A Confusion of Mind

Connecticut's freshman Senator Bill Benton, who earned a precocious fortune as an adman, has two deep feelings about the U.S.: 1) as a package to sell, it is an adman's dream, and 2) the U.S. is advertising itself much too dreamily. Last week, before a Senate foreign relations subcommittee, Bill Benton got another chance to make his pitch. Up for discussion was his resolution calling for an overhaul of U.S. propaganda and an expansion of the Voice of America to reach "virtually every radio set in the world."

"I choose to view the fighting in Korea today as a direct failure of this nation to project the idea of democracy in the world," said he. The Voice is nothing but a "hoarse whisper," and U.S. propaganda little better than "schoolboy essays." "Gentlemen, we would never think of matching a Willie Pep, good as he is, against a Joe Louis in a ring fight in this country; but that is what we did in our propaganda fight with Russia."

Endorsers. To back his plan, he brought along enough distinguished endorsers to make other admen ulcerous with envy. David Sarnoff, board chairman of the Radio Corporation of America, thought the Iron Curtain countries could be ringed with U.S. transmitters at a cost of about $200 million. Lieut. General Walter Bedell Smith, onetime U.S. ambassador to Moscow, guaranteed that Russian satellites would be a "most fertile field," with some 4,000,000 Soviet radios also within reach, and an average of seven listeners to each set. Russia's frenzied efforts to jam Voice of America broadcasts, he added, were proof of the Voice's effectiveness.

Ike Eisenhower was so enthusiastic about Benton's idea that he felt he might "expose a sense of frustration trying to express how deeply I do agree." Truth, he said, should be the U.S.'s "T-bomb," under control of "a general staff of a new kind," divorced from the State Department and "headed by some great American." Bernard Baruch thought that the job ought to go to "a body of thinkers," reporting directly to the President.

Secretary of State Acheson, like the rest, wanted the U.S. sales talk amplified, provided the U.S. was chary of "permitting what we say to outrun what we do." But he wanted his department to keep the job: State was, in fact, just about ready to ask Congress to underwrite a $100 million "Campaign of Truth."

Action v. Words. John Foster Dulles said that Russians "know that everybody wants peace, and if they can pose as the lovers of peace, then perhaps they can risk war." But it was gently gruff George Marshall who sprinkled a dash of salty reserve on Benton's enthusiasm. "Something has to be done," he said, "and it has to be more dynamic . . . We have had a military conquest, but it is not lasting. There is a confusion of the mind. How you correct that I do not know unless it is by some such method as this."

All in all, Bill Benton had put on a presentation that seemed to impress the Senate. But the U.S. was beginning to understand that U.S. troubles abroad have not come from a deficiency of clever commercials ; they have come from a deficiency of right action, from wrong action or from no action at all. U.S. words, like everybody else's, would always be interpreted against the background of U.S. deeds.

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