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http://bss.sfsu.edu/fischer/IR%20360/Readings/Congress%20Cultural%20Freedom.htm
Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses--yes, even among the soldiers--of Stalin's own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people. Sidney Hook, 1949
The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA's more daring and effective Cold War covert operations. It published literary and political journals such as Encounter, hosted dozens of conferences bringing together some of the most eminent Western thinkers, and even did what it could to help intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. Somehow this organization of scholars and artists--egotistical, free-thinking, and even anti-American in their politics--managed to reach out from its Paris headquarters to demonstrate that Communism, despite its blandishments, was a deadly foe of art and thought. Getting such people to cooperate at all was a feat, but the Congress's Administrative Secretary, Michael Josselson, kept them working together for almost two decades until the Agency arranged an amicable separation from the Congress in 1966.(2)
The Congress for Cultural Freedom--despite the embarrassing exposure of its CIA sponsorship in 1967--ultimately helped to negate Communism's appeal to artists and intellectuals, undermining at the same time the Communist pose of moral superiority. But while CIA sponsorship of the Congress has long been publicly known, the origins of that relationship have remained obscure, even to Agency veterans who worked on the project.
The Congress itself sprang from a conference of intellectuals in West Berlin in June 1950, a gathering that itself marked a landmark in the Cold War. By a lucky stroke, the conference opened just a day after North Korea invaded the South. This coincidence lent unexpected timeliness and urgency to the conference's message: that some of the best minds of the West--representing a wide range of disciplines and political viewpoints--were willing to defy the still-influential opinion that Communism was more congenial to culture than was bourgeois democracy. Historians have surmised that this event had some CIA connection, but the handful of CIA officers who knew the full story are dead, and scholars today tend to skirt this issue because of the lack of documentation. | Agency files reveal the true origins of the Berlin conference. Besides setting the Congress in motion, [the Berlin conference in 1950] helped to solidify CIA's emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left--the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades.
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war." The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
Hook's new group called itself the Americans for Intellectual Freedom. Its big names included critics Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, composer Nicolas Nabokov, and commentator Max Eastman. Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist union leaders, remembered the excitement of tweaking the Soviet delegates and their fellow conferees: ``We didn't have any staff, we didn't have any salaries to pay anything. But inside of about one day the place was just busting with people volunteering." One of Beichman's union friends persuaded the sold-out Waldorf to base Hook and his group in a three-room suite (``I told them if you don't get that suite we'll close the hotel down,'' he explained to Beichman), and another union contact installed 10 phone lines on a Sunday morning.
Hook and his friends stole the show. They asked embarrassing questions of the Soviet delegates at the conference's panel discussions and staged an evening rally of their own at nearby Bryant Park. News stories on the peace conference reported the activities of the Americans for Intellectual Freedom in detail. ``The only paper that was against us in this reporting was The New York Times," recalled Beichman. ``It turned out years later that [The Times reporter] was a member of the Party.''
In Washington, members of Frank Wisner's fledgling Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) chuckled at the news reports from New York and wondered how a group like the Americans for Intellectual Freedom could help OPC and the CIA in countering the Soviet peace offensive. OPC was the Agency's new covert action arm, a bureaucratic hybrid formed only a few months earlier and still struggling to establish a mission and identity. (It comprised only a handful of staffers in the spring of 1949, and it looked to the State Department and private contacts for operational ideas). Soviet operatives, on the other hand, had a wealth of experience to draw from, having learned from the late Willi Mnzenberg before the war how to build front groups that were ostensibly non-Communist--and thus attractive to liberals and socialists--but were still responsive to Soviet direction. OPC had no such expertise, but it did have a cadre of energetic and well-connected staffers willing to experiment with unorthodox ideas and controversial individuals if that was what it took to challenge the Communists at their own game.
