As a “budding historian on subject” – his self-designation – Matt makes many sweeping, dramatic, and revisionist claims about the history of public diplomacy and about Senator Fulbright, and he wants to unmask Fulbright as politician, who has been responsible for undermining national security since 1953 – or at least 1972. His task in the future will be to document how Fulbright “continues to undermine national security.”
Frankly, I am personally perplexed by Armstrong’s claim that the “actual lasting legacy” of Senator Fulbright is “the kneecapping of U.S. global engagement.” This appears to be based on Matt’s assumption that the scholarly and legal analysis of the Smith-Mundt Act to date is more or less flawed across the board; that the “accepted history” is “wrong”; that the implications of Fulbright’s 1972 amendment were epoch-making; and that they have had a negative and lasting effect for the past fifty years.
I want to preface a few observations by noting that I find many of Matt’s previous posts more convincing. For example, in his “R Changes Coming?” post on his Substack from January 30, 2023, he identified a lack of PD leadership, a lack of PD funding, and a lack of Congressional interest in PD since 1999 as problems, and he pointed out that the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs had been vacant almost half of the time since it was established in 1999.
It is not clear to me how Fulbright is related to these shortcomings, but I am not a specialist in public diplomacy or in the history of U.S. public diplomacy like Matt. However, I have done some work on the history of the Fulbright Program, and I would like to suggest that it would be helpful for the readers of Matt’s Substack to have a bit more information to Fulbright’s skepticism regarding governmental information programs. This is a long story that goes back to the “first cold war” in the 1950s.
Stacy Cone has written an informative article on Fulbright’s engagement in the antipropaganda movement – “Pulling the Plug on America’s Propaganda: Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s Leadership of the Antipropaganda Movement, 1943-74,” Journalism History 30, no. 4 (2005): 166–76 – that contextualizes Fulbright well. He “had long been the most proactive propaganda critic in Congress, but he was far from being the only one and further still from being the first.”
Matt uses what he calls a “snippet” of an exchange between Senator Fulbright and Frank Stanton, the Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information, from a hearing in 1967 as an example of “Fulbright’s position” instead of citing substantially more important works that contextualize Fulbright’s concerns regarding the manner in which presidential administrations and U.S. government were informing (and misinforming) the U.S. public in the 1960s.
Fulbright documented his reasons for what Matt called Fulbright’s “distrust and dislike of the executive branches public statements” in three books: Old Myths and New Realities and Other Commentaries (1964); The Arrogance of Power (1966), which had the distinction of being a best-seller; and The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (1970) . Fulbright was of the opinion that American anticommunism was misguiding policy in Latin America, Southeast Asia, unnecessarily exacerbating the East-West conflict, and fueling the arms race, thus increasing the risk of a nuclear war, the avoidance of which was consistently his highest political priority.
Matt traces Fulbright’s allegedly malignant influence back to the Senate subcommittee hearings on “overseas information programs” chaired by Fulbright in 1952 and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) in 1953: twenty-five days of hearings with over 1,500 pages of testimony on film, broadcasting, press work, libraries, and exchanges. It is worth noting that Alexander Smith (R-New Jersey) and Karl Mundt (R-Iowa) served on this special subcommittee, too.
One of the most important outcomes of these hearings – from the perspective of the integrity of exchange programs – was the consensual Congressional opinion that bilateral cultural and educational exchange programs based on the idea of dialogue – or “mutual understanding” – should be institutionally segregated from policy-driven, unilateral “information programs” – especially film, radio broadcasting, and print media – with their objectives of informing, shaping, influencing, or manipulating foreign public opinion.
This insight was based on the assumption that educational exchange and propaganda/information programs were fundamentally different enterprises and the the organizational segregation of the former from the latter enhanced the credibility and impact of exchanges. Hence, the management of exchanges was “retained” in the State Department’s International Education Service (IES), the forerunner of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), when USIA was chartered in 1953 (and only belatedly incorporated into the USIA portfolio after 1978, when the Fulbright Program was rebranded the USIA Fulbright Program).
The 1953 testimony of Walter Johnson, the Chair of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, is particularly instructive in this context. Johnson commented on the unique nature of the Board of Foreign Scholarships and its role in the governance of the program, the structure and importance of binational commissions, and the reliance of the program on Smith-Mundt funding. He also argued that “[I]t is most unfortunate that the exchange program and the information program are in the same division of the Department of State. The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-today foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media.”
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.
I am at a bit of a loss to comment on Matt’s aside about Fulbright’s alleged “elitism.” Fulbright’s concern about democracy as a “dangerous experiment” was based on the fragility of democracy, not its principle inadequacies. The focus of the Fulbright Program on graduate students as a primary target group and scholars as a secondary one was based on the insight that the impacts of the exchange experience would be greatest for these academic cohorts (as opposed to primary and secondary school students and teachers) and reinforced by the U.S. government’s initial experience of organizing exchanges with Latin America in the 1940s.
