Rethinking the Cultural Cold War
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS'S The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters* is a widely discussed retrospective on post—Second World War liberalism that raises important...
...THE Congress for Cultural Freedom was the principal vehicle of this counteroffensive...
...Indeed, if one of its primary purposes was to support European anticommunist liberals, the other was to demonstrate to a skeptical European public the virtues of American culture and politics...
...foreign policy establishment may have its own reasons for (sometimes) doing (some of) the right things...
...These efforts came to a head during the Vietnam War...
...And this is not the world in which we live...
...In fact, the differences among them are very important...
...For Saunders's own narrative makes it clear that there were serious divisions about McCarthyism among Congress liberals...
...Lasch's important polemic on "The Cultural Cold War" was published in the Nation, and Noam Chomsky's equally important "The New Mandarins" was published in the New York Review of Books...
...To be sure, these intellectuals committed many errors (some more than others), and often disagreed sharply among themselves about these errors...
...that the line separating liberalism from the New Left is complex and blurred...
...And yet others moved to the left...
...Writing against the grain of post-1989 liberal self-satisfaction, she identifies the intellectual and political narrowing that helped to buttress anticommunist liberalism and to constrain the development of alternatives to it...
...That communism really was an awful system...
...Such a nuanced account would highlight the following points: 1. Contrary to the idea that anticommunist liberals toed a single line as "organic intellectuals of the national security state," there were serious disagreements within the Congress and even within the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), which was the most doctrinaire Congress affiliate...
...that its demise in the sixties owed less to public scandals than to serious contradictions that were experienced and articulated, in different ways, by many liberal intellectuals and activists...
...What Is Wrong with the Argument...
...view, and elsewhere, and disparaged by neoconservatives in The American Spectator and the National Interest...
...Even Josselson, who unlike the intellectuals named above was on the CIA payroll as director of the Congress, was about as far removed from such activities as the pacifist A.J...
...Many of these similarities, and differences, are broached in the fascinating 1967 Symposium organized by Commentary magazine on "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited" (September 1967...
...The anticommunist liberals of the Congress, like any group of human beings, included cranks and fanatics...
...Saunders argues that the world of arts and letters in the so-called "Western" zone of influence was something other than it seemed to its inhabitants...
...Motivated in part by the confusions and hypocrisies of cold war liberalism, the New Left sought to unmask liberalism generally and to hold it accountable for its failures...
...Many were themselves former communists who had experienced Party hypocrisy, deceit, or worse, and CULTURAL COLD WAR who had concluded that the "god" had failed...
...This narrowness makes it impossible for her to take her subjects seriously as public intellectuals who became, for intelligible reasons worth thinking about, anticommunist and liberal...
...Along the way specific instances of intellectual corruption are recounted: the role of the CIA in providing covert support for avowedly independent anticommunist magazines such as Partisan Review and the New Leader...
...It unfolded in the wake of two bloody world wars that shattered European civilization...
...But it takes only a moment of reflection to realize that the people to whom this sentence refers are not the people discussed in most of the book...
...For Saunders, these stories converge in a single narrative about how the CIA corrupted the world of arts and letters during the early years of the cold war, conscripting liberal intellectuals in the battle against communism at the cost of their independence and critical function, causing them, in the words of Michael Rogin, to trade in "their pariah status [and] act as organic intellectuals of the national security state...
...The CIA no doubt had its own reasons for believing this to be the case...
...that William Sloane Coffin, whose anticommunist liberalism in the fifties led him to work, in Saunders's telling, with the CIA, was a major figure in the antiwar movement...
...This was a highly problematic liberalism, and the late-sixties revelations about CIA involvement in the Congress highlighted its compromised character...
...High Commission...
...This is especially significant because it opens up some interesting questions about postwar American foreign policy and indeed about the CIA itself—questions that Saunders prefers to ignore...
...But, written in the wake of the Gulf War, NATO intervention in the Balkans, and the global triumph of McDonald's, Starbucks, Nike, and "free market values," it is not simply another historical account of the cold war but also an intervention in current political controversies...
...The machinations of the CIA in covertly founding, financing, and seeking to influence such intellectual efforts is one side of this...
