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The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. By Nicholas J. Cull. New Yotk: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 533 pp.
Public diplomacy was long the stepchild of the American national security establishment. With the abolition of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999, it became an orphan. In this rich and superbly researched study, Nicholas J. Cull of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communicarion provides an institutional histoty of this now barely remembered agency of the U.S. government, one that has never before been attempted on this scale and is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon. Making full use of archival materials from the relevant presidential libraries and other original sources, buttressed by petsonal interviews and correspondence with scores of former officials of the agency, Cull has consttucted a narrative that is not only comprehensive but also judicious and remarkably unbiased (on a subject that has always been something of a political...