It was a war in which few shots would be fired, but upon which the very safety of the Free World was said to hang. It was a war where words and symbols were the primary weapons and Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L. Bernays, supplied the ammunition. And in 1954 Bernays’s arsenal was as well-stocked as it would ever be.
He had a plan for spying, one that involved putting in place a network of moles. He had a plan for waging psychological warfare, and another plan for wooing the press. He even had a plan for contrasting his Godless enemy’s outlook on twenty-two vital issues with those of Christianity. All this for an undeclared war waged on behalf of United Fruit, one of America’s richest companies. A war fought in quiet alliance with the US government, on foreign soil, against the elected government of Guatemala. A war that, in the mid-1950s when the Cold War seemed ready to boil over, was seen by those waging it as a crusade to keep Moscow from gaining a beachhead a thousand miles south of New Orleans.
Bernays helped mastermind that war for his fruit company client, drawing on every public relations tactic and strategy he had refined since giving birth to the profession forty years before. Historians have written extensively about that propaganda campaign, but always relied on the sketchy account Bernays provided in his autobiography and the limited materials available from the American and Guatemalan governments. Upon Bernays’s death in 1995, however, Library of Congress made public fifty-three boxes of his papers on United Fruit that paint in vivid detail his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and show how, in 1954, he helped topple Guatemala’s left-leaning regime. Those papers offer insights into how the United States viewed its Latin neighbors as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation—and how the propaganda war Bernays waged in Guatemala set the pattern for future US-led campaigns in Cuba and, much later, Vietnam.
“This whole matter of effective counter-Communist propaganda is not one of improvising,” Bernays noted in a 1952 memo to United Fruit’s publicity chief. “What is needed,” he added, is “the same type of scientific approach that is applied, let us say, to a problem of fighting a certain plant disease.”
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