Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (review)

In an article in Life magazine in 1952, the soon-to-be secretary of state John Foster Dulles famously proposed a new Cold War strategy for the United States and its allies. “The free world,” he wrote, “[must] develop the will and organize the means to retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red armies, so that, if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our choosing.” (Quoted in Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles [Boston: Little, Brown, 1973], p. 127.) Known as massive retaliation, this doctrine appeared to be the centerpiece of the so-called New Look of U.S. foreign policy during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Rather than relying on large conventional armies to deter Soviet-bloc aggression, the United States would threaten to use nuclear weapons to end Cold War crises and military confrontations in its favor. In light of the potentially cataclysmic outcome of massive retaliation, it is not surprising that the doctrine has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Perhaps too much attention, suggests historian Kenneth Osgood in Total Cold War, his impressive new history of key elements of Eisenhower’s foreign policy. In the book, Dulles’s apparent bellicosity and Eisenhower’s acceptance of massive retaliation are eclipsed by the two men’s shared belief that the real Cold War was being fought off the battlefield. Eisenhower wondered what would happen if the Soviet Union used political methods, as in Czechoslovakia, to advance the spread of Communism. Dulles himself later stated: “There was a great danger that we should so focus our eyes on the military aspects of the struggle that we lose the cold war which is actually being waged, forgetting that an actual military conflict may never be waged” (p. 333).

As Osgood convincingly demonstrates, the Eisenhower administration developed and deployed a striking array of psychological warfare (psywar) and propaganda activities to fulfill U.S. Cold War goals. The cultural, psychological, and ideological struggle to win the allegiance and support of the peoples of the world was just as significant as the economic, military, and political conflict between the Communist and Western blocs. Eisenhower throughout his presidency not only enthusiastically advocated the use of psywar and propaganda, but also directly involved himself in the drafting and execution of many programs and initiatives. The book’s presentation reinforces the “hidden hand” interpretation of Eisenhower, but Osgood parts way with the revisionists on a key issue. Eisenhower, he argues, was not interested in ending the Cold War by reaching a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, as Stephen Ambrose, Robert Divine, and Richard Immerman have contended. Instead, the president, according to Osgood, wanted to win the Cold War through psywar and propaganda. This is a bold thesis, and for the most part Osgood substantiates it. He scoured the Eisenhower Presidential Library and the National Archives and examined records relating to psywar and propaganda campaigns previously unexplored by historians. Furthermore, his wide reading in the field of communication studies enables him to provide interdisciplinary context for his concept of “total cold war.” The result is a profound and important study of U.S. foreign policy during the 1950s.

Osgood organizes his narrative and analysis along several related themes. First, rapid advances in communications technology, most prominently radio and television broadcasting, allowed the great powers to mold global public opinion through propaganda, which some policymakers labeled the “fourth weapon” of U.S. foreign policy (the three others were military, political, and economic programs). Second, propaganda became an essential, though not always visible, component of seemingly unrelated programs such as nuclear energy, the nuclear arms race, and outer space exploration. Third, to understand the totality of propaganda and psywar, it is necessary to examine in detail their implementation, not just the basic policy and aims. Closely related to this point is the nexus between state and private or corporate initiatives, as well...