Reasserting America in the 1970s

U.S. public diplomacy and the rebuilding of America's image abroad

Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, David J. Snyder

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526104861
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Reasserting America in the 1970s brings together two areas of burgeoning scholarly interest. On the one hand, scholars are investigating the many ways in which the 1970s constituted a profound era of transition in the international order. The American defeat in Vietnam, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods exchange system and a string of domestic setbacks including Watergate, Three-Mile Island and reversals during the Carter years all contributed to a grand reappraisal of the power and prestige of the United States in the world. In addition, the rise of new global competitors such as Germany and Japan, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union and the emergence of new private sources of global power contributed to uncertainty.

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Introduction:
Reasserting America in the 1970s

Hallvard Notaker, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder

What was it about the 1970s that required the “reassertion” of America, as we claim in the title of this book, then as now the single most powerful nation in the world? The period under discussion overflows that of a simple ten-year decade—the “long 1970s” is now a common term—and it was deeply felt emotionally, psychologically, financially, and politically by those who lived through it. For this book, “the 70s” covers 1965–1980, what we can refer to as America’s “post-confidence era.” “The 70s” encompasses, emphatically, the dawning consciousness in the United States and around the world that the Vietnam War was a watershed of major proportions, encompassing the conviction that the war demonstrated the limits of American power (though not of American hubris). “The 70s” marks the disappointing end to the hopeful period of civil rights gains for African Americans that had begun years earlier, as well as the still very uncertain outcome of the feminist battle for women’s rights. It symbolizes a new era of American economic vulnerability in the world. Finally, “the 70s” is a shorthand for the deepening political mistrust that reached its peak in the convulsions of Watergate, but which also includes the increasingly desperate dissembling of the Johnson administration at the opening of the era and the apparent fecklessness of the Carter administration at the close, each bookending the underhand menaces of the Nixon administration. It was, as the opening essay by Thomas Zeiler makes clear, a time of FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Symbols of American decline seemed to be everywhere in “the 70s.” Inspiring political leaders were gunned down in public, as if law and order itself were evaporating. Riots in northern cities and slums seemed, for many, proof of America’s spiritual decline, a certainty verified when violence claimed younger lives on college campuses north and south. The excitement of the Apollo missions quickly died away, factories shuttered, American streets filled with Japanese cars, nuclear power plants cracked open. For many conservatives, the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion offered a shuddering imprimatur to the new era of brutal disregard for old verities. Progressives lamented the fracturing of the old liberal establishment, certified by George McGovern’s crushing 1972 defeat to Nixon. American mass culture, consumption habits, environmental norms, and gender practices came under intense scrutiny. Big Government was questioned by increasingly fervent market-oriented solutions to social and political dilemmas, with the restructuring of New York City’s debt-ridden administration according to a monetarist agenda in 1975 a harbinger of what was to come.¹ Strange new vocabulary entered the American lexicon: “urban guerilla,” “stagflation,” and “gas guzzler” among them, all heralding a shocking and unexpected end to certainties that had seemed to define the postwar generation since 1945. In this era of cultural pessimism, Americans turned inward, to the family, to a rapidly coalescing preoccupation with “morality” as a cause of the decline, and to cultural escapism via disco music, Saturday Night Live, and increasingly insipid television sit-coms.

For many Americans, it seemed as if overnight the United States had lost its way. Gone were the triumphant days of apparently easy American foreign policy successes, from the Marshall Plan to the Berlin airlift to any number of morally dubious, but nevertheless successful Cold War interventions in foreign lands. Gone too were the easy days of American economic supremacy when the dollar, growth rates, and consumer habits ruled the world. A (white) man with a gray flannel suit was no longer assured success in “the 70s” as he seemingly had been before. The rise of new global competitors such as Germany and Japan, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, and the emergence of new private sources of global power—the sudden recognition of the impermanence of American ascendancy that one influential anthology memorably terms “the shock of the global”—all assaulted American confidence in the nation’s purpose and decency.²

In that earlier postwar period, American culture seemed to reign supreme. The images and habits of American mass culture were everywhere, or at least to many foreign observers, appeared to be everywhere. Who did not know James Dean and Marilyn Monroe? Who had not considered, and perhaps even pined for, the luxuries of the American grocery store and the opulence of the American kitchen? Several European nations found it necessary to enact prohibitive import quotas on Hollywood films lest American cinema swamp their domestic film industries.

