For Falls Church's Lou Olom, It's Been a Lifetime of Reading Between Global Lines

For long time Falls Church resident Lou Olom, propaganda isn’t a four letter word. It doesn’t necessarily mean fraudulent claims by devious, oppressive governments. It’s not always about slick, film productions full of moving and grandiose images. It’s just a form of communication. Beyond the specific definition, propaganda, and all it entails, has comprised most of Olom’s professional life. First as an analyst, and later as an advisor, Olom has watched as people and governments at the highest levels have used images and information to represent what they wish about themselves and others. The lifetime of work, has provided insight into international interaction and why, sometimes, those interactions don’t go as planned.

As a student at the University of Chicago, Olom didn’t start off considering political science. He was training to be a doctor, and made it through three and a half years of pre-medical study before he realized his math wasn’t strong enough to pass physics, necessary for the completion of his degree to complete his degree. He remembers taking physics twice without getting a passing grade. On the third try the professor, who had taught him twice before threw his arm over Olom’s shoulder and told him frankly that he should try another field.

At that time Olom was only concerned with getting his degree without spending any extra time and money at school. He was struggling to make the tuition, working part time for a professor to make ends meet. With a quick graduation his focus, he moved into political science where he could graduate with his class. It wasn’t until after he started that he discovered a love for the psychology of politics, a realization that would profoundly affect rest of his life.

Following his graduation he continued his studies at the University, learning from and working as research assistant under two of the brightest minds in political science, Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam. Under Lasswell, the scholar who pioneered the study of psychology in politics, Olom came to realize a fascination with how personal motivations are involved in the overarching formulation of policy. He learned about the usages of foreign propaganda, specifically in communist countries and the psychology of the politics behind propaganda. Then, following Lasswell’s move to Washington, D.C., Olom continued his studies with the even more vaunted Merriam. Merriam also asked Olom to work as his assistant, a task that was at first intimidating to the young Olom.

“I didn’t think I was that good,” Olom said.

Olom helped him Merriam write a book and then, through Merriam’s insistence, started work on his dissertation on the study of leadership, a task he never finished, interrupted by the onset of World War II. He finished his schooling with essentially half a doctorate, having completed his written exams, but not his dissertation.

The beginning of the War brought an entirely different challenge, one that would provide immediate relevancy to the studies that had consumed Olom for the preceding three years.

Reuniting with Lasswell, Olom began working on the subject of content analysis, which consisted of studying foreign communications, from letters to books to radio addresses coming from other countries, and analyzing them to determine hidden messages and meanings within the texts.

Discovered primarily by Lasswell with Olom’s assistance, the work was pushed forward knowing that it could become an asset in the coming war in Europe.

“We were preparing for a war. We knew there was going to be a war breaking out. And we watched Nazi and Communist propaganda,” Olom said. But for the theories of content analysis to be taken seriously by America’s policy makers, they had to prove that it could accurately deconstruct foreign communications.

To prove this, Olom and a fellow researcher, Tom Whiteside, spent a summer in New York working at the New York public library reading the British press and applying the methods of content analysis to the British press.

At the end of the summer they prepared their report for Lasswell and presented it to the Rockefeller foundation hoping to receive a grant for further work. They told them what they thought could be done through content analysis and recommended that they continue the project. The foundation looked over the material, the insights and conclusions, and not only approved the project, but gave them a grant of $150,000, over a million dollars in today’s money.

The group was instructed to go down to Washington and meet with Archibald McLeish at the Library of Congress, to establish and train a staff in the methods of content analysis disseminating foreign propaganda. Olom worked training experts in the cultures and histories of foreign countries, in how to analyze communications for hidden information. Once trained, they were scattered throughout the U.S. government, into all the agencies dealing in foreign affairs for the war.

After leading training for some time, Olom was moved to the FCC, the foreign broadcast intelligence service, where he worked applying the technique to foreign broadcasts. Olom can still remember plowing through reams of Nazi propaganda, pulling out hints about the day to day living conditions in Germany and the possible future intentions of its leaders.

