explicitly centered on “liberation,” (b) restricted to “political” means, and (c) committed to furthering world conditions amenable to serving American interests. Washburn, in a memo written to candidate Eisenhower summarizing the majority sentiment at the conference, stated: “the policy of mere ‘containment’ or holding of the line against further Soviet expansion has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with a more dynamic and positive policy of ultimate liberation of the enslaved nations, in line with our fundamental American concept of man’s God-given right to individual freedom.” However, he continued, liberation did not mean conventional war; political warfare could “win World War III without our having to fight it.”⁶¹

Upon Eisenhower’s election, however, the importance of projecting an appearance of America’s “peaceful” intentions in the world took precedence over a strong call by the United States for the liberation of peoples in the Soviet sphere. Confronted with the surprise announcement of Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, and the subsequent “peace offensive” by the Kremlin, the new administration was cautious about acting too aggressively on the world stage, and in fact launched its own “peace offensive” with Eisenhower’s April 16 “Chance for Peace” address. The Jackson Report, officially submitted on June 30, sought a balance between “peaceful” appearances and aggressive actions. “Soviet rulers will be most reluctant to run deliberately a grave risk of general war,” it claimed, and so should be the United States.⁶² However, the report advised that counteroperations against the Soviets were still very much needed. Officially, they should include economic embargoes and use of agencies like the Voice of America—that is, as long as the U.S. government could accept responsibility for their actions. Otherwise, the report urged that private organizations be used, which could secretly operate with the support and supervision of government agencies like the CIA but appear to be purely civilian agencies, therefore freeing the U.S. government from having to accept responsibility for their actions. In this way, the Jackson Report placed a strong emphasis on state-private networks in fighting the most provocative battles of political warfare. Crucially, it urged that overt interventions by the United States within the Soviet bloc or otherwise contentious areas be designed so as to not bear the traces of official U.S. hostility or aggression. Whatever subversive or liberatory actions the United States might take, it concluded that the nation must maintain the appearance of being basically pacific in its intentions.

Even as the Jackson Report was being composed and finalized, C. D. Jackson suggested the sort of offensives he imagined the report sanctioning. In May 1953, he wrote Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s National Security Advisor, regarding the problems the French were facing in Indo-China. Complaining of French ineffectiveness, he urged that the United States work with France to “produce a global political plan, long-term if necessary (25 to 50 years), for the freedom of all these [colonized] people.”

Can you imagine the consternation of the Commies, and the neutralists, and the fuzzy-headed intellectuals, when they discover that the French Government and the Americans are for freedom and against colonialism, and when the natives in these areas discover that the French are no longer lying, but mean what they have said?⁶³

Eisenhower never embraced this idea; however the president did allow a smaller-scale, Jackson-inspired initiative in East Germany in June 1953, on the heels of a relatively small but widely publicized workers’ uprising there. Jackson and the Psychological Strategy Board (transformed into the Operations Coordinating Board in September 1953) presented the East German uprising as “the greatest opportunity for initiating effective policies to help roll back Soviet power that has yet come to light,”⁶⁴ following it with a highly publicized program to provide food to impoverished East Germans. For Jackson, the program was not only in keeping with the appearance of peaceful American intentions, but a significant sign of the symbolic potential of America’s material abundance in Cold War interventions behind the Iron Curtain.

That fall, NSC 162/2 (October 30, 1953)—the major security statement of the Eisenhower administration, centered on fiscal restraint and nuclear deterrence—put particular pressure on the understanding of liberation as a martial exploit, explicitly cautioning against its dangers. Echoing Joyce’s concern about the attitude of Europeans toward America’s ability to exercise military restraint and political wisdom, NSC 162/2 warned that American militancy threatened to weaken the confidence of allies in America’s leadership. “Many consider U.S. attitudes toward the Soviets as too rigid and unyielding and, at the same time, as unstable, holding risks ranging from preventative war and ‘liberation’ to withdrawal into isolation. Many consider that these policies fail to reflect the perspective and confidence expected in the leadership of a great nation, and reflect too great a pre-occupation with anti-communism.”⁶⁵ Consequently, the document echoed the Truman administration’s emphasis on combining positive programs meant to bolster the strength and confidence of the “free world” with disruptive and destructive efforts to fragment, but not directly “liberate,” the Communist world.⁶⁶ America, it held, had to instill constructive confidence in its allies while still taking “feasible political, economic, propaganda and covert measures designed to create and exploit troublesome problems for the USSR, impair Soviet relations with Communist China, complicate control in the satellites, and retard the growth of the military and economic potential of the Soviet bloc.”⁶⁷ In this way, NSC 162/2 supported aggressive and subversive maneuvers against Soviet power, but only in ways that would not undermine the confidence of U.S. allies and otherwise “uncommitted” nations in America’s prudential judgment and pacific intent.

