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Ickes was the chairman of the committee. I was a member of it. Henry Stimson was a member of it. He almost immediately asked if he could send John McCloy as his substitute, saying McCloy knew a great deal more about it than any of the rest of us did, which proved to be the truth, and certainly more than he did. I can't remember who the other Cabinet members were, but we brought in one or two other high government people.
We met every week. The idea was first to evaluate such items of German propaganda as we could lay our hands on that came through the intelligence and information services, and, second, to discuss and try to plan out a method of overcoming it. We actually never got very far on a plan. To this day I have never quite known why we broke up, but I always have suspected that there was a leak about this committee. But I never knew. It just suddenly disintegrated and didn't meet again.
The material was extraordinarily interesting. For instance, McCloy had some transcripts of the actual things that were said by this man in Stuttgart and his method of utilizing some certain wave lengths on the radio, getting ideas over to England, France, the northern countries and to some sort of connections that got them over to the USA. It was very shocking to realize that such propaganda could be conceived, carried on and had the deliberate purpose of weakening morale. It was
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