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'The Father Of Spin' by Larry Tye

A new spin on Edward Bernays

Sunday, September 27, 1998

By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	The Father Of Spin By Larry Tye Crown $27.50

You would expect to hate a guy like Edward Bernays. As the "father of public relations," he spent most of the 20th century manipulating and exploiting human nature, getting Americans to buy certain products, vote for certain politicians and rally behind certain causes.

His strategy was not simply to extol his clients' products but to shape national trends so they would fit with what his clients offered. Paid handsomely by the powerful and the rich, he was relentless and uncompromising, and rich himself.

But in reading this new biography, subtitled "Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations," you can't help but like the guy, too.

Larry Tye writes that, in addition to advising tobacco companies and monolithic fruit importers, Bernays used his PR skills to help charitable organizations and performing artists. He crusaded for women's' rights and public discussion about sexually transmitted diseases. And he was charming, witty, funny and frank.

It's certainly possible to feel contradictory about Bernays, whose tactics PR students dissect to this day.

But Bernays himself was a bundle of contradictions. Tye, a reporter at the Boston Globe, writes that Bernays convinced women that smoking in public was a form of liberation, yet he urged his wife to quit for health reasons. He was passionate about women's issues, but left most of the housework and child-rearing to his wife.

And although he advised the government of South Vietnam in the early 1960s, he came out against the Vietnam War a decade later.

Who was the real Bernays? Did he have any core beliefs of his own or did he simply believe whatever his clients did? It is difficult to answer these questions after reading Tye's biography. The book overflows with Bernays' accomplishments and details about his life (even about his retirement home), but Tye fails to draw the facts together to paint a portrait of the man. There is little discussion of how, or why, Bernays did it all. And we fail to get a sense of how Bernays' upbringing might have led him to such a unique career.

Tye also passes up the opportunity to discuss how Bernays' strategies might have been influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, who was the brother of Bernays' wife.

Tye, however, does detail the rocky personal relationship between Freud and Bernays.

Oversights aside, the book gives a fine understanding of why public relations is such a big business today. Bernays was successful, and his success inspired other PR practitioners to think big.

Bernays' strategy was to push the country to behave in ways that were favorable to his clients. For example, when the American Tobacco Co. became concerned that women were not buying Lucky Strikes because the green packages clashed with their clothing, Bernays threw lavish "Green Balls" to make green the "in" color.

Similarly, he helped bolster the coffers of a bacon company by convincing Americans to change their eating habits from light breakfasts to bacon and eggs.

He even helped persuade the United States to overthrow a Guatemalan government that was antagonistic toward the interests of United Fruit, a banana importer that was one of his clients.

Perhaps Bernays would not have been as successful in today's society, where there are so many competing media and leisure activities and the population is so ethnically diverse. It would probably be difficult for one person to change America's habits today because there are so many habits.

But from the 1920s through the 1960s, working out of a New York City office, Bernays got results. And he left behind pages of memoirs and personal effects that detailed his very public and powerful life.

Can one believe Bernays' own recollections even though he was a famous exaggerator and sometimes took credit for more than his worth? Tye heavily quotes from Bernays' papers, and one should probably take a lot of that material with a grain of salt.

In the end, Bernays, who died in 1995 at age 103, paved the way for the booming public relations business and the modern presidential campaign, with its heavy emphasis on spin. Maybe he can even take credit for bacon and eggs.

And Tye should take credit for presenting this fascinating figure to an American public that is constantly being "spun."