Fulbright’s own Rhodes experience also informed his original conception of the program. As a graduate of a land-grant institution in the South and a Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright was concerned about an equitable national distribution of awards from the very start, and he advanced the idea of a representative national geographical distribution of Fulbright awards from the very start. The mantra of the Fulbright Program from the start has been annual, open, national, merit-based competition.
Matt references Fulbright’s “atrocious record on civil rights” –I have used the term “deplorable” – and cites Randal Woods’ Fulbright’s 1995 biography of Fulbright in a footnote: “That J. William Fulbright was a racist is indisputable.” Woods never convincingly documented this opinion, which was immediately contested by many of Fulbright’s contemporaries, and he toned it down in a Fulbright obituary a few years later with a reference to Fulbright’s patrician upbringing with the qualification that “his racism had much more to do with class than skin color, . . . “
It is important to note in this context that Lee Riley Powell published a fine and lawyerly second full-length biography of Fulbright – J. William Fulbright and His Time – which appeared in 1996 one year after the Woods biography and should be read parallel to Woods’ book. Powell, who critically deals with Fulbright’s civil rights record at great length and contextualizes in Arkansan politics, also takes Woods to task on a number of stylistic and methodological issues by observing, for example, “. . . it is shrill and superficial to not only dismiss Fulbright as a racist, but to claim that his alleged ‘racism’ was ‘indisputable.’”
Finally, the most recent extensive evaluation of Fulbright’s legacies at the University of Arkansas in 2021 came to the conclusion that his voting record against civil rights “reflected the demands of political expediency of the times” that “did not reflect a hardened personal racism toward African Americans” but was “more a reflection of his need to appease a voting constituency that was not ready for social change.”
Three different disparate legacies were part of Fulbright’s public political persona during his lifetime: the international educator, the Southern Democrat, and the dissenter. Stacy Cone would add a fourth legacy: “his postwar leadership of the disorganized, dispersed, but indefeasible antipropaganda movement in America.”
According to Matt’s post, in 1972 Fulbright, the international educator, advocate for disarmament and detente, and tireless advocate for ending the war in Vietnam, “helped militarize US foreign policy by denigrating, handicapping, and relegating non-military methods that were critical then and remain, if not more so, today.” Is this Fulbright’s newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?
Lonnie, thank you for your thoughtful and detailed response and for reading my work. A reply here will be an inadequate method to completely respond, so I'll be relatively brief here and make part II of the series a more detailed response.
To start, your closing comment – "Is this Fulbright's newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?" – is absurd. The sentence of mine you quoted immediately prior to the above question makes it clear, it seems to me, that Fulbright's attacks reduced the oversight, awareness, accountability, and appreciation of the value of the informational means of foreign policy today. That outcome is evident in virtually every discussion about this broad line of effort, which frequently invoke, in some form, Fulbright's amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972, as I showed early in the piece.
You dismiss the snippet from the 1967 hearing with Fulbright and Stanton in 1967, but I need clarification on how that exchange doesn't match the position you suggest is different, or perhaps more nuanced, in the sources you provided in your reply.
For example, you cited Stacey Cone's work in this space, with which I'm quite familiar, both regarding Fulbright and "propaganda," a term requiring discussion, and the Freedom Academy, the forgotten effort I mentioned in the piece that Fulbright killed. Cone's liberal and seemingly everything-under-the-sun-that-is-convenient implicit definition of propaganda echoes Fulbright. Her history of the Smith-Mundt Act in the paper you suggested is deeply problematic, including that during Congressional debates over the pending Smith-Mundt bill, "it had become obvious that the exchange program would have to compete with the VOA for limited funds." The Act, she said, "continued indefinitely America's wartime radio propaganda operations after the war by establishing the VOA as a permanent government institution." Her descriptions are relevant to my point that scholarly work and law review articles pivot on the radio element rather than on the vast and broad other informational elements authorized by Smith-Mundt that were coordinated with US private industry, from newspaper to magazine to book publishers and beyond, that were conducted by public affairs sections, and a broad list of activities often falling under the umbrella of "public diplomacy."
As an aside, I'm writing a piece on how the intended separation of VOA from the government, a priority starting by the end of 1945, might have changed our understanding and organizational history here.
