Fulbright's "Knee-capping" of US Global Engagement, Part 2
A sort of deep dive into what the law was and how he changed it into the barrier it is today
In the spring of 2005, I sat in a university conference room attending a State Department public diplomacy official’s presentation about US public diplomacy. I didn’t know what this “public diplomacy” thing was. I had returned to the university the year before to complete an undergraduate degree in international relations. (I had dropped out in 1992, a different era for IR, for a career in technology that I subsequently left to return to IR.) Having the “what next?” conversation with the IR department head, he suggested I look at the new joint venture between IR and the communications school: a Master of Public Diplomacy. I signed up and was in class 0.5 that fall. The presentation was part of a publicity event, so to speak, for the soon-to-be-launched program.1
I learned that I had personally participated in public diplomacy as an exchange student in high school. In 1982, I went to Japan on student exchange, and my family hosted Japanese students twice.2 In 1984, I participated in a sports exchange (water polo) in Australia and New Zealand.3 But there was apparently much more to public diplomacy.
So there I was in this conference room fascinated by the details (as detailed as an overview for outsiders should or can be). Though I don’t recall the specifics of the PowerPoint or of the Q&A, it was interesting enough for me to ask for a copy. The response, replicated nearly precisely below, started a journey that continues today.
State Department Official: “No, I can’t give it to you. The State Department’s public affairs office needs to ‘scrub’ it first.”
Me: [A nonverbal huh followed by a verbal] “Why? What?”
State: “Because of the Smith-Mundt Act…”
Naturally, I had to find out about this Smith-Mundt thing. A clear narrative immediately surfaced. First, and this was generally foremost, it was an anti-propaganda law intended to prevent the US Government (as in the entirety of the government) from propagandizing folks at home. A second part of the narrative was that this law also enabled sending US “propaganda” abroad. Occasionally, there was a reference that the law had something to do with exchanges, but any such mention was almost always brief and clearly less interesting to the author than the informational side. This third point was surprisingly avoided by many writers, mostly journalists and law review writers, despite the official name of the legislation: the United States Information and Educational Act of 1948. Fourth, references to the Act were declarative and without citation or support. The meaning and purpose of the legislation were simply a known fact. Thus, any explanation was unnecessary.
However, as I dug deeper, I found that the commonly shared descriptions of the intent and purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act didn’t align with the evidence. However, identifying the gap between the alleged goal of the Act was not the same as understanding why the difference existed and how it became so established.
“Never since I have been in Congress,” Rep. Karl Mundt, Republican from South Dakota, remarked during a June 1947 debate of the Mundt bill, “have I heard such a disorganized collection of misinformation circulated about any one piece of legislation as about this legislation.”4 A law intended to engage global audiences to prevent the effects of misinformation, disinformation, and the absence of information was and continues to be the subject of astounding amounts of misinformation.
“Never since I have been in Congress have I heard such a disorganized collection of misinformation circulated about any one piece of legislation as about this legislation.”
This is the second post in a short series tracing modern misinterpretations of the Smith-Mundt Act. The path does not start with the original legislative debates around the pending bill. No, the narrative can easily be traced to Senator J. William Fulbright and his statements and actions in the 1960s that culminated with his 1972 amendment to the Act.5 A 1985 amendment from Sen. Edward Zorinsky to close a “loophole” in Fulbright’s earlier effort reinforces the Arkansas Senator’s role. Zorinsky provided a memorable one-liner while arguing for his amendment: “The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”6 While true, scholars have offered contorted arguments that this was a – if not the – original purpose of the Smith-Mundt Act. I’ll admit that I fell for this – with respect to the “a” purpose – until I did more research. While Zorinsky’s amendment led a federal court to rule that US Information Agency materials were exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, the practical and philosophical source is Fulbright.
In a comment to the first post in this series, Lonnie Johnson questioned my assertion that Fulbright has had a “noxious influence” – I prefer deleterious – on US global engagement.
Matt’s task will be to document how the position of Fulbright – and Smith and Mundt in 1953 – can serve as pre-history for Fulbright’s 1972 amendment and then to document how Fulbright’s noxious influence has been a driving force in the “knee-capping of US global engagement” in the course of the fifty years since then.
