Transcripts For CSPAN3 Cold War And The Third World 20170618

Eric from Washington University is traveling, so i am filling in, which i am delighted to because jason parker is a good friend of mine. First, let me make some general introductions. This is the last session of the washington washington history seminar for this spring season. We will start up again in september, and we have together our fall lineup of speakers, and we will be sending that out very shortly. It is a very exciting list of speakers. I think you will find it very exciting very interesting. We are delighted that we have been able to attract so many very first rate people to speak. I want to thank, as always, the people behind the scenes who make this possible. The liaison for the Wilson Center makes all the logistical arrangements here, and amanda perry, over to the side and the front, the assistant director of the National History center who also helps out in arranging these events. I also want to issue a special word of thanks to our sponsors. First and foremost, schaeffer, the society of historians of american foreignpolicy. They have provided funding to make this series possible. We also have anonymous donors, and if any of you would like to join that list or even be nonanonymous, we certainly welcome donations. Thank you. Last, if you have a cell phone, i urge you to put it on silent mode or turn it off entirely. This event is being filmed by cspan and will be broadcast and we do not want anyone to be embarrassed in the midst of this event. Let me turn to our speaker today. Jason parker, who is an associate professor of history at texas a m university, where he has taught since 2006. He is the author of brothers keeper the United States raised an empire in the british empire, which was published in 2008. He has also written articles for the gender of journal of American History, diplomatic history, journal of African American history, and so on and so forth. Too many to site. He has avoided any number of fellowships and awards, and he has a new book that has just recently come out called hearts, minds, voices u. S. Cold war Public Diplomacy and the formation of the third world. I should add which will be the subject, by the way, of his talk today. I should add that he has written a blog entry in the history of Public Policy program of the Wilson Center, and a printout of it is available outside, and copies of the book will be available for sale outside as well afterwards. Once this is over, i invite all of you to join us in a reception in a neighboring room. So i will turn this over to jason. Mr. Parker thank you, dane. I do have my phone here, but it is just for stopwatch purposes. But the nba draft is coming up soon, so if i get a call in the middle, i might have to take it. All right, thank you for that wonderful introduction. Thank you to christian and eric and of censure, to the Wilson Center, to the National History center, for allowing me to be part of the National History seminar thank you to christian and eric in absentia. Not a little bit of nostalgia coming back to d. C. Where i spent many of the last few summers and considered as something of a second home. I thank you all for coming, especially on a day as gorgeous as this. I will hope to make it worth your while. I do think at least i have good timing because of last weeks history seminar, which overlaps somewhat topically with what im going to talk about today. I wanted to share some of the stories and findings from the book as well as trace its evolution for those in the middle of projects of their own. I know it helps me a long way to learn about the way the project change as you are working on them. You follow them where they lead you, even if it is to somewhat unexpected places. The story that i had to tell is one of unintended consequences. The path that the book took to its final state was not one that i had laid out at the beginning. The Research Design that i had laid out many years ago ended up being quite different from the book that you will hear about today. That, too, the story that it tells is the unintended consequence of americas engagement with the broader world. What do i mean by this . Getting back to the part about the unintended consequence out there, the unintended consequence in here had a lot to do with the genesis of the book. The question why do they hate us, what do they think of us, what are they hearing from us those kinds of things that rang in peoples minds and ears after those attacks 16 years ago led me to wonder what the United States sought to do when it spoke to the peoples of the global south during the cold war. This would seem to be something that had been well covered. While there was a version of scholarship on Public Diplomacy, which i will discuss on a second, and the world relations, the twain did not really need meet, so i set out to discover with the United States said to them. I use the term third world sort of uncritically, just sort of accepting that in using it, for all its baggage, that we kind of knew what we meant, that it was something that was sort of their and that our actors, u. S. Diplomats and public diplomats after world war ii had a specific thing in mind in conceptualizing this place somewhere out there on the map, but then a number of welltimed other books persuaded me that we needed to rethink and his store says the term itself. What i found in a nutshell was that Public Diplomacy not just american Public Diplomacy but the cacophony of discussion that emerged in these years was itself a catalyst and incubator for the concepts of third world. If you want to follow Benedict Andersons idea of the imagined community, sort of being a generative source of nationalism, what we have in these years and on this global sort of setting is a kind of multimedia multinationalism that generates a Global Community rather than a national one, so i contend that Public Diplomacy helped create what we thought of then and what we spoke of then as the third world. I wanted to place it at the intersection of the sort of two macro mega processes that dominated the air, represented by these maps, the top being the map of the colonial Imperial World 1945 in the bottom being the map john brady cold war of the first, second, and third world. The process of decolonization that turned those colonies into independent nationstates unfurls really in earnest after 1945 and especially 1947, as does the process that drew these sets of lines blue, green, red. You had two processes that intersect and generate between them this map, the one we have today of 200 nationstates in a postcold war setting. Just to emphasize the ways in which the flux engaged by these processes continues to shape our world today. Notice the date of this of this map. I really need to update my slides, but you will see my powerpoint skills are not great. This map is from 2001, which means i have to apologize to any kosovars or macedonians or south sudanese in the room whose countries are not there. The story that im explaining today is of that very large unintended consequence that essentially took an american strategic problem and ended up making a new map of the world, by which these independent nationstates coming from empire themselves formed a collective that nobody really saw coming at the outset of the broader superpower conflict. The cold war starts kind of a bipolar confrontation, but in this telling, it evolves into a multipolar conversation by the time all is said and done. The book used a range of Public Diplomacy case studies to trace the three major constituent parties of the third world project. As these three strands fused into a broader identity, a kind of a racial solidarity or transracial solidarity, and developments of poverty, Economic Developments. Im going to lay out a couple of vignettes from the book that touch on each of these themes. Ive selected these from the chronology because they sort of weave together and demonstrate them and circle back around to that big unintended consequence that dominates the story. By way of definitions and