2005/08/11 by Steven Casey · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Race, History, and American Society
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2005.00510.x
openalex publication_date 2005/08/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In the spring of 1950, as the joint study group charged with producing a reassessment of U.S. national security policy circulated a draft plan that would dramatically increase defense spending, the problem of how to sell such a lavish program to the American public dominated everyone's thinking. “Cohesion in our democracy is basic to U.S. security,” insisted one consultant, “and the government was going to need assistance in getting public support for the national effort which would be called for.” This would be far from easy, however, for America's democratic process—the very thing that set it apart from its enemies—was also a potential weakness. “I fear that the U.S. public would rapidly tire of such effort,” lamented Edward R. Barrett, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs. “In the absence of real and continuing crises, a dictatorship can unquestionably outlast a democracy in a conventional armament race.”1 How could this problem be overcome? In the large historiography on NSC68 it is often suggested that the Truman administration deliberately devised an excessively simplistic and exaggerated information campaign, employing arguments that were “clearer than truth.” Historians have long argued that from the Truman Doctrine onward, the president and his advisers believed they could best drum up popular support for their Cold War policies by “scaring the hell out of America,” by using overheated rhetoric that locked U.S. policy into an “ideological straightjacket,” perhaps even by engendering a “war scare” to “deceive the nation.”2 With respect to NSC-68, such arguments have been given greater force by two pieces of evidence that are aired in almost every historical account. One is the suggestion made by Barrett in March 1950 that it would be necessary to initiate a “psychological scare campaign.” The other is Dean Acheson's famous claim in his memoirs that “the task of a public officer seeking to explain or gain support for a major policy is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home the point.”3 Emphasizing these two comments, historians have frequently argued that the administration sought to sell NSC-68 “in dramatic, even exaggerated terms,” devising an information campaign that sought to “bludgeon” the minds of both top officials and the mass public.4