The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2010

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 55 Pyrrhic Victory The Cold War and the U.S. Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989 Nicholas J. Cull, Cambridge University Press, 2009, $36.99, paperback, 533 pages. R EVIEWED BY A LLEN C. H ANSEN Nicholas J. Cull’s comprehensive, yet lively, history of the United States Information Agency was first published in hardcover in 2008. This new paper- back edition of that tour de force, based on 12 years of painstaking research, should find an even wider audience, one it richly deserves. Cull’s tenure as a professor of public diplomacy at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California, where he directs the master’s degree program in public diplomacy, ably equips him to analyze the many different points of view about USIA’s mission that vied with each other within the agency throughout the Cold War. He gives eloquent voice to the concerns and aspirations of field of- ficers, Voice of America staff and top USIA officials, as well as their col- leagues at State and elsewhere in the federal government. His sources, all scrupulously docu- mented, include the National Arch- ives, various presidential libraries and the Oral History Project of the Associ- ation for Diplomatic Studies and Train- ing. He also conducted more than 100 interviews with veteran public diplo- macy practitioners at USIA and State, and cites numerous books, articles and other materials, including several USIA-produced films. (I found some of his footnotes as enlightening as the text.) Taking the Cold War as a whole, Cull depicts USIA as generally suc- cessful in giving foreign governments and individuals highly effective expla- nations of U.S. policies and culture. Yet he doesn’t mince words where the agency fell short. And when it comes to the perennial debate about whether it is fair to use the term “propaganda” to describe USIA’s programs, he calls a spade a spade, describing the very rea- son for the agency’s existence as the perceived need for government propa- ganda. One theme that pervades this ac- count is how often history has repeated itself: most notably, through the debate about whether informational and cul- tural programs should be managed in- side or outside of the State Depart- ment. He also usefully reminds those who complain about the establishment of the “Broadcasting Board of Gover- nors” — the entity that succeeded USIA as responsible for all U.S. inter- national broadcasts — that it is not a new term at all. USIA employees will relish seeing the names of old friends and acquain- tances in these pages. And those FSOs who spent most of their careers over- seas may find especially interesting the tensions and debates about the agency that swirled back inWashington. These arguments were fueled by numerous commissions that regularly issued de- tailed recommendations about how to organize what we now call public diplo- macy. Cull usefully summarizes and as- sesses most of these efforts, including the 1975 report of the United States Advisory Commission on Information Cull depicts USIA as generally successful in giving foreign governments and individuals highly effective explanations of U.S. policies and culture. B OOKS