Later, as will be described, the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs was supplemented by a Psychological Strategy Board outside of the Department of State and still later by a White House assistant in charge of informational policies at the highest level.

What can be said of this first U.S. peacetime performance in the propaganda field?

The Assistant Secretaries themselves have been men of varied capacities and interests. Mr. Barrett was an OWI veteran and a journalist of high standing. George Allen was a tough-minded career diplomat. Howland Sargeant was a distinguished government official. William Benton was the founder of the most successful "canned" music system for restaurants and the most vigorous promoter which the Encyclopædia Britannica ever had; later he became a Senator. Men such as these can scarcely be called tight-lipped fanatics emerging from the hidden recesses of a U.S. "Politburo." They and their colleagues did a surprisingly good job.

American travelers overseas were often amazed to find that the U.S. propaganda effort was far more polished and purposeful than an observer within the United States could expect it to be. The activities of the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs consisted of supervising the domestic origination of broadcasts directed to the Soviet Union, the satellite countries, neutrals, and friends. The radio system was generally known as the Voice of America. To this degree he had charge of a propaganda system operated within the United States by Americans, but speaking to foreigners, sometimes by transmitters located within the USA and more often with relay transmitters which picked up programs originating in the continental United States and rebroadcast overseas.

One echelon removed, there were installations attached to the diplomatic and consular establishments of the United States which were usually known as USIS although in some particular cases quasi-private facilities were sponsored instead. In each foreign country there was at the embassy or legation level a Public Affairs Officer (PAO) who was the information specialist for the diplomatic mission and—in theory at least—in charge of all U.S. propaganda or informational activities, whichever one preferred to call them, in the country to which he was accredited.

A complex hierarchy of officials routed, relayed, screened, and coordinated programs from headquarters to the PAOs in the field and proposals or requests from the PAOs back to headquarters.

After all, what is one to do? Is it valid to "propagandize" our innocently cherubic service personnel abroad whom so many domestic purity leagues and local pressure groups are anxious to defend? After all, these service people possess fearful weapons. Each has a Congressman to whom he might write. But if service personnel in a foreign country are to be given nonpropaganda materials, how can the same area be given propaganda materials for the benefit of the indigenous personnel? The propaganda from the United States Government must not be too much at variance with the "nonpropaganda" of the United States Government. If the two extremes of communication were too far apart, the United States Government might look like an ass. That would be most unhappy.

Over and above the contradictions and difficulties involved in the operation of at least two governmental systems and many private systems of U.S. news communication and dissemination systems in foreign areas, there is the further problem of additional U.S. facilities. Sources such as The Washington Post, Joseph Alsop, James Reston, and other well-informed Washington journalists often hinted gloomily and darkly that U.S. cloak-and-dagger operations are still going on; Dorothy Thompson was often troubled by what she regarded as the feckless successors of the wartime OSS. Many times Americans resident in local areas concerned seemed never to have heard of the hush-hush operations in their own overseas homes, operations which were denounced with purple prose in Washington; we can say that covert operations, when they have been really uncovered, as in the case of the Time story about overzealous U.S. support of a German nationalist resistance group, turn out to be much more pale than the lurid columnists or inside stories from Washington would lead one to believe.

More serious have been the duplication, and triplication, and occasional quadruplication of official informational activities. The overseas economic and military aid program, known successively as Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), Mutual Security Administration (MSA) and Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) has not only supplemented the existing leaflet, broadcast, and other informational activities of the State Department and the armed forces with a third set of information programs; it has itself had a fourth rival in the Point Four administration, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), which was both a part of State and not a part of State, depending upon the particular situation overseas.

The advantage of the RFE and RFA type of operation is that by giving voice to independent nongovernmental resistance to Communism it has often been possible to go far beyond the limits which intergovernmental protocol would impose upon U.S. official broadcasts. That is, the United States can scarcely describe a deputy minister in the Rumanian Government as a scoundrel, thief, pervert, or renegade; Rumanian exiles allowed access to Radio Free Europe stations need have no such limitations. On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Radio Free Europe, because of its U.S.-based finance and management might lend an unnecessary U.S. sponsorship to genuinely independent anti-Communist undertakings. Here again, as in the case of the reconciliation of the State Department and Defense broadcasts, it is impossible to draw a doctrinal rule which would prescribe on one hand that all propaganda broadcasts should be unofficial or that they should all be official. One cannot even say that they should all be coordinated.

