Psychological WarfareLinebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
History
Psychological Warfare
Linebarger, Paul Myron Anthony
Psychological warfare
A year of wrangling produced the solution, after a Joint Psychological
Warfare Committee had been set up under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
had failed to fulfill an effective policy-supervising function. On 13
June, 1942 the President created the Office of War Information. This
agency was given control directly or indirectly over all domestic
propaganda, and over white propaganda abroad, except for the Western
Hemisphere, which remained under the Rockefeller Committee in the State
Department. The FIS was taken from the COI, and the COI took on the new
name of OSS--Office of Strategic Services--under which it retained three
major functions:
(1) continuation of scholastic and informal intelligence;
(2) black propaganda operations (given _explicit_ authority only in
March, 1943);
(3) subversive operations, in collaboration with regular military
authority.
The OWI was placed under Mr. Elmer Davis, a Rhodes scholar and novelist
who had become one of the nation's most popular radio commentators. The
FIS was perpetuated under the control of Mr. Robert Sherwood, who had a
most extraordinary coterie of odd personalities assisting him: Socialist
refugees, advertising men, psychologists, psychoanalysts (of both the
licensed and lay varieties), professional promoters, theatrical types,
German professors, a commercial attaché, young men just out of college,
oil executives, and popular authors (novelists, slick writers, Pulitzer
winners, pulp writers, humorists, poets and a professional pro-Japanese
writer, fresh off the Imperial Japanese Embassy payroll).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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