Black, White, and Shades of Gray: The Sixty-Year Debate Over Propaganda versus Public Diplomacy

Abstract

This article explores public debates over the use of U.S. “soft power”—international government-to-people communication, generally classified by proponents as informational “public diplomacy” and critics as persuasive “propaganda” efforts. The focus is on challenges emerging during both the Cold War and the War on Terror. The study relies heavily upon previously classified documents from the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries, as well as reporter Bob Woodward's contemporary accounts based upon classified materials in the Bush White House. The author examines the 1953 debate over the role of U.S. propaganda, and shows how many of the same issues reemerged following the September 11 terror attacks. While there is broad consensus for communicating U.S. policies and values to foreign audiences, differences of opinion in the role, scope, and administration of overseas information programs dominate the debate. The role the State Department plays in administering these public relations programs, first raised during the Cold War, remains unresolved. In both debates, the president's closest communications adviser appears to have exerted the greatest influence on the outcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• Committee on International Information Activities (“Jackson Committee)
• Coalition Information Center (CIC)
• Donald Rumsfeld
• international communications
• C. D. Jackson
• Pentagon
• propaganda
• public diplomacy
• public relations
• U.S. State Department
• War on Terror

Notes

1. The basic problem with most definitions of propaganda is that they lack consistency and often fail to distinguish propaganda from other forms of persuasion. Perhaps the best attempt to clarify this issue is by Richard Alan Nelson (1996, p. 232) who argues for a neutral definition in which propaganda is “a systematic form of persuasion which attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels.”