Importantly, NSC 162/2 stressed strengthening the economic fortitude of the “free world” relative to the Communist world. It argued that the United States could both strengthen the “free world” and reduce the dependency of other countries on U.S. economic aid by “stimulating international trade, freer access to markets and raw materials, and the healthy growth of under-developed areas.” Furthermore, it urged courses of action that could strengthen ties with allies and “win the friendship and cooperation of the presently uncommitted areas of the world.” “Constructive U.S. policies,” it explained, “not related solely to anti-communism, are needed to persuade uncommitted countries that their best interests lie in greater cooperation and stronger affiliations with the rest of the free world.”⁶⁸ Such language was consistent with Jackson’s effort to envision liberation in a new political-economic way. Indeed, NSC 162/2 reflected a central belief of Eisenhower that Jackson shared, namely, as Martin J. Medhurst writes, “In the end [of the Cold War], it would be economic success or failure that would determine who was to be the victor and who the vanquished.”⁶⁹ Still, the document’s foreign policy vision with regard to the expansion of capitalistic economies was relatively limited, urging that the United States “should consider a modification of its tariff and trade policies” and insisting that whatever aid might be offered in the future should be limited and judged only in terms of immediate U.S. interests.⁷⁰ This was more or less consistent with the Randall Commission Report commissioned by Eisenhower. Completed in the winter of 1954, the report, as Walt Rostow has written, “broke no new ground,” recommending the curtailment of foreign aid and the encouragement of private investment abroad and more liberal trade policies.⁷¹ Neither NSC 162/2 nor the Randall Report projected anything like what Jackson, along with Rostow, would propose in 1954: a large-scale economic aid program aimed at bolstering the capitalistic economies of underdeveloped nations and ultimately “expanding the area of freedom.”

Rather, in sum, as Eisenhower established his Cold War policies, three emphases were clear: the avoidance, if possible, of general war; an emphasis on America creating for itself the appearance of peaceful purposes; and the emergence of the global economy alongside nuclear deterrence as pivotal fronts in the Cold War. Consequently, for the Eisenhower administration as a whole what was retained of the old idea of liberation was largely sublimated into the activities of stateprivate networks, covert actions, and other forms of action abroad aimed at vindicating and furthering the American way without risking America’s “peaceful” image or economic strength. For Jackson, however, liberation represented the possibility of a grand strategic approach dependent on the confluence of adventurism and artistry. Jackson held that America’s actions in and before the world on behalf of an “expanding area of freedom” needed to be of such character as to forward the superiority of the American economic and political way. For Jackson this emphasis required an element of striking spectacle, because global audiences, he held, needed to come to associate the United States on an emotional level with the promise of their own well-being. On the other hand, Jackson believed that U.S. propagation of its image in this manner had to be designed so as not to draw attention to its aggressive and contrived character. It must appear “natural.” Otherwise the United States could appear at best as a disingenuous manipulator upon the world stage, and at worst as a careless and unlawful antagonist. This demand meant the invention of efforts to extend American political-economic processes and ideologies that would not seem to be anything but natural expressions of America’s pacific purposes. As Medhurst shows, “Chance for Peace” and “Atoms for Peace” were conceived in this vein, and as Michael Hogan demonstrates, so was “Open Skies.”⁷² Jackson was an integral part of all three of these speeches. However, Jackson pushed for a much more expansive approach to combating the Soviets. He believed large-scale international programs were entirely in line with the psychological and economic concerns of Eisenhower, and moreover, that they were critical to the United States’ long-term success. Jackson, in other words, believed liberation should motivate an adventurous, grand political-economic strategy.

What Jackson’s ambition in fact pointed to was a reenvisioning of the Cold War wherein American actions abroad might remake the world by restructuring, so to speak, world opinion in favor of liberal ideals and thereby creating the conditions for the recession of Soviet power and the expansion of political-economic systems that mirrored America’s. He would as a result address through a conception of political-economic adventure one of the central aporias of early Cold War strategy, that between a structural “defensive” and contingent “offensive” outlook. We cannot adequately appreciate Jackson’s rhetorical reconstruction of liberation as political-economic adventure without first understanding Henry Luce’s notion of “the American Century” and Walt Rostow’s economic development theories.

Jackson and the Artistry of the American Century

In 1959, by then quite frustrated with the Eisenhower administration’s Cold War designs because of what he perceived as a lack of an orchestrated offense, Jackson wrote Allen Dulles, “Were we really smart in abandoning the policy of liberation and carefully never mentioning the word again?” “Liberation,” he continued, “is not an ugly word: it is a good word: it is an American word; it is an unambiguous word. It is the one word the Kremlin fears.”⁷³ Indeed, Jackson measured the progress of the Cold War not on a scale of world stability or a balance of powers, but on one of world opinion vis-à-vis the contagion of the idea of liberty. As much as any of his contemporaries in the Eisenhower administration, he retained the ideological emphases of the Truman administration’s NSC 68. Jackson believed that the conflict with the Soviets was strongly ideological in nature and needed to be approached as such.⁷⁴ For Soviet successes, as Jackson measured them, were derived from the combination of a wellorganized political system with a compelling ideology.

