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Book Reviews(1)The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
By Frances Stonor Saunders. New York: The New Press, 2000. 509 pages. Reviewed by Thomas M. Troy, Jr.
(2) Existential America
(3) American Existentialism Real or Fiction? http://www.batr.org/solitary/082905.html
(1) If The Cultural Cold War had been published in the 1960s or 1970s, it most likely would have caused a sensation and been a best seller. It would have provoked anguished editorials in major Western newspapers and a barrage of "we-told-you-so" items in the communist-controlled media. Published at the turn of the century, however, the book is something of a curiosity.1 It contains a long cry of moral outrage over the fact that the CIA committed "vast resources to a secret program of cultural propaganda in western Europe."2 At the same time, the author, an independent filmmaker and novelist, has produced a well-written account of a basically unfamiliar story with a cast of many larger-than-life characters who played roles in the Cold War. To over-simplify the historical background: In the late 1940s, Washington did not take it for granted that the people in Western Europe would support democratic governments and that their states would effectively oppose the Soviet Union and support the United States. To help promote democracy and to oppose the Soviet Union and West European communist parties, the CIA supported members of the non-communist left, including many intellectuals. Because the CIA's activities were clandestine, only a few of the beneficiaries were witting of the Agency's support, although a large number suspected Agency involvement. Frances Saunders evidently was dismayed and shocked! shocked! to learn there was gambling in the back room of Rick's café. She finds the Agency's activities to be reprehensible and morally repugnant and believes that the CIA's "deception" actually undermined intellectual freedom. She rejects the "blank check" line of defense offered by some people that the Agency "simply helped people to say what they would have said anyway."3 She reminds readers that the CIA overthrew governments, was responsible for the Bay of Pigs operation and the Phoenix Program, spied on American citizens, harassed democratically elected foreign leaders, and plotted assassinations. The CIA denied these activities before Congress and, "in the process, elevated the art of lying to new heights."4 Ms. Saunders vents her spleen mainly in her introduction, but in the text she repeatedly returns to the theme that the CIA injured the cause of intellectual freedom by clandestinely supporting (oh, irony of ironies!) champions of intellectual freedom. Not adverse to using clichés, Saunders refers to the CIA at various times as a "wilderness of mirrors," an "invisible government," and a "rogue elephant." According to Saunders, the list of CIA covert activities during the 1950s and 1960s is long. The Agency subsidized European tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and paid for the filming of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. It clandestinely subsidized the publishing of thousands of books, including an entire line of books by Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., and the renowned work by Milovan Djilas, The New Class . It bailed out, and then subsidized, the financially faltering Partisan Review and Kenyon Review . The centerpiece of the CIA's propaganda campaign—and the focus of Saunders's book—was the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its principal publication, the journal Encounter . Saunders's diligence and hard work shows as she describes the creation, activities, and downfalls of the Congress and the journal. She read the Church Report, performed research in various archives, and conducted many interviews, including some with retired CIA officers.5 Her fine writing style and occasionally even gossipy method of presenting the material makes what could have been a dry-as-dust account of institutions read easily. She also has some fascinating characters, for the people discussed in The Cultural Cold War are among the leading intellectual figures of post-World War II Europe and America. She presents these people with wit and occasionally a pen dripping with acid. After the CIA established and funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine, did it then call all the shots? Did the Agency determine what the Congress should support or what Encounter should publish? Evidently, no. In the 15 years that the Agency "ran" the magazine, Encounter probably published about 2,000 articles and reviews. Saunders can cite only two (rather dubious) cases in which the CIA may have intervened to prevent the journal from printing articles. For Saunders, however, the CIA's "interference" was much more invidious. She writes that, "The real point was not that the possibility of dissent had been irrevocably damaged...or that intellectuals had been coerced or corrupted (though that may have happened too), but that the natural