The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2017 89 Bay of Pigs fiasco; construction of the Berlin Wall; the Cuban Missile Crisis; nuclear testing and arms control; and the Vietnam War. Tomlin’s take on each policy, and on USIA’s effec- tiveness in selling the U.S. line under Murrow’s leader- ship, is tough but fair. For example, despite the good intentions underlying the Alliance for Progress, he considers it a noble failure. Tomlin faces a stiff challenge in dis- cussing the Cuban Missile Crisis: Mur- row was seriously ill in October 1962 with what was diagnosed as pneumo- nia at the time, but was very likely the lung cancer that would force the heavy smoker to resign in early 1964 and kill him the next year. Deftly working around that obstacle, Tomlin shows how well the bureaucratic and journalistic structures Murrow had established at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (USIA’s symbolically rich street address) functioned during the crisis, even in his absence. Two other chapters examine USIA’s domestic operations. The first, “Mr. Murrow Goes to Hollywood,” docu- ments Murrow’s campaign to entice the film and television industries to collaborate more closely with Uncle Sam. (As Murrow commented in 1962, “I don’t mind being called a propa- gandist, so long as the propaganda is based on the truth.”) Thanks largely to Mulling Over the Murrow Myth Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration Gregory M. Tomlin, Potomac Books, 2016, $34.95/hardcover, $24.07/ Kindle, 400 pages. Reviewed By Steven Alan Honley In March 1961 America’s most promi- nent and respected journalist, Edward R. Murrow, ended a 25-year career with the Columbia Broadcasting System to serve President John F. Kennedy as director of the United States Informa- tion Agency. This exhaustive (and, at times, exhausting) work assesses Murrow’s efforts to improve the global perception of the United States as a way to advance U.S. foreign policy. Gregory M. Tomlin, its author, is a former assistant professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Even if the book jacket had not told me that, I would have guessed something of the sort from Tomlin’s faithful adherence to the military brief- ing model of “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; then tell ’em what you just told ’em!” The result is a book that has many virtues, but also requires considerable tenacity to fully appreciate its insights. Happily, Tomlin’s introduction, “Public Diplomacy for a New Frontier,” is a model of clarity and cogency—almost worth the price of the book by itself. His overview of how public diplomacy evolved during the 20th century is one of the best explanations of that develop- ment I’ve ever run across. For most of Murrow’s Cold War , Tomlin devotes chapters to case studies of Pres. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Prog- ress” outreach to Latin America and the BOOKS his personal connections, that outreach was quite fruitful. The second, titled simply “Birmingham,” addresses one of Murrow’s finest hours as USIA direc- tor. Despite great pressure from both the White House and Congress to stand down, he insisted that the Voice of America must cover the civil rights movement—and its bloody repression by Southern demagogues— fully and objectively. As Murrow explained during a Feb. 26, 1962, address congratulating VOA employees on the 20th anniversary of their broadcast service: “It is our task to bring our story around the world in its most favor- able light. … But as part of the cause of freedom, and the arm of freedom, we are obliged to tell our story in a truthful way—to tell it, as Oliver Cromwell said about his portrait, ‘Paint us with all our blemishes and warts, all those things about us that may not be so immedi- ately attractive.’” Tomlin concedes that Murrow was not as successful at that grand endeavor as his myth suggests. But he makes a compelling case that he was utterly dedicated to the cause. Steven Alan Honley, a State Department Foreign Service officer from 1985 to 1997, is the Journal ’s contributing editor. Tomlin’s take on Murrow’s performance as Pres. Kennedy’s USIA director is tough but fair.