Empire of Pictures: Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy 9781782388425, 9781782388432, 9781789200577

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Empire of Pictures

Explorations in Culture and International History Series General Editor: Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht

Volume 1 Culture and International History Edited by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher Volume 2 Remaking France Brian Angus McKenzie Volume 3 Anti-Americanism in Latin America and the Caribbean Edited by Allan McPherson Volume 4 Decentering America Edited by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht Volume 5 Practicing Public Diplomacy Yale Richmond Volume 6 Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy Edited by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and Mark C. Donfried Volume 7 Music and International History in the Twentieth Century Edited by Jessica CE Gienow-Hecht Volume 8 Empire of Pictures: Global Media and the 1960s Remaking of American Foreign Policy Sönke Kunkel

Empire of Pictures Global Media and the 1960S Remaking of American Foreign Policy

Sönke Kunkel

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published by

Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2016 Sönke Kunkel All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kunkel, Sönke.   Empire of pictures : global media and the 1960s remaking of American foreign policy / Sönke Kunkel. -- First edition.    pages cm. -- (Explorations in culture and international history ; volume 8)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-842-5 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-843-2 (ebook)   1.  United States—Foreign relations—1961–1963.  2.  United States— Foreign relations—1963-1969.  3.  Pictures—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century.  4.  Mass media—Political aspects— United States—History—20th century.  5.  Globalization—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century.  6.  Imperialism— History—20th century.  I.  Title.   E841.K84 2015  327.73009'046—dc23 2015007894

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78238-842-5 hardback E-ISBN: 978-1-78238-843-2 ebook

To Anke, Love of my life

Contents List of Figures

ix

Preface xi List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction

Why Empires Need Pictures

1

Part I. The Rise of the Visual Age Chapter 1

The Picture State and Its Innovators

17

Chapter 2

Contact Points with Empire and the Globalizing of Media

38

Part II. Picturing Empire Chapter 3

Prosperity: Official Visits to the United States

57

Chapter 4

Progress: Popular Aspirations, the Global South, and the Politics of Imagination

80

Chapter 5

Peace: Space Flights as “Pictorial Acts”

104

Chapter 6

Power: Global Media and the Other History of the Vietnam War 130 Conclusion

From Nixon to Obama, or: The Legacy of the 1960s

165

Endnotes 171 Bibliography 211 Index 251

List

of

Figures

Figure 3.1. A photo opportunity with the Lincoln Memorial in the background: U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk bids farewell to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

62

Figure 3.2. Tanganyikan President Julius Nyerere enjoys the view of New York’s skyline.

71

Figure 4.1. An example of a typical USIA picture booklet circulated in India that visualized the various development projects the United States funded in India.

88

Figure 4.2. A flyer circulated by USIA in Argentina advertising a new housing project financed by the Alliance for Progress.

93

Figure 4.3. An example of how USIS India made use of the national map in window exhibits.

98

Figure 4.4. An example page of a typical Alliance for Progress cartoon.

100

Figure 5.1. Followed by photographers, Gordon Cooper leaves the “Faith 7” capsule after its recovery. 111 Figure 5.2. The Gemini capsule exhibited in Bombay.

116

Figure 5.3. Edward White’s space walk.

119

Figure 5.4. Television image of Armstrong and Aldrin during their telephone call with Nixon.

127

Figure 6.1. Walter Cronkite interviews a commander.

134

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List of Figures

Figure 6.2. A soldier and a helicopter approaching their target area.

137

Figure 6.3. Vietnamese mother and children flee village bombing, © Kyoichi Sawada/Bettmann/Corbis.

143

Figure 6.4. Marine guarding a Viet Cong suspect to the collection point.

148

Figure 6.5. West German protestors carry a banner depicting U.S. aircraft bombing a school and a hospital, © Klaus Lehnarzt/bpk.

154

Preface

“One TV picture is worth ten thousand words,” then former U.S.

Vice President Richard Nixon once observed in 1962, paraphrasing the old proverb that “a picture is worth a thousand words” (which, in turn, he attributed to Khrushchev who had claimed that it was an “‘ancient Russian proverb’”).1 This was more than just a casual remark. Ten years after Nixon had delivered his Checkers speech on television and two years after Kennedy had beaten him in the presidential elections thanks to his better on-screen performance in the televised debates, the proverb reflected a new conviction Nixon had come to form, it was his way of saying that the times had changed and that a new era had begun in American policy making—the age of visual media. This book explores the implications the rise of that new visual age had for American foreign policy. Specifically, it has four goals: first, to explain how and why picture making became a core concern for American policy makers; second, to show how the globalizing of visual media changed foreign relationships toward American empire; third, to understand how pictures contributed to consolidating America’s imperial order; and fourth, to offer a fresh and novel narrative of U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s. It is a book with pictures, but mainly it is one about pictures: about the ways American administrations staged, made, and utilized them; about the modes in which they circulated around the world; and about the political emotions they aroused or were intended to arouse. This way, the book also wants to sharpen our understanding of the global picture battles that American empire is engaged in today. Writing and researching this book has been a joyful time, yet it has also required the help of many, and I have looked forward for a long time to acknowledging their support. Thanks are due, first of all, to those institutions that generously funded my research, among

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them the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., Jacobs University Bremen, the Oslo Contemporary International History Network, and the Fulbright commission. Without their grants, this project would not have been feasible, and I appreciate their support. The course of my research brought me to different archives in the United States, Argentina, Germany, Netherlands, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom where archivists spared no effort to help me track down documents, newspapers, magazines, films, or television features. I thank the staff of all those archives and libraries listed in the bibliography; without their work, this book would have been impossible. At all stages of this project, numerous conversations and discussions with friends, colleagues, and historians whose work I admire helped me to sharpen my arguments. At Harvard, Charles Maier, Akira Iriye, and Erez Manela set aside much of their precious time to discuss my ideas and provided crucial advice, while the research seminars and lectures of Lisa McGirr, Sugata Bose, and Stephen Greenblatt widened my horizons. At Oxford, Gareth Davies made me rethink and refine some of the core assumptions of my argument, and so did the graduate workshop in American history at Rothermere American Institute. And that I went into the field of international and global history in the first place had much to do with the way Robert McMahon, Peter Hahn, and Carole Fink taught it at Ohio State University—so I thank all of them. In Germany, frequent exchanges with Thorsten Schulz-Walden, Michael Lenz, Clemens Häusler, Urs Buettner, Kathrin Reinert, Christoph Meyer, Ruth Jachertz, Boris Niklas-Tölle, Esther Möller, Stefan Hübner, Torsten Weber, Maria Framke, Lisa Heindl, Tilman Pietz, Olaf Stieglitz, Ellie Engel, Norbert Finzsch, and Simone Derix enriched my work as a historian and often helped me to clarify issues I was grappling with. Special thanks go to Jessica Gienow-Hecht, not only for including this work in her series but also for providing perceptive commentary at critical stages of my work, to Jost Dülffer, a sharp mind and great thinker whose unique grasp of history I have always admired, to Corinna Unger, a fountain of ideas and fellow cineaste at Jacobs University, and, above all, to Marc Frey, a friend and inspiring scholar whose enthusiasm and acumen has carried me through the project and my early academic career. I am also grateful to those who invited me to present my ideas at their conferences and colloquia, including Bernd Greiner and Tim

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xiii

Müller, the organizers of the Conference series on the Cold War at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Barbara Potthast and Michael Zeuske at the University of Cologne, and Philip Gassert (then at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.). In addition, I would also like to thank the audiences of SHAFR’s 2009 annual conference, of the contemporary history workshop at the University of Cambridge, and of the colloquia of Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Jost Dülffer, and the Intercultural Humanities colloquium at Jacobs University Bremen who often prompted critical reflection on various issues. This work has also greatly benefitted from the intense—and truly exceptional—days of discussion that the annual meetings of the Oslo Contemporary International History Network facilitated between 2010 and 2012, and I appreciate all that Hanne Hagtvedt Vik and Hilde Henriksen Waage have done to set up and organize the network. Once I finally got to write the manuscript, I was lucky enough to get perceptive suggestions from various sides. Harold James, Gareth Davies, Patricia Clavin, Helge Pharo, Øystein Rolandsen, Carl Emil Vogt, Robin Allers, Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Volker Barth, Espen Storli, and Hilde Katrine Haug all have read parts of the manuscript, and I am grateful for their thoughtful comments. I would especially like to thank those who took the time to read the complete manuscript, including Marc Frey, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Corinna Unger, Clemens Häusler, Michael Lenz, and the two anonymous reviewers at Berghahn Books who all helped me to improve and strengthen it in countless ways. Finally, thanks are also due to Johanna Wallner as well as to Adam Capitanio, Molly Mosher, and Jessica Murphy at Berghahn Books who guided the manuscript through its final stages. Still, all errors and follies left are of course of my own making. Beyond academia, I would like to thank all those whose extraordinary hospitality I enjoyed during my research trips. In Buenos Aires, Pablo Ben introduced me to Argentinean food, films, and culture— and helped me to understand how the bus system works (an art in itself).In Dar es Salaam, Sebastian Gromig and Jenny Helbig opened their home to me and introduced me to Tanzanian cuisine, including ugali dishes and a memorable prawn masala. And whenever I came to Boston and Washington, D.C., I could be assured that Murray Wheeler Jr., Bob Bagnall, Alex Tang, and Xiaonan Cao would welcome me with the greatest warmth and kindness, and I am grateful to all of them. I also thank those who provided support and encouragement before and during the research project: Rainer Dohse, Bodo Buhrmann, Jürgen Savcenko, Stefan Mohr, Mike and Jane Knowles,

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the Ruck and the Hugo families, Animisha and Bertram Stöbe, and Philip, Sophie, Heike, and Horst Gross. Last, to my family: my siblings, Annegret, Krischan, and Sylla, offered encouragement throughout the project, my parents, Wolfgang and Brigitte, kept up morale with care packages from their garden, and my children, Effi and Lion, were thrilled to discover after a few months that Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation also applies to history books; which reminded me of the important things in life. My wife Anke has shared all ups (research trips) and downs of this project (research trips). She is a wonderful companion, sharp-eyed critic, and, perhaps, one of the most patient persons in the world who has waited for a long time to see this book get finished. And so here it finally is for her.

List

of

Abbreviations

AID

Agency for International Development

AP

Associated Press

ARA

Acción Revolucionaria Anticomunista

CPI

U.S. Committee on Public Information

INTELSAT  International Satellite Corporation JUSPAO

Joint Public Affairs Office

MACV

U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam

NDC

National Development Corporation

NLF

National Liberation Front

NSC

National Security Council

OSS

Office of Strategic Services

OWI

Office of War Information

TANU

Tanzania African National Union

TVA

Tennessee Valley Authority

UN

United Nations

xvi

List of Abbreviations

USIA

United States Information Agency

USIS

United States Information Service

Introduction

Why Empires Need Pictures

On 23 March 1964, the diplomatic corps of Washington, D.C. gath-

ered for a reception in the Benjamin Franklin room of the department of state. Those receptions were always important events, the department served good food and chilled drinks, and they usually involved stirring speeches: enough reasons to go. This reception, however, was different. There was only one short introductory speech by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and no ringing declaration. Instead, Rusk unveiled a model replica of two huge towers that looked like stretched shoe boxes. These towers, he explained, were going to be built in New York, they would be the largest buildings in the world, and their name would be: World Trade Center.1 The reception kicked off a series of activities through which the Johnson administration and World Trade Center representatives sought to advertise what its architect Minoru Yamasaki called the “first building of the twenty-first century.”2 Immediately after the reception, representatives of the center drove around in Washington and handed out literature and information materials to embassies. Colleagues flew to Western Europe where they introduced the center to the governments of West Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, the Scandinavian and the Benelux countries, and explored their willingness to reserve office space in the buildings.3 Administration officials, meanwhile, showcased them abroad in their own ways. In West Germany, officials of the United States Information Service (USIS) staged an exhibit about the “Great Society,” which included photos and a model replica of the World Trade Center. The exhibit traveled through West Germany and was also shown in the halls of the West German federal parliament.4 In India, the USIS flagship publication, Span, carried a photograph of the center’s model, describing the

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Empire of Pictures

twin towers as “the world’s tallest structures, topping majestic Empire State Building by thirty metres.”5 Long before it was completed and ever since it was officially opened in April 1973, the World Trade Center became a towering icon of America’s economic power and a symbol of its claim to world leadership. The World Trade Center, however, also represented something else: the inherently symbolic nature of American empire itself and the degree to which it was built on pictures. Neither the models nor the finished towers, after all, were simply architectural structures standing in miniature in a random state department room or for real on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Both were strategically represented abroad and multiplied in endless visual images by tourists, news media, or filmmakers.6 Cinema heroes either saved or destroyed it, King Kong climbed on top of it, aliens destroyed it, and later Homer Simpson took its elevators. This way, images of the World Trade Center became part of an intensifying globalization of pictures, which made them circulate around the world and turned “seeing America” into a global experience. Indeed, in the same moment in which Dean Rusk was speaking to the house guests on 23 March 1964, American communications satellites sped around the world and beamed images across oceans, television sets spread globally in rapid pace, and transnational flows of images connected societies to each other in new ways. Rusk’s contemporaries perceived those changes as the time of a revolution in global technology and mass communications or as the end of the “Gutenberg galaxy”7 and the beginning of an “electronic culture of the global village.”8 Or they spoke, like Austrian philosopher Günther Anders, of a “global flood of pictures” and the age of global “icono-mania.”9 In this work, I explore how the “global flood of pictures” changed foreign encounters of American empire and explain why the rise of the visual age also transformed American foreign policy. Indeed, as I show, American policy makers began to rely on picture making on such a scale through “photo opportunities,” films, exhibits, and the staging of television events that one could speak of an emergent icono-mania in American foreign policy itself.10 Often, the making of pictures now became as important for American policymakers as the actual policies themselves: foreign policy transformed into a policy of the picture, by the picture, and for the picture, and with it, American empire, too, transformed—into an “empire of pictures,” which it has continued to be to this day.11 Examining the rise of America’s empire of pictures, this book draws widely from what is now often called “visual history,”12 and,



Why Empires Need Pictures

3

accordingly, it takes the history of pictures serious as a historical problem in its own right.13 In recent years, scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the important role that pictures have played in history, and calls for an “iconic turn,”14 a “pictorial turn,”15 and a “visual turn”16 have left their marks in the historical profession. Today, “visual history” is a burgeoning field whose scholars examine how pictures were produced, what they contained, how they were disseminated, or how spectators interacted with them. Visual historians emphasize that no picture emerges naturally, but is always an artificial product that is being produced with specific agendas, intentions, and expectations in mind that historians have to probe and examine. It is one of their premises that, as visual culture theorist Tom Holert has underlined, “visibility is not given, but man made,” that optics are a “politics of positioning,” that images are tools of power strategies by which those who produce them seek to draw others into their ways of seeing.17 This book has been written in the spirit of “visual history,” and accordingly it explores similar questions: how did American administrations come to terms with pictures? How did they make, disseminate, and utilize pictures? What did they expect from them? Which representational strategies did they pursue in pictures? How did commercial visual media play along? Did they print and broadcast the kinds of pictures policy makers hoped for, or did they use different ones? Which emotional-aesthetic experiences of empire did those pictures create? How did observers respond to them?18 At the same time, the book also addresses a broader issue, namely, the question of how empires consolidate their global rule. As historian Michael Hochgeschwender writes, one can speak of an (informal) empire once a state is “able to create and conserve a hierarchic inter-state order.”19 Such an order is always in a precarious balance and depends on mechanisms of symbolic integration through which it assures the acknowledgment of hierarchies on a mass scale.20 Pictures, I argue, became a key resource to achieve that aim in the 1960s, because they created sensory experiences of American superiority and thereby strengthened global recognition of and for American leadership. To understand how that process of imperial integration worked, it is necessary to explore briefly the somewhat broader question of how political orders conserve their existence. In what follows, I therefore outline what I understand to be the crucial axioms of political order, relate those to American empire, and explain why pictures became so important for consolidating it.

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Imperial Order Reconsidered In line with a growing body of scholarship that brands itself as a “new cultural-political history,”21 this book rests on the general assumption that political order is not something that is simply given via constitutions, institutions, or laws—who ever reads the constitution, after all?—but is constantly being reactualized in symbols, rituals, signs, and aesthetic practices that allow its subjects both the sensory experience of order and lead to its recognition (which then is the process of integration). Particularly medieval and early modern historians have illuminated how rituals and other symbolic practices were vital means for recreating and stabilizing political orders. As their research shows, political interactions usually followed symbolic codes and protocols that were meticulously planned in order to make power relationships visible.22 Likewise, other cultural-political historians have argued that politics is at its core an “ensemble of symbolic practices”23 and have extended this argument also to the arena of the nation-state. Accordingly, they do not consider the nation-state as “naturally given” but as a “network of apparatuses and daily practices”24 that produces the “national” citizen and makes the state recognizable as the best possible model of political organization. What increasingly emerges from these discussions is a general recognition that no political order of any kind—regardless whether it is a democracy, a monarchy, or a military dictatorship—is viable without a symbolic repertoire that sensualizes the whole and its parts and makes it visible to its subjects. Any political order, as historians and anthropologists emphasize, therefore makes its presence felt through parades and monuments or through mass rituals like inaugurations and elections. Those offer aesthetic and emotional participation, but also compress the larger political context into a concrete sensory event that lets order appear paradigmatically and creates awareness for its reach and its presence.25 The mobilization of collective emotions through grand spectacles, in turn, is a fundamental prerequisite for the generation of four other key resources of political integration: trust, identification, loyalty, and the willingness to comply with “the order” political subjects are part of. All of those ingredients are the product of specific emotional experiences of order, and virtually no political order can thrive without any of them. Only if political subjects have trust in a specific political order, that is, if they rely on and believe in the worth of promises and actions taken by that order, will they not subvert it.



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5

Where they identify with it, they will likely actively support it.26 The degree to which an order can build trust and identification, in turn, also shapes the degree of affirmative loyalty subjects exert toward it. On the other hand, orders can also thrive without trust, identification, and loyalty as long as they succeed to shape a general willingness to comply with it.27 But that willingness, too, depends on the creation of emotional experiences. In addition, orders rest on two further pillars: visibility and imagination. Only if people see the nation-state (as one example of a political order) and its power resources can they recognize it as a form of political organization that they reckon with. As Norbert Elias has observed on early modern orders: “The people do not believe in a power which may exist, but does not become visible with the appearance of the ruler. They have to see the power in order to believe in it.”28 Visibility thus is a fundamental constituent of any order. Only that which is visible can be recognized as part of an order. Put differently this means: political order can be interpreted as a hierarchic ensemble of visibility constellations, and the creation and consolidation of political order is therefore vitally dependent on the stabilization of visibility constellations.29 On the other hand, nobody can ever see the whole political order, and here imagination becomes important. As Benedict Anderson has famously pointed out on the history of nationalism, the nation is always an “imagined political community,” because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion” (Hegel’s version of this was that the state was one existing “in the thoughts” of its people).30 Imagination, thus, is the constructive force that allows a member of a political order to form a notion of the broader systemic context of which he or she is a part. Political order, then, not only rests on military and economic “hard power” or on “soft power”31 but also on something one could term “symbolic power,” by which I mean the degree of recognition a political order generates for and of itself. Recognition is the integrative core of any order. It emerges from the interplay of visibility, imagination, and the activation of emotions, and is reflected in identification and loyalty. Recognition is never simply given. It has to be constantly reactualized through practices of symbolic integration that keep recognition high—this is why stable systems as well still have their spectacles, emotional events, and rituals of selfcelebration. The dissolution of order, in turn, is always the product

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of a system’s specific symbolic failure to do so, namely, to generate as much visibility, imagination, loyalty, trust, and compliance as would be necessary to maintain its recognition. Recognition is always a precarious problem in times of change: when new orders emerge, when orders are not yet fully established (i.e., not fully recognized), or when they face a crisis of recognition. But it is all the more critical for another class of political orders— empires. Like any other political order, empires are not merely given macrostructures that rule simply by virtue of their military, economic, or institutional power. They, too, are dependent on symbolic integration.32 To stabilize their hierarchic order, empires have to create their own symbolic mechanisms through which they make their presence and capacities visible, create sensory experiences of their superiority, and thereby make those they rule imagine that they have a powerful reach. Moreover, to reduce the costs of their rule, empires have to activate enthusiasm for their rule, extend their appeal, and develop forms of aesthetic-sensory involvement that create identification and loyalty among those that live within their sphere of influence. Those findings, to be sure, apply to every empire since ancient times. Already the Roman Empire, for instance, paid comprehensive attention to imperial representation, which included architecture, coins, entertainment, monuments, statues, and also pictures. Much of the same can be said about nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial empires.33 Still, what set America’s postwar empire apart in the history of empires were two distinct features: For one, it was an informal empire, not a formal one, a condition that limited the representational options it could make use of. Unlike colonial empires, for example, it could not erect monuments or statues or stage annual imperial parades in the areas it ruled. However, what compensated for those limitations, were the completely new representational and integrational possibilities that American empire gained from the 1950s and 1960s onward thanks to the rise of visual media whose global advance contributed to an important delimitation of imperial visibility. Where before the act of seeing empire (that is, representations of it) had typically been confined to concrete spatial locales—after all, one can only experience the aesthetics of a monument if one stands in front of it—the mass circulation of pictures now led to a delocalization as far as seeing empire was concerned. Thanks to the pictures visual media printed and broadcast, observers could now see American empire without having to travel to specific representational



Why Empires Need Pictures

7

places (which, in turn, then also opened up new opportunities to use domestic monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial as a symbol for empire, see chapter 3). Moreover, the spread of visual media entailed that representations of empire now also began to conquer private spaces and private homes whereas before they were mostly limited to public places (with the notable exceptions of coins, of course).34 American empire, in other words, gained a degree of mediated visibility no other empire had before (and those that could have gained a similar visibility, namely, the Soviet, French, and the British empires, either failed to fully grasp those changes or they toppled at the time visual media spread around the world).35 And this also had an important consequence for the way American empire could build recognition for its rule: because of the evidence effects that pictures have—that they seem to show what really happened or exists— pictures instantly create recognition for that which is immediately represented, say, American missiles, and thereby they also create recognition for the political order that such symbols represent. This means, in turn, that a large degree of mediated visibility also assures recognition on a broad scale.36 American policy makers, as this book shows, intuitively understood those changes, and they were quick to seize upon the great possibilities visual media offered them. By making pictures, they understood, they could build visibility and emotional involvement, identification, trust, and loyalty abroad; they could define foreign notions about American empire; and they could affect the willingness of foreigners to go along with American leadership. In the end, they recognized, it were pictures that could make American empire persist, and so they set to work to fabricate them.

Writing the Global Cultural History of American Empire: Media, Pictures, and Emotions By examining the role picture making played in the process of American empire’s symbolic integration, this book seeks to bring up new questions and to map out new approaches for historians of American foreign policy that look beyond the classic military or economic dimensions of imperial rule. This is of course not to discount the importance of those dimensions. No empire, after all, can exist without real military power and economic strength; both are fundamental to imperial rule: economic strength allows an empire to cover the costs of its rule, and military power is essential to get

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Empire of Pictures

and consolidate control of areas and to enforce power interests. Yet, to build acknowledgment for their hard power, empires at the same time depend heavily on symbolic and mediating representations of that really existing power, for on the whole relatively few people ever experience it directly: normally, populations only come into contact with it by way of symbolic representations such as pictures that then create their own realities. Hard power, then, depends as much on symbolic power as vice versa—and it is the purpose of this book to sharpen our understanding of those interrelationships. At the same time, this book also understands itself as a contribution to a number of new research fields, including emotional and media history. Emotional history has turned into one of the most vibrant and fascinating fields of historiography in recent years, and numerous research interests and approaches exist side-by-side now. While nobody is able to define precisely what an emotion is—a side effect of the numerous ramifications into which emotional research has branched out—there is more or less general agreement that an emotion involves a bodily sensation, a cognitive impulse, and a sociocultural context.37 Also, scholars agree that emotions encompass such different feelings as fear, empathy, love, hate, disgust, anger, solidarity, pride, trust, compassion, joy, bliss, surprise, or sadness.38 Emotions, as historians emphasize, have their history, and accordingly the way they were expressed, experienced, and regulated were distinct from place to place and time to time.39 Like emotional history, media history, too, is a booming field in the United States and Germany. Media historians examine media cultures, media discourses, the broad sweep of media reconfigurations throughout the twentieth century, the role of media in the Cold War, and trace the volatile relationships between media and politics.40 They also debate concepts such as the public sphere or engage with postmodern media theorists or literary critics.41 Increasingly, media historians also look beyond national horizons where they investigate “transnational media events,”42 the mechanics of “transnational public spheres,”43 the rise of “global TV”44 or look at transfers of media practices, techniques, and values.45 In this context, this book puts forward another perspective on media, one that integrates the intimate relationships between media, pictures, and emotions—and this is the idea of mass media as “mobilizing machines.” The concept is based on a simple three-fold proposition: media want to mobilize emotions, media do mobilize emotions, and media are used because they mobilize emotions (as a philosophical speculation, one could also add: most media exist



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because they mobilize emotions, but pondering this question would require another book). As providers of emotional and “aesthetic experiences,”46 all mass media, except for radio, rely on pictures. With good reasons, of course: as art historians and visual studies specialists emphasize, pictures are not merely simple reproductions of reality but active generators of feelings, and as such have their own actor capabilities.47 Containing vitality, energy, and a mobilizing “aggressiveness”48 of their own, they activate emotions in different ways. People, human faces, and specific situations, for example, often generate empathy among beholders. Likewise, their special “sensual immediacy”49 automatically creates emotional involvement, so do their special aesthetic qualities like perspective, spatiality, light, color, or the arrangement of objects, which draw beholders into the picture and make them eyewitnesses of the situations depicted. Pictures also activate spectators through the productive openness and creative challenge they pose. Because they only show selective parts of a situation, they constantly put beholders under pressure to supplement missing objects outside of the frame, to add smells and sounds, to bring objects depicted to life, and to put what they see into a larger context.50 Viewers thus have to perform an “imaginary transfer,”51 and such a transfer always involves the mobilization of feelings. It is important to note, however, that different visual media of course provide different forms of emotional experiences. The distinct emotional effect of exhibits, for example, rests on the interplays they create between rational engagements with the exhibits on display and the bodily sensations that spectators have of them. At the same time, they offer an emotional experience that has a spatial component insofar as spectators move through aesthetic environments that create several sensory sensations. Thereby, they also open a shared social space of emotional expression. Like exhibits, newspapers and picture magazines, too, offer an aesthetic experience marked by the interplay of rational engagement with a news item and a bodily feeling about it, though with the difference that this act does not take place in a shared aesthetic space. Film and television, in contrast, leave little space for rational engagements and constantly activate the senses and bodily feelings through cuts, camera movements, action, and so forth, an effect that can be explained by the evolutionary constant that movement always draws the attention of humans (which explains why both film and television sometimes can have hypnotic effects).52

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In the 1960s, as this book shows, U.S. policy makers actively sought to employ and capitalize on those different types of emotional and sensory experience to build enthusiasm for their policies, and it is precisely by exploring those efforts that this book hopes to open up fresh perspectives for a history of American empire that looks beyond decision-making processes.53 In this sense, the book is also part of a change of perspective toward a sensory history of American empire. Sensory history, as Andrew Rotter has explained, takes it as a premise “that all human relationships, including imperial ones, are shaped by all five senses; how we understand others, even more how we feel about them, emotionally, and thus how we act toward them, have a good deal to do with how we apprehend them through every sense.” By taking an interest “in life on empire’s quotidian ground,” sensory history would thus help historians to “understand how empire functioned, or did not.”54 In this work, I follow Rotter’s implicit call to rethink how empire functioned by examining it through a cultural-historical lens—though with a focus on one sense in particular: seeing.55 By doing so, this work at the same time seeks to contribute further to globalizing the way we write and think about American empire. This is a task that is especially pressing when it comes to reflecting the relationships between global media and American foreign policy. Most of the histories that examine those relationships still dwell on the domestic context, that is, they look at the interplay between domestic American media and foreign policy making.56 There are only few works that actually go beyond that context and look at foreign media responses and discourses as well. In contrast, this work tries to put the media history of American empire into global perspective by examining foreign encounters of American empire in Argentina, India, Tanzania, and West Germany.57 The choice of those countries, I should note here, is completely arbitrary—of course I could have chosen different countries as well— yet it is not without reason; it builds on the methodological premises that, first, a global history also requires a global approach and, second, that one can only make sound analytical judgments about the globalizing of media, pictures, and of American recognition-building if one covers at least some different continents and cultural contexts (however, it should be noted that I see those four countries not as stand-ins for cultural contexts at large, i.e., for instance Tanzania as reflecting East Africa generally, but am aware that Tanzanian encounters of the United States differed as much from Kenyan ones as West German encounters differed from French ones and so forth). What I



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am interested in here, then, is less a global comparison of different national encounters with the United States like the “West Germans and America” vs. “Argentineans and America,” etc. Rather, I am interested in understanding the emergence of global interconnectedness itself—and how it changed American empire building. Accordingly, the narrative is not organized along national lines, though sometimes it shifts to national comparisons where it seems appropriate. Most times, the book utilizes a mobile narrative perspective that often switches back and forth from one actor to another, from the White House to an Argentinean artist, from the local level to the global, and thereby makes the movement between scales a deliberate analytic technique to gain insights about the scope and texture, dynamics, and ruptures of symbolic integration.58 In the spirit of a “selective interest,”59 the book is organized in three parts. Part one maps the various layers of the U.S. “picture state” and shows how U.S. policy makers professionalized their picture making over the course of the 1960s, a process that turned picture performances into a key technique of governance. Focusing on West Germany, Argentina, India, and Tanzania, part one also describes how United States Information Agency (USIA) tried to establish contact possibilities with America abroad and traces the global advance of television as well as the growing popularity of illustrated weeklies around the world during the 1960s, all of which established the primacy of pictures in media landscapes around the world. Part two zooms in on four early examples of America’s foreign policy of pictures: official visits, American development policies, space flights, and the Vietnam War. It shows how in all four instances American administrations began to make and use pictures on a large scale to mobilize foreign emotions, and it explains that thanks to the new mass availability of pictures foreign observers became emotionally involved in American policies like never before. At the same time, part two also puts forward a more general argument, namely, that empires typically fashion themselves as providers of four broad benefits: of prosperity, progress, peace, and power. This way, they not only construct hierarchical relationships between themselves and those they rule (namely, insofar as each promise of a benefit suggests that an empire has what others lack and that it can establish what others cannot). They also associate themselves with the core expectations that people typically have toward political orders, namely, that they will bring prosperity for all,60 that they will accelerate the process that leads to prosperity—progress, that they will guarantee a state of untroubled, safe living—peace, and

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that they will build up and use their power to assure that state of living and to fight off enemies. Against this background, part two shows that American empire, too, showcased itself as a provider of those benefits in order to build broad recognition and acceptance for its rule. Chapter 3 shows how official visits were used deliberately as opportunities to shape specific impressions of America and to stage the United States as a “reference society” (Reinhard Bendix) that embodied the kind of prosperity visitors and the societies they represented wanted for themselves too. The chapter is the first thorough study to examine the history of official visits to the United States. Likewise, chapter 4 offers a new perspective on U.S. development policies in the 1960s and examines how programs like the Alliance for Progress were staged through films, exhibits, and cartoons. As the chapter argues, visual representations were part of an American politics of imagination: by showcasing U.S. development policies through pictures, USIS officials sought to identify American policies with collective aspirations for improving living standards. At the same time, such pictures were also intended to demonstrate how American empire responded to those aspirations. This way, they thus formulated visually American empire’s promise of progress. Chapter 5 tells the global media story of American space flights. It explores how space flights became global picture-making events and shows how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to create—and tap into—foreign spaceflight enthusiasm through organizing global tours of the space capsules, film showings, or travelling exhibits. The chapter also describes how American administrations utilized space flights to stage America’s peace promise. Chapter 6, the longest chapter, investigates the global media history of the Vietnam War. Arguing that the war was rather a “picture war” than merely a “television war,” the chapter reconstructs how U.S. policy makers sought to draw foreign media into their way of representing the war, shows how those efforts failed abroad, and explores the emotional impact pictures had on antiwar activists. It also explains the war’s central paradox, namely, that it was successful in demonstrating American power although the United States, in the general perception, did not ‘win’ it. Part three, finally, wraps up some broader findings of the book and explains why, on the technical level of picture making, the Obama administration has more in common with the Nixon administration than one would think at first glance.



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This book, then, sheds light on multiple issues and tells different stories. But above all, it is a history of pictures: a book that treats pictures not as a derivative of other historical problems, but understands them as historical actors in their own right, a history that wants to sharpen our awareness for the mechanisms by which American empire generated and employed pictures for its own purposes. This way, it also hopes to contribute to a more thorough understanding of America’s empire of pictures today.

Part I

THE RISE OF THE VISUAL AGE

Chapter 1

The Picture State and Its Innovators Isn’t that a hell of a thing that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles? —Richard Nixon

In the beginning was Nixon. A rising star among Republicans in the

early 1950s, young face, aggressive attack dog, Nixon was nominated as Eisenhower’s vice-presidential candidate in 1952. The campaign went well, but then charges surfaced that Nixon had set up an illegal campaign fund. Calls for his resignation began to rise. On 23 September 1952 Nixon went live on television to defend himself. 1 “I come before you tonight,” he began, “as a candidate for the vice presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity have been questioned.” Tonight, he promised, he was going to give the audience a “complete financial history: everything I have earned, everything I have spent, everything I owe.” Seated behind a desk, Nixon spoke without notes for half an hour, read out financial numbers, told stories, pointed to his wife Pat who sat next to him, stood up, and moved to the camera. He delivered a dramatic, engaging performance in which he narrated his personal autobiography: how he, Nixon, had grown up in “modest circumstances” and had worked his way through college; how he had fought in the war; that his wife was born on St. Patrick’s Day; that they did not own much but had “the satisfaction that every dime we’ve got is honestly ours;” how Pat could not afford a “mink coat” but wore a “respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything;” and how they had gotten this dog, Checkers:

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A man in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he sent all the way from Texas. Black-and-white-spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the six-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know the kids love that dog, and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re going to keep it.

Every part had its special gesture and camera angle: Nixon’s personal story—the camera showed him in close-up; his financial accounting— he lifted his papers into the air, as if to underline the accuracy of his statements; the story of the decent family man—the camera turned shortly to Pat. Toward the end of the speech, Nixon rose from his chair and walked toward the camera, going over into attack mode against Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, the Truman administration, the Communists in Washington, closing with saying: “And remember folks, Eisenhower is a great man, believe me. He’s a great man. And a vote for Eisenhower is a vote for what’s good for America.”2 Democrats called Nixon’s “Checkers speech” a “cheap attempt to exploit decent human motives,”3 but it had a broader significance. The Checkers speech marked the birth of a new American politician—the “picture politician”: a politician who deliberately launched himself into picture situations, who utilized visual media to create emotional connections with voters, and who brought the acting skills along to make his performances in front of cameras appear authentic, convincing, and touching. The picture politician was part of an emerging American “picture state” where visual communication—the making, staging, and dissemination of pictures—became progressively more important for policy makers with the rise of visual media.4 In this process, as this chapter shows, picture making transformed from a nuisance that distracted from the “real” policy making into a key function of policy making itself. Political acts now increasingly came to be built around picture making or were even initiated and staged to produce pictures in the first place. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, picture concerns therefore began to attain a new absolute centrality in U.S. policy making—more and more, the “state” began to govern through pictures. For Americans, meanwhile, those changes entailed that they increasingly encountered the state and those who represented it through pictures—and thereby experienced the political order they were part of as an order of pictures.5



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In this chapter, I disentangle the various layers of the emerging American picture state and trace the learning processes through which American administrations generally came to terms with pictures. Accordingly, the first part of the chapter—“picture makers”— briefly looks at the historical origins of the U.S. picture state and shows how the rise of television elevated picture making into a key concern for policy makers since the 1950s. Part 2 explains how visual advisors professionalized picture making, and part 3 looks at those actors who had to create pictorial situations in the first place—the presidents. Finally, part 4 explores presidential trips abroad as a special form of presidential picture performances and thereby illustrates how much “icono-mania” began to dominate U.S. administrations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Picture Makers America’s picture state did of course not evolve out of the blue in the 1950s and 1960s, but was rooted in a longer history of governmental picture making that, on principle, reached back to the beginning of the American republic. In its early years, especially presidential portraits were an important medium of governmental picture making, and from the 1830s onward, presidents also used pictures more and more in their reelection campaigns.6 As soon as 1841 William H Harrison sat down for the first photograph ever made of a U.S. president, so did William Polk and his cabinet in 1846. With the introduction of the new glass plate technology in the late 1850s—which made reproductions possible—posing for photographs became a regular duty for U.S. policy makers. On average, Abraham Lincoln sat down for a photo-taking session at least every two months. In the 1890s, further improvements such as the development of roll film facilitated picture making, and as a result, presidential appearances were photographed more often. However, photographs only began to enter print media on a broader scale since the 1910s—the New York Times did not even publish photographs at all before 1922. At the turn of the century, U.S. policy makers also embraced the new medium of film. Already a few months after the Lumière brothers had introduced cinematography in 1895, presidential candidate William McKinley was captured on film while campaigning. In 1897, McKinley’s inauguration was the first to be filmed. Cabinet members, too, appeared in short clips done by private film companies, and when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, some of

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his major activities were already documented on film regularly, including his visit to the St. Louis Exposition and his trip to Panama in 1906. However, because cinema was not yet a mass medium, few Americans actually watched those films. Perhaps the most important forerunner of the picture state was the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), which was created at the end of World War I. Charged with selling America’s participation in World War I to the American public, the so-called Creel committee (named after its chairman George Creel) represented the first massive governmental effort to produce pictures on a broad scale. This was well reflected in its organizational setup: in addition to a Division of Cartoons, which developed cartoons and placed them in U.S. newspapers and magazines, it had a Division of Pictorial Publicity— responsible for developing illustrations, leaflets, and posters—as well as a Division of Films, which produced its own “documentaries.” One of those films, titled Pershing’s Crusaders, became a huge box office success within the United States. Even though the Creel committee was dissolved soon after the war, its institutional experiences became an important reference point for future administrations. Seeing the introduction of weekly newsreels such as Hearst Metrotone News or Fox Movietone News, the 1920s and 1930s further paved the way toward a state of pictures. In those decades, weekly newsreels became a popular source of information for Americans, especially with the beginning of sound film. Another milestone development was the emergence of photo journalism since the late 1920s, which was boosted by the invention of a new handy camera called “Leica.” The new camera gave photographers complete flexibility as they did not have to carry massive equipment around with them anymore to make professional photographs. Realizing photography’s new potentials, Henry Luce launched Life in 1936, a weekly magazine that was almost completely devoted to pictures. Other picture magazines such as Look soon followed, heralding what is often called the golden era of photo journalism. Together, newsreels and photo magazines thus created a new institutionalized demand for pictures, the effect of which was that photographers and camera operators now began to cover political events more intense than before. For U.S. policy makers, in turn, this meant that their public appearances often translated into pictures (even though they did not yet plan and stage them to make pictures in the first place). It also entailed that they now began to worry more about the photographs that their appearances would generate. Within the Franklin D Roosevelt administration, for instance, Press



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Secretary Stephen Early directed that candid photographs of FDR or of his withered legs would be strictly forbidden.7 In addition, the Roosevelt administration also produced its own pictures. A famous example here was the New Deal photography program of the Farm Security Administration, which documented the hardships of rural farm life and showed how the New Deal alleviated rural poverty. Once the United States entered World War II in late 1941, picture making began to move further to the center of attention within the Roosevelt administration. Building on the experiences of the CPI, the Roosevelt administration established an Office of War Information (OWI) and further professionalized its picture making, especially in the field of movie making: in contrast to the CPI’s documentaries, movies were now often shot not by the military itself but by professional Hollywood directors, including director Frank Capra, the winner of several Academy Awards, and director John Ford. Capra produced a series of short instructional movies for the U.S. army titled Why We Fight. Ford, in turn, put together his own team of camera crews, play writers, and cutters, which he associated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1941. His documentary film The Battle of Midway became a huge success in the United States, partly because Ford had been able to film parts of the actual battle. It was also during the war that the Roosevelt administration began to stage photo opportunities more proactively. For example, all high-level war conferences of the Allies included at least one photo session. One of the pictures that emerged from such a photo opportunity was the famous picture taken of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Yalta in early 1945.8 Long before the 1950s and 1960s, then, U.S. administrations already utilized pictures in different ways, but, still, the United States was not yet a picture state. To the contrary: the picture making efforts of the CPI, the OWI, or the OSS were still rather an exception than the normal state of affairs in American politics, and picture making was not yet of paramount importance for U.S. policy makers since radio and newspapers were still the more popular and, therefore, also the more important media for policy makers (it is certainly no coincidence that FDR is rather remembered for his fireside chats than for the pictures he made). In this context, pictures were important, but not yet essential for policymakers, and often they only had a supplementary value: typically, they were a by-product of public appearances, but appearances or events were not yet staged and scheduled primarily to make pictures. The political value of pictures began to change in the 1950s, however, when television rose quickly to the number one spot among

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America’s mass media. By 1952, the time of Nixon’s Checkers speech, already 34.2 percent of all American households possessed a television set (the number for 1950 was 9 percent), up to 40 percent of the U.S. population watched TV news about the Republican and Democratic Conventions, and the majority of Americans already preferred television over radio. In the following years, television expanded rapidly through the United States, and by the end of the decade, 85.9 percent of all American households owned a television set. On average, as surveys showed, Americans turned on their TV sets for five hours a day, and while sports and entertainment shows dominated, news shows on the major networks saw a steady increase in popularity and replaced newspapers and radio as a primary source of information by 1963.9 The rise of television had several implications for U.S. administrations. For one, the enormous popularity of the medium offered policy makers a convenient way to reach most Americans through televised speeches or appearances and build up emotional connections with them. The only prerequisite here was that policy makers had to develop formats that made good pictures and conformed to the emotional entertainment desires of TV viewers. At the same time, the growing popularity of news shows also meant that television channels were in permanent demand of pictures and therefore covered all major political events, a development that profoundly altered the conditions under which policymakers acted and that required a permanent alertness on their part. Still, this also opened up the powerful possibility for U.S. policymakers to shape pictures, and thereby emotions, by staging events that then would be filmed by television teams, a new structural possibility that gradually began to have transformative effects on the policy making process itself: Where before pictures had typically been a side-product of political acts, policy making now more and more became organized around such picture-making events. One of the first politicians who fully grasped the opportunities and changes television enacted was, surprisingly enough, 63-yearold President Eisenhower. The first president to hire a TV consultant, Eisenhower frequently staged appearances exclusively for television cameras and was creative in inventing new and entertaining formats. He performed speeches on television, televised fireside chats, interviews, simple photo opportunities, and filmed press conferences. After some urging from his advisors, Eisenhower also acquiesced to stage televised coffee klatsches with housewives and allow for broadcasts of his birthday parties. Television thus became an important



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channel for the administration to connect with Americans. More important, it also allowed Americans to participate in the actual conduct of policy in new ways because Eisenhower also agreed to stage televised cabinet meetings (which were always carefully rehearsed, though). For the first time, Americans could thus see in action how policy was made within the Eisenhower administration.10 Eisenhower’s televised cabinet meetings marked an important step in the history of America’s transformation into a picture state because they represented one of the first instances where policy making was performed and enacted primarily to produce pictures. At the same time, they also created a new visibility of the political process, an approach that specifically the Kennedy administration developed further in spectacular ways in the early 1960s by opening its doors to photographers, news reporters, and television cameras.11 As advisor Fred Dutton outlined to Kennedy, the challenge was “to bring directly into American homes a first hand acquaintance and personal association with the new Administration” in order to “help consolidate and expand our public backing.” Dutton’s idea was to launch a seven-week television series on the administration that would include shows about several fields of political action, and that should leave a “residual subjective impression in the viewer: ‘a great and warm group of men and women are working with the President . . . I’m for him and them.’”12 The television serial did not materialize, but photographers and camera operators now often found themselves in the middle of Kennedy meetings with advisors. In February 1961, George Tames, photographer of the New York Times, accompanied Kennedy for a whole day for a story on “A Day with John F Kennedy.”13 Tames made pictures of Kennedy answering phone calls, reading, signing documents, and attending meetings. “All the doors leading into the president’s office were open at all times,” Tames later remembered, “I got me a chair and I sat just inside the president’s office.”14 Television viewers, in the meantime, were shown around the living quarters and official rooms in “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F Kennedy,”15 and in mid-1963, they could literally sit in on meetings with Kennedy and his advisors in a television feature titled “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment.” Shot by Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, the founders of “direct cinema,” the feature showed how the administration grappled with the crisis at the University of Alabama, where Governor George Wallace blocked admission of two African Americans, Vivian Malone and James Hood. It also showed Robert Kennedy having breakfast with his family or

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playing with his children in his office, and took viewers into the crisis meetings in the Oval Office where they saw Kennedy and his advisors debate their options, choices, and opinions. Those were unusual and sensational perspectives even for TV viewers who had watched Eisenhower’s cabinet meetings before. “As of now,” as Kennedy’s press secretary Salinger could therefore boast with some justification, “no other administration has given the people a better glimpse of the Presidency and the President and the inner workings of the executive branch of the government. . . . People have been given a new dimension of the Presidency and the President. The President is no longer a mysterious figure operating behind closed doors.”16 To a major degree, the president’s new visibility also had to do with another innovation of the Kennedy administration: the invention of the official White House photographer. Before, presidents had often relied on photographers from the Army’s Signal Corps who were only summoned for special events. Kennedy departed from this practice and made Cecil Stoughton his personal White House photographer. Stoughton followed Kennedy at every turn and thereby set an example that Johnson and Nixon followed who hired Yoichi Okamoto (Johnson) and Oliver Atkins (Nixon) as personal photographers. White House photographers brought in a new visual expertise. They arranged and supervised the photo shootings presidents did with external photographers, and thereby assured presidential control over the kinds of pictures that would get out, the visual perspectives they would contain, and their aesthetics. At times, they also tested possible camera angles for presidential events and thereby predetermined the concrete pictures that would come out of those events. In addition, the White House photographers assured a permanent photographic coverage of presidential activities. While their job was primarily to document White House life in a form of preparatory memory politics, their pictures were often also released to the media and offered viewers glimpses behind the scenes that were sensational at the time. Stoughton documented how Kennedy played with his children, photographed cabinet meetings in Kennedy’s living room, or portrayed his leisure activities: touch football games with his family (not involving the cabinet), golf playing sessions, or sailing trips.17 In the Johnson administration, too, White House photographer Okamoto often covered Johnson’s private activities, the same went for Oliver Atkins.



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By documenting presidential activities, White House photographers lent political processes a new visibility and often did so in new ways. Their pictures showed presidents at work, in meetings with advisors, or talking on the telephone, and thereby countered the notorious “invisibility of the actual political process.”18 Specifically Stoughton’s photograph of the improvised Johnson swearing in on the day of Kennedy’s assassination gained iconic status, as it showed the dramatic transition of power from one president to the other. Here, the picture not only simply documented a political act but also had an important constitutive function: to Americans, it was the picture, not the act itself, which initiated Johnson as president. Johnson clearly understood this correlation, which is why he insisted that a photographer should document the swearing-in ceremony.

Picture Controllers The invention of the White House photographer reflected an important development that was symptomatic for the emergence of the picture state in general: while before administrations usually had left aesthetic choices to commercial photographers, including the choice of camera angles, arrangement of objects, motifs, and backgrounds, they now increasingly tried to predetermine those choices themselves or produced pictures on their own right away in order to take control of the pictures that circulated in the visual media. Those developments were also reflected in the emergence of the visual advisory systems that administrations now began to set up to perfect their picture making. Again, it was Eisenhower who pioneered those developments. To prepare his television appearances, Eisenhower hired Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery as an outside expert who supervised and arranged every single Eisenhower appearance on television, including the preparation of the visual background, of camera angles, and the choice of suits Eisenhower wore during TV appearances. In the 1960s, administrations built on those institutional experiences, with one important difference, though: where Eisenhower had consulted only one advisor, his successors began to rely on a whole visual advisory system of formal media advisors, television experts, journalists, and public relations strategists. Particularly, the Johnson administration sought to tap all imaginable resources. Johnson frequently asked journalists for advice or they volunteered it, and the administration was generally open for unsolicited external

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ideas. For example, when a former television aide to Adlai Stevenson named Ed Plaut sent in a long letter on how to improve presidential television appearances, the memo circulated among Johnson advisors and went to Johnson as well. Johnson aide Douglas Carter underlined long passages in red, including thoughts such as “the people want entertainment from their TV sets” or that Johnson needed “a more effective approach to television” and had to apply the knack of “dramatizing himself” to television. In forwarding the letter to Bill Moyers, Cater termed it a “thoughtful analysis” of Johnson’s television problems. A few months later, Cater met with Ed Plaut to discuss his ideas.19 The exchanges with Ed Plaut illustrate not only the administration’s openness towards external visual advice but also how hard it worked to perfect Johnson’s picture appearances. Indeed, all media advisors, even Johnson’s speech writers, constantly sought to enhance their aesthetic expertise as well as their understanding of visual media. In particular, Fred Panzer evaluated one public relations manual after another which had titles such as “How to Use Visual Aids,”20 “Ten Ways to Vitalize Group Photographs”21 (one element being the “posed-unposed shot”), “The [PR] Program: Blueprint for Results,”22 or “Movies Move People.”23 In November 1966, Panzer also attended a lecture of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan. In his notes, Panzer jotted down central findings of McLuhan’s philosophy, including his famous slogans “The medium is the message” and “The medium is the massage.” Moreover, Panzer took special interest in McLuhan’s claims that “color TV will create a new sensory response” and that “the effect of the medium is different from the content. Content is what you see. It’s what you don’t see that works on you.”24 After the lecture, Panzer continued to be fascinated with McLuhan’s media theories and at one point even proposed to invite McLuhan to the White House for a lecture. It would be valuable, he wrote, to explore more of McLuhan’s recent insights that television was “killing off the voting bloc” and elevating the “leader who tries to be the all-inclusive image,” and that “the young TV generation has a completely different sensory life than the adult generation which grew up on hot radio and hot print.”25 While McLuhan never delivered his lecture at the White House, the administration succeeded in recruiting a permanent formal television advisor—NBC director Robert Kintner.26 Like Montgomery, Kintner took over the planning of all aspects of Johnson’s television appearances, but now did so on a daily basis. As he reminded Johnson again and again, “every appearance should be carefully



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prepared; the equipment carefully set-up and the greatest impression made.”27 How to assure “the greatest impression” remained a nagging task for Kintner, however: should Johnson wear glasses during TV appearances or not? Should he use a teleprompter or rather speak informally? Which background should frame his appearances? From which angles would cameras show Johnson, and which angle was most favorable? How would the lighting setup affect Johnson’s effect on screen? Should Johnson sit behind a desk, stand behind a rostrum, or walk around during televised press conferences? And should he call the names of questioners or rather point his fingers at them?28 As trivial as Kintner’s problems seem at first sight, they confirm an important observation art historian Michael Diers has made. Photography, as Diers has noted, produces pictures according to “rules of aesthetics” and therefore also arranges “politics in accordance with aesthetic criteria” by forcing politicians to act “photo-conform.”29 The challenges involved with creating such aesthetic photoconformity (which also includes television) were well reflected in Kintner’s daily work as well as in Panzer’s engagement with public relations manuals and McLuhan’s theories. At the same time, those efforts also pointed to the high degree of aesthetic consciousness with which the Johnson administration set to work. Efforts to control and prearrange pictures as much as possible climaxed with the Nixon administration. The extent of Nixon’s public relations and visual advisory apparatus alone was stunning. Nixon had a chief of staff trained in advertising (HR Haldeman), a television office, and a communications office. He had a press office, an external television advisor, and a special consultant to the president who concerned himself with “exploiting the potential of TV.”30 And he had formal public relations advisors who met frequently as the “five o’clock group”31 to develop “an overall PR look zeroing in on television.”32 Nixon advisors, too, read McLuhan’s “Understanding Media,” but most of them already had a background in advertising or in television.33 Roger Ailes of the television office (today head of Fox News) had produced The Mike Douglas Show, USIA director Frank Shakespeare came from CBS, and HR Haldeman had worked at the J Walter Thompson Company before joining Nixon’s team. No other administration could thus draw from a comparable visual and aesthetic expertise, and under Nixon, the apotheosis of the visual often reached new heights. Nixon was the first president to direct that his daily and weekly news summaries were to focus on television.34 In addition, the administration also set to

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work with a new aesthetic awareness. Guided by the maxim that “good TV needs good pictures,”35 as Bud Wilkinson put it in April 1969, advisors searched constantly for new spectacular picture possibilities “where the setting tells the story,”36 as Nixon advisor Buchanan formulated it. Every single presidential appearance was preevaluated in terms of its visual setting, the backgrounds and camera angles, and television advisors were instructed to “concern themselves with how an event will look through the eye of a television camera.”37 Ideas for such “photo opportunities,” as they were called within the Nixon administration, never ceased to flourish, and sometimes even included unusual measures, as a photo opportunity with the Apollo 13 astronauts in Honolulu illustrated. To get the best camera angle with Diamond Head in the backdrop, Haldeman instructed a construction company to let bulldozers work night and day to remove piles of dirt that blocked the angle; the costs amounted to over $20,000.38 The administration’s quest for aesthetic perfection culminated in spring 1972 with its “headline-picture-storyboard plan.” According to the plan, no public Nixon event would be scheduled “without headline, picture and television storyboard done” in advance. The storyboard had to include an actual sketch of the picture, and it had to indicate in detail the pictures and leads most likely to be used on TV.39 No doubt: here the quest to control exactly what kinds of pictures were produced of Nixon reached its final level of perfection. Given the administration’s belief in the importance of visuals, it is not surprising that the Nixon administration also perfected the way in which U.S. administrations monitored, adapted, and improved their own picture policies, a practice that had been in place since the days of the Eisenhower administration. Back then, Eisenhower and Montgomery typically called outside observers for their impressions of Eisenhower’s performances and asked for comments on which camera angles had played well or where Eisenhower had looked bad. Kennedy, too, often reviewed recordings of his press conferences and frequently commented on the lighting set-up or unfavorable camera angles. Johnson monitored pictures through the famous set of three television screens he placed in the Oval Office. The set allowed him to monitor all three American television channels at once.40 Again, however, it was the Nixon administration that defined new dimensions. Feeling that many photo opportunities did not translate into pictures at all, the administration set up an elaborate monitoring system in 1971. In weekly reports, advisor Mort Allin recounted where photos had been placed in newspapers, if they



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resulted from a photo opportunity, and which headlines and stories an event had generated.41

Picture Performers No photo opportunity, however, worked without the actual presidential picture performance that created the photo situation and then led to the actual picture in a newspaper or on TV. Performances, write sociologists Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast are situations in which “social actors, embedded in collective representations and working through symbolic and material means, implicitly orient towards others as if they were actors on a stage seeking identification with their experiences and understandings from their audiences.”42 Their aim is to “create, via skillful and affecting performance, the emotional connection of audience with actor and text.”43 Picture performances are such performances, but they are distinct from other performances insofar as they have a double character: they are performances conducted for the creation of emotions in which presidents make functional use of pictures. But they are also performances conducted to create the picture in the first place. Making pictorial performances appealing so as to build emotional connections with viewers became a steady concern for American presidents and their advisors in the 1950s and 1960s. Eisenhower’s picture advisors, for instance, regularly worried that he was “not a dashing figure on camera”44 and therefore frequently suggested new dramaturgical elements in televised appearances. Recommendations ranged from leaving the chair during a telecast to walking toward the camera or using a huge map in the background when talking about world problems where Eisenhower could point out problem zones.45 Eisenhower did not always welcome those suggestions, snapping at his advisors once “Why don’t you just get an actor? That’s what you really want.”46 In contrast to Eisenhower, Kennedy had theatrical talent, and he enjoyed acting. He liked to call his press conferences “The 6 O’Clock Comedy Hour,”47 and his performances were flawless.48 Observers were often stunned. Arthur Schlesinger, the White House intellectual, considered them “a superb show, always gay, often exciting.”49 Journalist Marion Gräfin Dönhoff of the West German weekly Die Zeit perceived the president as a “new type” of politician who appeared shy yet determined, “intensive and focused” during his press

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conferences.50 Suffering from chronic back pain, Kennedy especially cultivated performances of toughness in front of cameras.51 Accordingly, he delivered his inaugural address in the cold but with his coat off, did half-naked beach strolls, and thereby demonstrated sun-tanned “picture-perfect health”52 when in fact he was replete with pain relievers. Such pictures were skillfully created, as Winfried Fluck has observed, and often responded to “imaginary longings” for “strength, salvation, or regeneration.”53 Picture performances were also a focal point for the Johnson and Nixon administration where they were known as “news and picture activities”54 or “picture walking.”55 In early 1964 alone, Johnson advisor Horace Busby outlined twenty-one picture possibilities for LBJ along with an analysis of their symbolic benefits. Conceiving of them as “inventive image-broadening activities” that would project “more personality” in an election year, Busby suggested, among other things, LBJ strolls with Lady Bird Johnson “alone, hand in hand, in White House gardens” to convey a “President in repose,” bowling sessions with his daughter (“showing graceful, inmotion Presidential form”), a picture-making session with Johnson and his wife “sitting together in White House living quarters, reading books,” and the release of a picture that showed Johnson wearing a cap. The picture, Busby pointed out, could serve as a good “style-setting story with much friendly, good-feeling publicity.”56 Dave Waters, in turn, proposed a televised “walking press conference” on the White House south lawn to demonstrate Johnson’s “great vitality and energy.” Johnson could bring his dogs along, Waters suggested, and do two or three laps on the lawn, which would be “a good action piece to knock off.”57 Johnson usually took these suggestions to heart, and his walking press conferences became legendary occasions where Johnson rejoiced in speeding around on the south lawn with his beagles while journalists desperately tried to catch up.58 However, much to his staff’s concern, Johnson also liked to improvise during his picture-making activities, which at one point led him to pick up one of the beagles by its ear. At another point, he showed his scar after he had undergone surgery. Both instances caused broad public condemnation. In 1964, Johnson also starred as the leading actor in a USIA movie. Produced shortly after his transition to power, The President showed Johnson at work in the deepest of night behind one of the few illuminated windows of the White House. Shown working in the flickering light of a table lamp, the president seemed still busy with signing documents, reading memos, and shifting paper from the one end of



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his table to the other. USIA officers were so pleased with Johnson’s performance that USIA director Rowan later even proposed to make a similar television documentary in order to “leave with the audience the portrait of a man who recognizes the grave responsibilities he bears and strives to discharge them with an intelligent concern for humanity.”59 As Rowan’s comment suggested, presidential performances were not only efforts to shape impressions and create “images” in the sense of sets of assumptions about presidents, but also deliberately catered to specific role assignments in order to consolidate emotional connections with viewers. The “vigilant protector working at night,” for example, was one of those assignments. Other roles presidents typically had to perform and to document through pictures were those of a “hard worker,” a leader “concerned for people overseas,” and “understanding . . . their problems,”60 or “that of the responsible, serious, forward-looking ‘Commander.’”61 Particularly, Nixon’s staff worried much about role assignments. As Haldeman surmised in early 1971, the American people seek confidence in their president as: • A strong leader of boldness, courage, decisiveness, and independence, who works hard at his job and loves it • An honest statesman of character, integrity, intelligence and ability with a clear concept of his office. . . . • A warm man of dignity, ideals, vision and style who cares deeply about people—their concerns and aspirations.62

To demonstrate Nixon’s “qualities of guts, of head, and of hearts,”63 the administration staged various picture activities, leaving nothing to chance even in the simplest activities. As Haldeman instructed the television office, Nixon had to get a detailed script for every appearance that would make pictures: “This would apply for getting off an airplane, walking across the garden, or anything else where there is camera coverage.”64 The care with which advisors prepared Nixon’s picture performances was exemplified by a documentary called A Day in the Life of the President, which was broadcast by NBC in December 1971. The idea was to show an ordinary presidential working day, but the reality was of course that it became a contrived day. Weeks in advance of the shooting, Haldeman and his staff began to script a detailed schedule that would make the president shine. The final arrangements balanced domestic and international matters and included Nixon meetings with some senators, Kissinger, and other advisors; phone calls

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to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiators in Vienna; and a walk with the dog. As in a lively theatre revue, Nixon and his advisors were supposed to stage one dramatic scene after another. Between 9:00 am and 10:00 am, as the script envisioned, “there would be a great deal of activity with staff members coming in and out. Perhaps Ziegler would come in more than once, the President could summon an additional staff member such as George Shultz, and he could place and receive some telephone calls relating to the material under discussion.”65 In later sessions there would again “be emphasis on activity, flexibility, with the president directing this meeting and asking piercing, penetrating questions.”66 Days in advance, cabinet members Peter Flanigan and John Connally were instructed to prepare themselves for “spontaneous” appearances. For Flanigan’s appearance, Stephen Bull envisioned “that at about 6:20 pm you will come down to the outer office and indicate that you need to see the President about a certain subject for a few minutes.” Then, Bull would “go into the Oval Office, advise the President that you need to see him, and tell him the subject of the matter that you wish to discuss.” Next, Bull instructed Flanigan, “You will be ushered right into the office, discuss the matter for a few minutes, and depart by about 6:25 pm.”67 Nixon himself got detailed instructions, too: in a meeting with Ehrlichman he was to ask a few general questions, then interject some forceful remarks about Congressmen Wilbur Mills, buzz Stephen Bull and ask him to have the vice president over, and turn back to Ehrlichman.68 Even whole talking sequences were either prescribed in their exact wording or outlined in their general structure. At 8:45 am, for example, Nixon was to call Bill Timmons and discuss the state of Lewis Powell’s nomination for the Supreme Court, saying according to the script: “Well if you feel I can help during the day, please let me know. As soon as the Senate disposes of Powell’s nomination see if the Senate can’t agree to vote Bill Rehnquist tomorrow.” Then, the script envisioned, Nixon was to look at his calendar, and would say: “I have a meeting with Prime Minister Trudeau from 4:00 pm–6:00 pm, but I want you to come over soon after six o’clock.”69 At 6:15, Timmons was to enter the president’s office and inform Nixon about the vote, to which Nixon was to respond: “That’s great! Lewis Powell will make a significant contribution to the court.”70 At the end of the day, finally, Nixon was to return “home after a day of work”71 where he would have a brief chat with his wife Pat, a scene that was ironically only included after a last-minute intervention from John Scali. As Scali pointed out, “millions of American women” would wonder why Mrs. Nixon was absent, and “at least a glimpse of her”



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would “add much to the family environment.” So it was “essential,” he emphasized, “that she be included as part of the day.”72 “A Day in the Life of the President” encapsulated the new element of theatricality and acting skills that picture performances required of presidents, but it also exemplified a structural inversion in the relationship between politics and picture making, at least as far as presidential actions were concerned. Apparently, pictures were not simply by-products anymore that represented political activities, but political activities were staged in order to produce pictures, as the instructions for Flanigan or Nixon’s phone calls to SALT negotiators in Vienna showed. Moreover, as Nixon’s request for detailed scripts even for televised walks in the garden signified, all public presidential activities were now prepared and conducted with a consciousness for the aesthetic and visual results they would have, a point that once again underlines how much a concern with pictures had begun to dominate the Nixon administration. Presidential picture performances thus not only prove once again the validity of Michael Diers’s arguments, but also confirm empirically an argument that art historian Horst Bredekamp has made. According to Bredekamp, pictures “neither mirror nor illustrate but create”73 what there is to mirror and illustrate. They have productive powers by which they predetermine the reality of an event and shape its experience. American administrations began to understand those qualities of pictures between the 1950s and 1970s. In their picturemaking activities, they not only subjected themselves to the primacy of the picture, but also enlisted pictures in order to create artificial pictorial realities of their policy making and personality, a good example being the last-minute inclusion of Pat Nixon in the president’s “typical day.” Those pictorial realities, however, should not simply be taken as sinister attempts to manipulate viewers, but also had an important integrative function. They offered those who saw them a sensory access to politics and thereby shaped their awareness for the political order presidents were part of. Thereby, they also consolidated the order presidents represented.