background, first of all, Public Diplomacy. This is conventionally defined as the need to move for an opinion in ways that serve a strategic or national interest. Often, this is national opinion, but it can be niche opinions. The term itself, Public Diplomacy, coined in 1965, so already, im committing misdemeanor anachronism with this one, but you can find it in documents dating back well before that. Like the term third world, the phrase or name Public Diplomacy undergoes a long and, i say, revealing evolution. You can find in the documents they seek a sequence of terms used to describe by americans to other americans what we thought we were doing. What is the name of this activity. Among the candidates, among the things that pop up the documents for propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, most commonly, most benignly, information operations. This involves a variety of means and media, from sort of smallscale people to people exchanges to the broader mass media sort of outreach. These various activities happen in various scattershot and disorganized fashion up until an umbrella is formed over them. Even the Public Diplomacy is going on before that, it is not called Public Diplomacy. Its after 1953 that they take on a certain sort of coherent as well as truly global reach. Just to sort of plant this seed, for those most interested in Public Diplomacy and less so in the dynamics of her world community, there are a couple of things at the heart of Public Diplomacy that the devil practitioners and people who study it. There is a permanent problem embedded in the practice of Public Diplomacy, but obviously, those are just teasers right now. We can come back to them in q a. The evolution of the term Public Diplomacy mirrors the evolution of the term third world. It took a while for the world collectively to settle on what the term means. Global north global south discourse. There is a certain evolution, one we cannot trace. For starters, when the phrase was coined by a french demographer, it did not include latin america. The fact that latin america came to be a part of what is conceived of as the broader third world is an interesting story in its own right. I will come back to that in a bit. Between the demographer and john paul sartre, the term gained a certain currency in france. It takes a while for the term third world to pop up in american diplomatic conversation. You will find you do not find it in correspondence until quite sometime later except for a couple of i would say very telling appearances early in the 1960s. As with Public Diplomacy, during these years, the documents reveal a sequence of terms applied to these areas of the world that american officials are trying to sort of fit into their mental maps. The americans preferred term was free world, but that construction did not quite capture it because many of the countries inside were sort of shunted inside that category and did not want any part of it, had no interest in being there. The noncommunist noneuropean world in the original construction free world is supposed to be part of it, and anything that is not communist is essentially free. That proves to be inadequate taxonomy. Past free world, the number of late imaging include the underdeveloped, the less developed, the afro asian arab nations, the uncommitted, the neutrals, the nonaligned, and each of these labels is correct as far as it goes in that each one captures something about the collective selfdefinition as well as the external American Post definition of these places, but they are also incomplete. Its not until you have the third world of this as this umbrella concept that brings them altogether. By way of background beyond these definitions, i mention the u. S. I o was created in 1953 to wrangle leftover world war ii agencies and try to create some sort of coherence in the american approach to the world in that Broader Campaign for hearts and minds, but 1953 is fairly late in the game by some measures. You can find reports of american diplomats, for example, in the middle east as early as 1945. You can find reports of soviet broadcast and arabic in that region of the world. The act outreach was already well under way before the usa ever takes life. It took time for the United States to build up a response, to try to find something that would at all measure up to this competition. When it did, it was mostly oneway. It was broadcast at, not listening to. It was spoken at the population and not necessarily engage with them in any meaningful or deep sense. For example, the truman doctrine announced in march 1947, in principle, declares a global conflict, but it does not actually go out of its way to make sure that were spreads in places like latin america or two south asia, it self at the forefront of decolonization. In other words, the truman doctrine eclairs a world conflict and then does not tell the world about it. It is very european centered, berlincentered, germanycentered. Thats all the more weird when you consider that the doctrine itself my apologies. It is probably not legible out there, but truman goes out of his way in distinction between totalitarian forces and regimes and the free world. He says that it is control of the media the way that these regimes control their people. In other words, it recognizes the power of media and a worldwide conflict but does not really do anything to announce that new doctrine to the broader world. It is a very atlanticfocused story. The graphic in the upper right is from first attempts on the eve of the korean war to try and six this gap. It is what truman called an ironically the campaign of truth. The thinking here is if we just tell our story to the world, tell the story about communist chicanery to the world, they will take our side. In other words, speaking at, not listening to and productively, not terribly effective. A game chance happens in 1953 along with stalins death that same year. A shift in American Resources devoted to Public Diplomacy and different targets for them. On your lower left, that is christian visiting india in december 1955. This, too, was part of a big pr tour. The other pictures i found in the photo archives, the bookmobile and cambodia to your upper left, a u. S. Library and by Cultural Center in baghdad on the lower right, and those of us with a sense of humor will note that those who have come to washington for training are being met by Vice President Richard Nixon at the time. Through the 1950s, the global south, what we will soon be calling the third world, proved its relevance on exactly these kinds of claims. So you have a kind of burgeoning, a kind of coalescence of activity in this area, having won the attention of american and soviet diplomats. That is where the unintended consequence starts to creep up. With this back story, i want to proceed to the main case studies. They are gathered around the early 1960s. This is the back story, the prestory of it. I want to show how the thing that animates the project really coalesce and combine in these years and do so in ways that leave the usia facing a whole different landscape than it thought it was engaging when it opened for business in 1953. That explosion of competition for lack of a better term is, i think, the real story and the reason for the unintended consequence. Were going to fix this whole story up with the climax. We will begin in 1961 at belgrade, yugoslavia, the founding of the nonalliance movement. Conference at belgrade signaled that nonaligned had become a fact of national and International Life to which the west must adjust. A different attitude band that displayed by the secretary of state just a few years earlier. Belgrade posed a delicate pr challenge to the new Kennedy Administration. The belgrade organizers each have their own reasons for championing nonalignment, some domestic, some regional, some aspirational, and their reasons, though they differed in particulars, were nonetheless broadly and sufficiently agreedupon to constitute a transnational persuasion. The Kennedy Administration debated how to approach this