Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom": Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950-1960 by Richard H. Cummings (review)

Radio Free Europe's "Crusade for Freedom" is the first book-length chronicle of the domestic campaigns initiated by the Free Europe Committee (FEC, renamed the National Committee for a Free Europe, or NCFE, in 1954) to garner support for Radio Free Europe (RFE), one of the major U.S. international broadcasting stations during the Cold War. Richard H. Cummings acknowledges childhood exposure to Crusade for Freedom (CFF) advertisements designed to inspire Americans to underwrite RFE's broadcasts of "'[u]p to 20 hours of truth a day . . . to five key satellite countries— Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary'" (p. 119). In the 1980s and early 1990s, Cummings was director of security at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in Munich. With this volume and his earlier book, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950-1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2009), Cummings joins a small group of former international broadcasting employees and advisers from the United States and East-Central Europe who have compiled historical narratives using RFE and RFE/RL corporate and research department archives, personal papers, and formerly classified government documents that have been made available to researchers in recent years.

Cummings does not analyze the CFF historically or theoretically, but he has created a map for a small but growing number of researchers investigating RFE who work independently of any previous relationship to U.S. international broadcasting. The book is a gift to scholars of communications history and media studies in particular. Cummings chronicles the involvement of Madison Avenue advertising agencies and The Advertising Council, along with the campaign strategies they considered and deployed. From Cummings's text, we can extract the social networks, media tactics, and persuasive rhetoric of CFF campaigns that permeated every level of society, presaging the grassroots organizing and media engagement techniques of today's fundraising and political campaigns.

Armed only with a thinly established bibliography and incomplete organizational and financial records of both the NCFE and the CFF, Cummings faced a formidable task. Documents related to The Advertising Council's involvement in annual fundraising campaigns, records of regional and local organizing committees, the personal papers of officials, and correspondence among campaign participants are scattered in collections across the United States. For instance, after extensive travel and research, Cummings was unable to assemble a complete set of CFF newsletters issued from 1950 through 1962. Even so, Radio Free Europe's Crusade for Freedom tracks the organizational and leadership evolution of the NCFE and the CFF and offers comparative data on annual fundraising goals and results, operating budgets, and covert subsidies from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Most importantly, the book offers a chapter-by-chapter, campaign-by-campaign catalog of the techniques, actors, and events that mobilized support for RFE. The NCFE borrowed U.S. iconography to powerful effect, locating its headquarters in the Empire State Building, tapping the Liberty Bell and tolling a massive facsimile Freedom Bell across America, and asking Americans to become Crusaders for Freedom by wearing campaign buttons, signing "Freedom Scrolls," and composing personal "Freedom Grams" to citizens in East-Central Europe. A national Council of Citizens along with state and local Crusade for Freedom committees mobilized business executives, clergy, the press, and members of labor, civic, women's, and children's organizations. For example, African Americans were enlisted via the National Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, local African-American churches, and celebrities such as Jackie Robinson. U.S. students in elementary through secondary schools competed in essay contests, and Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls, and paperboys went door-to-door. Hollywood celebrities such as Ronald Reagan and Henry Fonda, newscasters such as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and war heroes and politicians of every stripe made personal appeals for "Truth Dollars" (p. 120) in print, on the airwaves, and at "Freedom...