THE CULTURAL COLD WAR: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM

by Christopher Lasch, 1968

HISTORIANS, like other scholars, need to become more conscious of the social conditions under which they work—the general influences shaping intellectual life in a bureaucratized industrial society organized for war, and more particularly, the conditions created by the Cold War of the 1950s. The essays in this volume in one way or another attack the prevailing historiographical orthodoxy in the United States. The following essay examines some of the social and political circumstances that have helped to create it. The established premises of historical interpretation, from which scholars are beginning to dissent, are the product, in part, of the intellectual's identification of himself with the interests of the modern state--interests he serves even while maintaining the illusion of detachment. Especially in the fifties, American intellectuals, on a scale that is only beginning to be understood, lent themselves to purposes having nothing to do with the values they professed--purposes, indeed, that were diametrically opposed to them.

The defection of intellectuals from their true calling--critical thought--goes a long way toward explaining not only the poverty of political discussion but the intellectual bankruptcy of so much recent historical scholarship. The infatuation with consensus; the vogue of a disembodied "history of ideas" divorced from considerations of class or other determinants of social organization; the obsession with "American studies" which perpetuates a nationalistic myth of American uniqueness--these things reflect the degree to which historians have become apologists, in effect, for American national power in the holy war against communism. But the propagandistic import of this scholarship, because it seldom takes crude or obvious forms, is not always easy to detect. The nature of intellectual freedom itself, moreover, is a difficult and complicated subject that cannot be understood as simply the absence of political censorship. In the following pages I have tried to explore the complexities of cultural freedom by examining the activities of its self-designated defenders--the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its American affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. The record of these organizations, both of them devoted to the proposition that a respect for cultural freedom continues to be one of the distinguishing features of Western society, furnishes compelling evidence of how precarious it has in fact become.

I.
From the beginning the Congress for Cultural Freedom had a quasi-official character, even to outward appearances. It was organized in 1950 by Michael Josselson, formerly an officer in the Office of Strategic Services, and Melvin J. Lasky, who had earlier served in the American Information Services and as editor of Der Monat, a magazine sponsored by the United States High Commission in Germany. The decision to hold the first meeting of the Congress in West Berlin, an outpost western power in communist east Europe and one of the principal foci and symbols of the Cold War, fitted very well the official American policy of making Berlin a showcase of “freedom.” The United Press reported in advance that "the five-day meeting will challenge the alleged freedoms of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and attempt to unmask the Soviet Union's and Soviet-sponsored 'peace' demonstrations as purely political maneuvers." H.R. Trevor-Roper, one of the British delegates, noted that "a political tone was set and maintained throughout the congress." Nobody would have objected to a political demonstration, he observed, if it had been avowed as such. The question was whether "it would have obtained all its sponsors or all its delegates if it had been correctly advertised."

The sponsors of the meeting included such eminent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, the philosophers G. A. Borgese and A.J. Ayer, Walter Reuther, the French writer Suzanne Labin, and Dr. Hans Thirring, a Viennese atomic scientist. Delegates attended from twenty-one countries, but the most conspicuous among them were militant anticommunists (some of them also ex-Communists) from the European continent and from the United States: Arthur Koestler, Franz Borkenau of Austria, Lasky, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, James T. Farrell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A number of themes quickly emerged from their speeches which would become polemical staples in the following decade. One was the end of ideology, the assertion that conventional political distinctions had become irrelevant in the face of the need for a united front against Bolshevism. Arthur Koestler announced that "the words 'socialism' and 'capitalism,’ ‘Left’ and ‘Right' have today become virtually empty of meaning." Sidney Hook looked forward "to the era when references to 'right,' ,left, and 'center’ will vanish from common usage as meaningless." Franz Borkenau made the same point and went on to explain the deeper sense in which ideology could be said to have died.

For more than a century utopian "extremes”--visions of total freedom competing with visions of total security--had "increasingly turned the history of the occident into a tragic bedlam." But having observed at first hand the devastating effects of utopianism, particularly in Russia, reasonable men had at last learned the importance of a more modest and pragmatic view of politics.

At the same time, the pragmatists who met at Berlin announced that in the present crisis, a moral man could not remain neutral from the struggle of competing ideologies. Robert Montgomery, the American film actor, declared that "no artist who has the right to bear that title can be neutral in the battles of our time...Today we must stand up and be counted." "In varying phraseology and in different languages but concentrating on one basic point, delegates. .. admonished listeners," according to the correspondent of the New York Times, ". . that the time is at hand for a decision as between the East and West." "Man stands at a crossroads,"' Koestler said, "which only leaves the choice of this way or that. At such moments "the difference between the very clever and the simple in mind narrows almost to the vanishing point"; and only the professional disease of the intellectual, his fascination with logical subtleties and his "estrangement from reality," kept him from seeing the need to choose between slavery and freedom.

The attack on liberal intellectualism, and on liberalism in general, ran through a number of speeches. Borkenau argued that totalitarianism grew dialectically out of liberalism. "The liberal utopia of absolute individual freedom found its counterpart in the socialist utopia of complete individual security." With liberalism in decline, intellectuals, looking for "a ready-made doctrine of salvation and a pre-fabricated paradise" turned in the twenties and thirties to communism and “permitted themselves to be led by the nose through Russia without noticing anything of the reality," During the Second World War--which Borkenau called "a second edition of the Popular Front"--even experienced politicians allowed themselves to be deceived by Stalin's professions of good faith. "Thus in the course of a quarter century Communism ran a course which brought it in contact with every stratum of society, from extreme revolutionaries to ultra-conservatives." But the very pervasiveness of communism, by another turn of Borkenau's dialectic, meant that "the entire body of occidental society has received an increasingly strong protective inoculation against Communism. Every new wave of Communist expansion led to a deepening of the anti-Communist current: from the ineffective opposition of small groups to the rise of an intellectual counter-current, and finally to the struggle in the arena of world politics.”

The attack on liberalism, together with the curious argument that exposure to communism was the only effective form of "inoculation" against it, points to another feature of the anticommunist mentality as revealed at Berlin: a strong undercurrent of ex-Communism, which led Trevor-Roper to describe the whole conference as “an alliance between... the ex-communists among the delegates.. . and the German nationalists in the audience." Borkenau, Koestler, Burnham, Hook, Lasky, and Farrell had all been Communists during the thirties, and it requires no special powers of discernment to see that their attack on communism in the fifties expressed itself in formulations that were themselves derived from the cruder sort of Marxist cant. Borkenau’s defense of "freedom," for instance, rested not on a concern for institutional safeguards of free thought, let alone for the independence of critical thought from national power, but rather on an assertion of man's capacity to transcend the narrow materialism posited, according to Borkenau, by liberalism and socialism alike. The defense of freedom merged imperceptibly with the dogmatic attack on historical  materialism which, in another context, had done so much to impede historical and sociological scholarship in the period of the Cold War. It is significant that Borkenau still regarded Leninism as a "great achievement," not, however, because Lenin had contributed to the materialist interpretation of society but because Lenin rejected Marx's "fatalism" and converted socialism "into the free act of a determined, ruthless and opportunist elite." Elitism was one of the things that attracted intellectuals to Leninism in the first place (more than to orthodox Marxism); and even after they had dissociated themselves from its materialist content, they clung to the congenial view of intellectuals as the vanguard of history and to the crude and simplified dialectic (of which Borkenau's speech is an excellent example, and James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution another) which passed for Marxism in left-wing circles of the thirties.