founding meeting of nonalignment, really sort of entrenching nonalignment is a feature of the cold war landscape. There was broad internal agreement ands team on the importance of the nonaligned nations and the importance of having good bilateral relations with each one, amounting to kind of an unspoken strategy of divide and conquer, but there were disputes internally in washington over the best ways to engage collective moments like this one. A month before the meeting, president ial advisor Arthur Schlesinger survived surmised the soviets were undoubtedly as uncertain as we are of what might come out of this bag of eels. So what is the u. S. Strategy . For lack of a better term they dont call it this, i do its handsoff. Lets not the seen as meddling and certainly not be seen as a tinting to influence the outcome, but the timing in treated. This is, after all, the summer of 1961. The berlin crisis reaches a third peak, i suppose. In china, theres a fear cold war defense will run away not just with world events but with the belgrade activities as well. That crisis in ui usia outposts is framed as a contest of selfdetermination. This is Kennedy Administrations attempts to speak to the global south, to the third world in language that surely decolonizing continents are going to relate to. It does not move the needle much in those places, but the continuing acuteness of the berlin crisis does leave the Kennedy Administration worried that a handsoff strategy will be inadequate in the event, so they shipped to a fairly vanilla message of anticolonialism. It is a minor gesture but helped along by the soviet presumption of Nuclear Testing in sensing the actors in belgrade. The American Ambassador on the scene in belgrade reported the following there appears to be an increasing likelihood that on several important issues, the countries will be less damaging than forecast anticipated. In the aftermath, this handsoff manila president ial message seems to have hate off. The u. S. Seems to have dodged a bullet as its image does not seem to have taken much of a hit. But divisions within the belgrade grouping did nonetheless continue to confuse and worry the United States because it offered potentially Common Ground for a third world project, seemed to offer the philosophical basis, by the way, one which transcends continent, race, or anything else. Theoretically, theres not any place in the world it could not spread. It already hit europe, asia, africa, and the middle east. If it offered Common Ground, it was not the only such element to do so. Now we turn to our second case study, the congo and africa. At the founding of its movement at belgrade, nonalignment was a more inclusive uniting principle than afro asian identity, it was almost far from certain at the time that it would eclipse its competition, not just recent and competition, not just recent years identity but poverty and underdevelopment. Race and anticolonialism preoccupied the belgrade party at least as much as the cold war or nonalignment issues did. Contemporary u. S. Observers like africanamerican robert brown said the same. The tremendous block, newly independent or uncommitted nations are primarily concerned about one issue the assertion of the equality of the white and nonwhite races. In comparison with this objective, all other issues communism, book, even a third world war, shrink in significance. So nonalignment could theoretically appeal to anyone. Him and it could be eclipsed by him and passionate calls to solidarity across the broader range of what some call the decorations. For many, race and africa were the far more pressing factor. These are photos from the actual meeting in indonesia in 1955, and the idea that there is a kind of postcolonial, post White Supremacy shared by these victims of european supremacy the world over is a powerful animating force, and it also has certain residences, given the way the african freedom struggle is progressing. I should stress that much of this sentiment, this solidarity and aspirations of solidarity predate the cold war by decades. Were not talking about something that was just born because of a superpower conflict, but they do take on a certain prevalence. Will African Solidarity and a sense of african destiny are very powerful. They found these sorts of dynamics and visions persisted and did so fairly well globally. Japanese, for example, stressed its racial kinship with its neighbors. Chinese pr in latin america highlighted that the american republics and the peoples democracy share code skin. Perhaps even more tellingly, china argued in africa that its own example of revolution was more relevant than that of the far more mature and essentially european soviet union. The chinese stressed their former colonial status and nonwhite and noneuropean origin and common problems with africa. Moreover, this was met with a rapidly expanding african appetite for media. The growth in Media Consumption that coincided with the congo crisis. These are wildcards. These are issues coming from the outside china to get the worlds focus on a cold war. You have a set of issues attached to race, to solidarity that have manifestations like apartheid that threaten to pull any emerging global collective in different directions. Away from, for example, the Nonalignment Movement to something more oriented toward race and anticolonialism. After kennedys inauguration, the congo crisis had absolutely dominated african opinion, having a great effect on that opinion by way of radicalizing it. News of his death lit a sharp edge to moscows prodigious efforts to identify the soviet union as the patron saint of anticolonialism, whose major theme was to charge it. Was machinations and western unwillingness to give up its colonial holdings. This sentiment has expression in various media. Coverage of protests, denunciation of imperialists led media output to more than double. You have essentially in response to that murder a rapid and widespread outpouring of propaganda, Public Diplomacy, and other sorts of media onslaught seeking to reshape the landscape of african and global cell opinion. The Kennedy Administration here the campaign was working and scrambled for a way to respond. What they came up with was a fairly lowkey, subtle attempt to not make is worse. The tagline for much of their output was the best way to keep the cold war out of africa is to keep the u. N. In. Even attempting a subdued multilateral approach was an uphill climb in large measure because of the power that found that the hero martyr is invoked at every opportunity. Glorified by african radical nationalist is the symbol of african aspirations and as a weapon in the struggle to consolidate unity. This climate made it hard for the usas subtle messaging and subtle multilateralism to be heard because washington lacked a figure to be the face of its african policy. One unable to match the voices of those whose African Bureau was itself like a usia continent wide with more than 100 agents working over the african continent, and the bureau exalted the nationalist unifier. Contemporary observers saw potential Movement Board along the media stream. At the time, the realist, likely to dismiss and africa as an as an idol, romantic dream, event may well prove them to be correct, but in the interim, devotion to 10 africanism is both widespread and charged with emotion, and hes far from being alone in his insistence that independence takes on its full meeting only if all of africa is free and if African Unity is achieved. So the pans and spirits loom large and are unpredictable in their ultimate destinations. The subtle approach the usia took was essentially to take the United States out of its only output regarding these very charged issues. On the lower right, you have an image used in millions of pamphlets as a kind of bridge across the atlantic emphasizing the shared anticolonialism in this moment. The other pictures you have, a usia photographer at an exhibit in kenya these are foreground. It talks less about the United States, at least not a steady stream and does more to