Picture Travels and the Completion of the Picture State A special form of presidential picture performances were the foreign trips presidents made abroad. Such trips occasionally involved spectacular itineraries: Eisenhower, for example, embarked on grand world tours from the summer of 1959 to mid-1960, travelling

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back and forth between Washington and such different countries as West Germany, India, Morocco, Argentina, and Korea, plus a dozen others. Johnson went on an Asian tour to New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Korea in October 1966, and Nixon even traveled around the world in nine days in July and August 1969 from the Philippines to the United Kingdom. Usually, however, presidents confined their travels to stops in a few countries: Kennedy went, among others, to France, Austria, and the United Kingdom in spring 1961, to Venezuela and Colombia in December 1961, and to West Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Italy in the summer of 1963. Johnson did shorter trips to Mexico, Punta del Este, and Bonn in 1966 and 1967. Nixon, too, did regional trips to Western Europe in early 1969, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Spain in fall 1970, followed by the summit trips to China and Moscow in 1972 (with some additional stops).74 Those trips, as Andreas Daum has shown exemplary and in detail for Kennedy’s visit to West Germany in 1963, always followed an imperative of visibility and were planned to assure the visitor’s maximum visibility through interactional formats such as motorcades, speeches in public spaces, or visits to popular sites.75 Wherever Kennedy went in West Germany, hundreds of thousands of West Germans lined the streets to see Kennedy and cheered for him, lending the visit an aura of emotional excitement. Moreover, every single step Kennedy did was closely followed by cameras—whose involvement advance teams had carefully arranged. Building on Kennedy’s experiences, the Johnson and Nixon administrations, too, planned their trips to get maximum visibility, but both also radicalized foreign travels by pioneering a new travel format, the format of “picture travels”: those were trips that were undertaken almost exclusively for the purpose of generating specific pictures, where communication with and to foreign populations was of secondary importance, and where direct exposure to populations was not planned for the encounter as such but as a coulisse for pictures that would then be relayed back to domestic television viewers and that would circulate around the globe. Specifically, Lyndon Johnson’s trip to Asia in fall 1966 was such a “picture trip.”76 Taking place in late October, the trip was timed well before November’s congressional mid-term elections and built around a conference Johnson attended in Manila. Within fifteen days, Johnson hurried through seven nations and from one photo opportunity to another, from “a short laboratory visit for pictures”77 at the International Rice Institute in Los Baños to a barbeque on a



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cattle farm. LBJ did motorcades, train rides, and boat trips. He planted trees and participated in wreath-laying ceremonies. He went to church and attended state dinners, whirled through art galleries and stopped at model farms, making the trip an ongoing visual spectacle. Just how much meticulous pictorial planning had gone into this spectacle may be illustrated with Johnson’s stopover in Pago Pago, Samoa. Although only a mere three-hour stop on the way to New Zealand, advance men explored multiple photo opportunities and overall thought that Johnson “should get mileage on this in states and abroad for months to come and stills and reels would have field day.” As the advance team cabled, “the color possibilities in words and pictures is ovvious [sic] but more important is the word and pittures [sic] potential for POTUS [President of the United States, SK] identification with education and progress in an undeveloped land which was once described as the slum of the South Pacific.” Specifically, the advance team proposed a motorcade (“ample ooporunity [sic] to get good scenic shots and frief [sic] stop-offs with children along road, etc.”), a stop at a school that utilized educational television sponsored by the United States, and a tram ride across the harbor by Lady Bird Johnson to the top of a mountain with a “short photo session at spectacular spot.” At the school, the Johnsons were to visit “a classroom for 6-year olds” which should “make an exciting picture—the moppets sit cross legged on straw floor mats, each one in front of a foot high desk, wearing native dress, and watching the television set in front of the room for their daily lesson.” Mrs. Johnson’s tram ride to the mountain, again, would end with another picture opportunity as Lyndon Johnson would greet her on return—“POTUS greet Mrs. Johnson as tramcar approachs [sic] port, she stand close to window—he close to railing—sun over and faintly behind photographers,” which were to use the “roof of tramport” for pictures. The scene, as the advance team emphasized “in itself” offered “all kinds of picture possibilities if it could be brought off.” Thus, within a mere three hours, Johnson and his wife were not only to follow a detailed performative schedule, but to run through one pictorial setup after another that had all been prescripted well in advance.78 Indeed, the team also gave a “detailed rundown of problems photographers will face at Pago Pago,” commenting above all on the potential lighting problems for photographers: “when POTUS gets off plane, will have strong cross light coming from his left side—photo stand located facing speakers.” During the welcome ceremony, there would be “45 degree cross light—light passing through plastic awning over his head—will reduce exposure but will cut down

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high shadows.” And Johnson’s next steps, too, would bring photographic problems with them: “when POTUS goes down to grass for gift giving—cameras can shoot from stand, but will be too high, and get top of his head,” which would give photographers “too sharp a downward angle.” The advance team hence asked the local U.S. staff to lower the photo stand.79 As those suggestions and remarks thus showed, no photographic detail was left to chance, and all Johnson appearances were carefully assessed in terms of the aesthetic and visual settings they would provide. Johnson’s East Asia trip set an example that Nixon followed in 1972 with the trips to China and the Soviet Union. Particularly, the China visit opened up new dimensions.80 In negotiations with Chinese counterparts, American advance men pushed through that the Chinese government would acquire a satellite ground station so that live television pictures could be transmitted to the United States. They also reached agreement as to the beginning of the visit: Nixon would arrive in Peking at 11:30 am, which meant that his arrival could be broadcast on American evening TV at 7:30 pm on the west coast and 10:30 pm on the east coast. As Haldeman noted in his diary, Nixon was “very strongly in favor of the ground station and having maximum TV coverage available” and wanted “maximum coverage in order to get the benefit from it, especially in the short term. . . . He points out that on TV the American president received by a million Chinese is worth a hundred times the effect of the communiqué.”81 Like the Johnson trip, Nixon’s visit was advanced carefully by several advance teams who evaluated all scheduled photo stops on-site and checked all imaginable camera and photo angles, including the best arrival position for the plane whose ladder Nixon would descend. Advisors even drew up precise sketches of the sites that Nixon would visit, indicating where Nixon would have to walk and where the photographers would be located. Thus, when Nixon landed on 21 February, everything was meticulously planned for the first photo opportunity of the visit, Nixon’s handshake with Chou Enlai, even though Nixon got last-minute stage fright on the way from Guam to Peking. “He’s very concerned,” Haldeman noted “that the whole operation at the Peking airport be handled flawlessly since that will be the key picture of the whole trip.”82 Once the Air Force One arrived, Haldeman personally made sure that nothing would spoil the first picture, letting an aide block the aisle so that neither Kissinger nor Rogers would push themselves into the picture.83 Pictorially, though, the visit did not accomplish all that Nixon and his team had hoped for. Most disappointingly for them, the



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motorcade from the airport to Peking’s center was not greeted by cheering crowds, making for an awkward ride through deserted streets. “The ever-present Chinese crowds were held back in the side streets as our motorcade swept through the square, vast in its emptiness,”84 as Kissinger observed. Here the People’s Republic of China demonstrated its own pictorial sovereignty, its power to control which pictures it would allow for and which it would not allow during the visit. This also pertained to the other iconic photo moment of the visit, Nixon’s first encounter with Mao. Until his arrival in the guest house, Nixon did not know when he was going to meet Mao and if he was going to meet him at all. Only once he had settled in his guest villa did Mao suddenly summon him up for a meeting—pictures were taken by Chinese photographers. This broke the ground, and was followed by the visual spectacle that Nixon and his advisors had hoped and negotiated for, including the grand banquet pictures, the “people pictures,”85 and Nixon’s trip to the great wall (commenting: “this is a great wall,”).86 Coming exactly twenty years after his Checker’s speech, Nixon’s trip to China in a way marked the final completion of America’s picture state: it was a trip not undertaken for diplomatic purposes (although it was later advertised as such) but in order to stage pictures for American media. In this sense, the trip not only reflected well how much picture making had come to pervade the thinking and the actions of American administrations, but also underlined once again how much the relationship between picture making and politics had been reversed: quite apparently, political action now often followed the imperative of picture making, not vice versa. The visual age had turned the United States into a picture state—and this also changed the way Americans governed their empire, as the next chapters are going to show.

Chapter 2

Contact Points with Empire and the Globalizing of Media The French monarchist, Rivarol, once said that “when the people have ceased to esteem, they cease to obey,” and it would be lightheaded to assume that the uncoerced “obedience” of which he was speaking will continue to be ours by divine right in Germany if our national policy shows signs of incoherence and myopia in the period ahead. The Germans have developed numerous and efficient means of communication since the war, and they can be expected to scan and report American reactions to events throughout the world, from the skies over Sverdlovsk to the streets of Japan, with the anxiety of people who know that their own fate is involved. —An assessment from USIS Bonn Satellites are going to change our lives. All people will be neighbors if they want to or not. . . . The television satellite is more powerful than the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. —Arthur Clarke A new form of “politics” is emerging, and in ways we haven’t yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything. —Marshall McLuhan

On 5 April 1963, West German television viewers witnessed an ex-

citing experiment: a new program called Weltspiegel (World Mirror).1 The jingle played, a projection of the world appeared on screen, and then the camera zoomed in on the show’s anchorman, Gerd Ruge.



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Seated behind a desk against the backdrop of a world map, Ruge announced that the program would start off with a sensation: via satellite Weltspiegel would do the first transatlantic television conversation with its correspondent in Washington, D.C. He ran a short animated cartoon on the relay satellite, and then passed over from his studio in Cologne to his colleague Klaus Bölling in Hamburg who was going to conduct the conversation. Bölling greeted the audience and his colleague Thilo Koch in Washington, D.C. who appeared on the screen, the U.S. Capitol in full view behind him. Koch talked about Washington politics and Kennedy’s newest activities, only interrupted by new questions from Bölling here and there. The TV image wobbled somewhat, but one could see Koch and the Capitol clearly nonetheless and could hear what he said. It all seemed simple, and yet it was spectacular: three journalists joined in the same TV broadcast, miles and miles of distance between them, and all of it came together on the same TV screen in West German living rooms.2 By establishing a direct connection from Washington, D.C. to West German sofas, Weltspiegel’s transatlantic telecast demonstrated dramatically how the new medium of television revolutionized the way foreign societies came into contact with America in the 1960s. Thanks to communication satellites, television easily transcended distances, compressed time and space between continents, and thereby made contact with the United States more intimate. Moreover, like no other medium before, television offered the individual foreign observer an aesthetic involvement in American politics that was both immediate and stimulating. With its visual appeal, sound, and its constant flow of images, television mobilized all senses and allowed the individual viewer an entirely new experience of American politics—visually, aesthetically, and emotionally. Reshaping the way foreigners followed and engaged with American foreign policy, television became a new powerful medium abroad in the 1960s, not least because the rise of a global satellite system allowed television to create new forms of direct participation in faraway events.3 In July 1962, the “Telstar” satellite went up to space as the first out of several communications satellites, and already the first official program Telstar relayed across the Atlantic between the United States and Western Europe foreshadowed how satellites would transform contact possibilities with America in subsequent years: in a mutual TV exchange across the Atlantic, Western European TV viewers were taken on a tour through the United States that brought them from the Statue of Liberty to a Baseball game in Chicago, and on to Cape Canaveral, Detroit, and the United Nations. At the

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end of the broadcast, Kennedy appeared on European TV screens with a short live press conference, a spectacular demonstration of the new kind of involvement satellite TV offered in American politics. Numerous further communication satellites were shot into space after Telstar. In 1964, NASA’s experimental “Syncom III” satellite broadcast live transmissions of the Tokyo Olympics around the world, and in the following year, the newly formed International Satellite Corporation (INTELSAT), launched “Early Bird.” Between May and July 1965, Early Bird transmitted TV programs from the United States to Western Europe about Pope Paul VI’s official visit, Gemini missions, sports, and news. By 1967, INTELSAT’s satellite system covered virtually every spot of the world safe for the Indian Ocean area and parts of Africa, and a global TV show arranged by journalist Aubrey Singer with the title “Our World” featured televised reports from dozens of countries, thus vividly reflecting the state of global interconnectedness.4 Over the course of the 1960s, in other words, the world seemed indeed to be shrinking into what Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, as early as 1962, had termed the “global village”—a world of “electronic interdependence” increasingly bound together by common communication spaces.5 Yet, television was not the only medium that revolutionized contact possibilities with the United States in the 1960s. Rather, as this chapter shows, foreign “contact points” with the United States multiplied and shifted on several levels in West Germany, Argentina, India, and Tanzania, because print media like newspapers or illustrated magazines, too, globalized their coverage and now generally put far more emphasis on visuals than in decades before—with the effect that they, too, now offered their readers new “aesthetic experiences” of American foreign policy. In this chapter, I map the various “contact points” and “media ensembles” that shaped the ways in which foreigners engaged with American foreign policy in the 1960s. In this context, the term contact point refers to those representational interfaces that allow individuals from one society to engage with another society (and its actions) without actually having to travel there. Such interfaces can range from buildings or concrete interactional spaces (like USIS centers) to other mediators like a specific television program, an exhibit, a cartoon, or a single photograph, to name just a few examples.6 Together they form a network of contact points that offers the possibility of encounter, but, of course, does not guarantee the individual’s engagement.



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The notion of contact points obviously bears some resemblance to Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones,”7 but it differs from Pratt’s conception insofar as it is stripped off the confounding spatial connotations carried by the word “zone”: a single photograph, for instance, is clearly not a spatial zone but it potentially offers the individual beholder a form of contact and engagement nonetheless. Moreover, where Pratt focuses on the travelling messenger and their messages, the notion of contact points takes into account that it is perfectly possible for societies to engage with each other without having any social interaction at all: a news photograph of an American foreign policy event, for example, offers its observer a contact possibility with U.S. foreign policy, yet there is no need for the observer to travel to the United States. Against this background, then, the chapter surveys those representational formats and media that offered foreign observers the possibility of an aesthetic encounter of American foreign policy in the 1960s. While the emphasis lies on the mass media as the most important sites of contact, the chapter starts out with a short examination of USIA’s contact strategies in West Germany, Argentina, India, and Tanzania. It then moves on to introduce the key media and formats that offered foreigners contact possibilities with America (excluding radio) and shows how those media broadened their coverage of the United States as the result of a broader globalizing tendency. The final part of the chapter outlines how American administrations reflected about those global changes in media landscapes, before the following chapters trace more in-depth how the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Administrations used visuals to govern American empire.

USIA: From Public Diplomacy to Picture Diplomacy Even though the rise of satellites and new television formats such as Weltspiegel heralded the beginning of a new era of global contact in the early 1960s, many foreign observers still also encountered the United States through an official “contact provider” that operated in their vicinity: the USIA, or as it was known locally: the United States Information Service (USIS). Set up in 1953, USIA was charged with the mission of “depicting imaginatively the correlation between U.S. policies and the legitimate aspirations of other peoples of the world,”8 and it quickly evolved into the most important conduit of American governments abroad. By 1960, USIA operated in dozens

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of countries around the world—including West Germany, Argentina, India, and Tanzania.9 In this sense, USIA was a globalizer of its own and an important driver of the globalization of pictures in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from organizational traditions, experiences, and personnel of predecessor agencies, USIA created and broadened contact possibilities with America through a number of channels, most of which had been set up already in the 1950s.10 Perhaps the most important cornerstones of American public diplomacy throughout the 1960s were USIS centers. Those centers lent the United States a concrete symbolic presence abroad and allowed the United States, as USIS Germany put it, “above all” to “be present, visibly and actively, involved as deeply as possible” in public life.11 Staging exhibitions, concerts, films, seminars, lectures, and evening entertainment, USIS centers were important representational as well as interactional spaces where foreign observers could learn much about U.S. culture and policies. Usually, the centers drew significant audiences, and American officials were always keen to underline their special contact value well into the mid-1960s. In Tanzania, for example, USIS staff counted 5,022 visitors to the library in December 1965, 7,800 viewers that were attracted by the film Profile of Tanganyika shown in the USIS center’s window on Tanzanian Independence Day, and 33,215 persons reached by 208 reels distributed by the film library.12 In West Germany, officials at an earlier point registered 3.9 million visitors to USIS libraries, while USIS India reported that 65 percent of visitors to a USIS library left the library with a more favorable impression of the United States than before, concluding that USIS centers and libraries were a “key medium for increasing Indian identification” with the United States.13 Such numbers were of course always questionable. However, the fact that USIS officials took upon them the task of counting as precisely as possible the concrete number of individuals they reached also reflected what USIS centers were all about in their perception, namely, the provision and extension of contact possibilities. Outside of USIS centers—whose reach was often limited to the cities—USIA chased elusive observers in a number of ways. One handy format was the portable exhibit. Easy to arrange, set up, and disassemble, portable exhibits gave USIA a representational mobility the centers did not have, and they allowed USIS officials to confront target groups more directly. In one instance, this even involved a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) exhibit in the corridors of the Tanzanian “Water Development Division of the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement,



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and Water Development.” The exhibit explained the role of the TVA in Swahili and showed pictorial evidence of its achievements. Thus, just in case Tanzanian bureaucrats were forming the idea of building a dam, they got a good idea of where to look for support.14 Pamphlets and publications that were passed out to locals were another device to reach populations. In Argentina, a major pamphlet operation was launched in 1961 and boosted by the establishment of a regional printing facility in Mexico City in March 1962. Publications included newspaper and magazine-type formats such as Enfoques Gremials, Puntos de Vista, and Temas Culturales, which were intended to reach target audiences.15 In Tanzania, West Germany, and India, too, USIS officials ranked pamphlets among their key assets. In India, for instance, USIS handed out 337,030 issues of the newspaper format American Reporter in 1965, 140,000 general pamphlets, and 32,000 quickly produced pamphlets that targeted key audiences like news reporters and students.16 In addition, USIS officers worked tirelessly to place USIA’s own writings in the national or local press. In Tanzania, officers counted eagerly as usual, reporting a “total lineage” of “404 ¾ column-inches” placed in the press in December 1965.17 Similar, if less detailed, success stories frequently came in from Argentina and West Germany.18 In India, officials were content with the “full freedom of contact and [the] capacity to place a large amount of material”19 in the press that was often facilitated by the media’s “heavy demand”20 for stories. Occasionally, USIS India also arranged press tours to American development projects, usually with good results. A tour of the Sabarigiri hydroelectric project in Kerala, for example, resulted in “22 articles with 38 pictures,”21 as USIS India noted, not without pride. In the 1960s, USIS operations in the field also increasingly emphasized visuals, signaling a gradual shift of emphasis from the word and text based approach of the 1950s to a more picture-driven form of public diplomacy. Visuals, as a USIA report to Congress stressed in 1962, were particularly important in countries with low literacy rates because they allowed “people to see what they perhaps cannot read.”22 Similar opinions were voiced in USIS posts abroad. In Tanzania, officials noted that visuals such as photographs seemed to have “more meaning . . . than any other form of display,”23 likewise did USIS India stress the “high value” of photographs.24 In Argentina and West Germany, too, USIS officials reported that “the importance of the visual approach, in general, requires no elaboration.”25 In the field, USIS officials hence tried to make use of films, newsreels, television programs, exhibits, and picture magazines

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wherever possible. For instance, in a typical month, USIS Tanzania toured the city with a mobile film unit, holding up to eighty-eight film shows, and staged three daily film shows at the USIS center in Dar es Salaam.26 Commercial cinemas, too, frequently played USIS films and the USIA-produced Today newsreel.27 In India, in contrast, USIS officers often bemoaned their difficulties in placing films in commercial cinemas, but sighed relief when they succeeded to do so, as in 1964 when fifty-seven USIS films were shown in cinemas and reached an audience of 12.25 million people.28 Program reports from Argentina and West Germany, in the meantime, stressed placement successes well into the 1960s. In West Germany, information officers reckoned that a hundred USIS films were running in commercial cinemas in 1961.29 Moreover, West German television stations frequently requested USIS material, as officers reported through the years. American officials stationed in Argentina made similar experiences, taking pride in the fact that many commercial motion picture film distributors like Allied Artists or Metro Goldwyn Meyer distributed USIS films throughout the country. The “television upsurge in Argentina,” too, did not go unnoticed by USIS, which responded with weekly broadcasts of Panorama Panamericano, its own TV serials, and the placement of USIS films.30 As USIS concluded by mid-1962, chances were thus high that “everybody in Argentina” who had “a radio or television set” had “sometime during the year been exposed to a USIS program.”31 In addition, USIS posts also developed new picture magazines in the 1960s that they disseminated to local populations. In Argentina, for example, officials capitalized on the special popularity of cartoons by handing out tens of thousands of cartoons that explained the Alliance for Progress and general American policies.32 Likewise, USIS India developed a new photo magazine called SPAN, which was modeled after Life magazine. With a print run of 90,000, SPAN illustrated key aspects of U.S.–Indian relations and informed Indians about the newest developments in the United States. USIS officers considered it to be USIS India’s flagship publication.33 In order to improve the effectiveness of its picture products, USIA also launched major research studies that evaluated their impact. However, the results were not always encouraging. As one review found, USIA easily outproduced “the largest advertising agency,” yet the “quality of USIA graphic presentation” was “not commensurate with the qualities of the U.S. we wish to project abroad.” For the most part, its author Robert Sivard stated, USIA was “pouring out mediocrity,” even though much of it was being “deliberately produced



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as low-grade” to match the appearance of USIA’s output with “indigenous materials in order to achieve acceptability and credibility.” Unfortunately, Sivard concluded, “the effectiveness of USIA materials in conveying the ‘inner vision’ through the quality of its visual output” nonetheless was low. To remedy those problems, he recommended to set up a centralized graphic design service, develop aesthetic guidelines for design standards, train visual specialists, and offer more training courses, seminars, and conferences.34 As Sivard’s study showed, USIA took keen interest in professionalizing its own picture making in the 1960s, and, indeed, for the first time developed a systematic picture diplomacy, particularly in the field of films. Where before the agency had only provided a monthly newsreel, copies of Eisenhower speeches and press conferences, and a few documentaries, but no major film (except for local, lowbudget productions that were usually short and of incredible bad quality),35 it now put new emphasis on producing films and improving the quality of its television features.36 Particularly USIA’s motion picture branch saw a remarkable “new renaissance of activity and quality”37 in the early 1960s. Under its new director George Stevens Jr., who had been brought up in Hollywood and was a renowned film producer, films were now made the flagship products of USIA’s public diplomacy. Together with the new USIA director Edward Murrow, a television celebrity and picture man himself, Stevens attracted new talents and young producers such as Charles Guggenheim, Leo Seltzer, and Bruce Herschensohn.38 Aesthetically, their films broke new ground, and Herschensohn’s Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, a film about Kennedy’s accomplishments, now even had feature film length. Several USIA movies were nominated for an Academy Award or for other international prices, and some even won in film competitions: The School at Rincon Santo, for example, a film about the Alliance for Progress, was awarded a first price in Venice, The March (about the civil rights march 1963) won a first price at the Bilbao documentary festival, and in 1964, Nine from Little Rock, a film that treated the beginnings of desegregation, even won an Academy Award, only to be followed by Years of Lightning, Day of Drums in 1965.39 The fact that USIA registered those films for such competitions, in turn, underlined how crucial films were becoming for its overall strategy. In the mid-1960s, USIA also began to stage seminars in “filmed communication,” which brought together USIA staff with outside experts. Often the list of speakers included prominent names. One of those seminars involved Dr. William Bluem of Syracuse University,

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Hollis Alpert, a motion picture critic from The Saturday Review, Lou Hazam of NBC, and John Grierson, “the father of the modern documentary” and long-time director of the British Empire Marketing Board’s film unit. The purpose of the seminar, as the program noted, was to come to terms with “the age of explosive change—not least of which involves the rapid emergence of the visual media as a primary tool of communication,” and to develop an approach that was “tailored to the requirements of visual expression” while exploiting the “full promise” of motion pictures and television.40 For this larger task, USIA also set up its own research studio in Bogotá, Colombia, where it tested audience reactions. In addition, it conducted research studies about its films. Usually, those studies measured categories such as the “relative appeal, persuasiveness, emotional impact . . . and degree of psychological identification or empathy” USIA’s films aroused, and therewith reflected how hard USIA worked to professionalize and refine its picture making.41 Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, then, USIA provided foreign observers multiple contact possibilities with the United States and its policies, and it increasingly did so through films, picture pamphlets, or cartoons. Still, the 1960s were also a transitional period for USIA which increasingly faced competition from commercial media abroad, and therefore gradually began to lose its contact value—a process that, eventually, also marked the beginning of its decline.

Contact Transformed: Image Wants and the Globalizing of Media Two factors accelerated USIA’s loss of importance abroad. First, around the world, mass media generally expanded their national reach during the 1960s through increases in print runs and, in the case of television, through a further spread of receivers. This meant that more people than before also had more opportunities to read, see, or hear something about the United States independent of USIS resources. And second: in addition to expanding their reach, mass media also increasingly globalized their coverage and therefore often sent their own correspondents around the world, a process which also made them independent of USIA materials. Typically, the spread of mass media and their globalization went hand in hand with another important development, a shift towards a new emphasis on visuals in most media. This overlap was particularly striking in West Germany where the growth of the number of



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television sets alone was phenomenal. Whereas there were roughly 12,000 television sets in West Germany in 1954, the number rose to 1.2 million in 1958, tripled within the next two years to 3.4 million (1960), doubled again until 1963 (7.2 million), and finally reached 15.1 million in 1970.42 At the same time, broadcasting hours and program variety increased steadily. In 1963, a second channel (ZDF) began operating side-by-side with the first channel (ARD), and regional channels affiliated with the ARD network, too, began to broaden their coverage.43 West Germans spent increasing portions of their day in front of their TV sets. According to some counts, 47 percent of all West Germans watched TV daily and for about seventy minutes in 1964. By 1970, 72 percent of all Germans spent 113 minutes of their daily time in front of the TV set, which now also broadcast in color and thereby offered its viewers a new aesthetic dimension.44 In opinion polls, West Germans frequently gave television high credibility ratings and lauded its authentic “reproduction of reality.”45 The rise of television profoundly altered the way West Germans engaged with “America,” because the new medium was eager to become a “window on the world”46—and often enough “the world” was either America or one of its foreign policy actions around the globe. Some of the earliest and most popular TV features were Peter von Zahn’s Berichte aus der Neuen Welt (Reports from the New World, 1955–1958), which introduced West Germans to the American way of life and were then funded by USIA.47 In addition, other documentary multi-serials like Schwerpunkte der westlichen Verteidigung (Focal Points of Western Defense), Auf der Suche nach Frieden und Sicherheit (In Search of Peace and Security), or Pazifisches Tagebuch (Pacific Diary) took viewers to U.S. military bases around the world and, in this sense, functioned as “showcases of Western military power.”48 In the early 1960s, TV programs on international politics were institutionalized, and ARD correspondents Thilo Koch and Werner Baedeker reported regularly from across the Atlantic in Weltbühne Amerika (World Stage America, 1960–1964) and Treffpunkt New York (Meeting Point New York)—programs that allowed West Germans to experience American politics and culture in novel and more dramatic ways than before. Likewise, new formats such as Weltspiegel, Panorama, or Blickpunkt (the latter on ZDF) often broadcasted features about U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1960s and thereby gave West Germans ongoing mass-mediated contact with the United States like never before.49 Audience ratings frequently reached between 38 and 50 percent.50 In addition to their international programming, both West German TV stations also began to build correspondent networks

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around the world. By the end of 1969, the second German TV channel ZDF had established thirteen studios worldwide, which fed West German TV viewers with pictures from abroad, including studios in Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, and Washington, D.C. (similar numbers applied for ARD).51 German print media, too, globalized and adapted to the new dominance of the visual. Journalists traveled frequently to the United States or the sites where it employed its power, and usually they came back with alluring images and long reports. Most print media also stationed their own correspondents in the United States. Reports about America hence were printed frequently in newspapers and illustrated weeklies, turning what many West Germans still had considered a faraway land in the 1950s into what Der Stern called “our neighbor America”52 in 1964. When printing those reports, illustrated weeklies in particular relied on “expressive visualization” and colorfulness with a degree unknown before.53 In contrast to the 1950s when major illustrated magazines had at times squeezed up to three textual stories onto one double page, photographs now occupied an ever-growing space and increasingly stretched fully over one or two pages, often without margins.54 In particular, photographic reports that ran over several pages became a popular narrative technique. At the same time, technical innovations improved the visual quality of printed photographs in terms of their resolution, sharpness, and depth, which enhanced their “naturalistic impression” and allowed a new emphasis on “emotional pictures.” Close-ups in particular became the new default setting in illustrated weeklies in order to provoke the emotional identification of beholders.55 Mobilizing their readers through appealing images, illustrated weeklies like Der Stern, Quick, or Die Bunte boosted their print runs to 1 million per issue between 1958 and 1963, and then up to roughly 1.7 million in 1973. Among those three, Der Stern became the leading pictorial medium that employed dozens of exceptional photographers.56 Likewise, the tabloid Bild, which combined screaming headlines with huge images (and hence was sometimes called “a newspaper for illiterates”57) encountered a staggering rise in demand from roughly one million in 1953 to four million in the 1960s, which made it the biggest tabloid in Western Europe.58 Yet contact possibilities with the United States did not only multiply and change in West Germany. In Argentina, too, traditional modes of American–Latin American interaction shifted toward a mass mediated sphere after the fall of Peron in 1955.59 Where images had traditionally assumed a great role in everyday life—as much reflected in a



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flourishing interwar cinema industry as in the popularity of cartoon booklets such as “Rico Tipo”—especially television found a fertile soil.60 Inaugurated in 1951, television became a dominant medium in Argentine everyday life during the 1960s, in particular during its “golden era”61 between 1964 and 1974. As in West Germany, the number of television sets spread quickly, growing from 450,000 in 1960 to 3.95 million in 1973, and Argentines, too, spent plenty of their time in front of the pantalla.62 Since 1961, moreover, they had the choice between four major channels: Canal 7, the state-owned channel with limited reach, Canal 9, Canal 11, and Canal 13, the latter three being privately run. Competition was intense. In one of his best-known phrases, comedian Alberto Olmedo would later appeal directly to TV viewers: “No toca botón!” (“Don’t touch the button!”).63 Since all of the private channels cooperated closely with U.S. channels—Canal 9 with NBC, 11 with ABC, and 13 with CBS—Argentine television programming was soon flooded with U.S.-produced serials such as Maverick, Sunset Strip 77, Bonanza, Lassie, or Viaje a las Estrellas (also known as Star Trek).64 Until 1966, fictional entertainment ruled the waves in the Argentinean TV market, and besides Panorama Panamericano, viewers only received one regular news program: Reporter Esso, a fifteen-minute news report on Canal 11 that featured silent film with off-commentary by Armando Repetto.65 The (television) picture began to change in 1966, however, when Canal 13 launched a popular news show called Telenoche that bridged the gap between what seemed dull information to many viewers and entertainment. The show became one of Argentina’s top ten mostwatched programs in 1967. Encouraged by its success, other channels began to offer news shows, too, as for example Canal 9 with its Noticieros.66 Contracts with U.S. TV stations assured that news would contain ample footage of U.S. developments. By the late 1960s, moreover, Argentinean news anchors also began to travel abroad in order to cover events on the spot. In 1968, Andrés Percivale, one of the two faces of Telenoche, reported directly from Vietnam for a few weeks and then went on to Paris to cover the student turmoil. Similarly, Percivale’s show partner Mónica Mihanovich went to Cape Canaveral in July 1969 to cover the Apollo 11 shot. Just three months later, Percivale, too, traveled to the United States where he moderated a direct satellite newscast to Argentina from the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. In addition to broadcasting pieces from the David and Julie Eisenhower wedding, Percivale also took viewers on a tour through Washington, D.C.—most of the footage had actually been filmed by USIA officers, though.67

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As in West Germany, illustrated magazines, too, became an important site of engagement with America, and here too, they transformed into media that were dominated more and more by visuals. As Aníbal Ford and Jorge Rivera have noted, most magazines witnessed an “internationalization of their contents and of their graphic techniques”68 that also included color prints. Dozens of new and major magazines were launched in the 1960s, including Panorama (closely tied to the Time–Life Corporation and with a legendary photo department), Primera Plana, and Siete Dias. All of these were magazines that relied heavily on graphics and visuals, and they reported frequently about international events, usually in “todo color,”69 which gave it a special aesthetic. Newspapers, too, always carried at least one photograph on page one in order to mobilize readers and covered international events.70 Besides TV and the print media, one of the most important Argentine visual media of the 1960s was a popular cartoon strip: Quino’s Mafalda.71 Featuring the stories of a small girl called Mafalda and her friends, the strip reflected the everyday life of the Argentine middle class and, in the words of one scholar, established itself in the public consciousness as the “legitimate mouthpiece for the uncertainties of the Argentine middle class.”72 However, there was also a remarkable globalizing tendency at work in Mafalda, for the strip commented frequently on international and American issues—and on the ways Argentines engaged with them, as further chapters show. In contrast to TV’s rapid expansion in Argentina and West Germany, the introduction of television lagged behind in India where it started off with an experimental TV service called “Doordarshan” in 1959. Broadcasting twice a week to twenty-one community centers in the vicinity of New Delhi, “Doordarshan” remained the only Indian TV station throughout the 1960s, the only exception being limited educational TV experiments the Ford Foundation and UNESCO conducted in India since 1961. Both experiments, however, remained an exclusive privilege for “TV clubs” around New Delhi. Only by the early 1970s would Doordarshan open further TV studios in Bombay and a couple of other cities.73 Nonetheless, visuals were extremely important in India. As Partha Mitter has shown, Indian society was already since the late colonial period a “visual society” that nourished on illustrated magazines, “pictorial journalism,” printed images, cartoons, and lithographs.74 Moreover, as scholars such as Sumati Ramaswamy, Diana Eck, Sandria Freitag, and Christopher Pinney have pointed out in recent years, images generally occupied center stage in Indian



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everyday life due to the prominence religious Hindu practices such as “darshan”— the seeing and being seen by an deity through an image—gave to visuality (and, of course, still do).75 Accordingly, many newspapers and weeklies such as the Illustrated Weekly of India put emphasis on photographs and cartoons, and often printed photographs offered through global news agencies. In addition, Indian newspaper and magazine correspondents as well as photographers traveled frequently to the scenes of global conflict and delivered Indian media consumers firsthand accounts of the United States and its policies. At the same time, a “newspaper boom” tripled circulation figures of dailies, weeklies, and monthlies between 1956 and 1976—and therewith also broadened contact possibilities with the United States.76 Tanzania, too, experienced a further spread of mass media and an intensification of globalization over the course of the 1960s. In Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam, approximately 40 percent of the population read a newspaper regularly, and the number of daily print runs of newspapers reached a daily average of 224,000 readers.77 In addition, popular magazines and newspapers such as the legendary Drum magazine (available in Dar es Salaam since 1961), Sunday News, or the popular Swahili daily Ngurumo, made rich uses of visuals, ranging from photographs to collages, cartoons, and advertisements.78 Tanzanian print media frequently used news agency materials and commented on global issues or American foreign policy. Particularly, the popular Drum magazine not only became an imaginary space for expressing notions of Africanness or fashioning visions for an African future, as Tom Odhiambo has shown, but also often sent its correspondents around the world and reported about global developments.79

American Foreign Policy in a Globalizing Age With the spread of mass media and their simultaneous globalization, the world of the 1960s thus was not a world of distance anymore but increasingly became a world of intimacy in which time and space were shrinking with breathtaking speed, and where contacts across vast spaces were intensifying. This also had important consequences for the way Americans could conduct their foreign policy, because the globalizing of media now offered foreigners an unprecedented degree of participatory involvement in global affairs. As Ted Meyers, assistant to FCC Chairman Newton Minow, put it in a memo,

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global television not only opened “a new era of massive and immediate contact among all peoples,” but also mobilized foreign emotions in new ways: “In one short instant, a single broadcast will touch the minds of hundreds of millions. Whatever these millions will see or hear can teach or distort, enrich or debase, preserve peace or stir to war. It is inevitable that broadcasting will acquire a powerful new role in the affairs of nations.”80 American foreign policy makers therefore increasingly began to take into account the importance of global media, noting that “with the spread of mass and instantaneous communications, the world’s business” was “being conducted in an ever-more transparent golden fish-bowl”81 or pointing out that even the “slightest failures” could be “magnified and exposed instantaneously around the globe.”82 Similar concerns were also voiced by grand strategists such as Walt Rostow— chairman of the Policy Planning Council, assistant national security advisor to Kennedy, and national security advisor to Johnson. As Rostow wrote in View from the Seventh Floor, the “revolution in science and technology, notably in international communications” had led to a world “where power and influence are being progressively diffused” and “where the interaction of societies” became “progressively more intimate.” As he noted: “the interests of nations are now so sensitively interwoven and communications are so quick and ample that conventional diplomacy no longer describes how the world works. Our allies in Europe, for example . . . are as sensitive to the moods and nuances of American politics as any American.” What American foreign policy now had to reckon with was therefore not merely “the nature of weapons” or “the scope and weight of the thrusts against us by the Communists,” but rather “the immediacy of modern communications” and “perhaps above all, the fact that virtually the whole of the planet is for the first time in history an intimate interacting political community.”83 As much as American policy makers worried about the challenges of global media, however, they also grasped that the globalizing of media opened them new opportunities to build emotional affection and identification with American leadership. Specifically, the Kennedy administration realized those potentials early on. As Sargent Shriver pointed out to Kennedy, the United States was “about ten years late already” in exploiting the tremendous opportunities of television, particularly in respect to “developing countries”: “Anyone who has ever seen hundreds of people standing outside the plate glass window of a TV showroom in Bangkok, Recife (Brazil), or Kuala Lumpur,” Shriver wrote, “would know immediately that television provides us with the greatest device we have to reach the minds of



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millions of people in the underdeveloped world.”84 In similar tones, advisor Bill Wilson underlined that the area of “worldwide television via a U.S. satellite” was “of extreme importance” because West Europe’s viewing audience alone would give Kennedy “access to about the same numbers of viewers that watched the first debate” in the United States (between Nixon and Kennedy).85 The administration therefore arranged transatlantic telecasts of Kennedy as soon as the first communication satellites were available. In addition, West European television stations often also broadcast Kennedy speeches, interviews with Kennedy, or special issues such as Jacqueline Kennedy’s tour of the White House. Kennedy also opened White House doors to foreign photographers. In July 1961, for example, the Illustrated Weekly of India titled “Inside the White House”, and took Indians on a picture tour through Kennedy’s working day, similar to the story George Tames had done for the New York Times. As the Illustrated Weekly noted: “Seldom has the reading public been given so fascinating a glimpse behind the scenes of a great public office as they have had during President John F. Kennedy’s first months in the White House.”86 Other issues and other Indian newspapers showed similar photos or illustrated Kennedy’s family life in long picture spreads.87 West German weekly Der Stern too visited Kennedy at the White House and spent the day with him, also picturing him playing with his children in the Oval Office.88 Kennedy pictures also often appeared in Tanzanian and Argentinean media. In Argentina, the new weekly Primera Plana even launched its first issue not with an Argentinean celebrity but with Kennedy on the cover, and the new illustrated weekly Siete Dias Ilustrados used a Kennedy photograph to advertise for itself. What these examples illustrated, then, was how powerful a resource pictures had become in shaping foreign emotional relationships with the United States. It was not only that the Kennedy administration provided more, and above all more spectacular pictures than administrations before—apparently, foreigners also expected and consumed them just as eagerly, a phenomenon that was not confined to presidential public relations activities. Rather, as the following chapters show, pictures began to play a key role in more conventional foreign policy fields as well, as USIA stepped up its efforts to produce pictures and as administrations increasingly took into account the picture wants of global media. Ultimately, the rise of the visual age therefore not only changed the mode in which foreigners engaged with American foreign policy—it also transformed the way American policy makers governed their empire.

Part II

PICTURING EMPIRE

Chapter 3

Prosperity Official Visits to the United States Protocol: a game played under rules that maximize the appearance if not the substance of welcome and friendship between nations. —Stuart Symington, former U.S. Chief of Protocol The thought sometimes occurs to me whether Khrushchev was not invited here to show the might and the strength of the U.S.A. so as to make him shaky at the knees. —Khrushchev—about: Khrushchev

In the fall of 1959—in the middle of the Cold War—Americans greet-

ed an unusual visitor: Chairman Nikita Khrushchev from the Soviet Union.1 The visit became a great success. For almost two weeks, Khrushchev toured the most notable sceneries the United States had to offer between east coast and west coast, including the Lincoln Memorial, film studios, shopping malls and housing projects, agricultural farms, computer and machinery factories, steel plants, and Camp David. “I am convinced,” Ambassador Thompson summed up American feelings after the guest had departed again, “that Khrushchev was deeply impressed with the richness and strength of the United States, both in material and human terms.”2 Reflecting on the benefits of such visits a few years later, Protocol Chief Angier Biddle Duke reported how he had witnessed “suspicions dissolve, fears dispelled, friends reassured, opponents disarmed or even persuaded” during official visits to the United States.

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Those effects, Duke suggested, did not come by accident. Rather, they were the result of carefully planned itineraries that rushed visitors through one emotional moment after another, extending from a “beautiful and impressive” helicopter arrival in front of the White House to trips to all or some of the ten places Duke recommended most, including Williamsburg, Boston, Detroit, the TVA, Los Angeles, West Point, and New York.3 Thereby, Duke explained, itineraries offered foreign visitors not only a “synthesis of our national character.” They also allowed visitors to penetrate “to the heart and core of America—to see us at home intellectually, politically, spiritually, and productively.”4 Khrushchev’s visit and Duke’s reflections both have one thing in common: they underline the important role official visits attained for the creation and management of foreign impressions of the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s.5 Often ignored by scholars who discount them as folkloristic and boring routine procedures, official visits to the United States were in fact a major source of imperial power, because they offered Americans a supreme opportunity to introduce foreign observers systematically to the wealth of productive resources and potential global benefits the United States had to offer.6 Indeed, nowhere else did policy makers have any comparable authority to determine what foreign societies would see and what they would not see of the United States and hence which notions they would form of “America.” By deciding where the visitor and his media entourage would go, policy makers could fashion and frame tangible, multifaceted images of America’s intentions and potentials, of its political, economic, and cultural strengths—and thanks to the rise of visual media abroad such images could increasingly circulate on a global scale.7 In what follows, I show how American administrations utilized official visits particularly during the late 1950s and early 1960s to stage the United States as the global “reference society”8 for a form of prosperity that was universally applicable and represented the kind of future foreign societies should aim for.9 In doing so, as I argue, protocol officials aimed specifically at creating what sociologist Reinhard Bendix has called “demonstration effects”10—representations that vividly illustrated America’s superior state of advancement and underlined its claim to global leadership. Typically, such demonstration effects were created on three distinct levels: a political, economic, and cultural level. Their purpose, as I show, was to produce pictures that would win over the hearts and minds of foreign societies and would thereby build acceptance, or at least recognition, for

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America’s global empire. Seen from the point of view of imperial integration, therefore, official visits were often less important as occasions for diplomatic consultations—at least for the time being—but rather served the broader symbolic purpose of convincing foreign societies that following American leadership would pay off in the long run. Or, as Johnson advisor Francis Bator put it on the occasion of German Chancellor Kiesinger’s visit in 1967: “the general impression we make will be much more important to future German behavior than what we say on any of the specific issues on the table.”11

Introducing America’s Civilizing Mission: From King Kalakaua to the Visual Age Official visits were, of course, neither an invention of the twentieth century nor of the Eisenhower or Kennedy administrations. Between 1874, when King Kalakaua from Hawaii arrived as the first official visitor, and the 1970s, formal visitors traveled frequently to places in the United States, and usually American administrations were well aware that the way they represented the United States was going to shape the visitor’s notions about American life.12 In comparison to the burgeoning official travel taking place in continental Europe, however, the number of visits to the United States initially remained reasonably low. Until the late 1930s, merely forty-two official visitors set sail to the United States (on average less than one visit a year). Indeed, before 1937, there not even existed a Protocol Office within the administration. It was only with the beginning of World War II that visitors began to come more frequently as foreign heads of government increasingly sought to engage in top-level diplomatic consultations with the Roosevelt administration (here consultations indeed had paramount importance). If time permitted, they sometimes also traveled to other places in the United States.13 At the end of the war, moreover, the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco drew dozens of government delegates to the United States, giving U.S. protocol officials an exceptional chance to project images of the United States on a worldwide scale. In the following years, the number of official visitors increased further, though in light of America’s new role in world affairs, it still remained surprisingly low well into the early 1950s. But then the number of official visits suddenly began to mushroom. Fuelled on the one hand by a “revolution of rising mobility”14

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that made it increasingly easier to travel across the Atlantic via airplane and, on the other hand, by the emergence of dozens of new states brought about by decolonization, the number of visitors expanded dramatically during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Gone were the times when the Protocol Office had greeted one visitor a year, the New York Times noted in 1957: now heads of state came “to Washington in swift succession—even simultaneously.”15 During Kennedy’s first year in office alone, thirty-five official visitors traveled to the United States (excluding foreign ministers), most of them coming from newly independent countries.16 As protocol chief, Angier Biddle Duke observed half-jokingly on this phenomenon, “to prove true sovereignty, a new nation’s leader must run up the new flag, take the oath of office, and visit with President Kennedy.”17 Under these circumstances, official visits began to assume a new urgency during the 1950s and 1960s. Not only were they essential to get to know new leaders personally, they were also an opportunity to make America visible as a model of modernity that was superior to the Soviet Union’s. In a world ever more interconnected, in which images and impressions of the United States (as well as those of the Soviet Union) proliferated on a widening scale, American administrations therefore increasingly perceived official visits as a key format to produce, manage, or correct foreign notions of America. Consequently, policy makers also made full use of all representational possibilities that official visits offered them. Usually, this involved daily photo releases to local print media abroad, picture window exhibits in USIS centers, and the dissemination of USIS picture pamphlets. Much to the merit of USIA’s new director, Edward Murrow, in particular, films turned into a principal means of representing official visits abroad during the early 1960s. Films about official visits, Murrow reasoned in 1961, would be “supplementary and complementary” to foreign media coverage yet would still be the “main vehicle for [the] long-range impact” of visits. They were intended “to emphasize important events and those aspects of the visit which demonstrate the friendly relations,” and at the same time, they should underline the vitality of cooperation and the mutuality of interests between the United States and the visitor’s country. Murrow placed much emphasis on the introduction of a new filmic technique he termed the “over-the-shoulder-approach”: according to this approach, films were going “to provide a view of the United States as seen through the eyes of the VIP,”18 and so they would document and recreate the visitor’s experience in the United States. However, far from being mere neutral documentaries, films also offered USIA an

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opportunity to create specific representations of the United States that, as the underlying rationale went, would in the best case lead to a positive emotional affirmation of American prosperity among foreign viewers. Equally important, in terms of representations of U.S. prosperity, was the actual itinerary that foreign visitors followed when touring the country. Usually, that itinerary was negotiated long in advance between the Protocol Office, the U.S. embassy in the visitor’s country, and the visitor’s office, typically on the basis of recommendations made by the Protocol Office. However, U.S. administrations were always open to take into account the wants and desires of the visitor. Those could range from simple personal wishes—Tanzanian President Nyerere wished to do a motorcade tour of Washington, D.C. when visiting in 1963, Indian President Nehru wanted to see Disneyland in 1961—to timing questions (how long would the visitor stay where) to the more fundamental question of what the visitor was going to see. Visitors thus could make choices and reject stops that the Protocol Office proposed; for example, German Chancellor Adenauer rejected the idea of a side trip to Philadelphia in 1962 (where he was supposed to see liberty bell), Nyerere declined the offer of a farm visit in 1963, and neither Adenauer nor his successor Erhard opted for a visit to the U.S Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, although the Protocol Office repeatedly pushed for it between 1962 and 1964. At the same time, the possibility to make choices also opened up an opportunity for visitors to pursue their own agenda during visits to the United States. As a result, official visits could serve a dual purpose insofar as visitors also utilized them to communicate messages toward their domestic audiences. For this reason, for instance, meetings with students from the visitor’s home country were a popular feature in the schedule, particularly for visitors from newly independent countries: in those meetings, the visitor could fashion himself as caring father of the nation (less often as mother at that time). European visitors, in turn, often took care to build a trip to the United States into their domestic reelection campaigns (long before Obama had the same idea in 2007) since a warm welcome in the United States could not only underline how much they were respected as national leaders abroad, but typically also boosted their domestic popularity (the best case in point is Adenauer’s visit in 1953, which was part of his election campaign). However, even though visitors had some leeway in shaping the final itinerary, it is important to note that they usually only rejected proposals for single stops—if at all—but rarely the complete itinerary

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the Protocol Office recommended. Thus, U.S. administrations could usually predetermine to a large extent where visitors would go, what foreign media would report about a visit, and thereby, which pictures would emerge from it. Accordingly, much work went into preparing itineraries and programs. As one early commentator observed aptly, for the Protocol Office, official visits were therefore often operations comparable “to mounting a Pacific Island invasion and, as a spectacle, to staging a De-Mille epic.”19 Indeed, that comparison captured quite well the Protocol Office’s work. Much like theatre directors, protocol officials made use of different stage settings, of stage props, actors, and symbolic objects to mobilize emotions and to create vivid impressions of American capabilities, intentions, and values. And just as in a theatre play, officials organized the story they were telling about America in different acts and with a certain dramaturgy. Foreign visitors, in turn, therefore often found themselves in a curious double bind: they were at the same time part of a play staged for their home audience—and one of its main spectators.

