COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS

CLARENCE CANNON, Missouri, Chairman

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78th

V.20

NATIONAL WAR AGENCIES APPROPRIATION BILL, 1945

HEARINGS CONDUCTED BY THE SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, IN CHARGE OF DEFICIENCY APPROPRIATIONS, MESSRS. CLARENCE CANNON (CHAIRMAN), CLIFTON A. WOODRUM, LOUIS LUDLOW, J. BUELL SNYDER, EMMET O'NEAL, LOUIS C. RABAUT, JED JOHNSON, JOHN TABER, RICHARD B. WIGGLESWORTH, WILLIAM P. LAMBERTSON, AND D. LANE POWERS, ON THE DAYS FOLLOWING, NAMELY:

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 1944.

OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION

STATEMENTS OF ELMER DAVIS, DIRECTOR; EDWARD KLAUBER, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR; CHARLES M. HULTEN, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR FOR MANAGEMENT; GEORGE HEALY, JR., DIRECTOR, DOMESTIC BRANCH; NOBLE CATCHART, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, DOMESTIC BRANCH; EDWARD W. BARRETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OVERSEAS BRANCH; THURMAN L. BARNARD, ASSISTANT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, OVERSEAS BRANCH; FERDINAND KUHN, JR., DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OVERSEAS BRANCH; OWEN LATTIMORE, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OVERSEAS BRANCH; LOUIS G. COWAN, CHIEF OF THE NEW YORK OFFICE; JAMES WELDON, CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF COMMUNICATIONS FACILITIES; KENNETH FRY, ASSISTANT CHIEF OF THE SAN FRANCISCO OFFICE; PHILIP HAMBLET, CHIEF, LONDON OFFICE; AND GEORGE TAYLOR, ASSISTANT CHIEF, PACIFIC REGION

SALARIES AND EXPENSES

The CHAIRMAN. Taking up the Budget estimate, Mr. Davis, in House Document 521, for 1945, the aggregate is $64,390,000, as follows:

SALARIES AND EXPENSES, OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION

Salaries and expenses: for all necessary expenses of the Office of War Information, including the employment of a Director and Associate Director at not exceeding $12,000 and $10,000 per annum, respectively; not to exceed $105,000 for the temporary employment in the United States of persons by contract or otherwise without regard to the civil service and classification laws; employment of aliens; employment of persons outside the continental limits of the United States without regard to the civil-service and classification laws; travel expenses (not to exceed $404,355 for travel within the continental limits of the United States); expenses of transporting employees and their effects from their homes to their places of employment in a foreign country and return to their homes in the United States; purchase of radio time and purchase or rental of facilities for 1

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radio transmission; purchase, rental, construction, improvement, maintenance, and operation of facilities for radio transmission and reception, including real property outside the continental limits of the United States and temporary sentry stations, guard barracks, and enclosures for the security of short-wave broadcasting facilities within the continental limits of the United States without regard to the provisions of section 355, Revised Statutes (40 U. S. C. 255) and other provisions of law affecting the purchase or rental of land and the construction of buildings thereon; advertising in foreign neswpapers without regard to section 3828, Revised Statutes (44 U. S. C. 324); printing and binding (not to exceed $2,710,389, for such expenses within the continental limits of the United States), including printing and binding outside the continental limits of the United States without regard to section 11 of the Act of March 1, 1919 (44 U. S. C. 111); purchase or rental and operation of photographic, reproduction, printing, duplicating, communication, and other machines, equipment, and devices; exchange of funds without regard to section 3651, Revised Statutes; purchase of 488 motor-propelled passenger-carrying vehicles of which 486 for use outside the continental limits of the United States, may be acquired without regard to statutory limitations as to price and authority to purchase; acquisition, production, and free distribution of publications, phonograph_records, radio transcriptions, motion-picture films, photographs and pictures, educational materials, and such other items as the Director may deem necessary to carry out the program of the Office of War Information, and sale or rental of such items by contract or otherwise to firms or individuals for use outside the continental limits of the United States; purchase, repair, and cleaning of uniforms for use by porters, drivers, messengers, watchmen, and other custodial employees outside continental United States; such gratuitous expenses of travel and subsistence as the Director deems advisable in the fields of education, travel, radio, press, and cinema; not to exceed $175,000 for entertainment of officials and others in the fields of education, radio, press, and cinema of other countries; payment of the United States' share of the expenses of the maintenance, in cooperation with any other of the United Nations, of organizations and activities designed to receive and disseminate information relative to the prosecution of the war; $64,390,000: Provided, That, exclusive of the contingency fund mentioned in the last proviso hereof, not more than $49,562,101 (including living and quarters allowances) shall be allocated to the Overseas Operations Branch and not more than $2,464,633 shall be allocated to the Domestic Operations Branch: Provided further, That notwithstanding the provisions of section 3679, Revised Statutes (31 U. S. C. 665), the Office of War Information is authorized in making contracts for the use of international short-wave radio stations and facilities, to agree on behalf of the United States to indemnify the owners and operators of said radio stations and facilities from such funds as may be hereafter appropriated for the purpose, against loss or damage on account of injury to persons or property arising from such use of said radio stations and facilities: Provided further, That not to exceed $600,000 of this appropriation shall be available to meet emergencies of a confidential character to be expended under the direction of the Director, who shall make a certificate of the amount of such expenditure which he may think it advisable not to specify and every such certificate shall be deemed a sufficient voucher for the amount therein certified: Provided further, That $10,000,000 of this appropriation shall not be available for expenditure unless the Director of the Office of War Information, with the approval of the President, shall determine that such funds in addition to the other funds provided herein are necessary for carrying on activities in conjunction with actual or projected military operations and that accounts for these funds may be merged with regular accounts.

