90
JACK NEWFIELD
on John McCloy, the seventy-two-year-old former Chairman of the
Board of the Ford Foundation and the Chase Manhattan Bank, who
in
1962 was formally nominated for chairman of the American Establish–
ment by Richard Rovere. McCloy's appearance again struck me as a
Yippie plot to parody Wall Street and State Department values
in–
truding on a group concerned with "cultural freedom."
McCloy began with a jovial reminiscence about the two times in
his life when he had been mugged. And then he tried his hand at a
few ideas.
"Our condemnations of suburbia are overdrawn," he said. "I'm
more impressed by the alertness to problems of that group, than I
am
by the drug addicts among the young. . . . I've been exposed lately to
the colored movement, and I think progreS'S is being made, despite the
nihilism of the youth.... My bank used to employ hundreds of colored
people. Now we employ thousands....
If
we don't provide the leader–
ship, where will it come from?"
I don't wish to be misunderstood. I'm not opposed to scholars or
writers having relationship with state or political power, and I'm not
advocating feeling and activism divorced from lucidity and tolerance.
I'm not insinuating that the CIA had anything directly to do with
IACF. What I am trying to say is that those intellectuals who control
and ornament such an organization have acted in this instance to
institutionalize commercial and cold-war values at the expense of
creativity and engagement. Therefore I think they are engaged in some–
thing that betrays their responsibilities to act as antennae for their
society. The phrase
"les trahisons des cl.ercs"
may be too strong but I
do not think it wholly inapplicable.
• A list of people who did not participate in the conference at Princeton appears
lin page
125.