The evidence to document how Fulbright’s actions continue to knee-cap US global engagement is clear and doesn’t require leaps of imagination or squinting hoping to transform one thing into another.
To answer the challenge, I will first show the original intent and text of the Smith-Mundt Act with specific attention to the elements that relate to Fulbright’s 1960s charges and, ultimately, his 1972 amendment. The resulting before and after contrast will show the inflection point caused by the Arkansas Senator’s blunt force attack on US global engagement.
I will not address the discrepancy between Fulbright’s position that USIA’s materials amounted to propaganda if available within the US, regardless of the content or who shared the content domestically or why, but it wasn’t propaganda when disseminated abroad. As the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee concerned about “propaganda” and described as an “antipropaganda crusader,” it’s interesting – to me, at least – that neither he nor the people writing about this side of him expend much, if any, ink examining his views of how this “propaganda” may have affected the nation’s foreign relations.
I will also not discuss – beyond this paragraph – the blunt force and distracting use of the term “propaganda” by Fulbright, those who wrote about his “antipropaganda” efforts, and those writing about the Smith-Mundt Act. If propaganda is the intent to influence, as many hold, then this well-documented response is propaganda. If delivery through mass media is required, as some have held, then does the audience this note ultimately reaches surpass the threshold or not? Fulbright’s use of the term, like those writing about his “antipropaganda” efforts, is intentionally broad to cover everything, not just what he dislikes. The result contributes to the knee-capping as it’s guilt by association to an office or agency and not by any other measure.
“Global engagement” is used here to include and go beyond “public diplomacy.” Public diplomacy is a term adopted – not coined! – in the 1960s to label the activities of an agency, specifically the US Information Agency, not in response to Fulbright’s attacks but for reasons related to the attacks. The result has been substantial confusion over what is and is not public diplomacy. “Only the State Department does public diplomacy,” a Defense Department official yelled at me during a conference in 2008. Since the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972 effectively only applied to USIA, it only covered “public diplomacy,” or did it? Today, the Act is not just invoked relative to the obvious legacy parts of USIA at the State Department and the US Agency for Global Media, but for a wide range of activities from departments and agencies across the government, despite the clear text on what agencies are subject to the Act.
The massive misunderstanding and misapplication of the Act as a so-called “firewall” to prevent the government (the rhetorical application is nearly arbitrary) from propagandizing the US public, a view propagated by government officials, journalists, scholars, and laypeople can be traced back to Fulbright’s 1972 amendment. Though your experience may differ, in my experience, outside of the State Department, the most common invocation of the Act is in the Defense Department world, despite being told DoD doesn’t do public diplomacy. Despite the passage of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which specifically declared the Smith-Mundt Act does not apply to the Defense Department, I continue to hear tales (as recent as a few weeks ago) of defense personnel invoking Smith-Mundt not to do this or that abroad because an American might see it. At the State Department, the Act is often invoked not to do something, something I’ve heard frequently and also as recently as a few weeks ago. The resulting narrative around the Smith-Mundt Act often fits the definition of propaganda and is always traceable to Fulbright’s 1972 amendment.
The Original Intent and Text
There are three points in the original Smith-Mundt Act and the debates preceding its passage relevant to the conversation here. First, we have the seemingly obvious authority for “an information service to disseminate abroad information” (Pub.L. 80-402 §2(1)). This was to authorize the Secretary of State, “when he finds it appropriate, to provide for the preparation, and dissemination abroad,” of information (Pub.L. 80-402 §501). The word “abroad” seems to have an obvious meaning. My early writings on the Act (before 2010) often argued that “abroad” was a prophylactic imposed by a Congress distrustful of the State Department. After all, in early 1946, the chairman of the House Rules Committee blocked the bill from proceeding because he and ten of the twelve committee members were against anything the State Department favored because of “Communist infiltration and [the department’s] pro-Russian policy.” Making sure his contempt for the department was not lost, the chairman added the department was “chock full of Reds” and “the lousiest outfit in town.” However, I was wrong, as I found through subsequent research.