integrate local storytelling. The Civil Rights Movement is itself beginning to bubble up into painful, violent, and bloody ways which make it hard to make a convincing case for the United States being the land of the free two and africa that is itself becoming free. The sometimes unpredictable dynamic of race as we bounced through an course through these crises made it very much a wildcard going forward. But i want to leave that part of the story now and stay on this side of the atlantic to turn to our third case study, latin america. This one is here in part because latin america achieved such importance in the wake of castros revolution in cuba. It became very important in american thinking in kennedys brain it was the most dangerous area in the world, but also, it was kind of a harbinger for where the global south would go. What you have then is a nice microcosm of why they think the issues they think are important are so important, especially the issue of poverty. One of the remarkable developments of these years is the way they can take quotes from che guevara, fidel castro, and remove the names and pretty much substitute quotes from kennedy officials about, for example, economic colonialism being as dead as political colonialism, that they are the same thing and their day is past. Above all, the supreme importance of poverty and under Development Going forward. This is how latin america joins the third world, how it becomes part of that broader and more broadly conceived entity. Just to take kennedy as an index of this, his famous 1957 speech on algeria included references to asia, africa, the middle east, and the uncommitted world, but only one and briefly passing reference to latin america. By the time we jumped forward to 1961, the Kennedy Administration has expanded the Geographic Area of concern to include the western hemisphere. Latin america is included, and that by itself is significant because you have a wider world defined not primarily by its recent colonial status or nonalignment but rather by its poverty, its underdevelopment, and crises are the most important priority for the Kennedy Administration. In the words of one committee, we are facing a revolt of the havenots, particularly in asia, africa, and latin america. Earlier documents akin to this report do not mention latin america, but by now, thanks largely to castro, it is there. The Kennedy Administration strategy to perform the alliance progress. There are other parts of the strategy. I do not want to give those short shrift, but a want to focus on these in particular today. The dimension of Public Diplomacy in the eyes of progress, which is in itself i will describe in a second. The Public Diplomacy mission is so important because it is a project with a mass brian. You have to reach mass public in order for them to join, mobilize forces of the whole society. In an environment where the same Committee Found the u. S. Was falling way behind when it came to Public Diplomacy, the importance is all the more important. John f. Kennedy announced in wonderful bostonian spanish the alliance intended to announce a hemispherewide corroborative cooperative effort to address social ills and poor standard standard of living via pooling resources to support latin American Social reform and Economic Development and in the process in ocular the region against a second castro and beyond that show the way forward for the noneuropean underdeveloped world. The thinking was that the afp was a way to capitalize on the kennedy teams words. Revolutionary and capitalistic forces to which communists are appealing, the thinking was that they could win those over and bring them on board with this project that hemisphere wide interamerican cooperation will speed up the development. The Immediate Response among latin american diplomats was electric, and the usia did a fairly comprehensive job in getting the word out across the whole hemisphere. But a year after his first announcement and the awakening of any such mobilization of such latin american publics was very little. As life magazine reported on the alliance this week reports found the usa was succeeding in flooding the latin American Media sphere with word of the project, like the one in the upper right, which is essentially a Housing Project where you tear down the old one and rebuild the new one. On the left, refurbished televisions to be distributed in latin america. Their success in blanketing the place with media output did not translate to getting mass buyin. It did not actually excite the population it was supposed to. American public diplomats were so busy congratulating themselves for getting this word through the hemisphere, and yet, it was not reaching the right people in the right ways, the right places, the right times, and having the right effect. It was not producing the mass buyin that they really needed. According to a council of foreign president s and Foreign Ministers from across the americas, the alliance was falling victim to a catch22. The alliance needed political and their word, spiritual support from people to accomplish its objectives, but until it completed the individual projects and accomplished its objectives, it could not elicit such political and spiritual support, no matter how comprehensive Media Outreach was. Historians have identified the shortcomings in the design and execution of the alliance, some of which were very evident at the time. But the commission was it required Popular Support and required ownership if it was to achieve its goal of transforming latin american society. Popular support could only be had by effective multilateral diplomacy, which did not appear to be in evidence. The initial expectation of mass, enthusiastic awareness was perhaps unrealistic. Maybe it is a simple matter of High Expectations and in the letdown leading to the consequence of pessimism. The council had some choice words about it. The former president of colombia noted, the program is fascinating and the surprising thing is that it fails to fascinate. The argentine foreign minister green that the alliance had failed to capture the popular imagination, not for want of trying. Millions of pamphlets, posters, cartoons, films, newsreels, tv program, radio programming, niche, mass, you name it it was tried, and it just did not move the needle. The fact that the diplomacy mission petered out in step with the larger alliance, which was effectively what kennedy did when kennedy was assassinated what is interesting to us are two things. In this story, you have confirmation that underdevelopment, poverty, and thus modernization became the central defining issue of interamerican and u. S. Third world relations. The notion that the real revolt was essentially the same one in asia and africa as in latin america represented this kind of unspoken and remarkable understanding, sort of agreement between kennedy and castro and latin america that the world was divided along economic lines, not ideological, racial, ethical, religious, cultural ones, but first and foremost, economic ones. So that is one. This sort of unspoken understanding that this is actually where the ballgame is, and this is what should drive should draw our mental maps. Thing two the increasing crowd miss of the Public Diplomacy field and increasing agreement among global voices. Conditions in latin america meant this was kind of always the case there. And cuba and castro very energetically use Public Diplomacy throughout the 1960s, but you could find this hitting kind of Critical Mass elsewhere as well. This is the key. It is the explosion of Public Diplomacy by multiple parties that produces the unintended consequences of the rise and shaping of the third world as a concept of a community, an entity on the world stage. The explosion of european equally important is the growth of homegrown african nation media itself. By the turn of the decade of 1960 cairo had Radio Networks that spanned the continent often with the help of americans. In very scores of africa, the middle east, and asia. The voice of america director took a tour of