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international / global

1.  

Interviewer: What I hope to accomplish this afternoon is to give you the opportunity to share how and where you lived your life and who and what influenced you. How you see the current state and the future of international public relations. So let’s go back to your military career. After you completed your work in Korea and Japan you continued to work in the international realm. Can you talk a little bit about that.

Reed: My goodness. Well, I because of my age I turned 18 in 1945, and I went a little in the Army a little ahead of that and so because Harry Truman dropped the atom bomb, I was spared the labor of landing in Japan to invade a Japanese resigned as it were and I was sent instead of Korea which at that time was called Chosun to help take the surrender of Japanese, send them home, and bring the Koreans back to Korea. My job as it turned out was to be a sort of PR man for the ruling general in Pusan. And he gave me a lot of leeway. I was 18. And he said “Well go do that, and then go do this.” And he his encouragement really got me sort of started in the notion and on the road to how do you persuade people to do something. The first task was to persuade sailors, civilian sailors on shipping on ships calling it Pusan Harbor not to patronize bad bars. Not to go and drink local bad whisky. And so I had tried to devise ways of persuading these active young men to stay away from bad bars… and bar girls. And it was a wonderful exercise in trying to solve a PR problem. I used to go out to ships when they pulled into the harbor and go out on the lighter and make a little speech about now don’t go here and don’t go there. Didn’t work. So I brought a bottle of local whisky out with me and said here I’ll save you a lot of trouble. Have a drink. this is what they serve in the local bar. So I said to the colonel, “We’ve got to find another place for these fellows to go where they won’t get sick.” Good idea says he. “Go do it.” Biggest free space at the time was the ground floor of the railway station hotel. And I said, “Can we take this and we’ll make it into a dance hall?” And he said “good idea.” “Go ahead and do it.” And so we discovered that there was a Korean orchestra, dance orchestra, stuck in China. The Japanese had brought the orchestra down to play for the Japanese troops who were occupying the coast of China. This gets to be very international. And so I was sent down to bring them home to Pusan. Put them to work in the lobby dance hall of the station Railroad Station Hotel. And the colonel arranged for an ample supply of low alcohol by volume beer to be available. And we found willing partners amongst the wives and children of the orchestra players and their friends and their friends friends so we had a swell dance hall that was safe. The lesson that taught me was it wasn’t the press release that did the trick as very often in the world of PR, but some action, some creative way of solving a problem. So I didn’t start out with the notion of press releases and interviews, but rather with some sort of action. Subsequent to the action, of course, we did a lot of publicity about the club, so that American boys living in this remote part of Korea in the southern coast would use the facility. Hence, stay out of trouble. I don’t know if that answers anything or?

Interviewer: Well it definitely does.

Reed: It’s what happened.

Interviewer: Right, I’ve heard this before with the military experience.

Reed: It solved the problem. By having the dance hall, we also had an alternative for the boys not going to the local bars so that when I went out to visit the ships that sailed into port, I could say here’s the address where you can go and have a safe drink and meet girls.

Interviewer: Now this was about…

Reed: 1945, 1945-46.

2.

Interviewer: Okay, I know that in, I think in 1960, you ended up back in the States at Olin Mathieson. What happened between that and 1960?

Reed: Well I came back to, after being in Asia for a couple of years, I came back to the United States, looked around trying to find a job, trying to decide what I was going to do. I lived in New York and I lived in Washington. Returned to Washington which has always been my real hometown. My brother never left. And I went to work on, I had worked as a copy boy on a newspaper. I looked around at what I could be doing and through a friend, I discovered that the newly formed United States Information Agency which was a successor of the war time office of what was it called. Stop. Yeah just a second. What the heck was it called? The, not OSS.

Interviewer: Was it the USIA?

