205. Letter From the Director of the United States Information Agency (Larson) to the Secretary of State1
Dear Mr. Secretary: Thank you for your letter of June 27, 1957, on the subject of the tone and content of the output of the Voice of America.
I am very glad to have this expression of your views, and of the views of the President. They strongly confirm the convictions that I have had ever since I entered upon my duties here. I am glad to say, also, that the responsible executives of this Agency are fully in accord with these ideas.
As you observe in your letter, the Voice of America for some time has been working hard to give effect to these ideas. The hardest part of the task is not so much arriving at an appropriate set of principles as suffusing a large organization such as this with a unified set of working ideas, particularly in view of the wide variety of backgrounds and convictions among the operating officials.
For this reason, I am undertaking some very definite and perhaps oversimplified actions to guarantee that the policy lines agreed upon will really be translated into action by the hundreds of people who work on our output. I have sent the enclosed directive2 to Mr. Robert Button, the head of our Broadcasting Service, and he and his staff have concurred in these actions and have undertaken to put them into effect.
The device of a central news desk will eliminate practically all of the uncertainty as to policy and tone which has resulted in the past from leaving considerable editorial discretion to the various language desks. Moreover, the sheer reversal of the quantitative propositions in the output as between news and policy, on the one hand, and commentary and features on the other, will give a necessarily different over-all character to our broadcasts.
The one question we have not yet disposed of is the matter of the Munich Radio Center. This is closely related to the actions [Page 593] referred to in this letter, but involves a number of other issues and complexities which will take a little more time to resolve.
Yours sincerely,
- Source: Department of State, USIA Files: Lot 60 D 322, Director’s Chronological Files, Reel 4, 1957. Drafted by Larson. Also sent to Washburn; John S. Voorhees; Robert Button, Chief, IBS; Clive Du Val, General Counsel; and Saxton Bradford, Chief, IOP.↩
- Not found in USIA Files or the Eisenhower Library.↩
- Printed from a copy which bears this typed signature.↩