America's Message in the Cold War

Abstract

Cold War diplomacy involved more than summit meetings and negotiating sessions alone. Propaganda played an important part as well. In the late 1950s, the United States tried to destabilize Communist regimes in countries behind the Iron Curtain by providing a glimpse of the good life – defined in materialistic terms – that was available in the democratic West. Shifting away from an often-strident propaganda approach that derived from the psychological warfare campaigns of World War II, American policymakers became more committed to the kind of cultural diplomacy that for a time promised to ease the tensions that plagued relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In Parting the Curtain, Walter Hixson, professor of history at the University of Akron and winner of the Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for an earlier book on George Kennan, provides a compelling account of another important dimension of the Cold War.