This easy confidence found its way into the work of the cultural relations officials in the State Department, the United States Information Agency, the Voice of America, the Economic Cooperation Administration, and the other agencies of what would later be called American public diplomacy. The 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s appear as a golden age of American culture as millions of foreigners, especially young people, hungered for the music, film, and fashion of the United States. During and after World War II, American information and cultural programs rested on a broad consensus that promoting American culture, and explaining American intentions, was an essential aspect of U.S. diplomatic practice. U.S. economic hegemony and cultural leadership helped legitimize the extension of military power, especially in areas traditionally suspicious of American culture. Misgivings and protest against American cultural exports only indicated that the message needed to be amplified, not adapted.

Yet the message was not universally accepted at the receiving end, and by “the 70s” the forces of rejection appeared to gain strength and combine into a more threatening cultural movement, often working in tandem with domestic U.S. criticism. European skepticism towards American-style modernity and perceptions of a culture obsessed with material progress were reinvigorated by waves of protest against global injustice and environmental destruction through the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the “70s” came to represent not only a rupture, but also continuity—a crescendo of lingering doubts about America. Violence both in Vietnam and on the streets of America became inducements for the receiving end to talk back at, and even to reject, U.S. public diplomacy efforts that had previously been consumed with a seemingly healthy appetite. By the time of “the 70s,” the paramount confidence of the surprisingly short-lived “American Century” was gone.³

This volume explores this environment along two tracks which give organizing shape to our narrative. Firstly, the problems of projection. How did American cultural and information officials approach their work in the new 1970s era of “fear, uncertainty, and doubt”? What could they say about a nation now apparently no longer confident of its own righteousness? How did public diplomacy function when its claims of progress through the 1950s and 1960s no longer squared with the political, military, and economic limitations of the 1970s? Secondly, the encounters at the receiving end. How were public diplomacy programs received in various parts of the world, each often undergoing their own historic convulsions? How did global publics perceive the United States in an era when many Americans themselves were deeply pessimistic about their country’s performance and future? How far did U.S. propagandists reshape or reframe their methods and messages to deal with this new critical environment? In short, how did U.S. public diplomats “sell” America to an increasingly skeptical global public?

Several important themes run through the chapters in this collection, all of them relevant for understanding America’s role in the world and its public diplomacy strategies during “the 70s.” Firstly, civil rights and the Vietnam War were the two issues that overshadowed all public diplomacy efforts around the globe. With 1968 as a rough cut-off point, while the message before had been one of gradual progress and commitments worth the cost, the message in “the 70s” had to deal with a sense of broken promises, simmering social discontent, and military defeat. Nixon may have crafted one of the most remarkable landslide victories in the 1972 presidential elections, but “Peace with honor” did not sell well outside of the confines of the U.S. electorate.

A second theme is the importance of public–private cooperation in promoting and interpreting U.S. interests and culture abroad. This was not new—the private sector had always been a partner, and indeed a forerunner, of government initiatives in this field. What the ensuing chapters demonstrate, however, is the variety of private partners that were active, to varying degrees of autonomy. While the Sister City movement did team up with the State Department, its local interests did not always coincide with national policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army was running its own public diplomacy campaign in West Berlin, and the fragmentation of U.S. foreign policy elite opinion in the era of détente saw influential private organizations such as the Committee on the Present Danger actively opposing Washington’s designs.