Figure 3.1.  A photo opportunity with the Lincoln Memorial in the background: U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk bids farewell to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.20

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Typically, a visit began with an arrival ceremony at St. Andrew’s air force base before the ceremony was shifted to the White House grounds in 1962. Similar to the opening scene in a theater play, the ceremony was important to create a general emotional atmosphere of cordial welcome and mutual respect, a goal usually achieved through performative elements like trumpet players, handshakes, and friendly welcome remarks. Moreover, it also gave the Protocol Office a chance to stage the visit’s first picture opportunity, even though the initial setting at St. Andrew’s limited visual possibilities mostly to stereotyped “handshake” pictures. This only changed with the Kennedy administration’s decision to replace the ceremony at St. Andrew’s with a new one on the White House grounds where it began with the visitor’s helicopter arrival.21 Now, the new spectacular setting itself offered photographers and camera operators a range of exciting picture motives, backgrounds, and camera perspectives, and thereby responded well to the growing aesthetic demands of visual media. Indeed, as journalist Peter Lisagor noted, the new arrival ceremony had “such obvious appeal to one’s sense of pageantry—with the Executive Mansion as a backdrop and the Washington Monument rising majestically in the foreground—that one wonders why the move was not made earlier.”22 The new White House arrival instantly embedded visitors within Washington’s symbolic landscape of monuments, museums, and memorials, trips to which were usually scheduled for the following days. With their manifold references to Ancient imperial architecture, landmarks such as the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, or the Capitol not only represented the struggles and achievements of American history, but also introduced official visitors and foreign media to various aspects of America’s civilizing mission. The Lincoln Memorial, for example, stressed America’s timeless commitment to freedom and North–South unity.23 Few first-time visitors could therefore get around climbing its steps in order to see the huge and unswerving Lincoln statue that watched over the course of the world. To drive home the point, an official usually also recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg address once the breathless visitor had arrived on top of the memorial. Especially visitors from newly independent countries could thereby get a vivid sense of America’s sympathy toward postcolonial aspirations for freedom—and of its willingness to make sacrifices for freedom’s cause in the world. At the Capitol, often next on the schedule, visitors got to know America’s longstanding democratic traditions and its mission to foster democracy abroad, especially if they got to address a joint session of Congress. Such

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an address was often—not always, though—a civilizing act in itself, because it forced visitors from nondemocratic countries to comply momentarily with democratic rituals. Early speakers that had to do so, for example, included King Albert from Belgium in October 1919 and Anastasio Somoza from Nicaragua in May 1939. In both of these instances, King Albert and Somoza effectively engaged in subversive acts against themselves, for their very performances in front of a joint Congress session demonstrated to their home audiences that there was an alternative political model available. On the other hand, the privilege of delivering an address to Congress was also frequently given to leaders from countries that had just made the transition to democracy, as for example Nehru from India in 1949, West German Chancellor Adenauer in 1957, Argentinean President Frondizi in 1959, and a host of other visitors from newly independent countries in the early 1960s.24 Here, the format served another civilizing purpose, namely, to strengthen democratic beliefs among foreign audiences and to sustain the community of values that bound the speaker’s society and the United States together. Sometimes, visiting speakers also explicitly affirmed their belief in democracy’s civilizing nature. Nehru, for example, exchanged the native dress he wore for a Western suit and tie before he delivered his address to Congress in 1949.25 Both the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol were natural stage settings that offered visual media multiple picture possibilities. At the same time, their symbolism effectively communicated America’s claim to global leadership. However, in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration also increasingly had to utilize them to counter the negative visual images of violent American racism that circulated in global media and blatantly contradicted the universal values American agencies preached abroad.26 This required careful crafting, as the visit of Tanganyika’s president, Julius Nyerere, in July 1963 illustrates. Taking place only a few weeks after police forces had harassed civil-rights activists with terrible brutality in Birmingham, Alabama—pictures of which had been printed around the world—the visit offered an opportunity to overwrite such pictures of racial violence, as the Kennedy administration realized. As the State Department emphasized, it therefore desired “naturally . . . maximum exposure Nyerere for mutual interests Tanganyika and US.”27 Likewise, the embassy cabled from Dar es Salaam: “In light importance civil rights advance in U.S., and nonracialism in Africa, believe ceremonials should not be too low-key.”28 Officials also advanced the idea of a recorded conversation between Nyerere and Attorney General

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Robert Kennedy about interracial problems that would be distributed to USIA, Tanganyikan, and American media, in order to “identify [the] U.S. sympathetically with African problems and vice-versa,” as the State Department reasoned.29 Yet, Nyerere stated plainly that “he did not wish [to] become involved in [the] United States civil rights controversy”30 and wanted to keep ceremonies down to a minimum.31 Still, in its pamphlets distributed in Tanganyika, USIA used the visit in order to brush up the paling image of America’s multiracial democracy. One of the pictures included in the pamphlet showed a smiling Nyerere in friendly interaction with white Americans on the steps of Congress. Apolitical and circumstantial as it may seem at first sight, the picture in fact contained a highly political message, especially if juxtaposed with the violence pictures from Birmingham, Alabama. Where the latter had suggested that American democracy had collapsed into violence, the picture of Nyerere showed an American democracy still very much in shape: respectful, orderly, harmonious, peaceful—and multiracial.32 In its subtext, moreover, the picture sought to defend and restore a normative ideal of American democracy whose legitimate site of political conduct, as it suggested, was not the protest on the street, but the orderly process embodied by traditional institutions.33 Picture-making stops at the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol were often followed by a visit to Arlington Cemetery where official visitors placed a wreath in front of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Such wreath-laying ceremonies, to be sure, were standard features of most international visits. Yet, particularly in the context of the Vietnam War, they were also gestures, by which visitors openly expressed their respect for America’s sacrifices and their loyalty toward its policies. Since the end of 1963, moreover, the trip to Arlington also included a stop at Kennedy’s grave where visitors usually placed another wreath. Here again, the words engraved in Kennedy’s tombstone openly confronted official visitors with America’s missionary self-image: “The Energy—the Faith—the Devotion; which we bring to this endeavor; will light our country; and all who serve it; and the glow from that fire; can truly light the world.”34 Harboring many of America’s heroes fallen in battle for seemingly universal ideals, Arlington cemetery was part of a symbolic repertoire that stressed the sacrifices and the revolutionary heritage of the United States. Depending on the visitor, that repertoire could also include sites such as Williamsburg/Virginia, Mount Vernon, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and Boston, and a stop at one or more of those sites was always an important part of the longer official

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visits (short working visits did not leave enough time). Thus, visitors could vividly relive and learn about America’s past as they toured the remains of (reconstructed) colonial Williamsburg in a carriage, visited the memorials to independence in Philadelphia, or strolled over the battle fields of Gettysburg. From the point of view of the Protocol Office, such stops not only had an intrinsic entertainment value but also were important for sending different political messages. For one, they stressed the common revolutionary and anticolonial experiences that bound the United States and newly independent countries together. In addition, they also told a success story of American democracy’s march forward, whose ideals had helped the country to survive even the most dramatic struggles. More so, as for instance stops in Boston were intended to underline, those ideals had also laid the groundwork for America’s prosperity, a message that once again also pointed to the benefits that foreign integration into an American world order would bring. Accordingly, American officials told Indian newspapers during Nehru’s 1949 visit to Boston that if Nehru saw “what free enterprise has done physically,” he would realize that “India is at heart . . . on the side of the free West.” Indeed, as Indian newspaper correspondents themselves reported after the visit, a historic city like Boston easily stirred the soul of everybody who identified with “humanity’s struggle for freedom.”35 If Arlington, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, or Boston introduced the visitor to the past of American democracy, the final stay in New York always hinted at its global presence. Serious urban and social problems notwithstanding, New York’s tangle of steep street canyons, lively traffic, skyscrapers, and luminescent advertising boards had not lost any of the appeal that had drawn immigrants, artists, and filmmakers to its shores since the late nineteenth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, it still epitomized the future to many—or was at least presented in this way to the official visitor who, of course, never saw New York’s rough and unsettling areas of social conflict.36 Rather, foreign guests visited those sites that represented America’s affluence: Times Square with its dazzling advertising boards, splendid art museums, or the Empire State Building (and later, of course, the World Trade Center). In addition, boat cruises to the Statue of Liberty one last time reminded visitors of the global missionary ideals that stood behind U.S. foreign policy. More important, foreign guests usually also paid a visit to the United Nations (UN) headquarters, which fulfilled an important and final symbolic purpose: since visual media commonly illustrated them with pictures that showed the UN buildings as part of New York’s skyline,

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they effectively highlighted the political claim that the world, represented by the UN, was not only an organic part of the United States, but that the United States was also the world’s political center. Without the United States, those pictures suggested, there would be no UN. Thereby, the final stay in New York effectively condensed and concluded the political core message the Protocol Office had built during the entire trip, namely, that by virtue of its history and of the ideals it represented, the United States had the will and the power to lead the way in world politics.

Visions of Prosperity and the Benefits of Knowledge Between their first days in Washington, D.C. and their final stay in New York, official visitors often ventured deeper into the United States where they encountered America’s economic accomplishments and knowledge resources. Never failing to impress visitors in general, stops at the key sites of America’s economic progress held a particular value for visitors from newly independent countries because they offered them shining visions of what would be possible in their own future—and thereby underlined why it was worth emulating America’s socioeconomic model. In fact, some visitors experienced the blessings of American modernity even before they arrived in the United States. Sudanese President Abboud, for example, lacking a proper airplane for the transAtlantic passage, was furnished a lavish U.S. aircraft since the State Department fully realized the “very great prestige value of state visits” and sought to avoid “invidious comparisons . . . with the Soviets” who had sent a “plush Ilyuahin” to Khartoum a few months earlier.37 As the State Department emphasized in late 1961, jet planes in particular had such a high symbolic value that their use was “rapidly becoming necessary to the overall success of state and official visits.”38 Indeed, as mentioned above, soon visitors were also taken to the White House by helicopter—another innovation that introduced the visitor to America’s technological capabilities as soon as he arrived in Washington, D.C. Apart from jets and helicopters, more profound examples of American economic achievements such as industrial plants or modern farms of course abounded, and usually the Protocol Office insisted on scheduling trips to them. Often included in the itinerary, for example, was a stopover in Detroit where visitors toured Henry Ford’s car factories and the General Motors (GM) production

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facilities. In addition to offering appealing picture opportunities, such tours showcased Fordist mass production in action and illustrated how America had entered the “age of high-mass consumption.”39 To underline the point, the Protocol Office sometimes also arranged further side trips to retail stores, model supermarkets, department stores, or shopping malls.40 Thereby, the Protocol Office not only framed and created specific snapshot pictures of American prosperity, but also formulated a promise of universal applicability: all of this, as those examples suggested, would be available and achievable for the visitor’s society as well—if only it followed and recognized America’s political leadership. Seen from a representational viewpoint, perhaps the most effective—and doubtless the most popular—place to formulate such claims and promises was the TVA, a complex of dams and cooperative agricultural farms stretched along the Tennessee river that had been built during the 1930s.41 Once described as a “world classroom”42 for foreign nations by the Christian Science Monitor, the TVA was a major attraction throughout the 1950s and 1960s, because most postcolonial countries were keen on erecting dams in their own countries as they were embarking on transformative modernization efforts.43 Foreign visitors, as Assistant Secretary George McGhee recognized as early as 1951, were therefore “always anxious to visit the TVA and always come away impressed.”44 Likewise, President Kennedy acknowledged in 1963 that the TVA’s impact on foreign notions of America was precisely the field where it made one of its “most important contributions.” Foreign visitors, Kennedy praised the TVA, come here and gain an impression . . . of vitality and growth, and the ability of people to work together in a free society. This has been one of the most powerful advertisements for the picture of the United States around the world that we have had, for these people come from nations whose poverty threatens to exceed their hopes, who do not feel they can solve their problems. They come here and compare this valley today to what it was 30 years ago, and they leave here feeling that they, too, can solve their problems in a system of freedom.45

Indeed, already the sheer magnitude of the dams overwhelmed visitors as they went up and down in elevators to tour power houses or enjoy the view from above. In addition, a subsequent stop at one of the TVA’s agricultural model farms often built further excitement. Here visitors could see for themselves how the TVA had transformed waste lands into fertile soil. Usually, they also witnessed a short demonstration of modern farming equipment. Visiting the TVA in 1961,

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Nigerian Prime Minister Balewa, for example, was so fascinated by the tractors assembled on the farm that he decided to explore modern farming technology head-on by climbing on a tractor and putting himself in the driver’s seat. Once Balewa had returned to Nigeria, he confessed to a Nigerian radio audience how impressed he had been by the TVA. In his speech, he described extensively how the TVA had turned an “economically weak region” and the Tennessee river into a “gigantic inland waterway carrying agricultural products and manufactured goods to a growing market,” which contributed greatly “to the general welfare” of the United States. The trip, he confided, had convinced him that “the United States is not only a friend of Nigeria but also a nation with immense resources which is prepared to contribute in a substantial way to the development of Nigeria.” More so, as he stated on another occasion, the TVA provided “lessons of practical application to the development of the River Niger Delta.”46 As Balewa’s remarks showed, a stop at the TVA could indeed have a substantial impact on its visitors and, potentially, also on the notions that foreign societies in general had of America’s resources and capabilities. At a time when practically all newly independent countries desired a rapid and grand-scale modernization, the TVA apparently provided a powerful inspirational role model that exemplified how newly independent countries could achieve those socioeconomic transformations. More important, it also demonstrated what American engineering and know-how could accomplish, and thereby accentuated the concrete and practical benefits that loyalty toward American empire would yield for newly independent countries. A stop at the TVA was therefore also part of another important narrative that the Protocol Office usually built during longer visits and that emphasized the availability and global applicability of American knowledge and technical know-how.47 The easiest way to build such a narrative and to make visitors aware of America’s enormous knowledge of resources was, of course, to take them to America’s centers of knowledge themselves: to universities, engineering laboratories, or expert councils. In particular, east coast universities like Georgetown University, New York University, and Columbia University were popular destinations during official visits, sometimes the Protocol Office also scheduled stops at Harvard and Yale. If the foreign guest came from an African country, the program usually included stops at universities with an African studies program, most notably Boston and Northwestern University.48 On a general level, such stops fulfilled a basic advertising

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function (as much for the United States as for the university visited), and accordingly, USIA films about visits often included sequences of neat and inviting campus greens, old-fashioned buildings, or of students sitting on benches eagerly studying books and jotting down notes on notepads. At the same time, such ceremonies also drew attention to the value of higher education and underlined the importance of knowledge and education as prerequisites of prosperity. Yet, from the point of view of imperial integration, simply taking visitors to universities did of course not suffice. Rather, to persuade visitors of the benefits that waited for them in case of a close cooperation with the United States, protocol officials also had to visualize the extent of American knowledge, the ways through which it was being produced, and the benefits it brought to the world. Accordingly, visitors were often also taken around on university campuses where they stopped in libraries or inspected laboratories. Upon his arrival at Northwestern University, for instance, Nigerian Prime Minister Balewa was immediately ushered through the African Studies Center and on to the African Studies Reading Room where the staff had prepared a display of Nigerian newspapers and fact sheets that illustrated how well American experts and students were informed about Nigeria. Later, Balewa and the center’s director, Professor Melville Herskovits, did a short press conference, during which Herskovits presented Balewa a pile of books published by the center’s scholars about Nigeria. Quite literally the tower of books served here as a tangible manifestation of the insights American experts had assembled about Nigeria. Evidently impressed by this towering wisdom, Balewa expressed his hope that at some day Nigerian scholars would be able to publish similar works about their country. Even after his return to Nigeria, Balewa continued to think about his visit to Northwestern University. In a radio broadcast, he specifically mentioned its African Studies program and promised his listeners “that by exchange of students and other means Nigeria . . . will make use of the results of research for social and cultural developments in Africa.”50 Other visitors, in the meantime, had the chance to participate more closely in the very process of American knowledge production, particularly when they visited engineering labs or testing facilities and witnessed the newest experiments. Here, knowledge did not remain an abstract value, but at times literally materialized in front of visitors with thunder and lightning. Particularly President Radhakrishnan of India could enjoy this kind of experience as he observed the launch of a research satellite in Cape Canaveral and toured an entire experimental concourse near Denver where he took

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Figure 3.2.  Tanganyikan President Julius Nyerere enjoys the view of New York’s skyline. In the 1960s, official visits typically included a final stay in New York to showcase American affluence as well as America’s political claim to world leadership.49

part in experiments that probed the stability of giant dams. As USIA’s movie about the visit underscored, those experiments had invaluable effects outside the laboratory because they had made it possible to erect a massive and stable dam in Colorado. The dam now allowed for a cultivation of dry land in Colorado that was independent from the weather. The subtext was obvious: this was precisely the kind of knowledge India needed for its modernization efforts—and the United States was willing to make it available. At times, USIA movies about particular visits also dwelled extensively on the benefits America’s educational training of foreign students would have for the visitor’s country. A good case in point was the movie about Haile Selassie’s visit in 1963. The movie introduced several Ethiopian students studying at Harvard and Cornell. As the film’s narrator asserted, those students were becoming “an important resource” for Ethiopian development because they increased “their knowledge in the universities of America” and were dedicated to “quickening the pace of Ethiopian development.” One of the students portrayed in the movie studied agronomy—his specialty was animal husbandry—and was shown working in the laboratories of

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Cornell University. As the narrator noted, the “laboratory and field experiments” he did at Cornell “relate to the types of problems he will find in helping to attain greater yields from Ethiopian fields and livestock.” Another student was shown “mastering the rudiments of flight at a Washington flying school” in order to become “a commercial pilot.” As the movie pointed out, he was learning aviation skills that were “of importance to his country.” Overall, the movie thus illustrated through vivid examples how “the knowledge and skills of America” were being made available to foreign countries. Therewith, it also condensed the broader core message that stood behind most demonstration effects staged during official visits, namely, that compliance with American empire would pay off in all fields for foreign countries.

The Americans: Culture and Civil Society From beginning to end, during motorcade or ticker tape parades, evening entertainment, or football games, visitors also frequently met with ordinary Americans and got to know their culture. Again, such encounters did rarely come by chance, but rather fulfilled wellplanned symbolic purposes. Specifically, meetings with Americans offered important clues about the general character of American society and its intentions—and hence also shaped decisively the degree to which visitors and the societies they represented would feel at ease with American empire in the world. “Lacking the ornate ceremonies of other nations,” Truman’s Chief of Protocol Stanley Woodward explained on this score, the United States depended “on the friendliness and vitality of the American people to speak for the country,” which indeed, was a special source for fashioning lasting impressions: informal contacts with Americans, Woodward suggested, made his “job much easier than those of my counterparts in other countries who must depend on ceremonial traditions to impress visitors.”51 In this sense, encounters with Americans and their culture may also be seen as vital tools for forming what historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has called “emotional elective affinities.”52 Until the mid-1960s, one of the most used features to create contact possibilities between official visitors and ordinary Americans were motorcade parades through Washington, D.C. A traditional form of public political ceremony that had its roots in ancient times, parades worked two ways. On the one hand, they gave Americans a chance to watch the visitor who usually drove by in an open

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limousine, and on the other hand, they allowed the visitor to review the Americans who usually gave a cheerful welcome. Especially on sunny days, motorcade parades were a fun event. Marching bands played along the parade route, the city was decorated with huge welcome banners, and Washingtonians waved the visitor (while the visitor waved Washingtonians). In the best case, parades therewith created an entertaining atmosphere and allowed the visitor to get a few first positive impressions of cheerful and friendly Americans. By the mid-1960s, however, officials began to feel that the effect of formal parades had worn off. Within the Johnson administration, Stuart Symington bemoaned that “without the schoolchildren of the Washington area to help line the streets, parades tend to encounter slim pickings,” not actually being the sign of warm welcome the Protocol Office expected. On the other hand, Symington cautioned with racist undertones, “release of only public school children in the Washington area could present an unbalanced ethnic picture to the visitor.” So why not, Symington asked, do something differently and assemble a “more manageable crowd with a shared sense of excitement on the White House grounds” instead? In company of the president and the visitor, the “warm and enthusiastic crowd” could witness one or more “suggested spectacles” such as “a drill team,” a “high school marching band,” a “sport display such as U.S. athletes executing pole vault, broad and high jump,” or a “display of American Indian dance, square dancing, or ethnic dance related to the origin of the visitor.” By and large this would “present a uniquely American display of excellence without getting too much into ‘circus’ atmosphere,” and so it would more than compensate for motorcades. Symington closed by underlining that “the exposure thus required of the head of state before the eyes of a large, friendly crowd of Americans viewing an all-American show, could do much to relax him and create a favorable atmosphere for the visit.”53 Symington’s recommendations in effect sealed the fate of motorcade parades, which were soon replaced by White House arrival ceremonies. Still, arrival ceremonies would continue to remain a constant headache for American officials throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly the Nixon administration remained sensitive to “atmosphere.” In 1969, Nixon himself directed to get “a much bigger crowd” during future ceremonies and to develop some way to “encourage having these people cheer” after he had been disappointed by the crowd reactions during the arrival ceremony for King Hussein from Jordan. In this context, he also considered to admit tourists to the ceremony, but showed himself, as Haldeman reported,

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“somewhat concerned about the appearance of the general run of tourists” and suggested that “at least up in front” there should be located people “properly attired.” Eventually, the administration decided to rely on older schoolchildren instead.54 If the appearance of American society during the arrival ceremony was sometimes cause of concern for policy makers, the state dinners usually following in the evening guaranteed that no unfavorable surprises would occur. In the protected spaces of the White House, visitors encountered all the glamour, luxury, and high culture an affluent society could muster, embodied as much in the jewelry and evening gowns of the women as in the concerts and plays performed on stage. Those ranged from performances of Mozart’s Magic Flute (performed for President Radhakrishnan from India in 1963) over chamber concerts (for German Chancellor Kiesinger in 1967) to Duke Ellington concerts (as in the case of President Senghor from Senegal in 1966). On occasion, even Shakespeare plays were performed.55 The White House always prepared meticulously for those kinds of events, sometimes even feeling troubled by minor irritants like wrong seating arrangements. Those could, as Malcolm Kilduff of the Kennedy administration worried, make “a nation as big & great as ours is, look silly.”56 Kilduff’s concern with the appearances that wrong seating arrangements could build points to the degree to which American administrations evaluated every single program element with an eye toward the impressions and pictures those would make. At the same time, it points to the importance that American administrations attached to the cultural events staged during official visits. Indeed, USIS offices abroad often actively requested specific pictures not only of “visits to historical sites” and “visits to universities” but also of visits “to other cultural groups” or of “encounters with ordinary Americans.” Such pictures, USIS India explained on one occasion, would give foreign observers “some idea of [the] breadth and diversity of [the] United States as seen by the”57 visitor. In fact, pictures thereby often fulfilled an extremely important symbolic purpose: by showing the diversity of the United States, they suggested that the United States embodied the world’s multicultural heritage and therefore not only had much in common with foreign societies but also had a superior understanding of their wants and concerns. The program of official visits therefore often also included trips to social institutions that represented the vibrancy and openness of American culture and civil society. In Washington, D.C., for example, visitors from Islamic countries were regularly driven to the Islamic

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Center, a nicely decorated mosque that had opened at the end of the 1950s. Many of them expressed their surprise at finding such a venue in a country they had been mostly considered Christian. For guests with a Christian background, in contrast, the Protocol Office often arranged a church service if desired—thereby underlining the shared religious values and cultural heritage that bound Christian societies together with the United States.58 In between, visitors often also had informal contacts with ordinary Americans and their culture. Here, too, the representational repertoire protocol officials drew from was rich and could range from watching a football game to granting the visitor the special honor of swinging a baseball bat in company of the New York Yankees. Some visitors were also surprised with “spontaneous” garden parties or did an overnight stop at a typical farm house—including, of course, dinner with the farm family. In most cases, the rationale behind such activities was to give visitors an insight of how Americans lived and what their passions were, but in themselves they always also symbolized the welcoming character of American society per se.59 Nothing, though, could match a stay at a presidential ranch, be it Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm in the 1950s or the LBJ ranch in the 1960s. At their farms, American presidents underwent a peculiar temporary metamorphosis from official commander-in-chiefs into private housemen who offered their visitors entry into what seemed to be their normal private life (notwithstanding the state of emergency brought upon presidential homes by the media invasion that followed the president’s and the visitor’s retreat). Moreover, because farms were traditional symbols of the American self-made individual and embodied the essential spirit of American values and everyday life, they also offered a perfect setting to stage a condensed image of the archetypical American (represented by the president), as hardworking, reliable, hospitable, well-meaning, and by conclusion, therewith extremely trustworthy.60 In this sense, the private again served a deeply political purpose: namely, to build trust and confidence in American leadership. Or, as Chief of Protocol Duke explained about visits to the LBJ ranch, the “warm and friendly informality, well and invisibly organized” at the ranch usually enveloped “the principals in a glow” that could not “but contribute to the successful prosecution of such important meetings.”61 A good example for how visits to the LBJ ranch were utilized in order to build and foster special emotional relationships between the United States and foreign societies was the visit of German Chancellor Erhard in late 1963. Coming at a moment when West Germans

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still hotly debated whether they should rather align with France or with the United States, the visit was prepared meticulously, wellreflected by the fact that German and American advance men even determined the exact kinds of photo opportunities they would allow: some meeting pictures plus one big photo opportunity on the “front porch of the ranch.”62 While Johnson and Erhard did have several formal meetings at the ranch on Saturday and Sunday, the visit’s core program revolved around informal cultural activities, which began with Erhard’s and Johnson’s joint participation in an early Sunday morning church service. After church, both went on to enjoy a real Texan barbeque party at the Stonewall High School that offered the chancellor all the pleasant joys of a lively Texan fair, including piles of beef, a Mexican music combo, square dance, and performances of folkloristic German songs brought to Texas by German settlers. At the end of the show, Johnson fitted large Cowboy hats on the heads of all members of the German delegation. During the visit, German participants and observers therewith not only got to witness lively examples of America’s everyday culture—the ranch, church, barbecue, German folk dance, cowboy hats—but also experienced an intense emotional atmosphere of intimacy, closeness, trust, and friendship between Johnson and Erhard. German media, at least, were exhilarated by the visit. Erhard’s activities as well as the ranch were featured prominently in television reports and photographs, and newspapers lauded the Texan “festival of friendship”63 whose “Ranch House politics” had “brought Washington and Bonn considerably closer together.”64 Apparently, the visit was successful in fostering a new sense of German emotional belonging to an American world order.65 Erhard might have enjoyed the privilege of a ranch visit, but he missed out on what many official visitors considered one of the emotional highlights of their trip—encounters with American mass culture.66 Those usually occurred on Broadway, in Hollywood’s film studios, or in Disneyland, which was particularly popular among Indian visitors. With its artificial facades, comic figures coming to life, and reproductions of American historical events, the entertainment park was a glittering cosmos of its own, an enchanting emotional environment that offered, as USIA praised abroad, universal fun and enjoyment “dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts which have created America.”67 Disneyland thus allowed visitors to reexperience in a feel-good mode some key demonstration effects staged before during the visit and threw up an important question for foreign visitors and the societies they represented: how, after all, could

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one mistrust America’s political leadership around the world if its “empire of fun”68 created so many positive emotional experiences?

Journeys to the Future and Imperial Order Twenty years after Khrushchev, another leader from a Communist country stopped by in the United States: Deng Xiaoping, the new leader of the People’s Republic of China. Once again, the Protocol Office had done its homework, and so, like Khrushchev, Deng was taken on an eventful tour through America’s landscapes of prosperity, beginning with a gala performance at the Kennedy Center and followed by stops at a Ford Motor Company assembly plant, a solar energy facility at Georgia Tech, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a side trip to a Texan barbecue plus a rodeo show, and a visit to Boeing in Seattle. As Deng confessed later, he was so exhilarated by what he saw in the United States that he could not sleep for several days, eventually concluding that, as Odd Westad has noted, “what he saw in the United States was what he wanted for China in the future.”69 In retrospect, it seems that Deng’s visit was perhaps one of the last visits to the United States, which were transformative in the sense that they stimulated emotional exhilaration and moved official visitors to launch policies that would create the kind of prosperity they had experienced in the United States—or at least to make it an essential reference point for their own modernizing endeavors. Indeed, already by the early 1970s, the Nixon administration began to wonder, as Nixon advisor Dwight Chapin wrote, “how State Visits could be changed around and made more interesting” in order to get away from the “stereo-typed way we now do things.”70 Likewise, Nixon himself showed himself “very intrigued about the possibility of holding State Visits outside of Washington,” not necessarily in big cities, but in “real off-beat type places” like Jackson Hole, Wyoming, or Yosemite National Park.71 Such ideas responded to a growing concern among the Nixon administration that official visits began to lose their magic touch, a process that clearly has been completed today where official visits are routine events that are hardly noticed anymore (interestingly, though, the Protocol Office still draws from the same representational strategies developed in the 1940s to 1970s, even though the TVA has been replaced by Silicon Valley). Yet, today’s relative insignificance of official visits should not lead us to disregard the important role that official visits had between the 1950s and 1970s. As occasions that allowed American

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administrations to stage snapshot pictures of American prosperity, official visits at the same time reflected and radicalized the growing centrality that picture making attained within American administrations between the 1950s and 1970s. This became particularly obvious under the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. Against longstanding diplomatic traditions, Nixon directed to drop departure statements once a visitor left and merely do a “picture opportunity of the President and the guest”72 instead. In addition, his administration revolutionized the way picture opportunities were planned and prepared during visits. Where before administrations had operated on the expectation that a stop at a certain site would guarantee good pictures by itself, the Nixon administration now began to take detailed control even of the concrete, single pictures that were to come out of those stops. The final picture decision, in other words, was not left to photographers and camera operators anymore. Instead, the Nixon administration now prearranged and predetermined the camera angles that they would use, the exact motives that they would get, and the backgrounds that would appear in the pictures. Especially the visit of Soviet leader Brezhnev in 1973 illustrated how carefully the Nixon administration by now prepared the visit’s visual images. At Camp David, Haldeman and his staff evaluated every pictorial possibility of literally every single step Nixon and Brezhnev would make when staying there. Eventually Bruce Whelihan came up with four picture options: arrival and departure pictures, a “walking picture,” and a “meeting picture.” According to the plan, the arrival picture would be taken from a “bull-pen constructed adjacent to the helipad” with Lieutenant Commander Todd being instructed to make sure that Nixon and Brezhnev would depart the helicopter “together and alone” and without any further helicopters standing by on the grounds. Because a signing ceremony was planned for the next day in Washington, D.C., Whelihan recommended additionally to do a “picture walking” at Camp David in order to “establish atmosphere.” As Whelihan reported, the picture walk would best take place between Dogwood lodge (where Brezhnev stayed) and Aspen lodge, because then “the background for the shot would be Dogwood, the grassy area where Old Maple was situated, the pond adjacent to the front door of Aspen and Aspen itself.” Moreover, Whelihan advised to admit two camera operators for the coverage in order to allow networks “two angles and sufficient film,” which they could thus “sequence . . . smoothly” in their reports. Another picture possibility was a “meeting picture” that showed Nixon and Brezhnev “seated, immediately adjacent to the fireplace in Aspen.” Finally, and in light

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of the signing ceremony taking place in Washington, D.C. after the Camp David stay, Whelihan opted for a “departure picture,” the “only Camp David picture that would tie into the story line ‘President and Brezhnev have returned from Camp David Meetings to Sign Agreement in new Spirit of Camp David.’” 73 The efforts the Nixon administration put into creating specific pictures points to the fact that by the early 1970s U.S. administrations clearly valued the pictures emerging from visits as high as their diplomatic substance, which in itself was a consequence of the growing importance of visual media around the world. Yet it also had to do with the fact that American administrations fully realized the symbolic potentials that resided in the pictures emerging from visits: by introducing foreign observers to America’s civilizing mission, the TVA, educational institutions, and the social and cultural diversity of the United States, those pictures gave foreign societies a sense of the resources and the intentions that underlay America’s claim to world power; and, in the best case, mobilized foreign affection for it. The empire, as foreign policy makers understood, needed pictures, and it was the format of official visits that could deliver them in novel and exciting ways well into the 1970s.

Chapter 4

Progress Popular Aspirations, the Global South, and the Politics of Imagination It is through contact with what are called the Developed Market Economies that we in the Third World have become conscious of the twentieth-century world. —Julius Nyerere To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. —John F Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961

In one of the key works on cultural globalization, anthropologist Ar-

jun Appadurai remembers his first contacts with “modernity” in the early 1960s: “In my own early life in Bombay,” he writes, “the experience of modernity was notably synaesthetic and largely pretheoretical. I saw and smelled modernity reading Life and American college catalogs at the United States Information Service library, seeing Bgrade films (and some A-grade ones) from Hollywood at the Eros Theatre, five hundred yards from my apartment building.” Gradually, as the established Appadurai writes about the pretheoretical anthropologist, he “lost the England that I had earlier imbibed in my Victorian schoolbooks” and drifted “from one sort of postcolonial subjectivity . . . to another: the harsher, sexier, more addictive New

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World of Humphrey Bogart reruns, Harold Robbins, Time, and social science, American-style.”1 In the years when the young Appadurai looked with aspiration toward American modernity from postcolonial Bombay, over in the United States, social scientists began to theorize about the implications the contacts Appadurai and millions of others in the “developing world”2 made with Western modernity. As Walt Rostow and Max Millikan, two scientists from MIT’s Center for International Studies, observed, global cultural flows and the revolution in mass communications had led to “a great world revolution in the horizons and expectations of the world’s peoples.” According to the social scientists, that revolution had created “new aspirations for education, social improvement, and economic development.”3 Yet in seeking to satisfy those aspirations, Rostow and Millikan pointed out, developing societies were typically not looking toward the United States but to its Communist Cold War antagonist. In contrast to the Soviet Union, they warned, the United States was therefore “no longer identified . . . with the aspirations of people for social and economic improvement or with their Utopian image of a society designed to satisfy those aspirations.” In the long run, Rostow and Millikan warned, those developments would favor the Soviet Union and undermine America’s power position in the Cold War. To reconnect the United States with the aspirations of developing societies, the United States needed a new foreign aid policy, and it had to act now. 4 Rostow’s and Millikan’s observations set the stage for the Kennedy administration’s new emphasis on development aid, which Rostow helped shape as assistant national security advisor and chairman of the Policy Planning Council.5 Accordingly, already in its first year, the Kennedy administration launched the Peace Corps, created a new agency that would organize the foreign aid program— the Agency for International Development (AID), and substantially stepped up its foreign aid program. At the same time, the Kennedy administration sought to reidentify the United States with popular desires in the global South through announcing bold new development programs. In a ringing speech delivered in March 1961, Kennedy called for an “Alliance for Progress” between the United States and Latin America, “a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”6 Following up on this speech a few days later with a special message to Congress, Kennedy also promised an expanded and ambitious foreign aid program for the whole

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Southern part of the globe, including not only Latin America, but also Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. For those regions, Kennedy proclaimed, the 1960s were to become a “Decade of Development” in which the United States would help lift them out of poverty.7 This chapter examines how the United States sought to reconnect itself with the popular aspirations of “developing societies” not only through ringing speeches, proclamations, and policies, but also through films, exhibits, and pamphlets. Development policy, I argue, was an important symbolic field where the United States could demonstrate directly and tangibly the benefits American empire offered individuals in the global South, and thereby could build confidence in American leadership. Pictures of development projects illustrated how the United States responded to collective aspirations; how it served them; how it had the solutions, the expertise, and the experiences it took to satisfy them; and thus, how it made the desires of developing societies its concern, too. Visual representations were therefore not simply representations, but rather tools of specific American politics of imagination, I argue: with their films, pictures, and exhibits, USIS officials always also formulated a larger promise of “uplift,” of new life possibilities, and of emerging “modern lifestyles” that accrued from American development aid. Thereby, they allowed the mass of viewers not exposed directly to development policies to imagine development as being underway and visualized the concrete acts by which the United States brought “progress” to the underdeveloped world. In this sense, pictures of development projects also served to inscribe the United States into what Appadurai has called the “social imaginary” of societies, by which he means their “constructed landscape of collective aspirations.”8 Examining the symbolic dimension of American development aid, the chapter proceeds in three steps. Part one outlines shortly popular development notions and expectations in the “third world” and explains how those were rooted in processes of cultural globalization. Part two looks at the visual strategies by which USIS officials demonstrated how the United States responded to popular expectations. Finally, part three explores the cultural sensitivities that often marked the work of USIS officers.9

Globalized Desires and “Imaginaries of Development” Between December 1961 and February 1963, Walt Disney’s Circarama toured through India. A “novel cinema spectacle” with gigantic

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screens, Circarama offered Indian viewers an imaginary trip through the United States. In twenty-two minutes, viewers saw, among other things, New York City, the “industrial activity of the Great Lakes region,” and a car ride “down a multilane highway,” which, as the Illustrated Weekly of India reported, was “such a vivid experience that the viewer finds himself swaying at the turns and bracing himself against the change of direction at cloverleaf intersections.” There followed pictures of factories, a suburban shopping center, and a modern public elementary school, which gave viewers “further glimpses of the face of America,” as the Illustrated Weekly relayed. In addition, the film showed the great plains of the Midwest where “batteries of harvesting combines reap the oceans of wheat,” and cameras finally circled “over the gigantic Hoover dam.”10 Circarama was tremendously popular in India. In Calcutta, long queues formed up in front of the cinema dome and meandered around several blocks. In Delhi, too, Indians waited patiently for hours to get inside, and responses were enthusiastic. As polls conducted among viewers showed, over 90 percent of viewers responded in “positive, complimentary terms,” 63 percent reported that they would like to see it again “to get more out of it, enjoy the scenery once more, and show it to other members of their family.” On impressions gained about the United States, 39 percent reported their impression of a “progressive” society, 14 percent noted that it was an “industrially and technically advanced country,” and over half of the viewers noted the “extent of its high standard of living.”11 Why was Circarama so tremendously popular? Why did Bengalis take it upon them to queue up for hours for a mere twenty-two minute film about the United States? The answer, as I would like to suggest, has much to do with the history of development—Circarama showed Indians what they wanted for themselves, too: the shopping malls and modern schools, the booming prosperity of New York, the fast cars, and the lifestyles that they connoted. Touring through the world, often under USIS sponsorship, Circarama was an example of the global cultural flows that pervaded societies around the world, and that steadily exposed them to images of Western ‘modernity,’ not only in India, but also in Tanzania and Argentina. In Tanzania, newspapers and magazines abounded with extensive advertisements for West German or Japanese cars (Volkswagen and Toyota), for fashion, and even for German chainsaws. Global airline networks like Air India, Alitalia, and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) advertised their services with photos of New York’s skyline, framed by newspaper reports about Hollywood

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stars or Ford’s Model T. In cinemas, foreign films dominated, and local youths in Dar es Salaam, too, as Andrew Ivaska has described, moved within an imagined “cosmopolitan field of global culture,”12 where miniskirts, cosmetics, and global music became sources for fashioning new cosmopolitan selves, based on the assumption, as one secondary student put it, that “What is widely practiced by many other people is also good for us.”13 Like Americans and Europeans, Tanzanian’s experienced Beatles fever, twist booms, and rock and roll passion, and thereby even forced the “Tanganyika Police Band” to widen its repertoire from “some typical Sukuma songs into a mixture of Western and African music,” as the Sunday News noted.14 Similar cultural flows surged through Argentina where Argentinean media reported frequently about the United States; Hollywood films and foreign theater plays dominated the scene in Buenos Aires, and by the 1960s, billboard advertisements for American and international brands were an established part of the public sphere in Buenos Aires.15 Such flows not only fashioned impressions about Western “modernity” in media in India, Tanzania, and Argentina, but were also an important source of development aspirations—to achieve on a mass scale those Western living standards that observers permanently saw or could imagine through the popular media. Accordingly, popular notions about what development meant and what it had to accomplish, too, were often shaped substantially by images of Western modernity. At least in mass media, where the landscape of collective aspirations was constructed, development was often portrayed as a process of expanding consumption opportunities and industrialization, and thus as a gradual approximation to Northern standards of production and living. Rhetorically and visually, this involved the use of metaphors such as “clocking-in”16 (into the stream of modern history, as it went) and of visuals that showed how the icons of modernity—the new shops, factories, dams, and high-rise buildings—finally were becoming part of the national life.17 In India, for instance, the Illustrated Weekly of India frequently printed reports about the newest modern research laboratories, or about India’s “Industrial Setting,” illustrated with photographs of power plants, synthetic fiber plants, a thermal plant, or of scooter production halls.18 The visual panorama thus illustrated what “the nation” had already achieved by 1965: a state of industrialization that largely resembled Western and Soviet ones. Likewise, a cartoon printed in the Times of India, titled “the Great Society,” summed up Indian collective desires

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by depicting an Indian shop window with a sign that said: “refrigerators, cars, TV sets, better life.”19 In Tanzania, newspapers often reported about openings of new shops or the newest housing construction projects, and the National Development Corporation (NDC) repeatedly published advertisements and supplements that showcased “Tanzania’s Success Industries”20 or reported about the newest development projects: a new cigarette factory and the opening of a tire plant here, a modern beef canning factory and a radio plant there. While those were development images of the “state,” reports in Drum, too, typically used similar representations of development. In a report about how Arusha “clocked in,” Drum described and pictured the flurry of new development projects under way, from one of the “most modern breweries south of the Sahara” to a new textile plant, a biscuit factory, and a planned fertilizer manufacturing plant: “Booming is the word to describe the town,” Drum noted.21 Breathing the air of modernizing departures, such reports indicated how development was coded in the popular imagination and what development policies had to accomplish according to popular expectations. Popular developmental expectations also crystallized in dearth discourses that pointed to aspirations by identifying the lack of particular supplies. Such discourses were especially outspoken in Argentina where living standards declined progressively in the wake of inflation, export losses, and a general economic crisis. In films, filmmakers such as Fernando Birri and Fernando Solanas for example emphasized the problem of rural poverty, the lack of adequate housing, and hunger.22 Artist Antonio Berni, meanwhile, drew attention to the social plight of those living in the slum areas of Buenos Aires, the so-called villas miserias, with his collages about “Juanito Laguna,” a figure he had created.23 By the end of the 1960s, artists also organized a collective exhibit with the title “Tucumán arde” (“Tucumán is burning”), which sought to draw attention to the worsening living conditions in and around Tucumán where the closure of a number of sugar refineries had caused serious social problems. Pictures used in the mobile exhibit—which were projected onto the walls of houses, disseminated among pedestrians, and shown in exhibit rooms— showed, among other things, hungry children and families without homes.24 In their subtext, such films and artworks always communicated important developmental expectations and identified the concrete goals that development policies had to accomplish: more and better housing, a better food supply, or more job possibilities.

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In contrast to studies that describe American development policy as a top-down project of Western ideological imposition, a short survey of popular developmental expectations thus reveals that there are also good reasons to see it as a response to Southern desires for “progress.”25 There existed, at least as constructed through mass media, a social imaginary of development where individuals aspired for mass consumption, industrialization, and a level of living standards similar to those conveyed through global cultural flows. Neither were those categories simply invented by Western modernization theorists, nor was development a program that elites imposed on passive populations in the “third world.” Instead, populations themselves had real and concrete expectations for “development”—and it were not least those expectations that made development such a valuable field for the United States to reconnect with societies in the global South.

The Politics of Imagination In practice, USIS operations in Tanzania, Argentina, and India responded to local imaginaries of development in different ways. In Tanzania, for example, USIS country plans regularly noted the Tanzanian “desire to elevate living standards.”26 An important goal, as plans underlined, thus was to demonstrate how the United States contributed to furthering a “better life for African peoples” and to satisfying “responsible African aspirations.”27 USIS Tanzania therefore frequently staged photo exhibits that showcased specific aid projects, produced or showed pamphlets and films that put aid into perspective, and disseminated news releases that sought to “promote confidence in America’s leadership, government, scientific and educational progress.”28 In Argentina, again, U.S. policy makers perceived a threat of fidelismo paired with an “irresistible desire to enjoy a higher standard of living” not at some point in the future but “right now.”29 In communicating the “material evidences”30 of rising living standards accruing from the Alliance for Progress, officials therefore pushed the alliance in all conceivable ways: through pamphlets, exhibits, TV shows, and films. According to USIA counts, the Regional Printing facility in Mexico City printed fifty-two leaflets and pamphlets on the Alliance for Progress between 1962 and 1965, all of which went into circulation in Latin America. An estimated 90 percent of all motion picture films produced for Latin America dealt in some aspect with the Alliance

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for Progress.31 In 1962, USIA also dispatched a photographer on a fifty-day tour through five Latin American countries, commissioned with photographing the “sites of 20 Alliance projects.” Two years later, the photographer went on the same tour to take “progress pictures,” which were then published in picture stories, leaflets, and on posters, giving spectators a sensible impression of the changes the Alliance for Progress enacted.32 Of course, USIS officials also staged exhibits on the Alliance for Progress that showed “how the program will benefit the viewers”33 and that demonstrated the breadth of development programs. A mobile exhibit arranged in 1964, for example, used forty-two grand size photographs of different Alliance for Progress projects that were still underway or already completed throughout Latin America, offering spectators a “graphic documentation of actual, tangible, visible accomplishments” of the alliance.34 In India, too, typical annual USIS plans noted the task “to obtain recognition and credit for the U.S. contribution” in economic assistance, to “increase awareness of the scope and the motivation” of U.S. development assistance, and to “identify the U.S. with progress and the interests of the common man.” As in Tanzania and Argentina, representational efforts included the whole range of visual means— pamphlets, exhibits, and films—that were all geared toward emphasizing “the benefits to the common man” that U.S. aid brought.35 In late 1965 alone, local USIS posts had six films on U.S. development policies in production, which carried titles such as Kanpur Institute of Technology, Agriculture in India, River Valley Projects, or Forest Research Institute.36 In regular intervals, Indian journalists were also taken to “impressive examples of American cooperation in India’s economic development,” a public relations practice that usually resulted in neat photographs and dozens of newspaper articles.37 In April 1966, for example, newspaper editors were first instructed on “self-sufficiency in food” in a two-day seminar and then taken on a two-day bus trip to the Trombay Fertilizer Plant and “outstanding agricultural sites.”38 In visualizing the scale, the benefits, and the services that American development aid encompassed, USIS officials often followed representational patterns utilized during official visits to the United States, and showcased the United States as a laboratory of the future that had already faced the challenges underdeveloped countries would soon encounter, and, therefore, also had the skills at hand to cope with them. Again, this often involved the example of the TVA. In pamphlets disseminated in India and Tanzania, for example, the TVA was described as “an idea which can work in hundreds in valleys the

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Figure 4.1.  An example of a typical USIA picture booklet circulated in India that visualized the various development projects the United States funded in India.39

world over” because the problems it had solved were the same “facing people living along great rivers everywhere.” To be sure, thirty years after the TVA’s beginnings and after dozens of other dam building projects had already been modeled after the TVA throughout the world, such stories were less intended to impress government officials, but rather aimed at telling a parable of the development process as such to ordinary observers abroad. In this parable, the TVA figured as a symbol that communicated to ordinary observers what

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special qualities and which kind of spirit it took to get modernization underway. Pamphlets and exhibits therefore usually emphasized in text and in pictures the TVA’s lessons: how it had “taught men that, working with each other, and with water, light, power, soil, they can change a valley’s face and its life,” or how the TVA’s test-demonstration farmers had learned that scientific agriculture “will produce better crops, healthier animals, and a happier farm.” Accompanying pictures then usually visualized how people were being trained in operating “modern” machinery, how new agricultural techniques were being tested, and how farmers cooperated with universities. Or they showed examples of how those tests made the “cattle grow fat,” thereby showing in miniature how the TVA embodied the experiences vital for solving the developing world’s problem of food shortages.40 Similar intentions stood also behind films and pamphlets about American agriculture. A typical pamphlet distributed in India about the “American Farm Revolution,” for instance, told the “dramatic story” of American farming “with special references to how Indian farmers can benefit from U.S. experiences.” Essential points conveyed were that the agricultural abundance of the United States was the result of “a massive application of science” and “education for farmers,” that “plant scientists had worked wonders,” and that technology was essential. Pictures on every page contrasted American farming techniques and the Indian contexts where they could be of use, juxtaposing for example a mechanized poultry farm in Mississippi and eggs being sold in an Indian market—a good example for the politics of imagination: the visual juxtaposition delivered a tangible example of how India could easily cover its demand for eggs. Accordingly captions noted: “On a poultry farm in the state of Mississippi, thousands of chickens eat special food, constantly drink water, and produce eggs at a record rate” as juxtaposed with: “At a market in Delhi, eggs are being sorted out after a sale. India is making strides in the development of improved strains of poultry.”41 As during official visits to the United States, USIS programs also stressed the scale of American knowledge resources available for development efforts. In Tanzania, for example, USIS offered locals films for rent such as Agricultural College—a film about Rutgers University as a “school for future farmers” and a place for the study of “technical knowledge” or County Agent—a film that showed how an expert helped farmers meet unforeseen problems and taught them modern techniques of cultivation.42 In addition, USIS officials also frequently staged exhibits in pursuit of one of its core objectives, namely, “to

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demonstrate America’s scientific achievements, particularly in agriculture under physical conditions similar to parts of Tanganyika.”43 One of those was an exhibit on cotton growing, one of the major export crops of Tanzania. The exhibit, as USIS reported, “showed the scientific approach” to cotton growing in the U.S. South and contained pictures of a farm “where everything from plowing to packing cotton bales is accomplished by machinery.”44 In November 1964, Tanzanians also had a chance to see USIA’s “Plastics U.S.A” exhibition, which toured around the world. The exhibit, as a USIS advertising text explained in the Sunday News, portrayed “to the people of Tanzania the great progress which has been made” in the United States, and its items reflected “a rising living standard at relatively low costs.” Including a swimming pool, a television system, and a “Sleek Silver Corvette ‘Sting Ray’” car model, the exhibit showed, like Circarama, the prosperity of American life. However, USIS also explicitly related it to Tanzanian development, pointing out the value of water purifiers “which could prove a boon to all those who live in the more remote parts of Tanzania.” Also, visitors were greeted by a message from Lyndon Johnson, which said: “We hope this exhibit will increase mutual understanding . . . and generate ideas for better living in your forward-moving country.”45 Those ideas for better living, as “Plastics U.S.A” and other USIS demonstration effects sought to make clear throughout the 1960s, were already available in the United States—and they were available for transfer. Indeed, the visualization of such transfers was an important theme in USIS operations on the ground. Films, exhibits, and pamphlets frequently demonstrated how, thanks to American aid, the dams, universities, and modern agricultural techniques became part of national life in developing countries. Pamphlets, for example, often depicted the new highways and factories that U.S. development aid funded in developing countries. Moreover, weekly television shows such as the Latin American Panorama Panamericano series included frequently features such as “cooperative housing in Costa Rica,” a “new dam in Nicaragua,” “water purification in San Salvador,” “hydroelectric power in Guatemala,” the remodeling of the airport in La Paz, “school construction in rural Colombia,” or the “construction of steel mills in numerous places.”46 Such pictures visualized the concrete act of American aid transfers and thereby demonstrated how the United States improved the living conditions of “underdeveloped” societies. USIA’s visual programs also promoted and showcased the application of scientific agriculture in developing countries which was

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one of the most important fields of American development policy in the 1960s.47 As American development experts believed, the introduction of scientific agriculture was essential in order to assure the food supply of underdeveloped countries, to reduce their export dependency, to match their population increases, and to generate the national income that would finance the “big push”48 of industrialization. U.S. AID hence made agriculture a centerpiece of American development policies, often in cooperation with the Ford Foundation.49 USIS offices were often intimately involved in promoting modern techniques among peasants, but also utilized agriculture as a symbolic terrain to showcase the benefits and services that Americans had to offer. A good example of those symbolic purposes was an exhibit USIS Tanzania inaugurated at University College in 1966 that intended to provide an example “of what’s possible through scientific farming.” As USIS officials reported, the exhibit was “prepared with an eye to involving the viewer, making him actively participate in the exhibit.” To that end, the exhibit not only included the usual explanatory boards and pictures of American farming. As its centerpiece, it had a handmade three-dimensional model of an agricultural farm complete with toy tractors, horses, and plastic fences. The farm was shown in two different stages, in its premodern and in its scientific stage, and the differences were appalling. In its premodern state, the farm consisted of only three small farm buildings, the landscape around them was deserted and forbidding, and there was no road infrastructure. Then, on the other side, scientific farming: tractors everywhere, good and wide roads, everything fenced in, apparently a farm run in a rational and efficient way. What had been unused and forbidding land before was now being cultivated with the tractors, and a little pond in the middle even permitted operation of an irrigation system. The resulting big leap in agricultural productivity was well visible next to the main farm house where now two brandnew silo mock-ups stored the farm’s agricultural surpluses—and the transport truck just turned into the driveway in order to get them to the market. The number of buildings as well had doubled; the small farm house itself had been expanded into a big main building with a neat and orderly front garden. By animating the spectator’s creative imaginativeness, the three-dimensional model thus demonstrated tangibly the differences between scientific farming and traditional cultivation methods. While there are no records of popular audience responses, the model farm seemed not ineffective in capturing the imagination of Tanzanian spectators. The Tanzanian Minister of Agriculture, Forests, and Wildlife, Derek Bryceson, at least, remarked

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that “such graphic lessons are ‘just what’s needed in Tanzania’,” and expressed his wish “that every farmer in Tanzania might see it.”50 As the Tanzanian exhibit showed, USIS representations had often an important symbolic subtext, insofar as demonstration effects had less of an educative purpose but rather visualized the prosperity and productivity promises that the United States generally had to offer. Seen in symbolic terms, showcasing American agricultural technology was a particularly effective means for building identification with the United States, because such representations always tapped into popular desires for food security. At the same time, they demonstrated the ostensibly infinite productivity leaps American development aid would bring. Accordingly, USIS publications—often circulated less among farmers but among urban readers—visualized American productivity promises in endless varieties and usually in rich colors that showed how American agricultural techniques created landscapes of plenty. Typically pictures, therefore, showed irrigation systems and the prospering fields they created, peasants disseminating fertilizer among their well growing crops, harvesters in action amid the plenty of a wheat field or they juxtaposed the rich yield of the new wonder plants, hybrid maize and miracle rice, with the poor yields of conventional breeds. Particularly, in the context of local food shortages as they occurred frequently in countries such as India in the 1960s, such pictures thus tangibly dramatized the benefits American aid would bring to locals in the field of food supply. Another important theme USIS programs showcased were the new modern lifestyles and life possibilities that American development aid created. Particularly in Argentina, USIA films and USIS pamphlets typically showed development as a process that changed the social environments of aid recipients through bringing new homes and housing districts, new school buildings, community centers, and hospitals. Wrapped into the language of “self-help”—a typical theme was “they helped themselves”—USIA’s visual programs emphasized the spirit of community solidarity, showed how Latin Americans built their homes and community centers together, or demonstrated the scope of the Alliance for Progress whose hospital boats and mobile trucks reached even the remotest corners of Latin America. Before-and-after photos dramatized how entire communities had been transformed within two years, showcasing for example a slum in Sao Paolo whose huts had been changed into neatly ordered housing units.51 Seen in the context of Argentinean discourses about housing shortages and the emergence of villas miserias, such pictures thus

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Figure 4.2.  A flyer circulated by USIA in Argentina advertising a new housing project financed by the Alliance for Progress. Such flyers responded directly to collective Argentinean desires for rising living conditions.53

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demonstrated to Argentineans how the United States tackled and satisfied their popular aspirations for social and material change in housing and other areas. Apparently, these efforts were not unsuccessful. After Kennedy’s assassination, service centers in the villas miserias were dedicated to Kennedy, appearing to the American embassy “indicative of the extraordinary appeal” Kennedy had for the “underprivileged of Argentina.”52 In India and Tanzania, too, USIS underlined the new lifestyles that American aid brought. In India, a USIS photo exhibit staged at universities showed how American assistance to power projects “contribute[d] to the welfare of the common man,” and did so by illustrating visually the new kinds of everyday activities they made possible. Photographs depicted a mother and her son reading a book together in the light of an electric lamp, showed how the mother used an electric iron, and depicted another woman using an electric sewing machine and a refrigerator. Tapping into Indian aspirations for Western modernity, such simple photographic scenes conveyed effectively the arrival of a new affluent lifestyle in domestic Indian house life, made possible by American-funded power projects.54 At the same time, they invited viewers who had not yet experienced the arrival of such progress to imagine that thanks to American aid those kinds of lifestyles would soon open up for them, too. In Tanzania, in turn, such politics of imagination became particularly evident in a film called Profile of Tanganyika. The film showed how farmers modernized their cultivation methods, how new machinery arrived in the port of Dar es Salaam, and how factories, processing plants, schools, universities, and community centers were being built. Dar es Salaam, the film suggested, was becoming a “bustling capital” where new shops, stores, “modern hotels,” modern family homes, and modern high-rise apartment buildings sprang up like mushrooms, “changing the nation’s skyline.”55 Like the exhibits and pamphlets in Argentina and India, the feel-good movie thus sought to activate the imagination of viewers by introducing them to the potential new homes they could soon move into, the shops where they would spend their wages, the schools where they would learn, and the factories where they would get work. At the same time, the film suggested in its subtext that it was Western development aid that brought that modern life. USIS officers frequently registered “enthusiastic receptions”56 of the film, which apparently responded quite well to popular Tanzanian development desires.