These things not only demonstrate the amazing persistence and tenacity of the Bolshevik habit of mind even among those who now rejected whatever was radical and liberating in Bolshevism, they also suggest the way in which a certain type of anticommunist intellectual continued to speak from a point of view "alienated" from bourgeois liberalism. Anti-communism, for such men as Koestler and Borkenau, represented a new stage in their running polemic against bourgeois sentimentality and weakness, bourgeois "utopianism," and bourgeois materialism. That explains their eagerness to connect Bolshevism with liberalism--to show that the two ideologies sprang from a common root and that it was the Softness and sentimentality of bourgeois liberals which had paradoxically allowed communism--liberalism's deadly enemy, one might have supposed--to pervade Western society in the thirties and early forties. In attributing "twenty years of treason" to an alliance between liberals and Communists, the anticommunist intellectuals put forth their own version of the right-wing ideology that was gaining adherents, in a popular and still cruder form, in all the countries of the West, particularly in Germany and the United States. In the fifties, this high-level McCarthyism sometimes served as a defense of McCarthyism proper. More often it was associated with official efforts to pre-empt a modified McCarthyism while denouncing McCarthy as a demagogue. In both capacities it contributed measurably to the Cold War.

At still another point on its multifaceted surface, the ideology of the anticommunist Left tended to merge with fascism, which has served as yet another vehicle for the intellectual's attack on bourgeois materialism. Borkenau, for instance--in so many ways the embodiment of a Central European, quasi-totalitarian sensibility--denounced totalitarianism at length without referring, except in passing and in the most general terms, to its most horrifying manifestation, the Nazi regime in Germany. In the United States, anti-communism found a more congenial basis in "pragmatism," which, however, shared with European neo-fascism the capacity to furnish a perspective--a quite different perspective from which to belabor "utopianism." And whereas the elitism of European intellectuals expressed itself in a cult of charismatic leadership, the American variety based its distrust of the masses precisely on their susceptibility to extreme political solutions; that is, to the same utopianism which the Europeans attacked as a vice of deluded intellectuals. Thus a neat twist of logic permitted those who opposed McCarthyism to argue that McCarthyism was itself a form of Populism. This condemned it sufficiently in the eyes of a generation that tended to confuse intellectual values with the interests of the intellectuals as a class, just as they confused freedom with the national interests of the United States.

II.
The Berlin meetings, meanwhile, broke up in a spirit of rancor which must have alarmed those who had hoped for a “united front" against Bolshevism. A resolution excluding totalitarian sympathizers "from the Republic of the Spirit” was withdrawn, "Professor Hook and Mr. Burnham,” according to Trevor-Roper, "protesting to the end." The opposition came largely from the English and Scandinavian delegates--a revealing fact for two reasons. In the first place, it showed how closely the division of opinion among intellectuals (who supposedly take a more detached view of things than governments do) coincided with the distribution of power in the world. In 1950, the United States had already emerged as the leader of an anticommunist coalition on the European continent, and Great Britain had fallen into her role of a reluctant and not very influential member of a partnership which increasingly tended to revolve around the West Germans. The discussions at Berlin--even the choice of the meeting place--accurately reflected these political facts.

In the second place, the reluctance of the British delegates to join a rhetorical crusade against communism, in this first of the postwar struggles for cultural freedom, seems to have suggested to the officers of the Congress for Cultural Freedom that British intellectuals needed to be approached more energetically than before, if they were not to lapse completely into the heresy of neutralism. The founding of Encounter magazine in 1953, with Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender and later Lasky at its head, was the official answer to the "anti-Americanism," as it was now called, which disfigured the English cultural scene. The editors of Encounter addressed themselves with zeal to its destruction. 

The new magazine lost no time in establishing its point of view and its characteristic tone of ultra-sophistication. The very first issue contained a spirited polemic on the Rosenberg case by Leslie Fiedler, whose uncanny instinct for cultural fashions, combined with a gift for racy language (“Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey'"), made him a suitable spokesman for cultural freedom in the fifties. Fiedler had already, in "Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” exhorted intellectuals to accept their common guilt in the Crimes of Alger Hiss. With an equal disregard for the disputed facts of the case, he now went on to berate sentimentalists who still believed the Rosenbergs to be innocent. "As far as I am concerned the legal guilt of the Rosenbergs was clearly established at their trial." From the fact of their guilt, Fiedler spun an intricate web of theory intended to show, once again, what a pervasive and deplorable influence Stalinism had exercised, for twenty years, over the life of the mind in America.

“To believe that two innocents had been falsely condemned," Fiedler argued, “one would have to believe the judges and public officials of the United States to he merely the Fascists the Rosenbergs called them, but monsters. insensate beasts." Whereas in fact, the implication seemed to be, they were dedicated humanitarians. Just so; and in order to believe that the CIA had infiltrated (for instance) the National Student Association, one would have to believe--heaven forbid!--that the CIA was a corrupter of youth. The absurdity of such a thing is self-evident; the case collapses of its own weight.

For a group of intellectuals who prided themselves on their realism, skepticism, and detachment (qualities they regularly displayed in cogent analyses of the deplorable state of affairs in Russia), the editors of Encounter and their contributors showed an unshakable faith in the good intentions of the American government. It was inconceivable to them that American officials were not somehow immune to the temptations of great power. The defense of "cultural freedom" was wholly entwined, in their minds, with the defense of the "free world" against communism. Criticism of the men who presided over the free world--even mild criticism tended automatically to exclude itself from their minds as a subject of serious discussion. These men might make occasionally mistakes; but there could be no question of their devotion to freedom.
 
Encounter, wrote Denis Brogan (a frequent contributor) in 1963, "has been the organ of protest against the trahison des clercs." Julian Benda's point, in the book from which Brogan took this phrase, was that intellectuals should serve truth, not power. Encounter's claim to be the defender of intellectual values in a world dominated by ideology rested, therefore, on its vigorous criticism of all influences tending to undermine critical thought, whether they emanated from the Soviet Union or from the United States. This is indeed the claim that the editors and friends of Encounter have made. As we shall see, the Cold War liberals have not hesitated to criticize American popular culture or popular politics, but the question is whether they have criticized the American government or any other aspect of the officially sanctioned order. And the fact is that Encounter, like other journals sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (except perhaps for Censorship, which recently expired), consistently approved the broad lines and even the details of American policy, until the war in Vietnam shattered the Cold War coalition and introduced a new phase of American politics. Writers in Encounter denounced the Soviet intervention in Hungary without drawing the same conclusions about the Bay of Pigs. The magazine published Theodore Draper's diatribes against Castro, which laid a theoretical basis for American intervention by depicting Castro as a Soviet puppet and a menace to the Western Hemisphere. Writers in Encounter had little if anything to say about the American coup in Guatemala, the CIA's intervention in Iran, its role in the creation of Diem, or the American support of Trujillo; but these same writers regarded communist "colonialism" with horror. The plight of the communist satellites wrung their hearts; that of South Korea and South Vietnam left them unmoved. They denounced racism in the Soviet Union while ignoring it in South Africa and the United States until it was no longer possible to ignore it, at which time (1952) Encounter published an overly optimistic issue on the "Negro Crisis," the general tone of which was quite consistent with the optimism then being purveyed by the Kennedy administration.

