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How the Cold War made Georgetown hot

How the Cold War made Georgetown hot.

BY LOUIS MENAND New Yorker

Washington, D.C., is a two-industry town. In theory, the people in government work their side of the street, passing laws and implementing policies that reflect the will of the electorate, and the people in the press work their side, reporting and opinionating on the laws and policies and the folks who make them. Down on the ground, the two groups are naturally enmeshed. The people in government want the stories in the press to be told their way, and the people in the press want stories to tell.

When conditions are cozy enough, the line between punditry and policymaking begins to blur, and the press and the politicians imagine that, together, they are calling the tunes to which the world waltzes. Something like this happened in the early years of the Cold War. It was a symptom of a striking feature of that period: the relative homogeneity of the people who ran America’s foreign policy, headed its foundations and cultural institutions, and published its leading newspapers, and the relative unity of their beliefs.

This coziness is the subject of Gregg Herken’s “The Georgetown Set” (Knopf), a look at the official and semi-official culture of Cold War liberalism. His sample is a circle of journalists, policymakers, and spymasters who lived and socialized in Georgetown after 1945. The grand Washington funeral, last week, of Ben Bradlee marked the passing of one of the last survivors of that era.

There were a few fixtures in the Georgetown scene: Joseph Alsop, the columnist; Phil and Katharine Graham, the publishers of the Washington Post and Newsweek; Frank Wisner, of the C.I.A., and his wife, Polly; Robert Joyce, also with the agency, and his wife, Jane. They tended to be the hosts on the occasions when members of the set ate and drank together.

But many players have smaller parts in the story Herken tells, including George Kennan, the author of the policy of containment and, briefly, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union; Chip Bohlen, Kennan’s friend and his successor as Ambassador; the C.I.A.’s Richard Bissell, who was the brains behind the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the failed invasion of Castro’s Cuba, in 1961; and Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s foreign-policy guru and a Washington player par excellence.

The relationship chart can get complicated. Bradlee, the Grahams’ editor, first at Newsweek and then at the Post, became part of the Georgetown set. His second wife, Tony Pinchot, was the sister of Mary Pinchot, the wife of Cord Meyer, who ran covert operations for the C.I.A. And Mary Pinchot was one of John F. Kennedy’s lovers when Kennedy was in the White House. (She and Cord had by then divorced.) Mary was murdered, on a towpath, in 1964, in mysterious circumstances; some conspiracy theorists have speculated that her death had something to do with Kennedy’s assassination.

For twenty years, these people, in and out of government—and their peers in the foundation world and in leading cultural institutions—were in ideological synch. They were anti-Communists, with the same view of the nature of the Soviet Union and the same conviction about the United States’ leading role in world affairs. There were sectarian fissures within this establishment, disagreements about how far the United States should go in fighting Communism, but it took two decades for the fissures to deepen and the establishment to implode. In American politics, twenty years is a long time.

Herken’s protagonist is Joseph Alsop, a self-conscious élitist who reached, through his journalism, a broad segment of the American middle class. Alsop’s story has been told before, by Robert Merry, in “Taking on the World,” and Edwin Yoder, in “Joe Alsop’s Cold War.” With his brother Stewart, Joe wrote a syndicated newspaper column, “Matter of Fact,” which, at its peak, in the mid-nineteen-fifties, appeared in almost two hundred newspapers, with a total circulation of twenty-five million. He and Stewart also regularly contributed to a weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, which was famous for its Norman Rockwell covers and had a circulation of six million.

“Matter of Fact” was usually a reported column, not what journalists sometimes call a thumbsucker, and it was dedicated to breaking news. The Alsops were the first to reveal the existence of the Long Telegram, George Kennan’s classified dispatch from Moscow that became the template for American policy toward the Soviets. And they broke the story of the development of the hydrogen bomb. They had sources in government and they were skilled at using them.

The Alsops could also claim credit for coining much of the political vocabulary of the Cold War era: hawks and doves, eggheads (used to characterize Adlai Stevenson supporters), the missile gap, the domino theory, and the phrase—used first wishfully and then sarcastically about the war in Vietnam—“the light at the end of the tunnel.”


Joe was a master of the Sunday-night dinner. This was a Georgetown ritual, the venue where journalists and policy-makers, spies and diplomats, along with visiting intelligentsia (the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin became an intimate of Joe’s and a close friend of Kennan’s), mixed. When the dinner was at Joe’s place, a servant circulated with Martinis on a salver, guests debated politics at the table, the men and the women separated after the dessert, and everyone was out the door by eleven. Alsop’s specialty was homemade turtle soup. Either the Martinis or the conversation must have been really good.

The Alsops descended from an old New England family. Theodore Roosevelt was their great-uncle. Stewart went to Groton and Yale, and Joe to Groton and Harvard, where he was in the Porcellian, a Harvard club that his fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, was not admitted to. (F.D.R. is supposed to have said, before he became President, that not getting tapped for the Porcellian was the greatest disappointment of his life.)

Through a family connection, Joe Alsop got a job after college, in 1932, as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. His grandmother (who was Teddy Roosevelt’s sister) knew the owners. Alsop wrote for the paper until it folded, in 1966. When he showed up for work at the Herald Tribune, in the middle of the Depression, he was wearing, Herken says, “a bespoke suit, silk shirt, and hand-sewn shoes from Peal in London.” He was also, though Herken barely mentions this, fat. He was self-conscious about his weight—it had been a social problem in school—and he eventually undertook a serious weight-loss regimen, with, judging from photographs, impressive results.

An ostentatious air of upper-class refinement became part of Joe Alsop’s manner. (Stewart was less showy.) He liked to say that he belonged to “the WASP Ascendancy,” which he defined in his memoir as “an inner group that was, on average, substantially richer and enjoyed substantially more leverage than other Americans.” This group, he said, “had long supplied the role models followed by other Americans, whether WASP or non-WASP, who were on their way up in the world.” Joe Alsop did not check his privilege.

