The Cold War: What Needs to Be Rethought?

...The elder Kristol's connections here gave him the entry into the neoconservative foundations that have so heavily influenced talk shows and dialogue in Washington—now more than ever...

...There are nonetheless serious questions to be raised about when it is legitimate for intellectuals to accept state funding—as most of us working in universities, including Birnbaum, have done in one way or another—and whether and when such funding might legitimately be covert (would Birnbaum be outraged, for example, were it to turn out that in 1968 the CIA gave money to support Czech samizdat publications...

...I do know that some prominent ACCF-associated intellectuals— Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Richard Rovere—did speak out forcefully against McCarthyism in all of its dimensions, including the blacklists...

...There is a further point...

...78 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 IHAVE NO interest in rehashing the intramural disputes of postwar intellectuals or in scoring easy polemical points...

...The end was the cause of liberal anticommunism...

...It's a field day for conspiracy theory from Washington to Guatemala City, Saigon and Santo Domingo to Kabul and even Baghdad, because the evidence around figures such as Allen Dulles and William Casey is so thick and their connections to CCF bigshots so intimate...

...In my essay, I praise the New Left critiques of the CIA's covert involvement...

...Insurgent Images...

...PAUL BUHLE teaches at Brown University and most recently is co-editor of Radical Hollywood...

...For this evidence, we need serious research, wide-open files of the pertinent organizations, and candor from the former leading intellectuals still around...

...I've always thought that Irving Howe acted most eloquently by keeping his distance on this and other matters...

...And so on...

...They used the funds placed at their disposition in ways that were hardly conspicuous for spiritual disinterestedness...

...Would he maintain that intellectuals who accepted such support would be hacks unless the support were publicly acknowledged...

...It seems to me that we want very much to know which volumes these are, and the processes by which the decisions were made to fund which publications and which authors...

...3. Secrecy: If there is nothing shameful about the past that Isaac describes, then why in the world has there been so much effort to keep it secret...

...But it did insist that the cold war liberal intellectuals associated with the Congress—even Kristol, who is an intellectual, whether one agrees with him or not—were intellectuals and not "spooks," that it is historically wrong to reduce their activity to "covert operations," that these intellectuals disagreed with each other about many important things, and that these disagreements are worth understanding...

...My essay offered no apologia for Irving Kristol (or his son) or Irving Brown, much less for Allen Dulles or William Casey...

...1. The cultural Iron Curtain at home: I know of no cases where the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the American Committee for Cultural Freedom defended that extraordinarDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 77 ARGUMENTS ily talented and often prestigious group of American writers, musicians, painters, lyricists, and so on, including the hundreds of Hollywood victims driven from their professions by the blacklist or the less formal graylist...

...It is beneath Birnbaum to recur to the absurd notion that writers challenging left shibboleths aspire to become thought police or to inhibit public debate...

...But Buhle's conspiracy thinking, and his insistence on "knowing who knew," seeing all the files, and so on, has an inquisitional tone that I do not think is intended to be ironic, and that brings to mind other forms of cold war inquisition, as practiced by Joe McCarthy but also by his more powerful counterparts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe...

...More to the point, now that the civil liberties climate looks more and more like 1950—when every peacenik opponent of domestic militarization, weapons programs, and multiple foreign operations was liable to be depicted as an Enemy of America—we really do need a new society for cultural freedom...

...ACCFers could surely have launched a powerful protest...

...But I do not consider it a "war crime" for an agency of the U.S...

...The CCF established canons of political respectability that narrowed western political discourse...

...I do not know whether any Congress liberals walked TWA picket lines...

...I support the Freedom of Information Act and believe that there is much more that remains to be told about CIA activities and perhaps even about the Congress...

...Briefly, we should explore the following points...

...government, even one so rightly criticized as the CIA, to have offered financial and logistical support to intellectual and civic groups seeking to challenge the influence of communist organizations in Paris or Prague...

...The argument is dubious...

...Finally, Birnbaum willfully misreads my final paragraphs, which are about difficult choices and how to wrestle with them, and not about bringing everyone into line with my choices, much less with the policies of the George W. Bush's administration...

...Just here, support for cultural freedom might have made a real difference...

...They might even have appeared on the picket-line for Television Writers of America, a union busted for refusing to blacklist its own members...

...Perhaps, rigorous liberal that he is, he will wish to reconsider...

...Yip" Harburg, whose wise and witty lyrics served as source for a Dissent fundraiser a few years ago...

...Certainly, figures such as Raymon Aron, Daniel Bell, Isaiah Berlin, Sidney Hook, and Edward Shils did not need to have the CIA call their attention to the fact that Stalinist politics were repugnant...

...80 n DISSENT / Winter 200...

...The narrowing of discourse was regrettable and tragic, but to reduce this to patronage networks and CIA machinations is foolish—and to imply that most of the intellectuals associated with the CCF were witting accomplices of the CIA is unfair...

...Of course the CCF's many legacies persist (and its legacies were multiple...

...Buhle's entire letter bespeaks a nostalgia for a time when many on the left could imagine that communist movements were somehow "progressive," and their opponents thereby "reactionary...

...I treasure political argument and feel fortunate to live in a society where people are relatively free to publish critiques of the state and even of me...

...The votaries of liberal anticommunism indulged in a western triumphalism that was utterly sterile...

...As someone too young to be much exercised by Old Left battles of the fifties or New Left battles of the sixties—and as someone who had long been drawn to the kind of New Left revisionism to which Norman Birnbaum seems still wedded— I am interested in revisiting the past seriously, in the light of my own efforts to understand the present...

