The Organising of Intellectual Consensus: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and Post-War US-European Relations (Part I)

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‘In any event, and whatever certain people in a certain department in the CIA may have been after, as far as the work of the Congress was concerned the perceived need to be perpetually “of the Left and on the Left” led sometimes to grotesque intellectual contortions.'(1)

The standard interpretation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) since the revelations concerning the source of its funding in the late 1960s has been that it was simply ‘another CIA operation’ designed to manipulate intellectual opinion in the Cold War. As Edward Said put it,

‘organised anti-communism in the US led aggressively to covert support by the CIA for otherwise unexceptional groups such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.'(2)

The point being that, with the value of hindsight, the CIA support effectively discredits the actual intellectual standpoints taken by the Congress and its members, or at least puts them in a suspect light. Without the CIA, the possibility is that the CCF would have been just another organisation among many, or would never have existed at all. What will be argued here is that a better understanding of the connections between different interests in the political, economic, and intellectual realms is needed to appreciate the importance of the Congress, especially in the context of post-war relations between the US and Western Europe. To do so it is necessary to take the Congress out of its standard context as ‘another CIA operation’ and, in a sense, reassess its role in the search for and organisation of an international intellectual consensus around certain key issues, particularly the ‘end of ideology’, in the 1950s Cold War. Through the CCF genuine viewpoints were co-opted as representing the norm and instrumentalised in such a way that they can be seen as being inseparable from the goals of American foreign policy towards Western Europe in that period. The point about this claim is that it is important to recognise that CIA involvement was centred on the promotion and manipulation of existing viewpoints on the left (eg anti-Stalinism), and not the actual creation of them out of thin air.

Initially (at least for the first two years of its existence) it was very unclear what exactly the goals of the Congress as a permanent organisation would be. Once its role as publisher, conference-holder, and cultural promoter was sorted out by 1952, with CIA man Michael Josselson in control as Administrative Secretary and regular funding secured, the danger was that the CCF would become too closely aligned with the interests of its major power-brokers back in Washington. As Szamuely rightly claims,

‘what had started off as a tactical ploy by the Congress – namely, to position itself on the Left in order to win support for liberal democracy from the European intelligentsia (who, it was supposed, were largely on the Left) – came to be a goal pursued wholly for its own sake.'(3)

In other words, while there were obviously always tactics employed to secure for this organisation as wide an audience as possible, at some point those tactics became obsolete in the context of the changing intellectual and political climate. The contention here is that this had occurred by the late 1950s, and that through the 1960s, despite CIA funding remaining very high (over $1 million a year), the CCF was basically an expensive white elephant which some in the Agency were happy to eventually see exposed. For this reason only the years of its formation and establishment are covered here.

Sidney Hook and Partisan Review

What is important here is the role of the CCF in solidifying connections between American and European intellectuals at a time when economic, political, and military links between the two continents were also entering a new level of cohesion. Before the CCF, the internationalist interests of the non-Stalinist American Left and the US government did not always coincide. In 1948 Dwight Macdonald had founded ‘Europe-America Groups’ with Mary McCarthy, Nicola Chiaromonte and Albert Camus in an attempt to create some kind of radical international post-war community away from the rigid demands of anti-Stalinism. However the attempt failed, mainly due to dissensions among its members as to its possible goals, with Macdonald losing enthusiasm due to his increasing confusion about political events in Europe and growing disenchantment with ‘absolute political positions’.(4)

The ‘absolute political position’ that would take hold of an increasingly active section of the American intellectual community, led in particular by philosopher Sidney Hook and the circle surrounding the literary journal Partisan Review (PR), was anti-Stalinism. Their leadership in this development had a lot to do with their disillusionment with the sterility of argument which had marked the American Communist Party in the 1930s, in particular its slavish adherence to every dictat from Moscow that marked every turn in the somersaulting Soviet foreign policy of that period. It was in these factional fights in the US Left that ‘cultural freedom’ was born, exemplified by Hook’s formation of the Committee for Cultural Freedom among academics and literary intellectuals in 1939, fronted by John Dewey. Through his dedication to the anti-Stalinist cause Hook had a major impact on many intellectuals of his generation. PR, set up as a literary organ of the Party in 1933, had gone independent after its editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, rejected the ‘socialist realism’ of the CP and sought a mix of radical politics and cultural modernism. After WW II Hook and PR were keen to take their anti-Stalinist message to Europe. It was the attempt by Hook, Phillips, and Rahv to take over EAG for this purpose that broke up the organisation. Hook then took his anti-Stalinism on the road in 1948-49. In 1948 he acted as educational advisor to OMGUS, the American military government in occupied Germany.(5) In the same year he also attended the International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam, declaiming any support or sympathy for the Soviet Union as ‘political cretinism’ and as a denial of responsibility when ‘the soul of the West’ itself was under threat.(6)