...Should they have ignored communist repression in Budapest in 1956 because speaking out against it meant making common cause with the United States—the United States that in other places supported oppressive regimes...
...its "human rights" rhetoric is not the only possible discourse of human rights...
...Saunders's book recounts how these ideas were mobilized, funded, and promoted by an elaborate covert operation orchesDISSENT / Summer 2002 n 29 CULTURAL COLD WAR trated by the Central Intelligence Agency...
...The Cultural Cold War is successful as a form of debunking...
...Many were noncommunist leftists or liberals for whom European communism had proved itself a disaster: in Barcelona in 1936, in Moscow in 1938, in Munich in 1939, in Berlin in 1945, in Prague in 1948 (on this score Orwell's Homage to Catalonia remains a classic...
...It is too prosecutorial in tone, too shrill in its historical judgments...
...Its central theater of activity was Europe, and many of its most important members were European intellectuals who had their own reasons, drawn from vivid personal experience, for being passionately anticommunist...
...But it is equally true that by the mid-sixties vital center liberals were genuinely conflicted on these matters, and that liberals played a crucial role in the unfolding critique that brought the vital center down...
...Similar sentiments on the part of many intellectuals, as Saunders notes, led Josselson (urged on by his CIA superiors) to marginalize the participation of Koestler and Borkenau in the Congress...
...Although she offers gripping accounts of classified CIA memos, she rarely discusses ideas and publications...
...Along with the CIA, the Congress also helped distribute such independently published periodicals as Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry, Daedelus, and the Journal of the History of Ideas...
...But this is only part of the story...
...Saunders never draws the obvious conclusion: perhaps Congress intellectuals were concerned with something very real, the brutality and aggressiveness of Stalinism...
...By the late sixties the Congress had outlived whatever usefulness it could claim...
...6. See Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986...
...Each of these points is, perhaps, partly true...
...Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (Touchstone, 1991...
...The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters The watchwords of post—Second World War liberalism were "intellectual freedom" and "open society...
...But what they shared above all was that they were Europeans who had experienced betrayal, displacement, forced exile, and fear for their lives.' The CIA's reasons for supporting the Congress were not the reasons of the intellectuals who joined it...
...But its reasons are not the only ones that might be advanced...
...5 WHAT DO WE know now that New Left activists did not know or would not acknowledge in 1968...
...But Saunders is also conflicted and more than a bit inconsistent in her overall evaluation of cold war liberalism...
...government believed that the noncommunist left was the best alternative in Europe, then we have to give up some simplistic stereotypes about postwar American foreign policy and consider the possibility that the State Department, and even the CIA, for a combination of ideological and pragmatic reasons, believed that reform would bring more stability to Europe than would the reinforcement of entrenched privilege...
...and third (though this seems inconsistent with the previous point), that McCarthyism was an aberration that served to make liberal anticommunism look by contrast democratically authentic and acceptable...
...If we ask why the U.S...
...It is this anticommunist mobilization that is Saunders's main theme...
...On an even deeper level, there can be no doubt that their passionate opposition to Soviet communism led many cold war liberal intellectuals to sacrifice their critical faculties, to force issues into the straitjacket of bipolar thinking and ignore inconvenient facts about the side they had chosen...
...Saunders never tells us that many of the most prominent American liberals associated with the Congress were active and vocal supporters of the civil rights movement, nor does she mention that the Ford Foundation—whose ties with the CIA and whose complicity in money laundering to the Congress she does discuss—was one of a number of liberal philanthropies that also provided financial support to civil rights and voter education projects...
...In a perverse way, the book is not really about the Congress or about anticommunist liberalism at all...
...Nonetheless, The Cultural Cold War is a deeply flawed book...
...There was a seamy side to the Congress and its various initiatives, and Saunders exposes it...
...deceit or hypocrisy may put one on the side of ideological "truth," and it may provide a sense of moral purity...
...FRANCES STONOR SAUNDERS'S The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters* is a widely discussed retrospective on post—Second World War liberalism that raises important questions about the relationships between intellectuals and political power...
...Others shifted around uncomfortably without clear direction (in 1969, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., published a book entitled The Crisis of Confidence, which gave eloquent voice to this liberal confusion...