Alsop was also a closeted gay man, who, in company, referred to homosexuals as fairies. His social role was that of what used to be called a confirmed bachelor, an apparently asexual gentleman—in his case, one who liked to schmooze with both sexes, and put on displays of old-fashioned snobbishness that his friends, since none of them had to live with it, found charming. Alsop didn’t give up the practice of banishing women after dessert until the late nineteen-sixties, when Katharine Graham finally told him she had had enough. Herken says that he refused to eat in Paris restaurants whose cellars were close to the Métro, because the vibrations might have disturbed the sediment in the wine bottles. He did not own a television set. That kind of thing.

In 1961, at the age of fifty, Alsop contracted a platonic marriage with Susan Mary (Soozle) Patten, the widow of a Harvard classmate. They had been close friends, and she thought that she could “convert” him, but he bullied her, and, in 1973, they separated. In his will, he left most of his estate to his male relatives—to help preserve the family name, he said.

Herken’s book is solidly researched and solidly written. It is a little less biographically enterprising (a little less gossipy) than the subject might seem to invite. Herken doesn’t tell us much about Alsop’s sex life, and not much is known. Alsop appears to have been either unusually abstemious or unusually discreet, although he was once hauled in by the San Francisco police for loitering in a gay pickup area. (Stewart was able to keep the incident hushed up; he was worried about the reputation of the column.) Joe seems to have had at least one sustained relationship, in the nineteen-forties, with a sailor named Frank Merlo, who later became Tennessee Williams’s lover.

Herken doesn’t mention the San Francisco arrest or the Merlo affair, and Alsop’s sexual preferences wouldn’t matter much, except that they got him into a famous Cold War honey trap. Herken does tell this story.

In 1957, Alsop visited the Soviet Union for the first time. He spent three weeks travelling in Siberia (he gave low marks to the food), and obtained an interview with the premier, Nikita Khrushchev. A couple of days later, at a party with U.S. Embassy officials, he was approached by a reporter from TASS, the Soviet news agency. The reporter was accompanied by a good-looking blond man, who introduced himself as Boris. Joe and Boris chatted, in French, and scheduled a rendezvous the following day in Boris’s hotel room. As soon as they had consummated their assignation, the door opened and several officials entered, including two men from the K.G.B. They explained that they had taken some photographs.


The K.G.B. offered Alsop a deal: to keep the matter quiet, all he had to do was talk to them from time to time so that the K.G.B. could “get advice that would assist the cause of peace.” Alsop played along, but he informed the U.S. Ambassador, his Georgetown friend Chip Bohlen, and then talked his way onto a plane headed home. (He told the K.G.B. that his mother was dying.) Bohlen notified the C.I.A., which debriefed Alsop on his return, and, through confidential channels, a report of the incident eventually reached President Eisenhower.

Alsop seems to have been mostly undeterred by the threat of blackmail, but it shadowed him for the rest of his life. In 1970, people around Washington began getting letters containing photographs of Joe and Boris in the nude—evidently a Soviet response to attacks Alsop had made, in his column, on the Soviet Ambassador. With the help of the C.I.A. director, Richard Helms, a back-channel deal was brokered: the photographs stopped appearing, and Alsop ceased attacking.

Probably the most powerful of the Georgetown insiders was Frank Wisner, chief of covert operations for the C.I.A., and one of the most zealous of the anti-Communist crusaders who turned the agency into an enormous, squid-like meddler in global affairs. Wisner’s story is a slightly scary one, though quite a few C.I.A. operatives had scary sides. It has been told before, too, notably by Evan Thomas, in “The Very Best Men,” about the early years of the C.I.A., and Hugh Wilford, in his valuable study “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” Wisner liked to compare his covert manipulations to pulling the stops on a big organ.

Wisner was from a wealthy Mississippi family; the Wisners were in lumber and banking, and owned most of the town of Laurel. He became a track star at the University of Virginia, and served with the Office of Strategic Services during the war. His political passions were apparently aroused in Bucharest, where he was the O.S.S. station chief. After the Red Army liberated Romania from the Germans, Wisner was appalled by the brutality with which Soviet troops rounded up ethnic Germans and transported them to Soviet labor camps. (He evidently didn’t grasp the savage nature of Russian-German enmity: the Germans had butchered millions of Russians during the war.)

Wisner decided that the Soviet Union, then our ally, represented an evil that had to be confronted. When he returned from Europe, he took a job at a Wall Street law firm, but he missed the action. In 1947, he accepted a position in the State Department, and he and his wife bought a three-hundred-acre farm in Maryland and a four-story house on P Street, in Georgetown. Tim Weiner, in his history of the C.I.A., “Legacy of Ashes,” says that it was the Wisners who started the Sunday-dinner tradition.

In 1948, Wisner became the director of the Office of Policy Coördination, nominally within the State Department (the office was later brought into the C.I.A.), and that is where Cold War covert operations began. The palette of covert activities was broad. They included secretly funding a wide range of associations, from the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe to the National Council of Churches and the American Newspaper Guild. The C.I.A.’s aim was to create new groups, or assist existing ones, to compete against international organizations that were Communist fronts. The Cold War was a looking-glass war. Half a century later, the C.I.A.’s bones keep getting unearthed, and in some unlikely places. The scholar Eric Bennett recently discovered that the agency gave money to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The C.I.A. also developed friendly relations with major news organizations, including Time, the New York Times, and CBS. The agency would sometimes debrief reporters, or ask to see unused footage of a television segment. And sometimes the organizations provided cover jobs overseas for its agents.

The C.I.A. carried out black ops all over the world, dropping agents behind the Iron Curtain into countries like Albania and Poland to foster insurgencies. It orchestrated coups and political assassinations—in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, Vietnam, and Brazil—and plotted more. It’s likely that for much of the nineteen-fifties, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to covert operations than to intelligence gathering, though the agency’s detailed budgets, past and present, are classified. Most of these operations, which Wisner ran for ten years, and which were continued by his successor, Cord Meyer, were completely contrary to the announced American policy and its philosophical underpinnings, the doctrine of containment.