PR also began to express itself more forcefully on the attitude the US should take towards the USSR. Hook had written to Rahv in August 1945:

‘Now that the war is over, I suggest that PR meet the challenge of Stalinist totalitarianism head-on and plan for concentrated fire in each issue on some phase or other of the theme.'(7)

In pursuing the line that American liberalism had to abandon any sense of sympathy for the Soviet Union, Partisan Review was certainly out of step with other liberal journals such as The Nation and New Republic, which continued to reject a confrontational approach towards the USSR until 1947-48.(8) PR’s anti-Stalinism, in the form of an article by Arthur Schlesinger,(9) became noticed by the State Department in mid-1947, and there was even a failed attempt to set up a regular column for Cold Warrior journalist and Washington ‘insider’ Joseph Alsop.(10) Having been out in the cold on the ‘independent left’ for several years, the journal was now becoming part of the officially-sanctioned mainstream. In 1947 the editors received the added bonus of an annual gift of $50,000 for four years from American poet Allan Dowling, and the money was used to expand the journal from a quarterly to a monthly.(11) At this time Hook and former Trotskyite James Burnham became associate editors, adding to PR’s Cold War conservatism.(12) So far nothing has been proved that this money came from an ‘unofficial’ source, and Phillips has always denied the persistent rumours of CIA money being channelled to PR.(13) However in 1952, when the Dowling money was exhausted and the journal had to revert back to being a monthly, CIA conduit the Farfield Foundation did provide $1500.(14)

Enter the CCF

PR also accepted the CCF-affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, as its publisher in 1958. However, it would be wrong to assume that Partisan Review was simply adopted by the power structure as a useful cultural front. Its value came from its prestige status both at home and abroad as a high quality periodical devoted to the defence of cultural standards and intellectual freedom, as opposed to the doctrinal demands of communism, and in the 1940s it had an increasing audience for these views. But Phillips and Rahv would never have given up their editorial independence in order to fit within a co-ordinated anti-Soviet strategy, and they were always concerned with their status as an intellectual vanguard outside of the political status quo. Commenting on the murky background to PR’s finances in this period, James Gilbert later stated that

‘men and their ideas must be considered for what they are and what they mean, not for who pays the bills. The important thing is that a good many intellectuals and America’s leading spy agency came to the same conclusions at much the same time about America’s role in world society.'(15)

Of course, as was mentioned in relation to Edward Said’s comment above, a secure money supply can give certain ideas a greater distribution and importance than they would otherwise enjoy. Yet there is still some truth to Gilbert’s position, since the viewpoints of people like Hook, Phillips, and Rahv were the result of the factional fights on the Left in the 1930s. As Hugh Wilford has remarked,

‘the important point to note is that the intellectuals clearly recognised the Cultural Cold War as their cause. It was they who had first alerted Americans to the gravity of the Soviet threat. The organisational weapons with which the Cultural Cold War was to be waged had grown directly out of their political activities during the late 1940s. Above all, the principle on which the American propaganda effort was founded, that is cultural freedom, was exactly the one they themselves had been defending ever since the 1930s.'(16)

So while there were shared ideas about the Cold War and America’s essential role in it, this does not mean that there was always a controlling interest in those ideas on the side of the CIA or anyone else in the government. While Thomas Braden, the originator of many CIA-sponsored schemes through his International Organisations Division, stated that the aim was to ‘use legitimate, existing organisations’,(17) when this was not possible a new venture was deliberately organised to fill the gap. This is especially noticeable here, since Partisan Review had begun its own London edition in March 1947, and it would consequently come into direct competition with Encounter in the coming years, a source of friction between PR’s editors and the CCF. Yet, while the Review was left to continue its own policy, it did provide a kind of blueprint for what would be attempted on a wider scale with the CCF’s own magazines, such as Encounter, Preuves (France), Tempo Presente (Italy), Cuardenos (Spain), Quest (India), and Quadrant (Australia), where editorial lines were kept within the strategic boundaries of anti-communism. Above all, it was PR’s quality and ability to act as a mouthpiece for a particular section of the intellectual community that made it a benchmark for later attempts by the Congress to do the same.