...For her, the book was a "sham," a piece of CIA propaganda...
...Magazines such as Ramparts began to investigate the Congress and to 36 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 make public information about its CIA sponsorship...
...Obsessed with the hypocrisies of liberalism, its focus is neither the cold war nor U.S...
...As a consequence, what she says about the book is simply silly...
...But she spends not a single word analyzing, even critically, the essays that Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender contributed to the volume, all powerful accounts of Stalinist tyranny and terror...
...Historical events are for Saunders simply precipitants of anticommunist statements on the part of Congress associates or CIA officials...
...I HAVE THUS far presented Saunders as most readers have read her: providing a clear argument about the complicity and corruption of anticommunist liberal intellectuals...
...This is no surprise...
...The New Left critique may have seemed to many liberals as a kind of apostasy...
...She considers it ironic, and hypocritical, that intellectuals so concerned with defending freedom and opposCULTURAL COLD WAR ing state oppression were so willing to identify with the geopolitical strategies of the United States...
...The Congress was emphatically committed to liberal values...
...military intervention and escalation in Vietnam...
...There was an important difference—historically, politically, and ethically— between those who supported McCarthy and those Congressaffiliated intellectuals who were anticommunist but also liberal and social democratic, just as there was a difference between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, between George Wallace and Hubert Humphrey, and between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton (though in CULTURAL COLD WAR many ways McCarthyism bears a closer resemblance to the contemporary discourse of Jorgo Haider and Jean Marie LePen than it does to contemporary American conservatism...
...THERE WERE important ideological and historical affinities between McCarthyism and the perspective of the more doctrinaire members of the ACCF (the Europeans, for obvious reasons, were horrified by McCarthy and by those Americans who supported him...
...We now know much that was not known, or only dimly suspected, by the Congress intellectuals...
...Looking back on these activities from a post - 1989 vantage point, it is hard to dismiss them...
...foreign policy...
...It is also central to understanding the difficulties many of them had in recognizing the counterrevolutionary role being played by American foreign policy in the newly labeled "third world...
...In the face of these attacks, antiliberal shibboleths about American imperialism ring hollow...
...She devotes a paragraph, for example, to discussing Reinhold Niebuhr's influence on cold war liberalism, commenting, strangely, that "for members of that [liberal] elite, Niebuhr was, of course, a congenial authority figure...
...Rethinking Anticommunist Liberalism Saunders does not take the full measure of her subject...
...Should Serbian brutality in Bosnia or Kosovo have been downplayed because the U.S...
...Such a history would require an account of the complex trajectory of ideas that for Saunders seem all the same...
...Saunders's book represents an updated version of the New Left revisionism about the cold war pioneered by such writers as Christopher Lasch, Gabriel Kolko, and Richard Barnet...
...High Command in Germany, and the State Department...
...But it is nonetheless significant that the Congress by and large was not a right-wing organization but one committed to New Deal-type reform in Europe...
...Most important, it published numerous books and some of the most important periodicals of the post-war period, including Der Monat (Germany), Tempo Presente (Italy), Preuves (France), Science and Freedom (Britain), Quadrant (Australia), Quest (India), Transition (Uganda), and Soviet Survey (a chronicle of Soviet and Eastern European affairs...
...CIA covert involvement with the Museum of Modern Art in promoting Jackson Pollack and Abstract Expressionism in the European art world...
...The central figure in Saunders's account is Michael Josselson, an Estonian-born Jewish intellectual who served in Berlin after the war as a cultural affairs officer of the U.S...
...It is to insist that cold war liberalism was a rich and complex discourse...
...and that liberalism is not simply a "corporate" and "militarist" ideology in need of debunking...
...and its efforts on behalf of "humanitarian intervention," when they are forthcoming, are not the only ones worth considering...
...My point here is not to lionize liberalism or to present any one of these efforts as somehow beyond reproach...
...And because it saw the United States as the principal bulwark against communism, it was also emphatically pro-American...
...Saunders's intention was to promote just such a debate...
...This is the most serious flaw in the book...
...Unless it is informed by a sober sense of the dilemmas of DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 37 CULTURAL COLD WAR political judgment in dark times, debunking can easily turn into cynicism...
