Pentagon Guests Are Primed for Promotion

The Pentagon did not have to wait long to get what it wanted from Martha Zoller.

The day after she returned from a weeklong Defense Department tour of military bases around the country, the conservative radio talk show host was regaling her listeners in Gainesville, Ga., with stories of all she had seen and done.

She and her 53 counterparts -- university presidents, newspaper publishers, business executives, elected officials -- had shared a private breakfast with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, a reception with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a last lunch on American soil with soldiers headed to Iraq.

They had trained on flight simulators at Moody Air Force Base, fired rocket launchers at Ft. Bliss, skimmed across Chesapeake Bay in a Coast Guard cutter, toured a nuclear-powered carrier off San Diego and taken abuse from a Marine drill instructor on Parris Island. Three businessmen caught enough of the “oooh-rah” spirit to return home with buzz cuts.

“We just had a terrific, terrific time,” Zoller reported in her May 2 broadcast on WDUN-AM, the first of several about her trip.

While other federal agencies have been accused of running propaganda campaigns recently by covertly hiring friendly columnists and distributing mock newsreels to broadcasters, the military has for decades used strikingly transparent programs to achieve comparable ends.

Every year, thousands of influential civilians are invited to fly in Air Force jets and cruise on Navy warships, all while being fed a diet rich in military boosterism. Many pay for the privilege -- or have their employers do so -- although the programs are significantly subsidized by the government.

The oldest and most prominent is the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, or JCOC, the tour taken by Zoller and the others. About 70 times since the program’s founding in 1948, the Pentagon has used JCOC to impress civilian leaders with the wizardry of its weapons and the determination of its service members.

The JCOC website explains that participants must be “regionally or nationally influential citizens.” The program’s nomination form makes it clear that a participant must have “an established regional or national audience” and must be “willing to commit to sharing what he/she learns during JCOC with his/her audience.”

Several weeks after this year’s trip, Pentagon officials could already count their successes.

On her first day back, JCOC participant Jennifer J. Burns, an Arizona state legislator, took to the House floor in Phoenix to convey her admiration for the military.

“What we really learned,” the Republican told colleagues, “is that our superiority comes from the men and women who volunteer to serve.”

The following week, another participant, Thomas J. Anton, a lawyer from Bakersfield, appeared on Fox News Channel to promote a Pentagon program that encourages volunteerism in support of the troops.

In past years, attendees have returned to write glowing op-ed columns, like a 2004 piece by Hawaii businessman T. Michael May in the Honolulu Advertiser: “The U.S. Military Is Something to Be Proud Of.”

The previous year, Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, wrote in his newspaper that “the caliber and spirit of the forces were evident even on a one-week tour.”

“These people on the trip become fabulous ambassadors for the men and women in the military,” said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of Defense, who oversees JCOC. “And that’s exciting for us.”

Barber rejected the notion that the tours were propagandistic. “What we’re doing,” she said, “is educating people about their military and where their taxpayer dollar is going, and they get to make up their own judgment and assessment.”

She said the program carried special import during wartime because participants gained “a greater appreciation for the sacrifice our men and women in the military have volunteered to make.”

But some critics question the military’s motives, saying that JCOC and related programs provide a sanitized and one-sided view, with a heavy focus on technological might, in an effort to win support for Pentagon acquisition budgets.

“This is the same administration that doesn’t want to show us what the ultimate sacrifice looks like,” noted Nancy Snow, an assistant professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton and the author of two books on propaganda in diplomacy and war. “Why don’t we see the body bags coming in?”

Since 1951, Congress has regularly included clauses in appropriations bills banning the use of government funds “for publicity or propaganda purposes” within the United States. There has been little congressional guidance, however, about how to define propaganda.

That has left the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, to identify prohibited activities as those that are self-aggrandizing, covert or purely partisan.

Last year, for instance, the GAO found that the Department of Health and Human Services had violated the prohibition by producing and distributing prepackaged video news stories that did not identify the agency as the source.

The GAO is now examining contracts between various federal agencies and media entities, like the $240,000 paid by the Department of Education to commentator Armstrong Williams to promote President Bush’s No Child Left Behind plan.

In 1970, during the Vietnam War, Sen. J. William Fulbright, an Arkansas Democrat, inventoried the military’s publicity programs in “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” a book that was quickly followed by a CBS documentary called “The Selling of the Pentagon.”

Subsequent GAO examinations -- the last conducted in 1973 -- found that JCOC’s actual costs to the government exceeded the amount claimed by the Pentagon by two to four times.

The Navy’s guest cruise program gained notoriety in 2001, when an American submarine, with the commander apparently distracted by 16 civilians on board, crashed into a Japanese fishing trawler and killed nine people. In response, the skipper was forced to retire and Rumsfeld ordered that civilians be banned from the controls of Navy vessels.

The program has continued, hosting 7,000 people last year.

The goal of JCOC, according to its website, “is to reach individuals who have neutral, negative or unformed opinions” on the military. But an examination of recent JCOC classes suggests that the program largely preaches to the converted, arming sympathetic “influencers” with the information and enthusiasm they need to make the military’s case.

“No, I certainly wasn’t neutral,” said Zoller, the daughter of a World War II prisoner of war who has frequently used her broadcasts and columns to support military causes. “I wasn’t always confident that all our tax dollars were being spent well, and I still think there’s waste. But it’s much more efficient than I thought it was.”

