[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened May, 1983 [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
July 9, 1974 by Richard D. McKinzie
MCKINZIE: What brought you into Government service in 1942? BARRETT: Well, I was working at Newsweek, where I was national affairs editor. I shall never forget Pearl Harbor Day. The day before I had put the whole National Affairs Department of Newsweek and the Periscope Department, for which I was responsible, together early. I got it in good shape so that I could go to a lollapalooza of a wedding anniversary party of an old friend. I got home from that party about 5:30 a.m. and wheeled into the office the next day with a terrible hangover, thinking I could just do a little updating patchwork on the department. I had been there a short while when the teletypes
started clanging, "Pearl Harbor!" We had to re-do the entire magazine, of course. Anyhow, I got war fever and I offered my services to the Navy, and they did not exactly leap at the opportunity. Then they came after me, very mysterious and very hush-hush. There was a young lieutenant, whom I thought was excessively the cop-and-robber type. I thought they were going to try to put me in CIA-type things, but it turned out that they had in mind censorship, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Somewhere in there FDR's old friend, Vincent Astor, suggested I go down and talk to the people in what was then the [William J.] Donovan Coordinator of Information operation. I did so, was hired, tarried at Newsweek long enough to train in a successor, and then went down to Washington. MCKINZIE: Did you have military status?
BARRETT: When I went abroad they would give me a simulated rank, but I didn't have a uniform. I was working as a civilian. That's how I got into it, and then the COI went through a series of mergers and conversions typical of the Roosevelt administration. When something didn't work, he'd just reconstitute it under a new name, and put two agencies together and place some new guy in charge. I was in charge of setting up a cable news operation for missions around the world. I also handled relations with other national radios when I was still with Donovan. Then that part of Donovan's operation, non-hush-hush, was switched to the Office of War Information under Elmer Davis, and with it went a couple of other Government agencies like the Office of Facts and Figures. That's how I got into this. MCKINZIE: By the end of the war you were the Director of Overseas Operations, at the time that the European countries were either being conquered
or liberated. Someone said that in World War I, the idea of wartime propaganda was to appeal not so much to that which was between the ears, but to appeal to the glands, and that World War II was more in the nature of selling a product. Elmer Davis made that distinction at some point in about 1943. Did you sense that there was this kind of difference? World War I was very sentimental. BARRETT: I suppose. Of course, we have to distinguish between national and international. I think when you talk about the emotions and all, you are talking partly about the national aspect: domestic. Elmer increasingly construed it as his job to get information out of the Government and coordinate campaigns for conservation of this, that, and the other. I think that probably his toughest battles were forcing reluctant bureaucrats to put out information that the good public had every right to know.
MCKINZIE: This was a different kind of situation overseas, however. BARRETT: Overseas we were really trying to tell our own story and to win friends. To win cooperation was the main thing; to get public support in the neutral areas. MCKINZIE: In World War I, in getting the public support in a neutral area, the idea was to portray the Germans as "Huns" and that kind of thing. To what extent was that still a viable philosophy when you were working overseas in 1941? BARRETT: Because of Elmer's beliefs, Bob [Robert E.] Sherwood's beliefs, and others' beliefs, we had a very high element of truth in this operation. Therefore, the old concocted type of horror stories were out of bounds. If we got a real one, as later in the war in the German concentration camps, where we could really get testimony and documentation, we played the hell out of it. We got out
booklets on them with grim pictures and all, because these were incredible stories. I didn't believe them myself when I first heard them. MCKINZIE: What about the battlefield commanders? You made some reference to this in your book, Truth is Our Weapon. Do you think General [Dwight D.] Eisenhower understood the importance of the propaganda effort? I noticed some of the pamphlets you distributed had his signature on them, or facsimilies of his signature. BARRETT: Yes, Ike understood better than most of them. I don't think [Omar] Bradley did. [Douglas] MacArthur, I suppose, did, but he wanted his own little cabal to run things, so we were not very much in there except to supply some competent staff members. These things were necessarily left up to the field commanders, who had a great deal of power. As the war moved along and we developed some expertise, we got pretty damn good cooperation from the Air Force, in the matter of dropping leaflets
behind the lines, et cetera. I remember we put some pretty good ones out of Okinawa with the full cooperation of Hoyt Vandenberg, "Tooey" [Carl] Spaatz, and a number of the Air Force people. MCKINZIE: Is the term "psychological warfare" a good one? Warfare implies no holds barred; that there's a motive which is beyond the surface of everything. BARRETT: I guess, from a purely philosophical standpoint, that I would question the term. I'm afraid it was adopted partly as a means of getting appropriations out of Congress. In those days we found that money for pure information operations, for libraries in neutral areas, for sending American performers abroad, was very hard to come by. If you dressed it up as warfare, money was very easy to come by. There is, in addition, the fact that this had become the accepted term by those who were a little more experienced than we, like the
British. They had a Psychological Warfare Executive who ran this kind of leaflet, loudspeaker, broadcast operation, directed to enemy areas. Really, we were supposed to be using that term mainly for the enemy areas. MCKINZIE: To what extent was there cooperation between your people, the British, and the other Allies? BARRETT: Cooperation with the British was superb; we worked with them very closely. With the other Allies it was rather nominal. After all, we and the British were the main participants after the collapse of France. Cooperation with de Gaulle and his aides was very difficult. MCKINZIE: Did you ever hear of any contact with the Soviets on this matter? BARRETT: Yes. I told a couple of little stories in my book, I believe. We had the wonderful experience of setting up the so-called psychological warfare
operation and an information operation at Ike's command in Algiers. The information operation was directed at the North African-Algerian audience to help justify our being there and to try to keep them from being too annoyed at these damned Americans. Our psychological warfare work consisted, in large part, of broadcasts. We took the old WABC out of New York over there, and we set up a few short-wave transmitters. There were also leaflet operations, a great deal of interviewing of prisoners to get information to broadcast back, and news services to the newly liberated areas like Southern Italy, where we really got the newspapers started again. We did the same thing in France, later. On the broadcast side (these were United Nations forces, if you remember) we decided to label this thing "United Nations Radio." The British concurred, and we just jockeyed around until we got a Russian "concurrence," which was
really just a Russian failure to object. After that we'd have to go through the motions of getting a Soviet representative there to "approve" when there was a new departure. We quickly learned a technique which was built on the fact that they do have a pretty rigid system. The technique was just that of saying, "Unless you object, we are beginning the day after tomorrow to do such and such." They didn't dare object without going back to Moscow through their whole bureaucracy. If we had asked their approval we could have waited months, because this was pretty low priority stuff on the Russian side. We had a great American-British civilian and military setup in North Africa. We took a few civilians over who knew the business, including a lot of linguists; individuals who had been newspapermen in Poland, Germany (particularly), Austria, Italy, and some very skilled British. Then we combed the military and we would find,
working in G-4, a superb Italian newspaperman who was being used to dole out uniforms. We managed to get a number of such individuals away from the military and put them to useful work. We had an utterly whacky organization; we'd assign individuals in terms of their ability. For example, I remember one day coming into the newsroom and finding Sergeant Schoenbrun, David Schoenbrun, giving Captain Burkell hell for the story he had turned in. MCKINZIE: In your book you quoted someone's statement that good public relations is just "acting right and letting people know about it." Of course, that right depends upon one's perspective of it. How sophisticated did you aim and to what audience? Did you appeal to a man who needed his news in terms of right and wrong, or to a more elite group who could perhaps see all of the perspectives on a problem and hopefully, logically, lead them to the proper conclusions?