...Inaugurated by a heavily publicized conference in Berlin in 1950, the Congress was a network of intellectuals, national affiliates, and publications organized by the newly formed CIA under the direction of Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and Tom Braden...
...We owe this knowledge to muckrakers of the New Left...
...Hardliners like Hook and Burnham pitted themselves against others, like Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, who were highly critical of the formers' credulous approach to American society and foreign policy...
...Although the CIA may have imagined that it was bankrolling a military-like organization, the Congress was in fact a very loose association...
...The book fails not simply as intellectual history but as any kind of history...
...Saunders observes that in the eyes of the CIA and the American national security establishment, support of the "NCL" (noncommunist left) was seen as central to the containment of communism in Europe...
...perhaps their struggle was not a simple fabrication of their own ideology...
...Even the most simplistic version of such a narrative—one in which the New Left is seen as the noble antithesis of everything corrupt about anticommunist liberalism—would be better than Saunders's story of media scandal...
...Any serious account of the topics broached in Saunders's book would have to deal with what happened in Europe in their lifetime...
...There are strong grounds for this reading, particularly in the way she frames her narrative at the beginning and end...
...Indeed, in important respects they were not a "they" at all...
...military response to the September 11 attacks is a compelling example of this...
...It is a historical oversimplification to view the CIA's role in the murder of Salvador Allende, say, as the apotheosis of liberal foreign policy, just as it would be reductive to hold Congress intellectuals responsible for Augusto Pinochet...
...His book The Poverty of Progressivism will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2003...
...that the New Left succeeded in generating valuable movements on behalf of civil rights, peace, ecology, and sexual freedom, but that by the late sixties it had begun to produce its own pathologies...
...Compared to communists and their "fellow travelling" supporters, all anticommunists may look the same...
...Moving between Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin, New York, and Washington, Josselson coordinated Congress activities, navigating skillfully between the broad ideological mandates of the CIA and the diverse commitments of the intellectuals whose work the Congress sought to promote...
...in fact it was essential if liberalism was to be anything more than an empty shell...
...They were anticommunists, to be sure...
...The intellectual content of cold war liberalism receives almost no treatment in her book...
...Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and others ran the CIA...
...There is something truly noble here...
...4. See Allen J. Matusow, The Unravelling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960's (Harper, 1984), and E.J...
...It pitted two global superpowers in an arms race that had the potential to destroy the world as we know it...
...but each is also seriously exaggerated...
...5. See especially James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Seige of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987) and Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (Metropolitan Books, 1995...
...But we do ourselves a disservice if we fail to recognize that debunking is sometimes the beginning but never the end of serious criticism...
...involvement in Vietnam...
...Saunders has nothing to say about this...
...But I wonder whether Saunders's restatement of the New Left critique is apposite today...
...They took up the cause of persecuted citizens of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including the communist dissidents of the Petofi Circle in Budapest in 1958 and the Polish and Czech Marxist revisionists of 1968...
...The European experience of these intellectuals is absolutely central to understanding why anticommunism loomed so large for them...
...Also, to be sure, the liberals of the Congress were not the only ones to insist on the antinomy between communism and freedom...
...Although it is true that we currently experience new forms of liberal hypocrisy, it is also true that we have experienced much else that sets us apart from the New Left...
...The important collection The God That Failed, for example, gets four pages of discussion, limited to details of the book's publication (its editor, Richard Crossman, had worked in wartime intelligence and its publisher later published a book by Allen Dulles...
...They worked on behalf of an ideal of freedom that, in its own time, had much to recommend it, whatever its limits...
...CIA efforts to influence the production of Hollywood films (Saunders notes that these efforts had no direct tie to the Congress...
...I wish that Saunders had deigned to read it...
...it would reveal the multiple legacies of her subjects...
...The anticommunist liberals of the cold war are instructive here, for what they did right and for what they did wrong, for the ways in which their commitment to a certain conception of freedom led them to choose a side in the cold war, for the ways in which they wrestled with the moral ambiguities of this choice, and for the ways in which they failed to wrestle with them sufficiently...