But back to Cone and her comment that the exchange programs were going to compete with VOA. I need help finding where Cone describes the Mundt exchange programs that were going to compete with the relatively small radio broadcasting operation. The Mundt exchange monies funded a great deal of students and teachers, and enabled institional exchanges. In addition to educational exchanges, the Smith-Mundt Act funded science and technical programs: census procedures, civil aviation training, industrial training, training in labor-related fields from apprenticeships to setting labor standards to collecting statistics to women’s working conditions and beyond, laboratory standards and testing, public administration, social welfare including maternal and child health, translation and printing of publications, and a load more and around the world. For a small glimpse into the expansive nature of the Mundt bill, it authorized the detail of US Government personnel to governments outside of the Western Hemisphere, continue the exchange of science leaders with China (which ended in June ’46 due to a lapse in authority when the Mundt bill, then called the Bloom bill failed to move in the Senate), funding for American Universities abroad, and international cooperation work of 26 other government agencies, all of which would end without the Mundt bill. The bill also granted the authority for government agencies to accept foreign money. For example, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (today known as the FAA) was asked by the Canadian government to erect a radio beacon to guide Canadian planes flying the Great Lakes. The Canadian government would pay but the authority to accept the money was in the Mundt bill. The ability of the US to cooperate with other countries on scientific and education matters was through this bill. It was imperative to build this cooperate in the wake of the war with European countries “when the loan of technicians and professors to devastated areas might influence their form of education (and their use of American products and American standards) for the next 50 or 100 years.” A State Department official noted that, “Our political office for Near Eastern Affairs is worried, for example, about an agricultural mission sent to Arab countries under emergency funds last year. This type of mission, invaluable to political relations, must be withdrawn until [the Mundt bill] is passed.”
The Mundt bill, by the way, began as an exchange bill to authorize the interchange of teachers-in-training preparing to teach at elementary and high schools. The failure of the Senate to take up the Bloom (formerly the Mundt bill) was because the Republican leadership viewed the now Democrat-led (Bloom was the Democrat chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Mundt was placed on... for the purpose of frustrating the Democrats foreign policy) as wrong. When Mundt, who was from South Dakota, by the way, not Iowa (just as Stacey Cone has an 'e' in her first name), reintroduced what originally had been his bill at the request of the State Department who still desperately wanted the authorities provided, the same Republican Senate leadership now backed the bill. So much for the "anti-propaganda" framing by so many.
Oh, and by the way, Fulbright scholars often relied on Smith-Mundt Act funding. When that was unavailable, problems typically ensued, contributing to poor satisfaction among participants for years, though probably ending before Fulbright virtually erased Mundt's name from exchanges in 1961. For example, a foreigner coming to the US couldn't use the foreign currency generated by the Surplus Property Act to buy transportation, tuition, food, housing, etc. in the US. Fulbright recipients typically relied on the Smith-Mundt Act for this. A US Fulbrighter would typically use Smith-Mundt funds to get to the foreign country and for continuing expenses at home in the US (typically supporting the spouse). I share this to highlight the shortcomings of commentary around this topic, though you did mention Walter Johnson's 1953 acknowledgment of Fulbright's Mundt problem, which, in this case, I don't understand except to ponder if Fulbright's effective rewriting of the narrative of the Smith-Mundt Act as an "anti-propaganda" law had something to do with it. But back to Johnson's comment – "The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-to-day foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media." – note his emphasis at the end. We have again the distraction of VOA, rather than the broader information programs. (See my comment above about a separate discussion to come about State's desire to separate the radio broadcast operation and how that might have changed things.)
By reinforcing the implicit, if not often explicit, point that intentional communication, especially by certain actors or for certain audiences (i.e, non-US) is "propaganda" (whatever that means as my reply to you can be construed as propaganda by some, though, for some definitions I need a bigger audience to "earn" that label) and thus unfit for a US audience, enormous limitations in how we think about, organize, and conduct global engagement should be expected to follow. And, they have. As I wrote in the article, this can best be sourced to the 1972 amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, but I am not arguing that's the only issue. Nor am I arguing everything goes, nor am I arguing Fulbright didn't have valid qualms and concerns (e.g., his letter to the SecDef re uniform personnel promoting the John Birch Society, the admin's use of USIA). There is nuance; Fulbright had little to none on this topic, and the scholarly and law review articles have even less. The result is the 1972 amendment is the best single inflection point. It is what many point to, like the Gates Center article, though many others think that it was a minor correct to align the legislation with the original intent, which is demonstrably false, not just inaccurate or misleading.
More later as there is more to address in your thoughtful response. Again, thank you for your comment.
Matt, I appreciate your response and regret my indulgence in a polemic at the end of my initial comment about Fulbright being a "militarist," which obscured the point I also wanted to make. I was suggesting that if Fulbright "willfully hampered the nation's non-military means of engaging with the world," as you had indicated, he nolens-volens left communicating with the world up to the military. (My initial comment also had 18 footnotes that were lost in the cut-and-paste from Word to the Substack platform, that I would be glad to share with you.)
Based on what Fulbright wrote in the 1960s, my assumption is that he had genuine and legitimate concerns about the manner in which the Johnson administration, U.S. government agencies, and USIA were informing (and misinforming) the American public as well as global audiences. Fulbright regarded his hasty support for the Tonkin Bay Resolution -- a bogus "incident" -- in 1964 as the worst mistake he made in his entire political career, and his criticism of the Johnson administration for fabricating a "Communist threat" in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to justify an intervention there ruptured his relationships with his long-standing personal friend and political ally, Lyndon Johnson.