You received, in the 1944 appropriation, first, from the National War Agencies Act, $33,222,504, and from the first supplemental National Defense Act, $5,000,000, or a total of $38,222,504, so that you are requesting here an increase over 1944 of $26,167,496. Mr. DAVIS. Yes.

GENERAL STATEMENT

The CHAIRMAN. This increase seems to be spread over all of your organization, Mr. Davis.

Mr. DAVIS. Over the Overseas Branch; the Domestic Branch is substantially identical.

The CHAIRMAN. Leaving out the liquidation expenses, in 1944, in connection with curtailment of the Domestic Branch there is an increase for that branch in 1945 of a little less than $60,000. The Overseas Branch, including the contingency fund of $10,000,000 shows an increase of about $26,000,000, and without the contingency fund it is approximately $16,000,000, most of which is in the outpost service, and your general administrative expense shows a slight increase.

We would like to have a statement, Mr. Davis, advising us of any changes in policy as to operations and control, any changes in your organization since you were last before the committee, any changes in directive personnel at the top of your organization, and the general scope of the operations in 1944 and a discussion of your program for

1945.

We will not interrupt you in your statement, and then we will take up a discussion of the Overseas Branch and the Domestic Branch, and we will then have statements from the heads of each of those branches, and at the conclusion of your statement we will inquire of you as to the general policy and will take up with the members of your staff the details of the estimate.

Mr. DAVIS. May I proceed?

The CHAIRMAN. Yes, Mr. Davis.

Mr. DAVIS. The Office of War Information requests an increased appropriation for its work in what will be, in all likelihood, the decisive year of the war. The military operations of the coming year, if successful, may well bring the war in Europe to a victorious conclusion before the end of fiscal 1945, while at the same time inflicting crippling blows on the Japanese. But to attain these ends, as we all know, will require the greatest military effort the United States has ever put forth, an effort which will probably entail greater strains on the civilian population than the country has known since 1865. O. W. I. has been charged with the duty of supporting that military effort, and almost all of the increase asked for in the appropriation for the Overseas Branch is for work projected in response to the demands of military commanders in northern and southern Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. Meanwhile our Domestic Branch-which is asking for funds for operations at its present level-will be charged with the responsibility of explaining Government policies to the home public, telling the American people why they are asked to do certain things, and to refrain from doing certain others, in support of a war effort which this year will reach its climax.

O. W. I. is purely a war agency, existing only for the duration of the war, and created solely because it seemed a necessary contribution toward the winning of the war. It is our duty to do our job just as efficiently as we can; and to avoid waste, whether of time, effort, or money, because waste of any of these ingredients of our work would reduce our efficiency. But we should be failing in our duty if we did not ask the Congress for as much money as seems to us necessary to do the job that has been assigned to us. The owner of an automobile could save money by never buying any oil, but it would not be real economy; nor would it be if we did not ask for sufficient funds for the effective operation of our Domestic Branch, which serves as an essential lubricant for the information machinery of government on the home front. Our Overseas Branch, on the other

hand, is in large part an auxiliary of the Army, and like the Army its business is to get a job done as efficiently as possible, and as economically as the demands of efficiency permit; but the essential point is not how much we are going to spend, but how much we can spend effectively, to the attainment of results that serve the national interest. This year seems likely to be the pay-off, when we shall cash in on the results of most of the military activity, and most of the propaganda activity, that has gone on since the war began. But we cannot do so without intensified military activity, and intensified propaganda activity too. O. W. I.'s expenditure this year is no more to be measured by that of past years than the amount of ammunition our artillery is going to shoot off this year should be limited to the amount it shot off last year. In both cases the criterion is simply, how much is it going to take to do the job which has been assigned to O. W. I.— a job which, if it is performed efficiently, will shorten the war in some degree and thereby save American lives, as well as the taxpayers' money?

The Congress last year decided to restrict the activities of our Domestic Branch by the elimination of publications and posters, of motion-picture production, and of our field service. This had the effect of making our Domestic Branch largely, though not entirely, what it had been in some degree theretofore-a staff operation, coordinating the information activities not only of Government agencies, but of private interests which contribute their effort to the furtherance of the Government's war programs. Basically our Domestic Branch now has two functions, as its director will later explain in more detaila news function and a service function. Both, however, are designed to fulfill the directions given us by the President to coordinate the informational activities of Federal departments and agencies in order to insure a clear and coherent flow of information to the public.

Our domestic News Bureau, while producing from time to time news reports on general aspects of the war effort, is chiefly engaged in bringing together and coordinating news from other agencies, to make sure that as clear and authoritative a story as possible is given to the people; and thus to eliminate insofar as possible those conflicits and confusions in official statements that were so frequent 2 years ago, and were one of the chief causes of the public demand for the creation of a single Government information agency. Our speech clearance unit makes sure that officials of the executive branch, when they speak on matters outside their own field of authority, reflect the total policy of the Government. Our Foreign News Bureau not only transmits news from foreign sources not otherwise available to newspapers and press associations but performs an extremely useful function in exposing and denaturing enemy propaganda; besides serving in emergencies as the most rapid means of transmission of war correspondents' dispatches to the American press. Our Bureau of Special Services provides information not only in response to public inquiries, but for the needs of Members of Congress and agencies of the executive branch; and our Book and Magazine Bureau serves the long-range news function of bringing information about the Government war effort, and about the needs of Government war programs, to the attention of magazine editors and book publishers who in due course transmit it to millions of readers.