...But what occurred to liberalism in the sixties was nothing less than an implosion of crisis proportions, for which liberals were themselves partially responsible.4 It is undeniable that the "vital center" liberalism extolled by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was complicit in a politics of compromise with the segregationist South, just as it is undeniable that it was responsible for U.S...
...Not civic virtue, but empire.'" This is the culminating indictment that Saunders has supposedly prepared in her four hundred and some pages...
...Still, McCarthyism was not simply liberalism run amok...
...It was fueled by powerful currents of isolationism and xenophobia, laced with a strong dose of anti-Semitism...
...Some, such as the famed neoconservatives, began a move to the right, to an even harder and more hawkish anticommunism...
...But the intellectuals of the Congress were not criminals...
...The U.S...
...6 I don't mean to excuse the crimes committed in the name of anticommunism...
...The debate about the book has been stark...
...The Congress organized a series of major conferences, concerts, and art exhibits in Europe at the height of the cold war...
...On her account, the Congress was undone by the wave of revelations, beginning in 1967, that blew the cover of the CIA and delegitimized the Congress...
...The gradual defection of these liberals was a central development in the shattering of the domino theory rationale for U.S...
...She is, after all, writing about intellectuals and accusing them of a trahison des clercs, but her mode of analysis could apply just as easily to carpenters or accountants as to writers and artists...
...A brief discussion of George Orwell fails in the same way: not a word about his arguments and ideas.' Saunders's refusal to discuss ideas no doubt reflects her hostility toward her anticommunist subjects...
...They opened their pages to the writings of Czeslaw Milosz, Leszek Kolakowski, Andrei Sakharov, and others persecuted in their own countries...
...The list of those who fig30 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 ure prominently in this story, as participants and leaders of the Congress, includes Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromante, Nicolas Nabakov, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and James Burnham...
...BY THE MID-SIXTIES, vital center liberalism was deeply contradictory and conflicted, and few liberals remained wedded to the positions of the fifties...
...And it makes Saunders completely unable to give a plausible account of the Europeans, including Josselson, who make up such an important part of this story...
...The Congress was a trans-Atlantic umbrella organization...
...on the other are those who embrace anticommunism and celebrate its 1989 triumph as a vindication of the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...that there CULTURAL COLD WAR really is an important difference between anticommunist conservatives and liberals...
...But Saunders has a preconceived stereotype of an anticommunist liberal, and nothing else interests her...
...In the name of what?' asked one critic...
...These are complex questions, but the answer finally must be no...
...They are anticommunist liberals...
...they were antirevolutionaries...
...In her political universe, all cows are gray...
...Its arguments are lacking in nuance and are often in tension with the information its narrative provides...
...Its most influential publication was Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol in London...
...But the line separating these groups is a blurred one...
...Saunders is to be credited for reminding us of this...
...To answer that question, we must make a serious analysis of the multiple crises of postwar American liberalism in the 1960s, centered around the civil rights and antiwar movements, the rise of the New Left, and the complex relationship between liberalism and the New Left...
...their members attended the same conferences, wrote for many of the same journals, published the same European authors—Silone, Camus, Spender, and so on—and experienced many of the same conflicts with the emerging New Left...
...How they became anticommunists or how the character of their anticommunism or their liberalism changed over time are matters of indifference...
...A good part of the book is taken up with stories of CIA intrigue and money laundering...
...Most of Saunders's attention is focused on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a cosmopolitan network that organized many of the most important conferences and publications in the postwar period, whose CIA cover was blown only in 1967, in a series of explosive revelations...
...They were neither the noble heroes depicted by neoconservatives nor the villains depicted by leftist debunkers...
...This debate, and others like it, was described in a published review (by another participant, Hugh TrevorRoper) that was highly critical of the Koestler line (also articulated in Berlin by Franz Borkenau, Sidney Hook, and James Burnham...
...But she is unable or unwilling to think deeply about these issues...
...Although Western liberal writers, artists, and performers extolled the virtues of the open society, they were in fact serving as foot soldiers of American foreign policy, organized and covertly supported by the CIA...
...Its focus is the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting postwar anticommunist liberalism...
...and, especially, Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the "politics" Circle (Cornell University Press, 1996...
...The piece was published instead in Dissent...