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Picture Diplomacy and Cultural Sensitivities In many ways, those exhibits, pamphlets, and films not only inscribed the United States into local social imaginaries but also translated into practice what American sociologist Daniel Lerner had theorized about a few years earlier. In The Passing of Traditional Society, a work that had established Lerner’s reputation as a modernization theorist, he had observed that media not only were the sources of new aspirations but, in the last instance, would also be those new teachers that would lead societies out of their “traditional” backwardness. Media exposure, Lerner wrote, enlarged “a person’s view of the world . . . by increasing his capacity to imagine himself in new and strange situations” and thereby led to what he described as “psychic mobility,” or, “empathy.” According to Lerner, empathy was “the basic communication skill required of modern men. Empathy endows a person with the capacity to imagine himself as proprietor of a bigger grocery store in a city, to wear nice clothes and live in a nice house, to be interested in ‘what is going on in the world’ and to ‘get out of his hole.’” All development policies, as sociologist Lerner concluded, therefore depended on the degree to which they could activate the imagination and expand the empathy of individuals. As he wrote about the Middle East, his particular field of study, the policies needed “‘to motivate’ the isolated and illiterate peasants and tribesmen” thus were policies that provided “them with clues as to what the better things of life might be. Needed there is a massive growth of imaginativeness about alternatives to their present lifeways, and a simultaneous growth of institutional means for handling these alternative lifeways.”57 Lerner’s observations reflected the double bind among American social scientists between views of development policy as a policy that responded to aspirations on the one hand and conceptions of it as an intrusive transformative mission that changed the lifestyles and behaviors also of those who did not aspire for development on the other hand. Those ambivalences pervaded also USIA’s visual programs that attempted on the one hand to sell American benefits, but in those efforts typically also fell prey to promoting intrusive paternalistic conceptions of development that sought to transform ostensible backward traditional societies into modern ones along the lines of modernization theory. However, the transformative hubris that permeated all American development policies in the 1960s should not blind one for the symbolic purposes that

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were part of USIA’s politics of imagination as well. Those politics responded strategically to real desires for change and sought to capitalize on such desires by underlining how U.S. development policies addressed them. In doing so, the politics of imagination often also took into account cultural idiosyncrasies. Specifically in India, U.S. officials were cautious to subscribe to cultural sensitivities, and at least in the field of representational policies, they did not continue the pattern of cultural misunderstandings that Andrew Rotter has described.58 USIS films, for instance, often made borrowings from the visual and aesthetic language of Bollywood films and thereby conformed to the viewing habits and aesthetic expectations of Indians. A film with the title Food for Development, for example, told the story of American food aid to India as a semifictional family drama, with lively background music (but no dances), focusing on a young fasting boy whose plight is finally being relieved by the arrival of public law 480 food shipments (“but what hope is there for him?,” the film asks, followed by a fanfare, and a scene that shows the arrival of a carrier in the sunrise).59 Perhaps the best example for USIS India’s sensitivity for cultural idiosyncrasies, however, was the peculiar emphasis USIS officials put on national maps when illustrating American development projects. Maps were used frequently in American exhibits and in the leaflets U.S. officials handed out.60 They always showed the whole of India as a geographical entity and pointed to the variety of development projects the United States funded in India, either represented by dozens of little dots sprinkled across the map or by symbols that specified the kind of project funded: a hydro project or a thermal project, agricultural or industrial, health, and education. Often those maps also included or were surrounded by photographs that showcased specific projects and thus literally zoomed-in into the projects. Giving beholders a sense of the scale, variety, and geographical scope of U.S. development aid, such maps created a demonstration effect that made beholders immediately understand the significance and magnitude of American development aid. As USIS Calcutta reported about one exhibit that included a national map of India, its intent was to “punch across the idea . . . that the U.S. has contributed more than any other country toward India’s industrialization.”61 However, those maps also had a more symbolic-emotional function. As Indian scholar Sumathi Ramaswamy has pointed out, maps of India played an extremely important role in India’s twentieth-century

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history and were vital for cultivating a sense of national belonging among Indians, because they enabled Indian citizens to take “visual and conceptual possession” of the national space. Specifically where “patriotic cartography” was involved, maps were powerful emblems for fostering popular commitments to the nation. Such popular cartography differed from the mere geometric, technocratic, and disenchanted maps produced by the colonial and postcolonial Indian state insofar as it enchanted the territory represented by utilizing religious imagery, national icons, and goddesses such as Bharat Mata, the iconic female goddess embodying the nation. In contrast to the state’s technical maps that focused on boundaries and portrayed the territory between them as vast “empty social space,” patriotic maps filled the territory with life and meaning, leading to a “sacralisation of India’s geobody” and transforming the national map into an “object of visual piety.”62 Seen against this background, the U.S. practice of using national Indian maps to illustrate the scope of U.S. development projects also appears to have been a deliberate and conscious effort to capitalize on the emotional dynamics associated with those cartographic practices. Comparable to patriotic maps, USIS maps filled India’s vast territorial spaces with lively scenes of Indian national life, but instead of depicting goddesses or Bharat Mater, USIS maps showcased India’s new icons of national advancement: its dams and power stations, modern agriculture methods, and centers of learning. A wooden map of India used in USIS Bombay’s exhibit on “Power for Progress,” for example, was accentuated by eight big photos that showed the various stages of construction of several power projects throughout India: one photo showed a dam under construction and a group of engineers surveying the scene, another photo showed a finished dam, a third one depicted its engine room where engineers inspected the turbines. The photos were arranged around the map, but small ribbons connecting them to the map pointed to their exact geographic location in India. Thereby, the photos filled the map’s “empty social space” with a lively vitality, for they made the photos appear as snapshot excerpts of the bustling socioeconomic activity contained in the territory represented. In Calcutta, the local USIS center chose a more technical approach to achieve this effect. In what was to become the “permanent AID window,” a plywood map of India “painted white and varnished” was made the focal point. On the map, as USIS explained its mode of operation, “six sets of different colored lights flash on briefly in

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sequence, pinpointing the locations of six kinds of USAID projects. The corresponding boxes to the left in matching colors simultaneously light up the words ‘Agriculture’ ‘Industry’ etc. At the end of each sequence, all 264 bulbs light up at once.” Here it was the electronic spectacle that breathed life into the national geobody and captured the eye of the passerby. Again the map was also supplemented by photographs that showed for instance a farmer sowing fertilizer or a rubber tire factory, thereby also pointing again to the lively activity taking place inside the map’s space. On the right side, moreover, the main caption explained: As India builds a modern and self-sufficient economy to insure freedom and higher living standards for her people, it is the hope of the people of the United States that their aid acts as a catalyst—supplementing but not supplanting national effort. The United States shares India’s pride in her transition toward economic prosperity. And it believes India can and will win the struggle to achieve this economic strength.63

Figure 4.3.  An example of how USIS India made use of the national map in window exhibits.64

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Overall, USIS maps thus not only catered deliberately to the spectator’s national aspirations, but also illustrated how the United States responded to Indian aspirations for development. In Argentina, USIA emphasized particularly cartoons as a medium to visualize the Alliance for Progress. As everywhere else in Latin America, cartoons were tremendously popular in Argentina, where they had been an integral part of the daily Argentine entertainment economy since the beginning of the century.65 Taking those entertainment habits into account, USIA launched its own cartoon program in 1961, pursuing two aims with it: first to deflate the appeal of Castroism and second to “engender support” for the Alliance for Progress through “direct, graphic, and easily understood appeals to Latin American workers and farmers.”66 Until late 1964, USIA exported almost thirty-eight million cartoon copies to Latin American countries and began to compete with Walt Disney’s popular Donald Duck cartoons.67 Marked by a strange mixture of fictional entertainment and educational realism, typical Alliance for Progress cartoon booklets disseminated in Argentina included impressionistic scenes of the alliance and showcased its benefits for Latin Americans. Those were supplemented by explanatory text boxes that provided facts about the Alliance for Progress and usually repeated the alliance’s basic mantra: to provide “trabajo, techo y tierra, escuela y salud.” A cartoon with the title “Unidos en la Alianza,”68 for example, depicted stylized scenes in which the rural village community constructed homes together, children ate (thus had enough food), a doctor cared for them, a tractor ploughed a field, or in which farmers marveled at the new, more fertile and yielding hybrid maize provided by the Alliance for Progress. Interspersed were scenes that depicted the political context: Kennedy declaring the Alliance for Progress in the White House and the governments of Latin America meeting in Punta del Este, thus making the spectator aware of who was responsible for the socioeconomic improvements. The small details in the backgrounds, too, were important: the neighbor who laid cables, the symmetric order in which new homes were arranged next to each other, and the rural church that was depicted as the community’s center. Such details showed how the Alliance for Progress gradually changed the life worlds of Latin Americans through electrifying their villages, emphasized its egalitarian democratizing spirit, and, in contrast to socialism, offered a vision of development reconciled with the Catholic Latin American heritage.69

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Figure 4.4.  An example page of a typical Alliance for Progress cartoon.70

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In Peru, to mention one last example, USIA even broadcast its own Telenovela, a twenty-six-part TV series with the title “Nuestro Barrio.”71 A “sociodrama” that idealized social reforms and sought to induce community action among its viewers, “Nuestro Barrio” revolved around the story of a doctor by the name of Alejandro Valdivia who set out to build up a clinic in a poor quarter to improve health conditions. Along the way, Dr. Valdivia faced different sorts of trouble, most of it stemming from the inevitable Communist antagonist. However, portrayed as a “vigorous, forward-looking and practical idealist,” Dr. Valdivia eventually succeeded with his self-help project. USIA was pleased with its show, considering the character of Dr. Valdivia in particular as effective “in stimulating aspirations for a better life.”72 The program was such a success that USIA continued producing other Telenovelas as well.73

The Problem of “Wants” and “Gets” Confronting foreign observers on television screens, in USIA centers, cinemas, or in the streets, USIS television shows, exhibits, films, and pamphlets thus created a constant visual panorama of uplift, emerging new lifestyles, and local progress that made the services and benefits American development policies had to offer accessible to foreign viewers in visual, aesthetic, and sensory terms. Creating those visual panoramas was also an imperative for USIS offices: by themselves, most development projects seldom generated publicity. Indeed, as USIS officials noted in Argentina, exhibits on the Alliance for Progress were often received with “many exclamations of wonder, admiration, and surprise,” because most viewers, as they voluntarily confessed, “had no idea as to what the Alliance was accomplishing, particularly outside Argentina” or were surprised that it still “was alive.”74 Responses, while difficult to ascertain in precise terms, varied from positive enthusiasm and identification to increasing frustrations until the mid-1960s. Field reports from Tanzania and India often noted positive responses to films and exhibits. As mentioned, Profile of Tanganyika was typically received well among Tanzanian audiences, and films on agriculture or even the Alliance for Progress were often deemed of “great help” for boosting “agricultural productivity” by regional development officers, which at least connoted certain recognition on part of Tanzanians for USIS’s visual offerings.75 In India, the pamphlet on “The American Farm Revolution” received

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praise from the Nagpur Times as a “good guide to Indian farmers and even the government,” and in a letter to USIS, a state government official recommended “it as a ‘bible’ to every farmer and agricultural expert in India.”76 However, by the mid-1960s, a general popular disenchantment with American development policies began to spread in Argentina and Tanzania, certainly also as a result of the Vietnam War and the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. In Argentina, Walt Rostow got a good impression of the state of American (un)popularity in February 1965 when a group of students attacked him while he was giving a lecture in Buenos Aires. With coins, eggs, and ripe tomatoes splattering down to his left and his right, Rostow had to terminate his speech and retreat to the American embassy.77 The event was symptomatic for the waning of the Alliance for Progress’s aura generally. By the late 1960s, most American officials noted that the “image of the Alliance for Progress has suffered,” because most Latin Americans had begun to doubt America’s “much-advertised altruism.” As officials reported from Colombia, they were “involved in verbal gymnastics of the most exhausting kind” because they had to advertise loans as “implying altruism, togetherness and a brighter tomorrow” when in fact they were negotiated for interests. “The dropping of the phrase,” they concluded, therefore “would not . . . cause a great anguish.”78 In Tanzania, too, American foreign aid received low praise by 1970. As opinion polls showed, the United States had been overtaken by Communist China in terms of popularity, doubtless due to the fact that China by then funded and built the Tazara railway, a prestige project.79 Asked about which countries were giving aid to Tanzania, only 33 percent of Tanzanians named the United States, but 82 percent named China; 16 percent thought that the United States was a friendly country, 78 percent opted for China. In addition, 2 percent thought that Americans were very much like Tanzanians, 86 percent that they weren’t at all like them.80 Here, efforts to connect the United States with Tanzanian aspirations for development had apparently failed on a large scale. The only exception was India. Opinion polls conducted among “college-educated Indians” in 1970 showed that 99 percent of them were aware of American aid, and that 49 percent believed U.S. aid had raised the standard of living of Indians (47 percent thought that it had not made a difference); 27 percent of them favored strongly receiving aid as before, 36 percent checked the “favor it somewhat” box.81

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As those numbers showed, efforts to reconnect the United States with the popular developmental desires of Argentineans, Tanzanians, and Indians brought mixed results at best, at least from the mid-1960s onward. On the other hand, given that development aid typically got low media coverage everywhere, the fact that 33 percent of all Tanzanians and 99 percent of college-educated Indians were able to name the United States as aid donor points to partial successes on part of USIS to build recognition of American aid (the fact that China scored a 82 percent awareness in Tanzania can be attributed to the fact that the Tazara railroad project got heavy media coverage). Yet, even the most sophisticated USIS campaign could not solve the basic problem associated with American development policy: as long as the United States did not deliver in material terms the broad transformative change it promised, its politics of imagination were in the long run doomed to fail to connect the United States with local aspirations. This was a point that Daniel Lerner and USIA officials, too, noted when they met for a seminar on communication problems in 1967. As Lerner outlined in his presentation, the thrust of mass communication “over the past 20 years” had “clearly been to stimulate wants,” yet material achievements or “gets,” as Lerner called them, seldom matched aspirations in developing countries. It was “much harder to supply ‘gets’ than to stimulate ‘wants,’” Lerner explained, and as a consequence, the “imbalance in the ‘want-get ratio’ or, relative deprivation” increasingly produced “frustrations.” What before had been the “revolution in rising expectations” had therefore now become a “revolution of rising frustrations,” and there was not much USIA could do about it.82

Chapter 5

Peace Space Flights as “Pictorial Acts” The moon is now an American.

—Bild, 21.7.1969

I deplore your headline “The moon is now an American.” Or did it escape your editors that the Americans landed as ambassadors of all mankind? —Letter to the Editor, Bild, 25.7.1969

Visitors to the Tanzanian National Museum in Dar es Salaam often

make a surprising discovery. Among the milestones of Tanzanian history like posh limousines of former presidents and an exhibit about the Maji Maji wars, the museum boasts of another exceptional item: a moon rock, displayed together with a goodwill message from President Nixon.1 The exhibit marks the moon landing as a landmark event in the national history of Tanzania and thereby points to the participation of Tanzanians in an unprecedented global moment. According to some counts, over 650 million people worldwide watched the lunar landing live on their television sets, with hundreds of millions more following it on radio, in USIS centers, or through the print media. On the day of the landing, over 150,000 people gathered in a public square in Seoul for a public viewing of the landing, Apollo exhibits in Warsaw, Lomé, or Addis Abeba were stormed by enthusiastic crowds, and in Hamburg, police officers on duty for the first time

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found themselves without any work: whoever had the chance to do so in West Germany sat down in front of a television screen in order to watch Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin descend on the moon. As much as the moon landing was a global moment, it was also an unprecedented emotional moment. Across the globe observers were excited when Armstrong and Aldrin finally took their first steps on the lunar surface. In many Latin American countries, church bells and sirens rang, and in Santiago de Chile, people danced in the streets. Babies in Scotland and Lebanon were named Apollo, so was a public bus in Dar es Salaam. As a USIA report noted, “no comparable number of human beings has ever had as deep a sense of participation in a news story or as deep a feeling of identification with two men as they did with Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.”2 Above all, however, the moon landing was also a unique imperial moment. As people around the world watched with joy and excitement, they also got a sense of what the United States was capable of doing, how powerful its technological and scientific resources were, and toward which ends the United States sought to employ those means. “Because of what you have done,” President Nixon said in a televised telephone call to the astronauts on the moon, “the heavens have become a part of man’s world, and as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth.”3 In this chapter, I examine how American administrations fashioned manned space flights as an American quest for peace and explore how they utilized pictures to build foreign emotional involvement in U.S. space flights.4 Picture making, I argue, was not only central in the U.S. space program, space flights themselves can also be described as “pictorial acts:”5 they were launched to produce pictures, and those pictures were what created the reality of space flights for foreign observers.6 In this sense, pictures had a systemic function: in the end, not the flights themselves but the pictures they generated were what created evidence of American capabilities and built identification with the United States. One should therefore not merely see them as entertaining illustrations or by-products of space flights. Rather, to make pictures was the actual underlying symbolic goal of the whole U.S. space program. The space race was therefore actually fought out less in space—its real battleground was in the visual media. By examining American picture making, the chapter wants to open a fresh window on the symbolic dynamics of the Cold War. While most historians now agree that those dynamics were the reason the

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United States launched its space program in the first place, surprisingly little research has been done so far on how the space race was actually followed around the world and how the United States sought to sell its space program to foreigners.7 Both of these aspects, however, are a key for understanding how the space race—and therewith the Cold War—played out on the symbolic level: how did foreigners actually participate in the space race? What sensory and emotional space flight experiences did they have and how did the United States create those? How did they dramatize space flights? To what extent did such efforts build support or affection with American empire? Focusing on American picture diplomacy, the chapter addresses those questions in three parts. Part one examines how symbolic imperatives urged American administrations to launch the manned space program, explores how NASA tried to shape the pictures coming out of the flights, and evaluates what kinds of pictures circulated in global media. Part two takes a closer look at USIA’s efforts to further emotionalize space flights. Part three, finally, takes the story to the Apollo program and explains how the Nixon administration sought to utilize the lunar landing to formulate an American peace promise.

The Cold War, the Politics of Visibility, and Global Media The space race opened in the late 1950s with a series of Soviet space spectaculars. The first of those was, famously, the Soviet launch of the Sputnik in 1957, the first satellite that orbited the world and stunned observers around the world. Just a few weeks later, the Soviet Union followed up with another publicity stunt as it sent a dog named “Laika” into orbit on board on another satellite. Both of those accomplishments set a pattern for the next years when the Soviet Union scored one space “first” after another, including the (crash) landing of the first unmanned space craft on the moon in 1959 and, of course, the first manned space flight in April 1961, by Yuri Gagarin. Soviet space successes sent shockwaves through the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations because they seemed to signify that the Soviet Union, not the United States, represented the political system of the future. As early as 1958, a key document of the National Security Council (NSC)—NSC 5814—therefore warned that Soviet successes “profoundly affected the belief of peoples, both in the United States and abroad, in the superiority of U.S. leadership in science and military capability.” Space accomplishments, the

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document noted, were increasingly perceived abroad as symbols of leadership in all fields of social life, and hence the psychological response of “sophisticated and unsophisticated peoples everywhere” also affected “U.S. relations with its allies, with the Communist Bloc, and with neutral and uncommitted nations.” Further Soviet space spectaculars and a continuing lack of U.S. achievements, the document warned, would “dangerously impair the confidence of these peoples in U.S. over-all leadership.” Yet, as the NSC memorandum spelled out, specifically manned space flight could restore such confidence: “To the layman, manned exploration will represent the true conquest of outer space. No unmanned experiment can substitute for manned exploration in its psychological effect on the peoples of the world.”8 Similar beliefs guided the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. As Lyndon Johnson, then vice president, wrote in spring 1961 after the first Soviet manned space flight, “This country should be realistic and recognize that other nations, regardless of their appreciation of our idealistic values, will tend to align themselves with the country which they believe will be the world leader—the winner in the long run. Dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.” Being first in landing a man on the moon would not only be “an achievement with great propaganda value,” but also be “essential as an objective whether or not we are first in its accomplishment—and we may be able to be first.”9 Johnson’s position was widely accepted within the Kennedy administration, not least by Kennedy himself who now began to fashion the space race as a race to the moon. As he announced to a joint session of Congress on 25 May, the United States would do everything it could to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. “No single space project in this period,” Kennedy emphasized, “will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”10 Roughly at the same time, the United States also began to conduct its first manned space flights under the so-called “Project Mercury” program. Reminiscent of the Roman messenger of the gods, Project Mercury unfolded in two stages, the phase of suborbital space flights, and the phase of orbital ones. In May and July 1961, Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom were the first two astronauts to do suborbital flights, followed by the first orbital flight of John Glenn. On 20 February 1962, Glenn was boosted into space on top of a Mercury-Atlas rocket, orbited the earth three times with his

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“Friendship-7 capsule,” and splashed down after roughly four hours. Similar procedures were repeated during Scott Carpenter’s flight in May 1962 while Walter Schirra extended the number of orbits to six during his MA-8 flight in October 1962. In May 1963, “Project Mercury” was successfully completed with the flight of Gordon Cooper, who performed 22.5 orbits and a flight time of one day and ten hours on board of the “Faith-7” capsule. In conducting Project Mercury, U.S. administrations understood well that the symbolic value of manned space flights derived not from the fact that they took place but from the extent to which observers abroad could see and follow them. Assuring their visibility therefore figured prominently in all preparations for manned space flights. As early as 1958, NASA envisioned the use of two motion picture cameras inside the capsule to get pictures of the pilot as well as of the instruments. Also, the capsule was to carry photographic equipment in order to take pictures of the earth. Even the development of a television system for the capsule was deemed “desirable” at NASA headquarters at the end of the 1950s.11 How extensively and meticulously NASA planned the visual coverage of manned space flights was well reflected in the preparations NASA made for Alan Shepard’s flight in May 1961, the first Americanmanned space flight. NASA’s information plan spelled out detailed visual arrangements, stipulating that all activity had to “be documented on film.” According to the plan, photographers and camera operators had to cover every single step from the arrival of the space craft at Cape Canaveral onward. Tests of the space craft were to be recorded, “showing machinery and personnel involved. Overall views of the spacecraft while in the laboratory shall be made. A limited number of personnel should be in the field of the camera view to provide animation and indication of spacecraft size.” Moreover, camera operators would have to film the arrival of the Redstone booster, its erection, and installment of the capsule on top from different positions, ranging from close-up to wide angle perspectives. The launch itself should be filmed from “several camera stations,” and the plan required “views of the capsule-booster combination during the minutes before launch,” adding specifically: “These scenes should show the vaporizing liquid oxygen and the base of the booster where the cooling water sprays are played, and in general, give a feeling of suspense and impact.” In addition, the plan stipulated: “It is desired that at least one closeup and one semidistant tracking camera shot be made that will cover a time period from 15 seconds before launch until the booster disappears from sight.” At the same time, another

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motion picture crew would document in color all activities in the Mercury Control Center. Again, the plan laid out specific visual requirements: “These sequences shall show overall views inside the . . . control center with personnel at operational stations, views of key personali­ties in working positions with appropriate equipment in view of the camera . . . and views of visual countdown indicators that will depict moment of launch.” Finally, the plan also decreed the types of visual motives wanted from the recovery operation, calling specifically for footage of “spacecraft reentry,” the “search operations with emphasis on ship and aircraft movement,” the “first sighting of the spacecraft,” and the “actual pickup of the spacecraft and/ or astronaut,” emphasizing on the latter: “This material should be shot from both ships and aircraft.”12 Although most of this visual footage would be released later, the plan also specified what kinds of “black and white quick-release news-type film” camera crews should shoot. Specifically, it called for film footage that included “preparations immediately prior to launch and tracking camera views of the launch itself” as well as “general activity around the launching pad on the day of the launch.” Moreover, “shots of key personnel and operating stations should be shown. Views of launch­ing pad and gantry with full views of the boosterspacecraft configu­ration shall be taken,” and, of course, the launch itself was to be covered. Meanwhile other camera operators would join the astronaut and cover all of the activities, following arrival, suiting up, prelaunch training, transportation to the launch pad, and insertion into the capsule.13 Such plans indicated that NASA not only had clear notions as to what kinds of dramaturgical visuals it wanted to get out of flights but also reflected its desire to create their maximum visibility—but under NASA’s picture control. However, NASA’s policy of visibility also raised concerns within the Kennedy administration. Jerome Wiesner, always a voice of restraint, advised Kennedy strongly “to prevent this operation from becoming a Hollywood production,” cautioning that “the people . . . in the control center are not professional actors, but are technically trained people involved in a very complex and highly coordinated operation.” In Wiesner’s view, “the effect of TV cameras staring down their throats during this period of extreme tension, whether taped or live, could have a catastrophic effect.”14 Similar views emerged from the State Department where the Special Assistant for Atomic Energy and Outer Space Farley worried that the high publicity surrounding the Mercury shot would foster “at least four undesirable impressions among foreign audiences”: not only would the

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“microscopically detailed coverage of the astronaut” contribute to “a foreign image of American braggadocio and lack of restraint” and encourage unfavorable reporting. It would also appear as an “obviously inadequate, perhaps even a pathetic, American response to a major Soviet achievement (the first Soviet space flight, SK),” which would be all the more damaging in case of an accident. Realizing the “intimate involvement of the U.S. space program with American prestige and the conduct of foreign relations,” Farley hence called for a concerted state effort “to influence NASA’s public relations toward effectively contrasting our open space program pursued for meaningful scientific ends with Soviet secrecy, while concurrently avoiding the carnival-like atmosphere characterizing present publicity.”15 Wiesner’s and Farley’s calls went unheard, though. Not only Shepard’s flight but all other following flights were marked by active NASA efforts to assure their visibility, and NASA constantly sought to improve the dramaturgical value of flights, and therewith their emotional effect. In negotiations with TV networks, for example, NASA’s public relations office gave green light for the networks to “build a sister map to the Mercury Control wall installation” at the press site so that networks could dramatize the progress of orbital flights. Moreover, for the first U.S. orbital flight of John Glenn in February 1962, it even made its own proposals on how to dramatize the takeoff of Glenn’s rocket and suggested that networks placed their cameras on the “jetty nearest the Cape” rather than on the roof of Vanguard Motel “for a crowd-reaction picture.” As for the launch itself, NASA announced that it would use “two vidicon cameras on the 11th deck of the gantry at Pad 14 and 4 others in the immediate area” to cover it from multiple angles. By January 1962, officials also agreed to allow usage of voice transmission, but only after it had been cleared by the Mercury Control center and information officers.16 Further visual innovations came particularly in the context of Gordon Cooper’s flight in May 1963, the longest manned space flight made until then. For the first time, NASA permitted the use of a mobile TV van at the cape and introduced a number of new camera positions. In total, television networks were allowed to use twenty-one camera positions to stage activities at the cape. Moreover, NASA constructed a new, more telegenic, Mercury map at the press site that it considered “one of the visual highlights of the mission.” Even Cooper’s recovery from the Pacific was televised live.17 The most spectacular decision, however, was the use of a television camera inside the space craft that transmitted live pictures. Ideas for this kind of coverage had been around since the beginning of

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manned space flights, to be sure, but only now were technical constraints, in particular the weight of the television setup, resolved. Accordingly, when Cooper was blasted into space on 15 May, the space craft also carried an advanced television system encompassing a “TV camera, Camera Control, Camera Shutter, shutter control, transmitter, two lenses, a wide angle and a telephoto,” as NASA counted. The televising from the capsule added another dramatic dimension to space flights. Cooper was able to take live pictures of himself, the instrument panels, and the outside environment, which were broadcast live once the space craft was in reach of certain ground stations.18 Cooper’s flight was also partially covered live by West European television stations. In pool meetings with NASA, the European Broadcasting Union had requested a “live launch, . . . an edited video tape resume of from five to ten minutes in length including pic­tures from the capsule camera, a live feed from the capsule camera, and possibly a final feed when recovery film is available,” and this was what Western European TV viewers got via the Relay and Telstar

Figure 5.1.  Followed by photographers, Gordon Cooper leaves the “Faith 7” capsule after its recovery. NASA took care to arrange maximum visibility for its manned space flights that in turn became important global media events.19

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satellites. Overall, the live transmission lasted around 80 minutes, and thus Western Europeans were able to participate closely in the flight.20 To emotionalize viewers, media often reported about flights with a specific dramaturgy that unfolded in five acts. The first act revolved around the preflight preparations; in the second act, the astronaut boarded his capsule; the third act showed the liftoff of the rocket; the fourth act was the flight itself; and the last act visualized the astronaut’s successful recovery. In the context of Alan Shepard’s flight, for example, West German weekly Der Stern printed a series of photos with high aesthetic quality that showed Shepard being checked by a doctor, approaching the elevator, being locked in the capsule, the liftoff of the rocket, and Shepard being recovered. The photo series thus visualized all stages of flight preparations and procedures, and thereby allowed observers to participate closely and gain intimate insight into what it looked like when the astronaut boarded the capsule or was being recovered.21 Such pictures often blended with intimate, behind the scenes accounts that showed the astronaut preparing and, thereby, built personal identification with the astronaut. In West Germany, for instance, Bild offered a big photo report on the flight of astronaut Cooper in 1963 that included pictures from the breakfast, the dressing up, the walk to the launch pad, and the entry into the capsule. The photo report was not only instructive for its creation of a visualemotional narrative, but at the same time also reflected the dramaturgical role Bild ascribed to itself. In the top picture, Bild intervened with an artificial arrow to point its readers to Cooper. Thereby, the newspaper also made clear that it was not simply a medium of transmission but an active agent of dramatic narration.22 Visually, however, the real sensations were the pictures that showed astronauts in flight. Such pictures were for the first time released after Shepard’s flight, but only came into broader use with John Glenn’s orbital flight in February 1962. Although often of rather bad quality, in-flight pictures now made the in-flight experience visible as well and thus offered observers a unique and unprecedented participatory involvement in space flights: for the first time, observers were able to witness what an astronaut had to cope with while in orbit and could thus put themselves into the astronaut’s position. In-flight pictures were therefore also highly effective in activating emotional empathy with astronauts.23 Thanks to the interplay of NASA’s politics of visibility and global media, U.S. space flights became new and exhilarating global media

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events in the early 1960s, whose spectacular pictures created intense emotional involvement abroad. In contrast to the Soviet Union, NASA perfectly understood that at the end of the day, it were the pictures, not the flights themselves that created admiration for the space program. Space flights therefore also often succeeded in reshaping foreign emotional relationships toward the United States, a phenomenon well captured by a commentary that Clarin published in Argentina on the flight of astronaut Gordon Cooper. As Clarin remarked: “We regard this launching as closer to us and more universal than all the Soviet Vostoks. . . . All the world was able to follow the experience step by step long before the Atlas left its launching-pad.”24

Foreign Space Flight Enthusiasm and USIA The degree of emotional participation and enthusiasm that media pictures generated abroad often crystallized nowhere better than in the excitement with which foreigners responded to a special USIA program—tours of the space capsules. Such tours typically made media pictures come alive: they allowed observers to now see and touch the space capsules they had before only seen in the media. Particularly when capsule exhibits were framed by film showings of the actual flight, they thus reactualized the emotional excitement viewers had sensed before. At the same time, such exhibits also allowed USIA to create further foreign emotional participation in the U.S. space program. USIA realized those potentials early on and started to send capsules abroad already in 1961. Alan Shepard’s capsule, for instance, was sent to the Paris Air show and Rome where it became the “hit of the show.” In addition, two more full-size mock-ups circulated in Western Europe and Latin America since summer 1961 and stimulated public curiosity wherever they were exhibited.25 However, the program’s undisputed highlight was the global tour of John Glenn’s space capsule, whose itinerary truly amounted to what Chester Cooper called the “fourth orbit around the world”: shipped to Latin America first where it was on display in Mexico City, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro, it went on to Europe, Africa, Asia, and, finally, Seattle—twenty-seven stops abroad within four months and with more than four million visitors.26 Wherever it went, the capsule was greeted with popular excitement. From Belgrade, Chester Cooper reported that “a near riot developed several times,” because people were so eager to see and touch the capsule: “Three inch [sic] iron railings, which had been sunk in

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concrete to funnel the people into an orderly line before they reached the capsule, were actually bent by the enthusiastic crowd.”27 Similar scenes occurred in Buenos Aires where the capsule was displayed in the “Sociedad Rural Argentina,” one of the biggest exhibition halls in Argentina that could barely accommodate the 160,000 visitors flocking to the exhibition grounds. Queues stretched around several blocks, and two TV channels broadcast thirty-minute live shows from the capsule during evening prime time (Canal 9 and Canal 7, the state-run channel). Argentine broadcasters explained the capsule and Glenn’s flight, making use of the capsule, USIS drawings, and a USIS film, John Glenn’s Orbital Flight. In addition, Canal 11 and Canal 13 both broadcast the entire film with opening and closing remarks prepared by USIS.28 The capsule itself was exhibited on a cart decorated with flowers that lent the occasion a solemn atmosphere. By climbing a few steps, visitors could take a look inside the capsule where a mannequin had replaced Glenn. Lights illuminated the inside that not only allowed viewers to see the equipment, but also added an aura of magic.29 The mannequin looked so authentic that during the whole world tour, as Chester Cooper reported, visitors would frequently ask “how long the man we had in there would stay before he got out.”30 As in Argentina, desires to see the capsule were intense and exceptional in India, too—and USIS did everything to assure its visibility. In Bombay, it chose Brabourne stadium as exhibition site for the capsule, making its transport there an event of its own by routing it directly through the city center. As Chester Cooper reported, more than a million people lined the streets and were “hanging out of buildings to watch Friendship 7 go by. Every balcony, window and roof top was jammed with cheering people as we rode by.”31 Consolidating such foreign emotional involvement became particularly important for USIA when Project Mercury neared its completion with Gordon Cooper’s flight in May 1963. Already in the context of the flight, USIA therefore organized a joint contribution with NASA to the West German “Photokina,” a fair for visual technology. Titled “Photography in Space,” the USIA/NASA exhibit for the first time showcased in Europe the photographs taken during the Glenn and Carpenter flights, arrayed next to a model of the Friendship-7 capsule and a film screen where a color film of Glenn’s flight was played over and over. As USIS Bonn cabled to Washington, all of the pictures “were displayed on a scale and in a manner which contributed to a dramatic impact on the viewer.” Apparently, those emotionalizing effects worked well. The model and the picture show, as the local newspaper reported, were “always beleaguered by

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spectators,” and few newspaper reviewers could elude the strong emotional appeal of these pictures: “We feel almost uneasy,” the Stuttgarter Zeitung confessed, “when we see the atmosphere as a slightly curved blue-white-red ribbon above the horizon, when the coast of Africa arises from the ocean like a geographic drawing, when blue-white cloud pictures stretch out like dream landscapes or the sun in glowing colors sets into the pitch-black sky.” The Glenn film, meanwhile, often won applause from viewers, as the Mannheimer Morgen commented, because it made “spectators relive part of this adventure in space.” And as a reporter of the Koelner Stadtanzeiger summed up his feelings: “Whoever stands in front of these transparencies senses the immediate value of photography which helps us partake in space flight.”32 In light of such positive popular reactions, NASA and USIA also agreed to send a mobile exhibit around the world by the end of 1963, the so-called spacemobile. An idea as simple as powerful, the spacemobile was a small truck equipped with a number of models and a trained lecturer who drove around in the country to deliver lectures on the space program. Once the spacemobile arrived, presentations always followed the same procedures. The trained lecturer introduced America’s space program to an audience by making use of the rocket models and staging experiments, followed by film showings and a questions-and-answers round. According to one USIS India staffer, the whole program aimed at providing “a dramatic lecture experience in space concepts and activities.”33 Sent around the world from 1963 onward, the spacemobile also toured India and West Germany in mid-1963 and early 1964, respectively. It was, as USIS Bombay reported from the Indian six-month tour, a “resounding success.” Wherever it went, the program “carried its own momentum and demonstrated extremely effectively . . . American achievements in space.” Students and listeners appeared amazed by the models and fired questions at the lecturers. Overall, USIS Bombay reported, the program was thus successful in stimulating “the curiosity of audiences for the peaceful implications of the space age.”34 Much of the same was reported from West Germany, too, where the spacemobile toured through thirty-one major cities in spring 1964 under joint sponsorship by USIS and the German Society for Space Research. While USIS Bonn remained skeptical of the cosponsor’s estimates, according to which the lecture series reached over forty million Germans through extensive media coverage (including reports in the ARD’s “Tagesschau”), it nonetheless applauded the spacemobile’s accomplishments,

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particularly its stimulation of “increasing interest in the American space program.” Especially young people were enthusiastic, USIS Bonn reported, and “showed considerable interest in inspecting the models at close hand.”35 In Tanzania, in the meantime, space lectures were performed by a special NASA lecturer supplied through USIS funding. During the lectures, as The Nationalist advertised, “Rocket and spaceship models will be on view,” and so Tanzanians had an experience quite similar to that of West Germans and Indians.36 At the end of 1964, Tanzanians could also gaze at a mock-up of a Mercury capsule that was displayed in the context of USIS’s “Plastics USA” exhibit. As the Sunday News reported in wonder, the “full scale model of the Mercury space-craft is complete in every detail—there is even a plasticclad spaceman inside.” Accompanying pictures indicated that the capsule was indeed a popular item of the show.37 By 1965/1966 as the U.S. space program had entered the “Gemini phase” (lasting from March 1965 to November 1966), USIS staff in Dar es Salaam also showed continuously the newest space films at the USIS center, including The Flight of Gemini-4. The film was another good example for how USIA tried to stimulate an ongoing and intimate foreign emotional involvement in the space program. A typical

Figure 5.2.  The Gemini capsule exhibited in Bombay. Exhibits, usually including pictures, were an important format to create further emotional involvement in the spaceflight program, and often aimed at recreating the in-flight experience for visitors.38

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U.S. space film, as NASA and USIA produced them by the dozens, The Flight of Gemini-4, took Tanzanians behind the scenes of the space program, showing them how the astronauts prepared for the flight, what the flight’s objectives were, and how it was managed from the control center in Houston. As the film narrator remarked, “for a brief moment we are able to ride tourist class with Gemini-4, watching the crew at work.” A long sequence showed how Edward White performed a space walk during the mission, but equally thrilling were shots of the inside life in the Gemini capsule that allowed Tanzanians a close participatory involvement in the flight. Such pictures had a profound emotional impact on Tanzanian viewers, and USIS Dar es Salaam frequently reported “great enthusiasm” after the film showings.39 In Argentina, in turn, particularly space exhibits continued to draw thousands of excited visitors as the space program moved into the Gemini phase, ranging from a 230-photographs exhibit at a technical school in Buenos Aires to mobile film unit showings in Patagonia where, according to USIS Buenos Aires, the “grass roots reception was enthusiastic.”40 The highlight was a larger exhibit staged in spring 1966 in Buenos Aires and Mar del Plate that involved film showings and the display of the Gemini V capsule. The USIS report noted poignant visitor reactions to the exhibit, including “a father carrying his small son whose legs were encased in braces, whispering explana­tions as the boy’s fingers touched the space craft’s heatscarred surface,” a “group of nuns inquiring interestedly about the space craft’s velocity on ascent and descent,” or “a 89-year-old man scowling at the space craft and shaking his head gravely.” As USIS Buenos Aires concluded, the exhibit thus had paid off in terms of “greater respect for U.S. scientific and technological capabilities.”41 USIA also staged a major exhibit on American space achievements at the German Industries Fair in Berlin in the fall of 1966. Providing a thrilling space flight experience of its own, the exhibit attracted over 300,000 visitors. The windows, as USIS reported, were purposely blacked out to “help create an appropriate ‘outer space’ atmosphere” in the exhibition pavilion, and films were projected on screens located in the “pavilion sky.” Moreover, films were shown on further screens on the main floor, which treated “almost continuously the Gemini spacewalk and rendezvous, the Saturn V and Apollo projects, and other dramatic ten and eleven minute film treatments” of the space program. Between films, “taped sounds of launching countdowns and satellite signals” were played through loudspeakers, adding further to the dramatic sensual experience of space flight.42

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At the same time, the exhibit also tried to lend America’s space program a universal meaning. In addition to full size Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury space crafts, hundreds of models of rockets, and replicas of the Telstar and Alouette satellites, the exhibit also featured an operating weather satellite receiving station as well as an operational satellite tracking antenna. Therewith, it not only demonstrated the concrete benefits the U.S. space program at large had for West Germans, but also underlined that it advanced humankind’s progress generally. Indeed, as a USIA proposal on a further “expanded overseas information effort to strengthen world understanding of the purpose and the achievements of the U.S. space program” stressed roughly at the same time, exhibits had explicitly the purpose of communicating that space exploration was “advancing mankind’s general scientific endeavor . . . in applied technologies that benefit all men.” Presentation techniques therefore intended to “engage the viewer in the idea that space activities have a relevance to his own life, both in his dayto-day activities and in his larger role as a member of an emerging world community,” and exhibits would “underscore, largely by implication, that it is the United States which is taking the lead in this field.” At the same time, future exhibits were to further underline that the space program was important in “strengthening the prospects for peace.”43 Therewith, USIA named a theme that soon would also become more prominently in manned space flights again.

Flights for Peace: The Apollo Program As USIA’s exhibits, films, and photographs as well as the pictures printed or broadcast in visual media underlined, the actual battleground of the space race—the place where emotional involvement and appreciation were built—were not the flights themselves, but the pictures and media that created the aesthetic experiences of those space flights. This also became particularly obvious during the Gemini-4 mission in June 1965 when U.S. astronaut Edward White performed a space walk. While the mission itself was part of the Gemini program’s broader goal to test the impact of the spatial environment on man, White’s space walk also fulfilled a concrete symbolic purpose: it responded to the first and spectacular Soviet space walk that had been performed by Alexei Leonow only months before, and as such, it was part of a symbolic visual battle.44 Media around the world had released black-and-white pictures of Leonow’s space walk, but those had been of bad quality and had showed him

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floating in space head-over-heels somewhat helpless and clumsily. The pictures NASA released of White’s space walk countered those pictures, but were taken in color and showed him doing the space walk in front of the most spectacular coulisse imaginable, planet earth. In his majestic white space suit, White fixed the camera (thus fixing the beholder), and the American flag on his right shoulder was

Figure 5.3.  Edward White’s space walk. The picture was widely printed around the world.45

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well visible. At NASA, officials immediately recognized the immense symbolic value of those space walk pictures. When the pictures were being processed, as NASA employee Richard Underwood remembered a few years later, “We stretched out the roll, and a dozen or so NASA VIPs huddled tightly around the spacewalk photos expressing elation at what they saw.”46 Here, not the fact itself that White had performed the space walk thus was important; important were the pictures it had generated. White’s space walk pictures again underlined that picture making was a crucial part of the flights themselves throughout the 1960s. Accordingly, the Apollo program, too, which followed the Gemini phase, therefore also centered on picture making. Televised live shows from the Apollo capsule now became an essential part of Apollo flights, and Apollo crews permanently had to move back and forth between their tasks as flight operators and evening entertainers.47 Particularly the Apollo 8 mission, taking place over Christmas 1968, demonstrated how much space flights were now also becoming full television events abroad. In West Germany, the second TV channel, ZDF, prepared meticulously for what it called the “televisionary space endeavour” and dispatched one of its lead broadcasters to the United States to conduct interviews and get firsthand images of the space program. ZDF also constructed a special space flight studio from where it broadcast its show. Overall, ZDF covered Apollo 8 for six hours, and therewith much longer than any prior U.S. space mission. Apollo 8, as ZDF later put it, was the “show of the year” and a “highlight of television’s young history,” because it presumably blended “humanity’s hunger for technical sensations with a sentimental Christmassy lust for emotions.”48 ZDF’s coverage, though, laid also bare some of the challenges involved with covering long space missions live. For one, the technical studio setup proved problematic. Because the broadcasters had only small monitor screens at their disposal, they missed out on important entertainment elements like the teeth-brushing session of the astronauts, making for clumsy commentary. While every ZDF viewer could clearly recognize the toothbrushes on screen, the small studio monitors only showed opaque pictures, leaving the broadcasters puzzling for minutes about what was going on in outer space. In addition, many West German viewers complained about the cheap-looking coulisse of the studio, a setting they thought not appropriate for the historic moment.49 For the United States, meanwhile, Apollo 8 also offered an opportunity to formulate a larger American peace promise. As soon as

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the space craft had entered lunar orbit, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders began Apollo 8’s televised Christmas show, which they used to communicate messages of one world united. Borman transmitted a sermon for his home church: To Rod Rose and the people of St. Christopher’s, actually to people everywhere—Give us, O God, the vision which can see thy love in the world in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust thy goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts. And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.50

Minutes later, Borman, Lovell, and Anders read out the first paragraphs of Genesis—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”—lending their voyage a spiritual and transcendental character, ending with: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.”51 Those sermons still reverberated around the world when the most spectacular image of Apollo 8 was released a few days later: “Earthrise,” a photograph taken by the Apollo 8 crew during its lunar orbit. Showing a deserted lunar surface in the forefront and the fragile blue planet earth hanging lost in space in the background, “Earthrise” proved all those right who had expected that the flight was going to produce “some spectacular new photographs.”52 On its surface, “Earthrise” seemed to represent a neutral or objective viewpoint, yet one could also see it as a picture that was intended to lend Apollo 8 a universal meaning and therewith also had the goal of visualizing American empire’s peace promise: not only was global peace a possibility, as the picture suggested in its subtext—Apollo 8 had also done the first step to unite the world again. Indeed, just how powerful the picture’s normative appeal to unite was also showed in a poem that poet Archibald MacLeish published after he had seen “Earthrise.” The poem closed with the lines: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”53 Apollo 8 was one of three dress rehearsals for the actual moon landing mission, Apollo 11, and almost with the launch of Apollo 8, preparations for Apollo 11, scheduled for July 1969, began. As early as February 1969, USIA started making arrangements, being aware,

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however, that it would only play a supplementary role to commercial media coverage. Plans called for the production of several films, a top quality pamphlet, and the construction of hundreds of “kiosks” that would “serve as displays for posters, photos, transparencies, small models,” and would “project an endless belt 8mm film.” In respect to symbolic items for the moon mission, several officials voiced the idea of planting flags on the moon and obtaining moon rocks for use in USIS exhibits.54 The most important task USIA officials saw themselves involved in was to make sure that NASA internationalized the moon landing properly. From abroad, USIS posts cabled recurrently reminders that it was imperative to avoid “chauvinism in treating the moon landing,”55 and this was an attitude widely shared within USIA headquarters. A guidelines paper sent to NASA spelled out how to frame the mission. It noted the importance of portraying the moon landing as representing humankind and the realization of its old desire to “overcome its Earthbound limitations.” But it also emphasized the theme that “space has brought man closer together” and stressed that the administration should remind people that “to over a billion onlookers, Apollo 8 was a universally shared experience, and its photos a dramatic reminder that men are ‘riders on the Earth together.’”56 Contrary to USIA’s expectations, officials at NASA, too, were keenly aware that the lunar landing would be a unique moment to drive home important points about America’s claim to global leadership. In fact, a key decision had already been taken early in the year when Georg Low rejected ideas for planting a United Nations flag on the surface of the moon. As he remarked, he felt “strongly that planting the United States flag on the moon represents a most important aspect of all of our efforts.”57 To assure proper planning for further symbolic activities, NASA set up a “Symbolic Activities Committee” headed by Willis Shapley in spring 1969. The committee was charged with planning the kinds of activities the astronauts could perform on the lunar surface and pondering the artifacts they would take along on their journey. “Symbolic activities,” Shapley outlined the agenda in April 1969, “should be simple, in good taste from a world-wide standpoint, and have no commercial implications or overtones.” The “intended overall impression” they were to convey and “the manner in which they are presented to the world should be to signalize the first lunar landing as an historic forward step of all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States of America.” Accordingly, the mission would have to stage two overarching themes. As Shapley pointed

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out, first the “‘forward step of all mankind’ aspect of the landing should be symbolized primarily by a suitable inscription to be left on the moon.” Second, the “‘accomplishment by the United States’ aspect of the landing should be symbolized primarily by placing and leaving a U.S. flag on the moon in such a way as to make it clear that the flag symbolized the fact that an effort by American people reached the moon.” But it was important to avoid any impression of the United States “taking possession” of the moon, Shapley underlined. The flag itself “should be such that it can be clearly photographed and televised. If possible, the act of emplacing the flag by the astronaut, as well as the emplaced flag with an astronaut beside it should be photographed and televised. Current thinking is that a recognizable traditional flag should be emplaced on the moon.” This was important, Shapley went on, because the “flag decal on the LM [Lunar Module] decent stage would not by itself suffice unless a flag proved to be clearly not feasible.” The cloth flag was either to be placed on a “vertically emplaced pole, with astronaut to hold flag in visible position for photographing” or “on pole emplaced at an angle so that flag is visible for photographing,” but visible for television it had to be. Other items the mission should carry along, in Shapley’s view, would be a “permanent commemorative marker, suitably inscribed, to be placed and left on the lunar surface, with photographic and television coverage as suggested above for the U.S. flag, if possible,” but the committee had not yet settled on the form of the marker, which could either be a “thin-walled metal pyramid” or a “container of cylindrical.” Another item would be “miniature flags of all nations, one set to be left on the moon in a suitable container (see above), and a duplicate set to be returned to earth for possible presentation by the President to foreign Chiefs of State.” Finally, besides pointing to a few secondary items, Shapley underlined that the “LM descent stage itself will be of prime symbolic significance since the descent stage will become a permanent monument on the surface of the moon.” For this reason, Shapley wrote, “the name given to the LM and any inscriptions to be placed on it must be consistent with the overall approach on symbolic articles.” The vehicle’s name “should be dignified and hopefully convey the sense of ‘beginning’ rather than ‘culmination’ of man’s exploration of other worlds.”58 Over at the White House, meanwhile, Nixon and his staff contemplated how to get the president involved visibly with the Apollo flight. Several ideas came up and were dropped again, but one idea persisted: having Nixon send televised congratulations to the moon

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in a split-screen performance that would show Nixon on the one side and the astronauts on the other. Such an appearance, Nixon’s television advisor Bud Wilkinson confirmed, would be easily achievable from a technical point of view, and it would “identify the President with the space program more directly and personally.”59 At one point, Nixon’s advisors also pursued the idea to play the “Star Spangled Banner” in conjunction with Nixon’s split-screen performance, but that idea was dropped soon again. The notion of the crew standing “at attention for some two and one-half minutes” on the moon’s surface, as Colonel Borman pointed out, seemed too odd and could furthermore be perceived as “non-productive from a scientific or exploration standpoint.”60 Planning went also forward on the more poetic items to be invoked during the landing, including Armstrong’s first sentence. By mid-April, there was ample agreement within USIA that he would “undoubtedly say that the landing is being made in the name of mankind,” and it seems that the idea for his famous first sentence actually came from USIA itself.61 Leaving nothing to chance, the administration also approached poet Archibald MacLeish with the idea for a special poem. In a short letter, Nixon himself confessed that he had been “deeply impressed” with MacLeish’s essay on the “the view of our world from outer space,” and hence would like to get a poem from him, which the Apollo 11 crew could take along on its journey. It was important, as Nixon emphasized, that the moon mission “be viewed not only as a great adventure, but in the perspective of a search for truth and a quest for peace,” as something that dramatized “the need for an understanding of the common goals of the human race.”62 MacLeish, however, did not deliver the poem. Another important symbol NASA prepared was the metal plate the astronauts would unveil on the moon. Under a graphic sketch that showed the world as a whole without political boundaries, an inscription stated: “Here Men From the Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon in July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.” Signatures of the three astronauts and of Nixon rounded off the plate. It was Austrian media philosopher, Günther Anders, who was the first to point out the bizarre absurdity of that metal plate: apparently, NASA and the White House not only operated on the premise that the moon was populated with lunar inhabitants who had to be informed of humankind’s landing on their planet (if they would ever stumble upon the plate at all)—but also, apparently, assumed that these inhabitants would have eyes like humans, would be able to read as humans did, would know the meaning of Latin letters, would

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be conversant with English, would be trained in the human calendar, and would know the difference between war and peace.63 Yet lunarians were of course not the actual target audience. Rather, the plate’s underlying purpose was to communicate core messages about the peaceful character of America’s global empire. As the plate, Armstrong’s first sentence, and Nixon’s reminders to MacLeish illustrated, the goal of the mission was to portray the United States as a peace-seeking nation that united people around the world behind a common cause. In this sense, the discourse of universalism, which Americans fashioned around Apollo 11 and through which they framed the astronauts as ambassadors of humankind, too, served a highly imperial purpose: it was that discourse that lent Apollo a universal meaning and therewith allowed Americans to communicate more effectively their peace promise. The closer Apollo 11’s launch day moved, the more moon fever also began to spread abroad. Around the world, the looming moon landing began to permeate every single sector of everyday life, and Apollo 11 items began to occupy much of the public sphere. In West Germany, banking centers and two large countrywide department stores set up window exhibits and TV screens that played USIS films, and the Bavarian state ministry ordered school principals to either “provide classrooms with television sets” or declare school holiday on the day of the moon landing.64 In Berlin, USIS installed the Apollo 8 capsule on a truck and toured the city, “attracting many thousands,” as it reported later.65 Among German women, meanwhile, the Apollo haircut became the fashion of the day, and many Germans stormed the bookstores, setting off a “moon boom on the German book market,” as Der Spiegel reported.66 Much of the same enthusiasm was shared by spectators in Argentina, India, and Tanzania. In Argentina, Canal 11 began to broadcast daily three-minute flash news on Apollo 11 preparations from 7 July onward, and all major TV channels sent their correspondents to Cape Canaveral. Those, however, operated with very limited capabilities: when Mónica Mihanovich of Canal 13 interviewed Wernher von Braun, the latter had to hold the microphone in the right hand— and the light bulb in the left hand.67 To the disappointment of many Argentineans who had assembled in front of TV screens, the Apollo 11 launch was not being shown live on television on 16 July because NASA blocked the Intelsat satellite for its own use. Most channels hence showed documentary images of former launches, while Canal 13 simulated the launch in a studio two days later. Yet, thanks to the completion of a satellite receiving

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station in Balcarce, live TV gradually came to Argentina over the next days, and so Argentinean television viewers received the first live shows from the Apollo 11 capsule, an exhilarating participatory experience for most viewers: “We were,” noted Crónica, “in the Apollo 11 capsule thanks to TV.”68 As the lunar landing approached, TV channels further stepped up their moon coverage. Canal 13 again was particularly creative: on its popular show “Sábados de la bondad,” it staged a “show de los lunáticos” from the planetarium, during which five beat bands played “música espacial.”69 In the afternoon of 20 July, finally, whoever could pause did so in excitement in front of a TV set to watch the actual landing. At the intersection of Avenida Corrientes and Pellegrini, hundreds of people even occupied both streets in order to get a glimpse on one of the TV screens that the “Trust Joyero Relojero” had put up in its shop windows. Once Armstrong and Aldrin had landed on the moon, sirens rang in the city and in the harbor. In Plaza de la República, people jostled to contemplate the Sea of Tranquility through a telescope—for twenty centavos—and even a football match between Los Cardales and Las Tacuaras was interrupted for a few minutes of commemoration. As La Nación observed, people all over Buenos Aires were joyful, and “all smiled and were satisfied with a feat they felt were part of.” Apollo 11, Primera Plana, remarked later, was the “best program in the local 18-year history of this medium.” Exactly 92.6 percent of all Argentinean TV viewers had followed it, an “absolute record almost impossible to beat.”70 In West Germany, in the meantime, it was already early morning (21 July) once Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon, but the number of TV viewers was nonetheless incredibly high as well. About 92 percent of all West Germans tuned in to one of the two major TV channels, as USIS reported.71 In particular, channel one, ARD, went to great lengths to deliver its viewers a moon show worthy of its name. The show was broadcast from a special Apollo 11 studio and featured, among other things, a model of the lunar landing vehicle, a panel of TV experts, telephone booths that viewers could call, and four, at times even five, broadcasters who presented the show from different desks. In between, the show frequently also included live scenes from Houston where an ARD correspondent reported the latest development. Here, German television thus underlined with all means of entertainment that it was a dramaturgical agent that gave its viewers unprecedented opportunities to participate in special global events—though from today’s perspective much of ARD’s moon show resembled a preprofessional state.72 Frequently the

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show’s broadcasters interrupted each other, were uncoordinated, made mistakes, started to talk at the same time, or remained silent altogether because they were unsure whose turn it was, which produced many awkward moments. In between, they told bad jokes or bombarded viewers with useless technical details. Other times, they were called up unprepared and were shown either drinking tea or relaxing with sunglasses on. Ironically, it was precisely the long lack of live images of the moon landing itself that was responsible for the carnival elements of the show. ARD not only offered a full model of the lunar landing vehicle, but also sent two studio astronauts into the arena who were fully dressed up and preenacted the most important scenes of the lunar landing. West German TV viewers thus witnessed one of the most bizarre fusions of fictional studio theater blended with reality ever broadcast on German TV. When Armstrong and Aldrin landed, so did the studio astronauts—cut together with live images from Houston’s control room, older moon images from former missions, and the live voice transmission. When Armstrong left the vehicle, so did one of the studio astronauts, a sports student. Only when Armstrong appeared on the ladder did the live transmission from the moon begin, including the famous scenes of the flag planting and Nixon’s phone call. Unlike West Germans and Argentineans, Tanzanians and Indians did not experience the moon landing through TV because of a lack

Figure 5.4.  Television image of Armstrong and Aldrin during their telephone call with Nixon.73

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of national TV systems. USIS staff in New Delhi therefore made use of models and exhibits, picking up on the universal and peaceful appeal of the “Earthrise” picture by copying it with a three-dimensional exhibit. Accordingly, USIS’s moon landing presentation was framed around a full-scale lunar module mock-up “resting on a lunar landscape complete with a painted earthrise in the background.” The presentation also included an “attractive photographic exhibit,” and the USIS exhibit alone drew a “quarter million enthusiastic viewers,” as Ambassador Keating reported from New Delhi. In addition, films and TV kinescopes of Apollo 11 were shown in the USIS center, in commercial cinemas, and on New Delhi’s small TV system.74 In Dar es Salaam, too, USIS officials compensated the lack of live images through models. At the USIS center, in particular, the staff went to great lengths to recreate the live experience for Tanzanians by playing former Apollo films over and over, and decorating the center with big models of a Saturn rocket, the lunar landing craft, and a space suit. Moreover, USIS officers also hang a papier-mâché globe and a papier-mâché moon under the ceiling, connected both with ropes that symbolized Apollo 11’s trajectory, and placed a big model on them. Broadcasting the Voice of America’s live coverage of the flight through loudspeakers, they moved the model along the ropes every now and then to dramatize Apollo 11’s flight progress.75 Though Indian and Tanzanian visual experiences thus were different from German and Argentinean ones, the lunar landing nonetheless stirred up popular emotions comparable with responses in Argentina and West Germany. As the U.S. embassy reported from Dar es Salaam, the “anti-U.S. backlash” brought about by the Vietnam war at that time “was but a minor irritant compared with what was nothing less than an American triumph acknowledged by Tanzanians of every description.” Indeed, the day the Eagle landed on the moon, the embassy noted, “Mobs besieged the space shot open house at the USIS Library, show­ing a degree of enthusiasm in their desire to get inside usually typical only of those in other lands who have wanted to burn down USIS offices.”76

The End of the Space Race The lunar landing marked the undisputed climax of America’s empire of pictures as it unified hundreds of millions of global observers in one visual moment. This also made it a powerful moment for the symbolic integration of American empire, and commentaries around

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the world generally indicated that Americans indeed had gotten their peace message across. In Argentina, opinion polls found that 77 percent of all Argentineans considered the moon landing important for the whole of humankind.77 In West Germany, TV moderators had already during the moon show stressed throughout their “gratefulness to the messengers of mankind” or had called Armstrong and Aldrin “our astronauts,” thereby reflecting the strong degree of West German identification with Americans. Similarly, Bild opined that the moon landing had begun a “new millennium” in which “America should and will lead mankind into a new technical and scientific future.”78 Signs of West German identification with America even stretched to West German front gardens where many Germans now placed garden gnomes complete with a U.S. flag, a bag of moon stones, and a space helmet.79 In a review of foreign responses to the lunar landing, USIA officials, too, noted that the lunar landing had won over hearts and minds abroad. As an Apollo 11 review stated, America’s openness had “permitted a high degree of personal identification with American space exploration, and [had] fostered a sense of vicarious participation” among outside observers. In fact, “the direct and immediate participation of millions upon millions as eye and car witnesses,” the review noted, “had not only “immeasurably magnified wonder, suspense, and jubilation” abroad: “To many, the ability to watch men on the moon was a marvel second only to the moon landing itself.”80 As much as Apollo 11 further consolidated American empire, however, it also effectively ended the space race, and therewith also brought the golden era of manned space flights to a close. Indeed, none of the subsequent Apollo missions reached the same levels of global attention and involvement again as the first lunar landing, although the quality of TV transmissions improved substantially with each new Apollo mission. Consequently, NASA decided to forgo another lunar mission after Apollo 17 had completed the sixth lunar landing mission at the end of 1972. Quite apparently, as the space race had been decided, manned space flights had begun to lose their symbolic purpose.