The day after the Waldorf congress closed, Wisner's flamboyant and ubiquitous aide Carmel Offie asked the Department of State what it intended to do about the next big peace conference, scheduled for Paris in late April. Offie was Wisner's special assistant for labor and migr affairs, personally overseeing two of OPC's most important operations: the National Committee for Free Europe, [and other operatives who] passed OPC money to anti-Communist unions in Europe. Offie dealt often with Irving Brown, who had extensive Continental contacts. In response to Offie, the Department of State cabled Paris proposing a US-orchestrated response to the conference, but Wisner in Washington and Brown in New York thought the suggested steps too weak. OPC took matters into its own hands in the bold but ad hoc manner that marked the Office's early operations. A series of meetings and conversations over the next few days resulted in a new plan, which OPC communicated through at least three separate channels. At the time there [were few] OPC station[s abroad, and various officials acted] as the Office's representative[s. One of them] soon heard from Brown and Raymond Murphy of State's Office of European Affairs. Wisner himself cabled Averell Harriman of the Economic Cooperation Administration (the managers of the Marshall Plan) seeking 5 million francs (roughly $16,000) to fund a counterdemonstration. Murphy graphically explained the need for a response to the Communist peace offensive:
Now the theme is that the United States and the Western democracies are the war-mongers and Fascists and the Kremlin and its stooges the peace-loving democracies. And there is a better than even chance that by constant repetition the Commies can persuade innocents to follow this line. Perhaps not immediately but in the course of the next few years because there is a tremendous residue of pacificism [sic], isolationism and big business [sic] to be exploited. For example, a recession in the United States might cause people to lose interest in bolstering Europe .... I think you will agree that this phony peace movement actually embraces far more than intellectuals and that any counter-congress should emphasize also that the threat to world peace comes from the Kremlin and its allies.
Working with Brown, [OPC's representative] contacted French socialist David Rousset and his allies at the breakaway leftist newspaper Franc-Tireur, which in turn organized a meeting called the International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War, inviting Sidney Hook and other prominent anti-Communists. OPC covertly paid the travel costs of the German, Italian, and American delegations. The latter included Hook and novelist James T. Farrell; both were unwitting of OPC's involvement.
The Paris counter-conference on 30 April 1949 disappointed its American backers. Although it attracted prominent anti-Stalinists and provoked blasts from the French Communist Party, its tone was too radical and neutralist for Hook and Farrell. OPC and State agreed with Hook's assessment. The main problem, Offie noted, was the barely concealed anti-Americanism of the Franc-Tireur group and many of the intellectuals it had invited. This flaw was aggravated by the loose organization of the meeting itself, which at one point was disrupted by a noisy band of anarchists. Offie did not believe that OPC had to rely on Franc-Tireur to reach European anti-Stalinists. Wisner added a pointed postscript to Offie's memo:
We are concerned lest this type of leadership for a continuing organization would result in the degeneration of the entire idea (of having a little DEMINFORM) into a nuts folly of miscellaneous goats and monkeys whose antics would completely discredit the work and statements of the serious and responsible liberals. We would have serious misgivings about supporting such a show [emphasis added].
One small forward step was taken in Paris, however. Hook had chatted with a former editor of The New Leader named Melvin Lasky about the prospects for a permanent committee of anti-Communist intellectuals from Europe and America. This idea would soon take on a life of its own.
Several people in Europe and America almost simultaneously decided that what was needed was a real conference of anti-Communists. Paris would have been the logical choice, but, as was demonstrated in April, Paris seemed too ethereal, evanescent, and neutralist in the struggle between liberty and tyranny. Parisians who cared about world affairs were often Stalinists; novelist Arthur Koestler quipped that from Paris the French Communist Party could take over all of France with a single phone call.
Berlin was much better. Surrounded by the Red Army and just recently rescued from starvation by the US Air Force's heroic resupply efforts, West Berlin was an island of freedom in a Communist sea. The Soviet blockade of Berlin had been lifted in May 1949, but morale in the Western sector had flagged over the summer as the proud but exhausted West Berliners wondered what would befall them next.