Kennan’s argument for containment was that although no permanent rapprochement with the Soviet Union was possible, the United States needn’t go to war. Communism would collapse from its own inefficiency and paranoia. The United States had only to keep the Soviets inside their box. In places where Communism was already established (including Eastern Europe), the United States should be patient. Despite some rhetorical drumrolling, this was the policy that American Presidents followed for forty years.

But Wisner didn’t believe in containment. He believed in liberation—or, as it was called, rollback. His schemes for fostering insurgencies inside Soviet-dominated nations had no official backup in American policy. They all failed. The Soviets had agents within the C.I.A.’s recruiting networks, and the would-be insurgents were almost all caught and executed before they had begun to make trouble. But even if rebellion had got off the ground in Albania or Poland, the U.S. government had no desire to intervene. The doctrine of containment can be boiled down to: What happens behind the Iron Curtain stays behind the Iron Curtain.

Still, the Office of Policy Coördination had three hundred and two employees and a budget of five million dollars in 1949, Wisner’s first full year as its head. By 1952, it had more than twenty-eight hundred employees, along with more than three thousand foreign contractors; it sometimes ran dozens of operations inside a single country; and the budget was eighty million dollars, possibly higher. Wisner also skimmed an unknown amount of money off the Marshall Plan funds for European recovery. His budget was larger than that of the rest of the C.I.A.

This continued, in part, because Eisenhower liked propaganda and covert operations, for the same reason that he liked nuclear weapons: they were cheaper than maintaining a standing army. But what was the point, really? There were plenty of opportunities during the Cold War to intervene in insurgencies behind the Iron Curtain, and the United States did nothing. In 1956, thousands of Hungarians took to the streets in a revolt against the Soviet-backed Communist government. When the regime collapsed, the Red Army invaded. More than twenty-five thousand Hungarians were killed, tens of thousands were arrested, and two hundred thousand fled the country. The revolt was crushed. Its political leader, Imre Nagy, was executed.

The C.I.A. had known nothing about the revolution in advance; it had only one operative in the entire country. Still, Wisner was elated. Since Bucharest, he had been dreaming of a genuine anti-Soviet uprising. He was in Europe when the revolt broke out, and managed to get to the Austrian-Hungarian border, where he saw panicked refugees streaming across. But he could do nothing for them. He personally had to tell leaders of the rebellion that the United States would not come to their aid. Already in an agitated state, he had a serious breakdown. Although he eventually went back to work, he never really recovered. He suffered from bipolar disorder—a condition that was probably reflected in the fantastic and unrealizable schemes he cooked up—and, in 1965, he killed himself with a shotgun on his Maryland farm. He was fifty-six.

The Georgetown set finally broke up over the issue that split Cold War liberalism apart, Vietnam. Vietnam was a crisis for containment, which was a theory with two prongs. One held that anytime Communism threatened to get outside its box, the United States was obliged to push it back in. But the other held that the United States should be guided by its own national interests, not by idealistic principles like “the right to self-determination.” To anti-interventionists like Kennan, the United States had no national interest in the fate of South Vietnam. To the last, Joe Alsop remained an interventionist.

Alsop began sounding the alarm about Indochina in 1950, even before the French had been driven from their colony. He visited the area frequently; he became friendly with the American officials there; and he was still supporting the war after almost everyone else in Georgetown had turned against it. John Kenneth Galbraith called Alsop “the leading non-combatant casualty of Vietnam” after Lyndon Johnson.

It ended grotesquely, with Alsop becoming Richard Nixon’s favorite newsman. Alsop dismissed Watergate as a distraction from the important business of staving off Communism in Asia. (After Nixon resigned, Alsop apologized to Katharine Graham.)

By then, Georgetown had lost its centrality in Washington life. The salon was no longer the preferred form of downtime for State Department officials, intelligence analysts, and a certain class of journalist. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and the people they brought into power with them, were not susceptible to Ivy League notions of noblesse oblige that prevailed among the Georgetown set.


It mattered that the Alsops, the Meyers, the Grahams, the Wisners, and the Bradlees were all from wealthy backgrounds. Many of them went to the same small number of élite prep schools and colleges. What seems to have motivated them to move to Washington and become involved in public affairs was the experience of the Second World War. The war had pulled them out of the world of cotillions and charities and Wall Street law firms, and given them a dose of excitement. They had the power to change people’s lives—some of them had life-and-death power—and they became addicted.

The Second World War was a total war. It was war without rules. You didn’t have to run your ideas by Congress. That was the spirit that fuelled the O.S.S., which many well-heeled Ivy League graduates, including Stewart Alsop, joined. This sense of tactical carte blanche got carried over into the Cold War. The Georgetown set must have liked the idea that they were operating above the realm of public opinion, that they were beholden to no one, that they made the rules.

The Georgetowners believed in the unapologetic use of American power, because they believed in the cause for which it was used. “I have never known him to go to any area where blood could be spilled that he didn’t come back and say more blood,” Johnson’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, said of Alsop. “That is his posture toward the universe.” They were hawks, but they were liberal hawks. They disdained vulgar anti-Communism. The Grahams and the Alsops were enemies of Joseph McCarthy, even before it was politically safe to be, and Alsop was critical of the Truman Administration’s loyalty program, which was enacted in 1947 and subjected millions of federal employees to F.B.I. investigations into their political backgrounds.

How influential was the Georgetown set? The conceit of Herken’s book is, as he puts it, that “the policies and stratagems that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union, and helped bring about the world we live in today, began with a simple invitation to cocktails and dinner.” Herken is echoing a remark of Kissinger’s, which he uses as an epigraph: “The hand that mixes the Georgetown martini is time and again the hand that guides the destiny of the Western world.”

By the time the last drinks were poured, the guests at the Sunday soirées no doubt felt that they were in the cockpit of history. But the United States is a democracy, not a Wasp Ascendancy. Presidents have to get elected. For most of the postwar period, Georgetown was not popular with the White House. Harry Truman disliked Joe Alsop; Eisenhower loathed him. There is no evidence that either Administration was much influenced by policy prescriptions emanating from P Street.

