Edward Bernays was considered the godfather of American propaganda, the dark art politely referred to in corporate circles as public relations and marketing. During a lengthy career—he died at age 103—Bernays successfully sold women on the idea that smoking was preferable to eating and that Lucky Strikes were to be brandished as feminist ‘torches of freedom’ (while privately imploring his wife to quit). Later, he leveraged manufactured populism and credulous journalists to warn of a communist threat in Guatemala, eventually helping engineer a CIA-backed coup that installed a dictator more friendly to the interests of another client, United Fruit Company.
“A rubber stamp inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of tabloids and the profundities of history, but quite innocent of original thought,” was how Bernays summarized his methodology.