In August 1949, a crucial meeting took place in Frankfurt. American journalist Melvin J. Lasky, together with a pair of ex-Communists, Franz Borkenau and Ruth Fischer, hatched a plan for an international conference of the non-Communist Left in Berlin the following year. Lasky, only 29, was already prominent in German intellectual circles as the founding editor of Der Monat, a journal sponsored by the American occupation government that brought Western writers once more into the ken of the German public. Borkenau too had been in Paris the previous April as a disappointed member of the German delegation. Fischer--whose given name was Elfriede Eisler--was the sister of Gerhart Eisler, a Soviet operative dubbed in 1946 ``the Number-One Communist in the US'' and convicted the following year for falsifying a visa application. She herself had been a leader of the German Communist Party before her faction was expelled on orders from Moscow, leading her to break with Stalin (and with her brother Gerhart). Ruth Fischer mentioned the plan to a diplomat friend[:]
I think we talked about this plan already during my last stay in Paris, but I have now a much more concrete approach to it. I mean, of course, the idea of organizing a big Anti-Waldorf-Astoria Congress in Berlin itself. It should be a gathering of all ex-Communists, plus a good representative group of anti-Stalinist American, English, and European intellectuals, declaring its sympathy for Tito and Yugoslavia and the silent opposition in Russia and the satellite states, and giving the Politburo hell right at the gate of their own hell. All my friends agree that it would be of enormous effect and radiate to Moscow, if properly organized. It would create great possibilities for better co-ordination afterwards and would also lift the spirits of Berlin anti-Stalinists, which are somewhat fallen at present.
Fischer hoped to talk to ``a few friends in Washington'' about the idea during her trip there that fall. [OPC's representative] pouched the Fischer proposal to Offie in mid-September. [OPC] officers seemed unimpressed with the Berlin conference idea, but Offie still thought the proposal was worth a closer look. Offie's interest notwithstanding, the Berlin congress idea remained in a bureaucratic limbo for the next two months. No one apparently seemed to know quite what to do with it. American occupation authorities in Germany probably knew that the proposed conclave would have little credibility among European intellectuals if it were obviously sponsored by the US Government. At the same time, Truman administration officials were not exactly looking for motley bands of former Communists to sponsor at a time when the White House was already taking flak at home for being soft on Communism.
The answer was covert funding. Michael Josselson stepped forward to promote the proposal late in 1949. Josselson had witnessed the shaky beginnings of the anti-Communist counteroffensive in New York and Paris that spring while he was still working as a cultural officer for the American occupation government in Germany. He told his composer friend Nicolas Nabokov that Berlin needed something similar. At some point that autumn Josselson talked with Melvin Lasky about the Berlin conference idea.
Josselson was the perfect man for the job of putting together such an event. Born in Estonia in 1908, his father, a Jewish timber merchant, moved his family to Berlin during the Russian Revolution. As a young man Josselson attended the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg, but he took a job as a buyer for the American Gimbels-Saks retail chain before he earned a degree. Gimbels eventually made him its chief European buyer and transferred him to Paris in 1935, and then on to New York before the war. Josselson became an American citizen in 1942. Drafted the following year, he made sergeant and served as an interrogator for the US Army in Europe. Like Melvin Lasky, Josselson stayed on in Berlin after demobilization to work with the American occupation government. Berlin was an ideal post for Josselson, who spoke English, French, German, and Russian with equal ease.
The drama and intrigue of postwar Berlin awakened something in Josselson and gave him scope to exercise his considerable talents as an operator, administrator, and innovator. His enthusiasm was boundless, his energy immense. In Josselson's capable hands the still-amorphous Fischer plan took specific shape. Where Fischer had proposed an essentially political gathering, the self-taught Josselson sensed that an explicitly cultural and intellectual conference, to be called ``the Congress for cultural freedom,'' could seize the initiative from the Communists by reaffirming "the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges."
With the backing of several prominent Berlin academics, a committee of American and European thinkers would organize the event and invite participants, selecting them on the basis of their political outlook, their international reputation and their popularity in Germany. In addition, the congress could be used to bring about the creation of some sort of permanent committee, which, with a few interested people and a certain amount of funds, could maintain the degree of intellectual and rhetorical coordination expected to be achieved in Berlin. The Josselson proposal reached Washington in January 1950. Michael Josselson's interest in the congress idea gave Lasky all the encouragement he needed. Lasky, unwitting of OPC's hand in the plan, forged ahead while official Washington made up its mind. He sent a similar proposal of his own to Sidney Hook, his old boss, who liked the idea. In February, Lasky enlisted Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of West Berlin, and several prominent German academics, who endorsed the plan and promised their support. Together these men formed a standing committee and began issuing invitations.