The Waldorf and after

After the demise of EAG in 1949 Hook went on to form first the Friends of Russian Freedom, followed by the more confrontational Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF). The renewed activities of the Cominform, resurrected in 1947 after Stalin had mothballed it in order to appease his Western allies during the war, were the immediate cause of Hook’s more belligerent stance. Attempting to recreate the pre-war Popular Front, the Cominform’s ‘peace offensive’ came right to New York with the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in March 1949, with many big names in attendance (including former Vice-President Henry Wallace). The Waldorf event is crucial because of its importance as a catalyst for what was to come. AIF, core members being Hook, Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, and Nicolas Nabokov, was an ad-hoc group that tried to disrupt the orchestrated consensus of the Waldorf meetings. As William Barrett, a former associate editor of Partisan Review, remarked, ‘there is no American organisation adequate in resources, energy, or direction to fighting Stalinist propaganda on a satisfactory level.'(18) Yet their effort to create a counter-demonstration and seize publicity was noticed, and the attempt to co-opt and organise the already-existing anti-Stalinism of prominent intellectuals such as Hook began. The day after the Waldorf gathering Carmel Offie, Frank Wisner’s second-in-command at OPC, contacted the State Department to find out what could be done to oppose the next Cominform peace conference due in Paris in April.(19) It is important to realise that at this time the Office of Policy Coordination, set up by National Security Council document NSC 10/2 in June 1948 to carry out all forms of psychological warfare, was funded and staffed by the CIA (set up itself in July 1947) but remained under the responsibility of the State Department. In 1948 Policy Planning Staff chief George Kennan was the State Department’s main representative to do with OPC’s formation and raison d’être.(20) Offie had up till then been concentrating on the anti-communist union network in Europe via American Federation of Labor (AFL) representative Irving Brown.(21) Also present at the AIF’s final rally was Michael Josselson, Deputy Chief of Berlin Information Control with OMGUS and formerly a member of the US Army’s Psychological Warfare Division. Josselson was impressed, and took the idea of creating something similar back with him to Berlin. As a recent study has pointed out, ‘Michael Josselson became the first OPC officer in Berlin in fall 1949. His primary concern was to provide the framework for the anti-communist “front” organisation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.'(22) In 1951 Josselson would successfully lobby to secure his former OMGUS colleague and Voice of America advisor Nabokov as CCF’s first Secretary-General.

The Cominform’s World Peace Congress, held jointly in Paris and Prague and graced with Picasso’s Peace Dove as its powerful symbol, successfully portrayed the US as the main threat to post-war stability in Europe and so achieved its aim. The counterevent planned by Offie and Irving Brown did not. French socialist David Rousset, at Brown’s request, set up an International Day of Resistance to Dictatorship and War. Hook and novelist James Farrell attended as representatives of AIF, their travel costs (and those of the German and Italian delegates) covered by OPC.(23) Hook told the New York Times that he wanted to establish an international organisation ‘independent of all governments which will represent independent thinkers and artists concerned with the least common denominator of a free culture.'(24) However, Rousset’s anti-Communism was in no way pro-American. In 1946-49 he was part of the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire, a group of independent socialist/neutralist intellectuals surrounding Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and the newspapers Le Monde, Franc-Tireur, and Esprit, which called for a European ‘Third Way’ outside of Soviet and American influence.(25) Rousset had not invited Koestler, Burnham, or Raymond Aron because they were ‘too anti-communist’, so that after Hook declared in his talk at the Sorbonne that ‘because I wish to diminish the possibilities of war and increase the possibilities of peace, I personally support both the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact’, Sartre publicly dissociated his group from the meeting and any pretence of an anti-communist united front disappeared.(26)

The Paris debacle demonstrated the problems of trying to form an anti-communist pro-American consensus among European intellectuals without a tight organisation on the ground to hold it together. According to Michael Warner, neither Hook or Farrell were aware of OPC’s involvement in Paris.(27) At some point in 1949 Hook was contacted by Walter Bedell Smith, the former Ambassador to the USSR who would become CIA Director-General in October 1950, to discuss ‘matters of mutual interest’.(28) But Hook more than anything was acting according to his actual intellectual concerns, and the fact that he now had important sections of the government behind him only encouraged him. Richard Elman has remarked that