The only President who belonged to that scene was John F. Kennedy. He was a wealthy, cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguer—Georgetown’s kind of Cold War liberal. On the night of his Inauguration, restless and needing to talk, Kennedy showed up on Joe Alsop’s doorstep. That must have given the columnist quite a kick. And Phil Graham and Kennedy were close friends. (Graham, too, was bipolar; he killed himself in 1963, three months before the President was shot.)

But Kennedy’s shrewdness was very deep. He had secrets himself, and he knew just how much of an illusion of intimacy was needed to keep journalists friendly. In fact, the whole Georgetown setup can be viewed as an information market. The press honchos were looking to buy the inside scoop; the government officials were willing to exchange some of it for the right kind of coverage.

The C.I.A. actively cultivated people in the press and the media. The agency could open doors and dish dirt; in exchange, it wanted a little information, or coverage that suited its interests, or, sometimes, to have a story ignored. The Alsops were plainly part of the information economy. Herken lists a number of occasions when they wrote stories reflecting the C.I.A.’s slant.

But none of these people thought they were selling out, because they all believed that they were in the game together. In 1977, when Carl Bernstein was writing a story about the C.I.A.’s manipulation of the press, he asked Joe Alsop whether he had been an agent for the C.I.A. “It was a social thing, my dear fellow,” Alsop replied. “I never received a dollar. I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn’t have to. . . . I’ve done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen.”


There was once an atmosphere of willingness that made a system of bribes and information exchanges seem, to the people involved, simply a way of working together for a common cause in a climate of public opinion that, unfortunately, required secrecy. No one got rich from the arrangement. People just lost track of what was inside their bubble and what was outside, as people tend to do. Vietnam was the reality check. “I’ve Seen the Best of It” was the title Alsop gave to his memoirs. Things hadn’t been the same since, he felt. He was right about that, and we should be thankful. ♦

Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy: A listing of "Notes and Essays" entries on the subject.

Note for a Planned Article

"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)

A Listing of Entries in "Notes and Essays" Pertaining to "Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"

"Poem" on Walter Lippmann by his Harvard classmate John Reed

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/11/creel-lippmann-and-origins-of-american_4.html

Criticisms of George Creel, the Chairman of the first USG Propaganda Agency, The Committee on Public Information (1917-1919), in the Intellectual Press, 1910s-1960s

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/criticisms-of-george-creel-chairman-of.html

The linguistic adventures of "Creeling" -- a WWI-era American-English word "honoring" the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, the first USG propaganda agency; leading to impertinent speculation about U.S.-British propaganda relations  http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-linguistic-advenures-of-creeling.html

"Souvenez-vous" -- French Post-WWI propaganda/advertising postcard

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/souvenez-vous-french-post-wwi.html

Creel and Muckraking, or How War Employs Intellectuals

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-and-muckraking-or-how-war-employs.html

Press and Congressional Criticisms of Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/press-and-congressional-criticisms-of.html

Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information, on Reason, Emotion, and Public Opinion http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/propaganda-tsar-george-creel-chairman.html

H.L. Mencken, at his most vitriolic, on USA anti-German WWI propaganda, with a mention of propaganda tsar Creel

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/hl-mencken-at-his-most-vitriolic-on-usa.html

Propaganda and Censorship: The Case of George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-19)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/propaganda-and-censorship-case-of.html

Theodore Roosevelt on Propaganda Tsar George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-19)

http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/theodore-roosevelt-on-propaganda-tsar.html

A quite worth reading Wikipedia entry on George Creel, despite certain omissions, including in the sources

vhttp://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-quite-worth-reading-wikipedia-entry.html

A meeting of great minds, from two different centuries, on cultural relations/diplomacy http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-meeting-of-great-minds-from-two.html

American Propaganda and the Propaganda Fide http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/american-propaganda-and-propaganda-fide.html

Colonel House and George Viereck: Former Wilson Confidant's Foreword to a Book (1930) by an American propagandist in WWII
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/colonel-house-and-george-viereck-former.html

Creel and Lippmann, both cheerleaders for U.S. military intervention in Europe in WWI, avoid the draft
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-and-lippmann-both-cheerleaders.html

Creel and Lippmann Face to Face http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-and-lippmann-face-to-face.html

Creel's Four Minute Men or, Twentieth-Century Century Twittering a la Great War http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creels-four-minute-men-or-twentieth.html

Creel, Lippmann, and American Public Diplomacy: Your thoughts/comments most welcome http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-lippmann-and-american-public.html

Creel vs. Lippmann -- Street Dog vs. House Cat: Searching the Origins of American Public Diplomacy
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-vs-lippmann-street-dog-vs-house_16.html

Lippmann and Propaganda
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/lippmann-and-propaganda.html

Nixon invites Creel to lunch; Creel looks for a job in the Eisenhower administration
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/nixon-invites-creel-to-lunch-creel.html

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose? Walt Lippmann on U.S. Diplomatic Missions during WWI
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/plus-ca-change-plus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

Propaganda and Censorship: Committee on Public Information Creel's Powers over the Press
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/propaganda-and-censorship-committee-on.html

Propaganda and Censorship: The Case of George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (1917-19)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/propaganda-and-censorship-case-of.html

Richard T. Arndt on George Creel and the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/richard-t-arndt-on-george-creel-and.html

Walter Lippmann on "the character of American propaganda in Europe" during WWI
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/walter-lippmann-on-character-of.html

Walter Lippmann on the New Republic: "We have no ...propaganda to grind."
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/walter-lippmann-on-new-republic-we-have.html

When exactly was the Committee on Public Information (CPI) established? http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/when-exactly-was-committee-on-public.html

World War I American Propaganda Images http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/world-war-i-american-propaganda-images.html

Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, as amended by the so-called "Sedition Act" of May 16, 1918
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/espionageact-of-june-15-1917-as-amended.html

FDR and George Creel's Propaganda: Not a Model for WWII
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/fdr-and-george-creels-propaganda-not.html

Notable book review on the autobiography of George Creel, chairman of the first USG "propaganda" agency, the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/notable-book-review-on-autobiography-of.html

The Committee on Public Information and the Office of War Information
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-committee-on-public-information-and.html

The Committee on Public Information's War Exhibitions
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-committee-on-public-informations.html