africa in 1959 and noted the it is a bit of a link the quote, but bear with me. I think this sums it up nicely. He reported back, a Young African told me in good english that he listened to the following radio stations bbc, nairobi, dar es salaam, d. O. A. , moscow, salisbury, leopoldo, brazzaville, cairo. He was unhappy because he could not get donna ghana. Programs are being africanized by africans, for africans, about africans. While each country is concerned with the broadcast of others, most are very eager to share their experience with their neighbors and become the leader of the emerging africa. I was told that external broadcasts took precedence over internal ones. The convergence of this conclusion showed patterns emerging. Belgrade, congo, and africa and the audience with nonalignment at the center of world attention made clear that despite superpower interest or intent, these were not primarily and certainly not exclusively east west issues. Rather, they touched on the concerns of the global south and did so at a time that revolutions in Media Technology made it possible for those regions to join the conversation , which points toward the broader conclusion. By carrying global into the noneuropean world, Public Diplomacy carried the identity into impoverished areas billing on a nucleus of nonalignment, underdevelopment, race consciousness and solidarity and anticolonialism. Leaders of the new nation in these areas formulated a third world project and expressed it to the wider world and to each other in Public Diplomacy and Media Outreach of that on in much the same way the gettysburg address altered the meaning of the civil war. Thank you very much. [applause] in 1966 castro convened the try continental conference in nevada. Solidarity of peoples in asia, africa, and latin america, and over his left does well, i guess on our left, over his right shoulder is one of the icons of the patron saints of this convergence. By this time, this is fairly well conventional wisdom, but it took a while to get there. Thats a story you can trace through the conversations held through Public Diplomacy in this decade. Mr. Kennedy mr. Kennedy all right. Thank you, jason, for a very interesting talk. We now turn to questions and answers. There are just a few ground rules. The first is that you wait to ask your question for the microphone. I will identify people, and also when you have the microphone, introduce yourself, so we will start right there. Hi there. Im francisco alvarez. Im here in an official capacity. I wanted to start with a comment very much appreciate how you started with a very agnostic view of the spread of communism across the globe noting that it it coincided with the crash of colonialism across the world. I wonder in all of this developing paradigm, where the history of human rights and the universal declaration of human rights also fits in. Does it take a backseat to this cultural narrative . I read lynn hunts amazing book basic human rights, and it basically stops where your book picks up. What happened to the declaration of basic human rights . Thank you. Mr. Parker excellent questions because that, to, is one of the changes that takes place during these years. It is not terribly present in a lot of the discourse you can find coming out of the u. S. Aimed at the broader world except certain moments, especially in the 70s, sort of after my period. Not to say that those factors, those ideas are not in conversations. Mark bradleys new book on the topic is really good discussing the language of human rights. It crests in the 1940s and receives and then in the 70s, but it does so this different media and for different reasons. Following that same chronology, half of which is passed the period i cover, you can find american sort of tactical use of human rights in its usia output, but you do not find it much in the 1940s as you might think. There is a serious emphasis on the u. N. And american output and all caps of places fairly consistently from the 1940s to the 1960s if its congo or korea or what have you. The idea is that the u. N. Is going to be the best guarantor of peace going forward, deemphasizing a sort of hyper role of the United States. Human rights enters through the side door there, but it is not as prominent as one might think, at least not in the stuff i found. I did not find it to be as much a part of the third world project as i might have expected it to until that latter phase in the 1970s. Once that conversation changes with the new International Economic order and the directions these discourses take , but i did not cover them as much in here because i just did not find them in evidence. If you want to sort of argue about the walks like a duck talks like a duck, theres certainly antecedents you can see popping up, but the phrasing does not really show up until really that Second Chapter in the 1970s. It is not really present here except if you read really deeply between the lines, but it is a great question because its one of those things that helps to sort of when looking back on these years in retrospect, it seems to have been practically revolutionary to sort of come into an International Conversation and dominate ultimately, but it was not necessarily so at the time. Mr. Kennedy at the table, right next to the previous speaker. I think your topic is very current, considering that in our days, between 80 and 90 of all news distributed undistributed by western News Agencies like Associated Press or united press international. That brings me to my first question. Are you also examining the relationship between the u. S. Government and in a broader sense, u. S. News agencies like Associated Press, united press international, or different News Agencies when it comes to the internet, like different Internet Companies who are responsible for the distribution and production of information . The training of journalists in Different Countries could also be a way to influence foreign opinion. My second question i wrote an article about the nonalignment news agency that was an attempt of the nonaligned countries to counterbalance the information that was put out by western News Agencies. The attempt failed for many, many reasons, but the people who set up this nonaligned News Agency Pool were discussing the reasons why there attempt failed for many years, and for me, it was quite interesting to read their discussion to follow the discussions. One reason why they thought their pool failed was people in Different Countries have different knowledge or different cultural backgrounds when they receive news, and you have to address them very specifically. You cannot just put out one press release and think everybody in the whole world will be interested in it. Sometimes you have to include more background information. Sometimes you have to put in less background information. They got the idea that their news was considered fake news in the western world. They were thinking about how can we prove that our news is objective in a way, not fake news that telling the truth about what is going on in our countries, say ghana, egypt, israel. I was wondering if the people you are interested in in the u. S. Government or the u. S. Information department were discussing similar topics. How can we make sure that everybody is believing that we are telling the truth, not only putting out propaganda . Mr. Parker let me go with that second question first with another caveat that i stop in the early 1960s, so i dont know what the later effort youre talking about by the nonaligned nations collectively to replace or complement the services, but the problem of figuring out how to sort of have credibility with these foreign audiences in either direction was one that the usia was they learned fairly quickly that you had to have at least some native voices, some local voices sort of in the mix. It just was not credible for the u. S. To show up and say im in woodrow and im going to tell you what happened, although when he was director of usia, he was the biggest proponent of finding local talent to be the journalist, to