In fact, the efficiency of the former, he believed, was due to the power of the latter. “We are always amazed,” he wrote Rostow,

at the way in which Communist officials and organizations are able within a brief space of time—24 hours—to say the same thing simultaneously in hundreds of languages all over the world in response to some event or action. The unsophisticated assume that a message of instruction on the Party line has been flashed from the Kremlin to all parts of the world. You and I know that that is not true, even if it were technically possible to cover that many bases in that short a time with a coded message.

What we actually witness is the operation of the “diamat” [dialectical materialism], the ideological and operational Litmus paper to which a trained Communist applies any stimulus. Given a worldwide uniform dogma, an identical set of goals, and few carefully worked out overall limitations, practically every half-way intelligent professional Communist anywhere in the world can almost instantly come up with the same answer.

We do not seem to have worked out our “diamat.”⁷⁵

For Jackson, the strategic gains and losses of America in the Cold War depended on the power of ideology. Jackson’s view of human psychology was strongly ideational, as well as quite behavioristic. Convince a people of an idea and you can manage their actions and reactions.

This is why he held that America’s success before communism depended on thoroughly integrating political warfare into every diplomatic, security, and economic policy. Political warfare for him, like Burnham, represented a realm of contingent and deliberate action. Thus Jackson argued that everyone in authority should take “responsibility for at least elementary psywar thinking.” Political warriors were not “magicians manipulating some mysterious device, but were to be considered specialists in assisting the Departments and Agencies to achieve the desired impact abroad.”⁷⁶ Political warfare, in other words, could not be partitioned into a distinct realm of the Cold War—it was at the very heart of “cold” war. And for Jackson an idea at the heart of political warfare remained liberation. Liberation, Jackson seems to have believed, should be the United States’ “diamat.”

For Jackson, liberation entailed the translation of the American Way into other countries and cultures. It was part of the comprehensive image of America envisioned by his mentor, archliberal internationalist Henry Luce, in 1941 in “The American Century”:

America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice—out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.⁷⁷

Luce’s vision was strongly ideological, but not strictly so. It claimed self-interest as well as a national historical mission as principal motives. “America,” Luce explained, “is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world-environment in which she lives. . . . [I]f America’s environment is unfavorable to the growth of American life, then America has nobody to blame so deeply as she must blame herself.”⁷⁸ For Luce and for Jackson praise and blame could only be measured in terms of an epochal and revolutionary American imperative demanding the expansion, rather than the maintenance or diminution, of the American Way. Luce and Jackson held an explicitly nation-centered rendering of internationalism.

Jackson’s vision of liberation represented the perdurance of the American Century into the Cold War. Consistent with Luce’s American Century, liberation under Jackson’s oversight hinged on notions of political and economic virtuosity: adeptness at accomplishment, articulation, production, performance, and profit on the world stage.⁷⁹ It demanded that America be what it represents. The abundance wrought by capitalism, Jackson believed, gave America a profound advantage in the Cold War with respect both to establishing a free world order and to generating favorable sentiments from other nations. Yet, unlike Eisenhower in his more fiscally conservative moments, Jackson tended to envision economic expansion less in terms of sustaining the American way of life and more in terms of fulfilling an adventurous American mission. Free enterprise was the product of artful innovation and intervention. In this sense, Jackson became not only a champion of liberation but also of development.

It was in collaboration with Rostow that Jackson had opportunity not only to refine his approach to development, but also to envision a way of reconciling a geopolitical vision based on contingent action with one conscious of the structures of power. In the early 1950s Rostow, an economist who had been involved in the formation of the Marshall Plan, served as an advisor and speechwriter to Eisenhower, working with Jackson on early drafts of “Chance for Peace”—a speech that, as Robert Ivie has shown, hinges on adventurous notions of “quest” and “crusade.”⁸⁰ Simultaneously, he was developing an approach to economic development that came to be known as the “take-off model,” and more broadly as “modernization.”⁸¹ The take-off model represented a reconciliation of what divided Kennan from Burnham during the Truman years, in that it was at once structural and contingent. It theorized development as proceeding from “traditional societies” through four subsequent discrete stages culminating in an “age of high mass consumption” associated with science and technology. Importantly, the model relied neither on historical determinism nor exclusively on impersonal economic forces for its theory of development. Development sometimes needed to be managed, massaged, or otherwise supervised by expert authorities. Economic epochs, much like Luce’s vision of historical epochs, rested on contingencies. And Rostow placed ideology at the center of these contingencies—communism, no matter if it was embraced in Russia, China, Cuba, or Antarctica, represented a monolithic approach to economic modernization and political control, captured in the notion of dialectical materialism, and a similarly monolithic democratic capitalism represented its only viable alternative. Thus, Rostow’s model stressed the role political actors could play in political-economic coordination and the propagation of an ideology.⁸²

Through his collaboration with the likes of Luce and Rostow, as well as through his experience in mass media and his impression of the stunning success of Soviet propaganda, Jackson seems to have grown increasingly convinced in the 1950s that the success of America in the Cold War depended on a strategy of aggressive but adept intervention in world affairs. “In this business of political warfare,” he exhorted attendees of the 1952 secret Princeton conference, “it does no good to stand still. Somebody is going to move into the vacuum; and if we don’t, the enemy will; not only will, but is doing it every day of the week.”⁸³ Jackson’s vision of the dynamism of the Cold War world engendered a strong belief in opportunism. In seizing or not seizing the moment, America would win or lose the fight with the Soviets, as it was the moment that afforded the nation the opportunity to change the climate of world opinion and so change the structures of world power.