BARRETT: Well, we found ourselves trying to appeal to both, really to quite a number of strata. Sure, that "acting right" line is a kind of a vast oversimplification attributed to an old shirt-sleeve type public relations guy, but the fact is that if you are not "acting right," at least by your own standards, you'll play hell having an effective public relations campaign. After all, there are a number of areas where, damn it, intelligent men's concepts of right and wrong should agree regardless of which side they are on, such as making agreements and breaking them or keeping them, treating prisoners decently in wartime, abiding by the Geneva Convention, living up to your commitment to your own Allies, and so on. I'd be the first to say that we really tried to stick to the truth and to tell nothing but the truth, but we didn't always tell the whole truth.
MCKINZIE: At that time, in 1943 through '45, to what extent did you think that your work was going to serve future political purposes? Or, did you see it much more as something which was designed to serve the immediate military purpose of reducing the will of the enemy to resist? BARRETT: Well, we tried certainly to reduce the enemies' will to resist in so-called tactical, psychological warfare -- the over-the-line stuff, the artillery and plane-borne leaflets directed at enemy troops. That was primarily tactical. Partly because we had a few decent historians and social scientists who had pretty clear recollections of World War I and its aftermath, we tried to keep from getting our necks out where anyone could say we hadn't lived up to our commitments. I think a majority of us, therefore, probably agreed with FDR and Mr. Truman on the unconditional surrender line, even though it would prolong the war a bit. That's a subject that has been debated and can be debated now. It's probably
better than having made commitments and promises that you've found, for one reason or another, you can't live up to. MCKINZIE: You talked briefly in your book about what you call "psyche-war." The group concerned with this had the responsibility of going in after the occupying forces to the radio stations, the movies, the magazines, and the newspapers and (to use your words) "to clean them out," start them up again, and gradually turn them over to trustworthy personnel. Do you recall the criteria for turning them over to other personnel? BARRETT: We had, by that time, recruited in our own ranks a fair number of emigré journalists and broadcasters from the countries concerned. We also had rounded up all of the Americans we could find who had had experience in Germany, Italy, or Austria, and we had a fair batch of them. We tried to put one of them in charge of, say, a major newspaper, buttress him with three or four
emigrés, and then they would go about trying to find the reliable Germans or Austrians who could be put in charge of this, that, or the other. They'd operate with a skeleton staff at first and they would have the G-2 people rounding up all the information they could, which was awfully inadequate on occasion. But usually, your American who had worked in Berlin, an Ed Taylor and someone like that, would know of four or five Germans and say, "Oh, damn it, I know that he's a good man, and I know he didn't go along with the Nazis any more than he absolutely had to, and I'm sure as I can be that we can count on him." Then you'd check with the native emigrés and they'd have similar views. So, you'd pull him in and then you'd ask him to help you pick some others, and you always were taking some chance, but your policing was not difficult if anyone tried anything tricky. MCKINZIE: You had good cooperation with the military commands at that point, because this was involved
with the occupation authority of the Army. BARRETT: At that point we had excellent cooperation (with a few exceptions) simply because they were pretty helpless in this field without us. I understood this; so did [Walter] Bedell Smith and Al [Alfred] Gruenther. President Truman understood what we were doing a hell of a lot better than Mr. Roosevelt ever did. I don't know how; he just kind of soaked it up through his pores. Even though Bob Sherwood was in there as Roosevelt's pre-eminent speechwriter, I never was sure that FDR really understood what we were doing. Mr. Truman did. MCKINZIE: Did you consider staying in that work when V-E Day came? BARRETT: Oh, no, I wanted to get the hell out. I helped through a transition period; we put it in the State Department. I proposed a man in whom I had implicit confidence, Ferdinand Kuhn, and he weathered all of the bureaucratic headaches
of the State Department. I was pretty exhausted at that time, too. MCKINZIE: In a sense, what happened as soon as you left was that the thing was dismantled? BARRETT: Well, they sure started cutting it down, but it wasn't completely scrapped. MCKINZIE: You wrote in your book concerning the time that President Truman asked the State Department to study the possibility of a permanent information service (which you did sometime in August of 1945), that "Secretary Byrnes had little appreciation for international information." Could you embellish upon that a little bit? BARRETT: I can't, because that's almost all secondhand. I don't think I talked with Jim Byrnes more than twice in that period, although I had known him slightly on the Hill. It was Ferdie Kuhn's job to work with him.
MCKINZIE: I noticed that they had you going to the London meeting in 1946, about a year after you got out. BARRETT: Yes, but that was on UNESCO matters. MCKINZIE: But it did involve the business of information? BARRETT: Yes, it involved the minds of men; trying to influence them. MCKINZIE: Did you have any faith that the U.N. was going to serve an important purpose in bringing a meeting of minds when you went off to London? BARRETT: Oh, I guess I thought that one thing it could achieve would be to provide a reasonably well-publicized forum where countries, through individuals, could debate issues, and that this could have a salutary effect. I thought also that we needed some special effort in this field, just as we need one in the economic and trade field.
