Cloak and Gown

To the captains of what was a brand new American empire in March 1947, the situation in Europe looked like a postcard from the Russian Revolution. The winter was exceptionally cold: cattle dying in the fields, the rivers choked with ice, snow in St. Tropez and, in the broken streets of ruined cities, an impoverished populace reduced to near starvation. The Vienna Woods had been burned for fuel; 13 million refugees, many of them without shoes, wandered across a desolate and frozen countryside, foraging for rats, sleeping in holes.

The abundant signs of misery gave credence to the voices crying up the hope of Communist salvation. In Italy and France the rumors of leftist coups d’etat drifted through the cafes and skulked behind the lines of the news and intelligence reports; Soviet youth groups on the march in Munich and Milan (singing songs, bringing flowers), labor unions up in arms in Barcelona and Marseilles (raising placards, shouting slogans), KGB agents disguised as high school gymnasts, university professors handing out the syllabus of Marx and Lenin, anti-American posters plastered on the statues in empty public squares.

Seen from the warm and well-lighted perspective of official Washington, the view was far from promising. The Allies had won the war against Hitler (won it in the name of democratic freedom and Western civilization), and now they appeared to be losing the peace to Stalin and the systems of totalitarian repression. What was afoot was a contest for the good opinion of mankind, and the Soviets didn’t play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules: All forms of literary or artistic expression were chained to the oars of state policy, the open market in ideas subject to the stamps of government inspection. If the Pax Americana wished to stay competitive, then the victorious gentlemen in the club chairs on K Street were going to have to learn (and learn pretty goddamned fast) the Cold War strategies of cultural propaganda: how to arrange a conference or stage a music festival, where to show the painters and when to send the poets.

In June of 1947, the United States set in motion the machinery of the Marshall Plan, and two months later the newly organized Central Intelligence Agency undertook the sales promotion for America the Beautiful. Communist agitprop at the time pictured the United States as a materialist wasteland inhabited by gum-chewing automobile salesmen, by lynchers of Negroes, by ignorant philistines unfamiliar with the works of Gramsci or Celine. It was left to the CIA to mount the counteroffensive, to present America as an empire of virtue, hospitable to art as well as commerce, and for the next 20 years--during the same period in which it was plotting political assassinations in Africa, routinely lying to the U.S. Congress, overthrowing elected governments in Guatemala and Iran--the Agency served as a clandestine ministry of culture, carrying out President Eisenhower’s instruction “to get the world, by peaceful means, to believe the truth.”

The American adventure on the battlefields of Kulturkampf provides Frances Stonor Saunders with the subject of her troubling and perceptive book. The story is not an easy one to tell. The dramatis personae were in the business of running a covert operation, well-versed in the vocabularies of misleading statement, often lying to themselves as well as to one another. Nearly half a century has elapsed since the events in question, and it’s hard to know why and when who said what to whom, how to as sign motive, who else was listening to the surveillance tape. Saunders overcomes the difficulty by writing well. Relying on letters, government memorandums and interviews with many of the people who were present, she supports her observations with named sources (the footnotes run to 47 pages), and she doesn’t pretend to knowledge that she cannot reliably document or reasonably infer. She writes with a sense of humor and an appreciation of the historical circumstances, and although quite a few of the sub-plots undoubtedly have gone missing in action, she avoids polemic and fits the fragments of elusive fact into a coherent and persuasive narrative.

Few American intellectuals in the 1950s questioned the villainy of the Soviet state and, like the CIA operatives trafficking in guns and dictators, the CIA propagandists took their cues from the national security directives being handed around the State Department, the White House and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Communists obviously were telling lies, and the friends of free expression couldn’t afford to come against them with the simple truth. George Kennan in 1949 advanced “the vital concept” of “the necessary lie,” suggesting that the Americans copy the Russian techniques of subversion, plausible deniability and the manufacturing of consent. A secret memorandum submitted to President Eisenhower in 1954 was even more explicit on the point:

“It is now clear that we are facing art’s implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. . . . [I]t may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”

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The fate of mankind was said to tremble in the balance, and the ornaments of culture must needs serve the imperatives of politics. The Boston Symphony was a weapon of war; so were Norman Rockwell’s paintings and George Gershwin’s songs, all of them paramilitary assets to be deployed as thoughtfully as a code name or a missile emplacement.