Creel and the Espionage Acthttp://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/creel-and-espionage-act.html

The Failure of WWI American Propaganda? George Creel Thinks Twice After the Great War ...
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-failure-of-wwi-american-propaganda.html

The political evolution of George Creel: from progressive propagandist to conservative collaborator
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-political-evolution-of-george-creel.html

Thoughts Inspired by a Wartime Billboard
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/thoughts-inspired-by-wartime-billboard.html

Update - The Committee on Public Information's 150,000: Details from a WWI Propaganda War
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-committee-on-public-informations.html

Updated: Lippmann's Propaganda Stint with the U. S. Army Military Intelligence Division in France (June-July 1918)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/lippmanns-propaganda-stint-with-u-s.html

Walter Lippmann reviews George Creel's book on the Committee on Public Information
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/walter-lippmann-reviews-george-creels.html

Walter Lippmann, "The Voice of America Should be Abolished" (Los Angeles Times. April 29, 1953)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/09/walter-lippmann-voice-of-america-should.html

Who is George Creel, the USA's first "minister of propaganda"?
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/who-is-george-creel-usas-first-minister.html

Why America Fights Germany
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-america-fights-germany.html

Why Chomsky is Probably Wrong: Was Walter Lippmann a Member of the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919)?
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/09/why-chomsky-is-probably-wrong-was.html

Woodrow Wilson on the results of Creel's Committee on Public Information's Overseas Propaganda (1917-1919)
http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/woodrow-wilson-on-results-of-creels.html

A Committee on Public Information (1917-1919) publication: The German Whisper http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2014/10/notable-book-review-on-autobiography-of.html

“Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy": A Select Annotated Bibliography

This entry is a work in progress; updated/reviewed 10/15/2016; suggestions welcome -- please email john.h30@gmail.com

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Albright, [Madeleine]. "The Importance of Public Diplomacy To American Foreign Policy: Remarks at a ceremony commemorating the consolidation of the Department of State and the U.S. Information Agency." Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State Dispatch, 10, No. 8 (October 1999): 8-9. The immortal words (drafted by a "consolidated" former USIA employee?) of Ms. Albright, who made the dissolution of the USIA possible: "It should be clear to all that American public diplomacy succeeds not because it conveys information but because of the information it conveys. That is why, for almost half a century, USIA has been the most effective antipropaganda institution on the face of the earth."

Arndt, Richard T. The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century. Washington: Potomac Books, Inc. 2005. A book critical of the very concept of “public diplomacy,” it contains a chapter castigating the CPI. See John Brown, “Richard T. Arndt on George Creel and the Committee on Public Information (1917-1919),” Notes and Essays [Blog] (October 12, 2014) Note: Dr. Arndt kindly responded to these comments on his magnum opus to me by email: "As for 'castigating' CPI, I thought I was a lot more subtle than that. CPI was a prime example of the Great American Mishmash, doing marvelous things and mediocre and useless and new-precedent things all in one big sloppy lump. Lippmann's CPI would not have done that. Actually I think CPI was a miraculous affair, for its time and place; it would have been nice, but given the context and the mental structures of our beloved country, it was more than we perhaps deserved."

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Auerbach, Jonathan and Castronovo, Russ, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Contains article by Sue Curry Jansen, “The World's Greatest Adventure in Advertising': Walter Lippmann's Critique of Censorship and Propaganda”: 301-325.

Bean, Walter E. George Creel and His Critics: A Study of the Attacks on the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919. Corrected carbon copy of Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, 1941. Stored in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, George Creel Papers, Box 7. A well-documented but somewhat naive defense of Creel's work as Chairman of  the CPI. Bean -- who interviewed Creel -- was evidently overtaken by his vivacious personality.

Blankenhorn, Herbert. Adventures in Propaganda: Letters from an Intelligence Officer in France. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. Lippmann, who was Blankenhorn’s colleague at the Military Intelligence Branch, is rarely mentioned in the book, but it is a useful (but too laudatory to be fully believed) account of the MIB’s work. Includes an introduction (rhapsody might be a better word) by Blankenhorns’s wife, Mary Dewhurst, as well as (in Appendix II, pp. 160-164) a memorable article from Stars and Stripes (January 3, 1919), “Gen. Propaganda Explains How He Won Boche Over.”

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Brewer, Susan. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Contains an intellectually uninspiring chapter critical of the CPI.

Brown, John. “Empire of Ideas” [Review of Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U. S. Foreign Policy by Justin Hart].” American Diplomacy (April, 2013). Suggests that, contrary to the book under review, the origins of American public diplomacy can be found in the CPI -- and in the Declaration of Independence.

Brown, John. "Our First Official Propagandist, review of Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda by Alan Axelrod." Foreign Service Journal (June 2009): 76-77.

Brown, John. “Public Diplomacy and Propaganda: Their Differences." American Diplomacy (September, 2008).

Brown, John. “The Anti-Propaganda Tradition in the United States.” Public Diplomacy Alumni Association (July 4, 2003).

Brown, John. “The Purposes and Cross-Purposes of American Public Diplomacy.” American Diplomacy (August, 2002).

Brown, John. “Two Ways of Looking At Propaganda.” Public Diplomacy Blog, University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy (June 29, 2006). Mentions two ways of looking at this phenomenon: moralist (e.g., Plato, Ellul) and neutralist (Lasswell, Taylor).

Bruntz, George G. Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918. Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1938. A clear, concise account which covers Creel and the CPI; only slightly dated, it contains a succinct foreword on propaganda by Harold D. Lasswell.

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Cone, Stacey. “Pulling the Plug on America's Propaganda: Sen. J.W. Fulbright's Leadership of the Antipropaganda Movement, 1943-74.” Journalism History, 30, No. 4 (Winter 2005): 166-176. An article which shows the persistence of the hostility toward propaganda in the U.S. -- which arguably began during/after WWI and Creel's chairmanship of the CPI.

“Creel: An Announcement.” Everybody’s Magazine, 13 (January 10, 1919): 24.

Creel, George. “George Creel Replies.” The New Republic, 2, Issue 21 (March 27, 1915): 209-210. Marks the beginning of the contentious Creel/Lippmann relationship. They both sound intolerant and self-glorifying. So much for experts in "communications" actually communicating with each other.