My assumption is that the discontent and the suspicions that informed Fulbright's 1972 amendment were informed by the hard-won experience he had chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an opponent of the Vietnam war and the arms race: tough rows to how in the 1960s. Calibrating his intent is a tricky operation. As you note: " I doubt Fulbright would have imagined the extent of the damage done by his 1972 amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, but I am wholly confident he would be pleased. " This kind of ad hominem speculation is a bit gratuitous in my opinion and distracts from your structural arguments.
With the title of your original post, you suggest that Fulbright's amendment has undermined national security for fifty years. Calibrating the extent to which that is the case -- especially in light of the other issues you have frequently mentioned, such as the lack of leadership, funding, executive and Congressional interest, etc. -- is the task at hand, which you have indicated that you will address in a later post. Your subscribers are looking forward to it!
I have another example of the "noxious influence" from Fulbright's amendment that I wanted to work into the article and into my prior reply to you. Back when President Obama made his Africa trip, there was an effort to SMS updates during his Ghana speech, but this was hindered by invocations of the Smith-Mundt Act because a person in the US might get the SMS aimed at a foreign audience – the target audience was across many African nations – and produced by the public diplomacy folks.
While I left out some bits, like references to the first post, I stand by my characterizations in the first post. Fulbright's antipathy toward the information activities strongly suggests he would agree with the imposed censorship and labeling. This view is supported by the analysis of Stacey Cone and Fulbright's own words that both use a broad brush to color the breadth of information activities as "propaganda" unfit and inappropriate for a domestic audience. Based on his own words, I don't think calibrating his intent is at all difficult.
I agree that Fulbright's anger around successive administration's communications around Vietnam, both Johnson's and Nixon's, were a prime motivation, perhaps a "last straw" sort of thing.
Let me make clear that I don't think Fulbright intentionally militarized US foreign policy through his intentional relegation of any USIA product as "propaganda", but that has been the practical effect. The amended legislation has been used countless times to not do something, both that the State Department and the Defense Department, and possibly elsewhere based on the gross misinformation about the Act. Just in my different roles in Government over the years, I heard examples of refusing to put an American on a German radio program because of Smith-Mundt. Refusing to allow NATO to use a VOA film for NATO's TV channel because of Smith-Mundt. Blocking of military information operations in combat zones because of Smith-Mundt. And the list goes on and on and on. Fulbright's amendment didn't just paint USIA and subsequent materials as "propaganda" unfit for domestic access; the resulting label marginalized and mischaracterized these activities inside and outside of government. This diminished awareness and understanding of the organizations and programs, relegating them through diminished support and resources.
Almost exactly two years ago, I worked with an FSO working in a Senator's office on a Pearson Fellowship from State. The Senator was interested in clearing the obstacles to global engagement and Smith-Mundt appeared to be one. My first point was to challenge the position and have them ask State etc for specific examples clearly prevented by the Smith-Mundt Act. Of course, that proved illuminating to the Senate office: the Act was invoked without merit or proof, it was just a "known" blanket prohibition of anything and everything. In other words, invoking the Act meant not needing to provide receipts or proof, which makes it hard to identify specific required textual changes.
Beyond the above lack of specificity of what exactly needed to be changed, we know (or I know and can prove) there are restrictions that can be pointed at that should be changed and even reverted to their original form or nearly so. That was the second intent of the Modernization Act, the first being this: "No, DOD, this does not apply to you!" That second message going unheard, as you know.
I provided a lot of detailed and specific advice to the FSO two years ago and again over a year ago. The key point, I suppose, was clearly separating USAGM with its VOA, RFE/RL, etc. from the State Department's activities, including "public diplomacy." Also, I believe I recommended to not use the term "public diplomacy" since that has no real meaning, is not defined in the Act, and most importantly it was adopted to apply to the activities of an agency (USIA) that no longer exists rather than means, methods, outcomes, etc. I also recommended emphasizing the transparency and oversight aspects any change will bring. This was a point I also emphasized when I helped write and defend (through assisting answering Member questions to the drafts) the bill that became the Modernization Act.
As far as who might champion "public diplomacy" on the Hill? I don't know anymore. I suppose my future money might be on a Senate candidate from New Jersey who is a former State Department diplomat (Schedule C). I think it's worth noting the Modernization Act came out of the House Armed Service Committee (Thornberry and Smith were primed by the need to tell DoD Smith-Mundt did not, in fact, apply to them) and not HFAC or SFRC. Might HFAC? There are Members that I could see might in a normal time, but won't dare because of their extremist constituents today. SFRC has Members that might, but I don't think it's a priority.
That Senator who was interested in changing the legislation two years ago? I was told a couple of months ago some form is intended to make its way into the FY23 State Department authorization bill. We shall see. That it is intended to go into the State auth bill is laudable and appropriate, but a State authorization bill has been a remarkably rare thing to pass in the past two decades. I don't know what the proposed text was, the intentions, let alone what a post-conference version might look like. I'd love to know, but there's no interest to bring me into or near the loop.
As a “budding historian on subject” – his self-designation – Matt makes many sweeping, dramatic, and revisionist claims about the history of public diplomacy and about Senator Fulbright, and he wants to unmask Fulbright as politician, who has been responsible for undermining national security since 1953 – or at least 1972. His task in the future will be to document how Fulbright “continues to undermine national security.”