The report, released in July 1953, pointed out the Psychological Strategy Board had erred in trying to plan informational activities in its own light instead of considering the informational aspects of every single U.S. Government activity possessing international significance. The report recommended the replacement of the Psychological Strategy Board by a more realistic policy-coordinating organization which would coordinate not merely propaganda policies, but all policies and, having coordinated all policies, would then resolve upon maximum psychological exploitation of the policies which had been decided.

In a sense this is rather like saying that the United States should have a President, since the powerful chief executive of this government has, since 1789, been the final arbiter of executive matters, both foreign and domestic. In another sense it can be interpreted to mean that the responsibilities of the Presidency are so great that no one man could perform in his head all the staff work necessary to see through the opinion-reactions which might develop abroad to U.S. executive decisions made here at home. If the latter supposition is true, it means that the United States is saddled with one more intricate governmental process made necessary by the closeness, dangerousness, and importance of international affairs in the lives of Americans and their government.

In so far as this development represented an attempt to coordinate the framing of U.S. Government policy in such a manner as to achieve maximum impact on the rest of the world, it represented a major step forward. The de-emphasis of "psychological warfare" or "psychological strategy" as operations which could somehow or other be efficacious without a context of material support through the real-life behavior of the Government issuing the propaganda was a healthy sign indeed.

Psychological warfare is at best a cumbersome and pretentious label for an important modern political and military weapon, the use of mass communication. The definition of empirical "psychological warfare" given in Chapter 3, and reproduced as it was originally written in 1946, makes it perfectly plain that the term acquires specificity which is made plain by the particular individualities involved undertaking the operation at any given time: psychological warfare is not an ancient term which is so well defined by the usage of centuries that modern men would be ill advised to redefine it or to sweep it aside.52

Indeed, the basic weakness of the term psychological warfare is its pretentiousness within American civilization of the 1900s. No one now knows whether the United States of the 1960s will turn out to be dynamic, forward-looking, insistent upon its own view of the world. It is difficult in the 1950s to see how the next decade or so could bring forth anything as explosive or violent in the social and political field as the atomic bomb has been in the field of fission. The United States certainly does not seem to be on the threshold of a new Islam. For better or for worse, the U.S. strengths are the strengths of sobriety, calmness, health. They are the strengths of living as opposed to the strengths of revolution. Revolution may be strong; it may even be pleasurable to some persons involved, but as Denis W. Brogan has pointed out in his The Price of Revolution (Boston, 1952), revolution has a cost factor which must be weighed against the results expected from it.

In the context of mid-twentieth century affairs it is almost pitiable and endearing to see us Americans of this time, who are so little given to the drama of fanaticism or the salvation of the world through cruelty, attempting to dramatize our own modest and reasonable operations by giving them melodramatic and pretentious labels. If the Communists torment us long enough they may make us into alert brutes; this seems doubtful now. It seems probable that we will continue to be brave without becoming fiendish in combat, strong without becoming ferocious in peace.

Varying definitions of PsyWar are adopted by official agencies from time to time. The current (1953) Joint Chiefs of Staff definition runs as follows:

"Psychological warfare comprises the planned use of propaganda and related informational measures designed to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of enemy or other foreign groups in such a way as to support the accomplishment of national policies and aims, or a military mission."

This definition differs from the one given in Chapter 3 in the following important respects: it stresses the planned character of PsyWar; it restricts the pertinent measures to those of an informational character; and it makes clear the operational goals. It is not clear why it is necessary to stress the element of planning of PsyWar as distinguished from other sorts of war, unless it is a homily to the PsyWar operator to keep his functions in line with those of other national activities. The question of restriction to informational character is more serious; it excludes the interpretation that in essence, psychological warfare depends upon warfare psychologically waged. Thus, substantive operations of a noninformational character, adopted and executed primarily for their psychological effect, could properly be called PsyWar. Finally, the specification of goals is chiefly important for the control of the function, and can largely be taken for granted. Therefore, to preserve an inclusive view of the function which will comprise the range of variation in official definitions—including those of one's enemies—the author stands by the definition stated in 1946.

