The United States Information Agency and Italy During the Johnson Presidency 1963-1969
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The United States Information Agency and Italy during the Johnson Presidency 1963-1969 Sara D’Agati Christ’s College, Cambridge November 2015 This dissertation is submitted to the University of Cambridge for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 CONTENTS Abbreviations INTRODUCTION 1 US Public Diplomacy between the fifties and the sixties. p. 34 Continuity and Change. 2 Lyndon Johnson and the limits of the centre-left formula p. 90 in Italy (1964-1966) 3. Adapting Public Diplomacy to a changing world p. 118 4. Foreign policy activism vs domestic immobilismo: fueling p. 167 Italian international prestige 5. Presenting American policies to the Italians: From selling p. 192 to justifying 6. Explaining Vietnam to the Italians: anti-Americanism, p. 238 Americanization and the power of dissent 7. From Johnson to Nixon: USIA conservative turn p. 279 CONCLUSION Bibliography 2 ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations are used throughout this dissertation CCF: Congress for Cultural Freedom CGIL: Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro CIA: Central Intelligence Agency CISL: Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori DC: Democrazia Cristiana ECA: Economic Cooperation Administration EEC: European Economic Community ENI: Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi ENEL: Ente Nazionale Energia Elettrica ERP: Europan Recovery Program MLF: Multilateral Force NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization NTP: Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty NSC: National Security Council OWI: Office of War Information PCI: Partito Comunista Italiano PSI: Partito Socialista Italiano PSIUP: Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria PSLI: Partito Socialista dei Lavoratori Italiano PWB: Psychological Warfare Branch RAI: Radio Televisione Italiana SIFAR: Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare UIL: Unione Italiana del Lavoro USIA: United States Information Agency USIS: United States Information Service VOA: Voice of America 3 Introduction In the summer of 1954, during a meeting held in Washington among key members of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the official propaganda agency of the American government, the new director of the USIA branch in Rome, Neville E. Nordness, argued that only one country in Europe was worthy of a concentrated effort by the agency. That country was Italy. Ten years later, at the time of the election of President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite the considerable shift of resources from Western Europe to the developing world, the USIA programme in Italy, with an annual operating budget of over $1 million, was still among the largest in the world, second in Europe only to West Germany. 1 This dissertation examines the USIA Italian programme between 1963 and 1969, and places it within the larger context of American policy towards Italy at this crucial juncture in the history of both countries. Created in 1953 by President Dwight Eisenhower, the main goal of the USIA, as stated in its founding charter, was to project a ‘positive image of the United States abroad.’2 The core idea behind the creation of the agency was that, with the heightening of tensions with the Soviet Union, America needed a permanent apparatus to 1 Department of State Memorandum of Conversation, Special Information Project for Italy, 9th July 1954, NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal File, 511.65/7-954, box 2466, p. 1. 2 U.S. Information Agency Strategic Principles, 2nd March 1954, NARA, RG 59, National Security Council Policy and Guidance Staff, Entry 1392, box 1, p. 3. 4 explain its views, culture, politics and society to the post-war world. Dramatically downsized by 1989, and finally shut down in 1999 by the Clinton Administration, the arc of its existence shows the nature of the USIA as a Cold War tool.3 Termed the ‘least of the Great Powers’, Italy hosted the largest Communist Party in the “free world”, the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), for the entire duration of the Cold War. It also saw more than twenty governments and two different political formulations, from centrismo to a centre-left coalition, alternate in the first two decades of the post-war period, signifying an inability to ensure the country’s stability. The government’s inability to ‘keep Italy on track’ and effectively oppose the Communist threat, as well as what was perceived by the US as the country’s endemic instability, led to the deployment of such an extensive USIA program in Italy. Beginning in the 1950s, following the traumatic experience of World War II and the unthinkable implications of nuclear warfare, the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was progressively channelled into non-military means of combat. In addition to the better-known methods of traditional diplomacy, the threat of force and economic aid, the United States 3 On the closure of the USIA see Nicholas Cull, The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency. American Public Diplomacy, 1989-2001 (New York 2012). 