Frankly, I am personally perplexed by Armstrong’s claim that the “actual lasting legacy” of Senator Fulbright is “the kneecapping of U.S. global engagement.” This appears to be based on Matt’s assumption that the scholarly and legal analysis of the Smith-Mundt Act to date is more or less flawed across the board; that the “accepted history” is “wrong”; that the implications of Fulbright’s 1972 amendment were epoch-making; and that they have had a negative and lasting effect for the past fifty years.
I want to preface a few observations by noting that I find many of Matt’s previous posts more convincing. For example, in his “R Changes Coming?” post on his Substack from January 30, 2023, he identified a lack of PD leadership, a lack of PD funding, and a lack of Congressional interest in PD since 1999 as problems, and he pointed out that the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs had been vacant almost half of the time since it was established in 1999.
It is not clear to me how Fulbright is related to these shortcomings, but I am not a specialist in public diplomacy or in the history of U.S. public diplomacy like Matt. However, I have done some work on the history of the Fulbright Program, and I would like to suggest that it would be helpful for the readers of Matt’s Substack to have a bit more information to Fulbright’s skepticism regarding governmental information programs. This is a long story that goes back to the “first cold war” in the 1950s.
Stacy Cone has written an informative article on Fulbright’s engagement in the antipropaganda movement – “Pulling the Plug on America’s Propaganda: Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s Leadership of the Antipropaganda Movement, 1943-74,” Journalism History 30, no. 4 (2005): 166–76 – that contextualizes Fulbright well. He “had long been the most proactive propaganda critic in Congress, but he was far from being the only one and further still from being the first.”
Matt uses what he calls a “snippet” of an exchange between Senator Fulbright and Frank Stanton, the Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information, from a hearing in 1967 as an example of “Fulbright’s position” instead of citing substantially more important works that contextualize Fulbright’s concerns regarding the manner in which presidential administrations and U.S. government were informing (and misinforming) the U.S. public in the 1960s.
Fulbright documented his reasons for what Matt called Fulbright’s “distrust and dislike of the executive branches public statements” in three books: Old Myths and New Realities and Other Commentaries (1964); The Arrogance of Power (1966), which had the distinction of being a best-seller; and The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (1970) . Fulbright was of the opinion that American anticommunism was misguiding policy in Latin America, Southeast Asia, unnecessarily exacerbating the East-West conflict, and fueling the arms race, thus increasing the risk of a nuclear war, the avoidance of which was consistently his highest political priority.
Matt traces Fulbright’s allegedly malignant influence back to the Senate subcommittee hearings on “overseas information programs” chaired by Fulbright in 1952 and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) in 1953: twenty-five days of hearings with over 1,500 pages of testimony on film, broadcasting, press work, libraries, and exchanges. It is worth noting that Alexander Smith (R-New Jersey) and Karl Mundt (R-Iowa) served on this special subcommittee, too.
One of the most important outcomes of these hearings – from the perspective of the integrity of exchange programs – was the consensual Congressional opinion that bilateral cultural and educational exchange programs based on the idea of dialogue – or “mutual understanding” – should be institutionally segregated from policy-driven, unilateral “information programs” – especially film, radio broadcasting, and print media – with their objectives of informing, shaping, influencing, or manipulating foreign public opinion.
This insight was based on the assumption that educational exchange and propaganda/information programs were fundamentally different enterprises and the the organizational segregation of the former from the latter enhanced the credibility and impact of exchanges. Hence, the management of exchanges was “retained” in the State Department’s International Education Service (IES), the forerunner of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), when USIA was chartered in 1953 (and only belatedly incorporated into the USIA portfolio after 1978, when the Fulbright Program was rebranded the USIA Fulbright Program).
The 1953 testimony of Walter Johnson, the Chair of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, is particularly instructive in this context. Johnson commented on the unique nature of the Board of Foreign Scholarships and its role in the governance of the program, the structure and importance of binational commissions, and the reliance of the program on Smith-Mundt funding. He also argued that “[I]t is most unfortunate that the exchange program and the information program are in the same division of the Department of State. The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-today foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media.”
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.
I am at a bit of a loss to comment on Matt’s aside about Fulbright’s alleged “elitism.” Fulbright’s concern about democracy as a “dangerous experiment” was based on the fragility of democracy, not its principle inadequacies. The focus of the Fulbright Program on graduate students as a primary target group and scholars as a secondary one was based on the insight that the impacts of the exchange experience would be greatest for these academic cohorts (as opposed to primary and secondary school students and teachers) and reinforced by the U.S. government’s initial experience of organizing exchanges with Latin America in the 1940s.
Fulbright’s own Rhodes experience also informed his original conception of the program. As a graduate of a land-grant institution in the South and a Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright was concerned about an equitable national distribution of awards from the very start, and he advanced the idea of a representative national geographical distribution of Fulbright awards from the very start. The mantra of the Fulbright Program from the start has been annual, open, national, merit-based competition.