be the voices im edward murrow, and im going to tell you what happened. You had this acknowledgment that there was a credibility problem essentially, so going outward from the u. S. To the world, you had an effort to try to make it a cooperative, to sort of find local allies, if they are employees of usia or of the press in various countries. The relationships built with local press establishments, local press infrastructure could make or break in some of the larger and more sophisticated societies like india of the decolonizing world and a lot of other ones where money was so short and there was not a local press to speak of a more of a reliance on a regional hub or what have you. You have the usia serving as a kind of free de facto upi or ap. I have a graphic not in this presentation of the upi operations in the murder of years the murrow years. Newsreels are reaching 30 million africans a week. They are putting out 10,000 words of copy a day, much of which is funneled right into local papers that are very happy to have the copy and not have to pay a fee. Even when those are sort of the aspects you are working with, you still have on the part of u. S. Public diplomats and effort to orient it towards the local idiom and often in the local voice. As were going the other direction i guess i could not answer because the direction i see going on a little bit less of third world responding to the United States except in so far as the cold war agenda is a nonstarter and a lot of places and third world project emerges specifically as a rejection of that agenda. Its more that you have people using their Media Presence to jockey for positions against each other and sort of battle for influence in these various spots. There may be part of your question i am missing on that front, but i believe it there and come back to it. As far as the relationship with the usia to american newspapers, that is a little tricky because theres part of the story that i do not engage in, which is the earlier first 10 years, especially in places like guatemala, the cia got involved in some of this stuff, too, and they were very much practitioners of propaganda. The usia had a very split personality between salesman and journalist, but they were not spies, and they did not want any propagandists. You had an intention to be something closer to a news agency or at worst, a mass avenue at agency rather than a spy, so they let the spies handle their part, and it is the spies who would use newspaperss and forge relationships with these newspapers and funneled in a story and make sure it got funneled into or reprinted or recovered in parts of the world that they wanted to have an audience. The relationship with american newspapers was not so nefarious and had more to do with coaching personnel coaching personnel paoaching personnel than anything else. But they did make use of newspapers in foreign countries. With a couple was called ventriloquism where you had a really close relationship with an editor in uruguay and would go through that editor to print a story, and the printing of that story in uruguay becomes reason for a somewhat more neutral editor in chile to pick up the story because there is something happening with the alliance in uruguay and we need to fill some space. The initial source is the usa, but it is funneled through sympathetic ally journalistic venues, and that inns of helping the story to have life in the same way i guess twitter is sort of a version of that today. You retweet something long enough, and it will have legs for days. Mr. Kennedy back behind the column. Yes . Right there. Hi. The way i hear the story, its mostly about conversation between the first world and specifically the usia, and the third world. Out of the conversation, the concept of the third world images. I wonder about the place of the second world in this story. What is the conception of the third world within the soviet union, soviet Public Diplomacy, and to what extent does soviet Public Diplomacy play a role in the emergence of the third world as a concept . If you were relying not just on the usia as your main source, but looking at common form, Something Like that, with the dynamics would the dynamics youre discussing change . Would there be a deficit different emphasis . Mr. Parker that is a good question because i do give a little short shrift to the second world in this story, but my overarching point is you cannot really separate the first and second if you are looking through the eyes of the third world, first and second are largely the same, seeking to bring the cold war to their environment, and they do not want any part of it. There are exceptions, but the idea of the third world as a sort of different path is a rejection of both the first and second world. The second worlds engagement actually tracks pretty similarly. I mentioned the soviet Union Outreach early on with the arabic broadcast. You can find evidence of at least a sort of baseline engagement that is higher than that with the u. S. , but stalin did not think very much of this project, so it did not go very far while he was alive. Its one reason why he had that picture with khrushchev in india. By that point, the suggestion is these places will be rising in importance, so the arrival of kris Jenner Khrushchev in south asia is one of those markers that says eisenhower is right to say the global south is important. The global south is agreeing with that, yes, we are important, but we also are rejecting what youre selling. Were not interested in being frontline figures in your cold war. We are more interested in developments, in getting away from the risk of nuclear war and other Dangerous Things the cold war might bring if it gets injected into their territory. Past that, you can find a couple of other milestones that suggest the continued and deepening infosys on the global south is another shared feature of the u. S. And soviets instinct. Kennedy is sort of conceiving of this broader global south that is economically defined above all else. The soviets in i want to say november 1961 branch off a version of their usia, hives off a sub agency devoted specifically to the global south. They are full of area experts that are meant to speak in local idioms to these places. They are doing this as much in response to american competition as to chinese competition. The sign of a soviet split, that is already fairly far gone, is played out in a lot of these sort of global south places. I mentioned the chinese output that said attention, africans, our version of visit revolution is the way forward for you. We certainly understand you better than those european soviets do. Their revolution does not have the same relevance. You are hearing that kind of rhetoric. The soviets founding of this press agency is as much a response to that as much as it is to anything the u. S. Is doing, but it is a great point. I guess it is a nice opportunity for me to emphasize that i do not mean to say that the idea is not emerging like athena from the head of usia. It is very much in interactive process. The north time to make a case to the south and the south rejecting that case, but on different grounds. I want to say thank you. Mr. Kennedy and you are . My name is jim bullock. Im a retired usia officer. I teach now at gw. A few observations one is i note that this is how usia played it, to. Their public identity insomuch as they had went inside the United States was the press and media, and you focus on that as well, but in fact, going back to the 1930s, the americans began creating u. S. Information Service Centers in latin america in response to german and italian activity, and that was mainly cultural. Then when usia does give founded, its elements are who is going to own this thing, and eisenhower separates it, has its own thing, but all the years they existed was mainly talking about their Information Media stuff, and in fact, in 1984, i went on to baghdad to reopen up the embassy. I spent three years there, and the only time i set foot in the newspaper was when one of my austrian exhibit techs, who was there for the fair, had a car accident and i had to go down and settle the insurance claim. 