Lasky's freelancing, however, was not all for the good. As an employee of the American occupation government, his activities on behalf of the congress struck more than a few observers, both friendly and hostile, as proof that the US Government was behind the event. This would later cause trouble for Lasky. OPC officers also liked Josselson's plan. Headquarters produced a formal project proposal envisioning a budget of $50,000. Time was of the essence, although OPC soon realized that the congress would have to postponed to May or even June. Wisner approved the project outline, which essentially reiterated Josselson's December proposal, on 7 April, adding that he wanted Lasky and Burnham kept out of sight in Berlin for fear their presence would only provide ammunition to Communist critics of the event.
It was already too late to rein in Lasky. He had appointed himself the driving force behind the event, inviting participants and organizing programs. Josselson defended Lasky when informed of Wisner's comment. Josselson explained that Lasky's name on the event's masthead as General Secretary had been largely responsible for the enthusiasm that the congress had generated among European intellectuals. ``No other person here, certainly no German, could have achieved such success,'' cabled Josselson. The congress in Berlin rolled ahead that spring gathering sponsors and patrons. World-renowned philosophers John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to lend gravitas to the event as its honorary chairmen. OPC bought tickets for the American delegation, using [several intermediary organizations] as its travel agents. Hook and another NYU philosophy professor named James Burnham took charge of the details for the American delegation. The Department of State proved an enthusiastic partner in the enterprise, arranging travel, expenses, and publicity for the delegates. Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Jesse MacKnight was so impressed with the American delegation that he urged CIA to sponsor the congress on a continuing basis even before the conclave in Berlin had taken place.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom convened in Berlin's Titania Palace on 26 June 1950. American delegates Hook, James Burnham, James T. Farrell, playwright Tennessee Williams, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., actor Robert Montgomery, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal had been greeted on their arrival the previous day with the news that troops of North Korea had launched a massive invasion of the South. This pointed reminder of the vulnerability of Berlin itself heightened the sense of apprehension in the hall. The Congress's opening caught and reflected this mood. Lord Mayor Reuter asked the almost 200 delegates and the 4,000 other attendees to stand for a moment of silence in memory of those who had died fighting for freedom or who still languished in concentration camps.
The time had come to choose sides. Austrian physicist and Congress panelist Hans Thirring dramatized this feeling by repudiating his own prepared remarks, which were essentially neutralist in tone, because the Korean invasion had betrayed his trust in Stalin's peaceful aspirations. German writer Theodor Plievier made a spectacular entrance after flying in from hiding in West Germany, defying the danger that he might be kidnapped by the Soviets or East Germans while visiting Berlin.
Leadership of the Congress sessions spontaneously devolved on two eloquent Europeans with very different views: the Italian socialist Ignazio Silone and the Anglicized Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. Although both had penned autobiographical essays about their breaks with the Party for a new book titled The God That Failed, they represented the two poles of opinion over the best way to oppose the Communists. Koestler favored the rhetorical frontal assault, and his attacks sometimes spared neither foe nor friend. Silone was subtler, urging the West to promote social and political reforms in order to co-opt Communism's still-influential moral appeal.
These competing themes lent a certain dramatic tension to the Congress, but their rivalry by itself helped to make the point that debate in the West is truly free, with room for all shades of anti-totalitarian opinion. In the end, it was liberty that really mattered. "Friends, freedom has seized the offensive!" shouted Koestler as he read the Congress's Freedom Manifesto before 15,000 cheering Berliners at the closing rally on 29 June. The irony was subtle but real; Koestler had once worked for Soviet operative Willi Mnzenberg managing front groups for Moscow, and now he was unwittingly helping the CIA's efforts to establish a new organization designed to undo some of the damage done by Stalin's agents over the last generation.
Having set the Congress in motion, OPC sat back and watched while events played themselves out. The men that OPC brought together in Berlin needed no coaching on the finer points of criticizing Communism. Josselson kept out of sight, although he kept track of everything that transpired. In Josselson's eyes, Silone seems to have won his debate with Koestler; Josselson personally eschewed the frontal assault in favor of the subtle approach. Indeed, Josselson's Congress for Cultural Freedom would later be criticized (by American anti-Communists, in particular) for tolerating too much criticism of America's own shortcomings by figures on the anti-Communist left. And thus was born not only the Congress for Cultural Freedom but also one of its most controversial features.
