Also under Eisenhower, USIA sent hundreds of thousands of books overseas to USIS libraries, subsidizing the U.S. publishing industry in an effort to woo the world’s readers away from the lures of communism. USIA officials carefully vetted books to ensure that only those that supported official U.S. policy and met with positive reception among the American public were designated as “acceptable” to foreign cultures and ticketed for wide cultural export. While the CIA funded and organized a Russian language edition of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, USIA rejected Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and William Lederer’s The Ugly American as far too morally equivocal statements on U.S. participation in the Second Word War and (in Lederer’s case) the ensuing promotion of American-style freedom abroad.

USIA also got into the business of directly bankrolling the publication of books that would promote a positive image of America. [...]