The secret to content analysis, Olom said, isn’t only about what a person writes or says, but also about what is not said. Olom described working with some of the speeches by infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, the voice of the Nazi party and dictator of cultural life inside Germany.

Using content analysis Olom would take apart Goebbels’ speeches and try to discern what was being emphasized and what was being left out. Then he would develop a profile of the speech and compare it to future speeches to track shifts in focus and intention that could signal what the state of things were in Germany, and what some possible future actions were by the military.

Olom remembers noticing specifically how Goebbel’s speeches were blatantly absent of any of the defeats that the German military was starting to face, and the difficult conditions that many German citizens were living and working under. “As far as the German public was concerned everything was hunky-dory,” he said.

It wasn’t until much later, at the very end when they started to admit they were not winning, an admission that signaled Germany’s imminent surrender.

The success of their work proved that despite having no sources stationed inside Germany, it was still possible to gain valuable insights about the state of affairs in that country.

A short time later, Olom was asked to work under Nelson Rockefeller to as an assistant setting up a division in Latin American Affairs. Congress wasn’t particularly interested in the focus of the work and closed the division within a year, but the time gave Olom a chance to go beyond analysis and get some experience in understanding foreign policy and operations.

When that folded he moved into the Field Intelligence division where he had a small staff responsible for gaining intelligence about the war in a variety of ways. When a group of American soldiers held by the Japanese was liberated the division sat down with them to reconstruct as much as possible details about Japan and what they could share, knowing that even the most mundane details could provide assistance.

Finally before the end of the war, Olom was transferred to the Voice of America, a multi-media international broadcasting service started in 1942 and run by the U.S. government. Olom’s job was to edit news copy before it was broadcast.

Broadcasting placed Olom on the opposite side of the mirror. While working for field intelligence he was scrutinizing broadcasts from other countries to discern information about them. When he started working for Voice of America he had to go through America’s own communications to make sure they weren’t communicating anything undesirable.

One of the most memorable parts of the job was working the overnight shift from midnight until four in the morning and legendary New York Yankees Baseball broadcaster Mel Allen would come in at midnight to do his Army news broadcasts. Allen would show up every night with his scripts and Olom would have to go over it for him, editing it for content, before it could be released. Of course, as they worked the conversation would inevitably turn to baseball and the Yankees.

“He was a hell of a nice guy,” Olom laughed. “It was just good to know this character.”

He also remembers an incident when he had to change someone’s copy because it reported that Stalin had called America an aggressor nation. Olom insisted to the writer that the copy had to be changed and a row started over that one word. Having taken international law, Olom objected to the word “aggressor” because he understood that it defined the U.S. as being in the position of a conquering nation, rather than defending other countries, an image contrary to U.S. policy.

While appearing to be a matter of semantics, Olom knew the one term could make a massive difference in the perception of the U.S. abroad. These subtleties are what define the work of propaganda and public diplomacy.

When the war ended and the focus of international concern shifted from National Socialism to Communism, Dwight D. Eisenhower became concerned with the lack of awareness about Communist propaganda and the image of the U.S. abroad.

“This was the thing the State Department could care less about,” Olom said.

Olom said the State Department was more concerned with formulating and implementing international policy and less interested in leading a propaganda war. To fight on this front Eisenhower installed a one star general in charge of psychological warfare, and founded a new independent agency, The U.S. Information Agency, independent of the State Department. With the founding of the new agency, Olom was brought in to head the office of intelligence, leading a large staff in understanding and analyzing propaganda.

Olom admitted that at the beginning of the process things were difficult. “For many years it stumbled,” he said. After being there for three years, Olom decided that he needed to get out, contemplating returning to the private sector. He was frustrated by the bureaucracy that seemed to stand in the way of getting things done.