This dream of a UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization, was worth doing to see what we could achieve. Those glowing words of the preamble to the UNESCO constitution, I guess drawn up by Archie [Archibald] MacLeish, were pretty good. "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed." There is some truth to that. MCKINZIE: So you could do it with enthusiasm when you went there in 1946? BARRETT: Yes. I could do it even while recognizing that we were going to have difficulties, that the kinds of people who get involved in those may not be the quintessence of practicality, like some of my academic colleagues; but we needed that ingredient. Because everyone brought his pet little notions in and got a little money for them, UNESCO came to be described as a "cavalcade of hobby horses." There was a lot
of that in it, but also a little bit of movement in the right general direction. MCKINZIE: You talk about Mr. Benton's valiant struggles to get money out of Congress in 1946 and 1947; did you know Mr. Benton, and did you think that his approach was appropriate? BARRETT: Yes, I knew Bill Benton well. I don't think his approach was always appropriate; sometimes it was, sometimes not. Bill was a little bit of an unreconstructed advertising man who tended to oversimplify. He had a lot of energy and had some good notions on how to sell things to Congress. He had a very good notion when he got the Congress to set up two commissions, one for information and one for cultural operations. When we had a Republican Congress he got a couple of good Republican names (Alexander Smith and Karl Mundt) on the authorizing legislation, and they took a part in it from then on; it was their little pet thing. Some of these things paid off pretty well. On the other
hand, when Bill went around donating sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the Appropriations Committee members, it rubbed some the wrong way. People like John Tabor didn't want to be "bribed" with anything as small as a set of encyclopedias. MCKINZIE: You discuss in your book the mood of Congress in the postwar years; stingy in some ways, and certainly not appreciative. How do you explain congressional reluctance to support information activities, at the very time the cold war was beginning to heat up? BARRETT: I think, to begin with, that American Congressmen, like Americans in general, were suspicious of anything that could be labeled propaganda, suspicious of Government information operations. Even today, a lot of the public relations types in Government have euphemisms as titles; they are "Assistant to the Secretary" and so forth. Secondly, there had been a few whacky things done in the early days of these operations. Half
the members of Congress had learned about these and had some stories about them. Thirdly, the whole business of public relations was, even on the national scene, just beginning to take hold. Transferring it to the international scene on the part of the government aroused some skepticism on their part. It was a matter of gradually winning their confidence with good operations, which came with experience. I remember two or three Congressmen who were very suspicious. We prevailed on them to take a trip to look in on some of the operations, trying our best to steer them to our better ones. They came away pretty impressed with the fact that a void was being filled; that postwar anti-American sentiments were being built up in one area, notably the economic area, and it was worthwhile to get the American viewpoint across, provide materials to editorial writers or to scholars. This, of course, was much lower-key stuff than the wartime business, and it involved a cultural effort. There were a certain number of hard-
bitten Congressmen who, at that point, certainly didnt believe in culture with a capital C. MCKINZIE: Were you following all this closely after you returned to civilian life? BARRETT: Yes, I couldnt help but follow it. I was serving on advisory panels and things like that, where I was asked to come testify on this, that, or the other thing. The plain fact is that in todays complex world youve got a void. If you dont make some effort to fill it, somebody else is going to fill it with the wrong information. You do such things as a simple exchange of persons; bringing a lot of Europeans and Asians over here just to see this blooming country, and sending lecturers around to lecture at their universities. You dont have to ask them to deliver propaganda; they just try to explain what the hell this crazy country is all about. And while it is crazy in many ways, its got a certain quality of openness, vigor, and general decency that appeals. MCKINZIE: After President Trumans speech, in which he promised aid to Greece and Turkey, you mention in your book that there were some prolonged evening discussions among the various members of the Congress who wanted the Government to take a stand which would not appear to put smaller nations in the position of pawns in the evolving power struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Do you recall anything at all about those discussions? BARRETT: My memory of that now is considerably less than it apparently was when I wrote it. I got the information about those meetings, I imagine, from Averell Harriman and some other friends, maybe through Ferdie Kuhn or Howland Sargent, who was working with Bill Benton then and had a much more subtle mind than Bill had. Bill didnt really have any appreciation of the subtleties in something like this. At the time of the Truman Doctrine I was at Newsweek. I was there during the early stages
of the announcements of the Marshall plan, and then I guess I moved into Government for the second time while the Marshall plan was being cranked up, which was in very early 1950. MCKINZIE: Who put your name forward? BARRETT: Well, it's a very curious thing. The State Department was looking for someone to go down there. A friend of mine named Thurman Barnard had been an advertising man with considerable sophistication in international affairs and had worked in our wartime operations. He was then second in command of the Compton Agency, was tired of advertising, and he wanted the job. They inquired about him and he asked me if I'd say a word for him. I did. I wrote Jim Webb, who was then Under Secretary of State, on his behalf. I got an acknowledgment, and about two weeks later I got a call saying, "We checked around with the people who knew Barnard and they all say he's good, but they say you'd be a lot better. How
about it?" I said, "Well, I'm just getting things organized at Newsweek." I began to think about it and talked to my wife (we were both getting rather steamed up over the cold war by then). I think I got a call from Acheson, whom I didn't know (it was one of those flattering things). I then became more open to it and went down to talk to him. Then I had that curious incident when (I think I told this in the book) they put my name forward prematurely. Some clerk asked me where I was from and I said, "Well, I'm technically a resident of Connecticut. I moved there three months ago." I also had to tell them that I hadn't voted for Mr. Truman. I had voted for Mr. Dewey, whom I had known and sort of respected. I hadn't known Mr. Truman. I subsequently had a few words with Mr. Truman about that that were very amusing. I think I may have mentioned that in the book. I've forgotten now.