...This is strange, because Saunders's book provides the basis for a different, more nuanced account than the simpleminded, anti-liberal story she seems wedded to—and for which she has been lauded by some friendly reviewers on the left...
...Muste...
...Saunders believes that the logic of anticommunism in general and Congress ideology in particular leads only to Reaganism, that the true face of cold war liberalism is the face of Sidney Hook or Irving Kristol...
...second, that McCarthyism, far from representing a threat to liberalism, was in fact the logical fulfillment of the anticommunist liberal project...
...A serious accounting of postwar liberalism would have to deal with all this...
...Saunders's subjects seem stuck in time...
...1. Michael Paul Rogin, "When the CIA Was the NEA...
...The cold war was a unique moment in world history...
...In the name of freedom from the state, an intellectual consensus was thus shaped by the institutions of the American national security apparatus...
...Just as the sixties caused many Congress liberals to think again about their anticommunism, so the eighties caused many New Left intellectuals to reconsider the vehemence of their antiliberalism...
...Saunders's story begins in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, with individuals and organizations associated with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)— the forerunner of the CIA—the U.S...
...These disagreements existed from the very inception of the Congress at the 1950 Berlin Conference, where, as Saunders herself points out, Silone engaged Koestler in a debate about the extremity of his anticommunist opinions...
...It was not Silone or Spender or even Hook or Kristol who went to Yale or recruited Nazis or masterminded CIA covert operations in Guatemala or Vietnam or Chile...
...Saunders does not even consider the possibility that although the CIA is clearly an important part of the story of "the cultural cold war," it is not the whole of the story—except in the eyes of the agency's own megalomaniacal leaders...
...In our own dark times, the need for sober judgment has hardly passed...
...Discussions of the book have the flavor of broader historical debates about "which side were you on...
...Indeed, Saunders points out that Joseph McCarthy vociferously attacked the State Department and 'the CIA because of their support for the European noncommunist left...
...And it is clear that anticommunist measures supported by many liberals, such as the Truman administration's loyalty oaths, helped set the stage for McCarthy's witchhunt...
...But its participants were by and large intelligent people who had experienced political trauma, learned firsthand about the authoritarian propensities of communism, and saw themselves as acting in defense of freedom...
...The only story of interest to her is the story of how the CIA sought covertly to manipulate intellectual life and how its cover was blown...
...Many of them spoke out bravely on important issues, and some—Aron, Berlin, Silone—made enduring contributions to political thought...
...If there is any historical narrative here beyond anticommunism as an eternal recurrence, it is what I would call a neoconservative teleology...
...that those anticommunist dissidents who fought against it in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Gdansk, and Warsaw were partisans of freedom who deserved the solidarity and support of Western liberals...
...In many ways the Congress was the intellectual equivalent of the Marshall Plan...
...There is an interesting history to be told of the sixties implosion of cold war liberalism in America and of the various outcomes of this implosion, only one of which was neoconservatism...
...Although key decisions were made in Washington, D.C., and Langley, Virginia, the principal site of the activity reported by Saunders was cold war Europe, centered in Paris and Berlin...
...it is about the CIA and the activities of liberal intellectuals seen from the point of view of the CIA...
...later, a version also appeared in Tempo Presente...
...The brainchild of such staunch anticommunist intellectuals as Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, and Melvin Lasky, the Berlin Conference on Cultural Freedom and the Congress that was its outcome were committed to countering Soviet cultural policy in Europe and to defending the institutions of liberal, capitalist democracy...
...State Department was calling for military action—though it had opposed intervention in Rwanda...
...Military Government and later as a public affairs officer of the State Department and the U.S...
...3 8 n DISSENT / Summer 2002...
...But we confront many of the same dilemmas that presented themselves to anticommunist liberals...
...It fails to grapple in a serious way with the ideas that were the chief currency of those it purports to study...
...In order to understand it all, one must ask why the revelations of CIA covert support had such an incendiary effect...
...Trevor-Roper, speaking for many anticommunist liberals, linked Koestler's argument to the totalitarianism it purported to oppose, commenting sardonically that "there was a moment during the Congress when I felt that we were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan...
