PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE AND AMERICAN WORLD LEADERSHIP

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01731R001200020042-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 26, 2003
• Sequence Number: 42
• Content Type: SUMMARY

ILLEGIB
Approved For Rl~rg0~ax~~i~0l1i01
World Leadership
In his San Francisco speech last fall, President Eisenhower declared that"we
must continue to help free people stay free, prevent further conquest by the Communists
that would increase their strength and weaken us, and give to those already enslaved
hope that will enable them to continue resisting the oppressor until his hold can be
gradually weakened and loosened from within."
He defined psychological warfare as "the struggle for the minds and hearts of
men," stated that "in"cold war' we use all means short of war to lead men to believe in
the values that will preserve peace and freedom" and designated the means to be employed
for spreading the truth as "psychological."
How are we thus to win "the minds and hearts of men"? What is it in the lives
and thoughts of the peoples of the world to which we caa address the psychological at-
tack the President thinks so necessary? Can we rely for persuading them upon the
statement of our traditional principles of liberty and 4emocracy and the rights of the
individual? Or are these people thinking in different -terms of other even more primary
and immediate interests which Soviet propaganda so far has much more realistically
and successfully appealed to?
The concerns of the peoples of Asia and Africa and the Middle East, and to a
large extent of Europe and Latin America as well, have been and are with freedom from
war, release from colonial control, reduction of the power of the landlord, more food,
better clothing and shelter, and a more adequate satisfaction of other material wants.
It is these things which now mean something to the world mass. It is to the satisfac-
tion of these desires that our policy and the propaganda which interprets it must be
directed. Unless we recognize this fact, our efforts at persuasion will fail, and
Soviet promises, false as we-know them to be, may succeed.
The result, it must be confessed, is a dilemma which we so far have not re-
solved. We and our principal allies are the 'have" countries and in our recent
history seem to have been principally motivated by the desire to maintain the status
quo. Within our own country there are interests which will bitterly oppose espousal
of a policy toward the "have not" regifnc`,h ich can be calculated to
Approved For Release 2003/07/01 : CIA-RDP80R01731 R001200020042-5
 Approved For Release 2003/07/01 : CIA-RDP80R0l731 R001200020042-5
bring them to our side.
The basic question confronting us, as we seek to implement the psychological
warfare the President has so wisely called on us to wage, is whether or not we have
retained as a nation enough of the revolutionary spirit of our earlier days, enough
courage to meet the requirements of a new time, and enough willingness to forego
present advantages for ultimate ends, to strive for the things the rest of the world
so sorely wants.
We need to formulate and to present to the peoples everywhere a dynamic
call to action which will give real meaning to our worli leadership.
00
Approved For Release 2003/07/01 : CIA-RDP80R0l731 R001200020042-5