With the backing of my wife, with whom I had discussed it, I decided when I went down to see the President (he was seeing all of the appointees, even the Assistant Secretaries) that I'd have to tell him. He said, "Oh, that's all right, Mr. Barrett." He said, "Between us, we've run out of good Democrats." MCKINZIE: That was the deciding thing, when he asked you to take the job, an important job, and said that you should stay at that period? BARRETT: Yes, that was it. But then I had to go around with these characters on the White House staff -- Donald Dawson, I believe, and get squared away with Brian McMahon, a Senator from Connecticut who had never heard of me. Then there was Bailie, who was sort of a Democratic chairman up there. Bill Benton was all right; he knew me. He was in there for a short time as Senator then, I believe. He and Chester Bowles were both there.
MCKINZIE: I suppose you had to testify before your Senate confirmation? BARRETT: Actually I didn't; they didn't make me testify. I guess I had had a fair record in the wartime work, and there were two or three of them who remembered, so they just confirmed me without my appearing. MCKINZIE: You said you began with a major study of how things were and what needed to be done. Would that be the way you would approach any job? BARRETT: Yes, it's the only way I know to do it. You try, in the short time you have, to get the best size-up you can. When they asked me to be Dean of Journalism at Columbia I took advantage of the time to get hold of five, six, eight friends I had who had been to Columbia Journalism. Then I pulled a dirty trick on them in a way; I didn't tell them I'd been offered the job. I would take them to lunch on one excuse or another, talk about everything under the sun, and then ask what they thought of the School of
Journalism. That was probably the last time I got fully frank answers. MCKINZIE: When you made that study you wrote a summary of your conclusions which you have included in your book. You didn't say anything about morale of the people when you went in, though you did say that the USIS hadn't been able to get enough engineers or good executives, because it hadn't been able to pay enough. Given the kind of people you had, did they feel like they were doing an important job? BARRETT: Yes. My recollection is not as clear as when I wrote that, but I would say that the morale was surprisingly good, considering. They needed some better key people, but the morale was better than you would normally expect in a Government bureaucracy. By the way, I happen to be one who thinks that we get in our Government Civil Service better people than we are entitled to. MCKINZIE: Your organization would be a very
heterogeneous group, wouldn't it, with many language competencies and various intellectual pretensions? BARRETT: Yes, that's right. I think it had a heritage of some great people who were brought into it during the war. I remember that during the war there were so many horrible stories going around about people who were assigned to work in the Army and Navy, for which they were utterly unqualified and in which they were utterly uninterested. But there was a pretty capable group who had gravitated into these information things; people who were pretty good at writing, editing, and had knowledge of various areas. There were still a fair number of them when I went back, and these were dedicated people. MCKINZIE: What about support from Dean Acheson? You must have talked to him since he was Secretary at that time.
BARRETT: He was all right on it. We were not Dean's first line of interest. His deputy, Jim Webb, had more interest in it. Dean, I guess, was more interested in the State Department's own posture in the U.S. Sometimes I had great admiration for him, but I didn't think his public relations were of the best, on a whole. He wouldn't always pay too much attention to the advice you'd give him. He became a different man when he became Secretary of State. As an Assistant Secretary in Charge of Congressional Relations, he handled a lot of things very smoothly on the Hill, but when he became Secretary he was maybe a little too busy, and impressed with the importance of the job. He was less than tactful in dealing with a number of people on the Hill, particularly individuals who were less intelligent than he. There were a vast number of those, because he was a very bright guy. MCKINZIE: His phrase was that he didn't "suffer fools gladly."
BARRETT: That's right, but while he was Assistant Secretary he did! MCKINZIE: Did you feel free or feel it was your responsibility to try to head him off on some things and send forward recommendations as to how to handle this or that? BARRETT: Oh yes, we wouldn't hesitate to do that. He'd call me in when he was making a speech -- after I'd been there awhile, though not very much in my earlier stage. He did bring me in on the top councils of the Department and in the morning meeting; things which my predecessors had not been in on. This had been a recommendation of his advisory board, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information, which was one of the things that Bill Benton and Alexander Smith had set up. They had recommended that it should be raised to a higher level within the Department, so I was brought in on these morning meetings
and all that sort of thing. MCKINZIE: Did you find it at all difficult to come up with believable packages when you tried to explain what U.S. policy was on particular issues? Dean Acheson is famous for having said that the best foreign policy was one of "flexible response," which makes it a little hard to say what you are going to do and what you believe. Do you recall ever being hard put to come up with something that didn't sound just too platitudinous? BARRETT: Yes, definitely. Dean, of course, had a very practical view of the execution of foreign policy, this flexibility. You've got to get over the notion that, you can solve every problem. You've got to try to break your major problems down to components and get them on a small enough scale so that each one of them is manageable. At the same time, Acheson had pretty decent ideals himself. When he went to work to think
through a problem, to make the case for it, he was pretty damn good. One of the wisest things I ever heard him say was on one morning when we were discussing a problem, and somebody came up with an approach to it. Another one said, "No, there is no sense in bothering with that. We just couldn't get that accepted on the Hill." And Dean said, "Well, now, to hell with that. Let's first consider what we ought to do, what the right thing is to do, and reach a decision on that. Then we'll come back and look at it again in terms of expediency and practical objections and see to what extent we have to modify it." It's a good philosophy, and he pretty well followed it. This was, after all, that gloomy period when we had isolationist trends, normal postwar stuff, and we were cutting the hell out of all of our military. If it hadn't been for the damn fools in Korea and China and Russia who pulled the plug in Korea, we never would have got built our forces up again to where
we could be on a par with Russia. MCKINZIE: When you took the office in early 1950, you concluded that the condition of the world was such that a number of modifications needed to be made. Among them, the Voice of America needed to be strengthened with more highly qualified top people, and there needed to be more technicians abroad who knew how to use various techniques in various places. You also said that the U.S. should take the offensive. What does that mean, "take the offensive?" BARRETT: As I recall, I was talking in a cold war, Russia versus the U.S., context. I'm at a disadvantage because you've done your homework better or more recently than I have. In the context of the cold war, we needed to take more initiative. I suppose that is what I would say. MCKINZIE: We should take more initiative, getting an accurate portrayal of U.S. life and U.S.
