8
PARTISAN REVIEW
Congress officials, the seemingly inexhaustible funds for travel, the big-time
expense accounts, and all the other perks usually associated with the execu–
tives of large corporations. After all,
Partisan Review
was always trying to
make ends meet, and my experience had led me to believe that poverty was
the normal condition for serious political outfits and literary magazines.
From the beginning, I was not asked to any inner council meetings of
the Congress, nor was I invited to any public ones, with one exception: a big
sprawling affair in Berlin in 1950. Thus I was an outsider, but moved in cir–
cles that crossed those of the Congress, and hence knew a good deal about its
operation and sensed even more. However, some of the revelations in
Coleman's book are quite new and startling. For example, it never occurred
to me that the CIA could be lax in its anticommunism.
The Congress, it will be recalled , was planned at secret meetings by a
small group of hardened anticommunists that included at different times Sid–
ney Hook, Melvin Lasky, james Burnham, Arthur Koestler, Irving Brown,
and Michael josselson , a CIA agent, who became the director and driving
force of the Congress and its far-flung network of magazines and confer–
ences. Soon such figures as Raymond Aron, Manes Sperber, Nicholas
Nabokov, who was appointed its secretary-general, Fran<;ois Bondy, jean
Bloch-Michel, 19nazio Silone, and Arthur Schlesinger were drawn into its ex–
ecutive activities. The Congress was funded by the CIA until this was ex–
posed by
The New York Times
in 1966, and by Thomas Braden, one of the
CIA agents who helped set up the funding operation, in
Th e Saturday
Evening Post
in 1967. Braden revealed many details of the CIA involve–
ment, including the fuct that it had placed one agent in the Congress and an–
other as an editor of
Encounter.
After this expose, the CIA had to step out,
and the Ford Foundation took over the support of the Congress, but on a
reduced scale, and the old guard was replaced by a new leadership. The
Congress also acquired a new name, the International Association for Cul–
tural Freedom. But the organization lost its original elan and was dissolved in
1979.
All through its existence, the source of the Congress's lavish funding
was speculated about in New York literary circles and its efficacy debated–
though there were inevitable differences of opinion about its aims and the
possibility of achieving them with covert money. But with much of the inner
story made available by Coleman, we might be in a better position to answer
some of the questions raised by what now can be seen as a bizarre enter–
prise: an attempt by a democratic nation to adopt the methods of a totalitar–
ian one, to combat the vast propaganda machine of the Soviet Union directed
by the KGB. The political stereotypes of the CIA, of the anticommunists,
and of the Congress simply do not teU this incredible story.