Creel, George. How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe. New York and London: Harper’s and Brothers, 1920. Creel's P. J. Barnum-style marketing of reports on the CPI. Public diplomacy (as it was not yet known) on steroids. Full of Soviet-style statistics on how many propaganda items were produced by the CPI; far less specific on how many people were actually influenced by them.

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Creel, George. “Propaganda and Morale.” American Journal of Sociology, 47, No. 3 (November 1941): 340-351. A conclusion from this article: Was Creel a subconscious Propaganda Fide Jesuit, given his (granted collapsed) Catholic background?

Creel, George. “Public Opinion in War Time.” Carl Kelsey, ed., Mobilizing America’s Resources for the War. The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, 78 (July 1918): 185-194.

Creel, George. Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947. How factually reliable this autobiography is can certainly be subject to much doubt (its author was 70 when he wrote it), but it provides valuable insights into Creel’s family and professional background. When covering Creel’s early years, it sells a folksy "down-home," Tom Sawyer quality to them. Creel was from Missouri, and so was Mark Twain. The book, difficult to follow from a chronological perspective, has been neglected by the scholarly literature.

Creel, George. Wilson and the Issues. New York: The Century Co., 1916. Creel’s ode to Wilson (when Wilson was against getting the U.S. into the Great War, which Creel, appointed by the president as Chairman of the Committee on Information, enthusiastically propagated).

Cull, Nicholas. “Engagement Is The New Public Diplomacy or The Adventures of a Euphemism,” USC Center on Public Diplomacy (June 5, 2009).  Important, succinct insight on recent public diplomacy history. A must read for "policy makers" at the State Department.

Cull, Nicholas. “'Public Diplomacy’ before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase.” Public Diplomacy Blog, USC Center on Public Diplomacy (April 18, 2006). Essential reading on the linguistic origins of the term “public diplomacy.”

Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The most definitive history, to date, of the United States Information Agency (1953-1999), a Cold War successor of the CPI (1917-1919) and Office of War Information (1942-45). Some would say its well-written treatment of the USIA, the product of enormous research, reads too much like an "official" history and is insufficiently critical. But it is a magnum opus by the Edward Gibbon on the story of American propaganda in the late twentieth century.

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Cull, Nicholas J. The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency: American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. The USIA might not have been the Roman Empire, but it did decline and fall as this book documents. Some would say for the better.

Eulau, Heinz. “Wilsonian Idealist: Lippmann Goes to War.” The Antioch Review, 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1954): 87-108.

Fraser, Lindsey. Propaganda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957. There is no better introduction to the study of propaganda than the initial pages (3-14) to this jargon-free, seldom cited volume. Fraser worked for BBC German Service during WWII. Definitely should be online as one of the classics on propaganda.

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Freedman, Max. “Lippmann on Democracy.” [Review of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann.] The Nation, 180, Issue 10 (March 5, 1955): 202-203.

Gary, Brett. The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. A useful source on the anti-propaganda mood that developed in the U.S. after World War I.

“George Creel.” Wikipedia. A surprisingly good short entry on Creel, despite some omissions.

Hodgson, Godfrey. “Charles Wick,” The Guardian (August 3, 2008): “He was born Charles Zwick in Cleveland on October 12 1917. … He shifted the Z from the front of his name to the middle when he was working as a business adviser to the Tommy Dorsey swing band in the 1930s … Charles Z Wick, political adviser, born October 12 1917; died July 20 2008” (note: no period after “Z”).

Iber, Patrick. Manufacturing the Manufacturing of Consent. patrickiber.blogspot.com.

Isaacson, Walter. “A Declaration of Mutual Dependence.” The New York Times (July 4, 2004). The former Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (2009-12) and author of a biography on America’s first “public diplomat,” Benjamin Franklin, argues that “the Declaration of Independence is, in effect, a work of propaganda -- or, to put it more politely, an exercise in public diplomacy.” One wonders why no journalist asked Isaacson about this statement when he was chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees USG international broadcasting. Question: "Sir, do you think the Voice of America is a 'work of propaganda,' as you state the Declaration of Independence was?"

Jansen, Sue Curry. “Walter Lippmann, Straw Man of Communication Research.” David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley, eds. The History of Media and Communication Research. New York: Peter Lang, 2008: 71-112.

Johnson, Joe. "Public Diplomacy's Surprising History - the Creel Committee Campaign of World War I." publicdiplomacycouncil.org (February 1, 2015). "Here is a guest post and a full interview by Dr. John Brown, former diplomat and lecturer affiliated with Georgetown University, about an important collection of papers released by the Department of State Historian."

Jowett, Garth S. and O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. Beverly Hills, California, 1986. Of some use in distinguishing the tricky distinctions between persuasion and propaganda.

Kazin, Alfred. “Walter Lippmann and the American Century.” The New Republic, 183, Issue 7 (August 16, 1980): 35-38. Kazin, in a not overly complimentary portrait of Lippmann based on his reading of Steel’s biography (see below), notes that Lippmann, marked by a “hatred of his Jewishness … thought it inadvisable for his ‘mixed marriage’ to produce children” (p. 38). “Is it possible,” Kazin asks, “that Lippmann will be remembered more for the life he led in American history than for anything he said about it? That he will be remembered as historical actor rather than as a thinker? He would not have liked that.” Kazin’s review suggests the tension between the literary (Kazin) and the philosophical (Lippmann). And I sense that Kazin felt Lippmann was prepotente in assuming that his -- Lippmann's -- brilliant thoughts were a solution to the world's problems.

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Kennedy, David M. Over Here: The First World War and American Society – Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. A thoughtful analysis that argues that “the American experience in World War I … darkly adumbrated the themes Orwell was put at the center of his futuristic fantasy” (p. 60). As a survey it lacks some command of "facts."

Lasswell, Harold D. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: P. Smith, 1938. [First published in 1927.] A classic, pompously written academic study of that early twentieth phenomenon, modern propaganda, by the social scientist who began its "objective" study in the United States.

Laurie, Clayton D. “The Chanting of Crusaders: Captain Heber Blankenhorn and AEF Combat Propaganda in World War I.” The Journal of Military History, 59, Issue 3 (July 1995): 457-481. This excellent article sheds much light on Walter Lippmann’s stint with U.S. Military Intelligence Division in the summer of 1918 in the small town French town of Chaumont. Walter made sure he went to Paris on assignment. Chaumont was not la Ville-Lumière for this oh-so refined pundit who made sure he avoided the draft but was nevertheless commissioned as an Army captain thanks to his White House contacts.

Lennox, Sarah and Lennox Frank. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974): 49-55. There is of course a strong case to be made that “public opinion,” as a social/political phenomenon, appeared in 18th century Europe, but of course cavemen had opinions too.

Lewis, Sinclair. “An American Views the Huns.” The Nation, Volume 121, Issue 3130: 19-20. Lewis, who defeated Creel for the Democratic nomination for governor of California in the 1934, writes sarcastically that “[d]uring the Great War I learned thoroughly at the skilled hands of Mr. George Creel that whatever the Germans were, they were brutal.”

Lippmann, Walter. “For a Department of State.” The New Republic (September 17, 1919), 20, no. 254: 194-97. A merciless attack on the State Department and its diplomats during the Great War by the philosofying pundit.

Lippmann, Walter. “Paul Kellogg Muckraked.” The New Republic 2, no. 16 (February 20, 1915): 60-61. [See Creel’s reply cited above.] Perhaps the first Lippmann attack on Creel, written anonymously, and the start of their antagonistic long-distance relationship (if they ever met face-to-face -- I've found no evidence that they did -- Creel, who liked to box, would perhaps have punched Lippmann in the nose; and Lippmann would have probably written a column about it).

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Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922. One of Lippmann’s most influential works. Provides strong evidence that, Plato-like, he was essentially anti-democratic.

Lippmann, Walter. “The Intimate Papers of Colonel House by Charles Seymour” [Review]. Foreign Affairs, 4, No. 3 (April 1926): 383-393. Interesting insights on how Lippmann thought Wilson viewed propaganda (negatively, according to Walter). But this review suggests that "policy-makers" (e.g., Lippmann with the Fourteen Points he helped draft) blamed the "propaganda" for not selling his -- Walter's -- Plans for the World.

Mock, James R. and Larson, Cendric. Words That Won the War: The Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939. Despite the "outdated" date of its publication, this book is the most thorough account of the Committee of Public Information, based as it is on  on research of records at the National Archives. It's quite sympathetic to Creel, but is critical of his "censor" role. Mock/Larson thought that with a new global war coming, the USA should have a propaganda (in the best sense, as they saw it) federal agency. Arguably, though, "what won the war" -- or at least gained support from the American public for WWI  -- were not words, but images (poster, movies). Did not the mass dissemination of images, via posters and film, define early 20th century propaganda, especially in the U.S. and Russia?

Noah, Timothy. “The Rise of a Not-so-great Communicator: Charles Z. Wick, Entrepreneur.” The New Republic, 186, Issue 15 (April 14, 1920): 11-14. Mr. Zwick (such was his original name; he did not put a period after "Z"), one of Ronald Reagan's favorite courtesans. He and Creel had much in common, including flattering persons in power and being infatuated by images as a way of "communicating" -- dare I say "propagandizing."

O'Connell, Joseph. Letter to the New York Times, “U.S.I.A. Is Guardian Of Fulbright Program,” New York Times (June 27, 1986).

Osgood, Kenneth. “Propaganda,” Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (2002). An admirable but perhaps overly "leftist" introduction to the subject, focusing on the United States. Ideal for a survey course on American propaganda -- in order to provoke students' thoughts on the matter. Has a good definition of propaganda: "Propaganda is usually, but not exclusively, concerned with public opinion and mass attitudes. The purpose of propaganda is to persuade—either to change or reinforce existing attitudes and opinions. Yet propaganda is also a manipulative activity. It often disguises the secret intentions and goals of the sponsor; it seeks to inculcate ideas rather than to explain them; and it aspires to modify or control opinions and actions primarily to benefit the sponsor rather than the recipient."

Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2006. Propaganda replaced diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy during the Cold War. Well, ok ... This dense book, hyped in its title about a "secret" activity, does not however read like a detective novel, although it has amusing passages, especially about dogs being the best ambassadors.

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Osipova, Yelena. “Fulbright on USIA.” Global Chaos [blog] (January 11, 2012). Ms. Osipova discovered a document in the Fulbright archives at the University of Arkansas that was not complimentary of the USIA. It came to her as a surprise.

“Paul Kellogg Muckracked.” The New Republic, 2, no. 16 (February 20, 1915): 60-61. With this article the Creel-Lippmann antagonism most probably began.

Plato. Gorgias. Athens, Greece: 380 B.C. :) No study of propaganda can begin without reading this gorgeous dialogue focusing on the tensions between rhetoric and philosophy. A must read for any course on public diplomacy that focuses on more than the immediate present or "strategic communications."

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Pope, Ellen Dittman. Pleasants County. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. According to the author, Creel’s grandfather, Alexander Jerbet, saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary encouraging him to complete the foundation of the town on St. Marys on the now West Virginia side of the Ohio River. The Catholic background of Creel has been overlooked in much of the scholarly literature on the CPI.

Qualter, Terence H. Opinion Control in the Democracies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. One of the best treatments of propaganda in the scholarly literature that, regrettably, is seldom mentioned.

Ross, Stewart Halsey. Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918. Joshua Tree, Calif.: Progressive Press, 2009). Another neglected work in the scholarly literature. Contains valuable information (based on archival research) on the creation of the CPI and on the Creel-Lippmann antagonistic relationship. Ross condemns Creel as "a narrow-thinking opportunist, always willing to compromise his diminishing bag of marketable ideals for expediency's sake."