The consequence was a good deal of historicism—repeated attempts by Jackson to read the times. In a memo to Luce and several other Time, Inc. executives dated June 21, 1955—the day after an Eisenhower’s speech at the United Nations in San Francisco in which the president declared, “But the summer of 1955, like that one of 1945, is another season of high hope for the world”⁸⁴—Jackson argued that 1955 would likely be, in the eyes of historians, “the year ‘things began to get unstuck’ internationally.” For the Soviets, he continued, “the summer of 1955 represents the moment when the ratio of their weakness to our strength became very plain to them and assumed practical military, political, and economic meaning to them.” Referencing an article in the New York Times, he insisted that the paper was wrong when it urged the free world to see the summer of 1955 as a time to “stand firm.” Such an approach was “defeatist.” Rather, “[T]his is the moment of all moments when our diplomacy, our military posture, and our economic actions should not give them what Walt Rostow refers to as ‘options for fussing around.’ . . . Our problem, our challenge, our responsibility, is to see to it that this moment is not just a passing point on a graph, but a continuing line through the immediately coming years.”⁸⁵

To see the moment as a point on a graph upon which depends the trajectory of history is to invoke both Luce’s revolutionary and Rostow’s structuralist narratives. History is characterized by epochal shifts formed out of actions taken within condensed auspicious moments, or crises. Political actors carry the weight of history itself as the future rests upon the quality of their response to the opportune moment. The deep structure of such a vision hinges on the ideal of political virtuosity as the right word or action at the right time (kairos). “Time,” as Jackson wrote in a philosophical mood in the June 1955 memo to Luce, “is the essential common denominator that runs through everything.”⁸⁶

Jackson thus worked behind the scenes on project after project and plan after plan to take advantage of opportune moments. The “Jackson Report” bore his distinct style as it suggested that Stalin’s death represented an auspicious moment in the U.S. propaganda offensive.⁸⁷ Following the report, Jackson, working on “Atoms for Peace,” wrote Eisenhower regarding the need for a candid speech about nuclear war, declaring, “The need for a frank speech on the atomic age and Continental Defense is, if anything, greater than ever. . . . The speech should be given as soon as possible—certainly before Congress reconvenes, and preferably during October or not later than the first week in November.”⁸⁸ Indeed, this fixation with the moment helped generate Eisenhower’s most memorable speeches. The dramatic announcements of “Chance for Peace,” “Atoms for Peace,” and “Open Skies” were fueled by Jackson’s penchant for creating what he once referred to as “absolutely electrifying” effects on the world stage.⁸⁹

Yet, because world opinion was primary, such effects often depended on what Gordon Mitchell, in a different context, calls “strategic deception.”⁹⁰ Jackson was nearly as satisfied with fostering illusions of American political-economic virtuosity as he was in seeing the nation take more muscular steps in foreign relations. For example, as a follow-up to “Atoms for Peace,” Jackson suggested to Eisenhower and the CIA’s Frank Wisner that the United States start an international rumor of plans to build an atomic reactor in Berlin for economic development purposes. A rumor, he argued, “is almost as good as actual [sic] getting on with the work.” What was critical for Jackson was that the United States follow “Atoms for Peace” with “symbolic evidence” of its intentions to spark the global economy with the infusion of nuclear energy, irrespective of the feasibility of the plans. “In this work” he continued, “as you know, the emotional and psychological impact of a small and relatively unimportant piece of action is as great, and frequently greater, than a vague realization that something tremendous is being cooked up behind closed doors which might be unveiled months hence.”⁹¹ Jackson was convinced that more concrete and material actions were needed as well—especially with regard to opening up foreign markets and encouraging trade—but economic enterprise was always principally a symbolic action, no matter what the material correlative.

“Liberation,” too, was wrought into this image under his care. It was, as he expressed to Allen Dulles, a word the Kremlin feared. By amplifying “liberation” into a word akin to Luce’s “freedom,” “liberation” operated on a strongly symbolic plane. Thus, when in 1956 the Hungarian revolt was quashed by the Soviets, Jackson—who had worked with organizations and efforts that helped propel the revolt—complained to the Eisenhower administration about their poor symbolic response to the crisis: in light of this quashing, why, he demanded to know, had the United States not led an effort in the United Nations to reject the credentials of the Soviet-backed Kadar government?⁹² In this way, Jackson urged an approach focused on dramatic maneuvers that preserved, above all, the image of America as liberator. Jackson saw the world aesthetically and, in an important sense, hierarchically, wanting the position of the nation in world opinion to move up relative to the Soviets. Success in this effort was contingent upon the way America composed itself before the world via word and action; global power, he held, would follow brilliant performances. Jackson thus imagined America as a virtuoso actor in the court of public opinion, profiting as it outwits and outmaneuvers opponents to move up the ladder of world esteem. In this, everything depended on the quality of America’s performances in opportune moments.