Chapter 6

Power Global Media and the Other History of the Vietnam War I was fairly sad when the Vietnam War ended. Specifically, because there weren’t any exciting news anymore. Of course I was on the side of the Viet Cong. But in terms of the visual appearance it really did have something quite appealing: US-Marines and F4-Phantom and combat helicopters on TV. Peter Hein, German singer They had decorated the folding table with paper webs and there it said: Stop the bombing terror on Vietnam! Are they ashamed, Ullrich asked himself, when they pass the table with their shopping bags and Christmas presents, when they read this or see the horrible photograph of the burned Vietnamese child? Did it embarrass them to evade his stretched out arm with the leaflet, just as it embarrassed him to stand here, with the sign wrapped around him? Uwe Timm, “Heißer Sommer”

One of the most memorable plays staged in Buenos Aires’s lively

theater scene in 1968 was a piece titled “Viet Rock.”1 In rapidly changing scenes, it staged the draft of young American boys, their combat in Vietnam, their bombing missions, and therewith negotiated the question of American power: the means, aims, and legitimacy of its deployment, its effects, and consequences. Reviewers praised it as a “spectacle of vibrant vitality,”2 and Argentine theater goers seemed

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to like it. For over three years, “Viet Rock” remained part of the program; in total, its actors staged 409 performances.3 Filling the evenings of Porteños, “Viet Rock” was also a play about pictures. Its purpose, as U.S. author Megan Terry explained in the program leaflet, was to deal with the “material which bombarded us every day from the television and the press,” and what it wanted was to work out the “bewilderment, shame, and confusion created by this war.” Trying to get at the “essence of violence,” “Viet Rock” thus sought to open up a space for Argentineans where they could come to terms with a war whose pictures, by 1968, had come to widely dominate Argentinean media and everyday life, too.4 This chapter explores the history of the war’s pictures, asks how pictures of the Vietnam war traveled around the world, how they were appropriated abroad, and examines why they became a fundamental problem for American empire. Although the war has often been termed a “living room war”5 or “television war,”6 I argue that it would actually be more apt to label it a “picture war,” whose images also circulated widely beyond TV screens. War pictures, I show, appeared not only on television but also in illustrated magazines and exhibits, in underground movies and propaganda films, in theater plays, leaflets, art works, posters, protest marches, and cartoons— and therewith reflected the absolute centrality pictures began to attain in foreign engagements with American empire over the course of the 1960s.7 Examining the global visual history of the war, the chapter also takes aim at a particular master narrative that has virtually monopolized the war’s media history over the last two decades. According to this narrative, the media reported and visualized the war in overwhelmingly favorable terms à la “our good guys in action” until at least 1968/1969 when the Tet offensive and the massacre of My Lai gave way to a second phase of a somewhat more critical (visual) reporting.8 Nearly all scholars emphasize that American media were not an agent of critical confrontation but a willing follower of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. Thus, TV reports and photographs rarely showed the wounded, dead, or suffering but instead showcased American combat bravery and technology.9 This narrative, however, only holds true for the history of U.S. media and does not apply to the global media history of the war, as this chapter is going to show.10 In fact, seen in a global perspective, the benevolent American visual portrayal of the war was the one big exception. Abroad, media reports typically showed the war in

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different visual terms, and even before 1968 emphasized widely the suffering it caused in Vietnam. Seeking to shift perspective from a U.S.-centered approach to a global media history of the war, this chapter consists of four parts.11 Part one looks at the interplay of commercial photographers and official image controllers. It examines the strategies by which U.S. information officials tried to lure photographers and camera operators into an “official iconography” of the war, explores how USIA films, pamphlets, and exhibits reflected these official aesthetics, and shows that efforts to draw photographers into those aesthetics were often surprisingly successful. However, as part two shows, efforts to frame the war as a legitimate and beneficial “good war” eventually failed massively in light of a fundamental global “image trouble” that contrasted and undermined official war aesthetics by showing the war’s effects on Vietnamese civilians. Especially television offered viewers in Argentina and West Germany an unknown participatory involvement in the war’s ostensible terror against civilians, but print media, too, visualized the suffering the war created. In addition, pictures of concrete acts of violence as well as the visual counterpropaganda from North Vietnam and the agencies of the National Liberation Front (NLF) further complicated the “clean” American perspective and rallied world opinion against the war long before the Tet offensive and the massacre of My Lai. Part three takes the story beyond the sphere of the mass media and examines how the war’s images mobilized and activated those who consumed them—specifically the protestors. Emphasizing the performative responses of those “activated observers” and drawing on Hans Belting’s approach of “picture anthropology,”12 the section looks at the visual practices by which protestors appropriated and contested the war’s images. While parts one to three cover roughly the years 1965 to 1969, part four treats the last stage of the (American) war 1969 to 1973, the phase of what I call “America’s visual disengagement” from the war. As I show, “visual disengagement” not only made image gathering inside Vietnam more difficult and led to a new scarcity as far as pictures from Vietnam were concerned, but also entailed a foreign “emotional disengagement” from the war. Only temporarily did events like the invasion of Cambodia (May 1970), the spring offensive (spring 1972), or the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam (December 1972) ignite foreign compassion and anger again. For the most part of those years, however, the war gradually moved out of view. The conclusion, finally, ties together the broader findings and

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explains the paradox of why the Vietnam War further consolidated American empire, although it ended its global hegemony.

In Search of the “Good War”: Picture Hunters, Picture Makers, and the Global Visual Economy Among the media events of the 1960s, the Vietnam War was doubtless the best example for the emergence of a global “visual economy”13 where images were traded globally like commodities and where a global hunger for visuals grew progressively. In this particular kind of economy, images of major international crises were in ever-increasing demand abroad, precisely because the mass media simultaneously globalized and turned more visual (see chapter 2). After the Algerian war and the Congo crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s, photographers from around the world hence flocked to Vietnam, coming in search of the spectacular image they could sell to the wire services and mass media abroad. As United Press International advertised in an American photography magazine: “If you’re young and hungry and want to get rich and famous then Vietnam is the place to be.”14 By the mid-1960s, when the Johnson administration escalated the war, dozens of combat photographers competed on the spot, including photographers like Horst Faas (the Saigon photo chief of Associated Press, AP) and Malcolm Browne (AP). Even the regular reporters, as AP correspondent Peter Arnett remembered, now “routinely began carrying cameras, and the war was discovered by freelance photographers who risked their lives for the fifteen dollars a photo that Horst [Faas] paid them.”15 Foreign television stations, too, discovered Vietnam as a new terrain that allowed them to demonstrate their worth as a “window to the world,” and television teams now took full advantage of the new mobility that the invention of portable cameras gave them, a mobility they did not have in prior wars and crises. As a result, the image supply from South Vietnam soared from the mid-1960s onward, and the numbers of accredited correspondents jumped to a few hundred, reaching a climax of over 600 in February and March 1968.16 In visualizing the war, photographers and camera operators benefitted from a peculiar American information policy that was officially based on the “principle of maximum candor”17 since August 1964. Although the candor was not as maximal as the Pentagon and USIA liked to depict it, the principle of openness nonetheless

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granted correspondents a freedom of movement inside South Vietnam and an access to sources unknown in wars before or after, mostly regardless of the correspondent’s nationality. Everything correspondents had to do to get accredited at the U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was to fill out a one-page form, hand in a couple of ID photos, and sign a declaration. Once the process was completed, correspondents were authorized to fly on military aircraft, and they could also book seats on regular U.S. flights in South Vietnam. Within the Joint Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) headquarters in Saigon, one section was solely charged with arranging interviews, clothing, and flights for correspondents, and correspondents made frequent use of its services. In 1967 alone, they booked seats on a total of 8,900 flights.18 However, even if American officials praised their candor, they nevertheless took steps inside South Vietnam through which they hoped to draw correspondents into their way of representing the war. A “special projects helicopter” inaugurated in mid-1964, for example, permitted JUSPAO the “quick transport [of] correspondents to [the] site of useful developments,” and thereby allowed U.S. officials to draw the attention of correspondents to those aspects of the war they wished

Figure 6.1.  Throughout the 1960s, hundreds of photographers, correspondents, and camera operators travelled to Vietnam to cover the war, which also became the first war to be broadcast widely on television, both at home and abroad. Here, Walter Cronkite of CBS interviews a commander.19

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to see emphasized.20 During a conference in Honolulu, U.S. officials spelled out a host of other measures to assure favorable reports. Air strikes, for example, were to be announced in innocuous tones such as “‘it looked good,’ ‘several large fires,’ ‘several large secondary explosions,’ ‘smoke covered the target as we left,’ ‘as an early estimate, it appears damage was heavy and the target was as much as 50% destroyed.’” Moreover, “strike photography should be made available to the [U.S.] Mission as soon as possible and the Mission should be authorized to release upon request good photography.” As for the correspondents, the conference pleaded to authorize them “to ride jet aircraft on strikes in South Vietnam and on strikes against North Vietnam,” but only under the condition that they were trained and agreed to submit all “copy and photos resulting from the flight.”21 U.S. administrations also produced and circulated their own pictures of the war throughout the world. As early as mid-1962, the USIS mission in Saigon inaugurated a Vietnam photo service to all USIS posts around the world. The attention “focused on Vietnam by the world press, coupled with limited wirephoto and newsphoto facilities here,” USIS Saigon cabled, provided “an excellent opportunity for other posts to render a valuable service to local editors and at the same time to counter Communist diatribes against the Diem regime and U.S. military and economic aid to Vietnam.” The weekly packet, consisting of three to five photos, was going to focus on such aspects as “evidence of external communist subversion, successful military actions against the Viet Cong, Viet Cong attacks on innocent Vietnamese villages . . . and social and economic achievements promising a better life for the Vietnamese people.”22 To increase the photo packet’s quality, USIA and the Department of Defense also dispatched teams of U.S. Army combat photographers to South Vietnam in mid-1964 in order to get “a wider selection of more dramatic photos.”23 In addition, the Department of Defense sent its own film teams to Vietnam, and around the world, USIA posts showed films about the war or disseminated pamphlets.24 In conjunction with the pictorial offers that U.S. information officials made to photographers on the ground in Vietnam, such photo packets, films, and pamphlets were constantly utilized by U.S. officials to establish an iconography of a “good war” that minimized the visibility of the war’s victims and that maximized appearances of U.S. actions as orderly, clean, beneficial, powerful, and legitimate. In contrast to the war’s deadly and often chaotic reality on the ground, this official American perspective dehumanized American warfare as a clean application of military technology and rendered invisible the mass suffering it created. To observers abroad, the good war was

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to be an enjoyable aesthetic experience, something worth watching, and by extension, worth accepting or even better supporting.25 The “key visuals”26 of those war aesthetics were pictures that showed the U.S. military machinery with its helicopters, bombers, or aircraft carriers and that offered observers immediate participation in its actions. In films such as USIA’s flagship movie, The Night of the Dragon, which the agency lauded for its “technical excellence,”27 USIA used bird’s eye shots from above that recreated the perspective of helicopters and showed explosions in the jungle from above, which rendered the victims invisible. In addition, film shots of helicopter squadrons or from inside helicopters created the feeling of an immediate participatory involvement, but also symbolized paradigmatically the extent of American power. At the end, the film also showed a long battle sequence that was filmed on the ground as well as from behind helicopter machine guns, thereby predetermining a certain techno-perspective on the war. Films like The Night of the Dragon not only gave viewers the feeling of an immediate visual involvement in the war and its military technology, but also reflected the aesthetics that U.S. officials envisioned for all war representations. Accordingly, photographers and camera teams were regularly ushered to U.S. aircraft carriers and military bases or could join in helicopter flights and on bombing missions. The aesthetic results were pictures that showed jets flying and releasing their bombs next to each other in neat symmetrical order, helicopters lined up, patrols wading through rice fields, or soldiers shooting their machine guns.28 A typical piece from Argentinean Panorama, for example, displayed the war in beautiful colors and with aesthetic motives: a close-up of a tank blasting off napalm (the “only effective weapon” against snipers, as the caption noted); marines landing in the sunrise; helicopters lined up; a vessel shooting off a missile. Only one picture drew attention to the plight of Vietnamese civilians.29 Like official U.S. representations, those photographs thus dehumanized U.S. actions as far as the Vietnamese victims they caused were concerned and instead showcased the technology of war. Especially foreign television stations often followed suit with American aesthetic offers. West German TV correspondent, Lothar Loewe, and his camera operators, for example, joined a jet aircraft on its bombing mission, and thereby offered West German TV viewers a war experience on screen that was similar to The Night of the Dragon. Like a sports reporter, Loewe commented “live” from the cockpit, describing how he was pushed back into his seat during takeoff, and providing details of the target area, a village somewhere below in the

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jungle. The raid was filmed from the cockpit’s perspective, and accordingly, all that viewers saw were explosions and clouds of smoke in the jungle—a “clean” bird’s-eye view of the war.30

Figure 6.2.  A typical example for the particular aesthetic perspective that U.S. officials sought to establish on the war—often with great success. Showing the war from above, the USIA photograph showcases military technology and renders invisible the war’s victims.31

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Loewe’s feature was not an exception. Similar TV clips were broadcast in Argentina where news programs—that is, at least in the fragmentary archival records left of them—were dominated by aerial top-down shots from inside helicopters or aircraft that showed viewers the war at a distance.32 For TV viewers in West Germany and Argentina such TV coverage often provided an enjoyable and exhilarating aesthetic experience that allowed them to participate immediately in the war without having to cope with the threats, the deadly effects, and the inconveniences of the actual flight. In addition, such TV images had a special mobilizing quality insofar as they not only engaged viewers emotionally and captured their imagination, but also subtly encouraged their identification with a particular perspective—the helicopter’s perspective—and, in this sense, with the U.S. point of view on the war. Portrayals of the techno-war nearly always corresponded with images of the opponent’s dirty war. Particularly, USIA was eager to visualize North Vietnamese acts of aggression or evidence of the NLF’s/Viet Cong terror in order to legitimize U.S. warfare and to mobilize foreign sympathies for the American policy of reprisal. Pamphlets such as “Viet Cong Use of Terror Against the Vietnamese People,” “‘Liberation’ Or Conquest: The Struggle in South Vietnam,” or “Massacre at Hue” were widely circulated abroad and showed what was described as the Communist arms supply to South Vietnamese guerillas as well as the disrupting effects it had on South Vietnamese everyday life.33 Most pamphlets used strong visual language on their title pages such as close-ups of crying men or women in order to arouse compassion for the South Vietnamese. Inside, photographs nearly always showed the same motifs: destroyed trucks, cars, refugee camps, and villages; burning cars; dead or severely wounded bodies—in short, the effects of Viet Cong terror. A pamphlet circulated in West Germany, for example, titled “The Viet Cong Liberate a Village” narrated how the Viet Cong typically governed a village through terrorizing its population, spreading fear, brainwashing, intimidating, or killing people. One picture included in the pamphlet depicted a Vietnamese man emaciated to the bone being examined by an American medical doctor, his eyes wide open, and reflecting the pain and horrors he had experienced in one month of Viet Cong confinement. Another picture once again aimed at creating empathy by depicting a crying man holding in his arms a dead child who had been killed in a Viet Cong attack.34 To a major extent, those pamphlets were also used to resolve a representational dilemma that preoccupied U.S. administrations

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throughout the war, and that was endemic for asymmetric warfare: because Viet Cong attacks on South Vietnamese civilians usually took place by surprise and in the dark, they often went unreported and without visual documentation. Asymmetric warfare, in this sense, entailed asymmetric representations. Where the organized joint U.S.–South Vietnamese war effort assured the visibility abroad of unwarranted violent acts in case they took place, the Viet Cong’s unpredictable surprise attacks often, though not always, remained invisible abroad. To offset this kind of representational asymmetry, the Johnson administration labored hard to draw attention to Viet Cong atrocities. As early as 1964, the Department of Defense dispatched two special photo teams to Vietnam “to obtain authentic and timely still and motion picture coverage showing the results of Viet Cong atrocities and attacks on the Republic of Vietnam civilians.”35 USIS Saigon, too, summoned a group of combat motion picture and still photographers with the explicit task of photographing Viet Cong atrocities. The results, however, were “very modest,” as USIS Saigon reported, partly at least because the scenes of violence are often so isolated, and nearly always so unpredictable, that the chance of a photographer being at the right place at the right time is negligible. For example, Larry Burroughs one of Life’s best photographers, last fall spent nearly three months of shooting to get enough action shots for one story in the magazine.36

As information officials within the Pentagon ruminated, atrocity pictures were “something we keep talking about, but which we just don’t seem to be able to document except with SVN [government of South Vietnam, SK] figures and reports. One picture is worth a thousand words, but even Horst Faas can’t seem to get one.”37 Still, what USIS photographers and journalists could photograph were the effects of Viet Cong attacks, and such pictures were indeed often published in Bild, Panorama, or the Times of India where they helped to construct the overall picture of a country living under the permanent menace of further sneaky guerilla attacks.38 Typical pictures printed in those media visualized Viet Cong attacks on civilians by showing the dead and mutilated bodies those attacks left behind; the desperate, disoriented people covered in blood; or depicted the wounded and crying mothers and children, the latter often in closeup views.39 From late 1965 onward, official images also increasingly featured another aspect of the war, namely, the material betterment

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it brought to the South Vietnamese. As Johnson aide Jack Valenti pointed out, the administration had to communicate better to the nation and the world “what we do that is useful and beneficcal [sic] in Vietnam,” specifically in the field of nonmilitary activities. Here, the United States did much, Valenti suggested, but it failed to dramatize it “in such a way to be understood and applauded.” Greater emphasis on civilian achievement, he speculated, would have positive side effects: “all that must be done militarily will be accepted in a better frame of mind by those who feel uneasy about bombs and bullets if they know about our non-military activities.”40 In particular, from early 1966 onward, USIA materials hence emphasized what the Johnson administration commonly called “the other war,” namely, the multitude of development projects under way in fields such as housing, education, food, and industry. The war, such representations suggested, was a war about South Vietnam’s future, which was being waged in order to improve living conditions in South Vietnam. Accordingly, USIA films such as Eighth District, A Nation Builds, or Other War showcased concrete examples of how South Vietnam tried to “heal the wounds of war and to build a sound basis for a peaceful and economically secure future” with U.S. and other free world assistance.41 Likewise, exhibits visualized the range of the free world’s civilian aid projects in Vietnam. One photo exhibit that toured USIS centers across West Germany, for instance, illustrated how twenty-eight countries supported South Vietnam’s development through assistance in farming, education, industrial development, or medicine.42 In USIA publications, too, “the other war” was frequently showcased through smaller articles about specific projects or villages. A typical example out of many was a story published in USIA’s SPAN in India about a South Vietnamese village called Trung An, with a population of 18,600 people. The village had been freed from Viet Cong control, the story explained, and its history was of “of significance to everyone interested in the success of co-operative efforts for peaceful national development.” Within those three years, the village had been “passing through a period of accelerating development,” and thanks to the productive role of the government, it had launched a “multiplicity of self-help projects” that had benefitted its citizens across the board, because they had advanced productivity, security, and prosperity. One picture showed a smiling mother with her child in her arms who had just received some medicine. Another one showed a close-up of a happy child standing in front of a school that was to open soon. Other photographs visualized how Trung

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An’s peasants used modern farming technology such as tractors and new fishing nets, suggesting that the war had also been launched for the sake of modernizing Vietnam.43 In order to showcase “the other war,” USIA also flew correspondents to Saigon under the auspices of a third country news reporters assistance program. The program was based on the assumption that foreign journalists would report more favorably on the good war when confronted with the “realities” in Vietnam. Until 1967, USIA assisted eighty-four correspondents in travelling to South Vietnam,44 among them four West German, one Argentinean, and seven Indian journalists.45 Often those trips had positive effects, as the journey of Drum journalist Sam Uba illustrates. Visiting in mid-1967 under a USIAfunded scheme, Uba was the first “Black African journalist” to visit South Vietnam, at least according to his own testimony. As he wrote in the September issue of Drum, the trip had not changed his critical views about the war, but it had “opened my eyes to a lot of things I did not know”—for example about the “other war.” In South Vietnam, Uba related, the United States was “carrying out . . . one of the most gigantic national reconstruction programmes ever attempted in history,” and for this, Americans deserved “support and commendation.” As Uba emphasized, in light “of the massive economic and social development programmes, the war has become a secondary issue.” To him, it seemed lamentable that American and European media reported mainly about the “sordid aspects of the war” when in fact the United States was rather engaged in “a struggle to free a great people from the scourges of disease, poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and to assist them to realise their dreams of a free, strong and great nation.” The photographs printed along with Uba’s report corroborated his positive view of the war. One of them showed three girls strolling through a peaceful Saigon street, illustrating Uba’s observation that “the evidence” of Saigon’s “booming wealth and prosperity is everywhere.” Others showed Uba himself in front of a helicopter, and a group of soldiers on patrol. Nowhere did Drum readers have to confront the destruction of the war and the suffering of civilians. In this sense, Uba’s account complied neatly with the official U.S. iconography of the war.46 However, despite these successes, pictures of the “good war” were already early on also challenged by pictures that showed a rather different, dirtier reality of the war, of burning villages, mistreated civilians, and senseless destruction. The reason why such pictures emerged, as some U.S. officials well recognized, was not

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that media misreported the war, but that they showed it as it often was. Over the summer of 1965 particularly, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, James Greenfield, pointed out that the United States was not facing a problem of public relations strategies, but a structural one. As he noted in a meeting on information problems that had been called at the White House, “news reports of U.S. soldiers setting fire to Vietnamese villages and related incidents are causing very serious problems here and abroad,” but in “view of the extensive press and media coverage in Viet-Nam stories and pictures like these will continue to appear as long as the incidents occur.” The United States, he emphasized, could not “pull a curtain on the problem. There were too many reporters covering the war.” Instead, it had “to get used to fighting in the open. This is a new kind of war, a war in which the basic goal is people, not territory. You can’t win the people in Viet-Nam by burning their villages. . . . We have to take steps to prevent these things from happening, not just to make sure reporters don’t see them.”47 Repeatedly, Greenfield urged to get at the root of the picture problem, military strategy. As he wrote to Bill Moyers, it was urgent to conduct a “thorough review of military actions and techniques.” Specifically, MACV and the Saigon mission should take “a long, hard look at such things as the use of artillery against occupied villages, serial bombing and the use of napalm in populated areas, military attacks on villages etc.”48 Greenfield’s advice, however, went unheard—and after the summer of 1965, photographers hence increasingly supplied the global visual economy with images that undermined the aesthetics of the good war by showing a different kind of war, causing a severe picture crisis for American administrations.

Image Trouble: Pictures and Their Empathy Effects At its core, image trouble stemmed from an important change of perspective: where the official pictorial vision of the war minimized the visibility of the war’s miseries through aerial top-down views or overthe-shoulder pictures, images of the dirty war drew explicit attention to the effects of U.S. warfare and its “reality” on the ground (which, of course, was always a mediated and selective reality, too). Therewith, pictures also moved the suffering of South Vietnamese civilians to the center of attention which they showed in endless variations that visualized how soldiers invaded and transformed (seemingly) peaceful Vietnamese everyday lives: how they disrupted villages

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with search and destroy missions, how they threatened, encircled, guarded, and arrested civilians, or burned their huts. Other pictures circulating in the global visual economy showed napalm victims and their injuries or visualized how U.S. warfare destroyed families and their livelihoods.49 Because those pictures typically drew a direct connection between U.S. warfare and Vietnamese civilian suffering, they thus increasingly associated the “dirty war” not with North Vietnamese guerilla attacks but with American warfare. Pictures of civilian suffering not only contradicted the official perspective and undermined the official credo according to which the war was launched to defend and modernize South Vietnam, but were also a novelty for many observers. For the first time, now the actual “target area” of military operations became visible, which in wars before had mostly remained an obscure zone of conflict that

Figure 6.3.  Pulitzer prize–winning photograph of Kyoichi Sawada showing a Vietnamese mother and her children fleeing a village bombing. Printed around the world in late 1965, Sawada’s photograph drew attention to the suffering the war caused among Vietnamese civilians and easily activated empathy effects among beholders through its powerful visual and emotional composition. As such, the photograph was a typical example for the image trouble that came to haunt the Johnson administration around the globe from 1965 onward. © Kyoichi Sawada/Bettmann/Corbis.50

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was left out of view somewhere behind the horizon. Therewith, the human dimension of the war, too, opened up to viewers abroad: a family torn apart either because the father had been killed or arrested, a home being destroyed, or a (seemingly) peaceful everyday life being uprooted by marching soldiers—these were visual realities that appeared outrageous to many and that raised fundamentally new questions of guilt, innocence, and the morality of U.S. warfare. Particularly television threw up such questions, because, as much as it offered visual pleasure, it also allowed viewers to partake in search and destroy missions through Vietnamese villages. A long TV program broadcast on West German ARD in March 1966, for example, accompanied a U.S. patrol on its mission through the jungle, with an off-commentary that stressed the futility of the war throughout. The feature gradually zoomed in on the war’s “heart of darkness,” beginning with a sequence that showed how bombers approached and bombed a village, leaving behind terrifying bomb explosions and burning huts, with all of this filmed from the “receiving end,” that is, the ground. In this sense, the feature early on indicated the change of perspective it was going to undertake, although the following sequences continued with the conventional over-theshoulder approach as the camera followed the patrol on its way over hills, through rice fields, and the jungle until it got drawn into a gunfight. Filming inside the battle, the camera recorded wounded GIs crawling through the mud in search of cover, followed by multiple shots of dead, severely wounded, and exhausted GIs laying on the ground and then being dragged and carried away. Those scenes pointed explicitly to the futility and the human costs of the war, but also contrasted visually its official version as propagated by U.S. information officials. As the audio commentary remarked: The lieutenant gives orders: here is going to be the gathering place for the survivors, the wounded, and the dead. There are many, for the GI’s up in front here too many. And yet everybody could recite the announcement the headquarters in Saigon will make tomorrow: it will speak of a successful offensive against the Viet Cong. . . . At the end it will literally announce ‘the own forces did not suffer any noteworthy losses.’51

The whole second part of the feature showed the patrol’s search for Viet Cong suspects in what appeared as the war’s everyday terror against Vietnamese civilians. Viewers saw a burning village that was “accidentally located on the route of the American offensive” and had been bombed by the “American fire roll” before the marines entered. Such bombings, the commentary pointed out, created “tears, pain,

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and hate” among Vietnamese civilians, because they destroyed “at a single blow everything those people have.” Accompanying TV images depicted an old woman crawling through the burning ruins of the village and “screaming insanely” either out of fear or because of pain, composed together with images of crying and fearful women and children herded together among the burning huts. While the audio commentary acknowledged that the marine patrol had come under fire from Viet Cong snipers from the direction of the village, and while it deplored those guerilla tactics in a longer passage, the images focused completely and for several minutes on the pain and destruction the patrol caused among the village community. The feature closed with the words: “For one hour the war swept through this village. It took away the husbands from the wives, the fathers from the children.”52 Reflective of an emerging critical ethos among West German journalists, the Weltspiegel feature thus offered TV viewers an immediate involvement in the plight the war inflicted on what seemed to be innocent Vietnamese civilians.53 A similar emphasis on civilian suffering was also at play in a TV documentary journalist Hans Dieter Grabe did on a hospital ship, the “Helgoland,” which the German Red Cross sent to South Vietnam in 1966 (one of the official West German contributions to the war).54 Following the “Helgoland’s” trip from Hamburg harbor to Saigon, the documentary drew broad attention to the civilian horrors of the war; indeed, as he later confessed, Grabe had joined the “Helgoland” explicitly to find the victims of the war, the civilians.55 Already the first scenes of his film left no doubt as to what he thought about the war: a montage of images showed scenes of U.S. soldiers harassing Vietnamese civilians, kicking them, and threatening them with knives. In the following scenes, the documentary highlighted the civilian troubles of the war by visiting a refugee camp near Saigon for a “first shy encounter with the sorrow of the poorest in Vietnam.”56 The images showed what Grabe had been looking for: severely mutilated and wounded women and children whose village, as Grabe noted, had been “pacified” with napalm and flame throwers. Other scenes showed an emergency operation on board the “Helgoland” and reported about a trip to the hospital of Da Nang where viewers saw the “battered-down, diced-up and napalm-burnt” victims of the U.S. Air Force. Such scenes—which were balanced out with passages showing the crew’s life on deck of the “Helgoland” or the deceptively peaceful facades of everyday life in Saigon—not only made the suffering of Vietnamese civilians tangible, but explicitly intended to mobilize the feelings of West German viewers against the war. Much in a similar vein, other TV clips broadcast in ARD’s Weltspiegel visualized the problem

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of civilian suffering by taking viewers to refugee camps or U.S. prison camps for Viet Cong “suspects”—sites that vividly illustrated how the war disrupted civilian life in South Vietnam, separated families, and gradually destroyed their life worlds.57 To be sure, such documentaries and images were not broadcast in West Germany on a daily basis, as the standard stereotype about the war goes.58 Yet from late 1965 onward, they increasingly began to build emotional outrage abroad. This was also registered among U.S. officials stationed in West Germany who frequently “reported the adverse effects of the dramatic and graphic coverage, particularly on TV, of the human tragedy and suffering attendant upon warfare in VN,” as a USIA in-house survey on world opinion noted.59 Specifically the U.S. consulate in Hamburg emphasized repeatedly “the tremendous importance in Germany of television and radio. . . . Here one can see the war in all its horror. Last evening one saw the riots in Da Nang and Saigon, weeping children, frantic mothers, rebellious students. The commentators who appear practically every evening on television are at least eighty per cent against American policy in Viet Nam.”60 Even Der Stern, the consulate reported in another telegram, was “definitely . . . opposed to our Vietnam policy. Its horror pictures of napalm-burned children and destroyed villages in South Vietnam do much to turn the average German against our policies.” As early as January 1966, the consulate therefore warned explicitly: “At least in Northern Germany we are about to lose the information battle in regard to Vietnam.”61 In fact, as developments would soon prove, Northern Germany was symptomatic for a global image trouble that created more and more emotional upheaval among foreign observers, something which had much to do with the empathy effects images printed in global media created. Often those pictures depicted crying, mourning, and scared children and mothers, often in close-up view, and thereby easily activated compassion for the victims of the war. A little boy weeping at the loss of his father, wailing women at a funeral, or a Napalm-burned, crying child—those were images that not only drew attention to individual fates, but for many also condensed the war’s inhumanity.62 Particularly when the pictures were printed on title pages, observers could hardly ignore them. In Argentina, for example, Confirmado printed a title page in December 1966 that showed three children—two of them in the foreground, one of them on the arms of a man in the background—standing in front of what looked like their home. Technically, the picture was well-composed and mobilized the viewer’s empathy in a number of ways. The combination of a central camera perspective with the positioning of three persons behind

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each other in spatial layers lent the picture a three-dimensional appearance, which pulled the beholder into the picture and facilitated his or her identification with the situation depicted. Moreover, one boy was shown raising one of his arms, which lent the picture motion and dynamism, indicating that the boy was responding to something happening nearby, an event the viewer could not see, but had to add with his or her imagination. Also, the facial expressions of the children implied that they were perceiving a threat, and the opened mouth of one child activated a synesthetic experience in which the beholder intuitively ascribed sound to what he saw. On several levels, the picture thus stimulated the beholder’s involvement in the situation depicted and allowed him or her to experience the war as an ongoing—and wrong—disruption of Vietnamese everyday life that brought pain and fear to innocent Vietnamese civilians.63 In addition, global media also frequently showed how U.S. Marines or their South Vietnamese allies committed acts of excessive violence against civilians. Again, this had much to do with the structural and representational problems of asymmetric warfare. Whereas Viet Cong atrocities usually became visible only in terms of their effects (tortured bodies, killed civilians), but rarely in terms of the actual act, the participation of photographers in U.S. and South Vietnamese military operations often meant that violent acts were captured on film and, subsequently, published in the global media. Long before the Tet offensive, foreign observers therefore frequently got to see shocking pictures that showed, for example, how soldiers pushed a spear against the throat of a “suspect” or a rifle against the head of a woman, or how they kicked Vietnamese that were lying on the ground.64 Those violence pictures redefined relations between Americans and Vietnamese as relations between perpetrators and victims, and thereby contradicted America’s claim to defend the freedom of South Vietnam for the good of its people.65 As early as April 1965, for example, the Illustrated Weekly of India portrayed U.S.–Vietnamese interactions as perpetrator–victim relations in an article titled “Round-Up of Rebels.” The photographs depicted U.S. soldiers combing through a village and arresting Vietnamese peasants, tying Vietnamese suspects with ropes, and pushing one of them brutally out of a (standing) helicopter. Such pictures suggested that brutal and deadly acts of violence against Vietnamese civilians were the standard operating procedure of U.S. ground warfare. As the text accompanying the photos of Viet Cong prisoners summed up: “The anguish on the faces of these prisoners reveals the sufferings of the common people.” One of the pictures even depicted an execution, captioned: “The end of a life.”66

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Similar pictures of perpetrator–victim relations were printed repeatedly in Indian media. As U.S. ambassador, Bowles reported in 1967, textual accounts of incidents such as “accidental bombings of friendly SVN villages” rarely seemed to “excite much interest” either in Indian newspapers or among readers yet “news photo, usually from US wire services showing civilians being browbeaten by ARVN or US soldiers at gun point” was all the more a problem and the “most harmful propaganda.” As Bowles pointed out, “news agencies do not of course photograph VC [Viet Cong, SK] in similar activities.” Instead, pictures such as the recent photo of a Vietnamese prisoner tied to an armored U.S. vehicle by a rope were “typical of highly damaging photographs issued by US press services that get play in [the] Delhi press.”67

Figure 6.4.  Showing a Viet Cong suspect being guarded to the collection point, this photograph illustrates how pictures constructed American–South Vietnamese relations as perpetrator–victim relationships. Perpetrator–victim pictures were increasingly printed and broadcast in global media since the mid-1960s, often also showing direct acts of violence against Vietnamese civilians.68

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Perpetrator–victim photographs were not only typical for Indian media, but circulated around the world where the “widespread use of pictures of suffering and destruction,” as USIA acknowledged, were “important factors working against us.”69 West German media in particular visualized Vietnamese and American atrocities against civilians, above all Der Stern. In March 1965, it published a long photo essay that depicted the atrocious side of the conflict, showcasing for example how a Viet Cong prisoner was maltreated or how Vietnamese troops used a Vietnamese “suspect” as a land mine detector. As the caption noted, while the Vietnamese peasant “has to wade through a pond the soldiers wait curiously for the explosion that is going to tear his body apart.” Similar to the Illustrated Weekly of India, Der Stern also showed an execution, visualized in a sequence of two pictures. The first picture depicted how the student who was going to be executed was tied to a pole. The next picture showed his body slumping down at the pole lifelessly, his head pointing down, his arms tied behind the pole but over his head, his shirt spilled with blood, a vast empty space around him. In the visual history of war, this was one of the few pictures that showed the actual moment of death, immediately evoking the viewer’s empathy, compassion for the victim, anger, and disgust vis-à-vis those responsible for the act.70 Readers responded strongly to those atrocity pictures. In letters to the editor, many of them expressed their outrage. As one reader wrote, the picture sequence of the execution evoked “compassion and a feeling of cold horror” in him. “And we are friends of a country that lets such atrocities happen!,”71 he exclaimed at the end of his letter. Another reader asked: “The freedom of the Western world is being defended in Vietnam? Nobody who has read your article can claim this.”72 Or, as another reader put it: “Are we allowed to send (innocent) men, women, and children . . . into an often very cruel death against their will, into torturous mutilations and into incredible sorrows, just to remain untroubled by Communism?”73 As these letters indicate, Der Stern apparently increasingly moved West Germans against the war. This was a process well recognized by U.S. officials, too. As the U.S. consulate in Hamburg reported, “precisely because it [Der Stern] is an illustrated magazine its effect on public opinion can be devastating. An old issue showed an American soldier allegedly kicking a prisoner of war who was lying on the ground. Other issues showed pitiful pictures of children burned with napalm.” The current issue, the report went on, featured

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another article on Viet Nam concentrating on an eye-witness account of the recent civil strife in Danang. There is a full-size picture of the rebel soldier who surrendered and who, after being disarmed, was shot down in cold blood by a South Vietnamese officer. The ‘Stern’ photographer caught the man with his hands up—and a few seconds later—as he was on the ground dead, with three soldiers looting his pockets and even stealing his shoes.74

Half a year later, the U.S. embassy in Bonn, too, registered a further “distinct deterioration in unofficial German attitudes” toward the Vietnam War, which it attributed to “the steady and—again mostly unfavorable—coverage during nightly TV news programs. . . . This has continued to stress the human suffering in the war. The films emphasize attacks by US troops and planes and efforts of the North Vietnamese to defend themselves.” Almost in passing, the embassy pointed to another important change of perspective that contradicted the aesthetics of the good war, namely, the view from North Vietnam. “The impression that comes across,” the embassy summed up, “suggests that the US does the attacking and the Vietnamese population in both North and South—the suffering.”75 The U.S. embassy in Bonn was particularly angered over what it termed “Harrison Salisbury’s stories from North Vietnam.”76 Salisbury, assistant managing editor of the New York Times, had traveled to North Vietnam in December 1966 and had toured several towns and villages around Hanoi. In a series of articles printed in the New York Times and in the media abroad, he delineated how American air raids had destroyed civilian areas of little or no military significance. Accompanying photographs showed ruins and desolated villages where few buildings had been left standing, and thus made visible what Salisbury described as “the ground-level reality of United States bombing.”77 The series received worldwide attention. Excerpts were reprinted in the West German weekly Der Spiegel, for example.78 In contrast to the United States where Salisbury was soon widely attacked for his deviation from the media consensus and even labeled a Communist, reports and pictures of the “ground-level reality” in North Vietnam soon became a key part of the war’s iconography abroad. On West German TV, Weltspiegel broadcast a report from correspondent Roger Pic, which showed burning homes, ruins, desperate civilians, destroyed dikes, and the permanent state of emergency North Vietnamese schoolchildren had to live in: they were shown learning in a classroom until a sudden air raid warning disrupted them. Then the film showed how they ran for cover in

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“defense holes.” By showcasing mostly children (and women), the report once again appealed strongly to the viewer’s empathy.79 Such imagery, USIA officials mused, was particularly powerful in West Germany, because “the vast majority of Europeans who have experienced war” had “done so as recipients, not deliverers, of bombs” and therefore tended to identify “not with the American planes in the air, but with the people crouching in the jungle below.” As USIA Official Weld pointed out in a letter to USIA Deputy Director Robert Akers, a potential new USIA film on the war should therefore not include aerial camera views or bombing scenes anymore. Specifically, the bombing of North Vietnam should be referred to “without using visuals. . . . At all costs, we should avoid the image of a passive population suffering punishment inflicted by an inexorable, dehumanized U.S. war machine.”80 Two years after the making of The Night of the Dragon, this was a remarkable departure from prior representational policies that underlined how much the visual aesthetics of bombing apparently had been recoded among Western European audiences between 1965 and 1967, a process that was also at work in Tanzania, India, and Argentina. Primera Plana, for example, printed a drawing of a crying Vietnamese mother whose tears had the shapes of bombs, and thereby pointed to the sorrows the bombing created among North Vietnamese civilians. Likewise, Indian media frequently pictured the bombing in terms of its effects on North Vietnam or showed North Vietnamese defense preparations.81

Regarding the Pain of Others: Pictures, Popular Emotions, and Protest Thanks to their strong empathy effects, pictures circulating around the globe often had an incredible emotional impact on foreign observers. Showing atrocities against Vietnamese civilians, of destruction and suffering, such pictures easily activated feelings such as empathy, compassion, disgrace, or outrage, and mobilized many to express their feelings openly. Between 1965 and 1968, pictures of the war therefore not only massively undercut governmental aesthetics of a “good war,” but, around the world, also built an explosive “emotional high-voltage”82 that increasingly moved observers to protest the war. Particularly in West Germany, U.S. officials often saw themselves confronted with passionate responses to the war.83 In Hamburg, the U.S. consulate reported, the local youth was so disturbed by the horrors of the war that it often became “quite emotional when

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criticizing American bombing.”84 The consulate left no doubt that the mass media exerted “extraordinary influence” on the youth, who often quoted critical television programs and articles in their discussions. “Photographs,” the consulate explained, “and descriptions of a war-torn country inevitably spotlight scenes of destruction, soldiers in action, civilian suffer­ing, and all the other ravages of the continuing conflict, to which the reaction is one of pity and the feeling that it ‘should,’ it ‘must,’ be stopped.” What appeared particularly troubling to consulate officials was their general inability to match the power of those photographs with any convincing arguments explaining why the United States was fighting the war: the right of a small country to remain unmolested by its neighbors, the unacceptability of an extension of Communist hegemony, the threat to other Southeast Asian nations if this case of imported revolution succeeds—all this appears comparatively abstract: it cannot be photographed, but must be ‘explained’—a much paler exercise for a speaker in front of an audience strong on feelings but short on any special training, experience, or background in foreign affairs.85

How much of an impact pictures had on German antiwar activists was often also well reflected in the fact that they utilized pictures themselves when protesting the war. Thereby, they openly expressed that the outrage they vented in their protests had been built by the pictures they were using, particularly when they took images to the streets. In Munich, for example, protestors erected “a cardboard pyramid signboard” in front of the Amerika House with “pictures of alleged atrocities in South Vietnam and . . . anti-American slogans,” as the consulate in Munich reported—so did protestors in Berlin whose cardboard pyramids showed crying mothers and children as well as scenes of destruction.86 Similarly, the walls of buildings in cities became frequent targets of slogan painters and billstickers.87 Theater plays, too, often involved images. At the University of Hamburg, for instance, students staged a theater play titled “Ami Go Home,” which after protests from university officials, they renamed “Attack Upon a Friendly Power.” The play combined readings with a few short sketches. As the U.S. consulate reported, war images took center stage through a “pre-curtain showing of slides, accompanied by American martial music, depicting various atrocities, burned babies and piles of bodies.”88 On thousands of occasions, activists also handed out pamphlets and flyers in shopping streets, marketplaces, or conference halls. Usually those picked up images printed in magazines and

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newspapers—typically from Der Stern—but then rearranged them in a new aesthetic textual-visual ensemble that sought to mobilize outrage and pity among those who took the flyers along.89 A pamphlet disseminated by the “Campaign for Disarmament,” for example, combined the picture of a bomber dropping his load with a picture that showed how a soldier threatened to rip open the stomach of a half-naked Vietnamese lying on the ground.90 Another flyer calling for a demonstration in Hannover shocked viewers with a picture that showed in a close-up how the barrel of a rifle was pushed against the head of a Vietnamese woman.91 One of the main flyers of the “Hilfsaktion Vietnam,”92 meanwhile, juxtaposed the “clean” and official perspective of U.S. warfare with the people it victimized on the ground. Pictures showed, among other things, an injured child, a bleeding woman, and a helicopter spraying “agent orange.” The pictures thus tied together, with clear attribution, cause and effect, perpetrator and victim. Under the heading “Help them!” the flyer noted in empathetic terms: Day by day defenseless, innocent people die in the villages and cities of Vietnam. Children and women are getting killed by bombs, converted into living columns of flame by napalm and phosphor, are getting terribly mutilated and burned. . . . A people that has not attacked anybody is without resistance being exposed to modern weapons of mass destruction.93

As the flyer indicated, pictures of the war often activated a number of collective fears among West Germans. At a time when West Germans began to cope with their Nazi past after almost two decades of silence, many activists worried that similar crimes against humanity were repeating themselves in Vietnam. There was virtually no bigger demonstration in West Germany without banner slogans such as “Freedom, said the Nazis; Freedom, says the U.S.; what kind of freedom?,”94 “Viet-Nam is the Auschwitz of the USA,”95 or banners that enumerated the symbolic sites of brutalized warfare: “Guernica, Coventry, Lidice, Dresden, Hiroshima, HANOI, PEKING [sic].”96 In addition, especially older Germans had vivid memories of the Allied carpet bombings against West German cities during World War II, and the pictures from Vietnam brought back those memories. Consequently, antiwar activists often referred to World War II when protesting against the Vietnam War. A call for a protest march in Hamburg, for example, described U.S. warfare in Vietnam as “scorched-earth tactics” and conjured up memories of the Allied bombing of Hamburg in World War II, which had destroyed much of the city and killed

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tens of thousands of people: “Especially we as Hamburgers know the devastating effects of that tactic and should for humanitarian reasons alone demonstrate against it.”97 Not surprisingly, pictures were therefore also often included— or quoted—in West German demonstrations, which became mass events from late 1965 onward. In December 1966, for example, protest marchers in West Berlin carried along the enlarged photo of a crying Vietnamese mother with her dead baby in her arms as well as an enlarged photo of Vietnamese bombing victims.98 In another demonstration, protestors had also painted their own war scenes on a large banner and thereby visualized how they imagined and understood the war: the banner depicted American bombers approaching a school building and hospital (interestingly from right to left, an aesthetic break with Western reading habits), and then showed the burning inferno the bombers left behind.99 To be sure, the utilization of photos and painted banners had partly the purpose of making protest marches more media compatible in order to get media publicity.100 Yet those visual practices doubtless also expressed and

Figure 6.5.  West German protestors carry a banner depicting U.S. aircraft bombing a school and a hospital. In antiwar demonstrations, photographs and visual drawings often served to mobilize public outrage against the war, but their use also reflected the emotional impact that pictures of Vietnamese civilian suffering had on protestors. © Klaus Lehnarzt/bpk.101

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reproduced the sorrow many had felt when they had for the first time seen similar (or the same) pictures of civilian suffering in the visual media. In Argentina, too, observers responded with agitation and fervor to the war’s images. Polls conducted in 1968 showed that 60 percent of all Argentineans described themselves as “passionate” about the war, as Primera Plana reported.102 The U.S. embassy could tell: as the diplomats bemoaned in a cable to Washington, they received a “continuous flow of well orchestrated petitions, letters and phone calls, some vituperative, some straightforward, demanding or requesting the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.”103 Specifically art galleries became an important space where Argentineans protested the war.104 In 1966, for example, the Van Riel gallery organized an exhibit called “Salón Homenaje al Vietnam.”105 Over two hundred artists (plus scientists, writers, etc.) participated, virtually the entire creative elite of Argentina, young and old.106 The exhibit also included León Ferrari’s sculpture “La civilización occidental y Christiana,”107 one of the most forceful interventions against the war.108 The sculpture consisted of a crucified Christ nailed onto a U.S. Air force bomber, two bombs placed on each wing, the Christ’s hands nailed into the bombs closest to him, and thereby connected Ferrari’s protest against the war with a general critique of Christian religion. Ferrari’s engagement with the war and its pictures was also reflected in a sculpture he created in 1965, a sculpture called “La civilización occidental y cristiana bombardea las escuelas de Long Dien, Causé, Linn Phung, McCay, Han Yanh, Aan Minh, An Hoa y Duc Hoa.”109 In the upper part, it showed six bombers arranged next to each other, three on each side, the crucified Christ in the middle. Below the bombers, Ferrari left an open area—apparently symbolizing the sky—and further below placed a line of bombs placed next to each other like cigarettes, stretching from left to right. Below the string of bombs, almost two thirds of the sculpture’s space was occupied by a tangle of arms and hands stretched out, evoking an impression of fire. More strongly than “La civilización occidental y Christiana,” which only hinted at Vietnamese suffering through the figure of Christ, this work of Ferrari plainly highlighted the suffering U.S. bombing raids caused, the scale of which was symbolized by the two thirds of space the arms and hands took up in the sculpture.110 Outside of art galleries, meanwhile, leftist groups and labor unions organized clandestine film showings in private homes, trade union offices, or village halls. Here they often showed Fernando Solana’s and Octavio Getino’s documentary La Hora de los Hornos,111