procedures of intellectual enquiry had been interfered with."6 And, "Whilst Encounter never shrank from exposing the useful lies by which communist regimes supported themselves, it was never truly free itself of the `bear trap of ideology,' of that pervasive Cold War psychology of `lying for the truth'." Encounter "suspended that most precious of western philosophical concepts—the freedom to think and act independently—and trimmed its sails to suit the prevailing winds."7 I must admit that as I read such passages, I kept thinking "those poor stupid intellectuals." Saunders deserves praise for presenting opposing views. She admits that other people thought and think much differently than she does on the issue of the CIA's stifling of intellectual freedom. She offers quotes from, inter alia , George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Michael Josselson that in effect are rebuttals to her arguments.8 She also does a fine job in recounting the intriguing story of how the CIA worked with existing institutions, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and established numerous "bogus" foundations to "hide" its funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its other covert activities. Everything came a cropper in 1967, however, as a result of press articles, especially revelations in the long-gone Ramparts magazine. The Cultural Cold War has some major shortcomings. First and foremost, despite Saunders's assertions that the CIA undermined intellectual freedom, she does not present any examples of people whose intellectual growth was stunted or impaired because of the Agency's programs. Nor does she provide any examples of people switching ideological sides after the revelations about the Agency's role in the Congress and Encounter . She mentions that Jean Paul Sartre switched sides—or just "dropped out" of the Cold War; however, Sartre denounced the Soviet Union and repudiated communism after the USSR invaded Hungary.9 Saunders also fails to discuss the results of the CIA programs. Granted, it would be difficult to measure objectively the effectiveness of propaganda programs or campaigns. What did CIA achieve by "running" the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter ? I would venture the guess that Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone won more "hearts and minds" in Western Europe by working with the trade unions than any 20 people involved in the Congress or all the articles in Encounter . (Of course, according to Ms. Saunders, the CIA also subsidized the activities of Brown and Lovestone.) I also suspect that the ham-handed tactics of the Soviet Union and its allies had a far more profound impact on the West European populaces than any Western propaganda program. Saunders, however, is so intent on asserting that the CIA "crippled" West European intellectuals that she does not take time to analyze the effectiveness of the Agency's propaganda campaigns. Another flaw in The Cultural Cold War is that the book discusses only the Western side and barely mentions communist participants in the Cold War. The author does not mention the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the Soviet military intervention in East Germany in 1953, or the upheaval in Poland in 1956. There is one sentence each about the Berlin blockade and the Berlin Wall. She does devote two pages to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but offers several pages on Western "desertion" of the Hungarian rebels. Perhaps Saunders thought her readers would know all about the Soviet cruelties and decided it was unnecessary to discuss or even mention them. A more captious view would be that she did not want to discuss Soviet actions lest it appear that perhaps the CIA and the West in general had real reasons for doing what they did in the "cultural Cold War" in Europe. The Cultural Cold War contains some silly mistakes and some real gaffes. For example, Charles Bohlen was not the US Ambassador to France in 1948;10 he became Ambassador to France in 1962. Edward Barrett was never Secretary of State;11 he is correctly identified as an assistant secretary of state elsewhere in the text.12 The KGB did not have a spy "planted" on Willy Brandt in West Berlin in 1962;13 unless Saunders knows something nobody else does, she is probably mistakenly referring to East German spy Guenter Guillaume, who infiltrated Brandt's office in Bonn in 1969. If the Cuban missile crisis was an "imperial blunder," then it was a Soviet imperial blunder, not an American one.14 Finally, the author relates a story from an interview with former CIA officer Tom Braden that David Rockefeller frequently donated money to aid the CIA, including at one time writing a check for $50,000 to assist European youth groups.15 Saunders believes that such "freelance transactions" and "governmental buccaneering" created a culture that eventually resulted in "Oliver North-type disasters." She says the comparison is "apt" because "like the architect of Irangate" these "earlier friends of the CIA were never once afflicted by doubt in themselves of their purpose." I think the comparison is absurd. As should be clear, I do not share Frances Saunders's opinion about the "morality" of CIA's activities and do not accept her notion that CIA undermined "intellectual freedom" in Western Europe. I highly enjoyed and strongly recommend her book, however. Consider it to be similar to your favorite TV broadcast: enjoy the program and ignore the commercials. Footnotes 1. The book was published in 1999 in the United Kingdom with the title Who Paid the Piper? Page citations throughout this review are from the paperback edition, published in the United States in 2001. 2. Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 1. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. Senator Frank Church was Chairman of the Senate Select Committee that investigated the CIA in the mid-1970s. The official title of the report, published in 1976, was Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities . 6. Saunders, p. 409. 7. Ibid. , p. 322. 8. According to Saunders, Josselson was the "agent" who handled the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Saunders confuses her readers by frequently mixing the terms "agent" and "case officer." In the case of Michael Josselson, one of the heroes for Saunders, she quotes him (on page 42) as writing in his unfinished memoir that he joined the "outfit" as "chief of its Berlin station for covert action" in the fall of 1948. According to Saunders, however, the "outfit" was the Office for Policy Coordination, which was not completely folded into the CIA until 1950. It is my impression from reading this book that Josselson was most likely not a CIA staff officer but rather a contract employee or a fully witting agent. 9. Saunders, pp. 305-306. 10. Ibid., p. 61. 11. Ibid., p. 97. 12. Ibid., p. 80. 13. Ibid., p. 352. 14. Ibid., p. 362. 15. Ibid., p. 145. Tom Braden was one-time chief of the International Organizations Division of the Directorate of Plans, the CIA office that "ran" the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine.
Thomas M. Troy, Jr., served in CIA's Directorate of Intelligence (2)
Existential America The Johns Hopkins University Press ($39.95) by Christopher Luna Existentialists argue for personal responsibility in the face of what Walter Kaufmann identified as the four elements of this philosophy: "dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness." But as George Cotkin's overview of existentialism's influence upon American culture points out, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir felt that the "confidence and na•ve optimism" of Americans blinded them to "the problems of existence, authenticity, and alienation." Beauvoir especially found Americans to be materialistic, "afraid of freedom, unwilling to engage in high-level discussions of serious ideas, childish in some ways, and unable to trust themselves." Yet Cotkin shows there was an existential strain in American culture that preceded all three of these philosophers, in the work of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edward Hopper, among others. Unlike their French counterparts, American intellectuals "refused to make a fetish out of nihilism"; instead, "anguish and despair" functioned as "goads to action and commitment." As Cotkin goes on to illustrate, the horror of World War I and "the skeptical disposition of science had rendered traditional beliefs untenable." The influence of Soren Kierkegaard's "inwardness and religious anxiety" upon American religious thinkers and artists in the first half of the century "did not bode well for political radicalism or reform; it supported for some intellectuals a retreat from leftist commitments of the 1930s." Kierkegaard shared a "faith in the absurd" with his largely conservative followers, who "found much of American religion empty, marked by rote optimism and belief in progress." The willingness of Kierkegaardian thinkers to wrestle with "paradox, irony, and tragedy" in the aftermath of World War II made the Danish philosopher's ideas very attractive to writers including Thornton Wilder and W.H. Auden, as well as the painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for whom art was "a mythological and heroic 'act of defiance,' which opened the path to transcendence through engagement with the canvas and the unconscious." Kierkegaard's "mode of argument, positing two opposites," was also posthumously appropriated by Cold War proponents who demanded that Americans make a choice between "faith in God and faith in communism." In the 1940s and 1950s, as the ideas of Sartre and Beauvoir attained prominence, the press emphasized their happiness in an effort to dismiss their philosophy as a pose. The couple skillfully manipulated their reception in France and the United States, presenting a "model of the philosopher as personality" that made them vastly popular. But ultimately, "the reception and dissemination of existentialism" was beyond their control. The chilly reception Sartre and Beauvoir received from the New York intellectuals, anti-Stalinists