It could be said that Stalin founded two global propaganda machines, as the US government’s Cold War propaganda structure was created in direct response to the scale of Soviet activity. US international propaganda flourished during World War II with institutions like Voice of America radio and the Office of War Information, but the entire effort very nearly folded at the war’s end. The ubiquity of Soviet propaganda motivated postwar initiatives like the Fulbright exchanges, the information component to the Marshall Plan, and the wholesale authorization of peacetime propaganda overseas in the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) mounted its own covert campaign and established Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to use exiles to broadcast propaganda into the Eastern bloc. Yet these efforts were uncoordinated. The threat of Soviet propaganda remained undiminished. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by establishing the United States Information Agency (USIA) to conduct all overt US information work around the world. As in the USSR, the US information machine had its turf wars. Senator William Fulbright contrived to keep the administration of culture and exchange at the State Department where it remained until 1978. Staff at both USIA and the State Department had wasted much energy on infighting in the interim.667
USIA’s achievements in the mid-Cold War period included massive programs to translate and publish "helpful" books and promote the teaching of English. USIA worked hard to present the African-American civil rights movement to the world, spinning the story as one of the heroic federal government coming to rescue brave black citizens from localized prejudice. USIA also managed to turn the death of President John F. Kennedy into an opportunity to accentuate the best in America. Voice of America carried American popular music and achieved success broadcasting jazz into the Eastern bloc. USIA and the State Department sponsored tours by jazz musicians, reaching out especially to Africa. In the field of film and television, USIA created documentaries and disseminated them to new and content-hungry TV stations in developing countries or placed them in cinemas around the world as supporting fare for the biggest Hollywood hits of the era. USIA also secretly subsidized several international newsreels and even created feature material for key audiences, as in 1965 when the agency launched a propaganda soap opera for Mexico called Nuestro Barrio (Our Neighborhood) about the struggle between a young doctor and an evil oligarch. The show reportedly soon topped the ratings in Mexico and across Central America.668 In support of such work, USIA rebranded its activities to allow a clear contrast with Soviet propaganda. From 1965 onwards, USIA commonly called its work Public Diplomacy. There is, however, little evidence that contemporary audiences drew great distinctions between Soviet propaganda and US public diplomacy. Both seem to have been taken with a pinch of salt.
Unlike the Soviet Union’s ideological warriors, America’s "public diplomats” had to coexist with a lively commercial media emanating from their country. USIA and the State Department worked to enable US culture to reach places where the commercial US media would not or could not go and to balance portrayals of America in countries where the commercial US media could be freely accessed. This meant that in the East and global South, the United States had to overcome stereotypes of heartless capitalism propagated by the Soviets, while in the West the United States had to overcome the impressions of ubiquitous violence and lax morals created by its own popular culture.
USIA had both friends and enemies in the commercial media. News organizations like the Associated Press and Scripps Howard disliked any government role in the news business and lobbied against Voice of America. Hollywood was initially more sympathetic, with the major studios agreeing in the 1950s to shape their output with foreign sensibilities in mind. USIA happily guided script decisions in many export-oriented films. But USIA’s informal arrangements with Hollywood did not endure in the 1960s. From the Kennedy years onwards, the gap between the ways in which the US government wished the country to be seen and the images favored by Hollywood remained a major concern for USIA.669
World History
