Selling America, ignoring Vietnam : the United States Information Agency in Vietnam, 1954-1960
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Once a neglected institution, the United States Information Agency (USIA) has recently received attention from scholars who wish to study American public relations, propaganda, and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. Here, I present a case study of the USIA’s activities in South Vietnam in 1954-1960 as a way to further investigate these issues. This thesis explores both the overt and covert aspects of the USIA’s operations within Vietnam, and attempts to gauge the Agency’s effectiveness. My study contends that forces internal to early American Cold War culture—racism and class—set the parameters of the USIA’s mission, defined the nature of its propaganda, and ultimately contributed to its ineffectiveness. Saddled to their own set of racist and self-referential belief systems, USIA officials remained remarkably ignorant of Vietnamese culture to the detriment of their mission’s success. As such, the central goals of the USIA’s mission—to inculcate the Vietnamese with American liberal democratic values, to market the Diem regime as the legitimate manifestation of these principles, and to taint Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DVN) as a puppet state of the Soviet Union—never took hold. Following the pioneering work of Kenneth Osgood, this study also sheds light on the USIA’s preference for “gray” propaganda: USIA-produced propaganda which appeared to emit from an independent or indigenous source. Whereas previous studies of the USIA have focused on the more overt forms of its propaganda, my work demonstrates that the bulk of the Agency’s operations were of a more clandestine nature, utilizing private Americans and local Vietnamese agents to carry out its missions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".