A republic cannot impose a purpose upon mankind.

A democracy cannot enounce a policy and then stick to it for years and decades.

Americans are not Messiahs. The limitations of American civilization over and above our specific political institutions are such as to make it impossible for Americans to lead a fanatical counter-crusade against Communism, or to guarantee to the human race at large that Americans of 1955 promise that Americans of 1975 will perform this or that specific action.54

American propaganda is always limited precisely because it is American. Even in an age of atomic weapons, to be American means, to some degree at least, to be free. The people of this country, or at the very least an awful lot of them, do have something to do with operating the government. A new election and a hostile House of Representatives can cut off the funds for any project no matter what its merits may be in the eyes of the top-secret planners. The outside world knows this even if Washington politicians and bureaucrats sometimes forget. One can even contradict the title of Archibald MacLeish's famous poem, America Was Promises, and state categorically that in the propaganda field, America certainly is not promises. The promise of a tsar or a dictator is usually good for his lifetime, whereas the promise of the United States is good only within the letter of the law—a specific treaty, a definite commercial agreement, a very sharp and very narrow commitment.

There is an American strength in international affairs. This strength does not lie in a propaganda capacity to promise, to threaten, or to commit the United States Government to future courses of action. It lies, rather, in the immense probabilities of American life, in the virtual certainty that the American people will react in such and such a fashion to a new aggression, that the American people will (if attacked) in all probability destroy their attackers, whoever those attackers may be, and that the American people, despite their occasional shortcomings in matters of racial tolerance, political freedom, and economic injustice, will in the long run be solidly ranged behind whatever policies seem to promise equality, prosperity, and freedom for all mankind.

The limitations of the United States as a source of propaganda are sharp. There is no U.S. party line; it is virtually impossible to imagine that within our civilization as we now know it there could be one. There might be an official U.S. line, unanimous and binding upon all federal departments, but the federal government itself is, after all, only one among the forty-nine separate governments operating within the continental USA. The state governments, the cities within them, and the people at large are free to contradict what the federal government may say at any given point.

American strength cannot be sought in unanimity. U.S. propaganda is incapable of pulling the Sudeten rabbit out of a Munich hat. Short of an intimate and extreme danger of war itself, the U.S. Government cannot threaten a foreign government very successfully; too many U.S. citizens would immediately shout at one another, at their own government, and to the foreigners concerned: "Those Washington officials don't really mean it! We don't want war. We're not going to go through with it." If the USA moved against Spain, there are friends of Franco in Washington who would tell him to sit tight; if the USA moved too rapidly against the Communist world, there are plenty of Americans, both in and out of government, who would say privately, through the press, or by letters that the Indian Government or some other should assure Moscow and Peip'ing that the U.S. would not dare carry through.

Exploitation of U.S. propaganda strength must therefore always be developed from the probable or apparent "center" of American opinion at that moment. It is impossible to find a U.S. policy which can be made compulsory and unanimous upon all Americans both public and private. It is not impossible through an adroit combination of the skills of leadership, foresight, and a keen awareness of intra-U.S. politics to devise foreign-policy programs which will command the decisive assent of the American people.

Once war breaks out, the American people have in the past shown a very good capacity to unite in winning and finishing the war. There is no reason to suppose that the situation will be different in the future. What is perplexing, and for the present insoluble, is this: how can the American people, short of getting involved in war, become so purposeful, so decisive, so nearly unanimous, as to take actions which will prevent a war? The situation in the early 1950s is on the Communist side a major crusade against what the Reds regarded, or pretended to regard, as "aggressive" U.S. capitalist power.

