Militant Liberty

Developed by John C. Broger of the Far East Broadcasting Company in 1954 and championed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Arthur Radford, Militant Liberty, a companion program to the Code of Conduct (1955), was one of a number of ideological initiatives supported by the Department of Defense (DoD) during the early days of the Cold War. Along with political, economic, and military means, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations relied on psycho-logical warfare to convince the Soviet Union that the American people were determined to resist communism at home and abroad. A number of policy papers, including George Kennan's Long Telegram (1946) and National Security Council Memorandum-68 (NSC-68; 1950), had brought up the issue of the potential psychological advantage of the Soviets in possess-ing a single party line as opposed to America's pluralistic soci-ety. Both recommended that the government take steps to create a unified national will and character as a deterrent to communist advances. Truman attempted to do so by calling for a program of Universal Military Training (UMT) that, if passed, would have stressed moral and spiritual values for American youth. He also created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951 to coordinate various international [Page 509]propaganda efforts of private and governmental agencies in promoting an evangelical democracy as a model for Third World nations in resisting communism.

President Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, viewed ideas as weapons and supported mili-tary efforts to reach out to the American public with evangeli-cal anticommunism. Such efforts increased after the so-called “prisoner of war scandal,” when 21 Americans held captive by the enemy during the Korean War refused repatriation at the end of that conflict. Although military investigations indicated that the Korean POWs had behaved no less patriotically than POWs had in any war, the DoD claimed that American homes, schools, and churches had failed to teach traditional values and crafted the Code of Conduct to both define proper POW behavior and as the first step in articulating a discern-able national ideology. The military worded the code as ambiguously as possible about what actions POWs would be held accountable for while implying that a new standard of behavior would be expected of all Americans.

Admiral Radford championed Broger's Militant Liberty as a companion program to the Code of Conduct. Militant Liberty preached Americanism with “personal evangelism in the political rather than the religious field” and taught American democracy to militaries in Third World nations, including French Indochina and Guatemala. It also provided a “political religion,” according to its proponents, for revital-izing America's national character. By comparing democ-racy's “sensitive individual conscience” to communism's “annihilated individual conscience,” Broger claimed that it was possible to measure a nation's commitment to authori-tarianism or freedom (by examining its discipline, religion, civics, education, social order, and economics) on a scale of –100 to +100. Admiral Radford hoped that Militant Liberty and Code of Conduct training would give service personnel the ideological armor needed to resist communist indoctri-nation and asked the nation's religious leaders to take a lead-ing role in spreading its principles at home and abroad.

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