...that "national liberation struggles" in the third world were not the riddle of history solved, and that they typically gave rise to terrible regimes, of the left or right...
...3. Saunders devotes a brief chapter to McCarthyism, focused on its repressive effects and on the failure of many Congress intellectuals in the United States and Britain to come out strongly against it...
...and that the writers' association PEN International, originally supported and subsidized by the CIA and the Congress, became an outspoken critic of American counterinsurgency policy and a vocal supporter of the rights of critics of American-supported DISSENT / Summer 2002 3 5 CULTURAL COLD WAR regimes throughout the third world...
...Lasch, Chomsky, Andrew Kopkind, and the other New Leftists whose criticisms helped make this clear did an admirable job, even if they could neither anticipate nor control what would follow the demise of the liberalism they chastised...
...Democratic socialists such as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, for example, who started Dissent magazine in the mid-fifties as an alternative to the Congress and its journals, were equally vocal in their criticisms of communism and more emphatic in their social democratic advocacy...
...F THE CIA viewed the Congress and its affiliates as its witting or unwitting accomplices, then for Saunders that is what they must have been...
...7. See my "Supporting the War: Thoughts on Doing Things with Words," American Prospect online http:// www.prospectorg/webfeatures/2001/1 1 /isaac-j-11-26.html and "Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan: The Limits of Marc Herold's 'Comprehensive Accounting.' " OpenDemocracy (March 14, 2002) http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/ document_details.asp?CatID=98&DocID=1143&Debatel D=152...
...But at a deeper level she makes one wonder whether she can deal in the intellectual currency of her subjects...
...Saunders's book provides us with much of the information necessary to accomplish such a task...
...She draws three general conclusions: first, that the Congress lib34 • DISSENT / Summer 2002 erals were cowardly...
...These events never appear as occasions for thought or argument on the part of liberal intellectuals or as watershed moments of crisis or change...
...THE ANTICOMMUNIST liberals associated with the Congress need to be understood in the context of the challenging times in which they lived...
...If ACCF leaders such as Hook, Kristol, and Burnham were "soft" on it, others, such as Macdonald, McCarthy, and Richard Rovere were harsh critics...
...Her sensationalist agenda leaves little room for them...
...These debates were endemic and were a function of real differences among the opinionated intellectuals who affiliated with the Congress, as seen in the divisions that arose repeatedly within the American affiliate...
...Responding to what Saunders describes as a "Soviet offensive" in Europe, a small group of individuals saw the need for an Americanled ideological "counteroffensive...
...that the New York Review of Books, which consistently ran New Left critiques of American domestic and foreign policy throughout the sixties and seventies, was started in 1964 by Jason Epstein and Robert Silvers, who had earlier been associated with the Congress...
...Josselson was designated by the CIA as the perfect man to lead the Congress, and, for almost twenty years, he served as its executive director and chief strategist...
...Where there was high intellectual, literary, and artistic culture in the West, there was the Congress, which sought to showcase Western culture and demonstrate its superiority to Soviet arts and letters...
...But only in a world in which the United States is the only actor, the only source of wrongdoing, can this suffice for a serious political position...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political theory at Indiana University, Bloomington...
...It is their activities that are the real focus of this book...
...Nation (December 14, 1998), p. 8. 3. See James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Harvard University Press, 1981...
...Martin Luther King, on the other hand, claimed to have learned from him the " 'potential for evil.' " Saunders doesn't understand that Niebuhr was DISSENT / Summer 2002 n 31 CULTURAL COLD WAR an intellectual authority for King as well, and that his ideas about power and evil were seminal for King and figures such as Schlesinger, Jr., for similar reasons...
...2. See Christopher Hitchens, "Was George Orwell a Snitch...
...The book's closing paragraph reveals its fundamental problem: The same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue," Saunders writes, "recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcomes of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, sup32 n DISSENT / Summer 2002 ported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster...
...Precisely because of this, it was actively and adamantly anticommunist...
...Like all debunkers, she performs a valuable service, revealing, in painful and sometimes excruciating detail, many of the foibles, miscalculations, and outright deceptions of cold war liberalism...