who "feared the power of popular and middlebrow culture," will be familiar to anyone who has ever argued over whether a particular artist's best work occurred before they achieved fame. Despite their criticisms of existentialism, the writing of New York intellectuals such as Saul Bellow "adopted many of its essentials." Norman Mailer saw Sartre as "the only thinker in the world who could match him." Both "shared a desire. . . to effect 'a revolution in the consciousness of our time,'" though Mailer thought that Sartre "lacked a sufficient sense of evil." Mailer labeled his own novel, The Barbary Shore, (1951) as existential, and revealed an "existential focus" in The Naked and the Dead, (1948) where "the absurdity of war" is "demonstrated in the utter inability of men to control external events and the forces of nature." Cotkin includes an astute analysis of Mailer's well-known essay, "The White Negro," in which he claimed that blacks had been "transformed into the psychopathic hipster through centuries of oppressive social conditions." Like Jack Kerouac and the photographer Robert Frank, Mailer saw African-Americans as "endowed with existential recognition and freedom." Cotkin sees this appropriation of the image of the "Negro as sexual libertine" as an act of "bad faith" and racist stereotyping. Mailer's habitual celebration of psychopaths leaves him in "no man's land. Action replaces impotence . . . but at the cost of human solidarity." Mailer is ultimately a "fundamentalist" who believes that only those "who live close to the abyss, who battle against the conformity of American culture. . . are near to religious ecstasy and existential transcendence." The ideas of Camus appealed to student activists during the 1960s. Like Camus, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Robert Moses and Tom Hayden, radical activist and drafter of the Port Huron Statement, "worried about how the rebel could avoid becoming the oppressor." Moses felt a certain amount of responsibility for those who were injured or killed in the civil rights movement, while Hayden came to regret calling for violent revolution, having learned from Camus that in "defining ourselves, we must move beyond mere inwardness toward commitment to values such as justice and humaneness." Unfortunately, this section of the book is undermined by Cotkin's statement that these students "were the last generation for whom books made a difference," a conclusion that will surely surprise every scholar and writer alive during the four subsequent decades. Cotkin concludes with a comparison of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1962), best-selling books that "transformed the lives of many women in America." Both women focused on the "responsibility of the individual" rather than external sources of oppression, and both held "the existential imperative that men and women create themselves through constant acts of negation and transcendence." But Beauvoir did not "appreciate the heroism of women working against constraints in a limited fashion: surviving domestic violence, facing yet another pregnancy, managing to support a family." Friedan, in turn, disagreed with Beauvoir's critique of capitalism; instead, she "was a reformist, wanting women to have opportunities equal to those of men within the existing structures of power." By 1975, when they met for the first time, "Friedan's conservatism . . . and her rejection of sexual politics--indeed, even of discussions of sexual identity--marked her as bourgeois and backward-looking." Beauvoir saw Friedan's ideas for reform as "reactionary, linked to a notion that 'women are doomed to stay at home.'" Both women virtually ignored the plight of the working class and avoided the subject of non-white women altogether. Within "liberal and leftist academic circles, existentialism had, by the 1970s and 1980s, been pushed aside by deconstructionist and postmodern theory. . . . Critics derided existentialism for its refusal to understand the science of signs, the ways in which the human individual is constructed and constrained by structures of thought." Nevertheless, Cotkin concludes that "existentialism is receiving renewed attention in American culture because it speaks to everyone's frustrations in life: to dissatisfaction with ideals of success and to the unavoidably tragic nature of existence." He hopes that we will be able to "pass through despair to, if not salvation, then to a depth of understanding that is at once humbling and enabling." Despite its fascinating subject matter, Existential America suffers from a maddening repetitiveness. Particular words (e.g. "anguish" and "absurd") and phrases recur so frequently that one is forced to wonder whether the author lacks imagination or is simply insulting our intelligence. Many of the chapters began as articles in scholarly journals and magazines, and it shows. Although it is unfortunate that more attention was not paid to the overall coherence of the narrative, Existential America is a useful reference volume for students of philosophy and American culture.