‘from the Control’s point of view this image is really of a dog being led on a very long leash. Central to its success with intellectuals, who were said to be committing themselves to freedom and independence, was the Agency’s calculation that some, if not most, should be permitted to remain “unwitting” because they were in basic agreement with Agency politics, or could be more co-operative and useful if permitted to act as if they were unwitting.'(29)

Or, more correctly, because the development of anti-Stalinism out of the 1930s came first, the Agency was in basic agreement with the politics of these intellectuals, and consequently sought to amplify their voice. As David Caute said about the CCF’s flagship journal,

‘common sense and the history of Encounter both indicate that CIA funds were not the cause of the magazine’s anti-communist, pro-American orientation, merely a materially-supporting factor.'(30)

Aside from the needless call to common sense (never a good reference point in these matters) this returns to the point made about Partisan Review – how much did the extra financial support contribute to the consolidation of a post-war anti-communist consensus? Encounter appeared in 1953 at a time when the British literary magazine market was at a very low ebb, with key publications such as Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, John Lehman’s New Writing, and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny all having folded by 1950. Exemplary of the ‘right-wing orthodoxy dominated by survivors of the 1930s’, Encounter’s achievement of annual sales of 16,000 by 1958 (even the high-quality Horizon never made it beyond 10,000) was undoubtedly aided by it being heavily subsidised in times that did not allow the creation of any serious competition.(31)

Melvin Lasky and Der Monat

While in Paris Hook met Melvin Lasky, a journalist with both Partisan Review and New Leader who had been briefly associated with Macdonald, Burnham, and PR during the faction-ridden splits in the New York Left in the late 1930s. Lasky would be the key figure in arranging the formation of the CCF, and he is a good example of someone who moved easily between intellectual, political, and intelligence circles.(32) He came to prominence through his single-handed disruption of the German Writers Congress held in East Berlin in October 1947 by complaining about the lack of writers’ freedoms in the USSR.(33) What followed is significant. The continuing attempt by key sections of the State Department and OMGUS to work with the Soviet Union in the post-war control of Germany led apparently to threats to expel Lasky for his disturbance of the status quo.(34) Yet in early December he presented two memos to the Information Control Division of OMGUS proposing the creation of a sophisticated literary-political journal to promote the idea that American power was there to protect European cultural/ intellectual freedom. As he said,

‘high hopes for peace and international unity blinded us to the fact that a concerted political war against the USA was being prepared and executed, and nowhere more vigorously than in Germany.'(35)

In response he suggested that

‘its formula would be to address, and to stimulate, the German-reading intelligentsia of Germany and elsewhere, with the world-views of American writers and thinkers. It would serve both as a constructive fillip to German-European thought and reevaluation (and re-education); and also as a demonstration that behind the official representatives of American democracy lies a great and progressive culture, with a richness of achievement in the arts, in literature, in philosophy, in all the aspects of culture which unites the free traditions of Europe and America.'(36)

To further emphasise the strategic intentions of the journal, Lasky finished by stating that such a development would help

‘to overcome the obstructions which anti-American forces in Europe have been relentlessly preparing to block the US position in world affairs – first and foremost, on the issue of the Marshall Plan for continental reconstruction.'(37)

The result of these memos was Der Monat, a monthly journal of philosophical-cultural-political debate which first appeared in October 1948 with Lasky as chief editor. It was an instant success, capitalising on the lack of intellectual debate in post-fascist Germany, and providing an alternative to the wide-ranging Soviet-sponsored pro-communist press.(38) Der Monat is a good example, perhaps better than the more deliberate strategy of Encounter later, of the collusion of intellectual and political interests in the West in this period. The defence of cultural values and cultural expression in a free society that this journal stood for was inseparable from the anti-communist Cold War strategy that was rapidly emerging as the dominant theme of Western geopolitics. What is also significant about Der Monat is that Lasky was able to seize the initiative so quickly at a time when the demands for a more aggressive cultural foreign policy were just beginning to gather strength in Washington. Lasky’s position can be summed up in a letter to Nabokov a few years later – ‘I wish we didn’t have to go around trying to make “Propaganda Kapital” out of everything, especially the arts; but I’m afraid we do.'(39)