Reactions in the US Government to the Berlin conference initially ranged from pleased to ecstatic. Wisner offered his "heartiest congratulations" to all involved. OPC's political sponsors were also gratified. Defense Department representative Gen. John Magruder deemed it ``a subtle covert operation carried out on the highest intellectual level" and "unconventional warfare at its best'' in a memo to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson. American occupation officials in Germany sensed the Congress had given a palpable boost to the morale of West Berlin, but believed the event's most important effect would ultimately be felt by Western intellectuals who had been politically adrift since 1945. Although Congress delegates had argued over strategies for combating Stalinism, their spontaneous and sincere unanimity in denouncing tyranny of all stripes had "actually impelled a number of prominent cultural leaders to give up their sophisticated, contemplative detachment in favor of a strong stand against totalitarianism."
Almost before the last chairs were folded in Berlin, [at least one OPC officer] began campaigning for covert backing for the Congress on a permanent basis. Wisner agreed that a standing Congress could pull European opinion away from neutralism, but ordered Lasky and Burnham removed from prominent positions in any ongoing project. Burnham was happy to step aside, agreeing that he made an easy target for Communist critics of the Congress.
The unwitting Lasky was another matter, at least as far as [one OPC officer] was concerned. Josselson had defended Lasky in April, and OPC's new Eastern Europe Division (EE) agreed with Josselson that Lasky had been a key to the Congress's success. This apologia infuriated Wisner because it betrayed ``an unfortunate tendency, apparently more deeprooted than I had suspected, to succumb to the temptation of convenience (doing things the easy way).''
In a scathing memo to EE, Wisner declared himself "very disturbed" by the "non-observance" of his April command to have Lasky moved to the sidelines of the project; Lasky's visibility was ``a major blunder and was recognized as such by our best friends in the State Department.'' Wisner made himself clear: unless the headstrong Lasky was removed from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, OPC would not support the organization. He tempered this bitter pill a little in a postscript. According to Wisner, Secretary of Defense Johnson was so impressed with the Berlin conference that he had sung its praises before President Truman, who was reported to be ``very well pleased.''
EE had no choice but to cable Wisner's instructions to Germany. [The OPC officer who received it exploded] and cabled back a histrionic protest, but there was nothing to be done. Lasky had to go, and OPC contrived to have him removed from the project. With Burnham and Lasky gone, the Congress's steering committee established the organization as a permanent entity in November 1950 (CIA support, under a new project name, had already been approved by OPC's Project Review Board). Josselson swallowed his pride and went along, resigning his job with the American occupation government to become the Congress's Administrative Secretary for the next 16 years.
(1)This article is an excerpt from a larger classified draft study of CIA involvement with anti-Communist groups in the Cold War. The author retains a footnoted copy of the article in the CIA History Staff. This version of the article has been redacted for security considerstions (phrases in brackets denote some of the redactions).
Imagine the United States government providing export subsidies not just to peanut farmers or aircraft makers. Imagine also a secretary of culture, financing operas, orchestras and painters especially to promote them abroad. Most card-carrying members of the intelligentsia would vigorously applaud so splendid an idea while bemoaning its utter unreality. Not for us, they lament, the C-word that stands for ''state-sponsored culture'' and recalls the feudal follies of Europe's princes and potentates.
Yet there was a time when Washington was guilty of such un-American activities in spades. With $166,000 (worth more than a million of today's dollars), the American taxpayer in 1952 dispatched the Boston Symphony to Europe on a glorious tour that helped establish the Bostonians as among the best in the world. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, David Smith -- artists of the school that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism -- were thrust into global fame with help from the feds. Except that the funds were supplied indirectly and clandestinely, with the Congress for Cultural Freedom the main channel and the Central Intelligence Agency the ultimate donor.
