Public diplomacy played an increasingly important role in the post-World War II years. In The Cold War and the United States Information Agency, Nicholas J. Cull, a professor of public diplomacy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, chronicles the birth, growth, and demise of the U.S. Information Agency (usia), America's vibrant and visible propaganda organization. In a clear, crisp account that draws on both archival sources and more than one hundred interviews with major figures in the agency, Cull makes a compelling case for the need for public diplomacy in the world today. Cull establishes his focus in the first sentence of his preface: “This book is the biography of an idea: the idea that America needed a permanent apparatus to explain itself to the postwar world” (p. xiii). He suggests at the outset that there are five core practices to consider: “listening, advocacy, cultural diplomacy, exchange diplomacy, and international broadcasting”; he goes on to provide a thoughtful description of efforts in all those areas (p. xvi). In his narrative, he highlights the contributions of the various directors who left their imprint on the agency, including the advertising executive William B. Benton, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, and entrepreneur Charles Z. Wick.
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Winkler et al. (2009) studied this question.