Having spoken to Hook in Paris in April, Lasky began to put a plan together for ‘a permanent committee of anti-communist intellectuals from Europe and America.'(40) In August 1949 he met up with Communist International historian Franz Borkenau and former KPD official Ruth Eisler at a hotel in Frankfurt to discuss the plan in more detail. Around this time Eisler, who was also in contact with Arthur Koestler, had written a memo herself about the need to create an ‘intellectual counter-offensive’ against the Cominform peace movement, with the emphasis being on those excommunists who could make use of their first-hand accounts of Stalinist falsities.(41) She proposed that it be held in Berlin (something Rousset had already suggested), and she ‘hoped to talk to “a few friends in Washington” about the idea during her trip there that fall.'(42) Eisler’s contribution illustrates the importance of the disillusionment with communism in general and Stalinism in particular amongst key figures of the European Left at this time – ‘the God that failed’ crowd.(43) Without this receptive audience the CCF would never have come about – but neither would it without American finance and American organisation.

At the end of 1949 Lasky met William Donovan at the cultural congress of the European Union in Lausanne. Donovan, the founder of OSS, was there as a representative of the American Committee for a United Europe, the US branch of the European unity movement that was effectively run by Allen Dulles as a possible cover for clandestine operations.(44) Whether Donovan had any influence on Lasky’s plan is not yet clear. Lasky went on in February 1950 to secure the patronage of West Berlin’s Social Democratic Mayor, Ernst Reuter, and together with two prominent German academics these four comprised the organising committee for what would be the CCF’s inaugural conference in June. Berlin was strategically the perfect place for the interests of the New York intelligentsia to combine with European anti-communism, and Lasky was what had been lacking up to this point – the ideal on-the-spot organiser to pull it together.

Funding: the union link

Coleman is quite frank about the fact that at the Frankfurt meeting the CIA was seen as the probable source of funding,(45) and Eisler’s plan did reach Offie in September. It was around this time that the State Department, realising that its support would make the whole event too obviously an act of propaganda, passed control over to the CIA.(46) Yet the Agency did not move for the rest of the year, mainly due to indecision on the next step. Then in January 1950 Josselson presented a coherent plan to OPC that transformed Eisler’s overtly political proposal into something (slightly) more subtle – a cultural-intellectual conference that could reaffirm ‘the fundamental ideas governing cultural (and political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges.’ Josselson was in touch with Lasky and this plan combined well with what Lasky had in mind. Again there was a delay, Wisner not giving the go-ahead until 7th April, with a budget of $50,000 allocated.(47)

Arthur Schlesinger, the liberal historian and friend of Allen Dulles, later said ‘I knew because of my intelligence links that the original meeting of the Congress in Berlin was paid for by the CIA.'(48) But the mechanisms by which this could be done took a while to sort out. Wisner had shown his interest ‘for a continuing organisation’ after the confusion in Paris in April 1949, but it was not until 1951 that Thomas Braden, who joined the CIA in the previous year, persuaded a somewhat doubtful Agency hierarchy to create the International Organisations Division to co-ordinate their expanding cultural activities.(49) And it was not until 1952 that the channel for 80% of the CCF’s funding, the Farfield Foundation fronted by Cincinnati millionaire Julius Fleischmann, was up and running. Prior to this the main channel of finance and logistical support had come via the American unions in Europe, in particular the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) headed by former CPUSA leader Jay Lovestone and AFL official Irving Brown. The FTUC, formed in 1944 to aid the rebuilding of democratic institutions in post-war post-fascist Europe, in 1949 agreed a formal arrangement with OPC to act as a financial conduit to European anti-communist groups.(50) The $5000 that union leader David Dubinsky, one of the founders of FTUC, gave to finance Hook’s AIF campaign at the Waldorf could have been CIA money.(51) Brown, through the FTUC, funded the CCF’s conference in Berlin, and paid out $170,000 to the CCF’s Secretariat to get the organisation moving.(52) When the International Committee of the CCF met to discuss its future agenda in Brussels in November 1950, it took place in the conference hall of the anti-communist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, organised by Brown.(53)

But Brown did more than simply provide logistics. He was one of the core group, alongside Lasky, Hook, Burnham, and Koestler, who monitored the passage of the Congress’s inauguration in Berlin.(54) It is clear that he had his own ideas about what the CCF should be, and he was prepared to fight for them. Lovestone and Brown may have received CIA money, but they also had their own agendas. The turning-point with the CCF seems to have come when Brown’s choice for General Secretary, Louis Fischer, lost out to Nicolas Nabokov, who had the support of Josselson and other power-brokers such as George Kennan.(55) Brown handed over the financial responsibilities to Josselson in autumn 1951, who from then on became the chief organiser in the field. (56)

Brown had wanted Fischer to form a more militantly anti-communist organisation, but Josselson’s focus on cultural-intellectual matters would now be the dominant theme.(57) Coleman explicitly says that ‘it is impossible to separate this coup – at once ideological and pragmatic – from the decision of the US Central Intelligence Agency to assume responsibility for the continuing funding of the Congress.'(58) And not only the funding. In order to install the Nabokov-Josselson leadership, something had to be done about Lasky, the self-appointed General-Secretary for the Berlin conference and the driving force within the intellectual community for the organisation’s actual existence.(59) Lasky’s prestige through Der Monat was very high – Peter de Mendelssohn commented that ‘in order to convoke a “Congress for Cultural Freedom” to Berlin, he had, in fact, to do little more than send out invitations to his prominent contributors over the past two years.'(60) But Wisner had already demanded before Berlin that Lasky be removed from his controlling position, since his public connection with OMGUS made the CCF too much of a target as a US government operation.(61) Josselson, well aware of Lasky’s vital role, delayed this as long as possible – the whole credibility of the conference would have been destroyed if its main organiser had been removed for no apparent reason only two months before it opened. But after Berlin Wisner overruled the protests from his subordinates in OPC’s European sections, including Josselson, and at some point between July and October 1950 ‘OPC contrived to have [Lasky] removed from the project.'(62) Josselson resigned from OMGUS and took on the full-time post as the CCF’s Administrative Secretary. In 1951, with both Lasky and Brown sidelined and Braden’s IOD created, the CCF came more directly under OPC control.

Part 2 of this essay, which will appear in Lobster 38, will cover the tactics used by the CCF to try and maintain an anti-communist consensus, 1950 – 1955.