...As fifties liberals such as Richard Hofstadter, Richard Rovere, and Seymour Martin Lipset saw, it was a form of rightwing populism that was antiliberal, anti-intellectual, and anti-New Deal...
...My basic point: intellectuals such as Silone, Berlin, Aron, Spender, Bell, DISSENT / Summer 2002 • 33 CULTURAL COLD WAR and Schlesinger, Jr., were not cast in a single mold, and the quality of the anticommunism they shared is not reducible to the views of the hard-liners...
...They rejected isolationism and nationalist parochialism and defended a conception of universal human values...
...If from the standpoint of the CIA, intellectual subtleties and the complicated motives of writers and artists were irrelevant, then for Saunders they are irrelevant...
...We live today in a post–cold war world...
...In fact, the editors insisted on substantial revisions, which Macdonald, understandably offended, declined to make...
...But as Hegel once noted, only in the dark do all cows look gray...
...For good and ill, they were Eurocentrist...
...These disagreements were vigorously and publicly aired...
...But on numerous occasions— at least fifteen by my count—she indicates, though always in passing, that "freedom of any kind certainly wasn't on the agenda in the Soviet Union, where those writers and intellectuals who were not sent to the gulags were lassoed into serving the interests of the state," and that a Soviet "offensive" existed in Europe...
...They are a part of our history that we must not forget...
...It is worth noting that The Pentagon Papers was written by liberals, and that a disillusioned liberal— Daniel Ellsberg—leaked the text to liberal reporters with the New York Times...
...government does is simply right, and should be supported because it is right.' For many of us, the U.S...
...2. It is important to pay careful attention to a second feature of the Congress noted by Saunders—that it was by and large an association of intellectuals who were social democrats, who thought of themselves as members of a broadly defined democratic left...
...Condemning U.S...
...The book has been celebrated by many left writers, in reviews in the Nation, Monthly Re*New Press, 2000...
...Nonetheless, as a work of history and political commentary, Saunders's book is very weak...
...and the attempt of the CIA to promote Gaitskellism—a centrist version of social democracy hospitable to NATO—within the British Labour Party...
...Much of the book's force (as well as its fundamental weakness) derives from her claim that "the cultural Cold War...was all a fiction, a fabricated reality," a projection of liberal anxieties and liberal will to power...
...they were considered too fanatical in their anticommunism...
...The credulity of so many intellectuals, and their inclination to go along with activities clearly supported by American policy— whether they were aware of CIA involvement or not (and Saunders concedes that most of them were not)—is the other, even more damning side as far as she is concerned...
...that Stephen Spender, the original editor of Encounter, in 1972 established the journal Index on Censorship to defend the freedom of dissidents and protestors...
...In some ways, the same charge that the New Left brought against the Congress can be brought against the New Left itself—that it was insufficiently aware of the limitations of its own politics, insufficiently attentive to the depredations of communism, and insufficiently appreciative of the value of liberalism...
...And most important, it is inattentive to the importance of liberal values and institutions and to the need to defend them when they are threatened, an inattentiveness particularly glaring in the aftermath of September 11...
...The list of those who participated in Congress conferences and published in Congress outlets was even more extensive, including virtually everyone who was anyone in Western arts and letters...
...Most notoriously, perhaps, there was the decision of the editors of Encounter—under pressure from the Paris office of the Congress, which was itself under pressure from Washington—to reject a 1958 essay by Dwight Macdonald, "America, America," which was harshly critical of American culture and politics...
...Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987...
...On one side are those who embrace Saunders's caustic account not simply of the CIA but of anticommunist liberalism in general...
...Among these intellectuals there were many important differences of opinion...
...4. If Saunders had offered a more nuanced account of the complexity of cold war liberal opinion, then she might also have been able to see that the story of the demise of the Congress is far richer than the sensationalist one she tells...
...Beyond this, there are times when what the U.S...
...Nation (June 12, 2000), p. 17...
...Similarly, though she notes that the Vietnam War shattered the broad consensus of liberals regarding the containment of communism (Josselson himself came to oppose the war), she is uninterested in the role that people like McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, and John Kenneth Galbraith played, not only in originally justifying the war, but later on in arguing for its termination...
Vol. 49 • July 2002 • No. 3