Jackson’s approach to America’s global performances was principally cultivated within the spheres of economic enterprise. It was thus, with respect to typical historic social forms, a form of economic adventurism where the discursive, aesthetic, and public dimensions of such enterprise were stressed. Indeed, as Georg Simmel argues, there is a “profound affinity between the adventurer and the artist.”⁹³ As publisher for Luce’s various periodicals, and as founder of Luce’s international publications, and as a practitioner of economic warfare during the war, Jackson approached his work artistically and adventurously, valuing both the imagination and adaptability of the artist and the freedom, mobility, and innovation of the adventurer.

Jackson’s artistic approach was not merely subconscious. As he explained to Ambassador George Allen regarding overseas propaganda, “there is a basic dilemma which throws the problem into the area of taste and intuition, rather than into a book of rules.”

By that I mean that these American publications, particularly TIME and LIFE International, become immediately suspect if the overseas reader gets the impression that they are being carefully edited to or for him. Their entire usefulness, propaganda-wise, depends on the credibility, and they achieve maximum credibility if the foreign reader thinks that he is simply looking over the shoulder of an American reader, seeing the news of the world and of the U.S. freely presented with no punches pulled, instead of seeing what is “good for him.”⁹⁴

This emphasis on “taste and intuition” was at the core of Jackson’s accent on an artistry that appears natural, manipulation that appears genuine, and contrived enterprises that appear authentic expressions of pacific and benevolent American purposes. An artistic frame provided Jackson and his close collaborators with an activist programmatic vision prone to bold proposals and ambitious adventures—proposals like the World Economic Plan.

A Political-Economic Adventure: The World Economic Plan

Jackson’s political-economic adventurism came to full fruition in his effort to inaugurate a World Economic Plan (WEP). For Jackson, a logical outcome of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” was the WEP.⁹⁵ Indeed, the WEP capitalized on the psychological and symbolic thrust of “Atoms for Peace.” As an early outline of the plan stated: “What can be immediately and effectively shared—or rather, stimulated—is not the isotope but all that the isotope stands for, namely an age of material abundance made possible by the tremendous culmination of scientific and technological knowledge and expertise.”⁹⁶ In this way, Eisenhower’s speech ballooned into an all-out program for the liberalization of smaller, less prosperous nations.

In 1954 Jackson formulated with Rostow and Rostow’s colleague at MIT, Max Millikan, a proposed Partnership for Economic Growth. Purportedly, the plan was developed in response to John Foster Dulles’s 1954 worries about the apparent aggressive growth of the Soviet economy, which Dulles feared would lead poorer nations to embrace the Soviet system.⁹⁷ However, the seeds of the plan can be seen earlier in Jackson’s approach to “Atoms for Peace” and even earlier in Rostow and Jackson’s collaboration (on early drafts) of “Chance for Peace.” With respect to “Atoms for Peace,” immediately after the speech Jackson argued for a serial and comprehensive follow-up, “a series of actions—repeated actions.”⁹⁸ “Atoms for Peace” was for him and others in the administration the inauguration of a Cold War offensive, not the culmination of one. And the nature of this offensive was already indicated in “Chance for Peace,” which addressed both the legacy of liberation and the need for world economic development. ⁹⁹ Thus, as Jackson argued to state and private officials regarding the WEP, “In both of these speeches he [Eisenhower] was leading into a Foreign Economic Policy.”¹⁰⁰ Such a policy, he proposed, could supplement, and perhaps supplant, “military symbolism” with a “weapon of peace.”¹⁰¹

The WEP conjoined liberation with liberalization in envisioning an expansive long-term American economic adventure abroad. As a July 1954 WEP proposal stated, “In the short run, then, Communism must be contained militarily. In the long run we must rely on the development, in partnership with others, of an environment in which societies which directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve. In the long we must free security from dependence on military strength.”¹⁰² The WEP, as Jackson, Rostow, and Millikan wrote in a draft of a presidential speech proposing the plan, was aimed at “An expansion, not a contraction, of the area of freedom.”¹⁰³ Through the infusion of capital and technical expertise in “underdeveloped” areas of the world, they proposed that the United States could ultimately win the Cold War without resorting to arms. The WEP was therefore tailor-made to fit the guiding principles of the Eisenhower administration: it avoided general war, it preserved and indeed sought to expand a strong U.S. economy, and it was consistent with “peaceful purposes.”

The WEP was proposed at a time of significant challenges to the vision of the American Century. Beginning in 1953, under the leadership of Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations raised economic development to the center of its concerns. Simultaneously, so-called underdeveloped nations were gaining more and more power in the General Assembly, exercising greater independence with respect to U.S. or USSR hegemony, calling into question economic dogmas, and seeking greater economic equity. Indeed, with regard to American Century–style economics, a quiet but forceful revolt against the free-trade doctrine was brewing among economists inside the United Nations.¹⁰⁴ The WEP therefore came at a time not only when the Soviets seemed to be succeeding economically but also when free trade and American prestige were under fire in the United Nations.

