The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe.

Writing in The Nation in 1967,

Christopher Lasch presented

what became the generally accepted judgment on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. According to Lasch, the Congress published works that served "as rationalizations of American world power," held meetings that preached "the immorality of neutralism," and worked with liberals whose views were " indistinguishable from those of the Right." The American branch of the Congress was, Lasch wrote, "a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of Communism." These intellectuals may have believed in "cultural freedom," but, like their Soviet counterparts, they were not free men. Indeed, the American intellectuals were almost pathetic, since they thought they were acting and thinking independently, while in reality they were "servants . . . of the secret police." Having once served the Communists, they now served the CIA. In both cases, they served a lie.

Given the wide acceptance of Lasch's interpretation, it is about time someone came along to look at the real history and meaning of the Congress, removed from the frenzy of the 1960s. This job has been undertaken (adequately, if sometimes a bit tediously) by Peter Coleman, editor of the Australian journal Quadrant, one of the periodicals created by the Congress. [See Mr. Coleman's "The Brief Life of Liberal Anti-Communism," NR, Sept. 15.]

The Congress was founded early in the cold war, at a moment when the Soviets had the field to themselves in the world propaganda battle. As Cole-

man shows, the Congress achieved some major victories. Through the journals it funded, the conferences it convened, and the international protests it organized, it kept "the issues of Soviet totalitarianism and liberal anti-Communism to the fore in a frequently hostile environment." By the end of the 1950s, as a result of its work alone, "the propaganda of the

Soviet Union and its fellow-travelers was no longer credible."

Rather than being reactionaries or even conservatives, the Congress intellectuals were by and large liberals, social democrats, and even democratic socialists. Indeed, the very premise of U.S. support for the work of the Congress was that supporting "the non-Communist Left" would be the most effective response to the appeal of the totalitarian (pro-Soviet) Left in Europe. It was for this reason that many followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy distrusted the Congress and saw it as a hotbed of radicalism.

The Congress went through three phases: from 1950 to 1958, when conferences and rallies were held to mount an offensive against the Communists and their allies; from 1958 to 1964, when the Congress helped create a community of Atlanticist, pro- NATO intellectuals, even reaching out toward dissidents within the Soviet Union and its satellites; and from 1964 until 1968, when the Congress floundered, as Vietnam disrupted unity within the American liberal community, and the revelations of CIA funding permanently harmed the image and effectiveness of the Congress.

Throughout the book one relishes the words and actions of that brave

and noble group of postwar intellectuals, including such luminaries as Franz Borkenau, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Nicolas Nabokov, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Sol Levitas, Bertrand Russell, Boris Souvarine, Anton Ciliga, Richard Lowenthal, Manes Sperber, and Ignazio Silone, and including also the Congress's remarkable organizer (and later CIA agent within the Congress) Michael Josselson. It was these people, George Kennan wrote, "who have done more to hold our world together" than any other group. But, as he all too accurately predicted to Nabokov, "few [in the United States] will ever understand the dimensions and the significance of your accom- plishments."

Even in its heyday, Coleman shows, it was not all wine and roses for the Congress. Nicolas Nabokov favored building an organization "for war

. .with a view to action." Sidney Hook argued that with "a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people," he would be able to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses . . . of Stalin's own empire, that all [his] problems . . . will be internal." But others in the Congress favored a more subdued stance, fearing that undue militancy among American supporters would undermine the appeal of the Congress to left-leaning European intellectuals. H. R. Trevor-Roper strenuously objected to the Congress's stand against neutralism, which he said amounted to an illiberal ban on Western European Communist parties. Arthur Koestler's strong leadership was condemned by Altiero Spinelli, who argued that ex-Communists showed the same kind of "Communist intolerance" that would "reduce us all to rubble."

Later, some leading Congress figures began to drift toward neutralism themselves. Bertrand Russell, in particular, threatened several times to resign from membership and was perhaps the first European intellectual to sound the theme that America and the USSR were moral equivalents. What upset Russell, Trevor- Roper, and others was the fraudulent charge that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was McCarthyist, a charge based largely on the refusal of the Americans to support clemency for the Rosenbergs, whom

many Europeans saw as innocent victims of American fascism. What the Europeans failed to acknowledge was the Americans' genuine belief in the Rosenbergs' guilt. (Lasch repeats the Europeans' charge, arguing foolishly that those who declared the Rosenbergs guilty ignored "the disputed facts of the case.") Russell now compared America to "other police states such as Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia." Josselson, the CIA director of the Congress, pleaded with Hook not to demand Russell's head, because of what Russell's name "on our masthead has meant to our international reputation." Josselson even threatened to join in a " rebuke to the American committee." Others, such as Diana Trilling, stood firm. "How untruthful about America may a man be?" she asked. Nabokov went further. Detailing from his own experience exactly what a police state was like (it included concentration camps, mass murder, and rigged trials), he bluntly informed Russell that such a "description hardly fits the United States of America." Sadly, the CIA funding seems to be the only thing most people remember about the Congress. The leftists who concluded that Congress intellectuals were no different from Soviet intellectuals have failed to consider that American power was, in fact, functioning on the right side of a world struggle against totalitarianism, and that such support as was provided by the CIA was useful and necessary in the early cold-war era. Ironically, Coleman reveals that Josselson, the hated CIA operative within the Congress, was most anxious to "direct the Congress away from its cold-war perspectives" and prove that the group was not "a tool of the U.S. Govern-

ment." And during the Vietnam War, Coleman notes, Josselson adopted the antiwar position of Galbraith, Schlesinger, and lawenthal, even going so far as to break off correspondence with pro-war Australian affiliates. Josselson explained that he agreed with George McGovern that Vietnam was "the most regrettable diplomatic, political, and moral failure in our national history." All of this was to no avail. The CIA funding was discovered and used to condemn totally the heroic efforts of a generation of liberal and left anti-Communists, who fought the good fight at a time of tremendous Stalinist influence in Europe. The Congress's collapse led some Congress veterans into neo-conservatism and others to a thinly disguised anti-Americanism. One cannot read The Liberal Conspiracy and not be struck by the irony of John K. Galbraith, who saw his participation in many Congress seminars as a high point of the intellectual struggle, presenting the keynote address at the pro-Communist Harvard Conference on Anti-Communism last year; or of Tom Braden-who bragged in his famous 1967 Saturday Evening Post article about how the CIA funded Encounter and anti-Communists in the labor movement-now uncritically defending Far Left initiatives on Crossfire. Perhaps NATIONAL REVIEW'S James Burnham was correct in his observation that the non-Communist Left ended up "undermining the nation's will and hampering or sabotaging the nation's security," although I think he was wide of the mark in wholly dismissing anti-Communist liberalism. In the end, it is the issue of CIA support that looms largest. George Kennan saw the flap about CIA money" as quite unwarranted," and

proclaimed that he " never felt the lightest pangs of conscience about it." Arthur Schlesinger defended the Congress by pointing out that during the waning days of Stalinism, the non-Communist intellectuals "were under the most severe, unscrupulous, and unrelenting pressure. For the United States government to have stood self-righteously aside . . . would have seemed to me far more harmful than to do what, in fact, it did"

to give subsidies "to help [the Congress] do better what they were doing anyway." Coleman observes that none of the Congress's critics "attempted .......any answer to Schlesinger's argument."

Kennan and Schlesinger were proved right. Peter Coleman argues that CIA funding may have continued after it was no longer needed, but it is time to admit that it did no harm. It aided a vital organization to do a necessary job. For establishing this fact and for offering the first documented corrective to the deplorable Lasch thesis, Coleman has earned our gratitude.