Frances Stoner Saunders
Granta, London, 1999, £20
There isn’t much worth saying about this book that hasn’t been said in the many reviews it has had since it appeared in July.(1) This is a big book, 425 pages of text, another 80 plus of notes, bibliography, index. It is well written, witty – a major landmark in the literature on the CIA. Although much of the content of the book will be familiar in outline if you have read the extant material on the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Saunders has dug up mountains of new detail, and vividly conveys the preposterous arrogance of the Ivy League, button-down, white Americans who were trying to regulate the non-communist world in the 1950s.
In his essay on the CCF in this issue, Giles Scott-Smith argues that Saunders – like almost everyone else who has written about the CCF from the left – exaggerates the extent to which the CCF was a ‘CIA plot’ and underplays both the European input into it and the degree to which the CCF was actually the movement of intellectuals it purported to be. These are good points: Scott-Smith is right to accuse those of us on the left who have written about CCF as having a one-dimensional view of it. But if it wasn’t just a CIA plot, it was a CIA plot; and this wonderful book describes it in incredible detail.
Note
- Notably by Edward Said in the London Review of Books, 30 September.