The congress, a club of scholars and artists founded in 1950 and subsidized by ''the Company'' until the late 1960's, encompassed some of the most eminent intellectuals in the West. It published journals and was the host of dozens of conferences while helping writers and thinkers behind the Iron Curtain. The C.I.A. connection is not a new tale; it was first told in 1967 and later embellished in many books and articles. Now, Frances Stonor Saunders, a young British writer and filmmaker, serves up the story again. Wisely, her American publisher has dropped the British title, ''Who Paid the Piper?,'' in favor of the more neutral ''Cultural Cold War.'' For these 500-plus pages do not bear out what the defamatory label insinuated: that some of the greatest in the world of arts and letters were varlets and curs who sold out to the C.I.A. or were manipulated into servitude by the minions of American imperialism. ''Abstract Expressionism was being deployed as a cold war weapon,'' Saunders jauntily asserts. That might be true for Socialist Realist kitsch extolling the kolkhoz. But Jackson Pollock's ''Number 6'' or Mark Rothko's ''# 18'' cannot be reduced to anti-Communist artillery pieces. [yes they can, ed.] Langley's Ivy-trained spooks did what no intelligence service has ever done, or will ever do again: they bankrolled the avant-garde. Obiter dicta like Saunders's pronouncement above highlight her irreducible problem. It is not that she has written a trashy book; her cultural history is entertaining, even witty (if you like ''Yanqui Doodle'' as a heading for the chapter on Abstract Expressionism). She has spent years wading through the files and interviewing both protagonists and critics -- though her project might have benefited from more rigorous spelling and footnotes.
[This dreadful review gets even worse I'm afraid - but the book is brilliant.]
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. Frances Stonor Saunders. The New Press (April 2000). ISBN: 156584596.
Some of us remember Tom Braden as the co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, where, on a nightly basis in the 1980s, he supposedly held down the left side of the political spectrum against Robert Novak. In the early 1950s, however, Braden, a dashing young intellectual who had previously taught English at Dartmouth, was engaged in more clandestine methods of political combat. As a high-ranking CIA official, he coordinated the CIA’s "cultural cold war" against the Soviet Union, which is the subject of Frances Stonor Saunders fascinating but frustrating new book. (Only in America can a former CIA agent become a liberal talk show host.)
To fight the cultural cold war, the CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which flourished from 1950 to 1967. "At its peak," Saunders writes, "the Congress had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and feature service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances." The mission, according to Saunders? "To nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism toward a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’"
The main actors in the CIA’s cultural crusade were certainly not Western Europe’s conservative politicians and landowners, many of whom fell into disgrace after the war. Rather, in an ingenious stroke, the CIA cultivated disillusioned leftist intellectuals, individuals like André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Stephen Spender, many of whom knew the Communist movement from the inside, and all of whom, by the late 1940s, were shattered by Stalin’s deceptions and betrayals. (Their American counterparts—ex-radicals like Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Kristol—were also drawn into the Congress.) These men were steely combatants in the intellectual wars; some, like Arthur Koestler, who spent several harrowing months in a fascist prison during the Spanish Civil War, nearly gave their lives to the Communist cause. By the late 1940s, they were weary and directionless but still full of fire; all they required was direction and funding. "We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. tells Saunders.
It is to Saunders’ credit that she captures the enormous range and subtlety of the agency’s cultural strategy in Europe. On one level, the Congress, headquartered in Paris, endeavored to bolster the image of the United States abroad—"to undermine the negative stereotypes prevalent in Europe, especially France, about America’s perceived cultural barrenness." To that end, the Congress brought America’s top musical and artistic talent to Berlin, Paris, and London for an endless series of performances and exhibitions. On another level, the Congress offered direct financial aid to beleaguered artists in need: When the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik emigrated to London and arrived in the city penniless, Braden and Co. arranged for a yearly fellowship of $2000. (One Congress official recorded Panufnik’s response: "He declared himself entirely ready to cooperate and collaborate with us for he is entirely sold on the ideals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.")
But the Congress (and its CIA backers) never lost sight of the central mission: to win the hearts and minds of intellectuals, and to blunt the impact of the men and women who challenged U.S. foreign policy. Saunders makes it clear that the CIA was particularly concerned about those European intellectuals—like Jean-Paul Sartre—who advocated a neutralist position in the Cold War, a position that condemned the United States and the USSR with equal vigor. In 1951, the Congress launched a Paris-based magazine entitled Preuves, whose main purpose was to undercut and attack Sartre’s influential journal Les Temps modernes. "The left bank intellectuals were the target," one Congress insider told Saunders.