In 1958, Dwight Macdonald submitted an article to Encounter--"America! America!"--in which he wondered whether the intellectuals' rush to rediscover their native land (one of the obsessive concerns of the fifties, at almost every level of cultural life) had not produced a somewhat uncritical acquiescence in the American imperium. The editors told Macdonald to publish his article elsewhere; in the correspondence that followed, according to Macdonald, "the note sounded more than once... that publication of my article might embarrass the Congress in its relations with the American foundations which support it." When the incident became public, Nicholas Nabokov, secretary-general of the Congress, pointed in triumph to the fact that Macdonald's article had eventually appeared in Tempo Presente, an Italian periodical sponsored by the Congress. That proved, he said, that the Paris headquarters of the Congress did not dictate editorial policy to the magazines it supported. But the question was not whether the Paris office dictated to the editors what they could publish and what they could not; the question was whether the editors did not take it upon themselves to avoid displeasing the sponsors, whoever they were, standing behind the Congress for Cultural Freedom. To point to their independence from overt official control did not necessarily prove their independence from the official point of view. It was possible that they had so completely assimilated and internalized that point of view that they were no longer aware of the way in which their writings had come to serve as rationalizations of American world power. Even when subsequent disclosures had made their complicity, in the larger sense, quite clear, they continued to protest their innocence, as if innocence, in the narrow and technical sense, were the real issue in the matter.

III.
 In 1951 the Congress sponsored a large conference in India, attended by such luminaries as Denis de Rougemont, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Ignazio Silone, Louis Fischer, Norman Thomas, and James Burnham. The Times correspondent understated the case when he wrote that "many of the delegates are said to be former Communists, who have become critics." He noted further: "The meeting has been described as an answer to the ‘World Peace Conference' supported by the Soviet Union." (The Berlin conference of the year before, it will be recalled, was also conceived as a Response to Soviet "peace propaganda." Its immediate stimulus was a series of peace congresses in East Germany.)

The delegates meeting in India hoped to bring home the nonaligned nations the immorality of neutralism. As usual, they could count on the American press to echo the party line. Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote in one of her dispatches: "There is no middle ground in the world conflict”; that was the message which the Congress hoped to impress on the Indians. When transferred to a non-Western setting, however, the reiteration of this theme, which had gone down so well with the Berliners, led to an "unexpected undertone of dissatisfaction," according to the Times. When Denis de Rougemont "compared the present Indian neutrality with that of the lamb that is neutral between the wolf and the shepherd," one of the Indian delegates drew from the fable a moral quite different from the one intended. He pointed out that the shepherd, having saved the lamb from the wolf, "shears the lamb and possibly eats it." Many Indians boycotted the Congress because it had been "branded widely as a U.S. propaganda device"--an unwarranted assumption of course, but one that many Indians seemed to share. The Indian government took pains to withhold its official sanction from the meeting, insisting that it be moved from New Delhi, the capital and original site of the conference, to Bombay.

 It seemed at times that the Indians did not want to be free. Robert Trumbull, a  correspondent of the Times, tried to reassure his readers about their "peculiar” point of view. The Indian speakers weren't really neutralists, they were only "manifesting the common Indian oratorical tendency to stray from the real point of the issue in hand." A dispassionate observer might have concluded that they understood the point all too well. The Congress, having suffered a rebuff, made no more direct attacks on neutralism in the Third World. In 1958 it held a conference on the problems of developing nations on the isle of Rhodes, which produced no notable results. Probably it was not expected to have any. A new official style was emerging, faithfully reflected in the Congress for Cultural Freedom--urbane, cool, and bureaucratic. The old slogans had become passé (even as the old policies continued). The union of intellect and power deceptively presented itself as an apparent liberalization of official attitudes, an apparent relaxation of American anti-communism. The day was rapidly approaching when officials in Washington would value ideas for their own sake as long as they had no consequences). McCarthyism was dead and civilized conversation in great demand. The Congress flew people to Rhodes and encouraged them to participate in a highly civilized, nonideological discussion of economic development--a gratifying experience for everybody concerned, all the more so since it made so few demands of the participants. Expansive and tolerant, the Congress asked only that intellectuals avail themselves of the increasing opportunities for travel and enlightenment that the defense of freedom made possible.

IV.
Shortly after the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, its more active members set up subsidiaries in various countries. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1951 by Burnam, Farrell, Schlesinger, Hook, and others, to hold annual forums on topics like "The Ex-Communist: His Role in a Democracy” or "Anti-Americanism in Europe" ; to "counteract the influence of mendacious Communist propaganda"; to defend academic freedom; and in general "to resist the lengthening shadow of thought-control." The Committee had a limited though illustrious membership, never exceeding six hundred, and it claimed to subsist on grants from the Congress and on public contributions. It repeatedly made public appeals for money, even announcing, in 1957, that it was going out of business for lack of funds. It survived; but ever since that time, it has been semimoribund, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.

 Sidney Hook was the first chairman of the ACCF. He was succeeded in 1952 by George S. Counts of Teachers College, Columbia, who was followed in 1954 by Robert Gorham Davis of Smith. James T. Farrell took Davis' place in the same year, but resigned in 1956 after a quarrel with other members of the Committee.

 Farrell, in resigning, said that "his travels had convinced him that he and other members had been 'wrong’ in struggles against Paris office policies." His statement, incidentally, suggests that the Paris office sometimes tried to enforce its own views on subsidiary organizations,in spite of its disclaimers. It also shows--what should already be apparent--that the Congress in its early period took an exceptionally hard line on neutralism.

 Farrell’s resignation, along with other events, signaled the breakdown of the coalition on which the American Committee was based, a coalition of moderate liberals and reactionaries (both groups including a large number of ex-Communists) held together by their mutual obsession with the Communist conspiracy. James Burnham had already resigned in 1954. Earlier Burnham had resigned as a member of the advisory board of Partisan Review (which was then and still is sponsored by the Committee) in a dispute with the editors over McCarthyism. Burnham approved of McCarthy's actions and held that McCarthyism was a "diversionary” issue created by Communists. William Phillips and Philip Rahv, adopting a favorite slogan of the Cold War to their own purposes, announced, however, that there was no room on Partisan Review for "neutralism" about McCarthy.

 Originally, the ACCF took quite literally the assertion, advanced by Koestler and others at Berlin, that the Communist issue overrode conventional distinctions between Left and Right. Right-wingers like Burnham, Farrell, Ralph De Toledano, John Chamberlain, John Dos Passos, and even Whittaker Chambers consorted with Schlesinger, Hook, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and other liberals. In the early fifties, this uneasy alliance worked because the liberals generally took positions that conceded a good deal of ground to the Right, if they were not indistinguishable from those of the Right. But the end of the Korean War and the censure of McCarthy in 1954 created a slightly less oppressive air in which the right-wing rhetoric of the early fifties seemed increasingly inappropriate to political realities. Now that McCarthy was dead as a political force, the liberals courageously attacked him, thereby driving the Right out of the Committee for Cultural Freedom. The collapse of the anticommunist coalition coincided with the Committee's financial crisis of 1957 and with the beginning of its long period of inactivity. These three developments are obviously related. The ACCF and its parent, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, took shape in a period of the cold war when official anticommunism had not clearly distinguished itself, rhetorically, from the anticommunism of the Right. In a later period official liberalism, having taken over essential features of the rightist world view, belatedly dissociated itself from the cruder and blatantly reactionary type of anticommunism, and pursued the same anticommunist policies in the name of anti-imperialism and progressive change. Once again, the Kennedy administration contributed decisively to the change of style, placing more emphasis on "counterinsurgency” than on military alliances, advocating an "Alliance for Progress," de-emphasizing military aid in favor of "development," refraining from attacks on neutralism, and presenting itself as the champion of democratic revolution in the undeveloped world. The practical result of the change was a partial détente with communism in Europe and a decidedly more aggressive policy in the rest of the world (made possible by that détente), of which the most notable products were the Bay of Pigs, the Dominican intervention, and the war in Vietnam. The European détente made the anticommunist rhetoric of the fifties obsolete, although it of course did not make anticommunism obsolete. The particular brand of anticommunism that flourished in the fifties grew out of the postwar power struggles in Europe and out of traumas of twentieth-century history--fascism, Stalinism, the crisis of liberal democracy--all of which had concerned Europe, not Asia. The prototype of the anticommunist intellectual in the fifties was the disillusioned ex-Communist, obsessed by the corruption of Western politics and culture by the pervasive influence of Stalinism and driven by a need to exorcise the evil and expatiate his own past. The anticommunism of the sixties, on the other hand, focused on the Third World and demanded another kind of rhetoric.