To create momentum in the administration for the WEP, Jackson convened under the auspices of Time, Inc. a secret, off-the-record conference at Princeton in the spring of 1954—much like the one he had composed to create momentum for “psychological warfare” in 1952.¹⁰⁵ Jackson opened the conference with a short speech in which he reminded the attendees that the president had said in “Chance for Peace” that the U.S. government was ready to help “other peoples to develop the underdeveloped areas of the world.” The offer, Jackson argued, was an example of “the dream,” but one without follow-through. He hoped to use the gathering at Princeton to “narrow the gap between intelligent dreaming . . . and action.” Otherwise, the United States would be stuck with a militant image and expensive military-aid packages. “In other words,” he summed up starkly, “is it to be cannons, or is it to be growth? Is it to be a functioning partnership in an expanding area of freedom, or a shrinking area of freedom on the American dole? We are right up against it.”¹⁰⁶

The United States, he argued, needed a foreign economic policy designed to marry the needs of America and Europe to those of poorer nations.

Bur I have been sitting in the Executive Office Building across the street from the White House for a year, and one thing has really struck me; that is, we have two kinds of economic headaches in the Free World. The first is countries that cannot find markets large enough for their own goods to buy what they need without our help. That is the plight of Great Britain, it is the plight of Germany, it is the plight of Japan. It is the plight of others whom we need as strong and not as resentful partners.

Then, second, we have in the world a host of what has gotten to be underdeveloped countries that badly need exactly what Britain, Japan, Germany, and the United States can export. But because they cannot get those things, they become increasingly vulnerable politically.

As I see the big job of a Foreign Economic Policy, it is to marry up these two Free World weaknesses into a functioning partnership, to make a tremendous asset out of two liabilities.¹⁰⁷

In this way, Jackson proposed that the United States make a macro-intervention in the world vis-à-vis a kind of political-economic matchmaking. Through capital investment, diplomatic efforts, presidential speechmaking, government-coordinated publicity, and the ample use of state-private networks, the United States could turn the tide of world opinion, as well as the fortunes of the U.S. economy, in a dramatic new direction.

Jackson’s belief in the feasibility of world economic matchmaking rested upon the edifice of the work of Rostow and Millikan. In an outline of the WEP, the two economists expressed concern about the “terrible disparity between the U.S. and the rest of the world” economically. The American economy, in the short 15-year period leading up to the postwar period, expanded fivefold. Why, they asked, could not such growth be realized in economies elsewhere? In “an age of high culmination of Science and Technology,” there was no reason it could not.¹⁰⁸

Thus Rostow and Millikan evoked an older and more ambitious form of economic theorizing, inscribed preeminently in the works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Political economy, and not simply economics, was the avowed domain.¹⁰⁹ “Because we mention Science and Technology first,” they explained in their WEP outline, “let it not be thought that we have anything but scorn for any narrow and shallow philosophy of ‘technocracy.’” “It is not possible to label or catalogue,” they explained, “all the dynamic (and often conflicting) elements which go into the making of America and the Western World generally. But, however the causative elements are classified, one result is self-evident: manking [sic] has arrived at a point where material abundance for vast numbers of people is quite plainly possible.” Indeed, Rostow and Millikan stressed the spectacular simplicity of their plan, even in a complex world, arguing that it could be reduced to basic propositions “comprehensible to all literate men and women.”¹¹⁰ What was important for America to see, they argued, was not economic calculations and detailed plans, but that “[t]he moment is propitious for mobilization of all capitalistic sentiments and techniques.”¹¹¹ Thus the problem with technocracy in their view was not the extent of its claim to be able to manage economic factors to realize general prosperity, but the limits of this claim. Nations and their economies, Rostow and Millikan protested, were at once as complex and as simple as people themselves, and the problems of the world economy could be overcome as leaders took a direct and aggressive approach to the historical, psychological, and material realities of the world’s political economy. Jackson’s image of matchmaking was therefore not merely a convenient trope; it carried the tenor of an ambitious revitalization of political economics in the name of global capitalism.

The Princeton Economic Conference in spring of 1954 resulted in a formal proposal to the Eisenhower administration for a “Partnership for Economic Growth” written by Jackson, Rostow, and Millikan. The proposal so thoroughly blended the historical, psychological, political, and economic that its premises could have appeared impossible to Eisenhower, who wrote to Jackson upon receiving it that he feared it would only be seen—by Republican leaders in Congress as well as fiscal conservatives within his own administration like George Humphrey and Joseph Dodge—as “bigger and better give-aways.”¹¹² In addition to the scope of the plan’s premises, Eisenhower could also have been put off by the tone of crisis the proposal set, evoking, no doubt unintentionally, something of the style of NSC 68. It began by describing “The Crisis of 1954,” claiming that the free world was growing more fragmented, threatening to leave the United States “essentially a beleaguered island.” Above all, it argued, the crisis was “political and psychological. . . . [T]he roots of the crisis lie in the minds of men and women throughout the Free World.” Still, the proposal argued that this crisis was an opportunity for U.S. action. “Indeed,” it claimed, “it is a part of our national character that crises evoke from us our best and most creative performances.” The United States could be not merely an example of abundance, but its source. “We must find the words and deeds which will restore and strengthen the image of the United States not merely as the military bulwark of the Free World but as the major source of its democratic faith, its constructive energy, and its initiative in the pursuit of peace.”¹¹³ Thus the proposal argued that by meeting the crisis of 1954 with creative world political and economic action, the United States could restore its ideological hegemony over the free world and “expand the area of freedom.”