“Abroad” had nothing to do with preventing domestic visibility of the content or preventing domestic competition. Such concerns from Congress and others, namely commercial print and broadcast media, of the State Department’s information operations, chiefly the radio operation, were addressed in plain text in other sections in the Act. Most of these have been forgotten, but include establishing commissions for timely and expert oversight, requiring content sourcing from private operators whenever possible, and non-compete and sunset clauses directing the department to recede as other sources of information become available. The last two are what I have consistently called out as the true anti-domestic propaganda parts of the Act, and these are with barely an exception, ignored by write-ups on the Act.7
For context, it’s important to know that even before the Mundt bill was introduced in January 1945, and through the deliberations on the iterations of the bill through January 1948, the State Department was under immense and growing pressure to be more transparent and accessible to Congress, the press, and the US public. The Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations was established in December 1944 to relocate communications from under the assistant secretary in charge of administrative functions to provide a single point of leadership for engaging and informing people both at home and abroad. This dual-hat responsibility of the Assistant Secretary did not change with the Act.8
The word “abroad” – as in “disseminate abroad” – was an explicit authority requested by the State Department; it was not an imposed restriction. Without this blanket permission, neither Congress nor the State Department were entirely sure where the department’s information service could operate under the existing hodgepodge of legislative authorities. Congress tried to remove “abroad” to clean up and shorten the text, after all, there was no debate where the information service was to operate. The State Department objected as it reasserted the need for the explicit authority the word granted.
Second, we have the key phrase “on request,” which also appears in Section 501 of the original Smith-Mundt Act, was how Congress directed the State Department to make available press releases and radio scripts in the English language to the press and Members of Congress. In the original text, this material was to be available “for examination.”
The “on request” requirement was later interpreted as requiring an act – merely a phone call early on but later perhaps an actual Act – of Congress to release the information for whatever purpose. Like “abroad,” the reason behind “on request” is not obvious. Congress originally wanted all of the materials disseminated abroad to be immediately available in English to exercise timely oversight, an artifact of their distrust of the department and the need to monitor this program, which some in Congress weren’t entirely sure was necessary. (“Not necessary,” I should point out, is not the same as the department will spew “propaganda.”) The State Department did not have a problem with the immediate access since there was nothing to hide. They also wanted to build support and awareness of the vast programs that most people in the US would never interact with. As the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs said in 1949 regarding Voice of America, “if you happen to get the program, the chances are that you would not recognize it” since the transmitters were pointed overseas and 85% of the content was not in English.
On making all of the materials available in English, the State Department raised an issue: it would need more money for additional translators and clerks to fulfill what was expected to be blanket requests from Congress and the press to provide what Congress agreed would be massive quantities of paper that would never be read. As such, the draft text was changed to “representative samples or specific individual press releases and radio scripts” to be available “upon request.” The text in the final was simplified right before the Senate approved the bill in mid-January – it passed the House in July – before the President signed it into law on January 27.
“On request” was a fiscal choice, not a prophylactic. Here is Sen. Alexander Smith, the Mundt bill co-sponsor, explaining the final form for the release of materials text:
The point of that was, the way it was worded before we might have had a deluge of requests from newspaper people for all of the releases, and unless they ask for specific things, specific samples, it seemed to us it was too broad and might cause a big expense and too big a burden.
Based on the discussions before and after the passage of the Act, it can be reasonably inferred that the focus here was on the radio operation.
In her 2012 paper on the Smith-Mundt Act, Emily Metzgar echoed my view then and now while also revealing a defect that permeates the narrative and discussions around the Smith-Mundt Act.
It is an irony of history that a senator whose name is associated so closely with international exchange programs and development of global awareness was in fact responsible for writing the law that keeps USIB [US International Broadcasting, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, etc.] materials beyond the reach of the American public, even today.9
Metzgar’s paper clearly focused on the broadcast operation of USIB, even if it was under the broad title “Public Diplomacy, Smith-Mundt, and the American Public.” Others also focus on the broadcasting element. See, for example, Weston Sager (“Apple Pie Propaganda? The Smith-Mundt Act Before and After the Repeal of the Domestic Dissemination Ban”, 2015) and Allen Palmer and Edward Carter (“Smith-Mundt Act's Ban On Domestic Propaganda: An Analysis of the Cold War Statute Limiting Access to Public Diplomacy”, 2006) who focus almost entirely on the broadcast operations of USIA and “public diplomacy.”10 However, you see the common perception in and out of government that the Act pertains to nearly every action, except those it doesn’t, with the separation, as I noted above, largely arbitrary.
