White House Press Release

13 # 453 IMMEDIATE RELEASE JANUARY 10, 1946 The following letter, outlining the proposals of the Department of State for the future overseas information service of the Department, has been received by the President from the Secretary of State: December 31, 1945 My President: On August 31 you issued an Executive Order trans- ferring to the Department of State the overseas information functions of the Office of War Information and the Office of Inter-American Affairs. You ordered them to be consolidated, until December 31, in an Interim International Information Service within the Department. At tho same time you asked me to study our foreign informational needs and to formulate during the renainder of this calendar year the program to be conducted on a continuing basis. The overseas information functions of the war agencies in this field have been transferred and consolidated, as you directed. Their transferred personnel has been reduced by half, and many of their functions have been lended. The study which you requested from me has been made, and on January 1 a new Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs, within the Department, will begin to con- duct those activities of the former war agencies which I feel should be carried on in peacetime in the national interest. All of this consolidation, reduction and planning has taken place without a break, anywhere in the world, in the effort to present what you described on August 31 as a "full and fair picture of American life and of the aims and policies of the United States Government." There never was a time, even in the midst of war, when it was so necessary to replace prejudice with truth, distortion with balance, and suspicion with understanding. The past four months have imposed critically im- portant tasks upon our information officers in every country. Many of them have been serving in distant posts, cut off from their homes and families, uncertain about their pay and status, yet they have carried on in the finest traditions of American foreign service. I should like to commend them, and those who have continued servicing them at home, for living up to the trust which their country placed in them. Detailed proposals for the future overseas infor- mation service, in terms of money and personnel required after July 1, 1946, have been submitted to the Burcau of the Budget for submission to you and to the Congress. These proposals call for the maintenance of American libraries of information abroad, the supplying of documentary and bac- ground material by wireless and by mail to our missions overseas, and scoring of documentary films into foreign languages, the continued publication of a Russian-language magazine for distribution in the Soviet Union, the con- tinuing supply of visual materials about the United States, and the maintenance in sixty-tow countries of smell staffs to conduct our informational and cultural relations, under the direct supervision of the chiefs of our diplomatic missions. (OVER)