Reed: I’m sorry, I beg your pardon. Okay they were creating a successor to the office of war information from WWII and they called it USIS or USIA and they housed it in the State Department, like for some strange reason. And we were recruiting people to staff the overseas branches. At that time, nobody wanted to go. No Americans wanted to go to Korea. No Americans spoke Korean. The Koreans had been speaking Japanese for 50 years. Nobody had been to Korea. And I volunteered and I got a job. It was the lowest ranking job in the Embassy staff. It was a FS-13. I was so low I wasn’t entitled to a wife. But I surprised by bringing one with me. And I went back to Korea in 1949 as a lowly functionary clerk really of the US Information Agency branch in Seoul, Korea. In the meantime, Korea had been divided in half; the Communist taking over the North and an independent free government being set up in the South under Dr. Sigmund Rhee. The propaganda war on both sides had begun. The psychological warfare was in full bloom. And the only kind of people that US Information Agency could recruit at that time were academics who really wanted to go abroad to be able to complete their thesis. And I had a very good boss named Jim Stewart. He was a missionary brat born in Japan, raised in China, spoke the languages. And he gave me my head and when I thought of something to do, he’d say go do it. So that’s how I really got started, by practical work in Korea. It quickly became obvious to me that Koreans didn’t speak English or even Korean much at that time. They were reverting to Korean. And that fascinated me, the whole notion of cultures enclosed by a language fascinated me. And I realized, how gradually, how important it was to get inside the linguistic cocoon in order to be in a place where you could persuade people to do something or persuade them not to do something. Or persuade them to let you do something. And those really are the three things toward which PR is directed. What was the question?

3.

Interviewer: Well we’re in the 50s now was there some time you spent in the Philippines?

Reed: Yes, well what happened was while living and working in Korea, a war began. The North invaded on June 25, 1950. I was living in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, which is only a few miles from the border where the tanks came over in the middle of the night and we were in deep doo-doo. And so we had to flee. Cargo planes were flown in to Kimpo Air Field and we were rushed out to board those planes and fly to Japan to safety. Shortly after that, the Americans committed troops to the defense of South Korea. To me, one of the great proofs of the efficacy of public relations is that during the initial stages when the North Koreans occupied all of South Korea except for one beachhead around the city of Pusan, there were no defections, the South Koreans stayed loyal to the West, to America. Why do they do that? Well I think part of the reason is because we had a good information program. We had exposed America, the United States as a model to follow for the South Koreans. And they had had a free election. And we promoted the use of the Korean language. One of the most interesting things to me personally was I noticed that the American Embassy in 1949 early 50 had brought over some intelligent people, scholarly people, to write a newspaper and to produce a daily newspaper. And I noticed that after they produced the paper, and it was printed, piles of them were still stacked up around the Embassy. I don’t usually talk this much. Piles of these papers were stacked up and they weren’t being delivered. And there were various distribution systems to the Embassy, the Embassy tried to establish for the newspapers. And my boss, Jim Stewart said “John why don’t you figure out how to get these things out to the people who should read them?” So, I went out to the villages in Korea. And I discovered that every village had a senior man, sort of as the unofficial local mayor or [inaudible]. He was called the Yong Bon and he wore a funny hat. And he was distinguished and deferred to. And he was wise. And he had a name and he had an address and so I started collecting the names and addresses of the Yong Bons of the villages of Korea. And then put other people to work doing it. And back at the Embassy in Seoul, we started addressing the newspapers to the Yong Bon and mailing them to them. One thing the Japanese were very good at in the occupation of Korea was roads and telegraphs and mail service and schools. The mail worked fine. So we mailed them. The Koreans loved it. They got a piece of mail. So the Yong Bon would read the newspaper giving credence to the propaganda we were issuing. This had a powerful effect.

This simple device of sending the newspapers, which otherwise were useless, direct to the Yong Bons with their name and address gave dignity to the recipient. He would read the paper to the local people. The paper was in Korean not in Japanese or English. We built up an enormous amount of support and good will in South Korea, by the simplest and most inexpensive of all possible projects. I liked that. I thought, hot dog! Now I’m learning something about public relations. Excuse me. It’s a true story. Well we got kicked out of Korea by the fate of the war going down to the Pusan beachhead, Pusan Perimeter, as it was called.

