The Cold War and the US Information Agency (review)

Nicholas Cull, a British scholar who now teaches at the University of Southern California and previously studied and taught at Leeds and Leicester universities in England, has written a well-researched, comprehensive book on the history of the US Information Agency (USIA). It is the first, and so far only, work that relies heavily on documentary sources rather than the personal recollections of a former USIA officer. It is unique, and scholars as well as practitioners of public diplomacy will want to read this insightful and well-written book.

Yet, despite more than one hundred interviews with former USIA officers and others and painstaking research in archival sources, a few important gaps exist. There are, for instance, three decisive events in the history of US information and cultural programs where additional facts would have strengthened Cull’s assessment:

1. 1. The end of World War II

2. 2. The directorship of Arthur Larson

3. 3. State’s coup d’état attempt

Cull describes the fate of the World War I information program, which ended with the conclusion of that war, and he tells us that a similar fate did not befall the World War II programs upon the end of that war. He quotes from a 1945 report by management consultant Arthur W. MacMahon recommending that the wartime information program be retained after the end of the war and states that President Harry Truman accepted the recommendation.

In fact, it was widely assumed that the president’s decision was based on his experience at the three-power conference in Potsdam a few weeks earlier. The overwhelming expectation among Office of War Information (OWI) employees at the time was that the international information programs would not survive the end of the war. Therefore, when President Truman issued Executive Order 9608 on 31 August 1945, which abolished OWI but transferred the overseas information services to the Department of State, his action came as a complete surprise. In the event, the president, after only a couple of months in office, was shocked by Stalin’s inflexible attitude at the Potsdam conference. He became convinced that the postwar situation would not be as harmonious as he had hoped. So, when the question of the future status of the wartime overseas information programs reached his desk, he considered it the better part of wisdom to retain rather than abolish the programs. That was a decision that fundamentally charted the course of American public diplomacy.

After President Eisenhower’s reelection in 1956, with the first USIA director, Theodore Streibert, having resigned, the president appointed Arthur Larson to head USIA. Larson had been undersecretary of labor in the first Eisenhower administration. On 16 April 1957, Larson gave a speech to the Hawaiian Republican Party that nearly destroyed USIA. While Cull reports the speech and the Democratic response in the Senate, the situation was much grimmer than Cull’s narrative might imply. In his Hawaii speech, Larson was quoted as saying that “throughout the New and Fair Deals, this country was in the grip of a somewhat alien philosophy imported from Europe.” That speech irked many observers, including particularly Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that handled USIA. Johnson was instrumental in Congress punishing USIA with a devastating budget cut. This hostile congressional attitude toward Larson had its repercussions not only in USIA but also in the State Department, where Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became concerned about the weakened status of USIA. His assistant secretary of state for public affairs was Andrew Berding, a former assistant director of USIA. Berding kept Dulles informed about the dire budgetary situation in USIA; operations in Europe were to be cut by over 25 percent and other programs heavily reduced. Dulles felt that Larson had to go, and even came up with a possible replacement: the US ambassador to Greece, George V. Allen, who had served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs...