Harnessing Brains for Freedom

...To be sure, the neo-Nazis and new "democrats" are neither clear nor present dangers...

...Its adherents look with sorrow and some sympathy at Cuba's Fidel Castro, yet will unhesitatingly join or help organize protests against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet...

...It was part of a network that Aspen of Colorado was building in different parts of the world to extend the meetings and seminars that give writers and artists a chance to look back and ahead...

...In its wake we have the double standard of the post-Vietnam period...

...Only the venerable and conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine picked up after the War where it had left off before the Nazis "equalized" (gleichgeschaltet) the media...

...Its ranks included American hard-line anti-Communists (Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Irving Brown), and those who shared a more pragmatic approach...

...No matter how much one might hate, distrust or merely dislike Germany, there was no denying the importance of its position in the center of Europe...

...He did not dictate a line...

...By now, hard-line anti-Communists have become marginalized in this country...

...Yes, it was wrong that most of those who participated in the undertakings associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom knew nothing about the CIA's role...

...The story of this mix of ambivalence, hypocrisy and the creation of high-level cultural material in defense of democracy during the Cold War is told in America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe...

...One wishes he had scrimped on some of the detail a careful documenter feels is necessary and devoted more attention to the substance of the thinking, debating and writing done under the CCF's aegis...

...Berghahn has written a scholarly but readable book...

...Shepard Stone died in an auto accident in 1990...

...Indeed, the Cold War would shortly be fought out in the middle of the country, where Stalin had lowered the Iron Curtain...

...Others in the second group were John Dewey, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Nicholas Nabokov, and Melvin J. Lasky of the U.S., Alfred Weber and Dolf Sternberger in Germany, Ignazio Silone inltaly, François Mauriac and Raymond Aron in France, and Denis de Rougemont in Switzerland...

...The son of Russian Jews living in Nashua, New Hampshire, he attended nearby Dartmouth College...

...It recounts the unique career of a man who felt comfortable among the best brains, enabled them to do valuable work, loved to argue, made enemies by putting people down—and made history...

...No one died from CIA-financed writing and speaking, but many died from bullets in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968, and for decades on the East-West German border...

...Nothing in his family background destined Shepard Stone to pursue a career in which Germany played a key role from beginning to end...

...So he distributed U.S...

...Back in the United States, starting with his drafting a plan in 1952 for developing a consensus on U.S...

...And when a party in France that still proudly calls itself Communist joins a coalition with the Socialists, it becomes palatable as "/a gauche plurielle" (the pluralist Left...

...Already 33 years old when the United States entered World War ?, hejoined the Army, became an intelligence officer, landed in Normandy, and was a natural for the Occupation Authority's public affairs work...

...In the course of his postwar years in Germany, Stone also married Charlotte Hasenclever and acquired a wide circle of acquaintances among the new German intellectual and political class...

...He ended up going back to his cherished Berlin, as head of the Aspen Institute's outpost there...

...Berghahn was right to choose this approach, for rarely has one person shaped and represented a major effort as singlehandedly and consistently as Stone...

...Still, this is a thoughtful volume by someone equally at home in American and European intellectual history...

...As intended the CCF grew into amajor vehicle for "containment" on the ideological and cultural fronts...

...Stone's main job under McCloy was to provide the resources for a new press...

...Now everyone knew that it was financed by the CIA, and that top Ford Foundation personnel, including its president, McGeorge Bundy, were fully aware of the connection...

...Perhaps because he never made much of his Jewish heritage, Stone did not echo the "hate-the-Germans" attitude that prevailed, despite the fact that the disastrous Allied policies after World War I showed this to be an emotional involvement policymakers could ill afford...

...Before long he became a close and valuable adviser to the U.S...

...The natural career path in those days for someone interested in international affairs was journalism...

...The author, Volker R. Berghahn, a distinguished German-born scholar, is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University...

...dollars to the mostly young journalistic entrepreneurs whom he deemed reliable...

...Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but in the rarefied atmosphere of Eero Saarinen's recently built atrium on Manhattan's East 43rd Street such things simply were not done—or admitted...

...What united the contributors was clear opposition to all forms of totalitarian rule—Left or Right—and a commitment to Jeffersonian democracy...

...Although its title is accurately descriptive, the book is actually a biography of Shepard Stone, who creatively and persistently, but also abrasively and arrogantly, organized the advancement and defense of Western values in the turbulent world of postwar Europe...

...With the unmasking of its CIA funding, the CCF crumbled...

...He was, as Berghahn puts it, always looking for "the good Germans" who could begin to plant democratic seeds in the conquered, shattered country, and root them securely...

...Standing aside or opposed to the whole effort were the antianti-Communists, such as Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein in America, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pablo Picasso and Pietro Nenni among the Europeans...

...former program officer, Ford Foundation When I joined the program staff of the Ford Foundation in 1968, the crisis that had developed over its support of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was still in the air...

...One of the latter was Daniel Bell, author of The End of Ideology (1960), considered by Berghahn the seminal work of the time...

...For the foundation to be in league with the CIA was a sin Bundy might have taken calmly, even benevolently, when he was National Security Adviserunder Presidents JohnF...

...In universities, the media and nonfiction, political correctness prevails...

...Cold War policies, he became an advocate of the kind of work that was being done by the then embryonic Committee for Cultural Freedom...

...This confirmed his belief that it was not only possible but essential to find "good Germans" if democracy was to have a real chance in the strategic country...

...He was 82...

...High Commissioner for Germany, John McCloy...

...However, was the revelation really so monumental an event that it justifies the practice of politically correct people—of whom, happily, Berghahn is not one—to write and talk solely about this aspect of a remarkably creative and effective organization...

...Stone's activities at the High Commissioner's office, which embraced as well key political and ideological issues on the broader East-West front, stood him in good stead in the endeavor that was to consume most of the rest of his professional life...

...These individuals and many more produced a broad range of consistently highlevel material that filled widely respected CCF-sponsored magazines like the British Encounter, French Preuves, German Der Monat, Italian Tempo Presente, and Spanish Cuadernos...

...The press had blown the international organization's cover...

...On the recommendation of a professor there, he decided to spend study time in Germany in the '20s and was captivated by the country, especially its then culturally buzzing capital...

...His one requirement was free and responsible journalism that would give German readers a variety of choices...

...What matters is that many if not most of today's politicians, professors and students have either forgotten or neverlearned to appreciate the values that the men and women of Shepard Stone's CCF were committed to and fought for with their typewriters and voices...

...Clear-cut opposition to totalitarianism has also been watered down...

...He soon mastered the language, studied German literature and philosophy, and received a thorough introduction to pre-Hitler European politics...

...The followingyear he left the Times andjoined the Ford Foundation, where he eventually was named head of a new International Affairs Division that would run an expanded Congress for Cultural Freedom...

...It was a relationship that would last for decades...

...The Ford Foundation lost interest in supporting a shortlived successor, the International Association for Cultural Freedom, also headed by Stone...

...We are all, or almost all, united in the quest to wipe out every trace of neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism and racism, but look kindly on the metamorphosis of a Communist Party that tortured dissenters and shot border-crossers into a "Party of Social Democracy" represented in the German Bundestag...

...Stone managed to get a job on the staff of the New York Times that he would later return to, but one gets a sense that at this stage he found it hard to stay in one place very long...