Legendary "Wild Bill" Donovan, CIA directors Allen Dulles and
William Casey, journalists Stewart Alsop and James Reston, diplomat
John McCloy, philanthropist Paul Mellon, playwright Robert
Sherwood, theatrical great John Houseman, and civil rights leader
Ralph Bunche were among the thousands of people who led or
participated in America's massive propaganda campaign against Nazi
Germany. In The Propaganda Warriors Clayton Laurie fully unveils
for the first time this unprecedented, ambitious, and embattled
wartime enterprise.
Laurie details the creation, evolution, and field operations of
the overseas branch of the Office of War Information (OWI); the
Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS);
and the Army-dominated Psychological Warfare units (PWB and PWD)
serving the Allied forces in Europe. These agencies, Laurie shows,
were as much at war with each other as with the Third Reich,
largely due to FDR's failure to establish an official propaganda
policy or to enunciate precise war and postwar aims. Within this
vacuum, each agency eagerly developed its own distinct form of
propaganda.
The propagandists at OWI and OSS (forerunner of the CIA) were
especially at odds with each other. The OSS was led by
Machiavellian "realists," conservatives, and Republicans who wanted
American values to dominate the international order and believed
that any means-including the Nazi's own subversive "black"
propaganda-justified that end. By contrast, the OWI was led by
liberals, New Dealers, and those in the media and arts who adhered
to Wilsonian ideals and believed that the truth about America, as
they perceived it, would win out through the sheer power of its
message. They detested the Nazi regime every bit as much as their
OSS counterparts but refused to emulate Nazi tactics.
Despite these conflicts, American propaganda did accelerate the
drive toward victory, thanks to the emergence of the PWB and PWD,
which after 1943 controlled the production of American propaganda
against Germany, bending ideological agendas to serve the
military's purely tactical objectives. But, as Laurie makes clear,
all three agencies played a vital role in this crucial effort, even
as their conflicts foreshadowed future ideological disputes during
the Cold War.
General
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