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Salmon, Christian. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. London and New York: Verso, 2010. "Even though ... this book adopts a very critical stance when it looks at the ways in which narratives are explicitly used to conceal or distort the truth ... my intention is not to liken all these narrative practices to mere propaganda, but to identify what is at stake in them, the ways in which they operative and their specific effects." Given that Creel spoke of the "amazing story" of the CPI's work, this book is an important element in the literature on the CPI.

Snyder, Alvin A. Warriors of Disinformation: How Charles Wick, the Usia, and Videotape Won the Cold War. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012. When one reads this book one cannot help but sense the similarities between USIA director Charles Z Wick (he did not place a period after his middle initial) and Creel. The book also reminded me of the remark by an American ambassador regarding the country (let it be unmentioned) where he was serving: "[In this place] truth is whatever you can get away with." He of course was not speaking of the United States -- but could he have been (?).

Sproule, J. Michael. Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. An enlightening account of the historical background to the establishment of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937-1942), which sought to educate the American public about the dangers and duplicity of propaganda. The book lacks a bibliography.

Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston and Toronto: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980. A magnificent work of scholarship, based on many unpublished sources, that is thus far the definitive biography (without glorifying him) of Lippmann. But it will not quite resurrect Lippmann from the ashheap of history -- which evidently was its intention.

Steel, Ronald. “Walter Lippmann: Journalist and Historian.” Society 36, no. 5 (July/August 1999): 77-79. A good summary of Steel's evaluations of Lippmann, like them or not.

Stolberg, Benjamin. “Walter Lippmann, Connoisseur of Public Life.” The Nation, 235, no. 3257 (December 7, 1927): 639-642. Worth a look, especially regarding Lippmann's Platonic tendencies.

Stone, I. D. “Creel’s Crusade” [Review of Monk and Larson’s Words That Won the War]. The Nation, 149, no. 24: 647-649. Perhaps the best short evaluation of Creel and his CPI work. Recommended for any college course pertaining to the subject. Stone: “One learns from the Creel story that the idealists are as necessary as brass bands in war time. One also learns that the idealists tend to suffer from the delusion that they are running the war, when it is the war that is running them.”

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Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: War Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Nuclear Age. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: P. Stephens, 1990. An informative, workmanlike historical survey of propaganda, unmarked by subtlety, that does not delve into its moral or philosophical implications.

The Committee on Public Information [CPI]. The Activities of the Committee on Public Information. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918. Assuming that the CPI told the truth (including regarding the statistics it cites), this is an indispensable resource to its activities.

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Public Diplomacy, World War I. Foreign Relations, 1917–1972. After some hundred years, the State Department has finally condescended to acknowledge, for the historical record, that public diplomacy is in America's national interest -- and most important, for all public diplomacy's faults, part of America's past. These documents are online.

Vaughn, Stephen. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Meticulous and thoughtful scholarship, based on archival research that provides valuable data about the origins, organization, and programs of the CPI. In many ways surpasses the Mock and Larson volume (see above).

Vaughn, Stephen “Prologue to Public Opinion: Walter Lippmann’s Work in Military Intelligence,” Prologue (Fall 1983): 151-163. An insightful historical footnote on Lippmann's short service with the Military Intelligence Branch, in France during which Walter made sure he spent time in Paris (see above).

Viereck, George Sylvester. Spreading Germs of Hate; with a foreword by Colonel Edward M. House. London: Duckworth, 1931. Viereck, a German-American who was editor of the pro-German paper The Fatherland, was an astute commentator on propaganda, which he also -- sadly -- practiced in support of Nazism. His work is seldom cited, perhaps because of his admiration for Hitler in his later years. It is quite intriguing that House, who played a significant role in the implementation of USG propaganda in WWI as a very pro-British adviser to Wilson, should have written a foreword to a book by a German-American more than just sympathetic for Germany during the Great War. The second edition of the book did not contain House’s foreword. Why this was the case would be an interesting subject for a historical footnote.

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Winkler, Henry. The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (Yale Historical Publications: Miscellany, 118). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978. Still the best account of the OWI.

Wolper Gregg. The Origins of Public Diplomacy; Woodrow Wilson, George Creel, and the Committee on Public Information [unpublished dissertation]. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991. A detailed and largely sympathetic treatment of CPI activities in parts of Europe: “[B]y creating an developing the [CPI’s] Foreign Section Creel performed a remarkable feat” (p. 347). Note: Creel was castigated when he was Chairman of the CPI not so much for his organization's overseas work as for his domestic propaganda/censorship. Lippmann was (to the best of my knowedge) one of the few contemporary critics of the CPI's work abroad.

Wolper, Gregg. “Wilsonian Public Diplomacy: The Committee on Public Information in Spain.” Diplomatic History, 17, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 17-34. An excellent, detailed “case study” of the CPI’s overseas operations. More such studies are needed to evaluate the CPI’s overseas impact; the focus on the scholarly literature has been on its domestic programs.

Wolper, Gregg. “Woodrow Wilson’s New Diplomacy: Vira Whitehouse in Switzerland, 1918.” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 24, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 227-239. A masterly “slice of life” account of a CPI operative and her travails with State Department functionaries. Whitehouse’s observations about turf-conscious Foggy Bottom male diplomats has a contemporary (or at least late twentieth-century) ring to it. The article, focusing on one person, is a perfect work of petite histoire with much wider implications.

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"Poem" on Walter Lippmann by his Harvard classmate John Reed

Note for a Planned Article

"Creel, Lippmann, and the Origins of American Public Diplomacy"
(comments welcome; draft, not for citation)

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Lippmann, -- calm, inscrutable,

Thinking and writing clearly, soundly, well;

All snarls of falseness swiftly piercing through,

His keen mind leaps like lightning to the True;

His face is almost placid – but his eye –

There is a vision born to prophecy!

He sits in silence, as one who has said:

“I waste not living words among the dead!”

Our all-unchallenged Chief!

--Cited in Ronald Steel,
Walter Lippmann and the American Century (1980) p. 28

The Reed-Lippmann mutual admiration society didn't last (Steel, p. 138). Walter -- at heart (or should I say "at mind," given his intellectual punditry, withstood by the public for perhaps too many decades) -- was essentially an establishment man, evidently not shaken (positively) by John's Bolshevik euphoria in Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)