Cull, Nicholas J.: The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989.

Cull, Nicholas J. The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008. 533pp. $125

Public diplomacy today is a topic of global conversation. Books on the "new public diplomacy" of state and nonstate actors appear with increasing frequency. Memoirs by practitioners and monographs on cultural diplomacy and international broadcasting abound. Until now, however, there has been no in-depth scholarly treatment of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the government organization primarily responsible for America's international information, broadcasting, and educational and cultural exchange activities during the Cold War.

Nicholas Cull, a historian who teaches public diplomacy at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, provides this much-needed scholarship, with a well written account grounded in twelve years of archival research and more than a hundred interviews with practitioners. Beginning with the development of information and cultural programs during World War II, Cull's narrative, organized in chapters on presidential administrations and USIA directors, deals principally with the decades between USIA's creation in 1953 and the end of the Cold War in 1989. He concludes with a brief epilogue on USIA's final decade, years that saw consolidation of U.S. international broadcasting services under the independent Broadcasting Board of Governors and the transfer of USIA's information, exchange, and foreign-opinion-research programs to the Department of State in 1999.

Cull assesses with remarkable evenhandedness the priorities, decisions, and organizational struggles of political leaders and USIA's practitioners. There is no ideological tilt in his examination of sharply contested approaches to winning the Cold War struggle for "hearts and minds." The book is not a lament for USIA's demise or a call for its restoration. Cull brings a scholar's discipline, a wealth of empirical evidence, and arm's-length perspective to his analysis. Nevertheless, Cull does have strong opinions. He renders critical judgments on USIA's successes and failures. In so doing, he frequently prefers to show rather than tell.

On foreign-policy issues and USIA's domestic political context, Cull's account is strong on the McCarthy era, the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. He provides insights into USIA's marginal role as an adviser to the president, State Department, and National Security Council on implications of foreign public opinion in policy formulation and communication. He deals at length with tensions between USIA and the Voice of America over missions, "firewalls," journalism norms, and organizational independence.

Yet the book has limitations. He problematically conflates the generic and constituent elements of public diplomacy--listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy, and international broadcasting--in the book's framework of underlying themes. He gives (as he recognizes) disproportionate attention to Washington, USIA's directors, and broadcast media.

The author ends with a brief look at lessons for the future, such as the need to include public diplomacy in foreign-policy planning and for the United States to listen as well as speak. These are valuable insights. But new forces are shaping twenty-first-century diplomacy. Networks challenge hierarchies. Attention--not information--is the scarce resource. Globalism, nonstate actors, a mix of secular and religious "big ideas," digital technologies, and new media are transforming the old order. Cull is sensitive to these forces and to the ways in which they are changing diplomacy. Perhaps one day he will write another book that completes his history of USIA and explores the evolution of public diplomacy in a world that is vastly different from the Cold War. In the meantime, Cull's masterful history will be the gold standard in scholarship on USIA.

BRUCE GREGORY

George Washington University