I was transferred from Tokoyo to Manila to help develop and build and operate a printing plant that would produce propaganda or PR materials for Southeast Asia for US Information Agency. The State Department did not like the notion of getting into practical business things. They liked diplomacy, flowery notes, cocktail sipping, la de dah. But a printing plant? Good God! Greasy messy! But that printing plant ran for 30 years after it was set up to produce PR materials from surrender leaflets to prayers in the initial stages in the war in Vietnam. And the production of that printing plant was also used in the Philippines and got people interested in and connected with learning local languages because they had to be printed in languages appropriate to the Philippines and to Indonesia and to Indochina and to Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and that helped to develop American scholarly interest and broaden American interest in those languages and therefore those peoples. So I worked there for quite a while and traveled into other parts of Asia seeing what kind of printed materials would be useful in promoting democracy and fighting Communism. It was practical PR. I should have paid them for the job. It was so much fun and I learned so much.

4.

Interviewer: And then you ended up back in the United States.

Reed: Right. What happened was I went back to the United States after my tour of duty was finished in the Philippines and I was signed up to go and I was taking home leave a couple of months here in Washington. And one day I was in the barbershop owned by a pal, my former roommate, Mike. He had converted from being a cook to being a barber. I think he was a better cook than barber. But anyway, Mike was cutting my hair and the phone rang and he said “John do you want to go on the phone by the State Department?” And I said “What is it?” And they said well we’ve had an inquiry and you need to call your former boss in Korea Jim Stewart because he wants to talk to you. So I called him from the barbershop and Mr. Stewart as I then called him said “John where are you going?” I said, “I don’t know. They are sending me to Hong Kong or somewhere.” And he said, “Why don’t you come out to San Francisco and work for me?” I said, “Can I work for you?” He said, “yeah.” I said, “Is it…” “You’ll like it,” he said. So I called the State Department and quit. Bought a car and drove across the country to San Francisco where I joined what was then called the Committee for Free Asia. It later became the Asia Foundation and still exists. But originally it was the Committee for Free Asia and I went back to work for my original boss Jim Stewart, who taught me so many things about people and about Asia and about languages. And I worked for him for ten years. And my job was to go out and run programs and projects to stop the spread of Communism in Asia and find things and ways of getting people to rally in support of democracy and free enterprise and motherhood and against sin. And it was wonderful. And they paid me to do it. And I learned stuff. And I traveled the great arc of Asia from Korea to Afghanistan. And back again from Afghanistan, to when it was then called West Pakistan to India to what was called East Pakistan and in the south to what was then called Ceylon. Now of course those are Bangladesh which is East Pakistan and Ceylon is now Sri Lanka and Burma is now, what is Burma now, whatever it is. Rangoon is became Yangon. And in every single case there were countries in trouble. China had fallen to the Communists, all of China. And it was a threat and the possibility that they would take over all of Asia, but they didn’t. So I worked for the Committee for Free Asia, Asia Foundation, for ten years. And I got a post-graduate degree in experience, country by country, and along the way picked up a few languages. It was practical training for the service of our country. I loved it.

Interviewer: You’ve had just outstanding experiences in your life.

Reed: Dumb Irish luck, I think.

5.  

Interviewer: You’ve touched on this a little bit. Well actually quite well. You place a lot of importance on learning about the cultures that you are going to be working with.

Reed: Yeah

Interviewer: Getting local help.

Reed: Yup.

Interviewer: Publishing things producing things, presenting things in local context.

Reed: Yeah.

Interviewer: Okay, you’ve talked a little bit how important this has been. Can you talk a little bit about how you get things to resonant with your target audience and how you really first realized that the challenge of this cultural myopia, that you don’t just arrive in a country and do things the way you’ve always done them at home. Do you have anything else that you might want to add? How you bridge these problems in international PR. Do you think these are important to building trust and credibility?