 The ACCF, then, represented a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of communism and who agreed, moreover, that the Communist conspiracy had spread through practically every level of American society. (It is the adherence of liberals to these dogmas that shows how much they had conceded to the right-wing view of history.) Sidney Hook's "Heresy, Yes--Conspiracy, No!”--published in the New York Times Magazine in 1950--1951 and distributed as a pamphlet by the ACCF--set forth the orthodox position and tried to distinguish it (not successfully) from that of the Right, as well as from “ritualistic liberalism." Heresy--the open expression of dissenting opinions--had to be distinguished, according to Hook, from secret movements seeking to attain their ends "not by normal political or educational processes but by playing outside the rules of the game." This distinction did not lead Hook to conclude that communism, insofar as it was a heresy as opposed to a conspiracy, was entitled to Constitutional protection. On the contrary, he argued that communism was a conspiracy by its very nature; since they were members of an international conspiracy--servants of a foreign power--Communists could not expect to enjoy the same liberties enjoyed by other Americans. Academic freedom did not extend to a Communist teacher; nor was it necessary to "catch him in the act" of conspiring against the country before dismissing him from his job--mere membership in the Communist party was sufficient evidence of conspiracy.

 The American Committee's official position on academic freedom started from the same premise. "A member of the Communist party has transgressed the canons of academic responsibility, has engaged his intellect to servility, and is therefore professionally disqualified from performing his functions as scholar and teacher." The Committee on Academic Freedom (Counts, Hook, Arthur O. Lovejoy, and Paul R. Hays) characteristically went on to argue that the matter of Communists should be left "in the hands of the colleges, and their faculties." "There is no justification for a Congressional committee to concern itself with the question." Academic freedom meant self-determination for the academic community. The full implications of this position will be explored in due time.

 "Liberalism in the twentieth century," Sidney Hook declared in the spirit of the Berlin manifesto, "must toughen its fibre, for it is engaged in a fight on many different fronts." A sentimental and unrealistic tradition of uncritical tolerance might prove to be a fatal handicap in the struggle with totalitarianism. "Ritualistic liberals," according to Hook, not only failed to distinguish between heresy and conspiracy, they helped to "weaken the moral case of Western democracy against Communist totalitarianism" by deploring witch-hunts, giving the unfortunate impression that America was "on the verge of Fascism." He conceded that some demagogues--he tactfully refrained from mentioning them by name--sought to discredit unpopular reforms by unfairly labeling them communist. But the important point was that these activities were not the official policy of "our government," they were the actions of "cultural vigilantes." Ignorant people saw progressive education, for example, or the federal withholding tax, as evidence of Communist subversion—an absurdity which suggested to Hook, not the inherent absurdity of the anticommunist ideology, but the absurdity of untutored individuals concerning themselves with matters best left to experts. The student of these events is struck by the way in which ex-Communists seem always to have retained the worst of Marx and Lenin and to have discarded the best. The elitism which once glorified intellectuals as a revolutionary avant-garde now glorifies them as experts and social technicians. On the other hand, Marx's insistence that political issues be seen in their social context--his insistence, for example, that questions of taxation are not "technical" but political questions, the solutions to which reflect the type of social organization in which they arise--this social determinism, which makes Marx's ideas potentially so useful as a method of social analysis, has been sloughed off by Sidney Hook without a qualm. These reflections lead one to the conclusion, once more, that intellectuals were more attracted to Marxism in the first place as an elitist and antidemocratic ideology than as a means of analysis which provided, not answers, but the beginnings of a critical theory of society.

Hook's whole line of argument reflected one of the dominant values of the modern intellectual--his acute sense of himself as a professional with a vested interest in technical solutions to political problems. The attack on "cultural vigilantism" paralleled the academic interpretation of McCarthyism as a form of populism and a form of anti-intellectualism, except that it did not even go so far as to condemn McCarthyism itself.

Some liberals, in fact, specifically defended McCarthy. Irving Kristol, in his notorious article in the March 1952 issue of Commentary, admitted that McCarthy was a "vulgar demagogue" but added: "There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anticommunist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing." This article has been cited many times to show how scandalously the anticommunist Left allied itself with the Right. Kristol's article was a scandal, but it was no more a scandal than the apparently more moderate position which condemned unauthorized anticommunism while endorsing the official variety. By defining the issue as "cultural vigilantism," the anticommunist intellectuals lent themselves to the dominant drive of the modern state--not only to eliminate the private use of violence (vigilantism) but, finally, to discredit all criticism which does not come from officially recognized experts. The government had a positive interest in suppressing McCarthy, as the events of the Eisenhower administration showed--not because of any tender solicitude for civil liberties, but because McCarthy's unauthorized anticommunism competed with and disrupted official anticommunist activities like the Voice of America. This point was made again and again during the Army-McCarthy hearings. (Indeed, the fact that it was the Army that emerged as McCarthy's most powerful antagonist is itself suggestive.) The same point dominated the propaganda of the ACCF. "Government agencies," said Hook, "find their work hampered by the private fevers of cultural vigilantism which have arisen like a rash from the anti-Communist mood." ""Constant vigilance," he added, "does not require private citizens to usurp the functions of agencies entrusted with the task of detection and exposure.”

In effect--though they would have denied it--the intellectuals of the ACCF defined cultural freedom as whatever best served the interests of the United States government. When James Wechsler was dropped from a television program, the New Leader (a magazine which consistently took the same positions as the ACCF) wrote: "This lends substance to the Communist charge that America is hysteria-ridden." Diana Trilling agreed that "the idea that America is a terror-stricken country in the grip of hysteria is a Communist-inspired idea." After McCarthy's attack on the Voice of America, even Sidney Hook criticized McCarthy because of "the incalculable harm he is doing to the reputation of the United States abroad." The ACCF officially condemned McCarthy's investigation of the Voice of America. "The net effect, at this crucial moment, has been to frustrate the very possibility of the United States embarking on a program of psychological warfare against world communism." A few months later, the ACCF announced the appointment of Sol Stein as its executive director. Stein had been a writer and political affairs analyst for the Voice of America. He was succeeded in 1956 by Norman Jacobs, chief political commentator of the Voice of America and head of its Central Radio Features Branch from 1948 to 1955.

V.
While avoiding a principled attack on McCarthyism, the ACCF kept up a running fire on "anti-anticommunism." (It was characteristic of the period that issues so often presented themselves in this sterile form and that positions were formulated not with regard to the substance of a question, but with regard to an attitude or "posture" which it was deemed desirable to hold.) In January 1953 the ACCF handed down a directive setting out the grounds on which it was permissible to involve oneself in the Rosenberg case. "[The] pre-eminent fact of the Rosenbergs' guilt must be openly acknowledged before any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having been made in good faith. Those who allow the Communists to make use of their name in such a way as to permit any doubt to arise about the Rosenbergs guilt are doing a grave disservice to the cause of justice--and of mercy, too."

