In an article which appeared last week, Mr. Meisler — a wire-service newsman stationed in Washington — described the public relations set-up of our armed forces as “unequal in private life,” and detailed the manner in which it operates on military personnel and on communities situated near military bases. In this second and concluding article, the author completes his picture of the operations of this multi-million-dollar propaganda machine. –— Editors

THE CAPTURE of military personnel, and of key civilians, is vital to a Pentagon publicist, but his more exciting, perhaps more significant, work centers on the capture of the mass media — Hollywood, television, the press, even the comics. The Department’s Office of News Services has an Audio-Visual Division which, among its other duties, sees to it that some movies and television shows have good chunks of military propaganda. The division examines scripts and then lends aid to those deemed worthy of cooperation from the Department of Defense.

Cooperation can save a producer a good deal of money. Indeed, if he plans a movie based almost entirely on the activities of the armed services, cooperation can determine whether he will have a movie at all. For a producer clutching a script blessed by the division, the services may provide military equipment that he can’t get elsewhere: modern tanks, weapons, ships, planes. An officer, acting as technical adviser to insure the movie’s authenticity, often is sent along. The services will not stage battle scenes for a movie maker, but they will invite him to film maneuvers or naval exercises. If the producer needs a few soldiers, sailors, or airmen for individual scenes, the Defense Department will give them leave to turn actor — at minimum Hollywood rates — for a few days. In addition, the services will supply non-classified documentary films of battles and maneuvers to fill some of the gaps in the movie.

The department has guide lines to determine which movies deserve cooperation; basically, the production must benefit the department and the services. The Audio-Visual Division applies the guide lines with flexibility. Comedies that twit the services usually receive cooperation under the theory that most people in the audience understand the ribbing is all in fun. In serious dramatic fare, the division worries about total effect, rather than individual scenes, and often asks producers for some kind of balance. Should the movie highlight a villainous officer, the division, before it allots tanks, may demand that one or two of the good guys be an officer, too. The Navy, for example, cooperated with the makers of The Caine Mutiny. Officials felt that the tyrannical, unbalanced Captain Queeg was offset by some of the young, intelligent and sincere other officers: in total effect, officials decided, the movie was favorable to the Navy. The Gallant Hours, I Aim at the Stars, GI Blues, Men into Space, Blue Angels and The Patton Story are other movies and TV series produced with Pentagon help.

IT IS HARD to criticize the Department of Defense for refusing to cooperate with producers who want to turn out movies injurious to the Army, Navy or Air Force. A question arises, however, when the department denies cooperation not because the movie is anti-armed services, but because its political or social implications are not acceptable to the Pentagon. Here, again, the military drenches itself in politics. Stanley Kramer was unable to obtain full cooperation for his movie On the Beach. Bertram Kalisch, chief of the Audio-Visual Division, said the Pentagon felt the movie, based on the Nevil Shute novel, was “defeatist” and therefore contrary to government policy. Actually, the movie was more anti-nuclear war than defeatist and, to this extent, in strict accord with official government policy, which is that the United States does not want a nuclear war. The Pentagon objected to On the Beach not because it crossed government policy, but because its message might stir sentiment for disarmament and thus cross Pentagon policy.

Because of Kramer's standing as a producer, the Pentagon did offer him some minor help, but he did not need it to produce the movie. With the cooperation of the Australian Navy and the many millions an artist of his caliber can command, Kramer gave the world On the Beach. A lesser producer with less money might not have been able to do so without massive help from the Pentagon. In a sense, the decision to lend or refuse cooperation, particularly when some producers alter their script to meet Pentagon complaints, is a kind of censorship.

AMONG the millions of men who man our defenses, it is difficult to imagine any spending most of their time bolstering comic strips. But Louis Kraar of The Wall Street Journal, one of the most perceptive and thorough of all the newsmen who cover the Pentagon, has reported: “While no military publicity men are assigned strictly to backing up comic strips, many often spent a lot of their working hours doing just that. For the services, the ‘right’ comic strip can do double duty as an animated recruiting poster and as a vivid support for budget requests.” The right comic strips for the Air Force are Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates; for the Navy, Buz Sawyer and Thorn McBride. The Army isn’t blessed with any.

Milton Caniff, supplied faithfully with Air Force information, returns the favor by using his hero, Steve Canyon, to fight for Air Force programs. Any Air Force propaganda mouthed by Steve Canyon reaches Americans through 625 newspapers. When the Eisenhower administration cut back the B-70 program, a Caniff strip read one day:

Steve: Captain, what happened to the BX-71?

Captain: Oh, nothing went wrong with the vehicle itself, Col. Canyon. But I’m afraid your job has been “reoriented.” The money boys bailed the bird out from under you. The BX-71 program has been cut back to save money. Your hardware returns to the shelf. I—I’m truly sorry, old man.

Steve: I guess it won't really matter! If the Russians send a few Roman Candles at us some cloudy night ... we’ll make a formal protest in the U.N. the next day — if we can only find the pieces of the building.