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a three-part movie that both directors had made in between 1965 and 1968. An overall critique of the capitalist system and the (presumed) longstanding foreign exploitation of Argentina, the film referred frequently to the Vietnam War and included photos of fearful, suffering Vietnamese civilians and of the violence against them. In one particularly shocking sequence, the film showed how cattle and sheep were slaughtered in a Buenos Aires slaughterhouse and, in fast cuts, contrasted it with the beaming, happy faces on advertising boards. The sequence could also be taken as a metaphor for the mass slaughter going on in Vietnam, and therewith again broke with the official war aesthetics as it showed explicitly and unsparingly the act of killing. As in West Germany, Argentine activists distributed leaflets and carved out their own fluid emotional spaces in the public sphere. Usually heavy in text, leaflets with titles such as “What I Have Seen in Vietnam” or “An Argentinean in Vietnam” also gave photographic impressions of how North Vietnamese defended themselves against U.S. attacks or tried to achieve empathy effects by depicting Vietnamese women trying to protect their children and napalm-burned children.112 The extent to which the Vietnam War suffused Argentine everyday life was also well reflected in Mafalda. As has been described in more detail in chapter 2, the comic strip depicted the life of the Argentine middle class and commented on it in ironic ways. The comic strip dealt frequently with the Vietnam War, which appeared in the headlines of the newspapers Mafalda’s parents were reading, in the radio news Mafalda listened to, or in the graffiti on walls that Mafalda passed. As she is quoted saying in one sequence: “We are all sick of this whole Vietnam.”113 Mafalda summed up a feeling that many observers in India and Tanzania, too, could easily share. As in West Germany and Argentina, activists responded with sympathy and passion to the war in both countries. In all major cities, Indian activists organized “All India Vietnam Protest Days,” “anti-imperialist weeks,” or “solidarity weeks,” and often hundreds, sometimes thousands, of participants joined. At times different protest groups even had to divide up by time slots. On 11 July 1966, for instance, students turned up at noon in front of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, while the Communist Party of India Left gathered there in the evening. Both groups had been preceded by a demonstration of children and women on 9 July.114 Between protest marches, protestors also often painted antiwar slogans on walls and fences, plastered cities with antiwar posters, or organized tea parties against the war.115

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In Tanzania, too, locals protested the war, but here protests were mainly confined to the capital Dar es Salaam, and, more specifically, to University College. At times, the youth league of the Tanzania African National Union (TANU) also staged demonstrations in front of its headquarters, usually being joined by hundreds of protestors. Youth activists of TANU also opened a North Vietnamese exhibit in the rooms of the TANU youth league’s headquarters that included photos of heroic North Vietnamese defense (women behind antiaircraft guns, wrecked U.S. bombers) and “photos of American troops in action” and “alleged atrocity scenes.” Visitors to the headquarters thus had the chance to engage further with the war.116 What those visual practices thus reflected was the overriding importance that pictures attained in foreign encounters of the war: they confronted foreign observers not only in magazines and on television, but also in exhibits, film showings, theater plays, cartoons, shopping malls, or in the streets. At the same time, the visual practices by which foreign activists engaged with the war also reflected the incredible emotional impact that pictures printed and broadcast in visual media had on them. Protests were therefore not simply political statements against the war; they were also reflective of how war pictures reshaped foreign emotional relationships toward American empire in general. This showed particularly in the acts of iconoclasm, which protestors staged frequently around the world, and that ranged from the desecration of presidential portraits, the burning of flags, LBJ effigies, or printed USIS matter to the throwing of eggs, red paint, stones, and bricks against embassies and USIS centers or even to the storming and temporary occupation of those centers.117 Through such acts, protestors broke symbolically and openly with the United States and made clear that they did not accept American leadership anymore.118

“War as Usual”: Disengagement and Disappearing Battlefields Long before the Tet offensive of early 1968 and long before the images of the My Lai massacre surfaced in late 1969, pictures that depicted the suffering of civilians or acts of excessive violence in North and South Vietnam thus circulated globally and built protest against the war. Seen from a global standpoint, Tet and My Lai were therefore less decisive as representational turning points than they were in the United States—at least as far as the representation of the “dirty

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war” was concerned. Rather, both of these events merely confirmed to foreign observers what they had seen all along for three years. Tet, however, had one important impact: it initiated a process which one could describe as America’s “visual disengagement” from the Vietnam War by the late 1960s. Visual disengagement meant, first, that U.S. officials increasingly closed out correspondents from military operations which, in turn, led to a new scarcity of “battlefield” images in the global visual economy. Instead, second, officials increasingly offered the visual media photo and filming opportunities that were not situated on battlefields anymore. And, third, visual disengagement also included the staging of the U.S. military withdrawal. Although the actual war dragged on inside Vietnam, its global representations therefore began to disappear, the battlefield became invisible again, and therewith the war’s victims and their pain, too, started to fade out of view. America’s visual disengagement began with the launch of the Paris peace negotiations in May 1968, which introduced a new pictorial scenery of “the war”: delegates arriving at airports, entering cars, giving press conferences, shaking hands, seated around tables; ministers making speeches. This all had to do with the conflict, but it did not show warfare anymore. Then, by mid-1969, the pictures from South Vietnam, too, began to change, as the Nixon administration started the U.S. military withdrawal. Where foreign television viewers had for years seen bombings, battles, and dead bodies on their TV screens, they now witnessed the hour of the marching bands, broadcast in endless variations but usually involving one and the same general sequence: the music played, officials saluted, U.S. soldiers lined up, and then boarded a plane or vessel that was going to bring them home. On their arrival in the United States, other officials waited, more people saluted, and further marching bands played. Such visual sequences were highly innocuous, unspectacular, even peaceful, especially when embedded in a similar imagery. West German Weltspiegel, for instance, began a report about the U.S. withdrawal by first showing flowers with intense colors, Vietnamese families on their Sunday afternoon strolls through the zoo, children holding colorful balloons or eating ice cream—a peaceful scenery that was completely detached from war.119 At the same time, the military “De-Americanization” also led to a “Vietnamization of the pictures,” that is, an increasing visual emphasis on Vietnamese soldiers and their training exercises. U.S. officials had actually started this process as early as mid-1968 when the Office of Information stressed the “continuing need for pictures

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of Advisors with ARVN counterparts and in different situations with the ARVN unit”120 and called for “creative imagination” among information officers in respect to “film pieces on RVNAF activities” that included “interesting operational units, interesting activities,” or “training situations which have photographic interest.”121 With the U.S. withdrawal, U.S. information officials pushed the pictorial Vietnamization further through films with titles such as Vietnamization of River Patrol Boats Moving Ahead Rapidly or The Republic of Vietnam’s Air Force Demonstrates Ground Support Ability or Navy Turns over Eighty River Boats to South Vietnamese.122 The withdrawal of U.S. troops also made image gathering for correspondents more difficult. Numerous field press centers were closed until 1971, the number of briefings was cut down considerably, the Department of Defense’s motion picture teams departed, and correspondents lost their “logistic support privileges.”123 Correspondents who had relied on U.S. helicopters and planes before, thus now often had to rent cars, minibuses, or motorcycles—a substantial loss of mobility that significantly reduced their photo opportunities.124 Therewith, it also became virtually impossible for correspondents to reach isolated scenes of military action. Accordingly, most correspondents started to leave the country in the early 1970s. The number of correspondents fell to 440 in January 1970 (as opposed to over 600 in February 1968), shrank to 380 in January 1971, and was down to 310 in December 1971.125 As a U.S. official observed accurately in late 1971, “We may not be down to a low profile in Indochina yet, but we sure have got down to low visibility, and we intend to keep things that way.”126 Under these conditions, correspondents jumped at those few opportunities that gave them a chance to photograph the actual war again. When the Nixon administration announced a temporary “incursion” into Cambodia in April 1970 to clear out Viet Cong sanctuaries, the number of correspondents swelled to over five hundred again, and photographers rushed to the border.127 For some weeks, foreign observers had the chance to see the war in all its details again, although MACV and the Nixon administration did everything to remain in control of the images.128 MACV, for example, undertook “special efforts to provide photography of caches and other evidence of the enemy bases in Cambodia for public use,”129 and Nixon’s advisors pushed, with some success, the idea of popularizing the redistribution of captured rice as “a great humanitarian gesture.”130 With the temporary reappearance of the battlefield, some observers abroad took to the streets again—as for example in Cologne, where

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protestors clashed with the police in what became known as the “battle in front of the America House.”131 Yet the invasion of Cambodia marked only a temporary return of the war. Once the troops had returned to South Vietnam in June 1970, the conflict started to fade out of view again, and a general apathy began to spread out. Only occasionally did journalists try to draw attention to the ongoing suffering in North and South Vietnam again. In October 1970, for instance, West German television broadcast another documentary by Hans Dieter Grabe that reminded viewers of the pain and misery the war continued to cause among Vietnamese civilians.132 Grabe had again visited the German hospital ship “Helgoland,” which was now stationed in Da Nang, and this time, he returned with expressively shocking pictures. The documentary with the title Only Light Battles Around Da Nang focused on the everyday life on the “Helgoland,” again, and confronted viewers with a number of shattering close-ups of wounded children and other civilians with terrible injuries. Viewers could see faces torn to pieces with no mouth or nose left, legs torn apart, whole bodies ripped up, in one case with an intestine creeping out of an open stomach. The documentary also showed surgeries in all detail and ended with showing in multiple close-ups how medical doctors conducted an amputation of the lower extremity on a Vietnamese boy, a sequence more than three minutes long. As the off-commentary noted: The boy will live on. Until the war catches him a second time. Until then he will live on, has to live on. A gift or a punishment? Those who have saved his life here, don’t have the right and the time to think about it. The assembly line which throws the wounded onto their operating tables does not stand still. Even though we start to forget this war. Even though we read in passing, if at all, on the last pages of our newspapers: ‘Only light battles around Da Nang.’133

Broadcast in 1970, Grabe’s documentary was one of the last efforts to show a “war reality” that increasingly slipped out of view even though the war still dragged on. Only in the last stage of the Vietnam War would that reality surface again in foreign media, specifically during the spring offensive launched by the army of North Vietnam in spring 1972 and during the Christmas bombings against North Vietnam conducted by the U.S. Air Force in December 1972. In both cases, newspapers, illustrated weeklies, and television reports again flowed over with images from North and South Vietnam, and images such as Nick Ut’s iconic picture of the screaming, Napalmburned Kim Phuc reactivated temporarily the empathy effects and

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emotional outrage among foreign observers that had been characteristic for the years 1965 to 1968.134 But that war reality, too, soon disappeared when the war ended in January 1973.

Conclusion: The Paradox Side Effects of the War’s Pictures In late January 1973, Tanzanian Sunday News published a cartoon that depicted Kissinger carrying Nixon on his back out of the Vietnamese bamboo jungle, a torn American flag around one of his feet. “Look at what you’ve left!” noted the caption. Behind the two men, readers saw the war’s balance sheet: skulls, bones, and skeletons.135 After eight years of expanded U.S. warfare, this was a comment many Tanzanians—in fact, many observers around the world—could easily identify with. For years, global observers had seen how the war destroyed the everyday lives of Vietnamese civilians, how women, mothers, and children were harassed by search and destroy missions, and how South Vietnamese and American soldiers committed atrocities. They had seen this because all of it took place under the watchful eyes of photographers and camera operators whose pictures then circulated around the world. Foreign spectators therefore often experienced the war differently than Americans. As Michael Arlen, one of the shrewdest TV critics of the time, observed on the American television experience, all that American TV viewers saw for years was a “generally distanced overview of a disjointed conflict” which was “composed mainly of scenes of helicopters landing, tall grasses blowing in the helicopter wind, American soldiers fanning out across a hillside on foot, . . . and now and then (as the visual grand finale) a column of dark, billowing smoke a half mile away, invariably described as a burning Viet Cong ammo dump.”136 Arlen hence disagreed “with people who think that when battle scenes are brought into the living room the hazards of war are necessarily made ‘real’ to the civilian audience.” In contrast, he wrote, it seemed to him “that by the same process” those hazards of war were “also made less ‘real’—diminished, in part, by the physical size of the television screen, which, for all the industry’s advances, still shows a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.”137 What Arlen described here was a particular American television perspective that camouflaged and trivialized the war. Abroad, however, observers for the most part experienced another kind of

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war that widely diverged from American representations of the war. Whereas pictures of the “dirty war” were rather the exception in the United States, they were mostly the standard representation of the war abroad. Television documentaries like Hans-Dieter Grabe’s features about the “Helgoland” or “search-and-destroy documentaries” allowed viewers to be intimately involved in the waging of the war, and showed it in terms of its effects on the ground where it often appeared as brutal, merciless, and terrorizing vis-à-vis innocent civilians. While these war victims were also only three inches tall, they nonetheless lent the suffering concrete fates and faces, and foreign camera teams often zoomed-in on their affliction. In contrast to the “distanced overview” of which Arlen spoke in the U.S. context, images broadcast and printed abroad therefore frequently confronted beholders with the reality of civilian sorrows, showed atrocities and victims in close-up, and often succeeded in creating foreign empathy effects, well reflected by the emergence of a global antiwar movement. Antiwar protests, in turn, often provoked emotional clashes between antiwar protestors and pro-America loyalists. In Argentina, for example, organizations such as the Acción Revolucionaria Anticomunista (ARA) often countered antiwar declarations in newspapers by publishing their own declarations in which they called on Argentineans to lend their “moral and physical support to American troops shedding their blood in Viet Nam to defend freedom and dignity.”138 In November 1969, protestors and loyalists also faced each other in a leaflet battle: some hundred protestors handing out leaflets against the war competed with a member of the Democratic Union of Argentine Entities who toured the area in his car and threw out leaflets denouncing the Communist role in Vietnam. The protestors were dispersed with tear gas, the car driver was allowed to drive on.139 In India, Ambassador Bowles at one point noted a “refreshing switch” when hundreds of demonstrators protested in front of the North Vietnamese consulate in New Delhi and burned an effigy of Mao.140 The most intense clashes occurred in West Berlin, though, where student protests were often countered by pro-American solidarity demonstrations. After a student demonstration in February 1966, for example, during which protestors had thrown eggs at the Amerika House and had lowered the U.S. flag, over two thousand Berliners responded with a counterdemonstration. Many Berliners sent flowers, telegrams, and called the Amerika House to express their sympathy, a remarkable “showing of trust in the United States,” as the U.S.

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mission Berlin noted: “many went on to express support of the United States in broader terms.” As the mission concluded: “The antiAmerican tone of the demonstration appears to have given Berliners occasion to formulate their feelings about the United States on political, intellectual, or emotional grounds.”141 In 1967, protestors who demonstrated against the war during a military show at the airport Tempelhof were attacked, and their posters were torn apart by infuriated visitors. Similarly, when students staged a demonstration in February 1968 after they had completed the international “Vietnam Congress,” over a hundred thousand Berliners took to the street in response to show solidarity with the United States. The war thus deeply polarized societies around the world, and therewith also began to undermine the global hegemony the United States had enjoyed since 1945 when it had been an “empire by invitation”142—a hegemonic power whose leadership societies around the world wanted and on the whole gladly accepted. However, in light of the pictures from Vietnam, and, particularly in the eyes of the younger generations, the United States now transformed into an “empire by self-invitation” that not only intervened at will, but did so with brutal force, utter recklessness, and at all costs. Much of the admiration with which students had looked upon the United States in the early 1960s hence had gone once the war was over in 1973. The war’s paradox side effect, though, was that while it destroyed much of America’s hegemony around the world, it also consolidated America’s empire—and thereby, ironically, proved those right who had argued for an escalation of the war all along. In the early 1960s, many foreigners had still seen the United States as trailing the Soviet Union in terms of military power (despite its actual overwhelming superiority) and thus as the second-ranked power.143 Only the Vietnam War drastically changed those impressions. As the pictures demonstrated day in and day out, the United States indeed had an overwhelming arsenal of power at its disposal, the most advanced technology, the most destructive weapons—and it was willing to use its might. In contrast to the early 1960s, even those observers who sneered at the inability of “the most powerful nation of the world” to win against a “nation of peasants” now openly acknowledged that the United States was the “most powerful nation,” not the secondranked power anymore. And this meant that even though the war’s pictures destroyed much affection abroad, they paradoxically also created global recognition for America’s overwhelming superpower, and thereby further consolidated American empire.

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At times, such recognition even extended to unusual quarters. As Primera Plana reported in Argentina, news and pictures of the “Asian war” had transformed the local toy trade, and had made “war toys the order of the day, a hit.” This also had effects on little consumers. In the Jugueteria Burlando, as Primera Plana related, a boy of ten years had invested a sizeable amount of pesos with an explicit order: to get “an arsenal of grenades and weapons ‘similar to those of Vietnam.’”144

Conclusion

From Nixon to Obama, or: The Legacy of the 1960s

Thirty-seven years after Secretary of State Dean Rusk had unveiled

a model replica of the twin towers in a department of state reception, two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. Minutes after the first plane had crashed into the North Tower, TV stations went live on air. Soon the whole world watched the drama unfold on screen: thick, black clouds of smoke darkened the sky. Firemen rushed to the scene. Another airplane crashed into the South Tower. People jumped into death from the top floors. The South Tower collapsed. Pedestrians ran away from the scene, covered in layers of dust. Eyewitnesses reported what they had seen, breathless, desperate, crying. Then, the North Tower collapsed. In less than two hours, the icon of American power disappeared before the eyes of the world. Like no other global media event, “9/11” highlighted how much visual media had become a key battleground of American empire. The attack did not affect at all the reality of America’s overwhelming military power, and yet its pictures radically questioned all of that reality: how powerful could a country be if it was not even able to protect its citizens at home? How credible was American power at all if the United States did not respond? Within days, the United States therefore launched its counterresponse. As the dust had settled, President George W Bush appeared on the ruins of the World Trade Center and promised through a megaphone that the United States would fight back. There followed a war in Afghanistan and a war in Iraq, both of which were also “picture wars,” as historian Gerhard Paul has argued, whose purpose it was to overwrite the pictures of 9/11 with new images of American power—of U.S. missiles, aircraft carriers, jet planes,

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and toppling Saddam Hussein statues.1 It took almost ten years, however, until the United States could effectively break the predominance of the pictures of 9/11 when U.S. special forces assassinated the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden, and the Obama administration subsequently released pictures of the operation. America’s contemporary picture battles are the temporary endpoint of a history that reaches back to the times of Dean Rusk’s department of state reception. It was then that the global spread of visual media began to change the way foreigners participated in American foreign policy, and it was then that policy makers discovered pictures as a new means to govern their empire. Many of the core dynamics that shape American policy making today, therefore, have their origins in the 1960s. The staging of photo ops, for example, has now become an essential function of policy making itself, but it was still a new technique in the 1960s, which policy makers steadily professionalized over the course of the decade. Administrations invited outside expertise from external television advisors, sought to improve their own visual expertise by consulting public relations manuals or the obscure media theories of Marshall McLuhan, and substantially expanded the number of public relations and television advisors who concerned themselves with picture making, finding the right camera angle, or perfecting visual backgrounds. Specifically, the Nixon administration broke new ground with its “headline-picture-storyboard plan.” Under the plan, Nixon’s public relations advisors had to prepare a detailed “headline, picture and television storyboard” for every public Nixon appearance, which had to include a sketch of the actual picture to be staged and of the broader story media could tell around the event.2 Policy makers also already set up picture tracking systems. Through those, they monitored which pictures circulated about them and what kinds of photo opportunities “got play” in the media. Likewise, U.S. policy makers also invented the new format of picture travels in the 1960s and early 1970s whose purpose it was to stage appealing pictures for home audiences. All of those innovations have become standard elements of presidential picture making ever since. Similar to Nixon’s “headlinepicture-storyboard”-approach, for example, Reagan’s public relations advisors met every day in the morning to plan the story of the day, which they would then offer TV stations. Like the Nixon team, Reagan’s public relations advisors also constantly searched for spectacular visual settings and developed memorable photo ops like Reagan’s speech on the cliff of the Normandy’s beaches to



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commemorate the fortieth anniversary of D–day in 1984, his speech to troops in the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, a visit to the Great Wall, or horse-riding sessions on his farm. Like Kennedy, Reagan also allowed photographers to join him for a day, and like Nixon, Reagan agreed to do a documentary titled A Day in the Life of the President. Similar techniques were at play in the 1990s and 2000s, and presidents continuously sought to find unusual photo ops: Clinton went running with Al Gore to make an appealing picture motif of himself, George W Bush served turkey to U.S. troops, and Obama further perfected the art of foreign travel: accordingly, trips usually included speeches in historic settings with a high symbolic value. What presidents of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s also had in common with their 1960s predecessors was the fact that all of them were excellent picture performers. This again was a consequence of the broader transformative effect that television in particular had on American politics. Since television was (and is) a medium of emotions, not one of rational discourse, the logic of rational political arguing increasingly became supplanted by the art of emotionalizing picture performances, a point well understood by American policy makers since Nixon’s Checkers speech in 1952. Like actors on a stage, presidents now regularly delivered performances that would eventually create the intended emotionalizing pictures. The rise of visual media therefore also introduced a new element of theatricality into presidential appearances, and good acting skills have become an essential qualification required of each president ever since the 1960s. A further important legacy of the 1960s was the new degree of foreign participatory involvement in U.S. foreign policy that the global spread of television and the advance of illustrated weeklies opened up. Although we are used today to following American foreign policy via CNN, BBC, national TV networks, or increasingly also via online media, the globalizing of visual media was a new process in the 1960s that brought sensational participatory possibilities with it, well reflected by the transatlantic telecasts that television stations now often began to broadcast Thanks to global mass communications, observers abroad could now for the first time participate directly in American policy making, a process which not only opened up a new kind of mediated sensory and emotional involvement in American foreign policy, but also had the effect that foreign observers now increasingly engaged through pictures with American policies. At the same time, the globalizing of media also lent American empire a new form of mediated visibility, and thereby also constantly assured the mass scale recognition of America’s imperial order.

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American administrations were quick to capitalize on those changes. They opened their doors to reporters, photographers, and television cameras, arranged for transatlantic telecasts, and overall began to stage, make, utilize, and disseminate pictures in new ways also in more conventional foreign policy fields. Making official visits an important format to shape, manage, and correct foreign notions of the United States, U.S. administrations took great care to frame specific snapshot pictures for global media during such visits, likewise did they also rely heavily on pictures in the context of their development policies in order to demonstrate how the United States responded to local developmental aspirations. At the same time, USIA went to great lengths to professionalize its picture making, attracted new talents and producers, evaluated and refined its picture products, and for the first time in its history developed a systematic picture diplomacy. More important, U.S. administrations also worked hard to make manned space flights global picture events. Not only did NASA officials plan and test with meticulous care the best camera angles that camera teams and photographers could use when covering flight preparations, they also pioneered new visual innovations that assured their broad visual coverage, including in-flight photographs and, eventually, in-flight live television. Such pictures offered foreign observers new and spectacular forms of direct participation, and often translated into a high degree of global emotional involvement in American foreign policy, well underlined by the global emotional excitement with which foreigners responded to manned space flights. The Vietnam war, too, was an example for the new centrality that pictures attained in foreign policy making over the course of the 1960s. Indeed, in contrast to common assumptions that a systematic U.S. picture policy only evolved out of American communication failures in the Vietnam war, the history of the Vietnam war shows that U.S. picture making was in fact highly professionalized during the war and already encompassed all of the techniques that would mark later information policies as well: for example, U.S. information officers welcomed embedded correspondents, provided special projects helicopters to fly correspondents to (carefully) chosen sites of interest, stipulated that correspondents who joined on bombing missions had to submit their photos before release, published strike photography, and produced pictures themselves to frame a certain perspective on the war that maximized the appearance of a clean, good war and that minimized the visibility of victims. The problem here, as officials like assistant secretary of defense for public affairs



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Greenfield captured, was not U.S. information policy, but American military tactics such as, in Greenfield’s words, “the use of artillery against occupied villages, serial bombing and the use of napalm in populated areas, military attacks on villages etc.,”3 tactics that often translated into damaging pictures. Circulating around the globe, such pictures then became uncontrollable for American administrations and eventually led to the emergence of a global protest movement against the war. In retrospect, and in light of the highly professionalized state of American information policies during the war, it therefore seems that American administrations learned less on the level of picture making from the Vietnam War but rather on the level of military strategy which in later wars was more and more marked by efforts to minimize the risks of negative and damaging pictures. Accordingly, American military strategy typically centered on missile or bombing attacks (as in the Gulf War 1990), which made direct photographic coverage on the ground difficult, and those attacks were now often aimed at infrastructure targets (as in the Kosovo War 1999). Moreover, even when civilians became more widely part of the battle zone, as in Afghanistan and in Iraq after 2003 when Taliban and Iraqi resistance fighters hid in civilian disguise, U.S. troops were cautious not to revert to similar reprisal tactics against civilians as during the Vietnam War, took care not to commit atrocities before commercial camera teams or shifted those to controlled spaces such as Abu Ghraib prison (which was a controlled space in the sense that no commercial camera teams or photographers were allowed to operate there; indeed, part of the significance of the scandal was that it made something visible which had been kept invisible before). The 1960s had one further important legacy, and that was the beginning of USIA’s factual decline. This is a point that is often overlooked in the cultural history of American foreign policy, and yet it is an important legacy of the 1960s because USIA’s decline also marked the beginning of the end of American public diplomacy in the conventional sense. That form of public diplomacy was built on the infrastructural and representational supremacy that USIA had until the mid-1960s, and that allowed it to shape to a large degree the way foreigners came into contact with the United States and its policies. With the globalizing of media, however, USIA’s films, exhibits, pamphlets, and cartoon booklets began to lose their exclusiveness because foreigners could now also engage with U.S. policies through the mass media. At the same time, those media became less willing to rely on USIA materials, a development that USIA officials recognized

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themselves in the late 1960s. Mass media, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information noted in 1968, had “become less accessible, especially in Western Europe, Japan and in the large metropolitan cities of the world,” and USIA efforts therefore had “become less successful.”4 In the following decades, budget cuts further contributed to USIA’s decline. Today, it is a negligible player in American foreign policy, not least because pictures of American foreign policy now circulate widely on television, computer, and smartphone screens, in newspapers and magazines. This, then, is the broader legacy of the 1960s: Today, we cannot think of American empire anymore without thinking of the pictures it generates, and so America’s imperial order has come to depend not only on the reality of U.S. military power as such—which is fundamental to consolidating imperial power relationships on the ground—but also on those realities that pictures create. Pictures shape the way we experience and engage with American foreign policy, they affect how we feel about it, and on them, it depends to a large degree whether we accept American leadership in the world or not. In the twenty-first century, this is not a trivial matter for the United States. After all, in the long run, it is less costly for an empire to govern through hegemony—leadership by acceptance—than through pure domination. Domination can make imperial rule expensive because it requires frequent power demonstrations to discipline those resisting and to remind populations of the empire’s superiority. Those power demonstrations can be costly, and they often create further costs, especially if they generate more resistance. Acceptance, in contrast, translates into support once it is established, assures mass loyalty and identification, increases the freedom of action, and thereby reduces the costs of imperial rule. At a time when the enormous long-term costs of America’s last wars have left little maneuvering space for further global power demonstrations, building global acceptance has therefore become a core challenge for American administrations. And in the end, if they will be successful in that regard, will depend to a significant degree on whether they will be able to create pictures that make life under America’s global empire look attractive, appealing, and reassuring— just as their predecessor administrations have tried it in the fifty, sixty years before.

Notes

Notes to Preface 1. Richard Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, 1962), 423.

Notes to the Introduction 1. Pomeroy to Jorden, The World Trade Center in the Port of New York, 27.7.1964, RG 59, Lot Files, Lot#67D554, Records of the Special Assistant to the UnderSecretary for Political Affairs, 1963–1965, Box 3, NA II. 2. Quoted in: “Zu neuen Höhen,” Der Spiegel, 18.3.1964. 3. Pomeroy to Jorden, The World Trade Center. 4. See USIA to USIS Bonn, Exhibits: The Great Society, 20.7.1965, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 9, NA II. 5. See SPAN, February 1965, RG 306, Entry 15, Box 7, NA II. 6. See for example “Las Gemelas de Manhattan,” Panorama, April 1964, Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 7. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto, 1962). 8. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York, 1968; reprint, Toronto, 2003), 17. 9. Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich, 1956; reprint, Munich, 2002). 10. See on “iconic centrism” in general: Wilhelm Hofmann, ed., Die Sichtbarkeit der Macht. Theoretische und empirische Untersuchungen zur visuellen Politik (Baden-Baden, 1999). See also Tom Holert, Imagineering. Visuelle Kultur und Politik der Sichtbarkeit (Cologne, 2000). See also Kiku Adatto, Picture Perfect. Life in the Age of the Photo Op (Princeton, 2008). 11. Following WJT Mitchell and others, I use a broad understanding of pictures that includes not only photographs, but also other visual representations such as exhibits, models, or other graphic forms. See for a concise discussion of picture theories Marion Müller, Grundlagen der visuellen Kommunikation. Theorieansätze und Analysemethoden (Constance, 2003), 18 f. 12. Paul, Visual History. 13. See for introductions to the picture problem: Nicolas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London, 1999); Gustav Frank and Barbara Lange, Einführung

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in die Bildwissenschaft. Bilder in der visuellen Kultur (Darmstadt, 2010); Klaus Sachs-Hombach, ed., Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt, 2005); Martin Schulz, Ordnungen der Bilder. Eine Einführung in die Bildwissenschaft (Munich, 2005); Müller, Grundzüge. 14. See Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild?, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich, 1994), 11–38. See also Jeffrey Alexander, Dominik Bartmanski, and Berhard Giesen, eds, Iconic Power. Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (New York, 2012). 15. William Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), 11. 16. Gerhard Paul, “Von der Historischen Bildkunde zur Visual History. Eine Einführung,” in Visual History. Ein Studienbuch, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen, 2006), 7–36, quote on 21. 17. Tom Holert, “Kulturwissenschaft/Visual Culture,” in Bildwissenschaft, ed. Sachs-Hombach, 226–35, quotes on 233. 18. In this sense, I follow mostly what Heike Talkenberger has called the “functional-analytical” approach, though mingled with reception aesthetics. Heike Talkenberger, “Von der Illustration zur Interpretation. Das Bild als historische Quelle. Methodische Überlegungen zur Historischen Bildkunde,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 21 (1994): 289–313. 19. Michael Hochgeschwender, “Die USA—Ein Imperium im Widerspruch,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 3, no. 1 (2006), http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen. de/16126041-Hochgeschwender-1-2006 (accessed 22 February 2011). Hochgeschwender actually applies the definition for all empires, so I modified it here. The definition, simple as it may appear, in fact involves a number of important implications: first, it points to the fact that, in the last instance, an empire is a political configuration (“inter-state order”) based on an element of superiority on the one side and the perception of inferiority on the other. Second, it leaves open the means by which this kind of order is being achieved which, potentially, could be by political, economic, military, technological, or cultural means. Third, the definition draws no distinction between hegemony and empire. Indeed, as I would argue, hegemony is not a mode of rule opposite to an empire, but a mode of rule empires rely on to reduce the costs of their rule. For a good concise description of the systemic differences between formal and informal empires see Jürgen Osterhammel, Kolonialismus. Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (Munich, 2009), 24 ff. A note on terminology: throughout this work, I use the terms empire and imperial order synonymously. 20. One of those mechanisms is public diplomacy. See on U.S. public diplomacy most recently, Justin Hart, Empire of Ideas. The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2012); see also Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War. Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, 2006). A longer perspective is being provided by Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power. A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1994). 21. See Ute Frevert, ed., Neue Politikgeschichte. Perspektiven einer historischen Politikforschung (Frankfurt, 2005); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ed., Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen? (Berlin, 2005); Thomas Mergel, “Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 574–606. For a critical review, see Andreas Rödder, “Klios neue Kleider. Theoriedebatten um eine Kulturgeschichte der Politik in der Moderne,” Historische Zeitschrift 283 (2006): 657–88.

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22. See Gerd Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale. Symbolik und Herrschaft im Mittelalter (Darmstadt, 2003), esp. 11 ff.; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider. Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008). 23. Jan Andres, Alexa Geisthövel, and Matthias Schwengelbeck, eds, Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht. Herrschaft und Repräsentation seit der Frühen Neuzeit (Franfurt, 2005), 7–18, quote on 8; Sabine Arnold, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Dietmar Schiller, eds, Politische Inszenierung im 20. Jahrhundert. Zur Sinnlichkeit der Macht (Vienna, 1998). For more on the importance of political aesthetics see Crispin Sartwell, Political Aesthetics (Ithaca, 2010). 24. Etienne Balibar, quoted in: Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief. India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, 2007), 8. 25. See also the complex of “symbolic politics” treated in depth by political scientists: Ulrich Sarcinelli, Symbolische Politik. Zur Bedeutung symbolischen Handelns in der Wahlkampfkommunikation der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Opladen, 1987); Andreas Dörner, Politischer Mythos und symbolische Politik. Sinnstiftung durch symbolische Formen am Beispiel des Hermannsmythos (Opladen, 1995); still inspiring is also: Clifford Geertz, Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, 1980). For more on the importance of political aesthetics see Sartwell, Political Aesthetics. 26. See on trust, and for varying definitions: Ute Frevert, ed., Vertrauen. Historische Annäherungen (Göttingen, 2003); Rainer Schmalz-Bruns, ed., Politisches Vertrauen. Soziale Grundlagen reflexiver Kooperation (Baden-Baden, 2002). 27. See on compliance: James Rosenau, “Governance in a New Global Order,” in Governing Globalization. Power, Authority and Global Governance, ed. David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge, 2002), 70–86, esp. 72. 28. Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft. Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie (Frankfurt, 1983), 179. 29. This is a point Thomas Macho has made who defines politics as the “order of visibility relations”: Thomas Macho, “Von der Elite zur Prominenz. Zum Strukturwandel politischer Herrschaft,” Merkur 47 (1993): 762–69, quote on 762. See also Geertz, Theatre State, who makes essentially the same point: Geertz, Negara, 102. On the emergence and the importance of mediated visibility see also John Thompson, “The New Visibility,” Theory, Culture and Society 22, no. 6 (2005): 31–51 as well as Thompson, The Media and Modernity. A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge, 2011), especially chapter 4. 30. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1995). 31. See Joseph Nye, Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, 2004). 32. See on the general issue of symbolic integration Jürgen Osterhammel, “Überlegungen über Symbolpolitik und imperiale Integration. Das britische Empire im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Die Wirklichkeit der Symbole. Grundlagen der Kommunikation in historischen und gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften, ed. Rudolf Schlögl, Bernhard Giesen, and Jürgen Osterhammel (Constance, 2004), 395–421. 33. See Paul Zanker, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (Munich, 2009) and also Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992). 34. See on the changing forms of visibility in the age of mass communications also Thompson, New Visibility. 35. This of course also throws up the fascinating question in how far the advance of visual media actually contributed to the fall of colonial empires, but this would surely require another book.

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36. That pictures work this way has to do with the fact that media typically use them as part of “actor narrations,” that is, of narrations that relate what an actor (like, for example, the United States) has done or what has happened to that actor. Those actor narrations, in turn, have the effect that beholders automatically see the single instances that pictures show—which are by themselves meaningless—not as meaningless single instances but as news about an actor and about the political order it represents or claims to represent. And it is that effect that then creates recognition for that order as a whole. 37. See Manuel Borutta and Nina Verheyen, eds, Die Präsenz der Gefühle. Männlichkeit und Emotion in der Moderne (Bielefeld, 2010). 38. For a good overview of approaches and the range of emotions still under negotiation between scholars see: Birgit Aschmann, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Emotionen in der Geschichte. Eine Einführung,” in Gefühl und Kalkül. Der Einfluss von Emotionen auf die Politik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Birgit Aschmann (Stuttgart, 2005), 9–32. 39. See for good introductions with further references: Jessica Gienow-Hecht, ed., Emotions in American History. An International Assessment (New York, 2010); Ute Frevert, “Was haben Gefühle in der Geschichte zu suchen?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 35 (2009): 183–208. For an older approach see Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds, An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998). 40. See on media cultures: Andreas Fickers, “Politique de la grandeur” versus “Made in Germany.” Politische Kulturgeschichte der Technik am Beispiel der PALSECAM-Kontroverse (Munich, 2007); Irmela Schneider and Torsten Hahn, eds, Medienkultur der 60er Jahre (Wiesbaden, 2003). On the broader sweep of media history see: Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Constance, 2004); Axel Schildt, “Das Jahrhundert der Massenmedien. Ansichten zu einer künftigen Geschichte der Öffentlichkeit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27 (2001): 177–206; Andreas Schulz, “Der Aufstieg der ‘vierten Gewalt.’ Medien, Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Zeitalter der Massenkommunikation,” Historische Zeitschrift 270 (2000): 65–97. On the Cold War and media-politics relationships see: Daniela Münkel and Lu Seegers, eds, Medien und Imagepolitik im 20. Jahrhundert. Deutschland, Europa, USA (Frankfurt, 2008); Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Massenmedien im Kalten Krieg. Akteure, Bilder, Resonanzen (Cologne, 2006); Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise. Eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945–1973 (Göttingen, 2006); Frank Bösch and Norbert Frei, eds, Medialisierung und Demokratie im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2006); Daniela Münkel, Willy Brandt und die “Vierte Gewalt.” Politik und Massenmedien in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt, 2005); Bernd Weisbrod and Thomas Mergel, eds, Die Politik der Öffentlichkeit—die Öffentlichkeit der Politik. Politische Medialisierung in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Göttingen, 2003). For conceptual remarks see Thomas Lindenberger, “Vergangenes Hören und Sehen. Zeitgeschichte und ihre Herausforderung durch die audiovisuellen Medien,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 1 (2004). 41. See Karl Christian Führer, “Öffentlichkeit—Medien—Geschichte. Konzepte der modernen Öffentlichkeit und Zugänge zu ihrer Erforschung,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 41 (2001): 1–30; Fabio Crivellari and Marcus Sandl, “Die Medialität der Geschichte. Forschungsstand und Perspektiven einer interdisziplinären Zuammenarbeit von Geschichts- und Medienwissenschaften,” Historische Zeitschrift 277 (2003): 619–54; Werner Faulstich, Medienkulturen (Munich, 2000). 42. See Friedrich Lenger and Ansgar Nünning, eds, Medienereignisse der Moderne (Darmstadt, 2008); Graduiertenkolleg Transnationale Medienereignisse von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed., Unvergessliche Augenblicke. Die

Notes

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

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Inszenierung von Medienereignissen. Katalog zur Ausstellung im Museum für Kommunikation Frankfurt 2006 (Frankfurt, 2006). See also Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, 1992). Hartmut Kaelble, Martin Kirsch, and Alexander Schmidt-Gernig, eds, Transnationale Öffentlichkeiten und Identitäten im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2002). James Schwoch, Global TV. New Media and the Cold War, 1945–1969 (Urbana, 2009). See Philipp Gassert and Christina von Hodenberg, “Manipulation und Markt, in Wettlauf um die Moderne. Die USA und Deutschland 1890 bis heute, ed. Christof Mauch and Kiran Klaus Patel (Bonn, 2008), 425–54; Norbert Finzsch and Ursula Lehmkuhl, eds, Atlantic Communications. The Media in American and German History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004). See for other international transfer histories as well the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and TV and Media History. See on the concept of “aesthetic experience” as well Winfried Fluck, “Playing Indian. Media Reception as Transfer,” Figurationen 2 (2007), http://www.figurationen.uzh.ch/hefte/02-07/playing-indian/ (accessed 15 February 2011); and Fluck, “California Blue: Americanization as Self-Americanization,” in Americanization and Anti-Americanism. The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan (New York, 2007), 221–37. Fluck defines the term aesthetic experience—a term I draw on throughout this work—as a “unique form of sensuous experience” of “aesthetic objects” during which readers and beholders conduct an “imaginary transfer.” Quoted in Fluck, “California Blue,” 228. See on “actor capabilities” especially: Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2007 (Berlin, 2010); Bredekamp, “Bild—Akt— Geschichte,” in GeschichtsBilder. 46. Deutscher Historikertag vom 19. bis 22. September in Konstanz, Berichtsband, ed. Clemens Wischermann (Constance, 2007), 289–310; William Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005). Michael Diers, Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 1997), 7. Mirzoeff, An Introduction, 15; see also Christian Doelker, Ein Bild ist mehr als ein Bild. Visuelle Kompetenz in der Multimedia-Gesellschaft (Stuttgart, 2002), 52, 57. The pressure for imaginary completion is a point that has been stressed by psychologist and film theorist Hugo Münsterberg. See Sigrid Lange, Einführung in die Filmwissenschaft (Darmstadt, 2007), 22 f. See on the concept of “imaginary transfers” Fluck, “Playing Indian”; Fluck, “California Blue,” 221–37. What Fluck means by the term “imaginary transfer” are the “associations, feelings, and even bodily sensations” that beholders attach to their sensory experiences of aesthetic objects to make those objects come alive. Quotes on 228. See Doelker, Ein Bild, 66 f. For efforts to broaden the methodological toolkit see Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, eds, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2004). Some historians have also explored visuals: David Brody, Visualizing American Empire. Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago, 2010); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters. Culture, Media and, U.S. Interests in the Middle East 1945–2000 (Berkeley, 2001). See for a classic example of how cartoons, and so on, are used more for illustrative purposes: Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1987). See on the history of American empire: Charles Maier, Among Empires. American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, 2006); Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Die

176

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

Notes

Logik der Weltherrschaft—vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten (Berlin, 2006); Andrew Bacevich, The Imperial Tense. Prospects and Problems of American Empire (Chicago, 2003). Andrew Rotter, “Empire of the Senses. How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters,” Diplomatic History 35, no. 1 (2011): 3–19. See for a good introduction on imperial history: Jürgen Osterhammel, “Imperien im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Einführung,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 3, no. 1 (2006), http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Osterhammel-1-2006 (accessed 22 May 2011). See on the (cultural) history of American empire: Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, Over There. Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present (Durham, 2010); Ricardo Salvatore, Imágenes de un Imperio. Estados Unidos y las Formas de Representación de América Latina (Buenos Aires, 2006); Marc Frey, Dekolonisierung in Südostasien. Die Vereinigten Staaten und die Auflösung der europäischen Kolonialreiche (Munich, 2006); Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government. Race, Empire, the United States & the Philippines (Chapel Hill, 2006); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, 1993); Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion. American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, 1984); Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas. U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge, 1981). Examples of this tendency are: Lance Bennett and David Paletz, eds, Taken by Storm. The Media, Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago, 1994); David Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy. Icons of Outrage in International Crises (Westport, 1998); Jonathan Mermin, Debating War and Peace. Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post–Vietnam Era (Princeton, 1999); Thomas Rid, War and Media Operations. The U.S. Military and the Press from Vietnam to Iraq (London, 2008). See for more such literature on domestic U.S. media contexts also the notes to the individual chapters. Note that Tanzania was until 1964 actually called Tanganyika. The name change occurred when Tanganyika united with Zanzibar in 1964. To avoid confusion, I nonetheless use the term Tanzania throughout. Readers will quickly note some imbalances in the narrative, as West German and Argentinean experiences get more extensive attention than Tanzanian and Indian ones. This is simply the result of the uneven and asymmetric accessibility of primary sources throughout the world. Although sources are easily available and accessible in the United States and Germany, archives in Tanzania, India, and, to some degree, Argentina often pose a challenge to researchers because they are either disorganized or have lost their records. Yet, this also makes record-hunting at times a fun experience. Ernst Troeltsch, quoted by Jürgen Osterhammel, “Baylys Moderne,” Neue Politische Literatu 50 (2005): 7–17, quote on 7. For more thoughts about the “prosperity promise” of empires see Münkler, Imperien, 157–66.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Epigraph source: Mark Feeney, Nixon at the Movies. A Book about Belief (Chicago, 2004), xiii.

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2. See on the Checkers speech and on Nixon in general: Rick Perlstein, Nixonland. The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008), 37–43; David Greenberg, Nixon’s Shadow. The History of an Image (New York, 2003), 31–35. See for a copy of the speech: http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/ speeches/detail/4638 (accessed 22 February 2010); for a solid overall account on Nixon see Melvin Small, The Presidency of Richard Nixon (Lawrence, 1999). 3. Quoted in Perlstein, Nixonland, 40. 4. See on domestic media James Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture. Journalism, Filmmaking and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (Baltimore, 2006). 5. See on the emergence of American political visual culture also the fine work by Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, No Caption Needed. Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, 2007). For broader reflections on the transformative impact the rise of media had on politics—and continues to have—see also John Corner and Dick Pels, eds, Media and the Restyling of Politics. Cosumerism, Celebrity, and Cynisism (London, 2003). See as well Robert Hariman, Political Style. The Artistry of Power (Chicago, 1995). 6. See for picture consciousness in the context of election campaigns Marion Müller, Politische Bildstrategien im amerikanischen Präsidentschaftswahlkampf 1828–1996 (Berlin, 1997). 7. See Dale Nelson, Who Speaks for the President? The White House Press Secretary from Cleveland to Clinton (Syracuse, 1998), 80. 8. One important example of wartime picture making was, of course, also the flag raising at Iwo Jima. See on this episode Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 93–136. 9. See Nancy Bernhard, U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda (Cambridge, 1999), 47 ff.; Baughman, Republic of Mass Culture, 91–116. 10. See on Eisenhower Craig Allen, Eisenhower and the Mass Media. Peace, Prosperity, and Prime-Time TV (Chapel Hill, 1993) on whose findings most of this paragraph is based. 11. See on Kennedy’s media and picture policies besides Zelizer and Lubin also Thomas Brown, J.F.K. History of an Image (Bloomington, 1988). 12. Dutton to Kennedy, 5.3.1961, WHSF, Pierre Salinger, Box 143, JFKL. 13. See “A Day with the President,” New York Times Magazine, 19.2.1961, or the newspaper clipping in President’s Office Files, Personal Secretary’s Files, Box 129a, JFKL. 14. See “George Tames, Washington Photographer for the New York Times,” Oral History Interviews, Senate Historical Office, Washington, D.C., http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/oral_history/George_Tames.htm (accessed 13 March 2011). 15. The tour was broadcast on 14 February 1962 on all three major American television networks. 16. Salinger to Sorensen, The relations of the President with the press, 17.4.61, WHSF, Pierre Salinger, Box 142, JFKL. 17. See for a selective documentation of Stoughton pictures Cecil Stoughton, Chester Victor Clifton, and Hugh Sidey, The Memories. JFK, 1961–1963 (New York, 1973). On Kennedy see Andreas Etges, John F. Kennedy (Munich, 2003). 18. Herfried Münkler, “Die Theatralisierung der Politik,” in Ästhetik der Inszenierung. Dimensionen eines künstlerischen, kulturellen und gesellschaftlichen Phänomens, ed. Josef Früchtl and Jörg Zimmermann (Frankfurt, 2001), 144–63, quote on 158. 19. See Plaut to Cater, 25.7.1965; Cater to Moyers, 27.7.1965; Moyers to Johnson, 3.8.1965; Plaut to Cater, 27.6.1966, all in WHCF, EX FG, Box 12, LBJL.

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20. “How to use visual aids,” Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 432, LBJL. 21. “Ten ways to vitalize group photographs,” Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 621, LBJL. 22. “The Program: Blueprint for Results,” Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 614, LBJL. 23. “Movies move people,” Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 384, LBJL. 24. Notes in Folder “Television [2 of 2],” Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 384, LBJL. 25. Panzer to Alexander et al., 2.3.1967, WHCF, UT, Box 3, LBJL. 26. Kintner advised Johnson from 1966 to 1967. 27. Kintner to Johnson, untitled, 2.3.1967, Office Files of Robert Kintner, Box 5, LBJL. 28. All those questions are documented in “Office Files of Robert Kintner,” passim. 29. Michael Diers, Schlagbilder. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt, 1997), 23. 30. Wilkinson to Klein, Exploiting the Potential of TV, 23.4.1969, WHSF, SMOF, Charles Burnham “Bud” Wilkinson, Box 16, RNPM, NA II. 31. See Ehrlichman to Five O’Clock Group, 16.6.1969, WHSF, SMOF, John D Ehrlichman, Box 50, RNPM, NA II. 32. Haldeman to Buchanan, 20.3.1969, WHSF, SMOF, HR Haldeman, Box 49, RNPM, NA II. 33. See on McLuhan, Joe MacGinniss, So macht man Präsidenten. Das Beispiel Richard M. Nixon (Bergisch Gladbach, 1970), 190 ff. 34. Haldeman to Buchanan, 20.3.1969, WHSF, SMOF, HR Haldeman, Box 49, RNPM, NA II. 35. Wilkinson to Klein, Exploiting the Potential of TV, 23.4.1969. 36. Buchanan to Haldeman, 27.6.1970, WHSF, SMOF, Box 141, RNPM, NA II. 37. See Folder “Appointment’s Office Procedures,” WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 38. Narrated in Richard Reeves, President Nixon. Alone in the White House (New York, 2001), 192. 39. Higby to Bull, HPS, 18.4.72, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 40. See on Kennedy’s reviews Pierre Salinger, J. F. Kennedy (Düsseldorf, 1967), 184. 41. 1033 Allin an HRH, Weekly Report on Coverage of Presidential Activities, Saturday, May 15 to through Friday, May 21, 1971, 24.5.1971, WHSF, SMOF, HR Haldeman, Box 121, RNPM, NA II. 42. Jeffrey Alexander and Jason Mast, “Introduction: Symbolic Action in Theory and Practice. The Cultural Pragmatics of Symbolic Action,” in Social Performance. Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (Cambridge, 2006), 1–28, quote on 2. 43. Jeffrey Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics. Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” in Social Performance, ed. Alexander, Giesen, and Mast, 29–90, quote on 54. Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics,” 54. See also Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Performance, Inszenierung, Ritual. Zur Klärung kulturwissenschaftlicher Schlüsselbegriffe,” in Geschichtswissenschaft und “performative turn.” Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold (Cologne, 2003), 33–54. 44. Robert Montgomery, quoted in Allen, Eisenhower, 31. 45. See Allen, Eisenhower. 46. Quoted in David Halberstam, The Powers that Be (New York, 1979), 230. 47. Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (London, 1965), 324.

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48. Within the Washington press corps, the press conferences were also known as the “best matinee in town.” See Stoughton, Clifton, and Sidey, The Memories, 25. 49. Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days. John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965; reprint, Boston, 2002), 717. 50. Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, “Und Wo Stehen Wir. Im neuen Kraftfeld um Kennedy,” Die Zeit, 24.2.1961. 51. See on Kennedy’s “cult of toughness,” Robert Dean, Imperial Brotherhood. Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, 2001). 52. Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy. An Unfinished Life, 1917–1963 (London, 2003), 322 53. Winfried Fluck, “The Fallen Hero. John F. Kennedy in Cultural Perspective,” in John F. Kennedy and the Thousand Days. New Perspectives on the Foreign and Domestic Policies of the Kennedy Administration, ed. Andreas Etges and Manfred Berg (Heidelberg, 2007), 277–300, quote on 290. See on Kennedy’s picture making also David Lubin, Shooting Kennedy. JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley, 2003). 54. Busby to Johnson, News and picture activities, 19.7.1964, Office Files of Horace Busby, Box 52, LBJL. 55. Whelihan to Ziegler, Camp David, 14.6.73, Nixon Presidential Materials Project, WHSF, SMOF, Ronald Ziegler, Box 41, NA II. 56. Busby to Johnson, untitled, 23.1.1964, WHCF, EX FG/RS/PR, Box 9, LBJL. 57. Waters to Johnson, Suggested Ideas for your utilization of radio and TV, 15.12.1964, WHCF, EX PR 18, Box 356, LBJL. 58. See on Johnson, Randall Woods, LBJ. Architect of American Ambition (New York, 2006). 59. Rowan to Johnson, untitled, 22.12.1964, WHCF, EX FG, Box 11, LBJL. 60. See “Shooting Script—Visual Analysis of the United States Presidency,” WHCF, PR, Box 810, JFKL. 61. Busby to Johnson, Activities, next 10 days, 17.6.1964, Office Files of Horace Busby, Box 52, LBJL. 62. Haldeman notes, 19.1.1971, WHSF, SMOF, HR Haldeman, Box 141, RNPM, NA II. 63. Ibid. 64. Haldeman to Bull, 9.2.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 65. Bull to Haldeman, “A Day in the Life of the President,” 18.11.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 66. Attachment to ibid. 67. Bull to Flanigan, “A Day in the Life of the President,” Monday, December 6, 1971, 3.12.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 68. Harper to Nixon, “Meeting with John Ehrlichman,” December 6, 1971, undated, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 69. “8:45 am, The President calls Bill Timmons,” undated, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 70. “6:15 pm Bill Timmons enters President’s Office and stands in front of desk,” 6.12.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 71. Bull to Nixon, Discussion with The First Lady, Monday, December 6, 1971 10:00 pm (approximately), West Hall, 4.12.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II. 72. Scali to Haldeman, A Day in the Life of the President, 2.12.1971, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 3, RNPM, NA II.

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73. Bredekamp, “Bild—Akt—Geschichte,” in GeschichtsBilder. 46. Deutscher Historikertag vom 19. bis 22. September in Konstanz, Berichtsband, ed. Clemens Wischermann (Constance, 2007), 289–310, quote on 291. 74. See for a good listing: U.S. Department of State, Visits Abroad of the Presidents of the United States, 1906–1989, available at LBJL. 75. Andreas Daum, Kennedy in Berlin. Politik, Kultur und Emotionen im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn, 2003). 76. See on Johnson’s vice-presidential travels: Mitchell Lerner, “‘A Big Tree of Peace and Justice.’ The Vice Presidential Travels of Lyndon Johnson,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (2010): 357–94. 77. Pachios to Moyers, 12.10.1966, NSF, International Meetings and Travel File, Box 3, LBJL. 78. See Laitin and Maddox to Moyers et al., 15.10.1966, NSF, International Meetings and Travel File, Box 3, LBJL. 79. Laitin and Maddox to Moyers et al., 15.10.1966, NSF, International Meetings and Travel File, Box 3, LBJL. 80. See on the visit, Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao. The Week That Changed the World (New York, 2007). 81. Harry R Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries. Inside the Nixon White House (New York, 1994), 363 f. 82. Ibid., 412. 83. Episode narrated in Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (London, 1979), 1054. 84. Ibid., 1055. 85. Haldeman, Diaries, 364. 86. Quoted in Macmillan, Nixon and Mao, 284.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. Epigraph sources: Arthur Clarke quoted in: “Hallo Nachbarn,” Der Spiegel 15, 1962; USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, USIS/Germany Country Plan, 18.7.1960, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 4, NA II; Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (Madera, 1967), 22. 2. “Weltspiegel—Folge 1,” ARD, 5.4.1963, Fernseharchiv, Deutsche Kinemathek— Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin, Germany. 3. See on the globalization of mass communications from a more general historical perspective Philip Taylor, Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945 (London, 1997); on television see Anthony Smith, Television. An International History (Oxford, 1995); Albert Abramson, Die Geschichte des Fernsehens (Munich, 2002). 4. Schwoch, Global TV, 145, 149. 5. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 31. McLuhan’s understanding of media, it should be noted, was that they are extensions of the senses. The electronic interdependence of the global village, in this sense, meant for McLuhan an interconnectedness of the senses. 6. In a broad sense, the term also encompasses such different things as radio features or even jeans (as far as they are taken as a representational format), but here the focus is on visual formats that do not stem from the domain of popular culture.

