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Minds wide shut | page 1, 2
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letter By Frances Stonor Saunders Encounter magazine was the jewel in the CIA's crown, "our greatest asset," according to Josselson. Based in London and edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender (and, later, Melvin Lasky and Frank Kermode), it was a cultural journal on a par with the Partisan Review, which Saunders says also received CIA money. Although toeing a predictably pro-American line, it could often be entertaining and learned -- "as lively and bitchy as a literary cocktail party," Saunders writes. Encounter's office politics were at least as interesting as its Cold War politics: Kristol sparring with Spender, Josselson feuding with Kristol, Lasky angling for a job, a disastrous period when the famously unreliable Macdonald became an editor. One wonders how the CIA expected to undermine the Kremlin when it had so much trouble keeping tabs on a bunch of City College kids. But the longstanding controversy surrounding Encounter had less to do with its contents than with its CIA patrons. A crucial feature of the agency's program was the ruse that it did not exist; an intellectual's pro-American views couldn't advance the cause unless they were perceived as independent. The problem was, with the European cultural scene devastated by the war, the Congress for Cultural Freedom's largess in funding European journals, concerts and intellectual gatherings raised eyebrows from the start. Many suspected CIA meddling all along. The Sunday Times labeled Encounter's first issue "the police-review of American-occupied countries," and Kenneth Tynan likened the congress' collection of magazines to a "cultural NATO." Although the CIA's role now looks like the worst-kept secret of the Cold War, most of those who were involved with Encounter claim they knew absolutely nothing about it. But knowledge is a slippery thing, and like ex-communists who make a point of the precise date they broke with Moscow (1939 being a better vintage than 1956, and certainly better than 1968), the Cold War intellectuals developed a calculus of moral purity according to which the prize went to those who remained willfully ignorant the longest. "Mike did try to tell some people, but they said they didn't want to know," claimed one of Josselson's henchmen. "They knew as much as they wanted to know, and if they knew any more, they knew they would have to get out, so they refused to know." In private, Isaiah Berlin assured Lasky that "men of sense and goodwill will understand" that Encounter received money that had originated with the CIA; but when the magazine's CIA connection became public knowledge, Berlin attacked Lasky for "having compromised decent people." William Phillips, whose Partisan Review was published by the CIA-funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom from 1957 to 1967, still claims he never suspected anything untoward. And perhaps he never did. "The most effective kind of propaganda," explains a National Security Council directive from 1950, is the kind where "the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons he believes to be his own." Saunders underscores the hypocrisy of these editors' willingness to "suck the teats" of the congress long after they suspected it was a government operation. But I wonder whether her moral zeal obscures the very paradox that held the whole thing together. Perhaps this gray zone -- the state of "not knowing" something that you surely do know -- was the key to the program's success, the magical elixir one must swallow in exchange for a chance to determine the course of history. Was learning about the CIA's role a demoralizing piece of information for these intellectuals or a naughty secret that only confirmed their importance? "These stylish and expensive excursions must have been a great pleasure for the people who took them at government expense," Random House editor Jason Epstein observes. "But it was more than pleasure, because they were tasting power. Who wouldn't like to be in a situation where you're politically correct and at the same time well compensated for the position you've taken?" What a time to be an intellectual -- free to express what you believed, as long as you claimed to be ignorant about what you suspected, and all of it paid for by the U.S. government. I miss the Cold War.
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