5 deployed new instruments to further its foreign policy goals and win the ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ against the Soviet Union.4 These new instruments included overt and covert propaganda operations, international broadcasting, influencing local media abroad, fostering personal contacts and cultural exchanges. Except for covert operations, all these means fall under the category of public diplomacy, and were carried out by the USIA worlwide through the widest network of local posts that any US governmental body has ever had abroad. Public diplomacy was key instrument in waging the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and its origins and evolution will be further analysed in depth. A preliminary definition, however, can be made by identifying public diplomacy as the attempt by an international actor, in this case the American government through the USIA, to establish a dialogue with foreign public opinion designed to inform and more importantly to influence. Supporting a country’s foreign policy goals is, therefore, the raison d’ètre of public diplomacy. The difference with traditional diplomacy, is that instead of relying on government-to- governmnt contacts, public diplomacy seeks to further such foriegn policy goals by engaging directly with the public opinion abroad. In my work, I will deal specifically with USIA efforts to influence Italian public opinion and 4 Kenneth Osgood, ‘Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4:2 (2002) 85-107. 6 thereby the politics and actions of its government, through a wide range of propaganda and cultural activities. 5 Public diplomacy, is a crucial element of another concept developed at the outset of the Cold War, that of political warfare. Defined by US diplomat and containment strategy architect, George Kennan, in 1948 as ‘the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives’, the term political warfare meant the application of diplomatic, economic, cultural, ideological, and covert tools in foreign policy.6 Italy, in particular, proves to be a very interesting case study in political warfare waged by the American government in Western Europe. As Kaeten Mistry shows in detail in his account of Washington’s intervention in the Italian elections of 1948, the event marked the first ‘inauguration’ in the field of this series of techniques, ranging from support for local actors to secret 5 For a definition of public diplomacy see Nicholas J. Cull, Nicholas J. Cull, “‘Public Diplomacy’ Before Gullion: The Evolution of a Phrase”, USC Center on Public Diplomacy; ibid., The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency; Brian C. Etheridge (ed.) The United States and Public Diplomacy. New Directions in Cultural and International History (Leiden, 2010); Jarol B. Manheim, Strategic Public Diplomacy and America Foreign Policy: The Evolution of Influence, (Oxford, 1994); Allen C. Hansen, Public Diplomacy in the Computer Age (New York, 1989); Critchlow James, “Public Diplomacy during the Cold War, The Records and Its Implications”, Journal of Cold War Studies, 5:1 (Winter 2004) pp. 75-89; Leo Bogart, L., Premises for Propaganda: The United States Information Agency's Operating Assumptions in the Cold War (New York, 1976). 6 A document of the Policy Planning Staff entitled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” describes it as ‘the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives’ ranging from ‘such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures and “white” propaganda, to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.’ Policy Planning Staff Memo, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”, April 30, 1948, RG 59, Box 11A, Lot File 64 D 563, NARA. Incorporated in a subsequent version of May 4, 1948, “The Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment”, FRUS, 1945-1950, http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/intel/index.html, Document 269. On the concept of political warfare, see also See William Daugherty and Morris Janowitz, eds., A Psychological Warfare Casebook (Baltimore, 1958); Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–1956 (New York, 1999). 7 funding for rightist organizations, in order to influence a country’s internal politics.7 While there is a rich literature on the role of the United States in influencing the Italian elections in 1948, and several references can be found on various aspects of American political warfare in Italy during the fifties, no scholar has ever carried out an in-depth study on the role of public diplomacy in Western Europe, and more specifically in Italy, during the Johnson administration. 8 Italian historians Luigi Bruti Liberati and Simona Tobia have investigated, respectively, the evolution of propaganda in Italy in the immediate post-war period, and the USIA’s first operations. Alessandro Brogi in his analysis of US overt and covert propaganda efforts to weaken the French 7 Kaeten Mistry, The United States, Italy and the Origins of Cold War: Waging Political Warfare, 1945-1950 (Cambridge, 2014), p.