Reed: Absolutely the task is to persuade people to do something. And the best way to persuade them is by understanding and making friends with, and using the channels that they find that they open naturally. In the case of Korea, for example. When I first went to Korea, the Koreans had been speaking Japanese for 50 years with an occupation power. They were yearning to speak Korean. A lot of the people who came to work in embassies, American and others, or in international agencies, whether it’s Red Cross or whatever, spoke Japanese. Japanese was a popular language of study. Japanese was a dominant language of big country. And everybody knew the Koreans spoke Japanese. And so they came in, speaking Japanese. I found out the first day the Koreans didn’t want to speak Japanese. That was what the occupying power head kept them submerged under for 50 years. They wanted to speak Korean. But the people who went over there had no idea about Korean. A few missionaries, Christian missionaries, spoke Korean and had bothered to study the language and there were a few books as a consequence of that. And a few ex-patriot Koreans had tried to teach people in other countries to speak Korean, notably in Shanghai and in Hawaii, and even in Washington. It became quickly obvious to me that we didn’t want to be speaking Japanese to Koreans. We want to speak Korean to Koreans. And that, that newspaper sent out by mail did that, that was a profound lesson for me to learn. Really, really in the Philippines, the United States had been an occupying force from the, from the war, Spanish American War, 1898-1900. For a long time the United States had been. And under the Tidings-McDuffie Act, had agreed to liberate the Philippines and make them an independent country in 1946. That was interrupted by the war but the United States kept its pledge and the country became independent and nobody in America spoke [inaudible]. They insisted the Philippines speak English. Well the Spanish had insisted they speak Spanish. That didn’t take. We insisted they speak English. That took halfway. But any American who could speak local language [inaudible] and its relative languages [inaudible] and [inaudible], and so forth really had an edge. It became quickly evident to me that if I wanted an edge, I’d learn to speak [inaudible]. It couldn’t be that tough. I mean the Philippines were speaking it. But that was a profound lesson to learn and it helped me a lot everywhere I went. Or if you are going to speak English in the Philippines speak Philippine English. That requires certain word selection and a certain accent but it’s very effective.

6.

Interviewer: Over your experience, over the years can you identify a time when you came upon unethical persuasion, and how did you handle that and how did you confront it and how did you resolve it?

Reed: Well the CPSUB, that is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Bolshevik, the original revolutionary group who, by the way, had an apologist by the name of John Reed who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. I’ve been trying to live that down. He was from Oregon. It’s a boring book. Beatty was the fellow’s name. Beatty something William, Warren Beatty played him, played John Reed in the movies. Terrible! The, the early pronouncements of the Communist Party which sought global domination and the conquest of all countries and sent it out that that was what they would do, had parties in every country and would take them over, were flawed right from the beginning, because they said things that weren’t true. I read the early manifestos, the Communist Manifesto and when What is to be Done? one of the great textbooks of communism and realized that they were bound to fail but were time because they weren’t telling the truth. And that impressed me very much and made me realize that I wasn’t just telling the truth because it was nice or the right thing to do, but because it was a winning, a winning ticket. It was the way to win the war, a way to win the world, a way to win men’s hearts. The truth shall make you free. And that, that experience in the Far East of seeing and reading and dealing with what the various Communist elements were using to persuade people in different countries to accept and to undertake the Communist regime taught me a lot about the truth. And that applies in commercial public relations as much as it does political public relations. When the, when the Communists were in the early days after WWII were really pushing and when Mao Tse Tung was consolidating his power, the Russians supplied textbooks to Japanese students in Japan at university level. Books about geography. Well the Committee for Free Asia guy and an academic pal discovered these geography books, which had the maps in the wrong place. That the lines were not drawn honestly. So they said I was on a visit and we had already done a project with collecting garden seeds for vegetables for the Philippines called Seeds for Democracy and we on the tabletop in a restaurant had sketched out books for Asian students project. We would get the geography classes of university students in the United States to donate their used textbooks and we’d take care of shipping them out and getting them into the hands of university students in Japan, knowing that if they were published in the United States that the lines would be correct for where the countries were and the descriptions of the countries would be accurate and truthful. And the Communists-supplied textbooks for geography be thrown out in the trash. And we did that. And it happened. This was profound. No one heard about it. No publicity was made about it. But tens of thousands of university students got the straight truth on where the Soviet Union ended and where whatever it was began, and American university students participated and supported that. I liked that.