Caniff told Kraar that no pressure was applied or needed for him to do his BX-71 strip. “I just knew how important the B-70 program was and that they were fighting to produce it,” he said.

George Wunder, who draws Terry and the Pirates, has gone even further than this for the Air Force. When the Air Force was feuding with Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R., Me.), mainly because of her refusal to approve the public relations gimmick of promoting actor Jimmy Stewart to a general in the reserve, Wunder introduced a new character to his strip. She was “Congresswoman Dolores Deepsix,” a notorious, penny-pinching, hardened legislator who spent a good deal of her time harassing the Air Force and obstructing some of its most vital programs. The Dolores Deepsix episode was part of a well-coordinated campaign against Mrs. Smith, which also included anti-Smith comment by a radio commentator and a syndicated columnist. “Unavoidably, Terry’s adventures are propaganda for air power and preparedness,” Wunder told Kraar, “but these are things I believe in strongly.”

Several years ago, the Navy almost lost Buz Sawyer, when its artist, Roy Crane, grew tired of sea adventures and decided to take his hero into the life of a private citizen. The fearful Navy publicity men launched a massive campaign, Kraar relates, and persuaded seamen throughout the country to write Crane and tell him how much Buz Sawyer meant to them. In addition, the Navy invited Crane to a tour of the Pacific fleet. Crane changed his mind and kept Sawyer in the Navy. Since then, the Navy has been busy supplying him with enough dramatic material to make sure that he doesn’t tire of naval life any more. Recently, Kraar points out, Crane had the run of an anti-submarine warfare ship for two weeks. The result was an anti-submarine warfare episode in his strip that coincided with a successful Navy campaign to win more funds for anti-submarine warfare.

Last year a second comic strip emerged to help fight the Navy’s battles at sea and in the public arena. The Copley Newspapers started distributing Thorn McBride, the story of the commander of an atomic submarine. The Navy League rewarded James S. Copley, chairman of the Copley Newspapers, for this and other favors by presenting him with the Rear Admiral William S. Parsons Award for Inspirational Civilian Leadership.

ON THE second floor of the Pentagon, facing the Potomac River, a long, rectangular room is filled every day with two dozen men, of varying skills and intelligence, who make up the single most important target of the military public relations establishment. The room is the Pentagon press room, and the men are the few American newsmen who spend all their working time covering military news. They represent the Associated Press, United Press International, The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, the Washington Star, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Time, Newsweek and a few other newspapers and trade magazines. Although other newsmen nose around the Pentagon from time to time and often come up with an incisive story or two, these two dozen in the news room, by and large, form the image of the military that reaches the American people through the press.

THE Pentagon publicity men, who work across the hall, must court these newsmen, answer their questions, direct them to sources of news and, hopefully, instill a military point of view in their stories. One of the best ways to fulfill all these goals at once is to take the newsmen on a “junket.” From time to time, with the military paying expenses, a newsman will find himself the guest of the Navy on a cruise of a nuclear submarine, or of the Army on maneuvers of the new anti-guerrilla warfare units, or of the Air Force on the flight of a B-52. For a newsman, these junkets can be invaluable. He has no other way to see the equipment and skills that he writes about every day in the Pentagon press room. At the same time, he may find it difficult to break through the cords of publicity men around him to get a meaningful look at all that is displayed. And, when he returns, he may find it difficult to write anything that might displease his kind military hosts. It takes a perceptive, hard-minded newsman to come through a junket without some bias in favor of his hosts.

In recent years, newsmen throughout the country have received free transportation to visit military installations all over the world. “It may surprise you to learn,” Sylvester wrote an editor recently, “that there are cases of editors and newsmen who annually turn up in the spring with requests for government transportation to Europe — including Paris — on the basis of doing stories about our overseas installations. For many years the aviation writers of the U.S. have been carried on government planes to their national convention. ... There have been many instances of large news-gathering organizations requesting transportation not only for one but two men to various places in the world where, if their news interest is legitimate, they can go by commercial transportation.” Sylvester has revived an old directive which prohibits free transportation except under exceptional circumstances.

In summing up defense reporting, Joseph Alsop has said: “The tendency is to take government handouts. This is a very bad thing to do in the area of defense — more than in any other. In this area, government handouts are always and persistently mendacious. All government handouts lie; some lie more than others, I’m certain.” The Pentagon’s Office of News Services prepares 1,500 handouts a year, whipping them to the newsroom across the hall. Most of these handouts describe new weapons or announce new contracts or describe some upcoming events, and most newsmen in the press room deny that they depend on them. The AP and the UPI may use the handouts to send small stories on their regional teletypewriter circuits for newspapers interested in a particular contract. The trade magazines also use many of the handouts, for their readers in the defense industries want to know about contracts. But the military reporters like to get their stories by talking to people, not by reading handouts. For some reporters, particularly those representing influential newspapers, the handout often is replaced as a source of news by something far more interesting and complicated — the “news leak,” the name for an exclusive story that comes from a source who can not be identified.