95 of my time in baghdad was on student advising, building a library, getting people off on Exchange Programs. I guess and looking for a common tear. You touched on it before because you said that the Truman Administration was very European Focus, and of course, a lot of our budget argument was very European Focus in the cold war was i remember sitting in baghdad getting all these talking points that i would kind of chuckled because my job was to get around the country. I brought a country and western band, and that was so much more important than going down to their newspaper and arguing about placement of Medium Range Missiles in europe. Nobody gave a damn. And if you are in the middle east, in 1967, this arabisraeli thing totally dominated internationally. You did not go there. You tried to be america as a society, and how many times did my colleagues say i cannot stand american foreignpolicy, but i love my american friends. We did that constantly. I guess the question to throw back at you ever since usia was founded, the Field Network took over the administration of the state Department Culture programs. In most of my career, most of my time was spent on culture. Mr. Parker mr. Parker it is a valuable, i guess, addition to the point im trying to make. I do not engage very much in the book with cultural diplomacy. That is part of what publicly just Public Diplomacy is about. It is under the umbrella. There are so many great books about it and spin doctoring and the Crisis Management and how you can see is reacting to these pivot moments and how they are taking advantage of them or not to try to make a cold war case, so i do not dismiss the culture part. I just do not cover it much. It is helpful to have this in the mix as well. It is absolutely right. Starting in the 1930s in latin america, the libraries and Cultural Centers, and even they one of the studies is on the rio pact of latin america. There is a shocking to me absence of engagement at black Culture Centers that let and Culture Centers in america. There is no usia yet, so theyre going through the office of interamerican affairs. There is no concerted effort i can find to even say the words truman doctrine at libraries and Cultural Centers. These are in latin america, which itself thanks to the rio pact, is a Cold War Alliance older than nato. It is the first one, really, and you would not know it even happened because there is not any sort of programming that i can identify that said welcome aboard, latin americans, to this great crusade. It is a nonissue. It does not happen. Because of the emphasis our culture places on exchange students, you are right those things dominate. Theres good evidence that is the stuff that actually works because of the relationships that can form, and they certainly did put a hard premium the u. S. Did on making sure that Exchange Programs and those kinds of niche targeting, that those paid off. You can find better evidence that they worked then the media campaigns did, with the possible exception of the cuban missile crisis and maybe the berlin wall. Theres significant Public Opinion Research Done by usia on how those things were covered, and those, usia came off ready well in terms of having a message sent across mass Media Worldwide and having it sort of work out the way that you had hoped. Mr. Kennedy wait, wait, wait. Because we are being taped, so you need the microphone. [inaudible] some of the people. We used to call them culture vultures. They actually deliberately shunned the media. The overall organization, you also had human beings. In some countries and in some programs, because of [inaudible] mr. Parker i dont know if it is a matter of priorities, agendas, what have you, or simple print, i guess, timelines and skill sets, but the cultural folks often were at odds, even when the culture folks could say , were the ones who make this difference. There is a fantastic quote a colleague of ours found. The Louis Armstrong tour, the jazz ambassadors tour going through africa, they said this impaired the building of a true Pan African Movement no less than Nelson Mandela himself said this in paired the building of a true Pan African Movement. Mr. Kennedy lets turn on this side. Right up front. Hi, ross johnson, Wilson Center. Comment question and then a real question. It should not be a surprise that it took the United States to 1953 or something to crank up this effort, given the general demobilization of not just information but everything after world war ii. It is only the korean war that starts the military mobilization and all that. So its not necessarily a surprise, i should think, and i wonder if i wonder if you are not reading too much into the socalled truman doctrine, which , to my mind, it is a comment, but i appreciate your reaction to my mind, it is not a worldwide doctrine. It is a doctrine about greece and turkey and not much else, actually, whatever the words are , so that is not necessarily a catalyst that one should look for immediate action. The question would be do you feel then in the book also specifically, in the voice of america, which starts cranking up in 1947 but europefocused, and incorporated in usia in 1953. I wonder if you deal with that in the book. Thank you. Mr. Parker second point first. I do deal with it a little bit, but more in passing because my focus is outside of europe, and that is where the action is in those early years. You can almost use Public Diplomacy to track the widening of the cold war over time. It does begin in this sort of europe centric and Europe Periphery with greece and turkey conflict, so much so that even the conflicts in indochina and indonesia that might have a little local coloring here and there are not quite conceived of as being the same phenomenon until fairly later in the game, so the Radio Infrastructure is built in europe in response, and that is really where the main chance is seen. I dont do much of that because my focus is elsewhere, but that by itself i think is telling. That is part of what i want to point our attention to, the way that scope widens over time. As for the truman doctrine, it is true that this was about the greece and turkey crisis, but the language of the doctrine is fairly totalizing. It does look at the broader setting, not just pulling it back to the idea of an antitotalitarian crusade akin to the one we faced in world war ii, so this is our continued sort of duty, but one which threatens subjugated people everywhere. It is a little overblown in the rhetoric, and you may be right that i take it slightly to literally on its face, given it was more about that east mediterranean crisis in the moment, but it did, i think, suggest sort of an american acknowledgment of something that continues in some other form in the war, and that is a certain kind of conflict as to expand its scope potentially if not actually to a global scale. You are right that its korea that flips the switch, but that reason is it attracts people to those early chapters on it because of what i see in this juncture between the language itself and the actions that followed. The one exception to that, and i think this will support your point, which i did not talk about in the presentation is the truman Doctrine Document that lays out the idea that there is a worldwide information war, media war, psychological war going on in the something has to be done, but that something really just takes the form of radio in europe and promotion of the Marshall Plan in europe, and that was kind of it until you get to prove in korea that this conflict could flare up for a field far afield. Mr. Kennedy i think there was a hand up. Yes, in the redshirt, if you could wait for the microphone. Im tim barton. I have two questions. One is on terminology. What did people say before third world . And if you wanted to comment on the flavors or personalities of who would use each phrase, that would be great to hear. Yeah, lets do that first. Mr. Parker mr. Parker well, the list that