policy with other people? BARRETT: Yes. We needed to work on strengthening facilities; getting stronger broadcast operations directed towards the Iron Curtain areas; being somewhat more forthright in telling the Russians and the captive peoples of some of the things going on in their own areas; and taking more initiatives in neutral and allied areas. Hell, as I probably implied in here, the short-wave radio isn't worth a whale of a lot in broadcasting to the people of London or Paris; it's too damn much trouble to listen to. With initiative, you can work out a lot of arrangements; to supply an American commentary show every Tuesday and Thursday to the national network. And it isn't a tightly controlled propagandistic thing for a guy who is a pretty good representative of this country to say what he wants to say. The same goes for a Britisher or a Frenchman who really understands this country. We might just
provide the facilities for getting his voice across the Atlantic. We also needed to be connected with providing films that can be used on national networks in South America or anywhere else you want and documents to editorial writers who are always writing in the dark. When Mr. Truman had a new speech, we should have been able to get the text over there in a hurry and give it to the editorial writer, who then would know more about it than anybody else in his country. MCKINZIE: Then you would have considered it within the responsibility of your office to deal with such things as book sales abroad, the use of U.S. motion picture films, etc. Those get kind of complex in tariff regulations and all that. BARRETT: Oh, boy! The motion picture industry had a whole set of problems of its own. They weren't always putting America's best foot forward; penthouses and gangsters were usual
themes. MCKINZIE: Was there anything that you could do? BARRETT: Very little. We tried our best and had untold numbers of conferences with motion picture exporters and export associations. We'd get them to distribute some shorts that showed the healthy, good side. But we couldn't and wouldn't attempt to censor their output. We would try simply to get them to achieve some balance. MCKINZIE: Mr. Benton was very impressed with the potential of the Voice of America. Were you? BARRETT: To shut-off areas, yes. In the so-called "free world," sometimes you could get to them when you could sway the local network or even the local stations to pick up Voice things and relay them. Short-wave radio to open areas is not a very useful device. Witness the number of people in this country who tune in short-wave radio. I know two of them. But granted that, in the
restricted areas short-wave can really do a good job. MCKINZIE: How were you brought into the councils with the outbreak of the Korean war? BARRETT: I was not in the councils with the outbreak of the Korean war, because I was out on the Pacific coast making three speeches. I was making a speech to, I believe, the motion picture people in Los Angeles. The Korean war had broken out just a few hours before. I irritated the councils a bit, I guess, because I was asked in a question period if it was likely that the North Koreans had done this without the knowledge of the Russians and the Chinese Communists. I said, "I don't know, but I find it difficult to imagine Donald Duck going on a rampage without Walt Disney knowing about it." I had a quick word from Washington that the Secretary wished I would hold my tongue on these things, which was perfectly right; he was
trying to get the Russians to quiet this thing down. So, by the time I got back to Washington the critical period was over, and they had done this fantastic job, with Jack [John D.] Hickerson in the State Department (an equally low-level type), mobilizing some forces of the U.N. The Russians stupidly walked out at the wrong time. Mr. Truman was great in that. He had the United Nations canopy under which to operate, anyway. I cannot claim I was really in on that in any way. On the MacArthur thing I was in, but I wasn't in on this aspect. MCKINZIE: To what extent were you encouraged to play up the United Nations aspect of it? This is something Mr. Truman seemed to do quite a bit. BARRETT: We advocated playing it up, so we didn't have to be told. This was great; we had a
collective of free nations that was opposing this thing in Korea and this was ideal from our standpoint. The trouble came when, every now and then, somebody would squawk that we were being a little too candid in reporting things like "Australian participation amounted to so much." But we always had the defense that we certainly weren't over-emphasizing it, and we had to be truthful. We never had any problem from the White House or Mr. Acheson; it was always some desk officer. MCKINZIE: Korean money got to be a little more plentiful and you could expand operations in the ways you had recommended sometime earlier. BARRETT: That's right. What applied to the whole big military strength of the U.S. applied to our little operation. MCKINZIE: Did you have contact with General MacArthur's
staff about an information program in Korea? closely, and we had people in the Pengaton who served on something then called the Psychological Strategy Board, a name I wouldn't have chosen for it if I were doing it over again. We were convinced that the Chinese were coming in, but never could prevail or get that across to MacArthur. So he got caught short. Then later the son of a bitch -- expletive not deleted -- took up this business of giving interviews and writing to Congressmen saying that his hands had been tied by the Administration in Washington. I was over with George Elsey and two or three other people in the White House, and they were saying that the President had a problem of how to deal with this very popular guy. I drafted on the back of an envelope a cable to all U.S. Ambassadors and field commanders during this particularly difficult time. It ordered, but it didn't quite say that. It said roughly: "It is necessary to instruct all
Ambassadors and field commanders not to deal with matters of U. S. international policy in letters to Congress or press interviews without first clearing with the appropriate offices in Washington." George took it to the boss the next day, and it went out. It went to them all --Ambassadors and military abroad -- and really designed for MacArthur. That became the ground on which President Truman ultimately fired him, and it was so cited. I got a letter from George the other day saying, "I remember it was your damn scrawling on the back of an envelope that got Mr. MacArthur out finally." MacArthur was way out of bounds, but until that order there was no clear-cut administrative ruling that commanders shouldn't sound off to members of Congress on foreign policy questions. MCKINZIE: Between that cable and the time that Mr.
Truman sent him his notice, had you any knowledge that his firing was coming? BARRETT: Yes, I knew it was getting tense, because I heard it from Acheson, and then I heard it from Averell Harriman. It was perfectly evident. They didn't say, "The President told us this." They'd say, "It's quite evident that the President is going to have to act on this thing, and there'll be hell to pay on the Hill when he does." MCKINZIE: Doesn't any internal crisis like that cause all kinds of problems for the people who are responsible for reporting it? How did you handle that with the kind of an information program you had? BARRETT: Well, my memory is cloudy on it. We probably would have reported it pretty straight-forward, but pulling out of Mr. Truman's statement things that we thought would be understandable abroad.