Matt references Fulbright’s “atrocious record on civil rights” –I have used the term “deplorable” – and cites Randal Woods’ Fulbright’s 1995 biography of Fulbright in a footnote: “That J. William Fulbright was a racist is indisputable.” Woods never convincingly documented this opinion, which was immediately contested by many of Fulbright’s contemporaries, and he toned it down in a Fulbright obituary a few years later with a reference to Fulbright’s patrician upbringing with the qualification that “his racism had much more to do with class than skin color, . . . “
It is important to note in this context that Lee Riley Powell published a fine and lawyerly second full-length biography of Fulbright – J. William Fulbright and His Time – which appeared in 1996 one year after the Woods biography and should be read parallel to Woods’ book. Powell, who critically deals with Fulbright’s civil rights record at great length and contextualizes in Arkansan politics, also takes Woods to task on a number of stylistic and methodological issues by observing, for example, “. . . it is shrill and superficial to not only dismiss Fulbright as a racist, but to claim that his alleged ‘racism’ was ‘indisputable.’”
Finally, the most recent extensive evaluation of Fulbright’s legacies at the University of Arkansas in 2021 came to the conclusion that his voting record against civil rights “reflected the demands of political expediency of the times” that “did not reflect a hardened personal racism toward African Americans” but was “more a reflection of his need to appease a voting constituency that was not ready for social change.”
Three different disparate legacies were part of Fulbright’s public political persona during his lifetime: the international educator, the Southern Democrat, and the dissenter. Stacy Cone would add a fourth legacy: “his postwar leadership of the disorganized, dispersed, but indefeasible antipropaganda movement in America.”
According to Matt’s post, in 1972 Fulbright, the international educator, advocate for disarmament and detente, and tireless advocate for ending the war in Vietnam, “helped militarize US foreign policy by denigrating, handicapping, and relegating non-military methods that were critical then and remain, if not more so, today.” Is this Fulbright’s newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?
Lonnie, thank you for your thoughtful and detailed response and for reading my work. A reply here will be an inadequate method to completely respond, so I'll be relatively brief here and make part II of the series a more detailed response.
To start, your closing comment – "Is this Fulbright's newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?" – is absurd. The sentence of mine you quoted immediately prior to the above question makes it clear, it seems to me, that Fulbright's attacks reduced the oversight, awareness, accountability, and appreciation of the value of the informational means of foreign policy today. That outcome is evident in virtually every discussion about this broad line of effort, which frequently invoke, in some form, Fulbright's amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act in 1972, as I showed early in the piece.
You dismiss the snippet from the 1967 hearing with Fulbright and Stanton in 1967, but I need clarification on how that exchange doesn't match the position you suggest is different, or perhaps more nuanced, in the sources you provided in your reply.
For example, you cited Stacey Cone's work in this space, with which I'm quite familiar, both regarding Fulbright and "propaganda," a term requiring discussion, and the Freedom Academy, the forgotten effort I mentioned in the piece that Fulbright killed. Cone's liberal and seemingly everything-under-the-sun-that-is-convenient implicit definition of propaganda echoes Fulbright. Her history of the Smith-Mundt Act in the paper you suggested is deeply problematic, including that during Congressional debates over the pending Smith-Mundt bill, "it had become obvious that the exchange program would have to compete with the VOA for limited funds." The Act, she said, "continued indefinitely America's wartime radio propaganda operations after the war by establishing the VOA as a permanent government institution." Her descriptions are relevant to my point that scholarly work and law review articles pivot on the radio element rather than on the vast and broad other informational elements authorized by Smith-Mundt that were coordinated with US private industry, from newspaper to magazine to book publishers and beyond, that were conducted by public affairs sections, and a broad list of activities often falling under the umbrella of "public diplomacy."
As an aside, I'm writing a piece on how the intended separation of VOA from the government, a priority starting by the end of 1945, might have changed our understanding and organizational history here.
But back to Cone and her comment that the exchange programs were going to compete with VOA. I need help finding where Cone describes the Mundt exchange programs that were going to compete with the relatively small radio broadcasting operation. The Mundt exchange monies funded a great deal of students and teachers, and enabled institional exchanges. In addition to educational exchanges, the Smith-Mundt Act funded science and technical programs: census procedures, civil aviation training, industrial training, training in labor-related fields from apprenticeships to setting labor standards to collecting statistics to women’s working conditions and beyond, laboratory standards and testing, public administration, social welfare including maternal and child health, translation and printing of publications, and a load more and around the world. For a small glimpse into the expansive nature of the Mundt bill, it authorized the detail of US Government personnel to governments outside of the Western Hemisphere, continue the exchange of science leaders with China (which ended in June ’46 due to a lapse in authority when the Mundt bill, then called the Bloom bill failed to move in the Senate), funding for American Universities abroad, and international cooperation work of 26 other government agencies, all of which would end without the Mundt bill. The bill also granted the authority for government agencies to accept foreign money. For example, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (today known as the FAA) was asked by the Canadian government to erect a radio beacon to guide Canadian planes flying the Great Lakes. The Canadian government would pay but the authority to accept the money was in the Mundt bill. The ability of the US to cooperate with other countries on scientific and education matters was through this bill. It was imperative to build this cooperate in the wake of the war with European countries “when the loan of technicians and professors to devastated areas might influence their form of education (and their use of American products and American standards) for the next 50 or 100 years.” A State Department official noted that, “Our political office for Near Eastern Affairs is worried, for example, about an agricultural mission sent to Arab countries under emergency funds last year. This type of mission, invaluable to political relations, must be withdrawn until [the Mundt bill] is passed.”