they run through from the late 1940s until the terms sort of takes root in the early 1960s starts with free world, meaning everybody is not a communist. It extends through a couple of different iterations. Once neutral is him, before it morphs into nonalignment. Neutral is him is another turn. The neutral nations or the uncommitted nations. Neutralism is another of the terms. These are largely the security and strategy and to a larger extent because they are not in lacey at the Public Diplomacy teams talking in these terms. I dont know about treasury officials or defense officials. Except their defense involved in the nfc. Free world, uncommitted, neutralist, nonaligned. There are other flavors, and this seems to be more the public diplomats than anyone else. Afro asian or african asian arab nations. You can pretty much hit each of the big three, you can find all of those. The last category would be sort of the underdeveloped countries or the lower or lesser developed countries. That actually lasts fairly late into the game, but there, too, you have an expansion of scope because they are talking about a shorter list of places then eventually is the case. By the time the 1964 edible annual report of usia back to congress is published, it discusses the ldcs and announces it has added result, venezuela and colombia to the list. They were not there before. Before that it was places like india. Have a broader scope to incorporate them. European radicals probably would have used underdeveloped countries. Mr. Parker one of the curious things is by the time you get to those years i do not get into it much, but it was what convinced me i was onto something. If you had asked latin american elites if they were part of this third world thing because in various forms, that was asked, most of them said no. There were military regimes that would not admit. Of course not, were all prowest and pronorth, except for cuba. Very much an outlier. You have by the end of the decade widespread agreement, even among centerright governments in latin america that yes, we are part of the third world. This poverty we are facing is not that different from the poverty that egyptians or ghanaians face. That is our lot as well. The second question is about scandinavia, about scandinavia taking global leadership, support for the earth summit, but during the 1950s and 1960s, i think. Com or schulz did theytill play as much of a leadership role in the 1950s and 1960s . Mr. Parker not that pops up in the documents i was going through. Other than the congo crisis. The other you an official from scandinavia, they are not really players in this, and you would expect them to pop up, given the sort of foreign aid traditions of these places, especially the high levels of donation and development aid. Especially because usia kept pretty careful tabs on what countries were helping places with their own media establishments, right . First of all, the british and french never really leave in media terms. They are sort of ubiquitous before independence and after, but when the independent governors governments want to compete with them and their neighbors, become to the usia not this building, but this agency, and they ask for help, and they also do the same thing in eastern europe. Every once in a while, there would be a scorecard the usa would include in its annual report saying that east germany helped the togo to build a Printing Press and czechoslovakia helped cote divoire or whoever to build a radio station. You have interest in the infrastructure of these networks, and you would expect maybe that to be a place where the scandinavians would pop up because these were priorities for these new countries. I mentioned the permanent problem and the permanent question. The permanent problem is the word deed gap. You can never quite spin to match her policy. Theres always a gap between what youre actually doing and what people perceive you to be doing. And part of the problem is you can never tell if it is working. You can never be sure your message is having the effect you desire. One of the fascinating things to me about researching this book was the language. The usa would report back on what is happening in these places, and they found that basically all of these places, especially if they had any remotely extraterritorial ambitions, they would themselves assert as they had independence engage in Public Diplomacy of their own. As soon as they got independence and before they could even pay for a lot of the other stuff they had a pay for, this was a national priority. For otherwise impoverished states trying to make a name for themselves among their neighbors and to their former colonial rulers and to the superpowers, this is one of the ways you do it, so you prioritize that, even when you are hardpressed to meet your other pressing needs. Mr. Kennedy we have time for one short question with a short answer. In the back there. Christopher newport university. I will keep it fairly short. Its partially based on things already discussed, and that is the reception of the Public Diplomacy. For a completely different project, i am studying media perception in the 1950s and 1960s in africa, and there is state run media. Radio cairo is big. The bbc. If you look at newspapers and what they publish, it is either written by their own journalists or 80 or 90 is taken from the new york times, so much of what we consider to be the basis of public debate or Political Society is that these are directly coming from these Public Diplomacy agencies. Maybe something has been placed. That is of course always possible, but id wondering thats the reason why i showed up here what is its actual impact . If we go to the state archives and look at how they spent some resources, we assume they had an impact, but it we actually look at the ground, it was not really important. What was important was what was going on on the editorial pages of the washington post, for example. The only time you actually see Public Diplomacy having any impact in the newspapers is when the american Cultural Center has a meeting or public event or sends a stipend to the u. S. Those kinds of things have a tangible effect on public debate. It is not easy question. Im really, seriously wondering if these things have any tangible debate in the socalled third world in mr. Parker the 1950s and 1960s. Mr. Parker right. The usia got better as time went on and trying to figure that out. In the same way that in 1948, doing defeats truman in part because of the unsophisticated polling apparatus, and later on, you can predict with a little more certainty what is going to happen. The usia got better over time figuring out what was the lay of the land, but they never really mastered it. That permanent question, the is it working question, bedeviled the whole operation forever. The best you can do is to ask in january and again in december, have you heard of the alliance for progress among urbanites in bolivia, mexico, and one other country, and compared the answer. Thats the mass targeting. With the niche targeting, you have a little bit better luck as far as going from that level to ive heard of it to it changed my mind or changed the debate in our country, that is harder to track and certainly harder to prove, but just as all these new states launched these campaigns and figured it is worth is spending the money to broadcast to our neighbors, even if we do not know if it is working, everyone else is doing it, so wed better keep up, and it is reasonably cheap as these things go. The budget of the usia compared to the military or something is peanuts, so you could potentially get some bang for your buck, if you cannot tell how large the bang is. Mr. Kennedy ok, you will all have an opportunity to speak to jason personally at the reception, which concludes outside this door, and also an opportunity his book, hearts, minds, voices u. S. Cold war Public Diplomacy and the formation of the third world , which is available for purchase, so please join me in thanking jason. 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