A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society. by Matthew W. Dunne (review)

In 1954, 21 U.S. soldiers captured by Communist forces during the Korean War refused repatriation and chose instead to remain behind the so-called Bamboo Curtain. Along with other examples of disloyalty among captured U.S. personnel, the actions of these soldiers generated a firestorm in the U.S. press as journalists such as Edward Hunter argued that Communist captors must have used advanced psychological conditioning (what he termed "brainwashing") to turn once loyal U.S. citizens against their own country. In A Cold War State of Mind, historian Matthew Dunne explores in detail the panic these news stories produced in the United States. Although scholars such as Susan Carruthers and Ron Robin have covered parts of this story, Dunne provides a much more comprehensive account, using an impressive array of sources, from Hollywood prisoner of war (POW) films, congressional debates, journalist accounts, courtroom documents, and much more, to demonstrate the history of this odd but important moment in the early Cold War. The strength of Dunne's book is his argument that the Korean War brainwashing scandal was more than just a minor episode that reflected a fleeting moment of paranoia. Rather, it was one of the key ways the Communist peril was constructed in U.S. public discourse. Already portrayed as a godless, totalitarian threat, the Communist menace was, in the aftermath of the Korean War, envisioned as a psychological threat too, maintaining the loyalty of its followers at home and abroad through manipulative psychological practices.

In this sense, the Cold War, according to Dunne, was just as much a psychological war as a military and economic conflict. As he notes, brainwashing became an obvious answer to explain any success by the international Communist movement around the world and any forms of political disloyalty at home. For Dunne, brainwashing "served as symbolic and metaphoric shorthand for the differences between democracy and Communism" (p. 50). If anything, Dunne underestimates how deeply this image of brainwashing seeped into public discourse, appearing in literary fiction, Supreme Court decisions, psychology textbooks, police interrogation manuals, religious texts, and more, and he sometimes overlooks the ways this discourse changed government policy. For instance, Dunne underemphasizes how the panic affected the U.S. military and generally brushes over the cantankerous debate about the passage and implementation of the U.S. Armed Forces Code of Conduct, which was instituted in 1955 in response to the POW experience in the Korean War. New survival training programs, such as the one at Stead Air Force Base, were not short-lived, as Dunne claims, but were quickly incorporated throughout the armed forces. Similarly, Dunne might have looked beyond the domestic arena and examined how changes in U.S. foreign policy, particularly the efforts of the Eisenhower administration to promote cultural diplomacy through the United States Information Agency, were driven in part by the events in Korea.

In the second part of his book, Dunne switches focus and examines how the concept of brainwashing was invoked to denounce the negative impact of mass media and large-scale political and economic institutions on the personal autonomy of Americans. As Dunne explains, the Eisenhower administration used the Korean War brainwashing scare to paint a particular image of the Communist enemy but eventually lost control of this narrative as more paranoid voices drowned out more restrained ones. In a reversal, brainwashing soon came to be seen as an internal threat as well, precipitating a panic over the mental and physical strength of U.S. citizens who seemed vulnerable to pernicious psychological influences. Fingers were pointed everywhere—at mothers for coddling their sons, at U.S. schools for weak physical fitness regimens, and at the military for lax training procedures. To prove his point, Dunne unfortunately relies on the most obvious examples from the 1950s, such as the nationwide debates over the impact of comic books on children or subliminal advertising on consumers and points to oft...