Word: benton
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Sirens screaming and horn ablare, Benton & Bowles are riding the air. Tinsel and paint and a jester's cap, Tinkling bells and a moit of pap, Under our elms and over our maples Selling themselves as they sold their staples...
Connecticut's freshman Senator Bill Benton, who earned a precocious fortune as an adman, has two deep feelings about the U.S.: 1) as a package to sell, it is an adman's dream, and 2) the U.S. is advertising itself much too dreamily. Last week, before a Senate foreign relations subcommittee, Bill Benton got another chance to make his pitch. Up for discussion was his resolution calling for an overhaul of U.S. propaganda and an expansion of the Voice of America to reach "virtually every radio set in the world...
...Eisenhower was so enthusiastic about Benton's idea that he felt he might "expose a sense of frustration trying to express how deeply I do agree." Truth, he said, should be the U.S.'s "T-bomb," under control of "a general staff of a new kind," divorced from the State Department and "headed by some great American." Bernard Baruch thought that the job ought to go to "a body of thinkers," reporting directly to the President...
Action v. Words. John Foster Dulles said that Russians "know that everybody wants peace, and if they can pose as the lovers of peace, then perhaps they can risk war." But it was gently gruff George Marshall who sprinkled a dash of salty reserve on Benton's enthusiasm. "Something has to be done," he said, "and it has to be more dynamic . . . We have had a military conquest, but it is not lasting. There is a confusion of the mind. How you correct that I do not know unless it is by some such method as this...
...Bill Benton had put on a presentation that seemed to impress the Senate. But the U.S. was beginning to understand that U.S. troubles abroad have not come from a deficiency of clever commercials ; they have come from a deficiency of right action, from wrong action or from no action at all. U.S. words, like everybody else's, would always be interpreted against the background of U.S. deeds...