(3) American Existentialism Real or Fiction? http://www.batr.org/solitary/082905.html Were the French Existentialists correct in concluding that the "American character swaggered with confidence and naive optimism?" Sartre observed, "evil is not an American concept. There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization." Beauvoir chimed in that Americans had no "feeling for sin and for remorse." And Camus, thought Americans "lacked a sense of anguish about the problems of existence, authenticity and alienation." In Carlin Romano's book review of Existential America by George Cotkin, Mr. Romano argues "On the contrary, Cotkin shows in the bulk of his study, "the French missed certain darker and deeper elements in the history of the American mind and spirit." For Cotkin, the "very notion of America as bereft of anguish is absurd. Death and despair appear as much in the American collective consciousness as does the luck-and-pluck optimism of Horatio Alger's heroes".
The post war period was a time when the United States was the victor, savior of the world. The new global empire would be idealistic, benevolent and magnanimous. Naïve optimism might be over generous in describing that innocence. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus may not have been the chroniclers of a de Tocqueville, but de Tocqueville certainly would have understood the angst experienced in the creation of the great American experiment. The 1950's was an era of benign tranquility. The threat of a nuclear holocaust loomed, but the society refused to forego its self-assurance. The "good old days" truly were nostalgic bliss.
From the Village Voice, Richard Polt asserts that: "intellectual historian George Cotkin proves existentialism's relevance by showing that it was never just a fad; existential sensibilities run deep in our history. Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, who all toured the United States after the war, saw only the country's exterior, its consumerist boosterism. But would it be so surprising if the land of the free were also the land of the searching, the anxious, the alienated? This is, after all, the country of Herman Melville and Edward Hopper."
Conversely, the overwhelming enthusiasm that supports the regimented 'PC' culture, economy and political system; often is immune to the underlying conflicts, intended exploitation and managed future. Over the last half century the accelerated demise of the land of the free has been transformed into the reservation of the oblivious. The awakening that took place during the 1960's suffered a relapse. The buoyancy of the civilization is not maintained with mere material progress. The test of true advancement lies in the consciousness of collective community. What was naïve before has become delusional today.
Christopher Luna's insightful comments on Existential America illustrates the sublime influence of distress in our search for authenticity. "The willingness of Kierkegaardian thinkers to wrestle with "paradox, irony, and tragedy" in the aftermath of World War II made the Danish philosopher's ideas very attractive to writers including Thornton Wilder and W.H. Auden, as well as the painters Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for whom art was "a mythological and heroic 'act of defiance,' which opened the path to transcendence through engagement with the canvas and the unconscious." Kierkegaard's "mode of argument, positing two opposites," was also posthumously appropriated by Cold War proponents who demanded that Americans make a choice between "faith in God and faith in communism."
How ironic that the trust in country demonstrated in the 50's has digressed into a psychosis of support in a political matrix that has virtually adopted the traits of Communism, while crucifying the teaching of God. The clash of RealPolitick has the consequences of national demise under the banner of jingoistic tolerance. The formula for 'good citizenship' has been written by a crazed pharisee pharmacists operating under a government grant and filled with drugs that neutralize individual self-interest.
Luna asserts: "Existentialists argue for personal responsibility in the face of what Walter Kaufmann identified as the four elements of this philosophy: "dread, despair, death, and dauntlessness." He goes on to say that Cotkin shows there was an existential strain in American culture that preceded the afore mentioned French philosophers, "in the work of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Edward Hopper, among others. Unlike their French counterparts, American intellectuals "refused to make a fetish out of nihilism"; instead, "anguish and despair" functioned as "goads to action and commitment."
The pragmatic character of American convention has a "can do" assurance that problems can be resolved. European annals have a long heritage of distrust for government, limits on upward mobility in society and brutality from continental hostilities. The anguish internalized from that history has not impacted the American culture to the same severity. Yet, who can deny that despair is enveloping our own post-millennia chaotic milieu? The emptiness of material excess, has not fully reached the pedestrians on Main Street. Nonetheless, the arrogance of unlimited hubris in the track for a global empire has hit deeply the practices of a demented Wall Street.