I'm sure that we emphasized in the second or third paragraphs, and in some other little commentaries we'd put out, the American tradition of civilian control of the military. Civilian control of the Armed Forces was paramount. Mr. Truman was great on that, by the way. I went over with Dean Acheson once to see him just after he made the decision. He said, "Oh, we're going to go through two or three weeks of hell on this, but I think people in Congress will realize that this is the right thing before it's over." And he was right; his perspective was better than that of a lot of the rest of us. MCKINZIE: There were some things that the U.S. was doing which would have seemed to have been good material for USIS dispatches or pamphlets, and one of them was the Point IV program. Was that a particular interest of yours? BARRETT: Yes, it was of interest to me, because it
was damn good material. If I remember correctly, the Point IV proposal got into the mill through a very circuitous route. Some man in the State Department dreamed it up and got it over to the White House out of channels. MCKINZIE: That is correct. Benjamin Hardy was his name. BARRETT: That's who it was. I don't think the Secretary was very taken with it, and it got to Mr. Truman by a circuitous route. MCKINZIE: One of the internal problems that the Point IV program had was that it was to be an operating agency within the State Department. Not only Dean Acheson, but other Secretaries of State seemed to be a little reluctant to have operating agencies. Did you sense this reluctance? BARRETT: Oh, sure, that was one of the internal headaches. This trend became worse later,
under Dulles. Dulles didn't want any of them; that's the reason it was healthy to get the USIA out of State when Dulles was Secretary. I know a hell of a lot of old-line policy officers who said, "Let's not mix policy with operations." And there is a rationale for it. I thought it was best ultimately to get the thing, once it had a little strength, out from under the State Department. Another reason was that they were not geared to get a transmitter moved abroad in a hurry or to get 80 typewriters somewhere. MCKINZIE: Well, Dean Acheson, I guess, felt this strongly about having operating agencies in the State Department, and I wonder, you know, if that made any difference when you went into... BARRETT: I think we were helped in that by two factors. One, before I was brought back on the scene, was a fairly prestigious National Commission on Information. By implication they said that it would remain in the Department and urged that it be brought more closely into the high councils of
the Department. Parenthetically, that was something that was carried farther, after my time, with Ed Murrow. They made another recommendation and Ed sat on the National Security Council, which I never did. I had my inputs to the Security Council and I and my colleagues worked there with the staff who drew up the papers and that sort of thing, but I never sat there at the table. That worked on my behalf. Secondly, I guess that Dean thought that if he was going to have any information service abroad, its capacities for fouling things up would be so great that he damn well had better keep the service in the family. MCKINZIE: Do you feel that you got good support from him when you went down to testify before the likes of Senator Kenneth McKellar and all those figures? BARRETT: Yes. He never went up and testified and I
never asked him to. I probably should have, but he was having enough trouble of his own by the time I was there. Maybe I didnt ask him because he wouldnt have been an enormous asset. I got Averell to come up and testify once, and I got returning Ambassadors, particularly from the Iron Curtain areas, to come up and testify. Now, Dean was a great guy; I still have vast admiration for him, but I dont think I ever asked him to go up and testify. He wasnt that strong on the Hill to begin with, and he was busy as hell. Its an unjust comparison, but it would be like a Republican asking Nixon to come in and campaign for him. I need not add that that demeans Acheson in a way that shouldnt be done. MCKINZIE: Did you handle the emerging McCarthy issue abroad? BARRETT: Oh, we reported it. We put it in the news broadcast, and Im sure we grabbed up anything
we could that answered him; any public statement, any statement by a Senator who disagreed with him, and probably we latched on to some columns and editorials that were critical of him. MCKINZIE: It sounds like you were very open about handling everything. Was there any issue that you just didn't want to touch? BARRETT: We didn't feel we could. I mean, we didn't feel we could suppress anything; that would be the wrong thing. Credibility was terribly important. I told the story, I think, in that book about when [Joseph] Stilwell came out of Burma and said that we took a hell of a licking. There had been a good deal of pressure on our broadcasters not to report that, but some of the broadcasters thought we should. I felt very strongly we should, and told Elmer. I think Elmer or Bob Sherwood, I forget which, took it to the White House and got the okay. We went ahead and did it on the grounds that here's one that's going to get
around the world, and we had better tell it. As I think I mentioned in the book, later on when we started doing systematic interviewing of Japanese, we got quite a fair number who said, "After the Voice of America reported that, we began to really believe them." We had to report our setbacks, and, sure, we'd put them in the best light we could, but we would report them. MCKINZIE: In 1950, right in the middle of the cold war, you still felt that if there were internal problems dealing with communism, those should be in the Voice of America, and that books relating thereto should be in the libraries of the USIS overseas? BARRETT: Yes. Now, we had troubles with these damn books, and we had trouble on some of the broadcasts. [Joseph R.] McCarthy cited one and Pat [Patrick A.] McCarran raised hell about the books that were "anti-American," particularly about the ones that were anti-McCarran. Good
old Brian McMahon was by then in my corner (although he had been offended as hell when I was appointed), and checked off against his patronage. He said, "Jesus, give me some ammunition; find something critical of me that you've sent abroad." We found a piece in Saturday Review, I think, and he told about that on the Senate floor. Sure, we had to supply the audiences abroad with any negative news that was fairly prominent. But we didn't go dig up exposés or negative stuff. MCKINZIE: But you couldn't suppress it either. BARRETT: No. We could do our best to put it in perspective. If Joe McCarthy charges this, then we could give prominence to the guy who's answering McCarthy. (There weren't many of them.) MCKINZIE: Just after you resigned, McCarthy zeroed in on the Voice of America. He brought a lot of people in there who contended that they hadn't
gotten the job previously because of their ideological beliefs. He brought in some people who maybe had been fired because they were incompetent, but who said they had been fired because they weren't sympathetic enough to Marxism or something like that. BARRETT: He also got a couple of snakes from within the organization, including a Russian named Barmine, who had been working there. He made some allegations to save his own hide. MCKINZIE: Granting that you've got people with axes to grind, some neurotics, all kinds of things, were there any more in that organization than in any in Government, or was it fairly typical? I'm talking about people who would be willing to testify against you. BARRETT: Well, it is my experience that when the heat is on, you can always count on about one or two percent of the people to cut and run. I don't