In other words, the Communists of the world had a crusade against the USA. The USA had a crusade against no one. A prominent Washington official long displayed the sign in his office: I Ain't Mad at Nobody. In a very real sense this epitomized one of the very real moods of the American people. How do we defend ourselves against a crusade, especially if we have no desire to have part in a counter-crusade?

U.S. propagandists sometimes forget that they are not speaking for a mere nation, but are the representatives of something which is far bigger than any single nationality—they are the spokesmen, whether they like it or not, for a way of life which is new in the world, for a kind of freedom which, though coarse, is real. Characteristic American strengths have been, are, and will be the strengths of patience, endurance, versatility, and curiosity. It is foolish to ask Americans to be strong in bitterness, strong in hatred, strong in a cruel or proud self-righteousness. We are not Japanese, or Prussians, or Russians; we are not Irish, or English, or French; we are mostly European and yet un-European. Our propaganda will be effective only if it springs from the simplest and strongest aspects of our life at home. Our material prosperity is beyond doubt; what is not so evident to the outside world is the frugality, the kindliness, and the humble foresight which drove so much of that prosperity into being.

This is, of course, not true.

The Swedes were very good friends of the Norwegians. Nevertheless, the Swedes saved their Swedish skins by sitting back when the Nazis overran Norway.

Did Lithuania have an enemy? Did Latvia have an enemy? Did Estonia have an enemy? These countries were the good friends of all the Western powers. These countries have disappeared.

The United States was a friend of China, a friendship boastfully and sentimentally proclaimed for more than a hundred years, from the days of Daniel Webster to the finale of George C. Marshall. What use was it to the Chinese to have the United States as a friend? When they fell upon trouble, a U.S. Secretary of State denounced their government as corrupt and told the Chinese how good the United States was.

Friendship does not usually lead to war or peace. War and peace depend upon survival. Any veteran will remember men whom he disliked intensely in his own wartime outfits: he never day-dreamed of turning them over to the enemy just because he was personally antagonistic to them. A common danger from something—more complicatedly, a common interest in something—is a far more potent assurance of future strength and strategic action than is friendship.

Friendship operates between individuals, not between the overgrown corporate fictions which are called nations.

If you were a West German, and if you were absolutely positive that all Americans were lovely people, you would be wise to join the Soviet side. That way, if the Russians win, you will have appeased the enigmatic and implacable Muscovites. On the other hand, if the Americans win and you are sure they are lovely people as well as good friends of yours, they will not really mind your having joined the other side as a matter of temporary factual necessity. If a man is your best friend he may jump into the river to rescue you, should you fall in; unfortunately, he might prefer to telephone a rescue squad. But if he is handcuffed to you, you are reasonably sure that if you fall in he will be with you.

Call it propaganda, call it information, call it international communication—under any name the major point remains: Americans can find trustworthy future allies through commitment to common interest or common danger. Friendship is pleasant, but not of the essence. In some cases it might be desirable for leaders or key groups in important foreign areas to realize that the United States could be a worse enemy than the Soviet Union, rather than to realize that the U.S. is a friend. If the French were sure of this—that is, that a Soviet-occupied France would get sixty-five hydrogen bombs dropped on it while a U.S.-occupied France would get only three—they might prefer the Americans whether they liked them or not.

Is this kind of communication consistent with American ideals? Perhaps not. Yet honesty has always been one of the American ideals and perhaps honesty may take us in the future to a stronger and a wiser position than friendliness has taken us in the past.

CHAPTER 16
Research, Development, and the Future

Psychological warfare is part of civilization. Civilization, no matter how one defines it, is not a static thing. It is an immense fermenting, active, often turbulent composite of the whys and hows of the way men and women think and behave. The short-run factors in a civilization are often as important as the long-run ones. Though the United States from 1860 to 1960 has been a steady part of the west European, predominantly Christian civilization, the United States has undergone immense changes of fashion, belief, appetite, preference, and behavior. With any changing, developing civilization, "war" may seem like a very static term, so that the Civil War and the war of the Western powers against Germany of 1939-45 may to some degree seem comparable phenomena. They are comparable, but only within sharp limits.