American Existentialism is a healthy tradition that needs to go mainstream. The fiction in the public psyche spins a yarn of communal unity when the reality of competing factions has no substantial commonality. The verity of control from the top down pervades every aspect of institutional behavior. Government maintains a monopoly on coercion as the means to herd the unruly into pens of docility. Where is the optimism when the fabulous fifties are but a blast from the past? It is not absurd to resist the juggernaut of servitude. Rational nihilism doesn't destroy fundamental values, morality or time honored principles. Positive nihilism acknowledges that eradication of existing failed political practices, the destruction of criminal government agencies and the elimination of fallacious imperialistic aspirations are necessary for real improvement.
Cotkin views the American experience as having an undercurrent of compelling anguish, which serves as a spur to commitment and onto action. If justice is a primary objective, the agony of enduring under an interdependent model of human conformity and material servitude necessitates the vision of existential rebellion. It is in the good and proper tradition of our heritage to correct a wrong, especially one that has gone so far a field of original intentions. There is nothing more noble than confronting despotism. Once you feel the pain of domestic anguish, the naïve will start to grow up.
The practical is an integral component in the legacy of our founding. The existential is also an essential element in knowing and understanding what is worthy of preserving and what must be purged. George Cotkin argues that an existential approach to life, marked by vexing despair and dauntless commitment in the face of uncertainty, has deep American roots and helps to define twentieth-century America in ways that we have not realized or appreciated. If you are unable to recognize national misery, your founding in historic independence is most lacking. Grasping that existentialism is a proud part of American tradition is a first step. Use this philosophy as a constructive means to change behavior and instill motivation towards action.
SARTRE - August 29, 2005
By JOSEF JOFFE Josef Joffe, a co-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, is Payne distinguished lecturer at Stanford University.
Yet there was a time when Washington was guilty of such un-American activities in spades. With $166,000 (worth more than a million of today's dollars), the American taxpayer in 1952 dispatched the Boston Symphony to Europe on a glorious tour that helped establish the Bostonians as among the best in the world. Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, David Smith -- artists of the school that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism -- were thrust into global fame with help from the feds. Except that the funds were supplied indirectly and clandestinely, with the Congress for Cultural Freedom the main channel and the Central Intelligence Agency the ultimate donor. The congress, a club of scholars and artists founded in 1950 and subsidized by ''the Company'' until the late 1960's, encompassed some of the most eminent intellectuals in the West. It published journals and was the host of dozens of conferences while helping writers and thinkers behind the Iron Curtain. The C.I.A. connection is not a new tale; it was first told in 1967 and later embellished in many books and articles. Now, Frances Stonor Saunders, a young British writer and filmmaker, serves up the story again. Wisely, her American publisher has dropped the British title, ''Who Paid the Piper?,'' in favor of the more neutral ''Cultural Cold War.'' For these 500-plus pages do not bear out what the defamatory label insinuated: that some of the greatest in the world of arts and letters were varlets and curs who sold out to the C.I.A. or were manipulated into servitude by the minions of American imperialism. ''Abstract Expressionism was being deployed as a cold war weapon,'' Saunders jauntily asserts. That might be true for Socialist Realist kitsch extolling the kolkhoz. But Jackson Pollock's ''Number 6'' or Mark Rothko's ''# 18'' cannot be reduced to anti-Communist artillery pieces. Langley's Ivy-trained spooks did what no intelligence service has ever done, or will ever do again: they bankrolled the avant-garde. Obiter dicta like Saunders's pronouncement above highlight her irreducible problem. It is not that she has written a trashy book; her cultural history is entertaining, even witty (if you like ''Yanqui Doodle'' as a heading for the chapter on Abstract Expressionism). She has spent years wading through the files and interviewing both protagonists and critics -- though her project might have benefited from more rigorous spelling and footnotes. Some might even forgive her (as this reviewer does not) for resorting to abusive stereotypes when arguments apparently elude her. Take her initial description of Melvin Lasky, a starring figure in her tale of treachery and deceit, who would later become