think there's any question that they ([Roy] Cohn, [G. David] Schine, and those boys) had something on Alexander Barmine that would be embarrassing. His testimony was to the effect, as I recall, that his superiors had made him soft-pedal this or that anti-Communist item. I wasn't in there, but I'll bet you ten to one that what happened was that his superiors said, "This is not proven material; it sounds pretty extreme. We are trying to win the confidence of our listeners. Why stick our necks out and go out with this kind of crap?" A Russian emigré who was mad as hell wouldn't have too much trouble convincing himself there was some foul play here. Radio Free Europe has such trouble right now. I was on a commission appointed by Nixon; going over and trying to work out a new plan for those radios. Well, in Radio Free Europe there was a former covert operation. We found two or three of these guys over there who see their best chance
of being restored to their previous prominence in their native Bulgaria or Romania in a way which is won by the West. We tried to restrain them from some of their fire eating. This became "an insidious plot." MCKINZIE: When you did get editors and chiefs of the divisions in the broadcast units, was there any way by which you tried to take their "ideological temperature?" Did you have any kind of check on those people? BARRETT: This was a tough one, always. This is why, in the whole Voice operation, we insisted on having an American in charge of every language desk. It got pretty tough to do when we were dealing in 17 languages to the Soviet Union alone. So, we sometimes had to end up with a competent editor who had an American deputy, who happened to know some Uzbek and who could translate it for him. In a very occasional case, we'd have to have a translation done by another native of the country
concerned; physically located far away from the desk. We then had an additional check if we could get it. We had an after-the-fact check: Embassy people could get translations sent back and complain strongly if they thought a broadcast was going too far. MCKINZIE: Did they call those things to your attention, or was that handled below your level? BARRETT: It was handled at the desk level, but if it got to where we wanted to fire a guy or to warn him, I'd sure hear about it. We also had all these pressures from emigré groups here. There were Slovak separatists all over Brooklyn and they really didn't give a damn about the U.S. versus the Communist bloc; their principal aim was to get Slovakia separated out of Czechoslovakia. They'd get after Congressman [John James] Rooney, who controlled our appropriations, and they'd get the Brooklyn Tablet, that ultra-rightwing Catholic organ, on their side.
We had lots of problems with that. MCKINZIE: These were problems with which you had to deal? BARRETT: Yes. I remember, I got one of the well-known Catholics in the Administration, John McCone, to arrange for me to visit Cardinal Spellman. We tried to get him to understand it was not our business to fight for Slovak separatism. Of course, by then they had given him a document saying that we were pro-Communists, and so we had to spend a lot of time on that kind of nonsense. During the war we used to hear from groups, too. They'd get to the point where they were demanding a right to broadcast and they'd get two Congressmen from their home district. It can now be confessed that we had one studio with dead microphones in it. We didn't have tape recorders then; we did have platters for later use or something. Sometimes a broadcast
never got out. That was our last resort. MCKINZIE: You mentioned that you, in 1953, watched the McCarthy group take on especially the Voice of America, and that you were quiet for a while. Finally you wrote a letter to a newspaper, and got called before the McCarthy group. BARRETT: I did that sort of a thing for the Times, and they didn't have any way to run it, except as a letter. I took it over to my friends at the Tribune and they ran it as a sort of a special column; I guess twenty or thirty papers picked it up. MCKINZIE: The McCarthy Committee picked that up very fast. You mentioned in your book that you testified in executive session. There are no records kept in executive sessions, I understand. Why was it in executive session, and what was the nature of this couple of hours you spent in there? BARRETT: Well, they heard almost everyone first in
the executive session, and didn't put him on unless they thought that they had him on a spot or could prove a case against somebody else. I just testified in support of the Voice of America, I think. The cause of it was this little bastard Roy Cohn. In this column I had made some slighting remarks about him and his playmate Schine, I believe. I called a couple of Senators I knew and asked them to be there. I can't think of who they were offhand. They were on McCarthy's subcommittee. I just wanted somebody who'd ask an affirmative question every now and then. The McCarthy group really didn't get anywhere; they tried quizzing me, mainly Cohn and some character with him. McCarthy was flitting in and out and asking a hostile question every now and then. Finally Senator McClellan, who was left in the chair, said, "Well, Mr. Cohn, I don't think
you have anything serious here. I think we'll suspend it." He said, "Just a minute, Mr. So-and-So wants to ask some questions." McClellan said, "Well, we've had enough questions, I think," and he just ended it. I said, "Is there going to be an open hearing on this?" He said, "No." I said, "Well, am I privileged to report this outside?" And he said, "I wish you wouldn't." They were a little afraid. One of the guys I asked to go there was Stuart Symington; he was all right. I think Scoop [Henry W.] Jackson was another. They were a little afraid of McCarthy; they didn't want to be attacked, and in those days they were being very mild. They didn't want to be attacked as being "pro-Communist." Don't forget, those were the days when Nixon won his election to Congress alleging
falsely that Helen Gahagan [Douglas] and somebody else were pro-Communists. He used such things as "on 83 recent roll calls, he has voted the same way as has Vito Marcantonio." No one could ever get it straight that those 83 roll calls were on such routine matters as adjournment. MCKINZIE: You stayed on then in Government, I take it, until Eisenhower's appointment. BARRETT: No, I resigned in early 1952, after a little more than two years there, and I resigned for a very particular reason. At that time we were utterly dependent on the appropriations we got from the Hill for this kind of operation. I had really got in the doghouse with Pat McCarran, who was chairman of our appropriations subcommittee, over what I think were very good and sufficient reasons. He had insisted on my hiring a couple of young whippersnappers who were his favorites and hadn't explained why. Then he went on the warpath about some magazine, Life
or Saturday Evening Post, which had just taken the hide off of the Senator as an old reprobate. He found we had distributed the magazine routinely to libraries abroad. He sent a representative to say that he hoped that we were not distributing it. We said that we were distributing it and explained why as politely as we could. So he, who really controlled his committee, cut our budget in half from what the House had voted. I'd gotten through all this trouble with Rooney and the Brooklyn Tablet, and so we had nothing we could do but mount a real fight on the Senate floor. I told Acheson about it, and we got Brian McMahon and others lined up, and I had my editor friends on the phone to their Senators. Pat McCarran hadn't been licked on an appropriation in three years, but McMahon, by this time a good friend of mine, said, "Ed, I'll do it for you, but I'll tell you, Pat's also chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I'11 never get another judge appointed in Connecticut."
