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 use Amer­i­can cul­ture to improve the coun­try’s image around the world. (That same year, Eisen­how­er also signed off on the con­struc­tion of the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem, such was the coun­try’s ambi­tion at the time.)

For an unam­bigu­ous­ly Amer­i­can art form, one could hard­ly do bet­ter than jazz, which also had the advan­tage of coun­ter­bal­anc­ing U.S.S.R. pro­pa­gan­da focus­ing on the U.S.’ trou­bled race rela­tions. And so the State Depart­ment picked a series of “jazz ambas­sadors” to send on care­ful­ly planned world tours, begin­ning with Dizzy Gille­spie and his eigh­teen-piece inter­ra­cial band (with the late Quin­cy Jones in the role of music direc­tor).

Start­ing in March of 1956, Gille­spie’s ten-week tour fea­tured dates all over Europe, Asia, and South Amer­i­ca. These would­n’t be his last State Depart­ment-spon­sored tours abroad: in the videos above, you can see a clip from his per­for­mance in Ger­many in 1960. This tour­ing even result­ed in live albums like Dizzy in Greece and World States­man.

Oth­er jazz ambas­sadors would fol­low: Louis Arm­strong (who quit over the high-school inte­gra­tion cri­sis in Lit­tle Rock), Duke Elling­ton, Ben­ny Good­man, and Dave Brubeck (whose dim view of the pro­gram inspired the musi­cal The Real Ambas­sadors). But none went quite so far in pur­su­ing their cul­tur­al-polit­i­cal inter­ests as Gille­spie, who announced him­self as a write-in can­di­date in the 1964 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. He promised not only to rename the White House the Blues house, but also to appoint a cab­i­net includ­ing Miles Davis as Direc­tor of the CIA, Charles Min­gus as Sec­re­tary of Peace, Arm­strong as Sec­re­tary of Agri­cul­ture, and Elling­ton as Sec­re­tary of State. This jazzed-up admin­is­tra­tion was, alas, nev­er to take pow­er, but the music itself has left more of a lega­cy than any gov­ern­ment could. Sure­ly the fact that I write these words in a café in Korea sound­tracked entire­ly by jazz speaks for itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dizzy Gille­spie Wor­ries About Nuclear & Envi­ron­men­tal Dis­as­ter in Vin­tage Ani­mat­ed Films

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

When Louis Arm­strong Stopped a Civ­il War in The Con­go (1960)

Louis Arm­strong Plays Trum­pet at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids; Dizzy Gille­spie Charms a Snake in Pak­istan

Dizzy Gille­spie Runs for US Pres­i­dent, 1964. Promis­es to Make Miles Davis Head of the CIA

How the CIA Secret­ly Used Jack­son Pol­lock & Oth­er Abstract Expres­sion­ists to Fight the Cold War

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.