editor of two monthlies subsidized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was also Jewish, as were many of his colleagues in the congress. ''Using his oriental-shaped eyes to produce deadly squints,'' Saunders writes, ''he had acquired from the brusque atmosphere of City College an ill manner which rarely deserted him.'' A sentence away, he turns ''lupine.'' Meet Attila the Wolf. Yet the demise of his journals, Encounter and Monat, has left lacunas still waiting to be filled. Everybody who was anybody wrote for those two magazines in the 1950's and 1960's: Isaiah Berlin, V. S. Naipaul, Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. Ayer, Evelyn Waugh, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell. Encounter, Saunders concedes, ''held a central position in postwar intellectual history. It could be as lively and bitchy as a literary cocktail party.'' In France, the C.I.A.'s largess, passed through the congress, helped start Preuves, which brought a much-needed Anglo-Saxon flavor to a world encapsulated in Cartesian deductivism and Marxist existentialism. Saunders's difficulty runs deeper than ad hominem slurs and careless sourcing. Her book is shot through with a strident anti-anti-Communism that refuses to accord the Western cause the moral worth it deserves, considering the wares the totalitarians were hawking. Echoing the conventional multiculturalist critique, Saunders relentlessly equates the sub rosa subsidies of the West with Moscow's heavy-handed propaganda efforts. Her indictment of Communist manipulation is rather perfunctory; there is just enough of it to blunt a charge of apologism. But for all her postmodernist fervor, Saunders does not mind sinning against her faith when it suits her. One of the creed's central tenets is that nothing can be properly understood, let alone judged, apart from its historical setting -- context über alles. Yet Saunders woefully (or willfully) ignores precisely the arena in which the cultural battle of the early cold war unfolded. Convinced that the cold war was but a ''fabricated reality,'' Saunders deftly isolates from its context what she sees as a heinous intelligence plot so that she can drench it all the better in self-righteous, ahistorical wrath. But if the war was make-believe, what were the Soviets doing when they tried to bring Communism to power in France and Italy, when they deported or liquidated ''bourgeois'' intellectuals in Eastern Europe, when they financed antidemocratic forces everywhere in order to conquer or cow hearts and minds? As Stalin famously put it in 1945: ''This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. It cannot be otherwise.'' What was Washington supposed to do? Write letters to the editor? In an all-out war, the ways of the totalitarians must at least partly condition the strategies of the democrats. The C.I.A. could have committed (and surely did commit) worse sins than sponsoring music, magazines and chatfests. Nonetheless, Saunders's basic point hardly needs laboring: it is the secrecy of the game that sticks in the craw, for it defies the very core of the liberal-democratic faith: transparency, openness, candor. There are no real excuses, just explanations. Ironically, Saunders supplies one of the greatest mitigating circumstances herself when she recounts the endless ego clashes among the denizens of Encounter. Describing yet another battle for editorial supremacy -- the site was a Congress for Cultural Freedom conference in Milan in 1955 just after Dwight Macdonald had become Encounter's associate editor -- Saunders reports: ''The delegates' hotel steamed with intrigue. Stuart Hampshire remembered more of the boudoir politicking than of the debates themselves (which were, according to Hannah Arendt, 'deadly boring'). . . . Sidney Hook's bedroom became the focus of a cell opposed to Dwight's appointment. A quick shuffle down the corridor led to Arthur Schlesinger's bedroom, which was where the faction in support of Dwight's appointment gathered.'' For the C.I.A. it must have been easier to run an operation right under Stalin's nose than to control this bickering crowd. Did ''the Company'' make editorial policy? Saunders thinks so, but she can document only one case: when an Encounter article by Macdonald was spiked in 1958 because of ''its anti-Americanism,'' as the British co-editor, Stephen Spender, characterized its tone just before his death. Macdonald himself complained after the exposure of the C.I.A. connection in 1967 that he had ''been played for a sucker.'' But even those who did know or suspect had not sold out, for they believed in what they were doing, no matter how hard Saunders tries to skewer their convictions as ''another ideology, a 'freedomism.' ''George Kennan, later an ardent détentist, put it succinctly: ''This country has no Ministry of Culture, and C.I.A. was obliged to do what it could to try to fill the gap. It should be praised for having done so.''
Considering the
context, he was right. History confirmed the verdict when the Berlin
Wall fell in 1989. |