Notes

  1. George Szamuely, ‘The Intellectuals and the Cold War’, Commentary, Vol. 88 No. 6, December 1989, p. 56
  2. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, Vintage/London, 1993, p. 83.
  3. George Szamuely, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Commentary, Vol. 89 No. 4, p. 6
  4. Hugh Wilford, ‘An Oasis: The New York Intellectuals in the Late 1940s’, Journal of American Studies, Vol. 28 No. 2, 1994, p. 216. This had not prevented EAG funds raised through private donation and public lectures, at one point consisting of more than $2000, from being distributed by Chiaromonte in Paris to ‘deserving individuals and ventures’ such as the magazine Revolution Prolètarienne. Cf. Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution, Manchester University Press/Manchester, 1995, pp. 172 – 174. Chiaromonte, after working with UNESCO, would re-emerge as co-editor of the CCF’s Italian journal Tempo Presente in 1956.
  5. Sydney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, Harper & Row/New York, 1987, p. 432
  6. See Sydney Hook, ‘On the Battlefield of Philosophy’, Partisan Review, Vol. 16, March 1949, pp. 251 – 253.
  7. Quoted in S.A. Longstaff, ‘The New York Intellectuals and the Cultural Cold War: 1945 – 1950’, New Politics, Vol. 2 No. 2, Winter 1989, p. 156.
  8. For a typical example of PR’s politics at this time see William Barrett (co-editor), ‘The “Liberal” Fifth Colum”, Partisan Review, Vol. 13, Summer 1946.
  9. ‘The Future of Socialism’, Partisan Review, Vol. 14 No. 3, 1947.
  10. Longstaff, p. 156.
  11. On Dowling see ‘Angel with a Red Beard’, Time, Vol. 49, June 1947, p. 64.
  12. Burnham, the son of a Chicago railway tycoon, had clashed repeatedly with Hook in the 1930s as Trotsky’s spokesman in the American left. Burnham broke with Trotsky after the latter supported Stalin in the fight against fascism, and he went on to work for the OSS by preparing a study on the coming war with the USSR. He later published it in expanded form as The Struggle for the World, a piece of hard-line Cold War rhetoric that came out in the same week as the announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 and that was consequently linked with the new turn in US foreign policy. Cf. Gary Dorrein, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology, Temple University Press/Philadelphia, 1993, p. 44. By the late 1940s Burnham, then ‘Professor of Philosophy at New York University, was a knowledgeable and valued consultant to the Office of Policy Co-ordination [OPC]’, the covert operations arm of the newly-formed CIA. Cf. Iain Hamilton, Koestler: A Biography, Secker & Warburg/London, 1982, p. 174.
  13. Dowling apparently earned considerable amounts through real estate deals. Phillips and Rahv, who had stated that $50,000/year would be enough to make PR into the foremost literary journal in the US, aimed to escalate sales from 7600 to 20,000 an issue. See ‘Angel with a Red Beard’, Time, Vol. 49, 30th June 1947, p. 64, where PR’s wayward path was described as ‘originally communist,[then] was revived as anti-Stalinist and vaguely Trotskyite, then independent Marxist, now classifies itself as “radical democratic”.’ Philips later reported that he was approached in Paris in 1949 to pass money on to particular European causes, but he refused. See A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life, Stein & Day/New York, 1983, pp. 104, 141 – 145.
  14. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta Books/London, forthcoming 1999.
  15. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America, John Wiley Inc./New York, 1968, pp. 274 – 275 note 31.
  16. The New York Intellectuals, op. cit. p. 199.
  17. ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”‘, Saturday Evening Post, 20th May 1967, p. 14.
  18. ‘Culture Conference at the Waldorf’, Commentary, Vol. 7, May 1949, p. 493.
  19. See Michael Warner, ‘Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949 – 50’, at http://www.odci.gov/csi/studies/95unclas/war.html. (originally from CIA in-house journal Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 38 No. 5, 1995.
  20. See Arthur Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency, Pennsylvania State University Press/University Park, 1990, pp. 273 – 279.
  21. Offie was an Italian-American who had developed a formidable reputation in the State Department diplomatic corps as a ‘fixer’ with dubious methods, and who assiduously cultivated social contacts with top-level people such as George Kennan and Charles Bohlen. Wisner grabbed Offie for OPC and gave him free rein for two years, until he had to be removed due to the bad publicity surrounding Joseph McCarthy’s questioning of Offie’s sexuality and danger as a security risk in 1950. Offie, who also worked on the Wisner/Allen Dulles creation the National Committee for a Free Europe (founder of Radio Free Europe), then moved to the AFL under Jay Lovestone, and worked closely with Irving Brown as a connection between the CIA and the AFL until 1954. The FBI continually investigated him, and despite removing him from government work never managed a prosecution. Nobody would let that happen: Offie knew too much about too many people. See Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, Charles Scribner/New York, 1992, pp. 42 – 44, 442 – 448.
  22. David Murphy, Sergei Kondrashev, & George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War, Yale University Press/New Haven, 1997, p. 106.
  23. Warner p. 3.
  24. Quoted in Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, University of California Press/Berkeley, 1991, p. 34.
  25. Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanisation, University of California Press/Berkeley, 1993, p. 46.
  26. Out of Step, op. cit. p. 399
  27. Warner p. 3.
  28. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, Yale University Press/New Haven, 1989, p. 69.
  29. Richard Elman, The Aesthetics of the CIA, 1977, unpublished manuscript, p. 6.
  30. The Fellow Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment, Weidenfeld & Nicolson/London, 1973, p. 299.
