In other words, most of the national foreign-policy decisions at the highest level have been dictated in recent years by strategic considerations. They have been National Security Council decisions, not Cabinet-type decisions of the kind which might have been made in the years of William McKinley or Warren G. Harding. Yet, even though the decisions have been strategic in type, the propaganda implementation of these decisions has fallen for the greater part on the State Department and on the economic aid program facilities, not on the military. The military have been pretty strictly confined to those aspects of propaganda which directly pertain to combat areas. By 1953 U.S. leaders had begun to understand the situation with which they had been dealing since 1947 and in light of that necessarily belated but correct appreciation of their own position, the William Jackson Committee began to recommend that propaganda policy be written not as something self-contained, but be considered an integral part of every other U.S. Government decision possessing world situation or news impact. =The Cold War and the Home Front.= Among editors, professors, officers, officials, and other experts concerned with foreign affairs, there has been frequent lamentation that the American people did not take the great struggle of our time more seriously. The contrary should be argued, at least by way of contrast. If it is true that the United States is engaged in a major struggle, if it is further true that this struggle has no visible end, if this struggle threatens all of us and our children as well with lifetimes of tension and violent deaths under ultra-destructive weapons, one may quite reasonably ask the question, _Which is the better reaction for the bulk of the American population: normality, emotional health, mild irresponsibility, and the stockpiling of nervous and physical strength for a time of trial which may lie far ahead; or, alternatively, tension now, worry now, responsibility now, fatigue now, all the way through from the uncertain present across the bitter and perilous future to the months of near-Armageddon which may lie fifteen, twenty, or thirty years ahead?_