Ed Murrow's Illusion

“‘The Man Who Invented Truth’: The Tenure of Edward R. Murrow as Director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy Years” by Nicholas J. Cull, in Cold War History (Oct. 2003), London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE, England.

When Edward R. Murrow took the job of director of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1961, he was the most famous broadcast journalist in the country. He’d made his name reporting for CBS Radio from London during World War II, and then, switching to the new medium of television, he’d taken on Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s (when he also interviewed Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities). But even journalistic icons have illusions. Mur­row’s was that he thought truth and power could easily be reconciled.

President John F. Kennedy promised Mur­row access and influence, and Murrow, in turn, publicly promised to portray the United States “warts and all” to the outside world. Neither promise was fully kept, writes Cull, a professor of American studies at the University of Leicester, England.

Established in 1953, the USIA had the mission of promoting U.S. interests abroad by informing foreign publics about U.S. policies and American life—what we would now call public diplomacy. “Murrow’s notion of showing ‘the U.S.—warts and all’ could be seen in the matter of civil rights,” Cull says. But USIA coverage of the protests and confrontations in the South played down the violence and played up the federal protection of the rights of black citizens.

Despite the presidential promise of access, Murrow was “left ‘out of the loop’” on the U.S. decision to sponsor a covert invasion of Cuba in April 1961. And when he did learn of the plan, he didn’t tell his staff. As the disaster unfolded, says Cull, journalists at the Voice of America, USIA’s radio arm, strove for balanced coverage but were “fed misleading material by the State Department and the USIA policy office”—and they resented it.

That summer, the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing was a boon to USIA propagandists. To take full advantage of the development, Murrow urged that U.S. resumption of testing be delayed as long as possible. That proved “his only decisive contribution to Kennedy’s foreign policy-making,” says Cull.

Murrow came to feel “increasingly ill at ease with the Kennedy administration,” writes Cull. He left the government in early 1964 and died the following year. Thirty-four years later, with the Cold War over, USIA was itself interred—absorbed by the State Department. And the age-old conflict between truth and power was no closer to resolution.