 In 1954 a group calling itself the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee sponsored a conference at Princeton, at which Albert Einstein, along with Corliss Lamont, I. F. Stone, Dirk Struik, and others, urged intellectuals not to cooperate with “witch-hunting" congressional committees. Sol Stein immediately announced that the ACCF opposed any "exploitation" of academic freedom and civil liberties "by persons who are at this late date still sympathetic to the cause of the Soviet Union." Following its usual practice, the ACCF proceeded to lay down a standard to which any "sincere" criticism of American life, even of McCarthyism, had to conform. The test of any group's sincerity is whether it is opposed to threats of freedom anywhere in the world and whether it is concerned about the gross suppression of civil liberties and academic freedom behind the Iron Curtain. The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee has not met that test." The validity of criticism, in other words, depended not so much on its substance as on its adherence to a prescribed ritual of dissent.

 The ACCF did not stop with this rebuke and also accused the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee of being "'a Communist front with no sincere interest in liberty in the United States or elsewhere." No evidence was adduced to support this statement. The conclusion followed logically, perhaps, from the ACCF's test of "sincerity." The Civil Liberties Committee, in reply, pointed out that even the Attorney-General had not thought to list it as a subversive organization. In this case, the standards of the ACCF were even more rigorous than those of the government itself.

 On another occasion, the ACCF tried to plant with the New York World Telegram and Sun a story, already circulated by the New Leader, that a certain liberal journalist was a "Soviet espionage agent." Sol Stein called the city desk with what he described as a "Junior Alger Hiss" story. The reporter who took the call asked whether the proper place to determine the truth of these charges was not a court of law. Stein replied, in this reporter's words, that "libel suits were a Communist trick to destroy opposition by forcing it to bear the expense of trial." The reporter then asked whether the ACCF was "upholding the right of people to call anyone a Communist without being subject to libel suits." Stein said: "You misunderstand the context of the times. Many reckless charges are being made today. But when the charges are documented, the Committee believes you have the right to say someone is following the Communist line without being brought into court." The reporter asked if Stein had any proof that the journalist in question was a Soviet spy. Stein said no, "but we have mountains of material that show he consistently follows the Soviet line."

 When they took positions of which the ACCF disapproved, the "ritualistic liberals" were Communist tools. When they took positions critical of the Soviet Union, the ACCF denied their right to take them. Arthur Miller in 1956 wrote a statement condemning political interference with art in the Soviet Union. The ACCF did not congratulate him; it asked why he had not taken the same position in 1949. The Committee also noted that Miller, in any case, had made an unforgivable mistake: he had criticized political interference with art not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States, thereby implying that the two cases were comparable. American incidents, the Committee declared, were "episodic violations of the tradition of political and cultural freedom in the United States," whereas "the official government policy” of the USSR was to "impose a 'party line’ in all fields of art, culture, and science, and enforcing such a line with sanctions ranging from imprisonment to exile to loss of job." Having dutifully rapped Miller's knuckles, the ACCF then went on to use his statement by challenging the Soviet government to circulate it in Russia.
 
VI.
 In 1955 a New York Times editorial praised the ACCF for playing a vital role in "the struggle for the loyalty of the world's intellectuals"--in itself a curious way of describing the defense of cultural freedom. The Times went on to make the same claim that was so frequently made by the Committee itself: "The group's authority to speak for freedom against Communist slavery has been enhanced by its courageous fight against those threatening our own civil liberties from the Right." But even when it found itself confronted with cultural vigilantism in its most obvious forms, the Committee stopped short of an unambiguous defense of intellectual freedom. In 1955, for instance, Muhlenberg College canceled a Charlie Chaplin film festival under pressure from a local post of the American Legion. The ACCF protested that while it is perfectly clear that Chaplin tends to be pro-Soviet and anti-American in his political attitudes, there is no reason why we should not enjoy his excellent movies, which have nothing to do with Communist totalitarianism." This statement left the disturbing implication that if Chaplin's films could be regarded as political, the ban would have been justified. The assertion that art has nothing to do with politics was the poorest possible ground on which to defend cultural freedom.

 But whatever the nature of the ACCF's critique of vigilantism, a better test of its "authority to speak for freedom" would have been its willingness to criticize official activities in the United States--the real parallel to Soviet repression. (In the Soviet Union, attacks on vigilantism are doubtless not only not proscribed but encouraged. It is attacks on Soviet officials that are not permitted.) 

 In March 1955 the Committee did criticize a Post Office ban on Pravda and Izvestia as "unreasonable and ineffective in dealing with the Communist conspiracy.” A year later the Committee deplored the Treasury Department's raid on the office of the Daily Worker. "However much we abominate the Daily Worker.. . we must protest even this much interference with the democratic right to publish freely." The ACCF criticized the Agriculture Department's dismissal of Wolf Ladejinsky and the Atomic Energy Commission's persecution of Oppenheimer, in both cases arguing that the victims had established themselves in recent years as impeccably anticommunist. On one occasion the ACCF attacked the United States Information Agency because it had canceled an art show in response to charges that four of the artists represented were subversive. Diana Trilling, chairman of the Committee's board of directors, insisted that actions of this kind hold us up to derision abroad." She went on to question the judgment of government officials who mix politics and art to the detriment of both."

On the other hand, when 360 citizens petitioned the Supreme Court to invalidate or to declare unconstitutional the 1950 Internal Security Act (which created the Subversive Activities Control Board), James T. Farrell issued a statement for the ACCF calling them "naive," accusing them of a "whitewash" of the Communist party, and declaring that "if freedom were left in the hands of the petitioners it would have no future."

 The infrequency of complaints against American officials, together with the triviality of the issues that called them forth--as contrasted with the issues against which others protested out of their "naiveté”--show that the anticommunist liberals cannot claim to have defended cultural freedom in the United States with the same consistency and vigor with which they defended it in Russia. Claiming to be the vanguard of the struggle for cultural freedom, the anticommunist intellectuals in reality brought up the rear.

 The Cold War intellectuals revealed themselves as the servants of bureaucratic power; and it was not altogether surprising, years later, to find that the relation of intellectuals to power was even closer than it had seemed at the time. They had achieved both autonomy and affluence, as the social value of their services became apparent to the government, to corporations, and to the foundations. Professional intellectuals had become indispensable to society and to the state (in ways which neither the intellectuals nor even the state always perceived), partly because of the increasing importance of education--especially the need for trained experts--and partly because the Cold War seemed to demand that the United States compete with communism in the cultural sphere as well as in every other. The modern state, among other things, is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument which can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as "free'" intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.

 A system like this presupposes two things: a high degree of professional consciousness among intellectuals, and general economic affluence which frees the patrons of intellectual life from the need to account for the money they spend on culture. Once these conditions exist, as they have existed in the United States for some time, intellectuals can be trusted to censor themselves, and crude "political" influence over intellectual life comes to seem passé. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, intellectuals are insufficiently professionalized to be able effectively to resist political control. As one would expect in a developing society, a strong commitment to applied knowledge mitigates against the development of "pure" standards, which is one of the chief prerequisites of professionalization. It can be demonstrated that in the nineteenth-century United States professionalization of intellectual activities went hand in hand with the acceptance of pure research as a legitimate enterprise, first among intellectuals themselves and then among their patrons. Only when they win acceptance for pure research do intellectuals establish themselves as masters in their own house, free from the nagging public scrutiny that naively expects to see the value of intellectual activity measured in immediate practical applications. This battle having been won, the achievement of "academic freedom" is comparatively easy, since academic freedom presents itself (as we have seen) not as a defense of the necessarily subversive character of good intellectual work, but as a prerequisite for pure research. Moreover, the more intellectual purity identifies itself with "value-free" investigations, the more it empties itself of political content and the easier it is for public officials to tolerate it. The "scientific" spirit, spreading from the natural sciences to social studies, tends to drain the latter of their critical potential while at the same time making them ideal instruments of bureaucratic control.