The Agency set out to win the loyalty of what it identified as the non-communist left in Europe--that is, the kind of people who sat around in smoke-filled cafes reading The New Statesman and the dicta of Jean-Paul Sartre. In Paris the CIA established the Congress of Cultural Freedom on the Boulevard Haussmann as a continental headquarters controlling the tactical movement of art exhibits and literary symposiums, and over the span of a generation (from 1950 until the operation was blown in 1967), it sponsored tours by the Yale Glee Club, furnished settings for performances of the music of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, stocked libraries with books by Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and Sherwood Anderson, staged plays by Thornton Wilder and Lillian Hellman, exhibited the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe, encouraged new writing from Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald and Robert Penn Warren.

One had to be careful, of course, to pretend that the Agency had nothing to do with the cocktail receptions or the funding. Back home in the United States in the 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was keeping a sharp lookout for subversive books and suspicious paintings, and his committee didn’t make fine distinctions between the communist and non-communist left. The country’s aesthetic tastes hadn’t yet been aligned with its foreign policy objectives, and if the Agency dispatched the novels of John Steinbeck to Hamburg, or the poems of Langston Hughes to Le Havre, one of McCarthy’s inquisitors was apt to impound the shipment under the seals of leftist contraband.

The CIA found two ways around the difficulty--by disbursing funds through front organizations and dummy foundations (as many as 17 of them that consisted of little else except a mail drop or a letterhead) and by rounding up the compliance of America’s leading cultural institutions. The second maneuver was easier than the first. The country’s governing class in the 1950s consisted of a relatively small number of people, wealthy and predominantly Protestant, who had attended the same schools, belonged to many of the same clubs, remembered the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Admiring of Winston Churchill and inspired by the plot lines of imperial romance, they staffed the boards of art museums and symphony orchestras, ran publishing companies and owned newspapers. Everybody knew, more or less, everybody else (if not Allen Dulles, then Nelson Rockefeller or one of the Bundy brothers), and the covert gentlemen in Washington didn’t have much trouble asking favors from the overt gentlemen in New Haven or New York. Among the government agencies and private organizations that served as conduits for CIA money (sometimes wittingly, sometimes not), Saunders names the Ford, Rockefeller and J.M. Kaplan Foundations, Time Inc., the Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Modern Art, PEN, Harper and Row, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Modern Language Assn. Of the 700 grants worth more than $10,000 each, bestowed by 164 foundations during the years 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete funding from the CIA.

To those beneficiaries well enough informed to know who was paying the piper, the Agency came to be known as “The Chocolate Factory” and “The Good Ship Lollipop.” Four cartons of American cigarettes hired the Berlin orchestra for a three-hour concert in the winter of 1947, and the corresponding prices for intellectuals in all denominations remained gratifyingly low during the decade of the 1950s. On what Arthur Koestler once described as “the international academic call-girl circuit,” the great democratic truths revealed themselves more clearly in dialogues backed up with oysters and champagne, and throughout the whole of its 20-year advertising campaign, the CIA’s hidden but munificent hand was never slow to pay the check, happy to arrange Mediterranean cruises and first-class hotel accommodations, to secure supportive book reviews and send its performing bears to Paris, London or Gstaad.

The Agency recruited its most eager standard-bearers from the ranks of the apostate left. The author of “Darkness at Noon” and a charter member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Koestler transferred his taste for caviar from Moscow to Paris when Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler in the summer of 1939; Melvin Lasky, a fierce Trotskyite at New York City College in the 1930s, attached himself to the American military government in Germany in 1946; James Burnham, Irving Kristol and Sidney Hook, each of them a once-upon-a-time Communist, brought with them the zeal of born-again capitalists, free at last from the KGB and five-year plans. Their conversions were well-timed. During the 1930s the rewards of tenure and literary advancement accrued to the accounts of the soi-disant revolutionaries in Greenwich Village who knew how to spell the names of both Gramsci and Celine. But then Stalin murdered Trotsky, the Moscow show trials proved awkward and disconcerting, and within the little space of six years (despite the Red Army’s heroic sacrifice at Stalingrad), the winds of opportunity were blowing from the West. The gravy trains were boarding at Waterloo Station and the Gare du Nord, and the time had come to win one for Wall Street and Adam Smith. Both Kristol and Lasky served stints as editors of Encounter, the magazine published by the CIA in London, and because they were accustomed to subordinating literature to politics, they knew how to fit the manuscripts to the frame of an ideological agenda.

