The story of U.S. "peacetime" propaganda since the end of World War II is a very complicated one. Quantity, direction, purpose, and quality have shifted with the various turns of the international situation. The subject has become much more difficult to write about since the time the first edition of this book was written in 1946. In the first place, governmental secrecy has been very sharply restored. Even very routine State Department operations for putting across the U.S. point of view have been shrouded in masses of classified documents. For reasons not always evident to the outside observer, the assumption has become prevalent that the normal operations of the United States Government should be kept confidential, secret, or even top secret. Often it would seem that the attempt to maintain secrecy in non-sensitive functions is not worth the security effort at all or, contrariwise, may even reassure the antagonists of the United States by not letting them realize how serious and how unfriendly our plans or policies with respect to them may be. (This is not the time or place to discuss the problem of secrecy as a protection against domestic criticism--which secrecy, of course, has often become, to the detriment of both the government and the citizens of the United States.) In the second place, not only have information activities become more hush-hush: they have also become more complicated. It is difficult to do justice to an intricate moving panorama of activities, some of which may not be mentioned or described under existing law. =Demobilization and Remobilization.= The ending of the OWI and the installation of the International Information Service, mentioned above on page 184, in turn changed into the information activities of the Department of State. These were headed from 1945 to 1953 by an Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. In 1953 a Director of the United States Information Agency, _not_ under the Department of State but mysteriously attached to the National Security Council, was inaugurated. The overseas operating component of USIA remained the United States Information Service (USIS), transferred from State Department control. In other words, there were eight years in which the Department of State had primary responsibility for the conduct of peacetime propaganda of the United States. This was the first and only time that the United States Government had in a period of relative peace undertaken a sustained propaganda effort. The effort had ups and downs because neither the citizenry nor the officials knew whether the country was in a condition of peace or at war and, if at war, at war with _whom_. To some the enemy was Communism, the ideology; to others, Communism the movement; to still others, the USSR; to others, the Korean Communists, but not the Chinese Communists; to others, the Chinese Communists in Korea, but not the Chinese Communists in China; and so on, _ad infinitum_.