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Osgood, Kenneth. Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. 512 pp. $45.
Cold War propaganda was no secret, but in Total Cold. War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, Kenneth Osgood aims to put it front and center with reams of new archival evidence and intriguing conclusions. He argues a totalizing propaganda-domestic and foreign-was essential to America's Cold War strategy, and Eisenhower was the key to the process.
Total Cold War joins a growing group arguing that propaganda, as part of the larger rubric of "psychological warfare" was at the center of American Cold War policies. Most notably, W. Scott Lucas connected propaganda, ideology, and private-public partnerships in Freedom's War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (1999), while Walter Hixson examined how U.S. propaganda used consumer culture to infiltrate the Communist world in Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (1997).
Osgood, an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University, approaches the topic from a top-down diplomatic historian's perspective. He clearly acknowledges that Total Cold War is about high-level propaganda policy, not its effects or...