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7. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 2009). In the second edition, Pratt defines a contact zone as “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations,” see page 8. 8. Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency. American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge, 2008), 101 f. 9. On the history of USIA see besides Cull—out of many more—: Osgood, Total Cold War; Wilson Dizard, Inventing Public Diplomacy. The Story of the U.S. Information Agency (Boulder, 2004); David Caute, The Dancer Defects. The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003); Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain. Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (London, 1997); Jarol Manheim, Strategic Public Diplomacy and American Foreign Policy. The Evolution of Influence (New York, 1994); Holger Ohmstedt, “Von der Propaganda zur Public Diplomacy. Die Selbstdarstellung der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika im Ausland vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zum Ende des Kalten Krieges,” (diss, Munich, 1993); Thomas Klöckner, Public Diplomacy. Auswärtige Informations- und Kulturpolitik der USA. Strukturanalyse der Organisation und Strategien der United States Information Agency und des United States Information Service in Deutschland (Baden-Baden, 1993); Thomas Sorensen, The Word War. The Story of American Propaganda (New York, 1968). Most recently, see also Hart, Empire of Ideas. 10. Among other predecessors, USIA built on the propaganda work of the Creel Committee (active at the end of World War I), the OWI, and the Office of InterAmerican Affairs (the latter two operated during World War II). As historians have shown, those agencies were in many ways laboratories for American propaganda programs used in the Cold War, which also had to do with the fact that many propagandists moved on to the USIA. See on precedents in Argentina and Latin America the illuminating in-depth analysis of Ursula Prutsch, Creating Good Neighbors? Die Kultur- und Wirtschaftspolitik der USA in Lateinamerika, 1940–1946 (Stuttgart, 2008); see also Uwe Lübken, Bedrohliche Nähe. Die USA und die nationalsozialistische Herausforderung in Lateinamerika 1937–1945 (Stuttgart, 2004), esp. 355–80. On India see Eric Pullin, “‘Noise and Flutter.’ American Propaganda Strategy and Operation in India during World War II,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (2010): 275–98. On postwar efforts in West Germany see Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible. American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge, 1999); Gienow-Hecht, “Die amerikanische Kulturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik, 1949–1968,” in Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945– 1990. Ein Handbuch, ed. Detlef Junker (Stuttgart, 2001), 612–22, 616; Frank Schumacher, Kalter Krieg und Propaganda. Die USA, der Kampf um die Weltmeinung und die ideelle Westbindung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945–1955 (Trier, 2000); Brigitte Hahn, Umerziehung durch Dokumentarfilm? Ein Instrument amerikanischer Kulturpolitik im Nachkriegsdeutschland, 1945–1953 (Münster, 1997). On the Marshall plan see for an overview Günter Bischof and Dieter Stiefel, eds, Images of the Marshall Plan in Europe. Films, Photographs, Exhibits, Posters (Innsbruck, 2009). Visual examples used in the volume are accessible at http://www.marshallplanimages.com/hans-jurgen-schroeder (accessed 7 June 2010). Nothing has been published in respect to Tanganyika/Tanzania. See on USIA efforts to create contact zones also Marc Frey, “Tools of Empire: Persuasion and the United States’ Modernizing Mission in Southeast Asia,” in Diplomatic History 27, no. 4 (2003): 541–66.

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11. USIS Bonn to Department of State, USIS/ Germany Country plan, 18.7.1960, 1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 4, NA II. 12. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 13. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, USIS/Germany Assessment Report 1960, 17.2.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 4, NA II; USIS India to USIA Washington, Country Assessment Report, 12.2.1965, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 2. See also Chidanand Stephens, “United States Information Library at Lucknow and Its Community Relationship,” diss., Catholic University of America, June 1963, RG 306, Entry 1061, Records Relating to Select USIA Programs, 1953–1999, Box 5, NA II. See on USIS centers in West Germany, where they were called “Amerika-Häuser”: Reinhild Kreis, “Von der Reeducation zur Partnerschaft: Amerikahäuser und Deutsch-Amerikanische Institute in Bayern,” in Wiederaufbau und Wirtschaftswunder, ed. Christoph Daxelmüller, Stefan Kummer, and Wolfgang Reinicke (Augsburg, 2009), 186–95; Kreis, Orte für Amerika. Deutsch-Amerikanische Institute und Amerikahäuser in der Bundesrepublik seit den 1960er Jahren (Stuttgart, 2012); Axel Schildt, “Die USA als ‘Kulturnation.’ Zur Bedeutung der Amerikahäuser in den 1950er Jahren,” in Amerikanisierung. Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marßolek, and Adelheid von Saldern (Stuttgart, 1996), 257–69; Manuela Aguilar, Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Policy. German–American Relations, 1955–1968 (New York, 1996). 14. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 15. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Annual USIS Assessment Report: 1961, 31.7.1962, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5. 16. Miller to Talbot, USIS Assets in India and Pakistan, 14.9.1965,RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 416, NA II. 17. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Highlights for October, 24.11.1964, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II; USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 18. See on Argentina for example USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, IPS: USIS relations with La Nacion of Buenos Aires, 27.1.1964, RG 59, Lot Files, Entry A 1 5096, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Policy Review and Coordination Staff, Country Files 1955–1966, Box 13, NA II. 19. Miller to Talbot, USIS Assets in India and Pakistan, 14.9.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 416, NA II. 20. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, USIS/Germany Assessment Report 1960, 13.3.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 4, NA II. 21. USIS India to USIA Washington, Country Assessment Report, 12.2.1965, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 2. 22. USIA, 18th Report to Congress, January 1–June 30 1962, NA II. 23. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Post’s Activities Report—May & June, 1962, 16.7.1962, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 24. USIS India to USIA Washington, Country Assessment Report, 12.2.1965, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 2. 25. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, USIS-Argentina: Country Plan, 21.4.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5. 26. AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, Dar es Salaam Youth report, 27.7.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–1966, Box 403, NA II. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. Officers counted an overall audience of

Notes

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

183

42,611 in the USIS center. In Zanzibar, film showings were often inhibited by local restrictions, see for example AmConsul Zanzibar to Department of State, Increased Restrictions on Film Shows, 21.11.1969, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 377, NA II. See USIA, East African Media Survey, November 1966, Office Files of Fred Panzer, Box 423, LBJL. On complaints see: USIA Conference on India, September 11–12, 1961, RG 59, Central Decimal File, 1960–63, Box 1081; on placement successes see Miller to Talbot, USIS Assets in India and Pakistan, 14.9.1965,RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 416, NA II. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, USIS/Germany Country Assessment Report 1961, 20.2.1962, RG 59, Lot Files, Entry A 1 5096, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Policy Review and Coordination Staff, Country Files 1955–1966, Box 24, NA II. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Annual USIS Assessment Report: 1961, 31.7.1962, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5, NA II; USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, USIS Argentina, Country Plan, 21.4.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5, NA II. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Annual USIS Assessment Report: 1961, 31.7.1962, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5, NA II. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Annual USIS Assessment Report: 1961, 31.7.1962, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5. By 1965, 50 million cartoon books were in circulation in Latin America. See Akers to McGeorge Bundy, 20.11.1965, NSF, Agency File, Box 74, LBJL. Miller to Talbot, USIS Assets in India and Pakistan, 14.9.1965,RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 416, NA II. Akers to Marks, Improvement of Agency Visual Materials—Sivard’s Report, with report attached, 4.1.1966, Papers of Leonard Marks, Box 23, LBJL. See Cull, The Cold War, 109. See Richard MacCann, The People’s Films. A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York, 1973). On USIA’s secret funding of newsreels see Seth Fein, “Producing the Cold War in Mexico. The Public Limits of Covert Communications,” in In from the Cold. Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham, 2008), 171–213. See MacCann, The People’s Films, 174, 178. See Cull, The Cold War, 207 ff. While one has to take into account the politics behind such prices, such prices also reflect recognition of new quality. Prices listed in: Richard MacCann, “Film and Foreign Policy. The USIA, 1962–1967,” Cinema Journal 9, no. 1 (1969): 23– 42, esp. 39. USIA, Program for the first tieline seminar in filmed communications. A USIA Special Studies Project, Airlie House Conference Center, June 2–5, 1966, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 247, Box 12, NA II. USIA, Preliminary Results of Film Effectiveness Study, 15.7.1970, RG 306, Entry 1030, Office of Research, Box 12, NA II. Knut Hickethier, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart, 1998), passim. ARD is the acronym for “Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” ZDF stands for “Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen.” Numbers quoted in Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 93. For background see also Schildt, “Das Jahrhundert der Massenmedien,” 177–206. Münkel, Willy Brandt und die “Vierte Gewalt,” 144. Hickethier, Geschichte, 175.

184

Notes

47. See Peter Ellenbruch, “Amerikabericht mit Augenzwinkern. Peter von Zahn und die ‘Bilder aus der Neuen Welt,’” in Mythos USA. “Amerikanisierung” in Deutschland seit 1900, ed. Frank Becker and Elke Reinhardt-Becker (Frankfurt, 2006), 171–85. 48. Peter Zimmermann, “Geschichte von Dokumentarfilm und Reportage von der Adenauer-Ära bis zur Gegenwart,” in Informations- und Dokumentarsendungen, ed. Peter Ludes, Heidemarie Schumacher, and Peter Zimmermann (Munich, 1994); Helmut Kreuzer et al., eds, Geschichte des Fernsehens in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. III (München, 1993), 213–324, quotes on 229. 49. See on Panorama Gerhard Lampe and Heidemarie Schumacher, Das “Panorama” der 60er Jahre. Zur Geschichte des ersten politischen Fernsehmagazins der BRD (Berlin, 1991). For a useful listing of all features broadcast in political television formats see Ernst Loewy and Achim Klünder, eds, Magazinbeiträge im Deutschen Fernsehen, 1960–1965 (Frankfurt, 1973). 50. Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 297, 450. 51. See ZDF Jahrbuch 1969, Mainz 1969, 63 ff. 52. “Unser Nachbar Amerika,” Der Stern, 9.2.1964; “Unser Nachbar,” it should be noted, was a series that also included reports from other countries, including the Soviet Union. See also Axel Schildt, “Zur so genannten Amerikanisierung in der frühen Bundesrepublik—einige Differenzierungen,” in Modernisierung als Amerikanisierung? Entwicklungslinien der westdeutschen Kultur 1945–1960, ed. Lars Koch and Petra Tallafuss (Bielefeld, 2007), 23–44. 53. Axel Schildt, “Vor der Revolte. Die sechziger Jahre,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 22–23 (2001): 7–13. 54. See on Der Stern in the 1950s Robert Lebeck and Harald Willenbrock, Rückblenden. Erinnerungen eines Fotojournalisten (Düsseldorf, 1999), 77. On West German illustrated magazines see Karin Hartewig, Wir sind im Bilde. Eine Geschichte der Deutschen in Fotos vom Kriegsende bis zur Entspannungspolitik (Bonn, 2010), esp. 212 ff. 55. See on this point Habbo Knoch, “Bewegende Momente. Dokumentarfotografie und die Politisierung der westdeutschen Öffentlichkeit vor 1968,” in Die Politik der Öffentlichkeit, ed. Weisbrod, 97–124, specifically, 104, 112 ff. 56. Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise, 89; Knoch, “Bewegende Momente,” 114. 57. Jürgen Wilke, “Bild-Zeitung. Die Bilderwelt einer umstrittenen Boulevardzeitung,” in Das Jahrhundert der Bilder 1900–1949. 1949 bis heute, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen, 2009), 64–71, quote on 68. 58. Ibid. On the intellectual history of Bild see Gudrun Kruip, Das “Welt”-“Bild” des Axel-Springer-Verlags. Journalismus zwischen westlichen Werten und deutschen Denktraditionen (Munich, 1999). 59. See on the history of Argentinean television: Mirta Varela, La Televisión Criolla. Desde Sus Inicios Hasta la Llegada del Hombre a la Luna, 1951–1969 (Buenos Aires, 2005); Jorge Nielsen, Televisión Argentina. 1951–1975. La Información (Buenos Aires, 2001); Carlos Alberto Ulanovsky, Silvia Itkin, and Pablo Sirvén, Estamos en el Aire. Una Historia de la Televisión en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1999). On the broader history of mass media in Argentina during the 1960s see: Laura Podalsky, Specular City. Transforming Culture, Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires 1955–1973 (Philadelphia, 2004); Sergio Alejandro Pujol, La Década Rebelde. Los Años 60 en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2002); Elizabeth Fox, “Latin American Broadcasting,” in Latin America since 1930. Ideas, Culture and Society. The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 10 (Cambridge, 1995), 519–68; Aníbal Ford, Jorge Rivea, and Eduardo Romano, eds, Medios de Comunicación y Cultura Popular (Buenos Aires,

Notes

60.

61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

185

1985); for broader background on cultural relations between Argentina and the United States see: Salvatore, Imágenes de un Imperio; Gilbert Joseph et al., eds, Close Encounters of Empire. Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations (Durham, 1998), and most recently: Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds, In from the Cold. Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, 2008). See on cinema Tim Barnard, Argentine Cinema (Toronto, 1986); see on Rico Tipo Jorge Rivera, “Historia del Humor Gráfico Argentino,” in Medios de Comunicación, ed. Ford, Rivera, and Romano, 106–40. Nielsen, Televisión Argentina, 130. English: “TV Screen”; Numbers given by Aníbal Ford and Jorge Rivera, “Los Medios Masivos de Comunicación en la Argentina,” in Medios de Comunicación, ed. Ford, Rivera, and Romano, 24–45, esp. 43. Pujol, Década Rebelde, 149. Nielsen, Televisión Argentina, 97, 328. Scholars of the “cultural imperialism” approach often took this influx of U.S. programs as an example to support their claim. See for example Alan Wells, Picture-Tube Imperialism? The Impact of U.S. Television on Latin America (Maryknoll, 1972); Herbert Schiller, Mass Communications and American Empire (Boulder, 1992); Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York, 1977). Nielsen, Televisión Argentina, 122. Nielsen, Televisión Argentina, 151, 162. Copman to Shakespeare, Satellite TV News Broadcast to Argentina, 7.10.69, RG 306, Entry A 1 42, Box 4, NA II; Guarco to Loomis, IMV Weekly Status Report, 9.10.1969, RG 306, Entry A1 42, Box 7, NA II. Ford and Rivera, “Medios de Comunicación,” 35. Ford and Rivera, “Medios de Comunicación,” 35. Primera Plana was an exception because most photos were printed in black and white. Amembassy Buenos Aires to Department of State, Survey of the Argentine Press, 15.2.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 412, NA II. See Rivera, “Historia del Humor Gráfico Argentino.” Pujol, Década Rebelde, 331. Hans Luthra, Indian Broadcasting (New Delhi, 1986), 408 ff. On Indian television clubs see “Tele-Clubs of Delhi,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 23.7.1961, BL NC. Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922 (Cambridge, 1994), 120. See Christopher Pinney, “Photos of the Gods.” The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London, 2004), 8 f. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed., Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi, 2003); Sandria Freitag, “Visions of the Nation. Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere,” in Pleasure and the Nation. The History, Politics and Consumption of Popular Culture in India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (New Delhi, 2002), 35–75; Diana Eck, Darsan. Seeing the Divine Image in India (New Delhi, 2007). For an account more focused on images in contemporary India see Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher, eds, Image Journeys. Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India (New Delhi, 1999). Indian arts and visual culture are covered in: Gayatri Sinha, ed., Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857–2007 (Mumbai, 2009). Shankarlal Chandulal Bhatt, Indian Press since 1955 (New Delhi, 1997), 1. From the mid-1970s onward, India even witnessed a “newspaper revolution.” See Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution. Capitalism, Politics, and the IndianLanguage Press, 1977–1999 (New Delhi, 2000).

186

Notes

77. Number given for 1965. See Martin Sturmer, The Media History of Tanzania (Ndanda, 1999), 110. As Sturmer argues, sharing of newspapers increased their reach beyond those numbers. 78. See on visuals and advertising Tobias Wendl, “Try Me! Reklame und visuelle Kultur in Afrika,” in Afrikanische Reklamekunst, ed. Wendl (Wuppertal, 2002), 12–30. On Drum see Tom Odhiambo, “Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century. Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine,” African Studies 65 (2006): 157–74; Tyler Fleming and Toyin Falola, “Africa’s Media Empire. Drum’s Expansion to Nigeria,” History in Africa 32 (2005): 133–64. On the broader background see Charles Ambler, “Mass Media and Leisure in Africa,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 119–36. For the broader entangled history of African media usage see also Emmanuel Akyeampong and Charles Ambler, “Leisure in African History. An Introduction,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (2002): 1–16. See on the role of visuals in Africa in general: Paul Stuart Landau and Deborah Kaspin, eds, Images and Empires. Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Berkeley, 2002). 79. See Odhiambo, “Inventing Africa”; Fleming and Falola, “Africa’s Media Empire.” 80. Meyers to Dungan, International Broadcasting, 24.5.1962, Personal Papers of Edwin R Bayley, Box 1, JFKL. 81. Cleveland to Tubby et al., Analysis of our Public Affairs Function, 7.6.1961, Personal Papers of Harlan Cleveland, Box 96, JFKL. 82. “Introductory Note on the Foreign Scene,” no author mentioned, 25.1.1961, WHSF, Pierre Salinger Papers, Box 130, JFKL. 83. Walt Rostow, View from the Seventh Floor (New York, 1964), 23, 49, 68. 84. Shriver to Kennedy, 29.5.1962, Personal Papers of Sargent Shriver, Box 12, JFKL. 85. Wilson to Salinger, 25.1.1961, White House Staff Files, Pierre Salinger, Box 111, JFKL. 86. “Inside the White House,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 30.7.1961. 87. See for examples: “The First Lady of America,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 3.9.1961; 10.12. “Personalities: Jacqueline Kennedy,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 10.12.1961; “The President and I. Exclusive to Blitz in India. By Jacqueline Kennedy,” Blitz, 3.3.1962. 88. See “Stern bei den Kennedy’s,” Der Stern 12.5.1963; “Cleopatra am Potomac,” Der Stern, 19.5.1963; “Ein Tag bei John F. Kennedy,” Der Stern 26.5.1963. For the tour of the White House see ZDF, 18.6.1963.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Epigraph sources: Stuart Symington, The Stately Game (New York, 1971), 9; Khrushchev quoted in: “Khrushchev has Public Quarrels,” The Statesman, 21.9.1959, BL NC. On the schedule discussions between American and Soviet officials see President Dwight Eisenhower’s Office Files, 1953–1961, Part 2: International Series, Reel 31, Frames 621 to 783, accessed at Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, Netherlands. For a description of the atmosphere and actual conduct of the visit see, for example, “Diplomacy: The Elemental Force,” Time Magazine, 28.9.1959. 2. Quoted in Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War (New York, 2006), 240. For a Soviet public diplomacy effort to narrate the visit

Notes

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

187

to Americans in retrospect see “Face to Face with America. The Story of N.S. Khrushchov’s Visit to the U.S.A.,” Moscow 1960, accessible at Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK. Angier Biddle Duke, Protocol and the Conduct of Foreign Affairs, Department of State Bulletin 11/1963, found in: B 8, Vol. 1067, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin, Germany. German protocol officials analyzed Duke’s speech carefully, apparently hoping for insights for their own visit planning. Duke, Perspectives in Protocol. “Address to the Women’s National Press Club,” Washington, DC,1.3.61, Department of State Bulletin 44 (1961): 414–18, quote on 417. The term “official visits” is used here in a pragmatic sense and refers to visits by high-ranking foreign leaders, such as presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors. It should not be confused with the department of state’s own system of classification for visits, which distinguished between state visits, official visits, working visits, informal visits, and presidential guest visits. Official visits, as understood by me, include the whole range of these visits, but are confined to supreme political leaders, excluding, for example, vice presidents, foreign ministers, or members of parliament. Two notable exceptions from a German context, however, are Simone Derix and Johannes Paulmann: Simone Derix, Bebilderte Politik. Staatsbesuche in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1990 (Göttingen, 2009); Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik. Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2000). For the United States, there is one short essay on one of Haile Selassie’s many visits by Theodore Vestal, “Emperor Haile Selassie’s First State Visit to the United States in 1954: The Oklahoma Interlude,” International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 1, no. 1 (2003): 133–52 though it is mainly concerned with its local history. In addition, official visits are sometimes mentioned in passing by scholars, though rarely analyzed in their representational functions, as for example by Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds. The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, 2000). This chapter owes much to Simone Derix’s perceptive insights about official visits. Those portrayals, to be sure, were always negotiated between different representational actors. For an example of how a multinational corporation tried to make use of a visit see for example the pamphlet “La Visita del Presidente Lleras a Los Estados Unidos de America,” published by the IBM Worldtrade Corporation in Bogota, probably in 1961. Found in Bodleian Library, Oxford, United Kingdom. Reinhard Bendix, Könige oder Volk, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1980), 20. Prosperity is being understood here as a perceived state of advancement that others aspire for and includes political, economic, and cultural aspects. Understood in this way, it is important to note, prosperity does not describe a specific segment on the historical continuum (as for example in “modern early history,” etc.). Rather it is a relative and subjective category that derives from a shared construction of hierarchical difference in which both sides play their role: the one side by showcasing how advanced it is; and the other side by acknowledging its own status as temporal latecomer striving for a similar state of advancement. In this sense, official visits were also an important format to formulate visually America’s “prosperity promise”—the promise that imperial leadership would bring prosperity for all those who followed. See Münkler, Imperien, 157–66. Bendix, Könige, 20.

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Notes

11. Bator to Johnson, Preparing for the Kiesinger Visit. Strategy and Procedure, 11.8.67, Box 193, NSF, LBJL. 12. For an extremely useful listing of all visits see: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/ c1792.htm (accessed on 28 February 2010). The second visitor, Emperor Dom Pedro II from Brazil, for example, was taken to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, and he also met with Graham Bell. See on the visit Argueu Guimares, D. Pedro II nos Estados Unidos. Reportagens de James O’Kelly e o Diário do Imperador, Rio de Janeiro 1961, accessed at Bodleian Library. 13. The respective number of visitors for the years 1940 to 1944 is: 53. Some key allies like Winston Churchill or Canadian Mackenzie King visited several times. Many visitors also came from Latin America (usually with scheduled stops in Detroit, West Point, and New York). 14. Duke, Protocol. 15. “Protocol Office is still growing,” New York Times, 10.2.1957. 16. The overall tendency during the Eisenhower years was a growth of the number of visitors, reaching eighteen visitors in 1954, for example, with seven of them going on multistop trips (meaning stops beyond Washington, D.C. and New York). In 1958, fifteen visitors (eight multistop) and in 1959 fifteen visitors (ten multistop) arrived in the United States. One exception was 1955 when only nine foreign leaders visited (yet seven of them travelled across the United States). Respective numbers for the Kennedy and Johnson years are: 1962: twenty-seven visitors, fifteen multistop; 1963 and 1964: thirty-four and twentytwo, in both years twelve multistop visits; in 1965 and 1966 the numbers fell because of the Vietnam War (twelve and fourteen, four and seven multistop), but in 1967 and 1968 they grew again (thirty-seven and twenty-six, eighteen and sixteen multistop). Under Nixon, the pattern changed, for although Nixon received thirty-five visitors in 1969, only nine of them went on to further stops, and in subsequent years, the number of multistop visits fell to three in 1971 and one in 1972. The high tide of official visits, then, was clearly during the early 1960s. 17. Duke, Protocol. Such visits were always also important to recognize and build the authority of the visitor, particularly if the visitor came from a newly independent country. 18. Murrow to Schlesinger, Color Films, 1.11.1961, President’s Office Files, Staff Memos, Box 65, JFKL. Films were usually only produced for visitors outside of Europe, the rationale here obviously being that European television would cover the event visually anyway. 19. Russell Baker, “About: Protocol,” New York Times, 22.9.1957. 20. Source: USIS India, A Memorable Visit, 1966, RG 306, Entry 31, Box 25, NA II. 21. The first official visitor greeted with a helicopter arrival was Prime Minister Ben Bella from Algeria on 15 October 1962. 22. Peter Lisagor, “A new record for V.I.P. Hosting,” New York Times, 29.9.1963. Providing these camera angles was in fact essential for the arrival ceremony. See Farrell to Haldeman, Possible Changes in Format for Arrival Ceremonies, 9.3.1972, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. Trying to perfect the photographs coming out of the ceremonies, the Nixon administration later on even made tests to determine the best location for cameras: Bull to Elbourne, Camera Position for Arrival Ceremonies, 8.5.1970, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 23. On the symbolic history of the Lincoln Memorial see Christopher Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (Princeton, 2002) and Albert Boime, The Unveiling of the National Icons. A Plea for Patriotic Iconoclasm in a Nationalist

Notes

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

189

Era (Cambridge, 1998), 253–306. On the use of the Lincoln Memorial by the civil rights movement see Scott Sandage, “A Marble House Divided. The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 135–67. See on the broader history of Washington’s monuments: Kirk Savage, Monument Wars. Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley, 2009); Carl Abbott, Political Terrain. Washington D.C. from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill, 1999); Andreas Daum and Christof Mauch, eds, Berlin–Washington, 1800–2000. Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities (Washington, DC, 2005). With the exception of the latter, however, all these authors ignore the international context. The first visitor to address Congress was King Albert from Belgium in October 1919, the second, President Somoza from Nicaragua in May 1939, about whom Franklin Roosevelt famously remarked he “may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch.” Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age. United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York, 1989), 358. “India will help in fight against aggression,” The Statesman (Calcutta), 14.10.1949 and “Nehru’s U.S. Tour,” The Statesman (Calcutta), 15.10.1949, BL NC. See Sandage, “A Marble House Divided”; Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life; and Savage, Monument Wars. See also Barber, Marching on Washington. See on the broader context Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line. American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, 2001); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000); Michael Krenn, The Color of Empire. Race and American Foreign Relations (Washington, DC, 2006); Ken Osgood, “Words and Deeds. Race, Colonialism, and Eisenhower’s Propaganda War in the Third World,” in The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World and the Globalization of the Cold War, ed. Kathryn Statler and Andrew Johns (Lanham, 2006), 3–26. See on foreign engagements with the civil rights struggle: Detlef Siegfried, Time Is on My Side. Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen, 2006), 355–98; Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom. The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York, 2010). Department of State to AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam, 27.6.1963, Box 4056, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, NA II. AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, 27.6.1963, Box 4056, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, NA II. USIA to AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam, 11.7.1963, Box 4056, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, NA II. AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, 13.7.1963, Box 4056, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, NA II. AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam to Department of State, 28.6.1963, Box 4056, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, NA II. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography. How Photographs Changed Our Lives (New York, 1991). Source: USIA, “Mwalimu Nyerere Amtembelea Rais Kennedy,” RG 306, Entry 39, Box 15, NA II. For the complete address see Kennedy’s Public Papers accessible at http:// www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8032 (accessed 3 March 2010). “Pandit Nehru’s Visit to Boston, Cradle of American Revolution,” The Statesman (Calcutta), 22.10.1949, BL NC. It is interesting to note against this backdrop that Castro and Khrushchev deliberately intended to undermine this rosy imagery of American prosperity

190

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

Notes

by meeting in Harlem in September 1960 (where Castro stayed at the Hotel Theresa). Rusk to Kennedy, Policy of Providing an Aircraft for State Visits—The Visit of Sudanese President Abboud, 11.9.1961, NSF, Box 288, JFKL, Boston, USA. Battle to Bundy, Policy of Providing Aircraft for State and Official Visits, 13.12.1961, NSF, Box 288, JFKL. Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1959). See for example Wiley Buchanan, Red Carpet at the White House. Four Years as Chief of Protocol in the Eisenhower Administration (New York, 1964), 144 ff. These efforts must of course also be seen in the larger context of the TVA’s own efforts to expand globally on the one hand, and the demand for TVA’s expertise among postcolonial countries on the other hand. On this context see David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission. Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton, 2010); Ekbladh, “‘Mr. TVA’: Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for U.S. Overseas Development, 1933–1973,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 3 (2002): 335–74. Moreover, the TVA was frequently visited by official visitors other than heads of state or government, from the 1930s onward as Robert Rook shows: Robert Rook, “Race, Water, and Foreign Policy: The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Global Agenda Meets ‘Jim Crow’,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 1 (2004): 55–81. Quoted in Rook, “Race, Water, and Foreign Policy,” 60. On the global history of modernization see most recently David Engerman and Corinna Unger, eds, “Special Forum. Modernization as a Global Project,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 375–506. Quoted in Rook, “Race, Water, and Foreign Policy,” 63. Remarks at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, at the Thirtieth Anniversary Celebration of the TVA, 18 May 1963, Public Papers of the Presidents, John F Kennedy, 1963, 409–11. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, “American Experience, Speech broadcast to the Nation on August 2, 1961,” in Mr. Prime Minister. A Selection of Speeches (Lagos, 1964), 61–66, quotes on 62 f. See also Balewa, “Nation Building,” in Mr. Prime Minister, 146–48, quote on 148. The Niger River dam was an important prestige project for Balewa. See on the nexus of American empire and knowledge David Engerman, “American Knowledge and Global Power,” Diplomatic History 31, no. 4 (2007): 599– 622; Paul Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 5 (2009): 775–806; Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire. Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War (New York, 1998). The first documented visits to universities were to Princeton in 1937 (Prime Minister Van Zeeland, Belgium) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1949 (Nehru from India), other universities frequently visited were the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of California in Los Angeles. Source: USIS Dar es Salaam, Viongozi Wa Amani—Mwalimu Nyerere Amtembeles Rais Kennedy (Leaders for Peace—Mwalimu Nyerere visits President Kennedy), 5.10.1963, RG 306, Entry 39, Box 15, NA II. Balewa, “American Experience, Speech broadcast to the nation on August 2, 1961,” in Mr. Prime Minister, 61–66, quotes on 62 f. Stanley Woodward, “Protocol: What It Is and What It Does,” Department of State Bulletin 21 (1949): 501–3, quote on 502.

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52. Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Sound Diplomacy. Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations 1850–1920 (Chicago, 2009). 53. Symington to Rostow, State Visits—More Imaginative Reception Ceremony, 24.5.1966, WHCF, Ex CO, Box 4, LBJL. 54. Haldeman to Chief of Protocol, 14.4.1969, RNPM, WHSF, SMOF, HR Haldeman, Box 50, NA II. 55. See Lisagor, “New Record” who relates that Shakespeare pieces were staged for the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. 56. Kilduff to Duke, 24.10.1963, Box 99, WHCF, Subject File, JFKL. 57. USIS New Delhi to USIA, Coverage of and support for President Radhakrishnan’s Visit to the United States, 5.4.1963, Box 317, RG 59, Entry 3051b, Executive Secretariat Conference Files, 1949–1963, NA II. 58. Argentinean President Frondizi, for example, attended a church service in New York when visiting in 1959. 59. Football games were for example followed by King Paul and Queen Frederika from Greece in 1953 and by British Queen Elizabeth in 1957.The farm family hosted King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece in 1953, and playing baseball was a privilege given to Burmese Prime Minister Nu in 1955. The garden party occurred during Balewa’s visit in 1961. See “Farm Family Is ‘Delighted,’” New York Times, 28.10.1963; “Nu Has a Busy Day With City’s Sights,” New York Times, 5.7.1955. 60. See on the broader uses of homes, ranches, and the general significance of wood in domestic American visual strategies Müller, Politische Bildstrategien. In a way, Johnson thus followed a tradition that had been established with Harrison’s log-cabin campaign in 1840. 61. Duke, The Functions of Protocol in Today’s World, “Address to the Women’s National Democratic Club,” Department of State Bulletin 50 (1964): 344–47, Quote on 345. 62. Summary of meeting, 14.12.1963, attachment to Cutcom to Clifton, Report on Operation in the Austin area, 6.1.1964, Box 8, WHCF, Confidential File, CO, LBJL. 63. “Texasbesuch—Fest der Freundschaft,” Bild, 30.12.1963. 64. USIA, West German Reaction to the Johnson–Erhard Meeting, 1.1.64, Office Files of Pierre Salinger, Box 2, LBJL. 65. See also Der Stern, 12.1.1964, which printed a picture of German folk dances performed by German–Texan clubs during Erhard’s visit at the LBJ Ranch. Shows like these underscored the transnational-cultural bonds between the United States and West Germany, but also put on display how the United States embodied the cultural heritage of the world. 66. See on the broader role of American popular culture abroad for example Reinhold Wagnleitner and Tyler May, eds, “Here, There and Everywhere.” The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture (Hannover, 2000); Rob Kroes, If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall. Europeans and American Mass Culture (Urbana, 1996); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels. Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, 3rd ed. (Berkeley, 2003). 67. Quote from USIA, “A Welcome Visitor to the United States. Prime Minister Nehru Guest of President Kennedy and the American people November, 1961,” Audiovisual Collection, JFKL. 68. Reinhold Wagnleitner, “The Empire of Fun, or Talkin’ Soviet Union Blues. The Sound of Freedom and U.S. Cultural Hegemony in Europe,” Diplomatic History 23, no. 3 (1999): 499–523. 69. Odd Arne Westad, “The Great Transformation. China in the Long 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global. The 1970s in Perspective, ed. Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, and Erez Manela (Cambridge, 2010), 65–79, quote on 77.

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70. Chapin to Walker, 15.2.71, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 71. Chapin to Walker, 15.2.71, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 72. Chapin to Bull, State Visits, 31.3.1970, WHCF, Subject Files, CO, Box 29, RNPM, NA II. 73. Whelihan to Ziegler, Camp David, 14.6.73, WHSF, SMOF, Ronald Ziegler, Box 41, RNPM, NA II.

Notes to Chapter 4 1. Epigraph Sources: Julius Nyerere, The Plea of the Poor, Address at Howard University, Washington, DC, 5.8.1977, Folder Nyerere Documents, No. 3, National Central Library, Dar es Salaam; John F Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20.1.1961, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Inaugural-Address.aspx (accessed 14 April 2011); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996), 1 f. 2. In this chapter, I use the terms “developing world,” “third world,” “global South,” interchangeably and also speak of “developing societies,” but am aware that they are problematic terms, because they were, first of all, terms of the time, and second, construct certain hierarchies. However, for a lack of alternatives, I stick to those terms here. 3. Max Millikan and Walt Rostow, An American Policy for the Next Decade, Rough Draft, April 1956, Max Franklin Millikan Papers, MC 188, Box 10, Folder 284, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 4. Walt Rostow and Max Millikan, A Proposal. Key to an Effective Foreign Policy (New York, 1957), 146, 6. 5. See on longer continuities for example Ekbladh, The Great American Mission; Nick Cullather, The Hungry World. America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, 2010). See on European development policies: Hubertus Büschel and Daniel Speich, eds, Entwicklungswelten. Globalgeschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (Frankfurt, 2009). See for reviews of the recent overall literature on development Corinna Unger, “Histories of Development and Modernization: Findings, Reflections, Future Research,” H-Soz-u-Kult, 09.12.2010, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/forum/ id=1130&type=forschungsberichte (accessed 15 February 2011); Marc Frey and Sönke Kunkel, “Writing the History of Development. A Review of the Recent Literature,” Contemporary European History 20, no. 2 (2001): 215–32. 6. John F Kennedy, Address at a White House Reception for Members of Congress and for the Diplomatic Corps of the Latin American Republics, March 13, 1961, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Speeches/ Address-at-a-White-House-Reception-for-Members-of-Congress-and-for-theDiplomatic-Corps-of-the-Latin.aspx (accessed 11 May 2011). See on the Alliance for Progress most recently: Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy. The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York, 2007); see also Ronald Scheman, ed., The Alliance for Progress. A Retrospective (New York, 1988). 7. John F Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid, March 22, 1961, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8545#axzz1OZk9aU00 (accessed 11 May 2011). 8. See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 5.

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9. See Laura Belmonte, “Selling Capitalism. Modernization and U.S. Overseas Propaganda, 1945–1959,” in Staging Growth. Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, ed. David Engerman et al. (Amherst, 2003), 107–28; Christina Klein, “Musicals and Modernization. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I,” in Staging Growth, ed. Engerman et al., 129–164; Wibke Becker, “Die USA und der Transformationsprozess in der Dritten Welt: Amerikanische Afrikapolitik am Beispiel von Ghana, 1950–1966” (diss, University of Cologne, 2004); Jonathan Nashel, “The Road to Vietnam. Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction,” in Cold War Constructions. The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian Appy (Amherst, 2000), 132–56. For a history of the Peace Corps see Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love. The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, 1998). 10. “Circarama,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 17.12.1961, BL NC. 11. Circarama Study, Delhi, Februray 1963, RG 306, Entry 1015, Box 46, NA II. 12. Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States. Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, 2011), 22. 13. Quoted in Ivaska, Cultured States, 28. 14. “African v. ‘Western’ Music,” Sunday News, 10.6.1962, BL NC. For Beatles fever see the summer issues of the Sunday News in 1964. On longer continuities see Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890–1970. The Beni Ngoma (London, 1975). 15. See Podalsky, Specular City. 16. “Arusha Clocks In,” Drum, March 1967. 17. See “Arusha Clocks In,” Drum, March 1967. Most of those observations are based on a survey of Drum and the Sunday News for Tanzania and the Illustrated Weekly of India and the Times of India for India, years 1961–67. 18. “Industrial Setting,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 25.4.1965, BL NC. For a report about research laboratories see: “Research for the Space Age,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 27.6.1965, BL NC. 19. “Great Society,” Times of India, 22.2.1966. 20. “Tanzania’s Success Industries,” Drum, July 1967. 21. “Arusha Clocks In,” Drum, March 1967. 22. See Birri’s “Tire Dié” (1958) and Solanas’s “La Hora de los Hornos” (1966–68), which although critical of Western “exploitation,” moves widely within a development paradigm. 23. See on the collages Podalsky, Specular City, 107 ff. 24. See on Tucumán Arde: Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde.” Vanguardia Artística y Política en el 68 Argentino (Buenos Aires, 2008). Thanks to Pablo Ben for having pointed me to this fine book. 25. For a plea to move beyond such top-down histories see David Engerman and Corinna Unger, “Introduction. Towards a Global History of Modernization,” Diplomatic History 33, no. 3 (2009): 375–86. Paradigmatic examples of top-down histories are: Irene Gendzier, “Play It Again Sam. The Practice and Apology of Development,” in Universities and Empire. Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York, 1998), 57–96; Michael Latham, “Ideology, Social Science and Destiny. Modernization and the Kennedy-Era Alliance for Progress,” Diplomatic History 22, no. 2 (2002): 199–229; Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future. Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, 2003). For an older account see Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World. Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton, 1973).

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26. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Country Plan: Tanganyika and Zanzibar, 4.8.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 1, NA II. 27. USIA, Country Plan for Tanganyika, 6.6.1963, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 28. Ibid. 29. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, USIS Argentina: Country Plan, 14.4.1961, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 5, NA II. 30. Ibid. 31. Akers to Bundy, 20.11.1965, NSF, Box 74, LBJL. 32. Ibid. 33. Waldman to Szekely, Project 63-068—Alliance for Progress Exhibit, 13.11.1962, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II. 34. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, Alliance for Progress Exhibit, 23.4.1964, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II; see also USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, Mobile Unit trips in Argentina, 27.10.1965, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II. 35. USIA, Country Plan India, 12.8.1965, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 2, NA II. 36. Akers to Bundy, 20.11.1965, NSF, Box 74, LBJL. 37. USIA, Country Plan India, 12.8.1965. 38. USIS New Delhi to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights Report, April 1966, 10.5.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 13, NA II. 39. “Aid to Progress. A Pictorial Report on Nine U.S. Assisted Projects in South India,” RG 306, Entry 15, Box 6, NA II. 40. Quotes all from “The TVA today,” RG 306, Entry 53, Box 9, NA II. 41. “The Farm Revolution,” 1964, RG 306, Entry 15, Box 6, NA II. 42. USIS Dar es Salaam, Catalogue of 16mm. Sound films, July 1961, RG 306, Entry 35, Box 18, NA II. 43. U.S. objectives in Tanganyika, 3.12.1962, RG 59, Lot Files, Entry 5096, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Box 4, NA II. 44. USIS Dar es Salaam USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights, 26.1.1966. 45. See “3,000 Items on Exhibition. A chance to see American life” and “This means more for all, says Johnson,” both in Sunday News, 29.11.1964, BL NC. 46. Akers to Bundy, 20.11.1965, NSF, Box 74, LBJL. 47. See on precedents Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert. Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, 2007). 48. Paul Rosenstein-Roda, “Problems of Industrialisation of Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” The Economic Journal 53, no. 210/211 (1943): 202–11. 49. See Corinna Unger, “Towards Global Equilibrium: American Foundations and Indian Modernization, 1950s to 1970s, ” Journal of Global History 6, no. 1 (2011): 121–42. 50. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington DC, Exhibit: “Agriculture: Key to National Progress,” 27.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 51. See for example “Se Ayudan a sí mismos,” [They help themselves], RG 306, Entry 39, Box 16, NA II. 52. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, Permanent Memorials to President JF Kennedy, 30.7.1964, USIA, Box 1, JFKL. 53. “Viviendas y la Alianza,” RG 306, Entry 15, Box 6, NA II. 54. USIS Bombay to USIA Washington, Exhibit entitled “Power for Progress,” 8.7.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 13, NA II. 55. See “Profile of Tanganyika,” released 1963, RG 306, Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Records Section, NA II. 56. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II.

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57. Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, 1958), passim. 58. See Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds. The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca, 2000). 59. See “Food for Development,” 1963, RG 306, Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Records Section, NA II. 60. See for example: “Map of India,” published 22.7.1964, RG 306, Entry 15, Box 6; “U.S. Assisted Development Projects” (Poster), published January 1963, RG 306, Entry 35, Box 12; USIS Calcutta to USIA Washington, Calcutta’s Animated Window Display, “Introduction to Indo-American Cooperation Through USAID,” 21.10.1963, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 14; USIS Calcutta to USIA Washington, Exhibit Entitled “Power for Progress,” RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 13, all in NA II. 61. USIS Calcutta to USIA Washington, Exhibits, 22.10.1964, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 14, NA II. 62. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Visualising India’s Geo-Body. Globes, Maps, Bodyscapes,” in Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, ed. Sumathi Ramaswamy (New Delhi, 2003), 151–89, passim. 63. USIS Calcutta to USIA Washington, Calcutta’s Animated Window Display, 21.10.1963. 64. Source: RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 14, NA II. 65. See Rivera, “Historia del Humor Gráfico Argentino.” 66. USIA, 20th report to Congress, January 1–June 30, 1963, Library, NA II. 67. See Rowan to President, Weekly Report, 15.12.1964, RG 306, Chronological Files of the Director, Box 12, NA II. 68. “United in the Alliance.” 69. See “Unidos en la Alianza,” RG 306, Entry 53, Box 9, NA II. 70. Source: RG 306, Entry 53, Box 9, NA II. 71. English: “Our Quarter.” 72. Adler to Stevens, Viewer Reactions to Nuestro Barrio—A Preliminary Report, 16.11.1965, RG 306, Entry 1030, Box 7. 73. See USIA send Soap Operas to Latins, New York Times, 29.3.1967, clipping in RG 306, Entry 1066, Box 161, NA II. 74. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, Alliance for Progress Exhibit, 23.4.1964, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II; see also USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, Mobile Unit trips in Argentina, 27.10.1965, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II. 75. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 32, NA II. 76. USIS India to USIA Washington, Country Assessment Report, 12.2.1965, RG 306, Entry 1047, Box 2, NA II. 77. See “Student Riot Halts Lecture By Rostow,” New York Times, 25.2.1965. 78. USIS Bogota to USIA Washington, The Semantics of the Alliance for Progress, 2.12.1968, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 318, NA II. See on the widespread mood of that time: Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance That Lost Its Way. A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago, 1972). 79. See Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway. How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (Bloomington, 2009). 80. Research Memorandum, “The U.S. Image in Three English-Speaking African Countries,” 16.11.1970, RG 306, Entry 1030, Box 12, NA II. 81. Research Memorandum, “College Educated Indian Opinion of the United States,” 20.10.1970, RG 306, Entry 1030, Box 12, NA II.

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82. “Report on the Agency’s Fourth Monthly Seminar on Communication Problems,” April 1967, RG 306, Entry 1030, Box 12, NA II.

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Epigraph sources: “Der Mond ist jetzt ein Ami,” Bild, 21.7.1969; letter of Richard Schüler, Cologne, quoted in “Bild-Leser Fordern: Tauft eine Straße auf den Namen Wernher von Braun,” Bild, 25.7.1969. 2. Shakespeare to Nixon, no title, 22.7.69, RG 306, Entry A 1 42, Director’s Subject Files, 1968–1972, Box 1, NA II. 3. Nixon Public Papers, 272—Telephone Conversation With the Apollo 11 Astronauts on the Moon, 20.7.1969, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index. php?pid=2133&st=&st1= (accessed 3 November 2010). 4. See on NASA’s public relations history and on the media history of manned space flights: Daniel Grinsted, Die Reise zum Mond. Zur Faszinationsgeschichte eines medienkulturellen Phänomens zwischen Realität und Fiktion (Berlin, 2009); Harlen Makemson, Media, NASA, and America’s Quest for the Moon (New York, 2009); Andreas Rosenfelder, “Medien auf dem Mond. Zur Reichweite des Weltraumfernsehens,” in Medienkultur der 60er Jahre, ed. Irmela Schneider and Torsten Hahn (Wiesbaden, 2003), 17–33; Mark Byrnes, Politics and Space. Image Making by NASA (Westport, 1994); James Lee Kauffman, Selling Outer Space. Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961–1963 (Tuscaloosa, 1994). For background see Igor Polianski and Matthias Schwartz, eds, Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter (Frankfurt, 2009); Gerard DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon. The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest (New York, 2006); Steven Dick and Roger Launius, eds, Societal Impact of Spaceflight (Washington, DC, 2007); Karsten Werth, “A Surrogate for War. The U.S. Space Program in the 1960s,” Amerikastudien 49 (2004): 563–87. 5. See on “pictorial acts” Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, Berlin 2010. Pictures, as Bredekamp argues, are not “silent sufferers but creators of perception-related experiences and actions.” Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts, 326. 6. See for a similar argument with a focus on the lunar landing: Lorenz Engell, “Das Mondprogramm. Wie das Fernsehen das größte Ereignis aller Zeiten erzeugte und wieder auflöste, um zu seiner Geschichte zu finden,” in Medienereignisse der Moderne, ed. Friedrich Lenger and Ansgar Nünning (Darmstadt, 2008), 150–71. 7. See for a first effort to do so Osgood, Total Cold War, specifically chapter 10. 8. National Security Council, NSC 5814, “US. Policy on Outer Space,” June 20, 1958, in John Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown. Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program Volume I: Organizing for Exploration (Washington, DC, 1995), 345–59, http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4407/vol1/chapter2-4.pdf (accessed 10 October 2010). 9. Lyndon B Johnson, Vice President, Memorandum for the President, “Evaluation of Space Program,” 28 April 28 1961, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, Vol. I, 427–29. 10. Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, 25.5.1961, http:// www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/ JFK/003POF03NationalNeeds05251961.htm (accessed 10 October 2010).

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11. NASA, “Preliminary Specifications for Manned Satellite Capsule,” October 1958, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown. Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civilian Space Program, Vol. VII: Human Spaceflight. Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (Washington, DC, 2008), 89–116; George Low, Chief, “Manned Space Flight,” NASA-Industry Program Plans Conference, 28–29 July 1960, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, Vol. VII, 449–56; Glennan to Goldenson, 18.2.1960, Folder “Impact: TV (1960–68),” NASA History Office. Of course, NASA’s public relations activities also have to be seen in the context of NASA’s budget concerns and, in this sense, also aimed at convincing Congress to step up its budget appropriations for NASA. See on this point Byrnes, Politics, and Kauffman, Selling Outer Space. 12. NASA, Office of Public Information, Public Information Operating Plan, Project Mercury MR-3, 21.4.1961, RG 255, Reference Files on Project Mercury Press Operations, Box 1, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas. 13. Ibid. 14. Wiesner to Bundy, “Some Aspects of Project Mercury,” 9 March 1961, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, Vol. VII, 175 f. Wiesner, however, also realized the significance of the event, acknowledging “that in the imagination of many,” the space shot “will be viewed in the same category as Columbus’ discovery of the new world.” 15. Memorandum From the Secretary of State’s Special Assistant for Atomic Energy and Outer Space (Farley) to the Under Secretary of State (Bowles), The Mercury Program and NASA’s Conduct of Public Relations, undated, but likely end of April 1961, FRUS 1961–1963, Vol. XXV, doc. 363. 16. Shollenberger to Participating Networks, 8.11.61, and Memo of Understanding for the Radio–TV pool, 18.1.1962, both in RG 255, Mercury Series, Box 37, NA-SW. 17. Les Gaver, Audio-Visual Report on MA-9, undated, RG 255, Reference Files on Project Mercury Press Operations, Box 4, NA-SW. 18. McDonnell and NASA, MA-9 Experiments, 1.4.1963, Box White House, Presidents, Kennedy, John F, Correspondence (1961), NASA History Office. See on earlier ideas for on-board television: Silverstein to Webb, Use of a Television System in Manned Mercury-Atlas Orbital Flights, 6.9.1961, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, Vol. VII, 211 f. 19. NASA, Image # S63-07854, Source: NASA on the Commons at Flickr. 20. MA-9 Radio-TV pool, Minutes of the Pool meeting held at ABC on Thursday, April 25, 1963, RG 255, Reference Files on Project Mercury Press Operations, Box 4, NA-SW. 21. “Der Zweite Sieger,” Stern, 14.5.1961. 22. “Am Kaffee durfte er nur riechen,” Bild, 16.5.1963. The choice of photographs itself as well as the headlines of course already point to the dramaturgical role. 23. See for example “Dos revelaciones de Glenn sorprenden los técnicos,” La Nacion, 23.2.1962, Hemeroteca, Biblioteca del Congreso, Buenos Aires. 24. AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to SecState Washington, Weeka No. 21, 25.5.63, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy File, 1963, Box 3818, NA II. 25. Remarks of Thomas C Sorensen, Deputy Director (Policy & Plans) of the U.S. Information Agency, Before the Office of Public Information Staff Conference, National Aeronautics & Space Administration, 27.6.1961, NASA Historical Reference Collection, Office of Public Affairs 1958–1968, Correspondence, Box 1, NASA History Office; Webb to Cox, 13.3.1962, Papers of James Webb, Box 2, JFKL.

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26. Chester Cooper, A Detailed Report on the “Fourth Orbit” of Friendship 7, undated, RG 255, Project Mercury Series, Box 37, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth. 27. Ibid. 28. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington DC, IPS: John Glenn’s Capsule Exhibit in Buenos Aires, 28.5.62; USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Radio and TV coverage on the exhibit of the capsule “Friendship 7”, 17.5.62, both in RG 255, Project Mercury Series, Box 66, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth. 29. “La Cápsula de Glenn,” La Razon, 2.5.1962, Hemeroteca, Biblioteca del Congreso, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 30. Cooper, A Detailed Report on the “Fourth Orbit” of Friendship 7, undated, RG 255, Project Mercury Series, Box 37, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth. 31. See on the transport: USIS Bombay, Press Release, Glenn’s “Friendship 7” Space Capsule to be shown in Bombay, 18.6.1962 and USIS Bombay Press Release, The Space Capsule Evokes Stupendous Interest Among Bombay’s Millions, 23.6.1962, both in RG 255, Project Mercury Series, Box 66, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth. Cooper, A Detailed Report on the “Fourth Orbit” of Friendship 7, undated, RG 255, Project Mercury Series, Box 37, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth. 32. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, NASA Exhibition “Photography in Space” at Photokina, Cologne, 9.5.1963, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 9, NA II. 33. USIS Bombay to USIA Washington, NASA Spacemobile, 30.8.1963, RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 14, NA II. 34. USIS Bombay to USIA Washington, NASA Spacemobile, 30.8.1963, RG 306, Entry1039, Box 14, NA II. 35. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington, Tour of NASA Spacemobile, 31.7.1964, RG 306, 1039, Box 9, NA II. 36. “To Lecture Here,” The Nationalist, 13.5.1964. 37. “3000 Items on Exhibition. A Chance to See American Life,” Sunday News, 29.11.1964. BL NC. 38. Source: RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 13, NA II. 39. USIS Dar es Salaam to USIA Washington DC, Monthly Highlights—December, 26.1.1966, RG 306, Entry 1039, 1955–1967, Box 32, NA II. 40. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, USIS—Buenos Aires Produced Space Science Exhibit, 12.5.1965; USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, USIS, IMS: Mobile Unit trips in Argentina, 27.10.1965, both in RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II. 41. USIS Buenos Aires to USIA Washington, Report on Gemini V Spacecraft Exhibit, 29.3.1966 and USIS Panama to USIA Washington, Information Officer on Gemini V Tour Reports on Showings in Argentina, Mexico, 31.5.1966, both in RG 306, Entry 1039, Box 1, NA II. See on Gemini V’s visibility in Buenos Aires AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to Department of State, Joint Weeka No. 35, 28.8.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 1890, NA II. 42. See USIS Berlin to USIA Washington DC, U.S. Space Exhibition, German Industries Fair, Berlin, Sept. 16–25, 1966, 18.10.66, RG 306, Entry 1038b, Box 9, NA II. 43. Proposal for Overseas Space Exhibits, attached to: Marks to Humphrey, undated, but very likely July 66, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 318, NA II. 44. The Gemini program was launched between March 1965 and November 1966 and comprised ten flights of two-man capsules. Its purpose was also to develop docking procedures in space and extend flight duration. Orbital flight

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199

time was extended to more than 190 hours during Gemini 5. A successful rendezvous maneuver took place during the Gemini 8 flight in March 1966. 45. Source: NASA, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/gemini_4_eva.html (accessed 12 October 2010). 46. Richard Underwood, “Gemini Earth Photographs. An Epilogue,” in On the Shoulders of Titans. A History of Project Gemini, ed. Barton Hacker and James Grimwood (Washington, DC, 1977; NASA History Series, no. -4203), http://www. hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4203/phot00.htm (accessed 11 November 2010). 47. See Grinsted, Die Reise zum Mond, for a close reading of these television shows. 48. Werner Stratenschulte, “Apollos Mondfahrt—Die Show des Jahres,” in Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, Jahrbuch 1968 (Mainz, 1969), 35–37, quote on 35: “So addierte sich die Erlebnisbereitschaft der Menscheit für technische Sensationen mit weihnachtlich-emotionaler Gefühlsbereitschaft.” 49. Werner Stratenschulte, “Apollos Mondfahrt.” 50. Courtney Brooks, Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft (Washington, DC, 1979), http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4205/ ch11-6.html (accessed 10 November 2010). 51. Apollo 8 Flight transcript, page 196, http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS08_CM.PDF; For a video of the Christmas message see: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/as8_genesis1a.mov (accessed 25 October 2010). 52. Department of State to AmEmbassy Bucharest et al., Exhibit of Apollo 8 Moon Orbital flight, 16.12.68, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 3011, NA II. 53. Archibald MacLeish, “Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold,” New York Times, 25.12.1969. 54. Stoddard to Participants of Media Coordinating Committee Meeting, Interests and Plans Relating to Apollo 11, 26.2.69, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 320, NA II. See on USIA’s supplementary role: Loomis to Rogers, no title, 30.6.69, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 283, Box 1, NA II. 55. Bardos to Guarco, Planning for Apollo 11, 3.4.1969, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 321, NA II. 56. Ryan to Cushing et al., Apollo 11 guidelines, 14.4.69, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 283, Box 1, NA II. As meeting notes from January indicated, these guidelines were also intended for NASA. See Stoddard to Participants of Media Coordinating Committee Meeting, Interests and Plans Relating to Apollo 11, 26.2.69, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 320, NA II. 57. Low to Phillips, Flag for Lunar Landing Mission, 23.1.1969, in Lodgson, ed., Exploring the Unknown. Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civilian Space Program, Vol. II: External Relationships (Washington, DC, 1996), 34 f. 58. Shapley to Mueller, Symbolic Items for the First Lunar Landing, 19.4.1969, in Lodgsdon, ed., Exploring the Unknown, Vol. VII, 730–33. 59. Wilkinson to Ehrlichmann, Apollo 11 flight, 27.5.69, WHCF, SMOF, Charles Burnham “Bud” Wilkinson, Box 16, RNPM, NA II. 60. Borman to Nixon, no title, 14.7.69, WHCF, Subject Files, Outer Space, Box 4, RNPM, NA II. 61. Bourgin to Ryan, Apollo-11: Symbols to Be Left on the Moon, 14.4.1969, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 267, Box 321, NA II. Bourgin had been involved in planning Apollo 8’s Christmas show. 62. Nixon to MacLeish, 1.7.1969, WHCF, Subject Files, EX OS, Box 4, RNPM, NA II.

