This book is the biography of an idea: the idea that America needed a permanent apparatus to explain itself to the postwar world. It charts the career of the institution created around that idea – the United States Information Agency or USIA, known overseas as the United States Information Service or USIS – and its role in the Cold War. The book relates the birth, youth, midlife crisis, and mature successes of the USIA. The story of the agency's post–Cold War demise must wait for another volume. The evolution of America's approach to global public opinion remains relevant today, especially as many of the lessons learned across more than forty years of Cold War effort seem to have been forgotten.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

This book builds on the work of a number of scholars of the history of propaganda, scholars of the role of culture in American foreign relations, and a small group of agency veterans who have written about the USIA and gathered oral evidence from its retirees. Despite these worthy antecedents, it is necessarily offered as a corrective to scholarly neglect. Not only is this is the first full and archive-based historical treatment of the agency, but also remarkably few accounts of American diplomacy even mention the USIA. This is not entirely the result of prejudice on the part of “conventional” diplomatic historians.