by Rich Cohen
Second: the people can be made to behave as you want them to behave via the subconscious of the public mind—no one else believed such a thing existed—which can be directed with symbols and signs. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” asked Bernays, “is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”
Editor & Publisher called Bernays the “young Machiavelli of our time.” The Atlantic titled its profile on him “The Science of Ballyhoo.” In a letter to FDR, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter characterized Bernays and others in his trade as “professional poisoners of the public mind.” To someone like Frankfurter, a public relations man was a cross between a hypnotist and a snake-oil salesman. In 1933, a Hearst reporter told Bernays that Crystallizing Public Opinion was a favorite book of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, who, the reporter said, was using Bernays’s ideas to design his campaign against the Jews. “It shocked me,” Bernays wrote, “but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.”
Edward Bernays, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1891, spent his first birthday on the ship that carried him to New York. He was Jewish, but neither poor, nor huddled, nor part of the masses he would spend his lifetime manipulating. His family was, in fact, illustrious, counting among its forebears Heinrich Heine and the chief rabbi of Hamburg. His father, a wealthy grain merchant, had a sister, and she married a Viennese man named Sigmund Freud. In other words, Freud was the PR man’s uncle. In his writings, Bernays recalled vacations to a family summer house in the Austrian Tyrol, where he spent time with Uncle Sigmund. “Although Freud was almost a quarter century my senior, we got along like two contemporaries,” Bernays wrote in his autobiography. “Freud and I took long walks together through the woods that surrounded Carlsbad, he in pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, green Tyrolean hat with feather and ram’s horn stuck in the hat band, brown hand-knit socks, heavy brown brogues and sturdy walking stick—and I in my Brooks Brothers suit. We walked over the sloping hills, talking all the way.”
Bernays claimed he crafted his philosophy under the influence of Freud, specifically the notion of a public subconscious, a concept Freud himself would surely have rejected.
Bernays grew up in apartments all over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was a short man, five four in fancy shoes, a trim hyphen of a mustache. His first job was in publishing, as editor of the Medical Review of Reviews, a magazine filled with research articles on goiter pain. He exceeded his mandate at the magazine, championing an unsolicited play—a play sent to a medical journal!—that dramatized syphilis via a dozen characters who pay for one night of sin. It was called Damaged Goods. Bernays said he published the play as an act of conscience, but he clearly saw it as a way out of the boring world of medical jargon and into the bright lights of Broadway. He described it as a warning to the young and a call to acknowledge those syphilitics who suffer quietly among us. The publication of the play was reported in newspapers and journals. Bernays then contacted a theatrical producer who had turned down the play previously and convinced him that, with all the media attention, Damaged Goods could be marketed as a public service. Bernays filled the seats at the first performance with doctors and social workers, who then sat on panels and wrote editorials. Damaged Goods was a hit. You had to see it even if you didn’t want to. It was performed at the White House for President Wilson. Bernays had pioneered a trick he would use throughout his career. If you want to advance a private interest, turn it into a public cause.
He worked on other plays, including Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs, a precursor to Little Orphan Annie. Audiences were asked to make a contribution to the Daddy-Long-Legs Fund—look for the cans in the lobby. In the end, it was not plays that interested Bernays: it was trends, driving opinion. In 1915, he opened a public relations firm. There had been others—the literary bureau of Mutual Life Insurance, 1888; the Publicity Bureau, 1900; Ivy Ledbetter Lee’s Parker and Lee, 1905—but Bernays’s firm was the most influential. He coined the term “public relations.” Before that, practitioners had been known as “press agents.” A press agent is a boozy hack with a big mouth; a public relations expert is a scientist. Early clients included Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which Bernays made famous in America, and Enrico Caruso, whom Bernays tagged “the man with the orchid-lined voice.”
In 1928, Bernays was hired by George Washington Hill, the owner of the American Tobacco Company, to expand the cigarette market. Especially irksome to Hill was the convention that kept women from smoking in public, behavior considered unladylike. Hill tried to sell smoking to women as a way to shed pounds, strike a pose, stay alert, but nothing worked. Bernays told Hill that he should instead link his private interest—get women to smoke more—to a public cause. With this in mind, he planted newspaper articles that challenged the taboo against female public smoking, arguing that cigarettes were neither a dirty habit nor a weight-loss tool, but a symbol of empowerment. He took out an ad, calling women to “smoke out”: the female citizens of New York were asked to leave their offices one afternoon and stroll along Fifth Avenue, puffing all the way. This was followed by “smokeouts” across the country. Bernays claimed he had not invented the issue—women really did want to smoke in public—but had merely exploited an existing sentiment, “crystallizing public opinion” and “manufacturing consent,” just as Joseph Goebbels did not invent the hatred of the Jews in Germany but merely exploited an existing sentiment, crystallizing public opinion and manufacturing consent for the Holocaust.