What might have been different if the radio broadcasting operation had not been part of the Smith-Mundt Act? This is not a random counterfactual. The Mundt bill was a hodgepodge of authorities. Introduced by Mundt in January 1945 to authorize the exchange of teachers-in-training across the Pan-American Union planning to work in elementary and high schools, the State Department eagerly picked up the bill as a vehicle to not just expand exchanges but to support growing requests from abroad for US government (and US government-provided) experts to assist in everything from agriculture to civil aviation to road construction to census taking and so on. Mundt’s exchanges, expanded beyond primary schools to individuals and institutions at all levels, and the technical and scientific engagements were collectively the “interchange of persons, knowledge, and skills.” As the United Nations grew in importance, a declared objective of the bill was to emphasize and support the UN in the authorized information operations, though this was dropped late in 1947. The bill also provided for administrative flexibility for the State Department’s overseas operations, including building, renting, or buying facilities abroad, printing, supporting government personnel working outside of the US, permitting the contracting with foreign or domestic government agencies and intergovernmental organizations, and private agencies and individuals, and collecting funds from foreign governments to fund mutual program objectives (one example was Canada paying a share of an aviation project). Debates over the Mundt bill often centered on the ideological and informational threat posed by foreigners coming to the US and US citizens going abroad. One Congressman decried the Mundt bill’s exchange provisions as granting the Secretary of State supreme authority over the nation’s immigration laws. What the bill was not intended to do until July 1947 was to support a radio operation, aka the Voice of America, let alone a radio operation run by the State Department.
From November 1945, soon after the radio operation was sent to the State Department with the instruction of figuring out the future of said operation, through September 1947, it was the intent of the State Department, including successive Secretaries of State, and many in Congress to remove Voice of America from the department and place it in a non-profit organization. This foundation would be run by a full-time CEO (paid a market rate, by the way) who was overseen by a bipartisan Board of Trustees, whose members were nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.11
At the end of the 79th Congress, the Mundt bill (then called the Bloom bill) that failed to move in the Senate despite passing the House by a two-thirds vote, was intended to be complemented by a separate bill for this private entity funded by the government, at least initially. Mundt reintroduced the bill in May 1947 at the request of the State Department, which desperately needed the expansive authorities in the bill. The amended form, including keeping the radio operation at the State Department, was passed by the House 272-97 in June. The decision to not privatize the radio operation seems to have been a requirement of Sen. Smith to co-sponsor the bill, though he had the support of other Senators. In July 1947, Smith described his objection to the separation to colleagues this way:
I thought the proposal of the original Mundt bill tried to go much too far. They had in there a setup of an International Broadcasting Foundation which covered more ground than I felt we should cover, but I am happy to say that the Mundt bill as finally passed and as sent over to us here for our consideration cuts all that out, making no program of that sort, but simply provides for the activities which I will review in a minute of the State Department in this field, and puts the responsibility right in the lap of the Secretary of State, where it seems to me it belongs.
In September 1947, the State Department still hoped the controversial radio operation would be separated. The pending Mundt bill did not appear in the State Department’s list of pending legislative priorities – 24 of them – but showing up as #3 behind “Entry of Displaced Persons” and the “World Health Organization” was the International Broadcasting Foundation. The radio operation had been controversial from the start and had been at the root of a substantial delay in discussing the bill in early 1946 because of the Associated Press’s antagonism toward VOA, which many modern reviewers projected as distrust of the entire program.
We thus have a plausible counterfactual to consider how much of the “antipropaganda” narratives around the Smith-Mundt Act center on the foreign broadcast operations. Fulbright’s 1960s and arguments leading up to the 1972 amendment largely focused on the broadcast operation. In 1972, Fulbright’s argument centered on a USIA film, but we can easily imagine the movie-making would have gone into the IBF. Perhaps this is a fair place to note that in 1955, Fulbright said in a Senate hearing that he never supported creating USIA. Later, he would say he hoped it would last no more than a few years, ten at most.