America as the paragon of the ultimate stage of science and technology represented for Jackson, Rostow, and Millikan a way not simply of being, but of acting, in the world. At the center of their vision of national performance was the seizure of opportune moments. Failure in such moments amounted to a kind of aesthetic catastrophe: “[I]f the rest of the Free World is in a mood to move along ‘free enterprise’ lines, then the responsibility of the U.S. is simply to promote what it itself profoundly believes in. To fail to respond to so simple a responsibility would be a tragic rejection of opportunity.”¹¹⁴ On the other hand, opportune political action successfully seen by the world as dramatic and dynamic could transform the structures of world power. An aesthetic experience of American action could change world opinion, and thus open up the way to “expand the area of freedom.”

Indeed, once the WEP finally failed to gain Eisenhower’s approval, Jackson registered and remembered the failure in aesthetic terms. “We both know that I failed,” he wrote Rostow in 1962. “I still hope that you will succeed.” As Jackson went on to explain, “An all-important element of my failure was my inability to enlist positive and continuing and dynamically meshed acceptance and support by the President and the Secretary of State of a total program. One-shot, crisis projects—sí. Orchestrated, total, long-term program—no.”¹¹⁵ Although hardly a solemn character, Jackson took upon himself extraordinarily weighty burdens with respect to American foreign policy. He sought to orchestrate coordinated, ambitious, and extensive programs that he knew would be met with a great deal of resistance.

The Princeton Economic Conference was one case in point. The conference was, like so much Jackson did and imagined the nation doing, a strategic deception, a premeditated ruse, meant for political effect rather than serious deliberation. Jackson, Rostow, and Millikan had developed a detailed sketch of the WEP well before the meeting, and their plan was not open to significant revision. Rather, the purpose of the conference was to navigate the idea through the labyrinth of Washington bureaucracy, like a courtier working to gain an audience with the sovereign. A month before the conference, Jackson wrote Luce, “Millikan agrees with you that the actual Plan could be written in 48 hours out of the heads of two or three of us, without the conference stage setting. On the other hand, I feel that this little bit of theatre has a certain importance, and, on the basis of previous experience, will make a definite contribution.”¹¹⁶ Indeed, echoing Jackson’s sentiment, Millikan wrote Jackson a week later,

Walt and I believe that it will be desirable to have our thoughts pretty clearly in mind beforehand as to what we want to come out of this first meeting, but we feel that the thing has got to be so stage managed that the other participants all believe that at least some the ideas were originally theirs. I am sure that you are even clearer about this than we are, and I feel a little foolish even mentioning this point except that it does bear on the question of how much you can expect to accomplish in this meeting.¹¹⁷

Thus, the Princeton Economic Conference was staged; its invitees, for the most part, were unknowing actors; its agenda was the performance of a script; and its aim the artful orchestration of American foreign economic policy. The stateprivate network Jackson so freely exploited was, in his view, nearly as susceptible to the techniques of “political warfare” or artful stage-managing as he imagined general publics to be.

Conclusion

In the postwar world the language of liberation was imprinted with the memory of war, sacrifice, risk, and costliness. Indeed, it was for this reason that Burnham advocated “a policy of liberation,” asking in Containment or Liberation? disparagingly,

Who would willingly suffer, sacrifice and die for containment? The very notion is ridiculous. The average man cannot even understand the policy of containment, much less be willing to die for it. Will the captives of the Kremlin risk death for a policy that starts by abandoning them to the usurpers of their freedom? Will the citizens of the western nations die willingly for the sake of running all over the earth to put out fires started by a gang of arsonists who are declared in advance to be immune in their own persons?¹¹⁸

Liberation represented for Burnham, as well as for Jackson, a motive force, a spirit that could summon the resting Allied soldiers of 1945 and renew their sacrificial quest against a new implacable enemy. As an objective of “cold war,” however—that is, war professedly without bloodshed—“a policy of liberation” could not but be faced with a crisis of form. If “liberation” was not to be a form of war talk, then what would be its form? Jackson’s intervention in this crisis was to seize upon the language of action and adventure, as well as economy and prosperity, to envision a policy of liberation that could win the war with the Soviets without having to fight it with guns and bombs. Furthermore, he envisioned a scenario that could overcome the aporia implicit in the debate between the ideas of Burnham and Kennan, one where opportunistic and aggressive contingent political action could remake the structures of world power through changing the climate of world opinion.