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When word of the CIA’s Kulturkampf finally reached the American press in 1966-1967 (the result of stories in The New York Times, Ramparts and The Saturday Evening Post), the entire regiment of front-line intellectuals issued statements of disavowal. Never in life had they been insulted with such infamous accusations--not Kristol, not Koestler or Lasky, not Stephen Spender, McCarthy, Hook or McDonald. They were their own masters, independent spirits, voices of conscience. Yes, possibly once or twice, late at night in the Ritz bar or on a train to Brussels, they might have met an American encyclopedia salesman (short-haired and clean-cut, wearing a Brooks Brothers raincoat and carrying a briefcase full of money), but they never made him for a CIA agent. To the best of their recollections they had talked to the gentleman about Mozart, Roy Campanella and his mother. Maybe so. It’s always a mistake to underestimate the credulity of the literary folk, and the sure sign of successful propaganda--italicized in the CIA’s own manuals--is a “subject moved in a direction you desire for reasons he believes to be his own.”

Before reading Saunders’ account, I was familiar with some of the CIA’s efforts on behalf of the good, the true and the beautiful (its contributions to Partisan Review and its sending of Robert Lowell to Argentina), but I didn’t appreciate the scale of the enterprise; nor had I guessed at the extent of the sympathetic collaboration on the part of the New York literary crowd. The list of names to which Saunders attaches a CIA connection reads like a Who’s Who of American Arts and Letters--not only Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell but also Arthur Schlesinger, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling.

Many of the writers and painters undoubtedly knew of the government’s interest in their essays or their water colors, but 50 years after the fact I can’t find any good reason to indict them on charges of conspiracy. Artists take their patrons where they find them, and they don’t much care whether payment comes from Cesare Borgia, the Margrave of Brandenburg or Allen Dulles. If one were to fault a work of art for the politics of either its creator or its creator’s employer, the corollary policies of aesthetic cleansing would oblige the world’s museums, together with the world’s libraries, theaters and concert halls, to remove from their inventories and repertoires most of the world’s masterpieces.

But the CIA, like the Soviet propaganda machine from which it borrowed both premises and methods, wasn’t interested in art. The Agency was in the advertising business, hawking a product, running a sales promotion, translating history into agitprop. The habit of mind implicit in “this fundamentally repugnant philosophy” conformed to the spirit of an age preoccupied with the alarms and excursions of the Cold War, some of them well-founded but many of them paranoid. Unfortunately, the CIA did its work so well that the habit of mind is still with us, still imprinted in the DNA of the country’s intellectual life. By the time the CIA withdrew its cultural subsidies in 1967, a second and third generation of critics had learned to rate ideology at a higher value than art and literature. The continuation of the Cold War--in Vietnam, on the map overlays in the Kremlin and the Pentagon, in the theories of mutually assured destruction--preserved the markets for deft sophistry and grand simplification. The government arts bureaucracies and corporate think tanks assumed the burden of paying for the intellectual mood music, and careerists schooled in the paramilitary deployments of Aristotle and Edmund Burke once again changed gravy trains, drawing up chairs to the conference and buffet tables at The Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute. Other critics in other rooms transposed the old Soviet Cold War techniques into variant doctrines of political correctness, infiltrating the nation’s universities, carrying the banners of literary Realpolitik into the pages of some of the country’s most august journals of opinion.

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By now we have become so accustomed of thinking of culture as an adjective modifying a political noun (cultural identity, cultural development and diversity, cultural policy objective, etc.) that on first opening a book or walking into an art gallery we look for the stamps of ideological inspection rather than a talent for expression. Saunders reminds us that long ago and in another country, literary critics valued the difference between good writing and bad and works of arts were ends, not means.