January 11, 2008

Masterminding Cold-War Propaganda

By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN

In 1951 dozens of young Europeans descended on the campus of Harvard University to take part in a 10-week, all-expenses-paid summer seminar on American history and culture. The program's chief architect, a thickly accented graduate student by the name of Henry A. Kissinger, envisioned it as an opportunity to create "a spiritual link between a segment of the foreign youth and the U.S." By most accounts, the seminar was a tremendous success.

As Hugh Wilford describes it in The Mighty