Chapter 7 explores a case study of how American PR interests, business interests, and government interests all aligned to help overthrow the elected government of Guatemala in 1954. Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz proposed land reforms that threatened the power of the US-owned United Fruit Company, the biggest employer and landowner in Guatemala. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) fought against the Arbenz regime, using PR and its connections in Washington to try and influence the Eisenhower administration and the public. The man in charge of UFCO’s PR strategy was Edward Bernays. While Bernays alone did not make the Eisenhower administration support a coup in Guatemala, his work to publicize events in Central America contributed to the governmental and elite opinion that the Arbenz regime was part of a global communist plot that threatened US interests.

Chapter 6 looks at how the Cold War strengthened connections between PR firms and the US government. In the heightened Cold War context of the late 1940s, the US government embraced propaganda and looked to the PR industry to help it promote its foreign policy. The industry happily obliged. It did so most notably through the Crusade for Freedom campaign that raised money for Radio Free Europe, which broadcast American propaganda behind the iron curtain. What the American people did not know was that Radio Free Europe’s creator, the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE), was not an organically created citizens’ organization. It was in fact a front organization created by the CIA. Arthur Page knew, and he was happy to help regardless. Other PR leaders, such as Edward Bernays, urged more effective use of the government’s overseas information services, such as the United States Information Agency (USIA).

In August 1953, the United States and Great Britain overthrew the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq with assistance from Iranian elements and the shah. The coup was motivated by American concerns that an Iranian “collapse” was imminent, one that would pave the way for a takeover by Iranian communists and threaten Western control of Middle Eastern oil reserves. Mosaddeq’s attempts to construct an “oil-less” economy, with some assistance from American developmentalists working in the Point Four program, may have succeeded in disentangling Iran from dependence on oil revenues. The coup squashed this experiment, and in 1954 the United States engineered a new oil agreement between the shah’s government and a consortium of oil companies, reintegrating Iranian oil into the global market and tying Iran’s economic future to the production of petroleum.