And so he did, and he did a hell of a good job. I got some others, and we finally licked McCarran 54 to 14. I told Acheson that I could never get another appropriation through that guy, and I'd better get out. MCKINZIE: You thought that was the time to leave then, once you had gotten through that appropriation? BARRETT: Yes, we got the whole thing through and licked the pants off of him. MCKINZIE: Have the recommendations you made before you left been carried out? BARRETT: Yes, I think in good part. I said that the agency should be given semi-autonomous status that would enable it to handle more expeditiously matters of supply and logistics, and that, in the longer range, it might be set up as an independent agency. I didn't think it was quite strong enough then. Both of those eventually took place. MCKINZIE: By that time, did you feel that this kind
of work was permanently implanted in the Government? BARRETT: At the end of the Second World War, it was still in real trouble and every appropriation hearing was a problem. By the end of my term, I felt it was much better implanted, and one reason was that it had a few champions on the Hill. From a political science standpoint it is interesting that Smith's and Mundt's names were attached to the basic legislation. Both gave the program consistent support. Karl Mundt, with whom I disagreed on a number of issues, was very good on this. We also had Bill Fulbright, whose Fulbright scholars were administered by this division. Going to Washington on another assignment, I was made sure of what I didn't know when I first went down there, that you'd better have two or three good firm champions of what you're doing in the Senate and a couple of them in the House if you can. This kind of thing is of marginal
interest to the majority of the members of both houses, I think. On anything that's of marginal interest, if you get two or three firm champions they can get you through. MCKINZIE: How did you come across this strategy of getting these champions? Did you just discover that you needed them and went out to get them? BARRETT: No, I inherited these. Bill Benton had gotten Smith and Mundt to attach their names to a bill in a Republican Congress. The Government didn't know where to put Bill Fulbright's thing and they put it under this agency. I did get a couple more. I mean, Brian McMahon, God bless him, really put a lot of influence on the line in the fight with McCarran. He probably didn't ever get another judge approved by McCarran. He was just basically a decent guy. MCKINZIE: Did you enjoy that two-year stint in Washington?
BARRETT: Oh, sure. I wouldn't want to make a career out of it, and I'm a firm believer in having itinerants come in and out of Government to head these agencies, even though they are front men sometimes, for the reasons I outlined in McCarran's case. You've got to have somebody who's dispensible. Only a guy who's a non-career officer can tell a Senator to go to hell, and they needed it, sometimes. When I left, I went over and had a courtesy visit with President Truman and he gave me the usual very gracious letter that's in his files. I told him about the McCarran thing and he fully understood, and that was all on that. Another time I remember was one of the few times I saw him, except in a big group. I was in there with his press secretary, who I think was Joe Short at that time. The President was irate about something, and he said, "Mr. Barrett, can't we put a circular out to everybody in Government and tell them not to do such and such?"
I said, "Well, Mr. President, do you know how you can get everybody in Government to read anything?" And he said, "No, unless you stamp it 'Secret.'" In the year after he left office and sometime after that, I was Dean of Journalism at Columbia. I asked him to come up and speak to the students, and he did it three times; he held practice press conferences. He could answer more questions in less time than anyone I ever knew. We had one gala week there when Fidel Castro came up and answered five questions in three hours. Mr. Truman was up two days later and answered 21 questions in 19 minutes. MCKINZIE: Did Mr. Truman's press conferences, when you were Assistant Secretary, create any embarrassment for you? There was a point here when he was not very well briefed sometimes. BARRETT: Occasionally, they did. Mr. Truman took a
few chances. One of Nixon's current deputies, a former student of mine, says that one reason he doesn't hold a press conference often is that he spends more than a day in preparing for it. Mr. Truman, even in his heyday, would spend no more than an hour and a half, as far as I know, on the briefing books. I remember once, in the early days of Korea, that there was a question asked to the effect that if the Americans should ever use atomic weapons in Korea how would that be handled? He said, "Oh, that would be left to the field commander." Our person over there called me immediately and said, "There's going to be hell to pay around the world." I got hold of Joe Short, and got him to get out a corrective statement very fast. I think the corrective statement was to the effect that such a decision would have to be made at the highest level in Government, though certain details as to the immediate circumstances might be left to the
field command. (That would have to be checked; it's all on the record.) MCKINZIE: Is that the only time that you recall doing something like that? BARRETT: Oh, no. There were little ones like that; every now and then he would "misspeak himself." That happens all the time; it happened with Roosevelt, too. MCKINZIE: You just consider that a normal part of being in the particular business you were in? BARRETT: Yes. It was I who would call the White House immediately, because this was a particular concern to us. This would set the world on its ear much more than it would set the United States on its ear. MCKINZIE: Were you given any input into these press conferences? BARRETT: Oh yes. The President and his staff were
most cooperative. For example, there would be an ugly rumor flying around the continent of Europe, or somebody would have hurt the feelings of the Japanese. We would get a little statement up and send it over to go into the President's briefing book, sometimes with a little thing saying that it would be very much appreciated, if when asked the appropriate question, the President would answer roughly as follows. Sometimes we'd even get a friendly reporter to ask the question. Mr. Truman never failed to oblige in that field, because we never abused it. The subject had to be fairly important. We did that with other press conferences around town, too; we were always cooking up statements for Cabinet officers and Senators to issue, where they were needed to get a point across and where they were perfectly honest. MCKINZIE: Is it true that policy is made in the course of speechwriting?
BARRETT: I think so. Don't forget the Marshall Plan and Point IV. Once, when we wanted to get tour appropriations raised greatly, and decided to dress up the program, we got the President to make a speech. Some White House speechwriter came up with a line about a psychological offensive. George Elsey, somebody else, and I persuaded the President to call it a "Campaign of Truth." Now, on that one I didn't even see him; this was done through Elsey and his colleagues. I submitted materials, and when they finished the draft, they asked me to come over and look at it. MCKINZIE: So, in sense you really have formed policy in the course of writing a speech. BARRETT: Oh, sure -- at least to some limited extent. President Truman was always cooperative when the national interest was clearly involved. [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Acheson, Dean, 26, 30-32, 33-34, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47-48, 49, 62, 63 Barmine, Alexander, 53, 54
[Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
|
|||||