...In short, we need to learn a lot more about these "spooks" and their intellectual connections...

...One understands why Irving Howe termed the whole thing a racket...

...One of the most talented victims scorned, by the way, was E.Y...

...Buhle seems incapable of coming to terms with the fact that cold war liberals had views different from his own, and that, right or wrong, these were differences of opinion...

...But what sort of Marxists would we be to forget the material base for their diffusion and the advantages consequently enjoyed, from public access to academic appointments, book-writing leaves, and so on, by insiders over heretics...

...4. Scholarship: Of the thousand or more volumes thought to be underwritten by secret CIA money, surely not all concerned art criticism...

...My essay makes clear that Congress for Cultural Freedom affiliates could be petty, that cold war liberalism was flawed by its (understandable) Eurocentric obsessions, and that many cold war liberals contributed to a narrowing of political discourse...

...One can agree or disagree with his points, especially his implication that the cold war liberals were also defending freedom across the CIA-beleaguered third world, that the liberals somehow tricked the agency into supporting a democratic agenda definitely not in its monumental human-rights abusing, warcriminal nature from Asia and Africa to Latin America, and that they opposed its agenda there until Vietnam...

...And I have never understood how to "stand at attention...

...JEFFREY C. ISAAC'S most recent book is Democracy in Hard Times...

...Treating those who thought differently as willfully or stupidly blind, eccentrics, heretics, utopians, or traitors, they made a major contribution to sustaining policies that may well have prolonged the cold war by several decades...

...IT IS HARD to know how to respond to Paul Buhle's letter, for although some of the questions he raises are important, it is less than clear to me how his manner of raising them responds in any way to my essay on the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...Buhle has every right to want to know all the dirt on the CIA...

...I suggested that the convergence of the agendas of these liberals and the CIA, especially in a war-ravaged Europe, is something complicated, interesting, and worthy of further investigation...

...If its savants did not all become neoconservatives, as Isaac properly notes, we can safely say that Irving Kristol (among other Kristols) would be a nonentity without a background in the CCF/ACCF...

...The International Association for Cultural Freedom did not close its doors and stop dispensing secret funds until 1979...

...We, on the contrary, rather urgently wish to know who knew (and who simply did not want to know because their suspicions were correct) and when they knew it about the Company's pet journal Encounter and all the rest...

...In this way he avoids any consideration of the serious ethical-political dilemmas that confronted liberal and left intellectuals who believed, with good reason, that communism was malevolent and ought to be opposed...

...I find any such nostalgia worse than distasteful...

...Only by refusing to take seriously what these people thought, wrote, and said can he do this...

...On the contrary, those in my field seem to have centered on just the issues that the CIA wanted to rationalize and justify with its own views, from the history of the American left to the recent past in global policies...

...For the record, I have never sought to apologize for any of the terrible things the CIA has done...

...J EFFREY C. IsAAc's "Rethinking the Cultural Cold War" (Summer, 2002) offers a welcome opening for discussion in an area that, rather like radical views of the ecological crisis until a few years ago, has seemed largely off limits in Dissent...

...But in any case, the discussion needs to go much further...

...He evidently had good reason...

...We should be arguing about the ideas expressed, as Isaac says...

...I cannot understand why DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 79 ARGUMENTS Buhle, a respected historian, would misleadingly describe such efforts as simply "demurring" about an updated blacklist, when he knows better than this...

...Far from it...

...In a similar vein, I did not argue that Congress liberals "tricked" the CIA...

...Their work ignored the inner contradictions in the Soviet bloc and reinforced a monolithic image of communism congenial to the cold war apparatus...

...But it also makes clear that many cold war liberals articulated important ideas and stood for important things, and that the liberaWm of the cold war period was internally complex...

...But not one on the Company tab...

...If Buhle thinks that I claimed that the CIA, or those intellectuals aligned with it, defended freedom across the third world, then I suggest that he re-read my essay, which maintains that the Eurocentrism of many Congress intellectuals explains "the difficulties many of them had in recognizing the counterrevolutionary role being played by American foreign policy in the newly labeled third world...

...Instead, he insists on seeing them as signs of covert influence or moral turpitude...

...Isaac's closing reference to the need for caution about criticism in contemporary politics, especially after September 11, 2001, could be read as a call for the rest of us to think only when standing at attention...

...The means was the covert collaboration by any number of eminent intellectuals in several countries with the Central Intelligence Agency, which funded and guided the Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...As Frances Stoner Saunders notes, Isaiah Berlin pleaded with his fellow CCFers not to write revealing memoirs...

...2. Trajectory: Isaac writes as if the issues concerned only the intellectual or political life of the 1950s-1960s...

...Many of the other figures involved in the operation were egregious intriguers and strivers, mediocrities for whom the CIA's money was a godsend...

...NORMAN BIRNBAUM is Professor Emeritus at the Georgetown University Law Center...

...In an intimately related issue, the AFL-CIO virtually abandoned domestic policy and was dragged down until 1995 by the agendas of ruthless intelligence operatives, notably Irving Brown, who played central roles in the early CCF and long afterward continued his work—as Nelson Mandela's enemy and Jonas Savimbi's number one backer...

...and an anthology, The New Left Revisited...

...Although differences surfaced within the ACCF in the middle 1950s (some urged a new and updated blacklist, others demurred), the silence of the group on these matters is awfully eloquent...

...They established networks of patronage from which intellectual adversaries were systematically excluded...