In the 1967 hearing on the Informational Media Guarantee program, an add-on to the Smith-Mundt Act to assist US book, movie, and news publishers to access foreign markets (I won’t ask whether this is not “propaganda” because the source isn’t the government), the Advisory Commission on Information’s chairman, Frank Stanton, repeated the commission’s recently released recommendation to relax the “on request” standard to allow for more oversight and awareness of what the US government is saying and doing abroad. Fulbright’s objection focused on VOA, sometimes changing the subject to the not-relevant Radio Free Europe operation and Defence Department activities. He did, I should note, also mention other activities USIA personnel were involved with, like Pentagon press briefings, but that wasn’t his focus. His ire was focused when, in 1972, he said, “the Radios should be given their opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”
Fulbright’s 1972 amendment in the Foreign Relations Act of 1972 (Pub.L. 92-352 §204) changed the clause on distribution. The clause directing that radio scripts and press releases be accessible now read, “Any such information…shall not be disseminated within the United States… but, on request, shall be available” to the media, “research students and scholars” (a post-1948 addition), and Members of Congress “for examination only.” The intent was crystal clear at the time: USIA material was not to be available for reuse or sharing or for any other purpose other than a quiet review.
In 1985, Sen. Edward Zorinsky, angered at USIA for a host of reasons, not the least of which was the USIA director using tens of thousands (?!?) of USIA’s funds for a home security system, closed what he called a “loophole” in Fulbright’s amendment. This (Pub.L. 99-93 §208 “Ban on Domestic Activities by the USIA”) tightened the restriction: “…no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the United States.” This change led a federal court to rule USIA materials were exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests, a ruling that came around the same time Congress relaxed the Foreign Agent Registration Act to drop labeling the source of foreign government information. In other words, as Congress applied the label of “propaganda” to USIA materials, it removed the label from foreign government materials.
The Fulbright amendment did not fix a loophole or align the text with the intent. On the contrary, it was part of his effort to muzzle and marginalize an operation, mostly but not exclusively the radio operation, he didn’t like. I cannot answer why he seemingly ignored the effects of the so-called propaganda, as he labeled USIA’s activities, on our foreign policy abroad. Perhaps he spoke to this, and I’ve missed it. Regardless, the result of Fulbright’s has been a broad rhetorical and practical application of the so-called “firewall” to prevent US so-called “propaganda” that has hindered both our global engagement programs and the knowledge and discussions around these efforts.
In early 2008, a foundation was interested in a proposal a colleague and I put together that used the Smith-Mundt Act to discuss broad issues of US global engagement. A foundation board member challenged the basic premise, stating the Smith-Mundt Act had nothing to do with the discussion since it was merely an antipropaganda act. “Has Matt even read the Act?” was how that rejection concluded. Yes, in fact, I had. I ultimately found money for the event – the Defense Department, which caused my colleague to leave the project – and I convened the 2009 Smith-Mundt Symposium.
In trying to increase knowledge of the legislation, I have stopped being surprised at the lack of information and misinformation surrounding the legislation, whether its history or its present form. The propaganda around the law, including why it is in its current form, is astounding, considering the legislation was intended to correct misinformation, counter disinformation, and address gaps in available information, and can be traced back to Fulbright.
Thanks for reading this far. Additional details – and I left out a *lot* of relevant details, less relevant but colorful details, and discussing related and tangential issue areas – and citations may be in future journal papers but definitely in my (still) pending book on the history of the Smith-Mundt Act.
Yael Swerdlow and I were the first members of USC’s Master of Public Diplomacy program, joining a semester before the program was officially launched. It should be noted that I had the second-highest grade in my cohort.
The currency exchange rate was ¥240 to the dollar. I remember this because I bought, among other things, speakers the size of a cassette for my Walkman. It was 1982.
I was supposed to participate again the next year on a trip to China. I declined in order to stay home and train with my team over the summer. Most of my teammates weren’t as serious, ultimately making my decision clearly unwise.
The Mundt bill passed the House nine days later, 272-72. The opposition in the House wasn’t partisan but hewed closely to isolationism. Looking at the nays leads me to agree with a columnist for The Washington Post who described the resistance as coming from Congressmen from the “geography of the hard core of isolationism.” In the prior Congress (the 79th), an earlier version of the bill, the Bloom bill (based on a bill introduced by Mundt in January 1945), passed the House on July 20, 1946, by a two-thirds vote, a lower percentage than the following year. The bill wasn’t taken up by the Senate, partly because of poor planning by supporters and partly because it was viewed as a Democrat bill and the Senate’s Republican leadership unanimously opposed it, only to support when it was reintroduced in the 80th so-called “Do Nothing” Congress by Republican Mundt and cosponsored by Republican Senator Smith.