By the 1930s, Bernays was a leading media figure in the United States. His clients included General Motors, General Electric, United States Radium, Eugene O’Neill, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mutual Benefit Life Insurance, Columbia Broadcasting System, National Broadcasting, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Time, Woolworth, Macy’s, and the government of India. He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to Road & Track, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product. In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers—including Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster—concerned about a dip in numbers, hired Bernays. Did he go into schools and make the case for books? No, he talked to the architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built-in bookshelves.
Indirection.
* * *
Zemurray hired Bernays in 1944. Their first meeting took place in Zemurray’s office on Pier 3 in Manhattan. “Mr. Zemurray sat at a flat-top desk in a large room overlooking the Hudson,” Bernays wrote. “A tall, well-built man, six feet two or three, he towered over me as he stood to greet me. His accent was slightly guttural, a hangover from immigrant days, I learned later. He had great surety about himself, and after a few minutes of conversation I recognized I was in the presence of a wise, strong, mature man. Zemurray was an extraordinary man,” Bernays continued, “experienced in the rough and tumble action of the banana business, and with a broad, liberal, philosophical bent. In years of meeting tycoons, I had met few who combined as he did the ability to think abstractly and to translate ideas into actions.”
Bernays was asked to help grow the banana market, which he did in all the usual ways: by stressing the nutritional value of warm-weather fruit, by bemoaning the bland nature of American breakfast. But his job changed dramatically in the mid-1940s when the Guatemalan president Juan Arévalo pressed for land reform. Bernays had been worried about the atmosphere on the isthmus since his first days with the company. His belief in indirection kept him focused on the big picture. The fisherman worries about the size of the c
atch; the philosopher worries about the soul of the river. “I kept insisting to Zemurray that revolutionary movements would spread in Middle America, as they had in other parts of the world,” Bernays explained. “Despite his wisdom and mature judgment, Zemurray kept pooh-poohing this warning. The Indians, he said, were too ignorant; they had no channels of communication, no press or radio, which drew dissidents together in other parts of the world. How could ideas of communism be spread from one person to another—ignorant persons at that—without primary channels of communication?”
When Zemurray finally accepted the seriousness of the Guatemala situation, he called Bernays into his office and asked him what should be done.
Bernays said he needed to study the problem.
Zemurray told him to go down, take a look, and report back.
Bernays spent several weeks on the isthmus, traveling compound to compound, talking to banana men, laborers, government officials, peasants, people in town. He took notes, sketched ideas. “This whole matter of effective counter-Communism propaganda is not one of improvising,” he wrote in a 1952 memo to Ed Whitman, “[but requires] the same type of scientific approach that is applied, let us say, to the problem of fighting a certain plant disease through a scientific method of approach.”
In other words, blast them till they’re as blue as parakeets.
Bernays devised a strategy built on his trademark tricks. By 1952, Jacobo Arbenz was the issue, yet the solution was not direct confrontation. That would only increase Arbenz’s standing, threatening United Fruit. But if the company could turn its corporate challenge (Arbenz is confiscating land) into a problem for the United States (Communists are infiltrating the isthmus), the U.S. government would take care of the rest. Never mind that Arbenz claimed no allegiance to the Communist Party; never mind that Arbenz cited Franklin Roosevelt as among his heroes; never mind that many of the Arbenz policies that United Fruit found so offensive were patterned on the New Deal—the signs were evident for those who knew where to look. (Doesn’t the Comintern allow adherents to obfuscate their true nature in the process of infiltration?) There was, for example, the fact that Arbenz included Communists in his government and seemed to support the spirit of communism as a whole; there was the fact of land reform, which replicated the policy of Communist governments everywhere; there was also the rhetoric, the interviews and the speeches—Arbenz sounded like a Communist; there was the statecraft, too, which, like a star speeding away, shifted red. In 1953, when Joseph Stalin died, Arbenz declared a day of mourning in Guatemala. As it says in the book of Matthew, “You shall know them by their fruits.”
Bernays set various goals: convince the American people of the Communist presence in Guatemala; convince members of Congress the issue is a winner; convince the CIA, which can actually do something on the ground, it’s time to act. Bernays wouldn’t make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas.
Indirection.
* * *
If Zemurray seemed less actively involved in Guatemala than he had once been in Honduras, that’s probably because he had moved into a new stage of life, taken on a new role in the company: no longer on the ground with the machete and vaqueros, he had gone into the shadows, where he operated as a puppet master, watching, waiting, giving a tiny nod—plausible deniability—that serves as the green light. He vanished into the background, became the manipulator described in the most paranoid rants. For the first time in his life, he worked entirely through underlings and advisers. He must have known the company was on dangerous ground. Guatemala was something new and terrible even in the history of the banana trade. The company was perverting the politics and social life of the country just as it had already polluted its soil and fields.
* * *
The campaign began with a media blitz, a press junket, a pamphlet, a film. “The Public Relations Department had only one task,” wrote Thomas McCann, “to get out the word that a Communist beachhead had been established in our hemisphere.”