War is coming to mean the effectuation or prevention of revolution, not the half-savage, half-courteous armed conflict of sovereign nations. War is getting to be chronic again.55 War between entirely comparable states such as the United States and Canada, Mexico and Cuba, Indonesia and India, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, or any similar combination, is getting to be more and more unthinkable. War between ideologically dissimilar states, such as North Korea and South Korea, Communist China and Nationalist China, Viet Minh and Viet Nam, USSR and USA, is getting to be virtual normality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the discussion of tensions as a cause of war. Tension certainly contributed very much to the outbreak of war in 1914. It is possible that the tensions and hostilities of Europe in the 1930s which allowed Fascism and Communism to become threatening and powerful also contributed in the end to the outbreak of war in 1939. It is difficult, however, to suppose that the coming of war in September 1939 was itself the result of tension except as a very remote and indirect cause. This author believes that tension leads to a perpetuation of a kind of civilization in which wars are possible, but cannot persuade himself that an additional factor of tension within civilization as we know it can be an immediate cause of war.57

Research into tensions has been carried fairly far. It may be that the wartime role of tension can be ascertained by scientific methods, so that the psychological warfare of Power A can cause so much more tension than Power B, either among the élite or among the general population, that Power B cannot further continue the war. Alternatively, it is imaginable that Power A may be able to relax tension so sharply among the élite or broad population of Power B that Power B's potentiality for war, or decision to wage war, can be postponed.

For purposes of research it seems worthwhile to suggest that tension appears to be highly prevalent in the two most powerful military civilizations on earth today: the USSR and its satellites, on the one hand, and the cluster of Western powers, on the other. Tension appears to be caused by the complexity of every-day life, the demands made upon the psychophysiological organization of each individual human being, by the technological facilities available, and through the relief offered within each civilization by the opportunity to discharge hatred against members of the other civilization instead of recognizing self-hatred for the very real problem which it is.

In other terms, it is tough to be modern; the difficulty of being modern makes it easy for individuals to be restless and anxious; restlessness and anxiety lead to fear; fear converts freely into hate; hate very easily takes on political form; political hate assists in the creation of real threats such as the atomic bomb and guided missiles, which are not imaginary threats at all; the reality of the threats seems to confirm the reality of the hate which led to it, thus perpetuating a cycle of insecurity, fear, hate, armament, insecurity, fear, and on around the circle again and again.

It would be unwise of U.S. military and political leaders to overlook developing strengths within American every-day talk and thinking, whether academic or popular. Too specific a concentration on the problem of winning a war may cause a leader or his expert consultants to concentrate on solutions derived from past experience, therewith leading him to miss new and different solutions which might be offered by his own time. Changes need not always be thought of as weaknesses, which they are if past criteria are retained as absolute standards. Men born in the period 1910-20 may have endowments which are not commonly found among men born in the period 1930-40, yet it is entirely possible that the generation born during 1930-40 may have capacities and resistances which the older generation does not altogether appreciate.

Apply this concept to Communism. Communism loses strength every day that it exists: each day deprives it of novelty, each day makes it a littler more familiar, each day makes its leaders one day older. If Americans can learn how to be flexible and imaginative and to understand themselves as they really are, they might find that the real American appeal to the youth of the world would be much greater than the Communist appeal. It was unfortunately characteristic of the United States in the early 1950s of the Cold War that U.S. propaganda was based on ideals and standards older than the ideals and standards competitively presented by the Communists, and that therefore in many parts of the world the struggle between Americans and Communists appeared to be a struggle on our side of the old against the young. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United States army in Korea in 1950-53 was one of the most revolutionary armies in history, an army dedicated to non-victory, pledging allegiance to a shadowy world government of the United Nations behind the practical reality of the government of the United States. Perhaps never before in many centuries have men fought so matter-of-factly, so calmly, so reasonably. They fought well and did not need to be jazzed up with the hashish of "making the world safe for Democracy" or "establishing the Four Freedoms."