BECAUSE of the news leak, Washington newsmen have found themselves in some lively debate since the inauguration of Kennedy — a debate that obscures more than it clarifies. The new President and his Secretary of Defense periodically have denounced breaches of security or speculative news stories that, in the view of Kennedy and McNamara, aid the enemy. As a result, many news columns have been filled with arguments about security and secrecy and the conflict between national defense and freedom of the press, all ignoring, in the main, the real irritant and the real problem.

“We have an obligation, a responsibility, to the press and to the public to keep them informed on the activities of the Department [McNamara told the Senate Armed Services Committee last April 5]. At the same time, we certainly have a responsibility to withhold information that would be of great value to our potential enemies. ... Why should we tell Russia that the ZEUS developments may not be satisfactory? What we ought to be saying is that we have the most perfect anti-ICBM system that the human mind will ever devise. Instead, the public domain is already full of statements that the ZEUS may not be satisfactory, that it has deficiencies. ... I think it is absurd to release that kind of information to the public.”

McNamara’s point of view has been roundly denounced by the press, particularly since it implies that the Secretary wants newspapers not only to refrain from printing information harmful to his department, but to fill their columns with lies that delude the public as well as the Russians. In 1958, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, in their book The Reporter's Trade, dealt with arguments similar to that of McNamara, and their point of view probably reflects the views of most newsmen in Washington today:

“We have always believed that the American people have an absolute, unqualified right to know exactly where they stand at all times. We have further believed that it is the reporter's highest function to add, if he can, to the American people’s knowledge of where they stand. ... We are further convinced that 99/100s of the American governments secrecy has no other purpose but official convenience’.”

Unfortunately, sound arguments like these are wasted now, for much of the current hubbub over secrecy and security is unreal. While Kennedy and McNamara are jumping at newspapers for printing secrets, they really are angry at military leaders for leaking stories. An examination of two incidents that irked the President uncovers the heart of the controversy.

On February 27, Pentagon newsman Richard Fryklund and State Department newsman Earl H. Voss reported in the Washington Star that Secretary of State Dean Rusk had sent a memorandum to the Pentagon advocating a policy that “would sharply restrict the role of nuclear weapons in diplomacy and war.” According to Fryklund and Voss, Rusk suggested that “even massive attacks on Europe should be met with conventional weapons.” The two reporters had not seen the memorandum, but Air Force officers had given them a summary. The summary actually was a distortion of Rusk’s view, which was that the United States must strengthen conventional forces while maintaining nuclear power. The officers had leaked a distorted version in hopes of discouraging the government and public from accepting Rusk’s actual views, if he ever advanced them publicly.

This neat dodge gave Fryklund and Voss an exclusive story, the public a false picture of Rusk’s views, and the Russians very little. Kennedy ordered an investigation, and the officers suspected of giving the story to the reporters were transferred from the Pentagon.

On July 3, Newsweek published an accurate summary of a plan developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet the Berlin crisis. The plan included several steps designed to show Russia that the United States would not yield an inch on Berlin: a limited emergency would be called, the draft would be increased, there would be some demonstration of American intent to use nuclear weapons if necessary. Publication in Newsweek angered Kennedy, for the plan appeared in the magazine before it reached the President’s desk. It clearly had been leaked to the magazine by some Pentagon officials to force Kennedy into accepting it — if Kennedy ignored the advice, the public and Congress now would know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our top military minds, had advocated a military course that our civilian President had refused to follow.

In an unprecedented move, Kennedy ordered the FBI to investigate the Newsweek story and determine who had given it to the magazine. This investigation, still uncompleted, has humiliated the Pentagon and, perhaps, convinced other military men to forget the news leak and find some other publicity device to mold opinion.

THE unleashing of the FBI, and several of the McNamara directives mentioned in this survey, make clear that Kennedy is making an attempt to keep the Pentagon and its massive public relations establishment in line, “Our arms must be subject to ultimate civilian control and command it all times, in war as well as peace,” Kennedy said on March 28 in a message to Congress.

The evidence so far indicates that Kennedy's civilian leaders are not afraid to issue orders to the military. But the methods of Kennedy and his administrators are more often oblique than direct. Using the tricks of power learned in Congress, Kennedy does not lash out at military publicity men, but whittles away at their sources of power. As a result, while Pentagon publicity men may be afraid these days to go too far, they do not always realize it is undemocratic to do so.

No one can expect the military to disband all its public relations programs. In the realities of Washington politics, every agency needs to create an image of itself that will draw funds from Congress. Otherwise even the most needed projects will wither for lack of money.

But the military publicity men, while doing their job of smoothing relations between the Department of Defense and Congress and the public, must be curbed far more than they have been by the Kennedy Administration. The dangers are real. According to UPI, the memorandum on right-wing military propaganda prepared for Senator Fulbright and sent to McNamara warned that while the parallel may seem farfetched, the revolt of the French generals in Algeria is “an example of the ultimate danger.” The publicity men of the Pentagon are busy molding the thoughts of America to fit a military pattern. If the generals and admirals ever capture all public opinion, they would need nothing as crude as another “Algerian coup” to control America.