Selling America, short.

• Author: Gedmin, Jeffrey

THERE WERE calls for an end to "U.S. warmongering." Washington had been overtaken by "a small clique of hate-mongers", claimed one speaker. American unilateralism was denounced. The United States itself had turned into "a state of holy terror", argued another speaker. The current administration was bent on a new "world war", contended still another.

No, these are not statements from a recent anti-war, anti-Bush rally. They are remarks given at a 1949 conference, convened to condemn U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union. Prominent literary and artistic figures from the United States and Europe, including Aaron Copland, Norman Mailer and Dimitri Shostakovich, played an active role. So when a senior French minister today calls the American President a "serial killer", or when a counterpart in Germany compares the U.S. leader to Adolph Hitler, it may be useful to remember that such strident expressions of anti-Americanism are hardly new.

The United States today has a public diplomacy crisis--not just in the Islamic world, but in the heart of Europe. America's traditional allies--those who stood with it in the fight against communism-are turning against the United States in droves, and little is being clone to stop or even slow this anti-American stampede. Instead of stumbling about trying to explain America to the world, the United States needs a serious campaign to open European minds to our positions. And, in order to determine what this campaign should entail, it may be useful to draw lessons from history.

After World War II, U.S. officials were forced to think hard and creatively about how to respond to a vigorous Soviet-sponsored peace offensive. The American challenge was to win hearts and minds in Europe. The result was, among other things, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, counter-conferences over the next two decades, the political opinion magazine Encounter and crucial alliances with leading intellectuals like Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook. The Ford Foundation and other charitable organizations were enlisted in a concerted effort to portray American culture in a fair and positive light. While it is true that some intellectuals abandoned their communist sympathies over time, they did not shed their cultural anti-Americanism. One Ford Foundation official noted in 1959 that Europeans "spent a lot of time worrying and stewing and griping about American domination, about the inferiority of our values and so on." This campaign, now often maligned incorrectly as a "CIA front", did not win over every European intellectual. It did, however, nurture a nucleus of thinkers and activists who were open to American ideas and willing to engage in serious discourse on the major issues of the day.

As the Cold War entered its final decade, America's reputation struggled once again. In the early-1980s, one poll showed that half of West Germany's population was eager for more independence from the United States, and nearly twothirds opposed the stationing of new missiles on German soil. As the peace movement gathered steam across Western Europe, Kenneth L. Adelman lamented in a 1981 issue of Foreign Affairs that "a penny wise and pound foolish" strategy of public diplomacy had resulted in "America's disengagement" from its closest allies. JosefJoffe, writing that same year in those same pages, argued that "the few premises still shared by Europeans and Americans are dwarfed by the many disputes where they clash not only over tactics but over Weltanschauung." Perhaps not coincidentally, the successful public diplomacy of the 1950s and 1960s was abandoned in favor of softer, less controversial approaches like the Fulbright program. This...