Jackson’s approach represented the culmination of a “political warfare” mentality, as it presumed the pivotal front of the Cold War was the purportedly nonrational sphere of fear, desire, and hope. To be sure, his own motives for advocating a “cold war” policy of liberation included fear of war, a desire to steer clear of a policy that would result in mass bloodshed. “I would not feel so strongly about all of this,” he wrote Rostow in 1962, “if I did not have another firm belief, namely, that the end of the road on which we are now embarked is war—war under what will by then be appallingly difficult conditions.” He predicted that “untold millions” of Americans would die. Yet, he insisted to Rostow, the Soviets fear war even more, and thus there was an imperative for the United States to act aggressively, positively, and adventurously:

As rulers of a slave empire, they know that the inevitable dislocations of war, unless they could totally knock us out with the first blow, will cause the slaves to rise (I am not talking about the Russian people), and they know they could not cope with 100-million slaves on the rampage plus a deadly serious war with U.S. military might.

If our leaders could get themselves to believe this firmly, a lot of the salami type decisions would not only be made quickly, but would be made positively instead of negatively. As things stand now, we have allowed the enemy to smell our fear and act accordingly, instead of creating situations where we could smell their fear. I can hear the dialogue in the White House or State: “A good idea, Mr. President, (Mr. Secretary), but isn’t this precisely the kind of provocation that would bring about the kind of Soviet reaction that could quickly escalate into World War III.” End of discussion. End of project. It is this constantly exuded fear which the enemy smells. Things would be far different if we had the odor of their fear in our nostrils.¹¹⁹

Jackson’s rhetorical reconstruction of liberation was therefore a psychological warfare tactic: convince the enemy of your fearlessness. But it also represented a kind of therapeutic tactic at home: namely, convince yourself of the enemy’s fear. In both cases, it presupposed the pivotal power of the nonrational.

In Jackson’s view the Eisenhower years were for the most part characterized by “salami type decisions” with respect to the conduct of foreign policy. The administration ground together various perspectives and packaged them as policy. Orchestrated, focused, and proactive policies, he felt, suffered the fate of the grinder more readily than lazy or defensive ones. Of Eisenhower he wrote Luce in 1956,

I don’t seem to be able to get across to that genuinely modest man that “one individual can do a hell of lot, particularly if he is President of the US.”

I know that if Eisenhower had a dramatic instinct comparable to FDR’s, I would probably be the first to deplore it, but between that and the Eisenhower dramatic absolute zero lies an awful lot of legitimate theater, sorely needed right now.¹²⁰

Eisenhower, Jackson concluded, was an ineffective Cold War leader because he lacked a knack for the dramatic—he could not effectively exploit the power of the nonrational. In fact, in light of what revisionist historians of Eisenhower revealed some time ago, it is probable that the problem was not so much presidential passivity or even a lack of the dramatic, but presidential caution, especially with respect to fiscal matters. Eisenhower may have also detected a certain incoherence at the heart of Jackson’s vision of liberation as political-economic adventure, wary as the former was of public initiatives that could ultimately compromise the ideal of liberal freedom.¹²¹

In a March 1962 speech at Purdue University, Rostow, who was then working on Kennedy’s international development programs, reflected Jackson’s sentiments about the course Cold War policy should take (which, of course, were Rostow’s as much as Jackson’s). He described Kennedy’s new foreign policy in this way: “We are working toward a positive strategy which takes into account the forces at work in our environment and seeks to shape them constructively to our own purposes and interests—as a nation and as members of a community committed to the principles of national independence and human freedom.” Success in this enterprise, he argued, depended on marrying the “forces of history” to positive and creative American interventions in the world’s crises. Thus blending the structural and contingent perspectives on the Cold War, Rostow hinged the future of the Cold War on, of all things, American wit. Historical forces “are working our way,” he claimed, “if we have the wit to work with them.”¹²²

Indeed, whatever our judgments about what Kennedy was really up to in foreign affairs, as evidenced here and in his message to Jackson that “the SOBs who fought C. D. and I are at their weakest point ever,” in 1962 and 1963, Rostow believed the Kennedy administration would finally fulfill the vision he had developed alongside Jackson during the Eisenhower years. And yet this vision entailed its own incoherence: for can a powerful nation act with “wit” without consigning its “partners,” “allies,” or objects of interest at least partially to the status of unknowing actors in the performance of the nation’s script? And does not this contradict “human freedom” and “liberation,” which assert autonomy from such dominance and manipulation? Indeed, while the reconstruction of “liberation” as a political-economic adventure represented a rhetorical success in one sense, merging as it did the idea of liberation with those of economic enterprise and reconciling in its own way contingent and structural perspectives on Cold War policy, it could not but represent an ethical contradiction. Ironically, in seizing on the content of liberation and giving it new form, Jackson, Rostow, and their allies risked a self-defeating rhetorical enterprise, for by abandoning ethical consistency, they eviscerated liberation’s moral integrity, and thus could not but weaken its rhetorical and aesthetic power in American foreign policy discourse.