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Notes

63. Günther Anders, Der Blick vom Mond. Reflexionen über Weltraumflüge (Munich, 1994), 75 f. 64. Guarco to Loomis, IMV Weekly Status Report, 11.9.1969, RG 306, Entry A 1 42, Director’s Subject Files, 1968–1972, Box 7, NA II; AmConsul Munich to SecState Washington DC, Growing Bavarian Interest in Apollo 11, 10.7.1969, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 3013, NA II. 65. Hemsing to Shakespeare, Significant USIS Support—Apollo 11, 25.7.1969, RG 306, Entry 42, Box 4, NA II. 66. “Rasante Niederkunft,” Der Spiegel, 21.7.1969. 67. Varela, La Televisión Criolla, 248. 68. “Programa Increible Que Llego Desde el Espacio,” Crónica, 18.7.1969. See as well Ulanovsky, Itkin, and Sirvén, Estamos en el Aire, 269. 69. English: “Saturday of good humour” with a “show of the monnstruck” and “spatial music.” See Ulanovsky, Itkin, and Sirvén, Estamos en el Aire, 269. 70. “El Descenso Lunar Desde Buenos Aires Con Emocion,” Crónica, 21.7.1969, Hemeroteca, Biblioteca del Congreso, Buenos Aires; “Reacciones del público porteño ante la hazaña,” La Nación, 21.7.1969; “ . . . Y Columbia Llego al Laboratorio,” Primera Plana, 29.7.1969, Hemeroteca, Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires. See Crónica, 16.7.1969, Hemeroteca, Biblioteca del Congreso, Buenos Aires for a good illustration of how Argentineans experienced the lunar landing as a collective TV event. 71. Guarco to Loomis, IMV Weekly Status Report, 11.9.1969, RG 306, Entry A 1 42, Director’s Subject Files, 1968–1972, Box 7, NA II 72. See Engell, “Das Mondprogramm,” for another analysis for the broadcast. 73. Source: NASA, Restored Apollo 11 EVA, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=S9HdPi9Ikhk (accessed 29 October 2014). 74. Shakespeare to Keating, 9.10.1969, RG 306, Entry 42, Box 4, NA II; AmEmbassy New Delhi to SecState, Keating to SecState, 21.8.1969, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 3018, NA II. 75. See USIS Bulletin, 10.9.1969, East Africana Collection, Library of the University of Dar es Salaam. 76. AmEmbassy to Dar es Salaam to Department of State, This Week in Tanzania, July 18 to 24, 1969, 25.7.1969, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 2514, NA II. See on the photo essay “American Diary 1968/69,” The Nationalist, 23.7.1969, Zeitungsabteilung, Staatsbibliothek Berlin. 77. “Una Encuesta: Los Argentinos Ante la Apolo 11,” Primera Plana, 22.7.1969. 78. “Ein neues Jahrtausend hat begonnen,” Bild, 21.7.1969. 79. See “Deutsche Mondmänner: Gartenzwerge!,” Bild, 23.7.1969, Arbeitsstelle für Geschichte der Publizistik, Universität zu Köln. 80. “Impact of Space Program on Domestic and Foreign Opinion,” 20.8.1969, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 283, Box 1, NA II.

Notes to Chapter 6 1. Epigraph sources: Peter Hein quoted in: Jürgen Teipel, Verschwende Deine Jugend. Ein Doku-Roman über den deutschen Punk und New Wave (Frankfurt, 2001), 21; Uwe Timm, Heißer Sommer (Munich, 1974), 149 f. 2. “Viet-Rock: Interesante Y Valiosa Experiencia Teatral,” Clarin, 18.10.1968, Folder Cronicas, Junio 1967 a Diciembre 1968, Biblioteca de Argentores, Buenos Aires.

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3. Numbers according to Jean Graham-Jones, “Transculturating Politics, Realism, and Experimentation in 1960s Buenos Aires Theatre,” Theatre Survey 43, no. 1 (2002): 7–21, esp. 7. 4. See the leaflet: “Viet Rock—Megan Terry—Teatro Payró,” Folder Programas, Septiembre 1967 a Diciembre 1968, Biblioteca de Argentores, Buenos Aires. See for the original quote and the script: Megan Terry and Peter Feldman, “Viet Rock,” The Tulane Drama Review 11 (1966): 196–228, quotes on 197. 5. Michael Arlen, Living-Room War (Syracuse, 1997). 6. George Bailey, “Television War. Trends in Network Coverage of Vietnam 1965– 1970,” Journal of Broadcasting 20 (1976): 147–58. 7. For a useful introductory volume on the war’s general history see most recently David Anderson, ed., The Columbia History of the Vietnam War (New York, 2011), which assembles short contributions from most of the leading historians of the war. For lack of space, I desisted from enumerating dozens of other works I consulted for this chapter and only name some of the most relevant works in the following footnotes. 8. See Peter Braestrup, Big Story. How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington (Boulder, 1977); Oscar Patterson, “An Analysis of Television Coverage of Vietnam War,” Journal of Broadcasting 28 (1984): 397–404; Daniel Hallin, The “Uncensored War.” The Media and Vietnam (New York, 1986); Clarence Wyatt, Paper Soldiers. The American Press and the Vietnam War (New York, 1993); Bernd Greiner, “Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie. Zur Rolle der amerikanischen Presse während des Vietnamkrieges,” Mittelweg 36, no. 3 (2001): 2–24; Greiner, “All Politics Is about Perception. Medien und Politik in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Mittelweg 36, no. 5 (2002): 65–77; Gerhard Paul, Bilder des Krieges—Krieg der Bilder. Die Visualisierung des modernen Krieges (Paderborn, 2004), 311–64; Paul, “Der Vietnamkrieg als Sonderfall und Wendepunkt in der Geschichte der Visualisierung des modernen Krieges?,” in War Visions. Bildkommunikation und Krieg, ed. Thomas Knieper and Marion Müller (Cologne, 2005), 80–104; Andreas Elter, Die Kriegsverkäufer. Geschichte der US-Propaganda 1917–2005 (Frankfurt, 2006). 9. Bailey, “Television War”; Kenrick Clarke and Alfred Thompson, “Photographic Imagery and the Vietnam War. An Unexamined Perspective,” Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied 87, no. 2 (1974): 279–92; Braestrup, Big Story; Hallin, The Uncensored War; Wyatt, Paper Soldiers; Greiner, “Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie”; Greiner, “All Politics Is about Perception”; Paul, Bilder des Krieges. 10. See, on the U.S. media history and administration media policies also the works of: Kathleen Turner, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War. Vietnam and the Press (Chicago, 1985); Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon and the Doves (New Brunswick, 1989); William Hammond, Public Affairs. The Military and the Media, 1962–1968 (Washington, DC, 1988); Hammond, Public Affairs. The Military and the Media, 1968–1973 (Washington, DC, 1996); Jon Western, Selling Intervention and War. The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public (Baltimore, 2005); Chester Pach, “‘Our Worst Enemy Seems to Be the Press.’ TV News, the Nixon Administration, and U.S. Troop Withdrawal from Vietnam,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 3 (2010): 555–66. 11. This chapter thus follows efforts to globalize the history of the war. See for example Andreas Daum, Lloyd Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds, America, the Vietnam War, and the World. Comparative and International Perspectives (Washington, DC, 2003). On the war and West German media discourses see Torsten Hahn, “‘Im Kampf um die Meinung der Welt.’ Der Fernseh-Krieg und

202

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Notes

die Selbstbeobachtung der Massenmedien,” in Medienkultur der 60er Jahre, ed. Irmela Schneider and Torsten Hahn (Wiesbaden, 2003), 52–70. See on USIA Caroline Page, US Official Propaganda during the Vietnam War, 1965–1973. The Limits of Persuasion (London, 1996). See also Wilfried Mausbach, “A Test Case for the ‘Free World’: Amerikanische Vietnam-Informationspolitik in Deutschland,” Paper presented at the 24th annual conference of the German Studies Association, Section: “Constructing Identity: Cold War Policies and the Promotion of Community in German–American Relations, 1950–1970,” Houston, Texas, October 5–8, 2000. Thanks to Wilfried Mausbach for sharing the paper with me. Belting, Bildanthropologie. This is a term I borrow from Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, 1997), 8. Susan Moeller, Shooting War. Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York, 1989), 380. On Vietnam correspondents at large see Lars Klein, “Größter Erfolg und schwerstes Trauma. Die folgenreiche idee, Journalisten hätten den Vietnamkrieg beendet,” in Augenzeugen. Kriegsberichterstattung vom 18. zum 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Ute Daniel (Göttingen, 2006), 193–216; see also: Horst Faas and Peter Arnett, Requiem. By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (London, 1997); Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty. From the Crimea to Vietnam. The War Correspondent as Hero Propagandist and Myth Maker (New York, 1975). Peter Arnett, Live from the Battlefield. From Vietnam to Baghdad. 35 Years in the World’s War Zones (London, 1995), 118. See “MACV Accredited Correspondents 1968–1970,” RG 472, MACV, MACIO, Command Information Division, Box 1, NA II. Those numbers, however, as should be borne in mind, also included TV technicians, staffers, and so on. The Ambassador to the Embassy, Mission Press Relations, 4.8.1964, Papers of William C Westmoreland, Part 1, Reel 2, Frame 0785, RSC, Middelburg. Sidle to Westmoreland, Public Affairs/Press Relations Subsection of Chapter on the State of the Command, 29.6.1968, Papers of William C Westmoreland, Part 1, Reel 14, Frame 884 ff, RSC Middelburg. Department of Defense, “Walter Cronkite and a CBS Camera crew use a jeep for a dolly during an interview with the commanding officer of the 1st battalion, 1st marines, during the battle of Hue City, 20.02.1968,” General Photograph File of the U.S. Marine Corps, compiled 1927–1981, documenting the period 1775–1981, RG 127, photo no.127-N-A190589, NA II. Amembassy Saigon to SecStateWashDC, 27.6.1964, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 176, Box 44, NA II. Report, Conference on Information Policy in Vietnam, Headquarters CINCPAC, Honolulu, Hawaii, 18–20 March, 1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964– 1966, Box 2955, NA II. USIS Saigon to USIA and all principal USIS posts, Inauguration of Vietnam Photo Service, 5.6.1962, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 176, Box 39, NA II. Rowan to Heads of Elements, Country PAOs, Assignment of Priority Project: Viet-Nam, 17.7.1964, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 176, Box 40, NA II. Col Hays, for the file, Army Special Pictorial Teams, 9.8.1965, RG 306, Entry UDWW 176, Box 39, NA II. Paul, “Der Vietnamkrieg als Sonderfall,” in War Visions, ed. Knieper and Müller, 86. See on the broader concept of “key visuals” Peter Ludes, Visual Hegemonies. An Outline (Münster, 2005).

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27. Rowan to all principal USIS/IAE posts, 7.7.1965, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 176, Box 39, NA II. 28. See for example: “‘Christbaum’-Krieg Über Vietnam . . .”, Bild, 28.9.1965; “Wieder Bomben auf Nord-Vietnam,” Bild, 2.1.1966; “Die Gesichter des Krieges,” Bild, 4.7.1967; “Hinfahrt mit der Düse—Rückfahrt mit dem Zinksarg,” Bild, 4.7.1967. See also Times of India, 14.4.1965; 15.6.1965, 3.7.1965, 3.2.1966. 29. “Cuento Cuesta La Guerra de Vietnam,” Panorama, September 1967, BN. The ratio between pictures of the good war, and the one picture that showed Vietnamese civilians in front of a burning village was a stunning 13:1. 30. See Weltspiegel, WDR, 3.10.1965; See also Weltspiegel, NDR, 7.3.1965, which shows a helicopter squadron in action, almost all of it filmed from the helicopter. 31. USIA, “Vietnam: Helicopter and soldier approaching target. Vietnam PhotoService, ca. 1965,” Master File Photographs of U.S. and Foreign Personalities, World Events, and American Economic, Social, and Cultural Life, compiled ca. 1953–1994, documenting the period ca. 1860–ca. 1994, RG 306, photo no. 306PSC-65(4106), NA II. 32. See for example: Noticias, Canal 10 de Córdoba, 23.11.1965, Video No. 221, No. 35, Archivo Fílmico, Centro De Conservación y Documentación Audiovisual, Universidad Nacional De Córdoba, Córdoba, Argentina (CDA); Noticias, Canal 10 de Córdoba, 8.7.1967, No. 43; see also Noticias, Canal 9, undated, but likely 1969, No. 848 and No. 1248, Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Buenos Aires. 33. See for the pamphlets RG 306, Entry 1063, Box 12, NA II. 34. “Der Vietcong ‘befreit’ ein Dorf. Report aus Vietnam,” RG 306, Entry 31, Box 3, NA II. 35. Hatch to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Motion picture coverage of Viet Cong atrocities at Cai Be, 4.8.1964, RG 330, Accession No. 72A2496, Box 14, NA II. 36. USIS Saigon to USIA Washington, Photographic Coverage of VC Atrocities, 2.4.1964, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 176, Box 39, NA II. See also Department of State to USIS Saigon, 28.5.1964, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 417, NA II. 37. Splitt to Sylvester, Government Credibility, 7.2.1966, RG 59, Lot Files, Entry 5516, Bureau of Public Affairs, Box 2, NA II. 38. See for example “Platzt jetzt den Amerikanern der Kragen? 16 Tote und Schwerverletzte,” Bild, 31.3.1965; “Vietnam: Die Opfer tragen keine Schuld,” Bild, 12.6.1965; “Bomben-Attentat auf Soldaten-Café,” Bild, 26.6.1965, or, from later stages of the war: “Feuer-Überfall beim Empfang der Helgoland,” Bild, 15.9.1966; “Alltag in Vietnam,” Bild, 13.4.1967; “Vietkong trieb Kinder als Schutzwall vor sich her,” Bild, 1.2.1968. On India see for example photos in the Times of India: 14.5.1965; 19.5.1965; 8.12.1965; 12.5.1966; 16.9.1966; 12.5.1967; 8.5.1968. 39. See for example: “Bomben-Attentat auf Soldaten-Café,” Bild, 26.6.1965; “Bringt ihn gesund zurück,” Bild, 29.7.1965; Times of India, 31.3.1965; “Platzt jetzt den Amerikanern der Kragen?,” Bild, 31.3.1965. For television’s portrayals of Viet Cong atrocities see for example Weltspiegel, WDR, 3.12.1967. 40. Valenti to Johnson, 6.12.65, 6.12.1965, WHCF, EX CO 312, Box 80, LBJL. 41. Guarco to Ryan, IMV and Vietnam, 26.12.1967, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 283, Box 2, NA II. “A Nation Builds” was acquired from AID. In sum, USIA made nine documentaries on Vietnam in 1966 and 1967, five of them on aspects of the other war. See also Ryan to all assistant directors and USIS posts, Policy Program

204



42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

Notes

Directive No. 11-2-67, 1.2.1967, Leonard Marks Papers, Box 24, LBJL, which calls for more emphasis on “the other war” in USIA programming. Marks to Johnson, 4.2.1966, NSF, Agency Files, Box 75, LBJL. “The Other War,” SPAN, March 1967, RG 306, Entry 31, Box 25, NA II. Marks to Rusk, 13.2.1967, Papers of Leonard Marks, Box 18, LBJL. Oleksiw to Marks, Viet-Nam Journalist Program, 25.4.1967, Leonard Marks Papers, Box 18, LBJL. “Vietnam. Mr. Drum Reports,” Drum, September 1967, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt. Memorandum of Discussion, Mr. Moyer’s Office, 10.8.1965, DDRS. Greenfield to Moyers, “Public Affairs Problems in the Viet-Nam Conflict,” 13.8.1965, DDRS. See for a sample of examples on India: Times of India, 2.6.1965; on Tanzania: The Nationalist, 19.7.1967; on Argentina: “Vietnam: Guerra de Nadie,” Panorama, April 1965 and Noticias, Canal 10 de Córdoba, 23.11.1965, Video No. 221, No. 36, CDA. “Vietnamese mother and children flee village bombing, Qui Nhon, September 7, 1965,” © Kyoichi Sawada/Bettmann/Corbis. Weltspiegel, WDR, 20.03.1966. Weltspiegel, WDR, 20.03.1966. See on the critical ethos among journalists (“Zeitkritik”) Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise. See “‘Die Helgoland’ in Vietnam,” ZDF, 2.12.1966, ZDF Unternehmensarchiv, Mainz. See Grabe quoted in Bodo Witzke, “Ich muss nicht Angst vor Bomben haben.” Der Dokumentarfilmer Hans-Dieter Grabe (Remscheid, 2006), 238. See on Grabe’s disappointment in respect to the pictures: “Interview Ulrike Angermann mit Hans Dieter Grabe,” ZDF, 11.11.1996, ZDF-UA. See Weltspiegel, WDR, 20.11.1966 and 3.12.1967. See Stefan Aust, “1968 und die Medien,“ in 1968. Bilderbuch einer Revolte, ed. Edmund Jacoby and Joachim Faulstich (Frankfurt, 1993), 81–96, esp. 83. USIA, Vietnam and World Opinion, August 1966, Papers of Leonard Marks, Box 30, LBJL. Amconsul Hamburg to Department of State, Critical Attitudes of North Germans toward Viet Nam War, 13.6.1966, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 3000, NA II. Amconsul Hamburg to Department of State, Increasing Criticism of American Vietnam policy, 6.1.1966, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 2976, NA II. See for those pictures Times of India: 24.8.1965; 4.6.1966; 19.5.1967. See Confirmado, December 1966, BN. This issue launched a series of critical articles about Vietnam written by Arthur Schlesinger. See for example Times of India 1.4.1965 and Grabe, “Die Helgoland.” On perpetrator–victim pictures see also Paul, Krieg der Bilder, 353. “Vietnam: Round-Up of Rebels,” Illustrated Weekly of India, 16.5.1965, BL NC. AmEmbassy New Delhi to SecState Wash DC, Viet Cong Terroism [sic], 28.4.1967, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 2781, NA II. Bowles refers here to the famous picture of UPI photographer Kyoichi Sawada. Department of Defense, “Corporal Atchley (Long Beach, CA), a squad leader of Company B, 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, guards a Viet Cong as he moves toward the collection point. Action took place during Operation Golden Fleece, 10/10/1965,” General Photograph File of the U.S. Marine Corps, compiled

Notes

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

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1927–1981, documenting the period 1775–1981, RG 127, photo no.127-NA186015, NA II. Kaplan to Harriman, Climate of World Opinion Regarding U.S. Policy in VietNam, 13.9.1966, RG 59, Lot Files, Entry 5305, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Vietnam Working Group: Subject Files, Box 11, NA II. See “Amerikas Schmutziger Krieg,” Der Stern, 21.3.1965. Konrad Hofmayer, Seibelsdorf, Der Stern, 11.4.1965. Ulrich Beckmann, Lintorf, Der Stern, 11.4.1965. Claus Weiss, Hamburg-Volksdorf, Der Stern, 25.4.1965. AmConsul Hamburg to Department of State, Critical Attitudes of North Germans toward Viet Nam War, 13.6.1966, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 3000, NA II. AmEmbassy Bonn to SecState Wash DC, German attitude toward Viet Nam, 12.1.1967, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 2773, NA II. Ibid. “Raids Leave Blocks Razed, Fail to Cut Lines to Hanoi,” New York Times, 27.12.1966. See for example “Ganze Wohnblocks versanken in Schutt,” Der Spiegel, 2.1.1967. See also AmConsul Munich to Department of State, Munich Press Comments on Salisbury Articles, 5.1.1967, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 3014, NA II. See Weltspiegel, WDR, 5.3.1967. See also “Amerikas Westen liegt im Fernen Osten,” ZDF, 27.9.1967/4.10.1967/13.10.1967, which also includes scenes of North Vietnam. Weld to Akers, Proposed Film on Vietnam, 27.12.1967, RG 306, Entry UD-WW 283, Box 2, NA II. See “Vietnam: La Gran Ilusión,” Primera Plana, 20.2.1968; “Focus on North Viet Nam,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, 20.6.1965, BL NC. Philipp Gassert, “Das kurze ‘1968’ zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Erinnerungskultur. Neuere Forschungen zur Protestgeschichte der 1960erJahre,” H-Soz-u-Kult 30.04.2010, http://hsozkult.geschichte.huberlin.de/forum/2010-04-001 (accessed 1 May 2011). See for background Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance. Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton, 2010); Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds, 1968. Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung (Bonn, 2008); Mausbach, Indochinakonflikt. Kurseinheit 3. Die Rückwirkungen des Indochinakonflikts auf die Gesellschaften des Westens. Vietnam als Katalysator politischer und gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche (Hagen, 2002); Jost Dülffer, “Die Anti-Vietnamkriegs-Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Frieden Stiften. Deeskalations- und Friedenspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Marc Frey, Ulrich Soénius, and Guido Thiemeyer (Cologne, 2008), 316–32. For an older but still useful study see Frank Werkmeister, Die Protestbewegung gegen den Vietnamkrieg in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1965–1973 (Marburg, 1975). See for a survey of the recent literature Gassert, “Das kurze ‘1968’ zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Erinnerungskultur. AmConsul Hamburg to Department of State, Youth Reactions to American Vietnam Policy, 7.3.1966, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2984, NA II. Amconsul Hamburg to Department of State, Reaction of Hamburg Youth to the Vietnam war, 7.8.1967, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 2786, NA II. Amconsul Munich to Department of State, Disarmament Group Holds Rally: Stages Illegal Demonstration at Amerika Haus, 4.6.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign

206

87.

88. 89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97.

98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

Notes

Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 2960, NA II. See also DHM, BA 95/399 and BA 95/391. In West Berlin, for example, some members of the Socialist German Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) conducted a nightly poster sticking operation in early February 1966. The posters declared: “Erhard and the Bonn parties support murder!” See Siegward Lönnendonker, ed., Freie Universität Berlin 1948–1973. Teil IV, 1964–1967, Die Krise (Berlin, 1975), 66. See for a good overview of the most important leaflets: Jürgen Miermeister and Jochen Staadt, Provokationen. Die Studenten- und Jugendrevolte in ihren Flugblättern, 1965–1971 (Darmstadt, 1980). For posters see Kurt Holl and Claudia Glunz, 1968 am Rhein. Satisfaction und ruhender Verkehr (Cologne, 2008), 124. Amconsul Hamburg to Department of State, Recent Discussion on American Policy in Vietnam, 2.3.1966, RG 59, CFPF, Box 2984, NA II. See for example the attached pamphlet to AmConsul Munich to Department of State, Demonstration at Munich American Consulate General, 3.12.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2224, NA II. Kampagne für Abrüstung, “Vietnam. Was soll daraus werden?,” 1966, record no. 1994/08/0227, Haus der Geschichte, Bonn. See “Schluss mit dem Krieg der USA in Vietnam,” November 1969, record. No. DG 73/703, DHM Berlin. Incidentally, the picture is another indicator for the high degree of integration achieved within the global visual economy, for it was also printed in Indian and Argentinean newspapers. “ Help for Vietnam.” “Help Them!,” attachment to AmConsul Dusseldorf to Department of State, Vietnam Protest Meeting, 2.1.1968, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 2798, NA II. AmConsul Frankfurt to Department of State, Protest Demonstrations in Saarbruecken, 19.4.1965, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 2957, NA II. AmConsulate Munich to Department of State, Anti-Viet-Nam War Demonstration, 6.7.1966, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, Box 3002, NA II. AmConGen Hamburg to Department of State, Anti-Viet Nam Demonstration in Hamburg, 27.2.1967, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 2776, NA II. See for a more thorough analysis of this context: Mausbach, Indochinakonflikt; Mausbach, “Auschwitz and Vietnam. West German Protest against America’s War During the 1960s,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World, ed. Daum, Gardner, and Mausbach, 279–98. “Demonstrieren Sie mit uns!,” attachment to AmConGen Hamburg to Department of State, Anti-Viet Nam Demonstration in Hamburg, 27.2.1967, RG 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Box 2776, NA II. The photo conjures up connotations with an antiwar sculpture of German artist Käthe Kollwitz, “Mother with her dead son.” See also Gerd Koenen and Andres Veiel, 1968. Bildspur eines Jahres (Cologne, 2008), 44. This is a point stressed by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, “Protestinszenierungen. Die Studentenbewegung im Spannungsfeld von Kultur-Revolution und MedienEvolution,” in 1968. Handbuch, ed. Klimke and Scharloth, 11–22. See also Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching. Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley, 1980). The picture was taken during an antiwar demonstration in West Berlin on 21.10.1967. “Encuesta: ¿Que Piensan los Argentinos Sobre Vietnam?,” Primera Plana, 5.3.1968.

Notes

207

103. AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to Department of State, Viet Nam: Publication of Declaration Attacking U.S. Policy, 12.4.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2957, NA II. 104. See for background: Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde.” 105. English: “Exhibit in Honor of Vietnam.” 106. “Salón Homenaje al Vietnam,” La Rosa Blindada, No. 9, 1966. 107. English: “The Western and Christian Civilization.” 108. See on Ferrari’s work Victoria Noorthorn, Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy. An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960–2007 (New York, 2008), 64 f. 109. English: “The Western and Christian Civilization bombs the schools of Long Dien, Causé, Linn Phung, McCay, Han Yanh, Aan Minh, An Hoa, and Duc Hoa.” 110. The sculpture could also be interpreted as an adaptation of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Hell Gate.” 111. English: “The Hour of the Furnaces.” 112. See Pablo Zapata, “Lo Que He Visto en Vietnam” (date unknown); Rubens Iscaro, “Un Argentino en Vietnam” (1965); “Los Argentinos ante el Drama de Vietnam”; “Si, Hay un Camino Para La Paz en Vietnam,” archived at CeDinCi. 113. See Mafalda 1128, 88, 102, 122. The slogan of the graffiti: “Asesinos Yanquis Fuera de Viet-Nam.” 114. AmEmbassy New Delhi to Department of State, Communist Demonstrations Against “U.S. Aggression in Vietnam,” 28.7.1966, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2291, NA II; AmConsul Calcutta to Department of State, West Bengal: Students Demonstrate on Vietnam Issue Before Consulate General and USIS, 13.7.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2963, NA II; AmCongen Calcutta to SecState Wash DC, 2.7.1966, and AmCongen Calcutta to SecState Wash DC, 9.8.1966, both in: RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2291, NA II. A picture of the demonstrations is also printed in Tanzanian, The Nationalist, 16.7.1966. 115. See for example Amembassy New Delhi to USIA Wash DC, 12.8.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2291, NA II; AmEmbNew Delhi to SecState, “Viet-Nam Day,” 14.1.1966, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2978, NA II. 116. AmEmbassy Dar es Salaam to SecState Wash DC, North Vietnamese Photo Exhibition opens in Tanzania, 27.12.1969, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 376, NA II 117. See for a sample of examples and descriptions: AmConsul Calcutta to Department of State, West Bengal: Students Demonstrate on Vietnam Issue Before Consulate General and USIS, 13.7.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2963, NA II; AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to SecState Wash DC, Vietnam Demonstration, 19.3.1966, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2985, NA II; AmEmbassy Bonn to Department of State, Vietnam Demonstrations in Germany, November 13–15, 25.11.1969, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 2822, NA II. 118. Particularly in the West German context, however, protestors often staged such acts of iconoclasm in order to get media attention; in this sense, they were image events of their own and thus also iconophilic acts through which protestors intended to create their own pictures. See on the broader context of image strategies in protest movements for example Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics. The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (Hoboken, 2012); for theoretical background see Cara Finnegan and Jiyeaon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public. Iconoclasm and Public SphereTheory,” Quartlery Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 377–402. 119. See Weltspiegel, NDR, 30.11.1969. See for further examples: Weltspiegel, NDR, 13.7.1969; 30.11.1969; 2.1.1972. 120. Browning to Information Officers, 23.8.1968, RG 472, Entry 304, MACV-MACIO, Box 3, NA II.

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121. Browning to Information Officers, 26.8.1968, RG 472, Entry 304, MACV-MACIO, Box 3, NA II. 122. Quoted in James William Fulbright, Das Pentagon informiert oder Der Propaganda-Apparat einer Weltmacht (Reinbek, 1971), 95 f. 123. The Office of Information, Information and the Press, undated, but very likely 1971, RG 472, MACV-MACIO, Command Information Division, Box 1, NA II. 124. Horst Faas and Marianne Fulton, “The Bigger Picture. Nick Ut recalls the Events of June 8, 1972,” http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0008/ng2.htm (accessed 23 April 2011). 125. See “MACV Accredited Correspondents 1968–1970,” RG 472, MACV, MACIO, Command Information Division, Box 1, NA II. 126. Quoted in Wyatt, Paper Soldiers, 200. 127. Ibid. 128. See for example AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to USIA Wash DC, 9.5.1970, RG 59, Subject-Numeric Files, 1970–1973, Box 2155c, NA II. 129. Abrams to Wheeler, press transports in combat, 1.5.1970, Abrams Messages, Box April to May 1970, CMH. 130. Haldeman to Safire, 13.5.1970, Papers of William Safire, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 131. See Holl and Glunz, 1968 am Rhein, 84 ff. 132. See “Nur leichte Kämpfe im Raum Da Nang,” ZDF, 13.10.1970, available at Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. For a close reading of the documentary see: Karl Nikolaus Renner, “Bilder vom Krieg. Die Emotionslenkung in Hans-Dieter Grabes Antikriegsfilm Nur leichte Kämpfe im Raum Da Nang,” in War Visions. Bildkommunikation und Krieg, ed. Thomas Knieper and Marion Müller (Cologne, 2005), 105–19. 133. Also quoted in: Renner, “Bilder vom Krieg,” 115. 134. For a detailed examination of the Nick Ut picture and its history see Gerhard Paul, “Die Geschichte hinter dem Foto. Authentizität, Ikonisierung und Überschreibung eines Bildes aus dem Vietnamkrieg,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 2 (2005). 135. See Sunday News, 28.1.1973, Stabi Berlin-AZ. 136. Michael Arlen, “The Falklands, Vietnam, and Our Collective Memory,” New Yorker, 16.8.1982. 137. Arlen, Living-Room War, 8. 138. Amembassy to Department of State, Viet Nam: Publication of Declaration Attacking U.S. Policy, 12.4.1965, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2957, NA II. 139. AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to Department of State, Viet Nam Demonstration, 23.11.1969, RG 59, CFPF, 1967–1969, Box 2822, NA II. 140. AmEmbassy Delhi to SecState Wash DC, 2.3.1965, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2953, NA II. 141. USIS Bonn to USIA Washington DC, Anti-U.S. Demonstrations on Viet Nam in Germany, 8.3.1966, RG 59, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2985, NA II; USBerlin to Department of State, Public Reaction to Berlin Amerika Haus Demonstration, 15.2.1966, CFPF, 1964–1966, Box 2983, NA II. 142. Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945–1952,” Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (1986): 263–77. 143. Richard Merritt and Donald Puchala, Western European Perspectives on International Affairs. Public Opinion Studies and Evaluations (New York, 1968), 208 ff. This, after all, had also been one of the reasons for the steady credibility obsession among U.S. foreign policy makers and their fears of imperial nonrecognition. 144. “Juguetes: Mambrú se fue a Vietnam,” Primera Plana, 9.4.1968, BN, BA.

Notes

209

Notes to the Conclusion 1. Gerhard Paul, Der Bilderkrieg. Inszenierungen, Bilder und Perspektiven der “Operation Irakische Freiheit,” Göttingen 2005. 2. Higby to Bull, HPS, 18.4.72, WHSF, SMOF, Stephen B Bull, Box 2, RNPM, NA II. 3. Greenfield to Moyers, Public Affairs Problems in the Viet-Nam Conflict, 13.8.1965, DDRS. 4. United States Advisory Commission on Information, The 23d Report, February 1968, Office Files of Harry McPherson, Box 17, LBJL.

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Index

Abu Ghraib, 169 Addis Abeba, 104 Adenauer, Konrad, 61, 64 Afghanistan, 165, 169 Ailes, Roger, 27 Algerian War, 133 Alliance for Progress, 12, 44, 45, 81, 86, 87, 92, 93, 99, 100, 101, 102 Alpert, Hollis, 46 American empire, xi, 3, 11, 12, 13, 41, 69, 72, 82, 106, 121, 128, 129, 131, 133, 157, 163, 165, 167, 170 distinct features of, 6–7 historiography of, 10 symbolic integration, 6–7 symbolic nature of, 2 Anders, Günther, 2 on Apollo 11, 124–125 Anders, William, 121 Anderson, Benedict, 5 Apollo 11 See space flights Appadurai, Arjun, 80 Argentina, xii, 10, 11, 34, 40, 41–44, 48–50, 53, 83–87, 92–94, 99–102, 113, 114, 117, 125–126, 128, 129, 132, 138, 146, 151, 155, 156, 162, 164 dearth discourse in, 85 emotional involvement in lunar landing, 126, 129 images of Western modernity in, 84 popular aspirations for development, 84–86

responses to Glenn space capsule exhibit, 114 responses to U.S. development policies, 101–102 responses to Vietnam War, 155–156, 162 rise of television, 49 Tucumán Arde, 85 Viet Rock, 130–131 See also Argentinean print media See also Argentinean television Argentinean print media Clarin, 113 Confirmado, 146 Crónica, 126 globalizing of, 50 La Nación, 126 Mafalda, 50, 156 new importance of visuals in 1960s, 50 Panorama, 50, 136, 139 pictures of Vietnam War in, 136, 146 popularity of cartoon booklets, 49 Primera Plana, 50, 53, 126, 151, 155, 164 Siete Dias, 50, 53 Argentinean television Canal 7, 49, 114 Canal 9, 49, 114 Canal 11, 49, 114, 125 Canal 13, 49, 114, 125 coverage of Apollo 11, 125–126 coverage of Vietnam War, 138 globalizing of, 49

252 Noticieros, 49 popular programs on, 49 Reporter Esso, 49 rise of, 49 Telenoche, 49 Arnett, Peter, 133 Arusha, 85 Atkins, Oliver, 24 Baedecker, Werner, 47 Balcarce, 126 Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa, 69, 70 1961 Visit to United States, 69–70 impressions of TVA, 69 visit to Northwestern University and impressions of, 70 Bangkok, 52 Bator, Francis, 59 Belgrade 113 Berlin, 117, 125, 152, 154, 162, 163 Berni, Antonio, 85 Bin Laden, Osama, 166 Birmingham, Alabama, 65 Birri, Fernando, 85 Bluem, William, 45 Bogotá, 46, 113 Bölling, Klaus, 39 Bollywood, 96 Bombay, 50, 80, 81, 97, 114, 115, 116 Bonn, 34, 38, 76, 114, 115, 116, 150 Borman, Frank, 121, 124 Boston University, 69 Boston, 58, 65, 66, 69 Bowles, Chester, 148, 162 Braun, Werner von, 125 Browne, Malcolm, 133 Bryceson, Derek, 91 Buchanan, Pat, 28 Buenos Aires, 84, 85, 102, 113, 114, 117, 126, 130, 156 Bull, Stephen, 32 Busby, Horace, 30 Bush, George W, 165 Calcutta, 83, 96, 97 Camp David, 57, 78, 79 Cape Canaveral, 39, 49, 70, 108, 125 Capra, Frank, 21 Carpenter, Scott, 108, 114 Carter, Douglas, 26 Chapin, Dwight, 77 China, 34, 36, 37, 77, 102, 103

Index

Christian Science Monitor, 68 Circarama, 82–83, 90 Clarke, Arthur, 38 Clinton, Bill, 167 Colorado, 71 Colombia, 34, 46, 90, 102 Cologne, 39, 159 Columbia University, 69 Congo Crisis, 133 Connally, John, 32 Cooper, Chester, 113 Cooper, Gordon, 108, 110–111, 112, 113 Cornell University, 71 Creel Committee See U.S. Committee on Public Information Cronkite, Walter, 134 Dar es Salaam, 44, 51, 64, 84, 94, 104, 105, 116, 117, 128, 157 Denver, 71 Detroit, 39, 58, 67 Disney, Walt, 82, 99 Disneyland, 61, 76 Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin, 29 Dominican Republic, 102 Drew, Robert, 23 Duke, Angier Biddle, 57, 58, 60, 75 Dutton, Fred, 23 Early, Stephen, 21 Ehrlichman, John, 32 Eisenhower administration responses to Soviet space flight successes, 106 Eisenhower, Dwight D, 17, 18, 28, 45, 75 and media, 22–23 picture performances of, 29 visual advisory system, 25 trips abroad, 33–34 Elias, Norbert, 5 empires colonial empires, 6 definition of, 3 as providers of prosperity, progress, peace, and power, 11 recognition as integrative core of imperial order, 5–6 Roman empire, 6 and symbolic power, 5 symbolic and imperial integration, 4–7

Index 253

See also American empire Erhard, Ludwig, 61, 75, 76 Faas, Horst, 133, 139 Farley, Philip, 109, 110 Flanigan, Peter, 32 Ford Foundation, 50 Ford, John, 21 Frondizi, Arturo, 64 Gagarin, Yuri, 106 Gandhi, Indira, 62 Georgetown University, 69 Germany See under West Germany Gettysburg, 63, 65, 66 Glenn, John, 107, 110, 112, 113, 114 global media See Argentinean print media See Argentinean television See Indian print media See Tanzanian print media See West German print media See West German television Gore, Al, 167 Grierson, John, 46 Grissom, Virgil, 107 Guggenheim, Charles, 45 Gulf War, 169 Haldeman, Harry Robbins, 27, 28, 31, 36, 73, 78 Hamburg, 39, 104, 145, 146, 149, 151, 152, 153 Harrison, William, 19 Harvard University, 69 Hazam, Lou, 46 Hegel, 5 Hein, Peter, 130 Herschensohn, Bruce, 45 Herskovits, Melville, 70 Honolulu, 28, 135 Hood, James, 23 India, 1, 10, 11, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 50, 51, 53, 64, 66, 71, 74, 76, 82–83, 84–85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97–98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 114, 115, 116, 125, 127, 128, 140, 141, 151, 156, 162 importance of images in Indian culture, 50–51 popular aspirations for development, 84–86

responses to Disney’s Circarama, 83 responses to Glenn space capsule exhibit, 114 responses to moon landing, 128 responses to U.S. development policies, 101–103 responses to Vietnam War, 156, 162 television in, 50 tour of NASA and USIA spacemobile, 115 See also Indian print media Indian print media “Newspaper boom”, 51 Nehru’s 1949 visit to United States, 66 report on Kennedy, 53 globalizing of, 51 Illustrated Weekly of India, 51, 53, 83, 84, 147, 149 pictures of Vietnam War in, 147–148 portrayals of Indian development, 84–85 Times of India, 84, 139 See also India INTELSAT, 40 Iraq, 169 Jackson Hole, 77 Japan, 38, 170, Johnson administration, 1, 12, 24, 25, 27, 30, 34, 41, 73, 107, 131, 133, 139, 140, 143 and globalizing of media, 51–53 Greenfield’s warnings on military actions in Vietnam, 142 visual advisory system in, 25–27 and Marshall McLuhan, 26 picture making in context of 1966 trip to Asia, 34–36 See also Johnson, Lyndon B See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also United States Information Agency See also Vietnam War Johnson Space Center, 77 Johnson, Lyndon B, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 52, 59, 76, 90, 140 picture performances of, 30 on importance of lunar landing, 107

254

Index

trip abroad, 34–36 USIA film The President, 30–31 Joint Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO), 134 Kennedy administration, 23, 24, 52, 53, 59, 63, 64, 74, 81, 106, 107, 109, and globalizing of media, 51–53 and official visits, 63–65 concerns within about politics of visibility on U.S. space flights, 109–110 new emphasis on development policy and foreign aid, 81–82 responses to Soviet space flight successes, 107 invention of White House photographer, 24–25 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 53 Kennedy, John F, xi, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 39, 40, 45, 52, 53, 59, 60, 80, 82, 94, 99, 107, 109, 167 and foreign media, 53 and media, 23–24 picture performances of, 29–30 on TVA, 68 trips abroad, 34 visit to West Germany in 1963, 34 Kennedy, Robert, 23 Khartoum, 67 Khrushchev, Nikita, xi, 57, 58, 77 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg, 59, 74 King Albert of Belgium, 64 King Hussein of Jordan, 73 King Kalakaua, 59 King Kong, 2 Kintner, Robert, 26, 27 Kissinger, Henry, 31, 36, 37, 161 Koch, Thilo, 39, 47 Kosovo War, 169 Kuala Lumpur, 52 Leacock, Richard, 23 Leonow, Alexei, 118 Lerner, Daniel, 95, 103 Life, 20 Lincoln Memorial, 7, 57, 62, 63, 64, 65 Lincoln, Abraham, 19 Lisagor, Peter, 63 Lomé, 104 Look, 20 Los Angeles, 58 Lovell, James, 121

Low, Georg, 122 Luce, Henry, 20 MacLeish, Archibald, 121, 124, 125 MACV See under U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam Malone, Vivian, 23 Mao, 37, 162 Mar del Plata, 117 mass media See Argentinean print media See Argentinean television See Indian print media See Tanzanian print media See West German print media See West German television McGhee, George, 68 McKinley, William, 19 McLuhan, Marshall, 26, 27, 38, 40, 166 Mexico City, 43, 86, 113 Meyers, Ted, 51 Mihanovich, Mónica, 49, 125 Millikan, Max, 81 Mills, Wilbur, 32 Minow, Newton, 51 Montgomery, Robert, 25, 26, 28 Moscow, 34 Mount Vernon, 65 Moyers, Bill, 26, 142 Munich, 152 Murrow, Edward, 45, 60 Nairobi, 48 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 40, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111–120, 122, 124, 125, 129, 168 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 61, 64, 66 New Delhi, 50, 128, 156, 162 New York, 1, 47, 58, 66, 67, 71, 83 New York Times, 19, 23, 53, 60, 150 New York University, 69 New York Yankees, 75 Nixon administration, 12, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 41, 73, 77, 78, 79, 106, 131, 158, 159, 166 staging of pictures in context of official visits, 78–79 “headline–picture–storyboard plan,” 28 visual advisory system in, 27–29

Index 255

picture making in context of 1972 trip to China, 36–37 photo opportunities, 28 Nixon, Richard, xi, 12, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 53, 77, 78, 79, 104, 105, 123, 124, 125, 127, 159, 161, 165, 167 A Day in the Life of the President, 31–33 and birth of picture politician, 18 Checkers Speech, xi, 17–18, 22, 167 trip to China, 36–37 North Vietnam, 132, 135, 138, 143, 150, 151, 156, 157, 160, 162 See also Vietnam War Northwestern University, 69, 70 Nyerere, Julius, 61, 64, 65, 71, 80 1963 visit to United States, 64–65 Office of War Information, 21 Official visits to the United States 1961 visit of Nigerian Prime Minister Balewa, 69–70 1979 visit of Deng Xiaoping, 77 arrival ceremonies, 63, 73 Brezhnev’s 1973 visit, 78–79 early history of, 59–60 encounters of American mass culture, 76 German Chancellor Erhard’s visit to LBJ ranch, 75–76 importance of for symbolic integration of U.S. empire, 58 informal contacts with ordinary Americans, 75 itinerary planning of U.S. Protocol Office, 61–62 and Kennedy administration, 63, 64–65 motorcade parades, 72–73 New York as final stop, 66–67 and Nixon administration’s staging of pictures, 78–79 as occasion to craft counter– pictures of American racism, 64–65 staging of American knowledge resources, 69–72 state dinners, 74 symbolic value of jet planes and helicopters, 63, 67 trips to social institutions, 74–75

U.S. Protocol Office, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61–63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77 use of Arlington Cemetery, 65 use of Capitol and Congress in context of, 63–64 use of Detroit’s car factories in context of, 67–68 use of Lincoln Memorial in context of, 63 use of Tennessee Valley Authority in context of, 68–69 use of Washington Monument in context of, 63 USIA representations of, 60, 65, 70–71, 74 visit of Tanzanian President Nyerere in 1963, 64–65 visits to presidential ranches, 75–76 See also United States Information Agency Okamoto, Yoichi, 24 Olmedo, Alberto, 49 Omaha, Nebraska, 61 Panzer, Fred, 26, 27 Paris, 49, 113, 158 Peking, 36, 37, 153 Percivale, Andrés, 49 Philadelphia, 61, 65, 66, picture state importance of rise of television, 21–22 origins of, 19–21 Plaut, Ed, 26 political order symbolic integration and conservation of, 4–6 Pope Paul VI, 40 Powell, Lewis, 32 Pratt, Mary Louise, 41 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 70, 74 Reagan, Ronald, 166–167 Recife, 52 Repetto, Armando, 49 Rio de Janeiro, 48, 113 Rivarol, 38 Rome, 113 Roosevelt administration, 20, 21, 59 Roosevelt, Franklin D, 20, 21

256 Roosevelt, Theodor, 19 Rostow, Walt, 52, 81, 102 Rotter, Andrew, 10 Rowan, Carl, 30 Ruge, Gerd, 38, 39 Rusk, Dean, 1, 2, 62, 165 Saigon, 133, 134, 135, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146 Salinger, Pierre, 24 Samoa, 35–36 Santiago de Chile, 105, 113 satellites, 2, 38, 39, 40, 41, 53, 112, 118 and television, 38–40 Early Bird, 40 globalization of mass communications INTELSAT, 40 Syncom III, 40 Telstar, 39–40 Scali, John, 32 Schirra, Water, 108 Schlesinger, Arthur, 29 Seattle, 77, 113 Selassie, Haile, 71 Seltzer, Leo, 45 Seoul, 104 Shakespeare, Frank, 27 Shapley, Willis, 122–123 Shepard, Alan, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113 Shriver, Sargent, 52 Silicon Valley, 77 Simpson, Homer, 2 Singer, Aubrey, 40 Sivard, Robert, 44–45 Solanas, Fernando, 85 Somoza, Anastasio, 64 South Vietnam, 133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 161 Soviet Union, 57, 60, 81, 106,113, 163 space flight successes, 106 Alexei Leonow’s space walk and pictures of, 118 Space flights Alexei Leonow’s space walk and pictures of, 118 Apollo 11, 121–128 Apollo 8, 120–121 Argentinean responses to Glenn space capsule exhibit, 114

Index

Argentinean television coverage of Apollo 11, 126 Earthrise picture of Apollo 8, 121 Edward White’s spacewalk and pictures of, 118–120 foreign media coverage of, 111–113, 125–127 foreign responses to Apollo 11 lunar landing, 104–105, 125–129 Gemini missions, 40, 116–117, 118–120 global tour of Glenn’s space capsule exhibit, 113–114 NASA’s and USIA’s spacemobile, 115 NASA’s planning for visual coverage of, 108–109 , 110–112 Project Mercury, 107–113 Soviet space successes, 106–107 television coverage of Gordon Cooper’s flight, 110–111 U.S. picture making in context of, 105, 108–109, 110–112, 113–118, 118–120, 121, 122–124, 128 U.S. preparations for staging of moon landing, 122–124 USIA films and exhibits about, 113–118 West German television coverage of Apollo 11, 126–127 West German television coverage of Apollo 8, 120 See also Argentina See also Argentinean print media See also Argentinean television See also India See also Indian print media See also Tanzania See also Tanzanian print media See also United States Information Agency See also West Germany See also West German print media See also West German television Sputnik, 106 Stevens, George, 45 Stevenson, Adlai, 18, 26 Stoughton, Cecil, 24–25 picture of Johnson swearing–in, 24 pictures of Kennedy, 23 Sverdlovsk, 38 Symington, Stuart, 57, 73

Index 257

Tames, George, 23, 53 Tanganyika, 42, 64, 65, 71, 84, 90, 94, 101 See also Tanzania Tanzania, xii, xiii, 10, 11, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 51, 53, 61, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 101, 102, 103, 104, 116, 117, 125, 127, 128, 151, 156, 157, 161 1963 visit of President Nyerere to United States, 64–65 images of Western modernity in, 83–84 National Development Corporation, 85 popular aspirations for development, 84–86 responses to moon landing, 128, 129 responses to U.S. development policies, 101–102 responses to Vietnam War, 157 See also Tanzanian print media Tanzanian National Museum, 104 Tanzanian print media coverage of Vietnam War, 141–142 Drum, 51, 85, 141 globalizing of, 51 Ngurumo, 51 The Nationalist, 116 portrayals of Tanzanian development, 84–85 Sunday News, 51, 84, 90, 116, 161 See also Tanzania Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 42, 43, 58, 68, 69, 77, 79, 87, 88, 89 use in context of official visits, 68–69 USIA pamphlets about, 87–89 See also official visits The Saturday Review, 46 Thompson, Llewellyn, 57 Timm, Uwe, 130 Tokyo, 40 TVA See Tennessee Valley Authority U.S. Committee on Public Information, 20 U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), 134, 142, 159 U.S. space flights See under space flights Uba, Sam, 141 Underwood, Richard, 120

UNESCO, 50 United Nations, 39, 59, 66, 122 United Press International, 133 United States Information Agency (USIA), 11, 27, 30, 31, 41–46, 47, 49, 53, 60, 65, 70, 71, 76, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 113–118, 121, 122, 124, 129, 132, 133–142, 146, 149, 151, 168, 169, 170 Alliance for Progress, 44, 45, 86–87 92–93, 99–100, 101 as ‘contact provider’, 41–46 exhibits, 1, 12, 42, 43, 60, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91–92, 95, 96–99, 101, 113–115, 116, 117–118, 125, 128, 140, 169 films, 30, 45, 60, 71–72, 90, 94, 136, 151 global tour of Glenn’s space capsule exhibit, 113–114 new 1960s emphasis on films, 45 Nine from Little Rock, 45 Photokina exhibit, 114–115 picture making in context of Vietnam War, 133–136, 138–141, 151 planning for representation of lunar landing, 122 research studies on impact of visuals, 44–46 seminars on filmed communications, 45–46 space exhibit at German Industries fair, 117–118 Spacemobile, 115–116 staging of moon landing, 127–128 Telenovela about development policy and social reform, 101 The March, 45 The Night of the Dragon, 136, 151 The School at Rincon Santo, 45 Third country news reporters assistance program in context of Vietnam War, 141 use of films, television programs, and picture magazines abroad, 43–46 USIS centers, 40, 42, 44, 60, 97, 104, 116, 128, 140, 157 visual representations of official visits to the United States, 60, 65, 71–72, 74

258

Index

visual representation of space flights abroad, 113–118 visual representations of U.S. development policies and foreign aid, 82, 86–94, 99–101 Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, 45 See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also USIS Argentina See also USIS Germany See also USIS India See also USIS Tanzania See also Vietnam War United States Information Service (USIS), 1, 12, 41, 46, 60, 80, 83, 104, 122, 157 United States Information Service Argentina (USIS Argentina), 41–44, 86, 90, 92–94, 99–100, 114, 117 Alliance for Progress, 86–87, 92–94, 99–100 and Argentinean television, 44 Enfoques Gremials, 43 pamphlets and publications, 43 Panorama Panamericano, 44, 49, 90 picturing American aid transfers, 90–94 Puntos de Vista, 43 space flight exhibits and responses to, 117 Temas Culturales, 43 use of cartoons, 44, 99–100 use of films, 44 visual representations of U.S. development policy and foreign aid, 86–94 See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also United States Information Agency See also Vietnam War United States Information Service India (USIS India) 41–44, 74, 87–89, 94, 96–99, 101, 102, 114, 115, 128 American Reporter, 43 and print media, 43 Gemini space capsule exhibit, 116 pamphlets and publications, 43

photo exhibit about power projects in India, 94 picture pamphlet about American agriculture, 89 picture pamphlets about the TVA, 87–89 sensitivity towards Indian culture, 96–99 SPAN, 1, 44 staging of moon landing, 128 use of films, 44 USIS centers in India, 42 visual representations of U.S. development policy and foreign aid, 86–94 See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also United States Information Agency See also Vietnam War United States Information Service Tanzania (USIS Tanzania), 41–44, 86–87, 87–90, 91–92, 94, 101, 116–117, 128 “Plastics U.S.A” exhibit, 90 and print media, 43 efforts to showcase application of U.S. scientific agriculture, 90–92 exhibit on TVA, 42 exhibits about American agriculture, 89–90 film showings of and responses to The Flight of Gemini–4, 116–117 lectures on space flights, 116 picture pamphlets about the TVA, 87–89 Profile of Tanganyika, 42, 94, 101 scientific farming exhibit, 91–92 staging of moon landing, 128 use of films, 42, 44 USIS center in Dar es Salaam, 42 visual representations of U.S. development policy and foreign aid, 86–94 See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also United States Information Agency

Index 259

See also Vietnam War United States Information Service Vietnam (USIS Vietnam), 135, 139 United States Information Service West Germany (USIS West Germany), 41–44, 114, 115–116, 125, 126, 140 use of films, 44 USIS center, 42 and West German television, 44 U.S. Committee on Public Information, 20 USIS See United States Information Service USIS Bombay See United States Information Service India USIS Bonn See United States Information Service West Germany USIS Buenos Aires See United States Information Service Argentina USIS Calcutta See United States Information Service India USIS Dar es Salaam See United States Information Service Tanzania USIS Germany See United States Information Service West Germany USIS New Delhi See United States Information Service India USIS Saigon See United States Information Service Vietnam Ut, Nick, 160 Vietnam War, 11, 12, 65, 102, 128, 130–164 Argentinean responses to, 155–156, 162 Cambodian campaign, 159 coverage of in Tanzanian print media, 141–142 coverage of on American television, 161 coverage of on Argentinean television, 138

coverage of on West German television, 136–137, 144–146, 150–151, 160, German responses to, 146, 149–151, 151–155, 162–163 Greenfield’s warnings on military actions, 142 Indian responses to, 156, 162 massacre of My Lai, 131, 132, 157 pictures of civilian suffering in foreign media, 142–151 pictures of printed in Indian media, 147–148 pictures of printed in West German media, 139, 146, 149 pictures of printed in Argentinean media, 136, 146 Tanzanian responses to, 157 Tet offensive, 131, 132, 147, 157, 158 U.S. information policy, 133–142 U.S. picture making and special iconography of, 134–142 U.S. visual disengagement, 158–159 See also United States Information Agency See also Argentina See also Argentinean print media See also Argentinean television See also India See also Indian print media See also Tanzania See also Tanzanian print media See also West Germany See also West German print media See also West German television See also space flights See also United States Information Agency Vietnam See under North Vietnam See under South Vietnam Wallace, George, 23 Warsaw, 104 Washington, D.C., 1, 39, 48, 49, 61, 67, 72, 74, 78, 79 Waters, Dave, 30 West Germany, 1, 10, 11, 29, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 64, 75, 83, 105, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 126, 127, 128, 129, 132, 136, 138,

260

Index

140, 141, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 160 1960s changes in print media, 48 emotional involvement in Apollo 11, 125, 126–127, 129 impact of Vietnam War coverage on popular emotions and protest against, 146, 149–151, 151–155, 162–163 rise of television, 46–48 tour of NASA and USIA spacemobile, 115–116 See also West German print media See also West German television West German print media Bild, 48, 104, 112, 129, 139 Der Spiegel, 125, 150 Der Stern, 48, 53, 112, 146, 149, 153 Die Bunte, 48 German Chancellor’s 1963 visit to LBJ ranch, 76 Koelner Stadtanzeiger, 115 Mannheimer Morgen, 115 new 1960s dominance of visuals in, 48 pictures of Vietnam War printed in, 139, 146, 149, Quick, 48 Stuttgarter Zeitung, 115 Die Zeit, 29 See also official visits to the United States See also space flights See also United States Information Agency See also Vietnam War West German television

ARD, 47, 48, 115, 126–127, 144–146 coverage of Apollo 11, 126–127 coverage of Apollo 8, 120 coverage of Vietnam War, 136–137, 144–146, 150–151, 160, German Chancellor’s 1963 visit to LBJ ranch, 76 globalizing of, 47–48 new 1950s and 1960s television programs as window on the United States, 47 Panorama, 47 TV feature on “Helgoland”, 145–146 WDR Weltspiegel, 38, 41, 47, 145, 150, 158 ZDF, 47, 48, 120 Western Europe, 1, 34, 39, 40, 48, 111, 112, 113, 151, 170 and Telstar television broadcast, 39–40 West Point, 58 Wiesner, Jerome, 109, 110 Wilkinson, Bud, 28, 124 Williamsburg, 58, 65, 66 Wilson, Bill, 53 Woodward, Stanley, 72 World Trade Center, 1–2, 66, 165 Xiaoping, Deng, 77 Yale University, 69 Yamasaki, Minoru, 1 Yosemite National Park, 77 Zahn, Peter von, 47 Ziegler, Ron, 32