In the years after the surrender of Germany and Japan and FDR’s supposed perfidy in Yalta, the United States felt so menaced by Soviet communism that it took Jean-Paul Sartre seriously. The CIA, a reconstituted and rechartered distillation of the rather blandly named wartime Office of Strategic Services, assembled the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the purpose of which was to conscript intellectuals into the global war against the Mongol hordes.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters depicts those years between 1945 and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as a boom time for writers, philosophers, and painters. Forbidden by its charter from interfering with the domestic scene, the CIA used the Congress and proxies like the Rockefeller Foundation to rescue the ailing Partisan Review or create new journals like Encounter, edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender. Through its front organizations the CIA promoted Abstract Expressionism. It sought recruits from New Critical enclaves headed by John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. The list of men on the payroll or who contributed to the enterprises reads like a hall of fame of an extinct cultural elite: Jackson Pollock, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Ellmann, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Lowell, Philip Rahv. The Congress, according to Donald Jameson, interviewed by Saunders, “made it possible to be a sensitive intellectual and eat. And the only other people who did that really were the Communists.”
What suckered the men and women in the know were the subtle ways in which the Agency played on their fears of irrelevance. Mired in the slough of despond instigated by the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, these intellectuals saw a organization whose command of an idea of hegemonic influence mirrored theirs. To the CIA, Saunders writes:
a ‘witting’ individual was a ‘man of their world, he knew the language, the code words, the customs, the recognition symbols. To be ‘witting’ was to belong to the club. To talk the language. To understand the high signs.
The petty intrigue and infidelities of these New York and London intellectuals were elements the Agency recognized in its own internecine squabbles. Expiation was the chic virtue. From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to Whittaker Chambers’ fascinating, purple go at an Augustinian confession, the postwar years saw a range of smart people wracked with guilt about leftist affiliations and homosexual desires, and the Agency exploited them, to the extent that they didn’t exploit themselves (Schlesinger comes off as a obtuse and loathsome sycophant, auguring his famous role as scullery maid in JFK’s Camelot). Even Arthur Koestler and George Orwell couldn’t resist; Orwell’s involvement, in the form of a list of suspected fellow travelers submitted to the Agency’s British apparatchiks, distressed me (Edmund Wilson, truculent to the end, comes off rather better; his essay on Cold War and the income tax must have saddened LBJ and Richard Helms). In case loyalties waned, Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn made for splendid motivators. How this duo turned on their enablers by threatening to investigate the CIA for employing former Communists is one of the more delicious ironies of Saunders’ book (it took the intervention of Allen Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon to stop them).
Saunders’ book, published in 2000, contains so much information so wittily presented that when she fails to vibrate an irony she’s set up it feels like a disappointment. Besides the money and the means of earning an absurd conception of self-respect, the intellectuals bought by the Agency sought status. America didn’t treat brains very well. Alfred Kazin, whose own hands weren’t clean, noted it himself in the essay “President Kennedy and Intellectuals”:
When a really good mind, suffering from the natural loneliness of really good minds, gets the ear of a man smart enough to make his way to the very top, even to make the topmost pinnacle an attribute of himself, there is a natural sense of satisfaction.
Years of betting on the wrong horse (attracted to “not a lost cause but to lostness as a cause,” Kazin writes), and now they got to have martinis in the East Room. When the crack-up came, as much from Vietnam as Ramparts‘ excellent reporting on who was paying the light bills at these front organizations, it was like stumbling out of a room in which too many cigarettes and drinks were consumed. A letter signed by the likes of Arendt, Philip Roth, Mark Rothko, Kazin, and Dwight MacDonald denying any involvement reads like a sordid, sad recrudescence of Stalin’s show trials (so they got to live the Communist fantasies of their youth after all). Whoever lived to wear polyester and grow hair over their ears became a neoconservative or a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, for which the Reagan administration served as a last meal ticket. When Saunders observes that Irving Kristol was reduced to grumbling about how American soldiers failed to stand properly to attention during “The Star Spangled Anthem” I can almost hear her applauding. But it’s not quite over. On NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday, David Brooks said the following:
This is the problem with democracy. If we had a party run by elites, which it should be, they would be far-seeing, they would know what’s in the long-term interest of their party, and they would push through change against a minority group, the Tea Party, which doesn’t see it that way.
Brooks made sure to qualify “which it should be” with a self-effacing giggle. Ah, that old devil expiation again.
Humanizing The Vacuum 