The Mundt bill, by the way, began as an exchange bill to authorize the interchange of teachers-in-training preparing to teach at elementary and high schools. The failure of the Senate to take up the Bloom (formerly the Mundt bill) was because the Republican leadership viewed the now Democrat-led (Bloom was the Democrat chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Mundt was placed on... for the purpose of frustrating the Democrats foreign policy) as wrong. When Mundt, who was from South Dakota, by the way, not Iowa (just as Stacey Cone has an 'e' in her first name), reintroduced what originally had been his bill at the request of the State Department who still desperately wanted the authorities provided, the same Republican Senate leadership now backed the bill. So much for the "anti-propaganda" framing by so many.
Oh, and by the way, Fulbright scholars often relied on Smith-Mundt Act funding. When that was unavailable, problems typically ensued, contributing to poor satisfaction among participants for years, though probably ending before Fulbright virtually erased Mundt's name from exchanges in 1961. For example, a foreigner coming to the US couldn't use the foreign currency generated by the Surplus Property Act to buy transportation, tuition, food, housing, etc. in the US. Fulbright recipients typically relied on the Smith-Mundt Act for this. A US Fulbrighter would typically use Smith-Mundt funds to get to the foreign country and for continuing expenses at home in the US (typically supporting the spouse). I share this to highlight the shortcomings of commentary around this topic, though you did mention Walter Johnson's 1953 acknowledgment of Fulbright's Mundt problem, which, in this case, I don't understand except to ponder if Fulbright's effective rewriting of the narrative of the Smith-Mundt Act as an "anti-propaganda" law had something to do with it. But back to Johnson's comment – "The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-to-day foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media." – note his emphasis at the end. We have again the distraction of VOA, rather than the broader information programs. (See my comment above about a separate discussion to come about State's desire to separate the radio broadcast operation and how that might have changed things.)
By reinforcing the implicit, if not often explicit, point that intentional communication, especially by certain actors or for certain audiences (i.e, non-US) is "propaganda" (whatever that means as my reply to you can be construed as propaganda by some, though, for some definitions I need a bigger audience to "earn" that label) and thus unfit for a US audience, enormous limitations in how we think about, organize, and conduct global engagement should be expected to follow. And, they have. As I wrote in the article, this can best be sourced to the 1972 amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, but I am not arguing that's the only issue. Nor am I arguing everything goes, nor am I arguing Fulbright didn't have valid qualms and concerns (e.g., his letter to the SecDef re uniform personnel promoting the John Birch Society, the admin's use of USIA). There is nuance; Fulbright had little to none on this topic, and the scholarly and law review articles have even less. The result is the 1972 amendment is the best single inflection point. It is what many point to, like the Gates Center article, though many others think that it was a minor correct to align the legislation with the original intent, which is demonstrably false, not just inaccurate or misleading.
More later as there is more to address in your thoughtful response. Again, thank you for your comment.
Matt, I appreciate your response and regret my indulgence in a polemic at the end of my initial comment about Fulbright being a "militarist," which obscured the point I also wanted to make. I was suggesting that if Fulbright "willfully hampered the nation's non-military means of engaging with the world," as you had indicated, he nolens-volens left communicating with the world up to the military. (My initial comment also had 18 footnotes that were lost in the cut-and-paste from Word to the Substack platform, that I would be glad to share with you.)
Based on what Fulbright wrote in the 1960s, my assumption is that he had genuine and legitimate concerns about the manner in which the Johnson administration, U.S. government agencies, and USIA were informing (and misinforming) the American public as well as global audiences. Fulbright regarded his hasty support for the Tonkin Bay Resolution -- a bogus "incident" -- in 1964 as the worst mistake he made in his entire political career, and his criticism of the Johnson administration for fabricating a "Communist threat" in the Dominican Republic in 1965 to justify an intervention there ruptured his relationships with his long-standing personal friend and political ally, Lyndon Johnson.
My assumption is that the discontent and the suspicions that informed Fulbright's 1972 amendment were informed by the hard-won experience he had chairing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an opponent of the Vietnam war and the arms race: tough rows to how in the 1960s. Calibrating his intent is a tricky operation. As you note: " I doubt Fulbright would have imagined the extent of the damage done by his 1972 amendment to the Smith-Mundt Act, but I am wholly confident he would be pleased. " This kind of ad hominem speculation is a bit gratuitous in my opinion and distracts from your structural arguments.