  31. The New Statesman and Nation, the mouthpiece for the non-aligned socialist movement in the early 50’s, may have been the political target of Encounter, but the Statesman had a circulation of 85,000 a week and Encounter was always too ‘high-brow’ to compete with that. As Coleman demonstrated, there was a constant dispute in the 1950s between Josselson and American political editor Irving Kristol over the level of politicisation that Encounter should aim for. See Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, Oxford University Press/New York, 1981, pp. 60 – 62; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, Free Press/New York, 1989, p. 77. For 1959 the subsidy for Encounter alone appears to have been $77,089.88, paid by the Farfield Foundation, cf. ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom: Subsidy of Periodicals During Year Ending 31 December 1959’, CCF Archive, Series IV Box 11 Folder 9.
  32. For instance, it is almost worthless speculating whether Lasky was the agent with Encounter that Braden mentioned in ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”‘ because it would be wrong to see him as just a CIA man. For Lasky the cultural and the political were inseparable in the Cold War.
  33. For a report see Time, Vol. 50 No. 16, October 20th 1947, p. 31
  34. Coleman’s typical emphasis on the ‘penetration’ of OMGUS by pro-Soviet liberals almost pays homage to the red-baiting of the McCarthy era and ignores the fact that as late as 1947 many administrators were still hoping for post-war cooperation between East and West. See Coleman p. 17 – 18.
  35. ‘On the Need for a New Overt Publication, Effectively American-Oriented, on the Cultural Front’, 7th December 1947; ‘Towards a Prospectus for the “American Review”‘, 9th December 1947. I must thank Frances Stonor Saunders for making these documents available to me .
  36. ‘On the Need for a New Overt Publication’, p.1
  37. Ibid. p. 3
  38. Der Monat: Eine Internationale Zeitschrift fur Politik und Geistiges Leben, No. 1, October 1948, ran to an impressive 112 pages and included articles and reports by Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre (‘Man Writes for His Time’), Alfred Kazin, Richard Crossman, Stephen Spender, Clement Greenberg, and opinions from Bertrand Russell, Franz Borkenau, and Arnold Toynbee on ‘The Fate of the West’. Lasky could also claim George Orwell as his London correspondent.
  39. Lasky, letter to Nicolas Nabokov, 2nd August 1951, CCF Archive, Series II Box 241 Folder 4.
  40. Warner p. 3.
  41. Ruth Eisler, alias Fischer, had previously been co-founder of the Austrian Communist party, chair of the Berlin Kommunist Partei Deutchland during the Weimar Republic, and in the Comintern leadership committee before Stalin removed her due to ‘Trotskyite sympathies’. Her brother Gerhard, also a major Stalinist cohort, would be the chief propagandist in East Berlin denouncing the Congress when it eventually took place in June 1950. See Hamilton op. cit. pp. 174 – 177.
  42. Warner p. 4. Hook mentions Rousset’s suggestion in Out of Step, op. cit. p. 432.
  43. The God that Failed (Hamish Hamilton/London, 1950) was a collection of six essays edited by Labour MP Richard Crossman, three by ‘the initiates’ (Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright) and three by ‘worshippers from afar’ (Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender) on their disillusioned experiences with communism and the communist movement. While there was no direct connection between the book and the CCF, the intellectual significance of it is obvious: Koestler and Silone became prominent organisers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Spender edited the CCF journal Encounter from 1953 until 1966, Louis Fischer almost became the CCF’s first Director-General, and Crossman attended several seminars of the CCF in the mid-1950s.
  44. Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, p. 165. On ACUE see Hersh pp. 255 – 257.
  45. Coleman p. 16
  46. Ninkovich p. 164
  47. Warner ibid. p. 5
  48. Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, forthcoming.
  49. Warner p. 3. Braden’s boss was Wisner but it was Allen Dulles as CIA Deputy Director who gave the go-ahead for IOD, and Braden worked directly under Dulles. Wisner’s ‘forte was blowing up bridges’ and not cultural affairs. Also the proposed IOD ‘crossed geographical lines’ in the CIA administration, making it unpopular with some section chiefs. Braden p. 12; Telephone interview with Braden, 16th June 1998.
  50. Anthony Carew, ‘The American Labor Movement in Fizzland: the Free Trade Union Committee and the CIA’, Labor History, Vol. 39 No. 1, 1998, p. 26.
  51. Phillips p. 148; Longstaff pp. 163 – 164. AIF would also not have succeeded without the organisational skills and connections of two other labour men, Arnold Beichman (public relations agent for the Electrical Workers Union) and Merlyn Pitzele (labour editor with Businessweek).
  52. Carew p. 27; Pierre Gremion, Intelligence de L’Anticommunisme: Le Congress pour la liberté de la culture Paris 1950-1975, Fayard/Paris, 1995, p. 74.
  53. Ibid. p. 57
  54. Coleman p. 27.
  55. Saunders forthcoming.
  56. Gremion p. 74
  57. Brown’s intentions were also opposed by Burnham who disliked the CCF becoming part of the Brown-Lovestone ’empire’ and opposed Brown’s focus on the European non-communist left. Burnham, definitely also a ‘militant’, wanted the Congress to incorporate right-wing elements such as the Gaullists as well. (I must thank Hugh Wilford for this information).
  58. The Liberal Conspiracy, p. 34.
  59. Hook said later that ‘if anyone can be regarded as the animating spirit of the Congress, as the person without whom it would have died aborning, it is Melvin Lasky’, Out of Step, op. cit. p. 432.
  60. ‘Berlin Congress’, New Statesman and Nation, Vol. 40 No. 1010, July 15th 1950, p. 62.
  61. Wisner also wanted Burnham out of the way in Berlin. Burnham instead gave one of the most notorious hard-line speeches and was one of the key operators for the conference, again illustrating the limits to Wisnerís control at this stage. ‘Origins of the Congress’, op. cit. p. 5.
  62. Ibid. p. 6

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