Interviewer: So did Arthur Page. That was one of his principles. Tell the truth.

Reed: Absolutely. It works. I mean, never mind whether you think it’s moral or not. And I do think it’s moral. It works. That taught me, those kinds of things taught me a lot that is, was later applicable to working for commercial clients.

10.

Interviewer: Yes. Well let’s look at kind of winding this discussion up. But one thing

Reed: I think we’ve been speaking for about four or five days haven’t we? I don’t know if this has been of any use to you at all?

Interviewer: Oh absolutely. Let me ask you quickly if for what what accomplishments are you most proud of in your life? Can you put your finger on something and say oh I know what that is?

Reed: Bayanihan

Interviewer: Say that again.

Reed: [inaudible]Bayanihan.

Interviewer: Will you talk a little bit about that?

Reed: I thought everybody knew about it, but goodness gracious. These are Bayanihan girls.

interviewer: Okay.

Reed: Here’s the problem. After WWII and after the independence granted to the Philippines by the Tidings-McDuffie Act took place in 1946. And after the Hukbalahaps to some extent were subdued in central Luzon, these were the revolutionaries, the left wing revolutionaries and the people the Muslims in the southern islands of the Philippines, notably Mindanao, were pacified and things were back to sort of normal by 1950. This is five years after the war ’55. Things were calm. The university students were radicalized as they had been in the United States if you remember the 50s and 60s in the United States. Well, copycat Philippines was like that. There were all these left wing beard-growing hippies of, Philippine type hippies, and so on and so forth. And they wanted to, they didn’t want to go and fight with the with the rebels as it were but they wanted to, there were strikes. There were parades. There were marches. There was all this agitation. And one of the big complaints among these young people who were to be the intellectuals and to be the teachers of the future for the country was that everything was Uncle Sam’s fault. The reason we don’t have it. The reason we aren’t. The reason we can’t. The reason… it was all Uncle Sam’s fault. And so the propaganda internally in the Philippines was against anything American. Uncle Money Bags. Well you have two ways to go at that sort of problem. You can say they can say you are the bad guy and you can say no I’m not. So you have the denial avenue. No I didn’t. No I can’t. No I won’t. Or you can use enfilade PR. I love the enfilade system. That’s where you shoot from the side. Instead of straight back or back and forth you shoot from the angle. Enfilade PR. Just as American culture was being decried by Philippine’s so called self-established or self-styled nationalists; a little group was forming called [inaudible]. [inaudible] it comes from the word byon meaning people and [inaudible] people working together. Great concept. And it was the name of a dance group. It was a group started at the Philippines Women’s University. You like the sound of this already don’t you? And they had gone out and done a lot of research through the PE department, physical education because dancing is healthy. But later through the whole university and they had learned that in all these islands, 7,100 islands of the Philippines, there were all different kinds of dances and songs and musical instruments. And you could say well there was no national Deutschland Uber Alles. No they had something stronger. They had this whole woven network [inaudible] working together. What a great thing to promote. To be in favor of Philippine culture. All they needed was recognition outside their own country. The way to get recognition - drill the company and take them on tour. Send back the newspaper clippings of how well they were received in Paris or in Washington and all of a, and that’s what happened. And all of a sudden in the Philippines there were a dozen more [inaudible] groups all over the country promoting their own culture saying we are proud of our culture. Nobody ever paid attention to our culture before. We have it now. And it’s wonderful and it’s beautiful. And all the critics of America are gone because there is something that is alive and wonderful. That’s great. Fiftieth anniversary of [inaudible] is in October this year. I’ll be going out to Manila.

Interviewer: [inaudible]

Reed: That’s a PR program in the way of no press releases but in the way of an action that has the result that’s positive and useful and at the same time without saying so crushes all these complaints. That’s PR in action, I think.