 Pure science, once it comes to dominate the organized life of the intellect, paradoxically establishes itself as even more useful to the prevailing social order than the practical knowledge it displaces--useful, if not in the immediate present, in the not-too-distant future. The high status enjoyed by American intellectuals depends on their having convinced their backers in government and industry that "basic research" produces better results in the long run than mindless empiricism. But for intellectuals to win this battle it was necessary not only to convince themselves of these things, but to overcome the narrowly utilitarian approach to knowledge that usually prevails (particularly in bourgeois society) among the patrons of learning. The patrons’ willingness to be convinced depended, in turn, on their having at their disposal almost unlimited funds; and more than that, on a positive predilection for useless expenditure. The advancement of pure learning on a large scale demands that the sponsors of learning be willing to spend large sums of money without hope of immediate return. In advanced capitalism, this requirement happily coincides with the capitalists' need to engage in conspicuous expenditure; hence the dominant role played by "captains of industry" in the professionalization of higher education (with the results described by Veblen in Higher Learning in America). At a still later stage of development, the same role is played by the foundations and directly by government, both of which need to engage in a form of expenditure (not necessarily conspicuous in all its details) that shares with the conspicuous expenditure of the capitalist a marked indifference to results. Modern bureaucracies are money-spending agencies. The more money a bureaucracy can spend, the larger the budget it can claim. Since the bureaucracy is more interested in its own aggrandizement than in doing a job, the bureaucrat is restrained in his expenditure only by the need to account to some superior and ultimately, perhaps, to the public; but in complicated bureaucracies it is hard for anyone to account for the money, particularly since a state of continual emergency can be invoked to justify secrecy in all the important operations of government. This state of perfect nonaccountability, which is the goal toward which bureaucracies ceaselessly strive, obviously works to the indirect advantage of pure research and of the professionalized intellectuals.

 In Soviet Russia, a comparatively undeveloped economy cannot sustain the luxury of unaccounted expenditure, and the bureaucracy is still infected, therefore, by a penny-pinching mentality that begrudges expenditures unless they can be justified in utilitarian terms. This attitude, together with the lack of professional consciousness among intellectuals themselves (many of whom share the belief that knowledge is valuable not for itself but for the social and political uses to which it can be put), is the source of the political interference with knowledge that is so widely deplored in the West. It is obvious that the critical spirit cannot thrive under these conditions. Even art is judged in narrowly utilitàrian terms and subjected to autocratic regulation by ignorant bureaucrats.
 
What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the triumph of academic freedom in the United States, under the special conditions which have brought it about, does not necessarily lead to intellectual independence and critical thinking. It is a serious mistake to confuse academic freedom with cultural freedom. American intellectuals are not subject to political control, but the very conditions which have brought about this result have at the same time undermined their capacity for independent thought. The American press is free, but it censors itself. The university is free, but it has purged itself of ideas. The literary intellectuals are free, but they use their freedom to propagandize for the state. What has led to this curious state of affairs? The very freedom of American intellectuals blinds them to their unfreedom. It leads them to confuse the political interests of intellectuals as an official minority with the progress of intellect. Their freedom from overt political control (particularly from "vigilantes") blinds them to the way in which the "knowledge industry" has been incorporated into the state and the military-industrial complex. Since the state exerts so little censorship over the cultural enterprises it subsidizes--since, on the contrary, it supports basic research, congresses for cultural freedom, and various liberal organizations—intellectuals do not see that these activities serve the interests of the state, not the interests of intellect. All they can see is the absence of censorship; that and that alone proves to their satisfaction that Soviet intellectuals are slaves and American intellectuals free men. Meanwhile their own self-censorship makes them eligible for the official recognition and support that sustain the illusion that the American government, unlike the Soviet government, greatly values the life of the mind. The circle of illusion is thus complete; and even the revelation that the campaign for "cultural freedom” was itself the creation and tool of the state has not yet torn away the veil. It has only led to the further illusion that the state is even more enlightened than the intellectuals had supposed.

 It is possible to hope, nevertheless, that when the matter is more completely understood, it will force people to quite different conclusions.
 
VII.
That there is no necessary contradiction between the interests of organized intellectuals and the interests of American world power, that the intellectual community can be trusted to police itself and should be left free from annoying pressures from outside, that dissenting opinion within the framework of agreements on Cold War fundamentals not only should be tolerated but can be turned to effective propaganda use abroad--all these things were apparent, in the early fifties, to the more enlightened members of the governmental bureaucracy; but they were far from being universally acknowledged even in the bureaucracy, much less in Congress or in the country as a whole. "Back in the early 1950's," says Thomas W. Braden, the man who supervised the cultural activities of the CIA, ". .. the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare. There was resistance to these projects in the CIA itself. To a man of Braden's background and inclinations, the idea of supporting liberal and socialist "fronts" grew naturally out of the logic of the Cold War. During the Second World War Braden served with the OSS--next to the communist movement itself the most fruitful source, it would appear, of postwar anticommunism (the same people often have served in both). Before joining the CIA in 1950, Braden served president of the California Board of Education. He represented a new type of bureaucrat, equally at home in government and in academic circles; but when in 1950 he proposed that "the CIA ought to take on the Russians by penetrating a battery of international fronts," his more conventional colleagues made the quaint objection that "this is just another one of those goddamned proposals for getting into everybody's hair." Allen Dulles intervened to save the project after it had been voted down by the division chiefs. “Thus began the first centralized effort to combat Communist fronts."

 Before they had finished, the directors of the CIA had infiltrated the National Student Association, the Institute of International Labor Research, the American Newspaper Guild, the American Friends of the Middle East, the National Council of Churches, and many other worthy organizations. "We... placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom," Braden notes. This "agent" was Michael Josselson, who was born in Russia in 1908, educated in Germany, represented American department stores in Paris in the mid-thirties, came to the United States just before the war, and was naturalized in 1941. During the war Josselson, like Braden, served in the OSS. Afterwards he was sent to Berlin as an officer for cultural affairs in Patton's army. There he met Melvin J. Lasky. In 1947 he and Lasky led a walkout of anticommunists from a cultural meeting in the Russian sector of Berlin. When they organized the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950, Josselson became its executive director--a position he still holds, in spite of the exposure of his connection with the CIA.

 "Another Agent became an editor of Encounter." The usefulness of these agents, Braden says, was that they "could not only propose anti-Communist programs to the official leaders of the organizations but they could also suggest ways and means to solve the inevitable budgetary problems. Why not see if the needed money could be obtained from ‘American foundations'?" Note that he does not describe the role of the CIA as having been restricted to financing these fronts; its agents were also to promote "anti-Communist programs." When it became public that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had been financed for sixteen years by the CIA, the editors of Encounter made a great point of the fact that the Congress had never dictated policy to the magazine; but the whole question takes on a different color in light of Braden's disclosure that one of the editors worked for the CIA. Under these circumstances, it was unnecessary for the Congress to dictate policy to Encounter; nor would the other editors, ignorant of these connections, have been aware of any direct intervention by the CIA.