U.F. financed the publication of Report on Guatemala, a sliver of a book written by a journalist who later asked to have even his pseudonym removed. It was delivered to every member of Congress. You could see them in their chairs, feet up, reading the opening line: “A Moscow-directed Communist conspiracy in Central America is one of the Soviet Union’s most successful operations of infiltration outside the Iron Curtain countries.”
(Ed Whitman, the head of U.F.’s in-house public relations department, produced a film called Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas. When a new generation came to power at the company, every print was searched out and destroyed.)
Bernays planted stories in big publications in New York, which were picked up across the country. The Herald Tribune, The Atlantic, Time—all ran pieces. “The core of Bernays’s strategy was the selection of the most influential media communications in America,” wrote McCann, “the Times, several other newspapers, two or three major newsmagazines, the wire services and the electronic networks—followed by a high-level saturation campaign to expose those media’s reporters to the company’s version of the facts.”
Bernays had great influence at The New York Times. According to The Father of Spin by Larry Tye, Bernays’s wife, Doris, was related to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the newspaper’s publisher. This put Bernays and Sulzberger in the same social circles, at the same openings and parties, where Bernays approached the publisher, took him aside, made the case. It’s the biggest threat in the world, Arthur, and for God’s sake, it’s not being covered! “He brought the Guatemalan situation to the attention of Times publisher Sulzberger as early as 1951,” wrote McCann. “The Times agreed to have one of their leading editors look into the matter closely, and Sulzberger himself made an inspection tour at the company’s invitation.”
Sulzberger sent the reporter Crede Calhoun to the isthmus, resulting in a series of articles about the Red menace, articles that Bernays called “masterpieces of objective reporting,” that were clipped and sent to other reporters across the country, resulting in still more “masterpieces of objective reporting.” When the Times staffer Sydney Gruson, the paper’s bureau chief in Mexico, became suspicious of these stories and wrote a piece of his own with a pro-Arbenz spin, Frank Wisner, a CIA operative heavily involved in Guatemala, complained to Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA and previously a member of the U.F. board of directors; Dulles spoke to his friend General Julius Ochs Adler, the business manager of the Times, telling Adler that Gruson and his wife, Flora Lewis, were liberals who could not be trusted on this subject. Adler had a conversation with Sulzberger, who then kept Gruson off the story, ordering him to stay put in Mexico, claiming, dubiously, that there might be a Mexican angle to the Guatemala affair. (You following this?) According to Bitter Fruit, Sulzberger described it as a patriotic act.
Shades of Vietnam, shades of Iraq, shades of every war in which the consent is manufactured, in which people are cattle-prodded down the warpath with words like MENACE (zap!), CONTAGION (zap!), DOMINOS (zap!). “In almost every act of our daily lives,” wrote Bernays, “whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”
Bernays’s plan began to show results by the summer of 1951. The situation on the isthmus, unheard of a few months before, moved onto the national agenda, where it was described not as a threat to a corporate interest, nor as a threat to the region, but as a threat to the American way of life. “As a result of many recent articles and editorials, a point of high visibility has now been temporarily achieved as regards the deplorable pro-Communist conditions prevailing [in Guatemala] and the potential dangers stemming there-from, both to the United States and the United Fruit Company,” Berna
ys wrote in a memo dated July 23, 1951. He added, “[But it’s] an axiom in government and politics that for publicity to be effective, it should be translated into an action program.” He suggested three steps: “(A) a change to US ambassadorial and consular representation, (B) the imposition of congressional sanctions in this country against government aid to pro-Communist regimes, (C) US government subsidizing of research by disinterested groups like the Brookings Institute into various phases of the problem.”
Who was Edward Bernays’s real audience?
Whom did he need to sell?
It was, in my opinion, less the American people than the American government, and less the American government than a handful of men working for the CIA.
* * *
If the system had been working correctly, the Office of Strategic Services would have been disbanded at the end of the Second World War. That’s how it had always happened in the past—when the war ends, the spies are defrocked and sent home. But the system was not working correctly or, more accurately, the war never really ended—it instead faded into another war, the cold war, the way, in a disco, one song bleeds into the next and the people never stop dancing.
In 1947, when Greece was threatened by a Communist takeover, President Harry Truman, who had planned to disband the OSS, turned it into the CIA instead, creating a new feature of national life, the civilian spy agency. (The only comparable institution had been Naval Intelligence, which grew out of the Spanish-American War.) The CIA was created by the National Security Act, which, in addition to making the organization permanent, changed its mission. Expanded it. Blew it up. Whereas the OSS had been authorized “to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and conduct special operations,” the CIA was given a mandate at once vague and ambitious. The new agency, Truman told Congress, will “help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose on them totalitarian regimes.” In this way, the spy agency went from being a guy who knows stuff to a being a guy who does stuff about the stuff he knows. In this way, the agency, which had been ears and a brain, became ears and a brain and hands.