U.S. public diplomats aimed to channel, package, or manage ideas, texts, and discourses emerging naturally, and chaotically, from American society. They wrestled with the ideological tensions of promoting U.S. diplomatic interests abroad while at the same time fairly representing a diffuse, pluralist, and often deeply conflicted domestic culture at home. Too determined management of public diplomacy campaigns would have invited charges of propaganda, but too little management would have left the cultural field open for accusations by critics of American racism, sexism, and materialism. These tensions were diluted somewhat in the triumphalist consensus culture of the 1940s and 1950s, but “the 70s” reveal more than ever the rich and problematic relationship between domestic American culture and official public diplomacy policy. Scholarship on U.S. public diplomacy tends to generalize the multiple sources of American cultural influence abroad, as if everything was guided by enlightened management. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the unexpected, multilayered sides to U.S. public diplomacy, in contrast to many studies that tend to flatten it out as a one-dimensional practice of selected one-dimensional agencies. By investigating public diplomacy as a fraught process of cultural management, as opposed to a peripheral marketing or “branding” of an American image, new directions for historical research are opened up.

Ensuing from this public–private relation as a key analytical lens for public diplomacy studies is the related observation that many of the domestic upheavals and social, political, and cultural protest movements which sapped American morale at home escaped the capacity of public diplomacy officials to manage them abroad. This is the third theme—the fact that America’s increasingly raucous social and political diversity produced unexpected results abroad. Even while government officials often failed to counter the image of an America in irrevocable decline, that very image opened new avenues of cultural prestige abroad. For many foreign observers, it was precisely the new uncertainties that made American culture less threatening, despite its prevailing ubiquity. The emancipatory potential of American culture, so confidently asserted at mid-century, had always been a force of cultural subversion, a fact often dismissed by American officials. Now it had to be less assertive, more accommodating, civilized, and ultimately agreeable. A new era of American prestige had arrived, but it was one that officials found difficult to perceive, or promote.

Going against the grain of much of the scholarship on “the 70s,” therefore, this book presents an array of reasons for claiming that American culture en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Reasserting America in the 1970s
• 2 Historical Setting: The Age of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
• Part One: A New Public Diplomacy for a New America
• 3 The Devil at the Crossroads: USIA and American Public Diplomacy in the 1970s
• 4 The Sister-City Network in the 1970s: American Municipal Internationalism and Public Diplomacy in a Decade of Change
• 5 The Exposure of CIA Sponsorship of Radio Free Europe: The “Crusade for Freedom,” American Exceptionalism, and the Foreign–Domestic Nexus of Public Diplomacy
• 6 USIA Responds to the Women’s Movement, 1960–1975
• 7 “The Low Key Mulatto Coverage”: Race, Civil Rights, and American Public Diplomacy, 1965–1976
• 8 Paintbrush Politics: The Collapse of American Arts Diplomacy, 1968–1972
• 9 Selling Space Capsules, Moon Rocks, and America: Spaceflight in U.S. Public Diplomacy, 1961–1979
• Part Two: The World Responds to a Reassertive America
• 10 America’s Public Diplomacy in France and Italy during the Years of Eurocommunism
• 11 Selling America between Sharpeville and Soweto: The USIA in South Africa, 1960–1976
• 12 Selling the American West on the Frontier of the Cold War: The U.S. Army’s German-American Volksfest in West Berlin, 1965–1981
• 13 Unquiet Americans: The Church Committee, the CIA, and the Intelligence Dimension of U.S. Public Diplomacy in the 1970s
• 14 Time to Heal the Wounds: America’s Bicentennial and U.S.–Sweden Normalization in 1976
• 15 “Something to Boast About”: Western Enthusiasm for Carter’s Human Rights Diplomacy
• 16 To Arms for the Western Alliance: The Committee on the Present Danger, Defense Spending, and the Perception of American Power Abroad, 1973–1980
• Afterword
• 17 Afterword: Selling America in the Shadow of Vietnam
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright