Murrow's Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration by Gregory M. Tomlin (review)

The struggle for world opinion constituted a major battlefield of the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union hoped to isolate their chief opponent internationally, influence uncommitted audiences abroad, and simultaneously reassure their respective alliance systems. From 1953 on, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) played a key role in advancing U.S. foreign policy goals through communication with global audiences. By the end of the Eisenhower years, however, USIA's effectiveness was strained by low morale after Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, limited budgets, and bureaucratic infighting. To revitalize USIA, the Kennedy Administration appointed one of America's most famous journalists, Edward R. Murrow, to the helm of the agency. Murrow headed USIA until early 1964, when he retired for health reasons.

Gregory Tomlin's eloquent and thorough analysis explores Murrow's directorship at USIA, years that are all too often treated as a mere afterthought to his brilliant and extraordinary career as a reporter since the days of the London Blitz. In ten chapters Tomlin explores Murrow's work with USIA in chronological fashion. He discusses Murrow's transition from CBS to USIA, his efforts to firmly anchor the agency within Washington's foreign policy decision-making apparatus, his efforts at reshaping hemispheric public diplomacy, Murrow's role in USIA responses to Cold War crises from Berlin to Cuba to Vietnam, and his challenges and successes in diversifying USIA's personnel.

Tomlin describes Murrow as a man of moral integrity and strong convictions. He left CBS after 25 years increasingly alienated by corporate influence in the newsroom. His reporting, in particular his 1960 prize-winning documentary "Harvest of Shame" on the life of migrant workers in the United States, was occasionally criticized for presenting the United States in a less than favorable light. Murrow, on the other hand, insisted that any presentation of life in the United States had to be accurate and to display tensions inherent in a pluralistic society. His appointment as head of USIA was widely lauded. Many contemporaries anticipated that Murrow's celebrity status and journalistic credibility would reflect well on the reception of U.S. public diplomacy abroad.

The new director quickly boosted morale at the agency. He was able to rehire personnel who had been forced out during the McCarthy purges, increased USIA's visibility through membership in the U.S. National Security Council, and recalibrated the agency's program focus away from its Euro-centrism to engage public opinion in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. But despite Murrow's personal integrity and credibility, public diplomacy initially continued to be plagued by its marginalization within the foreign policy decision-making process. In this context Tomlin explores how Murrow's support for John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress as a modernization model of hemispheric cooperation was undermined by his exclusion from important foreign policy decisions, in particular the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in April 1961.

USIA fared better through Murrow's active role during and after the Berlin crisis of 1961. Public diplomacy at this time became an important instrument of Cold War crisis management, as Murrow not only understood the Berlin Wall as a key propaganda opportunity against the USSR but also recognized the simultaneous need to reassure U.S. allies and, in particular, to bolster morale in West Berlin. During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, USIA became an integral part of the Kennedy administration's highest-level deliberations and substantially enhanced U.S. propaganda outreach through its global distribution of reconnaissance evidence for Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Nonetheless, the tensions between Kennedy's overarching concern for political expediency and Murrow's moral stance constituted a persistent challenge to USIA's effectiveness. A typical example was Murrow's approach to ending racism and his concern for a policy response embedded in his witty question, "Is it possible that we concern ourselves too much with outer space...