The temper of the U.S. forces in Korea in 1951 was demonstrated by a Reserve sergeant who scarcely knew he was in the Reserves until he was on a boat bound for Pusan. He was a practical man, anxious to get home, but willing to do his share in this war as long as he had to. He was given the assignment of testing the voice plane of U.S. headquarters at Taegu. The loudspeaker was not working quite right, and he was instructed to test the plane at 500, 1,000 and 1,500 feet. The plane flew low over U.S. headquarters. The roar of the engines almost deafened everyone within the building, yet even above the roar of the engines there could be heard the bone-chilling hum of the silent loudspeaker—an immense magnification of the noise one hears from a radio set which is turned on without being tuned to a station. Everyone expected the sergeant to say, "This is the EUSAK voice plane testing; one-ah, two-ah, three-ah!" Instead the immense voice came through clearly, through brick, and plaster, and wood, through air and trees. It must have reached four miles. The gigantic voice of the sergeant seemed to roar over half of South Korea as he said, "Why—don't—you—imperialist—sons o' bitches—go—back—to—Wall-Street—where—you—belong?" It was said that fifty colonels grabbed for their phones simultaneously, but the purely American gimmick to the whole story lay in the fact that the sergeant was not punished. No damage was done. The Americans thought their enemies were funny or silly. We had shown that we were not afraid of Communist ideas. Several South Koreans told the author that they regarded the Americans as inscrutable people indeed.

The development of modern civilization is certain to have developments in war both as to the purpose of war and as to the modes of war. It seems likely that in the face of the supreme danger of atomic and thermonuclear weapons nations will resort more and more to small wars and semi-war operations which will offer the opportunity of strategic advantage without the cataclysmic danger of a world-wide showdown. In a very hush-hush way the U.S. Army is looking into the possibilities of small and irregular kinds of war; security regulations prohibit the author from discussing some of the interesting new developments in this field.

Within the general research field, two basic approaches have been recognized by the U.S. Army as being distinct from one another: developmental research and operations research. Developmental research consists of that research which creates new weapons, new methods of war, new devices or procedures, doing so by digging through modern science, investigating its applicability to military problems, and then advancing the frontier of science, when necessary, in the military interest. The goals of operations research are more modest and, in some respect, more provocative. Operations research takes operations as they exist and reexamines them from beginning to end to discover how much of each operation is scientifically pertinent to its stated goal, what economies, modifications, or changes might be introduced, and how the operation might be improved.

Developmental research had a great deal to offer, but the gap between initial scientific advance and practical military application appeared to be too broad to warrant the assumption that the research had transformed the U.S. PsyWar program.

Among other things, Army officers in the PsyWar field showed, early in the Korean war, that land forces possessed tactical opportunities which combat propaganda could exploit very effectually. Various experiments were tried, none of them so decisive as to affect the outcome of the war, but some of them of real tactical value and others of great importance in obtaining Chinese prisoners.

One of the points examined was surrender as a process. Surrendering does not depend upon the disposition of the individual enemy soldier to say yes or no to the war as a whole. He could say no a thousand times and still be on the other side shooting at us.

The actual physical process of surrender is an elaborate one consisting of the psychological processes of getting ready to give up on the other side, the physical capacity to surrender when the opportunity for getting captured presents itself, and the alternative, more difficult process of deliberately leaving the other side and getting to our side alive. In 1951 and 1952 there were considerable developments along this line. Americans learned much about how to teach enemy soldiers to surrender. Late in 1952 and early in 1953 the front had become so static that it took extraordinary heroism for soldiers—outside of a tiny minority engaged in reconnaissance patrols—to get away from their own side and surrender to the enemy without being killed by their friends as deserters or by the enemy as sneak attackers.

The U.S. public did not realize that throughout the Korean war the Communists—Russian, North Korean, and Chinese—enjoyed a distinct radio advantage over the UN side both as to funds available for programs and as to number of station-hours on the air. The language gap between the Americans and Chinese was so extreme that it was hard for Americans to realize that the Chinese broadcasts covered wider audiences and covered them better than did our own. American restraint in this field may have been dictated in part by the fact that the war was a limited war consisting of combat only with those armed Chinese Communists on North Korean territory, but not with armed Chinese Communists elsewhere in the Far East.