With the title of your original post, you suggest that Fulbright's amendment has undermined national security for fifty years. Calibrating the extent to which that is the case -- especially in light of the other issues you have frequently mentioned, such as the lack of leadership, funding, executive and Congressional interest, etc. -- is the task at hand, which you have indicated that you will address in a later post. Your subscribers are looking forward to it!
I have another example of the "noxious influence" from Fulbright's amendment that I wanted to work into the article and into my prior reply to you. Back when President Obama made his Africa trip, there was an effort to SMS updates during his Ghana speech, but this was hindered by invocations of the Smith-Mundt Act because a person in the US might get the SMS aimed at a foreign audience – the target audience was across many African nations – and produced by the public diplomacy folks.
Lonnie,
My response laying out how Fulbright's amendment was an inflection point is up. https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/fulbrights-knee-capping-of-us-global
While I left out some bits, like references to the first post, I stand by my characterizations in the first post. Fulbright's antipathy toward the information activities strongly suggests he would agree with the imposed censorship and labeling. This view is supported by the analysis of Stacey Cone and Fulbright's own words that both use a broad brush to color the breadth of information activities as "propaganda" unfit and inappropriate for a domestic audience. Based on his own words, I don't think calibrating his intent is at all difficult.
I agree that Fulbright's anger around successive administration's communications around Vietnam, both Johnson's and Nixon's, were a prime motivation, perhaps a "last straw" sort of thing.
Let me make clear that I don't think Fulbright intentionally militarized US foreign policy through his intentional relegation of any USIA product as "propaganda", but that has been the practical effect. The amended legislation has been used countless times to not do something, both that the State Department and the Defense Department, and possibly elsewhere based on the gross misinformation about the Act. Just in my different roles in Government over the years, I heard examples of refusing to put an American on a German radio program because of Smith-Mundt. Refusing to allow NATO to use a VOA film for NATO's TV channel because of Smith-Mundt. Blocking of military information operations in combat zones because of Smith-Mundt. And the list goes on and on and on. Fulbright's amendment didn't just paint USIA and subsequent materials as "propaganda" unfit for domestic access; the resulting label marginalized and mischaracterized these activities inside and outside of government. This diminished awareness and understanding of the organizations and programs, relegating them through diminished support and resources.
Looking forward to a summary of how we might change the law and who might champion PD on Capitol Hill.
By the way, make sure you read the footnotes. Number 9 might be your "favorite."
I despair
Almost exactly two years ago, I worked with an FSO working in a Senator's office on a Pearson Fellowship from State. The Senator was interested in clearing the obstacles to global engagement and Smith-Mundt appeared to be one. My first point was to challenge the position and have them ask State etc for specific examples clearly prevented by the Smith-Mundt Act. Of course, that proved illuminating to the Senate office: the Act was invoked without merit or proof, it was just a "known" blanket prohibition of anything and everything. In other words, invoking the Act meant not needing to provide receipts or proof, which makes it hard to identify specific required textual changes.
Beyond the above lack of specificity of what exactly needed to be changed, we know (or I know and can prove) there are restrictions that can be pointed at that should be changed and even reverted to their original form or nearly so. That was the second intent of the Modernization Act, the first being this: "No, DOD, this does not apply to you!" That second message going unheard, as you know.
I provided a lot of detailed and specific advice to the FSO two years ago and again over a year ago. The key point, I suppose, was clearly separating USAGM with its VOA, RFE/RL, etc. from the State Department's activities, including "public diplomacy." Also, I believe I recommended to not use the term "public diplomacy" since that has no real meaning, is not defined in the Act, and most importantly it was adopted to apply to the activities of an agency (USIA) that no longer exists rather than means, methods, outcomes, etc. I also recommended emphasizing the transparency and oversight aspects any change will bring. This was a point I also emphasized when I helped write and defend (through assisting answering Member questions to the drafts) the bill that became the Modernization Act.
As far as who might champion "public diplomacy" on the Hill? I don't know anymore. I suppose my future money might be on a Senate candidate from New Jersey who is a former State Department diplomat (Schedule C). I think it's worth noting the Modernization Act came out of the House Armed Service Committee (Thornberry and Smith were primed by the need to tell DoD Smith-Mundt did not, in fact, apply to them) and not HFAC or SFRC. Might HFAC? There are Members that I could see might in a normal time, but won't dare because of their extremist constituents today. SFRC has Members that might, but I don't think it's a priority.
That Senator who was interested in changing the legislation two years ago? I was told a couple of months ago some form is intended to make its way into the FY23 State Department authorization bill. We shall see. That it is intended to go into the State auth bill is laudable and appropriate, but a State authorization bill has been a remarkably rare thing to pass in the past two decades. I don't know what the proposed text was, the intentions, let alone what a post-conference version might look like. I'd love to know, but there's no interest to bring me into or near the loop.