The Cultural Cold War has many virtues. Saunders, who has done prodigious amounts of research on an extremely murky and difficult subject, evokes the shadowy universe in which the Congress for Cultural Freedom existed, a universe filled with interlocking networks of OSS agents, rightwing millionaires, and dummy foundations created by the CIA. She raises tough questions about the behavior of individuals like Arthur Schleslinger Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and Stephen Spender, and enlivens the narrative with some mordant humor, as in this passage about William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, one of the chief architects of the CIA: "He was a lifelong anti-communist," she writes, "keeping vigil right up to the moment of his death in 1959, when he reported spotting Russian troops marching into Manhattan across the 59th Street Bridge outside his window."
Yet the book’s strengths are nearly offset by its flaws. Saunders’ chapter on the CIA’s links to the New York art world—wherein she asserts that "the CIA was an active component in the machinery which promoted Abstract Expressionism"—has already been challenged as simplistic and overstated by reviewers in The Nation, Artforum and ArtNews. Where The Cultural Cold War excels is in delineating the vast number of organizations that received CIA money—magazines, symphony orchestras, foundations. But that is only half the story. One is left with a deeper question: how (if at all) did those CIA dollars influence specific cultural products?
Take the world of small magazines, which were a direct link to the cosmopolitan intelligentsia the Congress had in its sights. According to Saunders, an astonishing number of journals accepted Congress money, including Encounter, Transition, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review and many others. But she never systematically analyzes the content of those publications to show what, precisely, the CIA got for its money. In the case of Encounter, she quotes Braden as saying: "[Encounter] was propaganda in the sense that it did not often deviate from what the State Department would say U.S. foreign policy was." Fair enough. But she also admits that a "leftish agenda" was allowed to survive at Encounter. How, then, did that "leftish agenda" co-exist with CIA imperatives? Other questions, too, come to mind. Were the editors of those journals pressured to attack figures like Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Pablo Neruda, who was held in contempt by the CIA? Did essays, stories, and poems by Russian and East European writers predominate in CIA-backed magazines? Did the editors downplay or ignore U.S. meddling in Iran, Guatemala, and Suez? One suspects the process of co-optation was far more subtle and ambiguous than Saunders suggests.
In one passage Saunders refers intriguingly to the writer Peter Matthiessen as a "CIA agent," without telling us when he signed up, what he did, and when he departed. Another passage notes that, at the height of the Cold War, CIA agents used Fodor’s travel guides as a front organization, but nothing more is said on this subject. Finally, since The Cultural Cold War reads like a who’s who of postwar intellectual history, names come and go much too quickly. For instance, we get strong hints that Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy were cognizant of the CIA’s activities in the cultural sphere, and approved of them; but Saunders never fully clarifies the question of what they knew and when they knew it. For all these reasons, Saunders’ book is not so much a definitive account of the CIA’s role in the world of arts and letters, but rather a valuable roadmap to a subject that requires further investigation.
The late 1950s marked the apex of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Vietnam War, and the critical spirit it engendered in the U.S., eventually consumed the Congress. In 1967, Ramparts magazine published a long expose on the CIA’s relationship to cultural front organizations, and many of those details were subsequently confirmed by other publications. Braden himself joined the fray with a critical essay in The Saturday Evening Post in 1967, which outlined, in great detail, the agency’s support for magazines, trade unions, art exhibitions, etc. Why did Braden turn on his masters? Saunders speculates that he was simply following orders from CIA brass, who felt that the agency’s romance with the anti-communist left had outlived its usefulness. Many of those intellectuals, energized by Vietnam, finally emerged from their Cold War torpor. At a White House dinner in 1965, Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson, and Dwight Macdonald turned on Lyndon Johnson with a vengeance. The intellectuals, in a sense, were now obsolete, and Braden’s article, Saunders suggests, was "an operational decision to blow the Congress . . . out of the water." In the wake of his article in The Saturday Evening Post, Braden launched a second career, as a writer of TV sitcoms. Saunders notes drily that he "wrote Eight is Enough, a happy series about an all-white American family."