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Telling America's Story to the World
Harilaos Stecopoulos
The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989. By Nicholas Cull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 600 pages. $106 (cloth). 560 pages. $43.50 (paper).
Upstaging the Cold War: American Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy, 1940- 1960. By Andrew Falk. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 264 pages. $34.95 (cloth).
Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey. By Yale Richmond. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. 192 pages. $29.95 (paper).
Persuader-in-Chief: Global Opinion and Public Diplomacy in the Age of Obama. By Nancy Snow. Ann Arbor: Nimble Books, 2009. 120 pages. $17.60 (paper).
U.S. propaganda is hardly a new scholarly topic. Americanists have long written about information, culture, and U.S. diplomacy.1 And with good reason: from George Creel's Committee on Public Information to the Good Neighbor Policy, from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. state and its various private affiliates or "fronts" have provided scholars with ample material.2 The end of the cold war and the subsequent downsizing of U.S. public diplomacy seemed to augur an end to this trend, but the Bush administration's largely ham-fisted approach to international relations had the inadvertent effect of provoking new academic and lay interest in these issues. Thanks in large part to Dubya's public relations fiascoes, the past ten years has witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of posts, articles, and books on the subject of U.S. propaganda. The war on terror has proved something of a boon for those who study soft power.3 With the exception of Andrew Falk (more on him in a moment), each of the authors under review has played a long-standing role in the making of propaganda studies within and without the academy. Nicholas Cull has authored an award-winning study of British propaganda and runs the Public Diplomacy Center at the University of Southern California. Yale Richmond, a retired cultural affairs officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, has published several books on the topic, the best known being Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (2000). And finally, Syracuse University professor Nancy Snow has engaged with the challenge of propaganda in two well-known books and currently blogs on public diplomacy for the Huffington Post.4...