George Creel, the onetime head of President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, recalled in his memoir “how we advertised America.” But more accurately, his legacy was selling World War I to the country’s largely neutral populace.

After proclaiming during his 1916 reelection campaign that “he kept us out of war,” Wilson had to abruptly switch gears as the U.S. formally entered the Great War a year later. It was left to Creel to switch the message. A native Missourian and former Kansas City newspaperman, he combined the new techniques of public relations and propaganda with extensive government censorship to shape public opinion and control the flow of war information.

Park University historian Timothy Westcott traces the life of the marketing maestro who created the template for an entire industry of Madison Avenue “Mad Men.”