Prior to leaving, though, he was approached by the advisor of the USIA supervisory commission. They were looking for a staff director who could put together and present the annual report to Congress and the President. Interested, Olom met with the five person commission, made up by among others, Philip D. Reed, president and chief executive of General Electric and Irwin Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor. The opportunity of bypassing bureaucracy and going directly to congress, and the chance to work with some fascinating personalities, made Olom reconsider leaving. He said that he would be interested, and a week later he was offered the position.

After giving it some though, he decided that he would try it for a while, telling himself that he could leave if he began to find the work draining. It wasn’t until 25 years later when he would finally give up the post in January, 1981.

During those 25 years it was Olom’s responsibility to ensure that the agency was operating effectively. While he forced accountability, he also became a person that people could come to talk directly about problems arising, without having to deal with a bureaucratic red tape. “It was my task to ask all the naughty questions without being offensive,” Olom said.

Olom can remember many times when public policy had a major part in determining how the U.S. acted in the world. One of most public times was during Kennedy’s administration when Russia detonated an improved version of the atomic bomb. At the height of the cold war, the detonation was a clear challenge to the U.S.

For the policy makers in the Defense and State Departments, the immediate reaction was to promote detonating their own bomb, matching might with might. But through sources in countries across the globe, USIA director and former broadcaster Ed Murrow discovered that many around the world were angry with Russia for the action and would be even more upset by a retaliatory maneuver by the U.S.

Murrow went to the National Security Council and convinced them and the president not to react immediately, because of the furor it would cause abroad. Kennedy listened to Murrow and decided to wait for several months, allowing the tension to ease, before detonating a bomb. The decision went a long way in swaying global public opinion in favor of the U.S.

But while the work during that particular crisis situation gained the agency public acknowledgement, Olom said that public diplomacy had greater impact in its day-to-day operations. While the U.S. and Soviet governments faced each other with missiles bared, the USIA fought for the favor and friendship of the people in the world through showing the brighter side of America. Throughout the world, they would sponsor displays of American ingenuity whenever they had the opportunity, including life scale models of the American kitchen, which drew lines thousands of people long when displayed in the Soviet Union.

In fact, one of the most useful propaganda tools they had was simply American catalogs, displaying all the products and appliances available in the U.S.

Other programs allowed Americans to speak for themselves. The Fulbright program, started in 1946 by Senator J. William Fulbright sent thousands of American scholars overseas, creating personal relationships with people in other countries. Similarly, the student foreign exchange program worked familiarizing American and foreign students with each other.

Olom pointed out that all of these things fall under the term propaganda, a term he believes doesn’t always carry negative implications. Olom, himself, knew that what he communicated about America was a belief he shared wholeheartedly. At one point during the Cold War, Olom went to Austria to interview defectors from the Soviet Union. For hour after hour he heard them talk about the conditions in Soviet Russia. Finally, when he walked out of the building that evening, drained by what he had heard, he noticed the American flag hanging in front of the building.

“I looked up at that American flag, and my god, I was never so happy to see it,” Olom said. The recent image of America has not shone as brightly as that Olom painted in his work with the USIA, something he attributes to the decline of the agency.

In 1997, with pressure from Senator Jesse Helms, the USIA was folded back into the State Department, losing much of its autonomy and efficacy.

“The point is, they killed it,” he said. “We don’t have any public diplomacy anymore.” Now, Olom said, the U.S. is essentially flying blind when it comes to dealing with global opinion. At no point was this clearer than when the U.S. invaded Iraq, expecting a popular acceptance and welcome.

Instead of open arms, though, there has been constant turmoil, and an insurgency that refuses to be squelched. “Had you had an independent agency with Arabic specialists who had worked in the Arabic countries and understood the mentality, they could have told you,” Olom said. “They would have at least told us what to expect.”

With the shrinking of the world and the growing need for cooperation among countries in dealing with terrorism, Olom believes that an awareness of what the citizens of the world think, is absolutely necessary in the U.S. remaining a beacon for the rest of the world.