PARTISAN REVIEW
33
the nation at large. Later on in 1967 in the wake of revelations
that leading periodicals and cultural organizations of the postwar
period had been secretly funded by the CIA, apparently as instru–
ments of the Cold War,
Commentary,
itself in the last throes of its
newfound sixties liberalism, invited some of the best-known intel–
lectuals of the fifties to rethink their past political behavior in a
symposium on "Liberal Anti-Communism Revisited." The result
was a revealing lesson in the varieties of self-exculpation. Some
were penitent, some impenitent; some seemed desperately embar–
rassed while others were indignant at being asked to reconsider, as
if the Vietnam war and the CIA exposure could have any effect on
the timeless truths of political philosophy.
What nearly all shared, however, was a tendency to minimize
the scope and effect of their past opinions, and to make distinc–
tions which few had been so precise about in the previous period.
We were anti-Stalinist, they insisted, not antiradical or anti–
Communist. Nothing disgusted us more than the garden variety of
Red-baiting that followed both world wars. We were libertarians
and free minds, not witch-hunters or kept men. Our independent
position made us a small dissident group with little influence
either on national policy in the fifties or on the climate of opinion
that later made the Vietnam war possible. (At least no one
bothered to add, Some of my best friends were blacklisted.)
Yet for all these protestations what future historian who
examines the vagaries of intellectuals during the period will fail to
observe the correspondence between the views published in
En–
counter
and the government policies that made the support of
Encounter
a good investment? Nor should our historian fail to
note that at a low ebb of American civil liberties Mary McCarthy
wrote a novel about a faculty Machiavel who tries to save his job
by
posing
as a victim of political persecution; that Robert War–
show and Leslie Fiedler wrote essays attacking the Rosenbergs and
their sympathizers rather than the government which had just
executed them; that Irving Kristol and others minimized the im–
portance of McCarthy while criticizing liberals and intellectuals
who were alarmed by him; that an influential group of social scien–
tists antipathetic to McCarthy tried to blame him, in a sense, on
