The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955 (review)

For those of you who like reviews that get straight to the point, here we go: Shawn J. Parry-Giles has written an important work that every serious student of rhetoric, the presidency, and the Cold War should read. Unfortunately, this title will not receive the audience it deserves due to the high price the publisher has assigned.

Although Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower are not remembered as the most gifted residents of the White House at rhetorical undertakings, Parry-Giles argues, "Truman and Eisenhower were the first two presidents to introduce and mobilize propaganda as an official peacetime institution. In a 'war of words,' propaganda acted as an integral component of the government's foreign policy operation" (xvii).

In this solidly researched study, drawing on documents housed at the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries as well as at the U.S. National Archives, Parry-Giles calls for an expansion of the traditional understanding of the rhetorical presidency to include covert communication campaigns. In the body of her work, she makes a strong case for her position, showing how propaganda efforts went from a journalist paradigm to a military one when that earlier effort proved ineffective. The journalistic approach was an information campaign designed to get accurate material about the United States, often written or produced by working journalists and appearing in established media outlets. The expectation policymakers had was that such information would work to the advantage of the United States, if they could just get it to foreign audiences. The military way was often called "psychological warfare," was usually covert, and had the main mission of defending U.S. foreign policy.

As the United States militarized its communication campaigns, the propaganda agencies developed efforts to increase dissent behind the Iron Curtain with the overall objective of achieving, according to a document Parry-Giles quotes, the "reversal of Russian communism." She states that this goal was "a key U.S. foreign policy objective" in the 1950s (82). In advancing this idea, Parry-Giles challenges the position that historian John Lewis Gaddis advanced in Strategies of Containment (1981) that U.S. foreign policy objectives were designed to limit Soviet influence rather than destroy the Communist regime. Since then political scientist Greg Mitrovich and others have argued that U.S. policymakers wanted to eliminate the Soviet Union. This work would support this new view of a much more aggressive or combative foreign policy. One of the key considerations in this debate will be the dominant view at the various policymaking levels of the foreign policy bureaucracy. It is one thing for the chair of an interdepartmental group to write that the U.S. government wants to do X, Y, and Z. It is another thing for the president of the United States and his senior advisors to commit the nation to such ambitions. On this matter, Parry-Giles is silent.

Even though this book is an important work, some of Parry-Giles's arguments seemed strained. Her claims that the U.S. propaganda agencies used the New York Times as a way around congressional prohibitions on domestic activities assumes a degree of influence for that paper of which its editors and reporters could only dream. While the Times might be an important outlet of opinion and information and strives to be the paper of record, not many people living in Louisville, Kentucky; San Diego, California; or Houston, Texas, were regular readers—particularly in the era before satellite communications—and could not have been influenced by whatever the staff of that paper put on its pages. More importantly, her claim that propaganda prolonged the Cold War is dubious. The conflicting foreign policy agendas of the United States and the Soviet Union might have had more to do with the duration of this period in international affairs than the information...