 On April 27, 1966, the New York Times, in a long article on the CIA, reported that the CIA had supported the Congress for Cultural Freedom and other organizations through a system of dummy foundations, and that "Encounter magazine... was for a long time--though it is not now--one of the indirect beneficiaries of C.I.A. funds." (Rumors to this effect had circulated for years.) The editors of Encounter--Stephen Spender, Lasky, and Irving Kristol--wrote an extremely disingenuous letter to the Times in which they tried to refute the assertion without denying it outright. They asserted--what was a half-truth at best--that the Congress's funds "were derived from various recognized foundations--all of them (from such institutions as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations to the smaller ones) publicly listed in the official directories." What was not publicly listed, of course, was the fact that some of these "smaller ones" received money from the CIA for the express purpose of supporting the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Thus between 1961 and 1966, the CIA through some of its phony foundations gave $430,700 to the Hoblitzelle Foundation, a philanthropical enterprise established by the Dallas millionaire Karl Hoblitzelle, and the Hoblitzelle Foundation obligingly passed along these funds to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Needless to say, no hint of these transactions appeared in the Lasky-Spender-Kristol letter to the Times.

 Privately, Lasky went much further and declared categorically that Encounter had never received funds from the CIA. (Later he admitted that he had been "insufficiently frank" with his colleagues and friends.) In public, however, the magazine's defense was conducted in language of deliberate ambiguity. Another letter to the Times, signed by John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., completely avoided the question of Encounter's financing and argued merely that the magazine's editorial independence proved that it had never been "used" by the CIA--a statement, however, which carried with it the implication that the CIA had had nothing to do with the organization at all. One must ask why these men felt it necessary to make such a guarded statement, and why, since they had to state their position so cautiously, they felt it necessary to make any statement at all. The matter is even more puzzling in view of Galbraith's statement in the New York World Journal Tribune (March 13, 1967) that "some years ago, while attending a meeting of the Congress in Berlin (he probably refers to a conference held there in 1960), he had been told by a "knowledgeable friend" that the Congress for Cultural Freedom might be receiving support from the CIA. Galbraith says that he "subjected its treasurer to interrogation and found that the poor fellow had been trained in ambiguity but not dissemblance." "I was disturbed," he says, “and I don't think I would have attended any more meetings if his entrance into government service had not ended his participation. In another interview Galbraith told Ivan Yates of the London Observer (May 14, 1967), that he "made a mental note to attend no more meetings of the Congress." Yates asked "how in that case he could possibly have signed the letter to the New York Times. He replied that at the time, he had ‘very strong suspicions’ that the CIA had been financing the Congress. ‘I was writing really with reference to Encounter, but you could easily persuade me that the letter was much too fulsome.”

 Whereas Lasky believes that he was "insufficiently frank," Galbraith allows that he may have been "too fulsome." It is remarkable what rigorous standards of intellectual honesty the champions of cultural freedom hold themselves up to. Galbraith's urbanity is imperturbable. The letter was “fulsome" indeed. Moreover, it specifically dealt with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, not with Encounter, which it does not even mention by name. The letter states that “examination of the record of the Congress, its magazines and its other activities will, we believe, convince the most skeptical that the Congress has had no loyalty except an unswerving commitment to cultural freedom. ..." Yet one of the signers of this statement was sufficiently skeptical to have "made a mental note” not to attend any more meetings of the Congress! And at the same time that he was assuring the still unsuspecting public of the Congress's unimpeachable independence, he had privately reached the conclusion that it was probably being supported by the CIA. As a further indication of the values that prevail among our more notable intellects, when the Encounter affair finally became public, Galbraith's principal concern was that a valuable public enterprise was in danger of being discredited. The whole wretched business seemed inescapably to point to the conclusion that cultural freedom had been consistently confused with American propaganda, and that "cultural freedom," as defined by its leading defenders, was--to put it bluntly--a hoax. Yet at precisely the  moment when the dimensions of the hoax were fully revealed, Galbraith joined the Congress's board of directors; and "I intend," he says, "to put some extra effort into its activities. I think this is the right course and I would urge similar effort on behalf of other afflicted but reformed organizations."

 What should a "free thinker" do, asks the Sunday Times of London, "when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war?" According to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organizations which have been compromised, it would seem, beyond redemption. Far from "reforming" themselves--even assuming that this was possible--Encounter and the Congress for Cultural Freedom have vindicated the very men who led them into disaster. At their meeting in Paris in May 1967, officials of the Congress voted to keep Josselson in his post. Lasky was likewise retained by the management of Encounter.
 
Ever since the New York Times asserted that Encounter had been subsidized by the CIA, the Congress and its defenders have tried to brazen out the crisis by intimidating their critics--the same tactics that worked so well in the days of the Cold War. Arthur Schlesinger leaped into the breach by attacking one of Encounter's principal critics, Conor Cruise O'Brien. Following the Times's initial disclosures, O'Brien delivered a lecture at New York University, subsequently published in Book Week, in which he referred to the Times story and went on to observe that "the beauty of the [CIA-Encounter] operation... was that writers of the first rank, who had no interest at all in serving the power structure, were induced to do so unwittingly," while "the writing specifically required by the power structure" could be done by writers of lesser ability, men skilled in public relations and "who were, as the Belgians used to say about Moise Tshombe, compréhensifs, that is, they could take a hint." In reply, Schlesinger at first dodged the question of Encounter's relations with the CIA by attacking O'Brien's "apparent inability to conceive any reason for opposition to Communism except bribery by the CIA." When pressed, he said that "so long as I have been a member of the Encounter Trust, Encounter has not been the beneficiary, direct or indirect, of CIA funds." (The subsidies to Encounter are said to have run from 1953 to 1964, although the Congress's connection with the CIA, according to Galbraith, continued until 1966.)
Moreover, Schlesinger said, Spender, Lasky, and Kristol had revealed "the past sources of Encounter's support" and documented "its editorial and political independence." They had, of course, done nothing of the kind. The magazine's editorial independence was not to be taken on the editors' word, and the question of its financing was an issue they had studiously avoided. Why did Schlesinger go out of his way to endorse their evasions? Presumably he knew as much about Encounter's relations with the CIA as Galbraith--probably a good deal more. How was cultural freedom served by lending oneself to a deliberate deception?

In its issue of August 1966, Encounter published a scurrilous attack on O'Brien by "R" (Goronwy Rees). Karl Miller of the New Statesman offered O'Brien space to reply, but when Frank Kermode of Encounter (who has since resigned as editor, saying that he knew nothing of Lasky's connections) learned of this, he called Miller and threatened to sue the New Statesman for libel if O'Brien's piece contained any reference to Encounter's relations with the CIA. O'Brien then sued Encounter for libel and won a judgment in Ireland. At this point Ramparts broke the story of the CIA's infiltration of NSA, bringing a whole series of other disclosures in its wake, including the CIA's connection with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The editors of Encounter, unable to deny those relations any longer, and threatened with heavy damages, apologized to O'Brien, retracted its aspersions on his integrity (which it now admitted were "without justification" ), and agreed to pay his legal expenses.

Throughout this controversy, the editors of Encounter have repeatedly pointed to their editorial independence. Spender, Kristol, and Lasky, in their letter to the Times, claimed that "We are our own masters and are part of nobody's propaganda." The  Galbraith-Schlesinger letter declared that Encounter maintained "no loyalty except an unswerving commitment to cultural freedom" and that it had "freely criticized actions and policies of all nations, including the United States." These statements, however, need to be set against Thomas Braden's account of the rules that guided the International Organization Division of the CIA: "Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest; protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy."

