When the State Department Used Dizzy Gillespie and Jazz to Fight the Cold War (1956)

It’s been said that the United States won the Cold War without firing a shot — a statement, as P. J. O’Rourke once wrote, that doubtless surprised veterans of Korea and Vietnam. But it wouldn’t be entirely incorrect to call the long stare-down between the U.S. and the Soviet Union a battle of ideas. Dwight Eisenhower certainly saw it that way, a worldview that inspired the 1956 creation of the President’s Special International Program for Participation in International Affairs, which aimed to...