Many of the participants -- who are selected by a Pentagon committee from the hundreds nominated by military officials and JCOC alumni -- have long histories of involvement with the armed services. Others hold important positions in communities with heavy military presences.

As the representative of a district that includes several bases, Arizona lawmaker Burns had sponsored a number of pro-military bills. Anton, the Bakersfield lawyer, was nominated at least partly because he had helped raise money to buy steak dinners for sailors on Navy ships. Raul Mas, a banker from South Florida, had spearheaded a fundraising campaign for the families of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Dawn B. Bannwolf, meanwhile, is customer advocate for the Bank of America Military Bank in San Antonio and chairwoman of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce’s “Celebrate America’s Military Week.”

“Before the trip, I had a very healthy respect and strong support of the military and the missions they undertook,” Bannwolf said. “I probably didn’t have an understanding of the diversity of the types of things they did.”

Pentagon officials said they could not precisely calculate the portion of JCOC’s cost that is subsidized by tax dollars. Each participant paid $2,100 for this year’s tour, from April 24 to May 1. That amount, according to Barber, covered lodging, meals and incidentals, including the numerous commemorative caps, pins, jackets, T-shirts, duffels and patches the participants brought home.

It did not, however, cover the estimated $75,000 cost of flying the group on a C-17 military transport, which took six flights over seven days (previous trips have been even more far-flung, taking participants to bases in Europe and Asia). Nor does it pay the approximately $153,000 in salaries for the Air Force lieutenant colonel and the Marine major whose full-time mission is to plan JCOC.

From 1994 to 1999, the program was directed by Linda Tripp. She was reassigned after she provided prosecutors with tapes of her conversations with Monica S. Lewinsky about the White House intern’s affair with President Clinton.

Thirteen military officials, including an Air Force brigadier general and a Pentagon accountant, took the most recent tour. A photographer and videographer were always on hand. The cost of lodging and meals for the escorts came to about $10,000, according to Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

Anne Cohen, a New York lawyer who participated in JCOC this year, said she recognized that promotional activities would always be scrutinized in times of tight budgets.

“Maybe I’m biased because I was a beneficiary,” she said, “but I actually think it’s money probably pretty well-spent in terms of the impact on the people we saw who felt they were getting a visit from the outside world, from the interaction we had with people up and down the line, and from what we take back.”

While many of the exercises viewed by the participants were part of routine training, others were scheduled especially for JCOC, like the flight of a B-1 bomber from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota to Moody Air Force Base in south Georgia. Keck said the flight constituted “a preplanned training mission, at no additional cost to the government.”

Though some participants paid their own way, many said their employers underwrote their trips. The University of South Florida paid for its president, Judy L. Genshaft, to attend, and New Mexico State University paid the way for its president, Michael V. Martin.

Many of the participants said that although the Pentagon clearly controlled the images and messages conveyed during the tour, they did not feel it was scripted. No topics were off-limits, they said, though Rumsfeld insisted he would not discuss the coming round of base closures. The participants had ready access to the brass and the grunts.

“Was it a PR exercise? Absolutely,” said Dee Carpenter, publisher and president of the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., home of the world’s largest naval base. “There certainly was a lot of gee-whiz stuff they showed us that was designed to impress. But they also gave us our chances to talk to people. We saw a broad cross-sample.”

Most of the discussion, according to participants, centered on weapons systems and war-fighting capability. There was little discourse about recruitment problems, the abuse of detainees in the war on terrorism, high rates of accidental deaths and injuries, the treatment of gays, and the heavy reliance on the National Guard and Reserves.

“They never really went to the issue of policy,” said Vance Van Petten, executive director of the Producers Guild of America. “They went to the issue of supporting our troops. That’s what they’re so smart about. They let us meet these people and hear their commitment. You’d have to be completely inhuman not to be touched by it.”

Van Petten said the Pentagon’s goal was “to drum up as much support as possible for the troops, to prevent what happened with the Vietnam War when many people who served came back to a very antagonistic public. That was mentioned several times.”

Carpenter, one of nine media executives on this year’s tour, said his experience would “absolutely” influence his approach to military issues considered by the editorial board he runs.

“In some ways it will be good, and in some ways bad,” he said. “But you’d have to be crazy to spend a week and not come away with some very definite opinions.”

In these days of an all-volunteer military, in which many Americans have little direct connection to the armed forces, the JCOC and other Pentagon publicity programs have provided civilians with exposure to some of the inner workings of the nation’s defenses.

In addition, the programs have given the military services a chance to make their cases to newsrooms, where defense policies are often intensely scrutinized.

Some publishers said they would write columns about their experiences. The two participants with the most direct connection to newsrooms -- Jim Amoss, editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, and Adam Belmar, senior Washington producer for ABC’s “Good Morning America” -- declined to be interviewed.

A number of those on the trip described it as a compelling survey course on the modern military, covering topics as diverse as the increased responsibilities of the Coast Guard and the Pentagon’s emphasis on cooperation among the branches.

“The military has a very nuanced and complex story to tell that is best rolled out by show and tell,” said John M.B. O’Connor, chief executive of J.H. Whitney Investment Management in New York. “As a taxpayer, I feel this was money well-spent, because I want to know what’s going on, and this audience is now inarguably better-equipped to tell the story.”