These rules do more than shed light on the nature and extent of Encounter's editorial freedom. By publishing them at a time when they must surely embarrass the writers concerned, Braden reveals a contempt for their kept intellectuals which the Officers of the CIA cannot conceal. Whatever the intellectuals may have thought of the  relationship, the CIA regarded them exactly as the Communist party regarded its fronts in the thirties and forties--as instruments of its own purpose. Most of the beneficiaries of the CIA have been understandably slow to see this point; it is hard to admit that one has been used and that one's sense of freedom and power is an illusion. Norman Thomas, for instance, admits that he should have known where the money for his Institute of International Labor Relations was coming from, but (like Galbraith, like Thomas Braden himself) what he chiefly regrets is that a worthwhile work has had to come prematurely to an end. The Kaplan Fund, Thomas insists, "never interfered in any way--which merely means that he was never aware of its interference. He does not see that he was being used, as Stephen Spender puts it in his own case, "for quite different purposes from the ones he thought he was advancing. He thought he was working for democratic reform in Latin America, whereas the CIA valued him as a showpiece, an anticommunist who happened to be a socialist.

Spender has had the wit to recognize the situation (retrospectively) for what it was. "In reality," he writes, the intellectuals employed by the CIA without their knowledge were "being used for concealed government propaganda." Spender admits that this arrangement made a "mockery” of intellectual freedom. Michael Wood, formerly of the NSA, has written even more poignantly of his relations with the world of power. "Those of us who worked for NSA during 1965-1966, experienced an unusual sense of personal liberation. While actively involved in many of the insurgent campus and political movements of the day, we were also able to move freely through the highest echelons of established power." These experiences, Wood says, "gave us a heady feeling and a sense of power beyond our years." But "to learn that it had been bought with so terrible a compromise made me realize how impotent we really were.”

VIII.
What conclusions can be drawn from the history of the cultural cold war? Some conclusions should be obvious. Thanks to the revelations of the CIA's secret subsidies, it is no longer a very novel or startling proposition to say that American officials have committed themselves to fighting fire with fire, and that this strategy is self-defeating because the means corrupt the end. "In our attempts to fight unscrupulous opponents," asks Arthur J. Moore in Christianity and Crisis, "have we ended up debauching ourselves?" The history of the Cold War makes it clear that the question can only be answered with an emphatic affirmative.

These events, if people consider them seriously and try to confront their implications without flinching, will lead many Americans to question (perhaps for the first time) the cant about American "pluralism," the "open society," etc. Andrew Kopkind puts it very well: "The illusion of dissent was maintained: the CIA supported socialist cold warriors, fascist cold warriors, black and white cold warriors.. .. But it was a sham pluralism, and it was utterly corrupting." A society which tolerates an illusory dissent is in greater danger, in some respects, than a society in which uniformity is ruthlessly imposed.

For twenty years Americans have been told that their country is an open society and that communist peoples live in slavery. Now it appears that the very men who were most active in spreading this gospel were themselves the servants ("witty" in some cases, unsuspecting in others) of the secret police. The whole show--the youth congresses, the cultural congresses, the trips abroad, the great glamorous display of American freedom and American civilization and the American standard of living--was all arranged behind the scenes by men who believed, with Thomas Braden, that "the cold war was and is a war, fought with ideas instead of bombs." Men who have never been able to conceive of ideas as anything but instruments of national power were the sponsors of "cultural freedom."

The revelations about the intellectuals and the CIA should also make it easier to understand a point about the relation of intellectuals to power--a point that has been widely misunderstood. In associating themselves with the warmaking and propaganda machinery of the state in the hope of influencing it, intellectuals deprive themselves of the real influence they could have as men who refuse to judge the validity of ideas by the requirements of national power or any other entrenched interest. Time after time in this century it has been shown that the dream of influencing the war machine is a delusion. Instead, the war machine corrupts the intellectuals. The war machine cannot be influenced by the advice of well-meaning intellectuals in the inner councils of government; it can only be resisted. The way to resist it is simply to refuse to put oneself at its service. For intellectuals that does not mean playing at revolution; it does not mean putting on blackface and adopting the speech of the ghetto; it does not mean turning on, tuning in, and dropping out; it does not even mean engaging in desperate acts of conscience which show one's willingness to take risks and to undergo physical danger. Masking as a higher selflessness, these acts become self-serving, having as their object not truth, or even social change, but the promotion of the individual's self-esteem. Moreover they betray, at a deeper level, the same loss of faith which drives others into the service of the men in power--a haunting suspicion that history belongs to men of action, and that men of ideas are powerless in a world that has no use for philosophy. It is precisely this belief that has enabled the same men, in one lifetime, to serve both the Communist party and the CIA in the delusion that they were helping to make history--only to find, in both cases, that all they had made was a lie. But these defeats--the revelation that the man of action, revolutionist or bureaucrat, scorns the philosopher whom he is able to use--have not led the philosopher to conclude that he should not allow himself to be used; they merely reinforce his self-contempt and make him the ready victim of a new political cause.

The despair of intellect is closely related to the despair of democracy. In our time intellectuals are fascinated by conspiracy and intrigue, even as they celebrate the "free marketplace of ideas" (itself an expression that already betrays a tendency to regard ideas as commodities). They long to be on the inside of things; they want to share the secrets ordinary people are not permitted to hear.

In the last twenty years, the elitism of intellectuals has expressed itself as a celebration of American life, and this fact makes it hard to see the continuity between the thirties and forties on the one hand and the fifties and sixties on the other. The  hyper-Americanism of the latter period seems to be a reaction against the anti-Americanism of the depression years. Both of these phenomena, however, spring from the same source, the intellectuals’ disenchantment with democracy and their alienation from intellect itself. Intellectuals associate themselves with the American war machine not so much because it represents America as because it represents action, power, and conspiracy; and the identification is even easier because the war machine is itself "alienated" from the people it claims to defend. The defense intellectuals, "cool" and "arrogant," pursue their obscure calculations in a little world bounded by the walls of the Pentagon, sealed off from the difficult reality outside which does not always respond to their formulas and which, therefore, has to be ignored in arriving at correct solutions to the "problems" of government. At Langley, Virginia, the CIA turns its back on America and busies itself with its empire abroad. But this empire, which the CIA tries to police, has no relation to the real lives of the people of the world--it is a fantasy of the CIA, in which conspiracy and counterconspiracy, freedom and communist slavery, the forces of light and the forces of darkness, are locked in timeless combat. The concrete embodiments of these abstractions have long since ceased to matter. The processes of government have been intellectualized. Albert D. Biderman, the prophet of "social accounting," speaks for the dominant ethos: "With the growth of the complexity of society, immediate experience with its events plays an increasingly smaller role as a source of information and basis of judgment in contrast to symbolically mediated information about these events....Numerical indexes of phenomena are peculiarly fitted to these needs."

Washington belongs to the "future-planners," men who believe that "social accounting'" will solve social "problems. Government is a "think tank,” an ivory tower, a community of scholars. A member of the RAND Corporation speaks its “academic freedom" which “allows you to think about what you want to." A civil servant praises the democratic
tolerance, the respect for ideas, that prevail in the Defense Department. Herman Kahn, jolly and avuncular, encourages “intellectual diversity"; on his staff at the Hudson Institute, a center of learning devoted to the science of systematic destruction, he retains a dedicated pacifist who doubtless thinks that he is slowly converting the Hudson Institute to universal brotherhood.

Never before have the ruling classes been so solicitous of cultural freedom; but since this freedom no longer has anything to do with "immediate experience and its events," it exists in a decontaminated, valueless void.