Mundt introduced the bill that became the Smith-Mundt Act in January 1945. That bill authorized the exchange of students training to be middle and high school teachers between the American republics, the contemporaneous collective term the nations in North, Central, and South America. He introduced a similar bill in March 1943, but it died due to limited transportation between nations during the war. Mundt’s bill was similar to prior bills introduced in March 1942 and June 1941 by Congressman Jerry Voorhis. Before entering Congress in 1938, Mundt was a school teacher, superintendent, and college instructor. He was a co-founder of the National Forensic League in 1925. A prolific writer, he and his wife were active in the South Dakota Poetry Society. The House Republican leadership placed him on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in January 1942 to disrupt the Democrats.
I used to come across this quote often, and rarely was there a mention of who said it and never was there a citation. In 2009, I finally found the source – Zorinsky – and the context. https://mountainrunner.us/2009/05/zorinsky/
See my post https://mountainrunner.us/2020/11/does-voa-compete-with-fox/. As someone who helped cause and had a role in drafting the language of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, I insisted on explicitly highlighting these sections (today 22 USC 1437 and 22 USC 1462, which remain nearly identical to the text from 1947). In hindsight, my insistence seems pointless as the few who seem aware of the Modernization Act don’t seem to have read it. The propaganda around the Act only got worse with the Modernization Act and became more nonsensical.
It is well outside the bounds of this discussion to look at the evolution of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs from after the passage of the Smith-Mundt Act through the creation of the International Information Administration, the direct predecessor to USIA, USIA, and then the establishment of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 1999 with the abolishment of USIA.
Emily T. Metzgar (2012): Public Diplomacy, Smith-Mundt and the American Public, Communication Law and Policy, 17:1, 67-101. On the whole, Metzgar’s is probably the best review of the Smith-Mundt Act available as it delves into details I didn’t in my 2008 “Rethinking Smith-Mundt” (Small Wars Journal). To be clear, this isn’t because she cites me several times or that she cites others who cite me (or I provided key information to, like the CRS report in FN40-41). I have four main quibbles with this otherwise very good review. First, it implies the bill originated in 1947. It did not; it was introduced in January 1945 and was substantially whole in July 1946, the end of the 79th Congress. It was initially aimed at general engagement abroad to prevent the misinformation (a term then encompassing today’s “disinformation”) that happened before the war. In early 1946, the imperative grew in response to Russian activities, shifting the arguments for the bill. Second, she gives great weight to discussions about the balance of private and government roles in broadcasting, see the reference to Rep. William Lemke, without noting either the government had publicly discussed this issue since December 1945 (following a July 1945 report that called out this very issue and offered several scenarios to consider, which formed the government’s roadmap here), emphasizing the need to step in where private (commercial and non-profit) broadcasters would not or could not. Third, she focuses nearly entirely on the broadcast operations. This is natural considering the critiques, but public diplomacy is not only mass media. And, fourth, Metzgar mischaracterized Fulbright’s amendment as merely the result of an affront: “The 1972 change was driven not by concern about propagandizing the American people, but rather as a result of one powerful senator’s perceived slight by an administrator of the United States Information Agency.”
I think I’m safe with “entirely” or “exclusively,” but I’ll hedge with “almost entirely.” Sager’s “Apple Pie Propaganda,” which I highlight because I see it cited so often, has errors in nearly every paragraph, including blatantly false statements in the article’s abstract. Palmer and Carter’s 2006 paper is also rife with errors, but their history of the Act hews closer to reality. It is interesting that their recommendation is, without realizing it, what the 80th Congress intended and what the 2012 Modernization Act intended to achieve.
In March 1946, the top suggestions for the Board of Trustees included Mark Ethridge, Roy Larsen, Edward Murrow, Milton Eisenhower, Donald Tresidder, Nelson Rockefeller, Paul Hoffman, Anna Rosenberg, Oveta Hobby, among others. The B-list included Arthur Sulzberger, C.D. Jackson, Clarence Dykstra, and Joeseph Kennedy.