WILLIAM PHILLI PS
9
For one thing, the CIA was not regarded at the time as the evil
underground empire it has since been perceived in many liberal circles.
It
has
to be remembered that we had fought what liberals and the left regarded as
ajust war, and all the agencies of the government had left-liberal support.
Indeed, during the war against Hitler many liberals and radicals cooperated
with the CIA. But even more important is the little-publicized fact that the
CIA, unlike the FBI , at the time was an elitist outfit, staffed largely by aca–
demics, and that it had a strong liberal-leftish wing. In fact, it was this wing
that initiated the creation of the Congress and its journals. According to
Coleman, Allen Dulles, himself, approved of the entire project, which was
based on the belief that only the liberals and the left could effectively oppose
communism - a view which appeared to be at least partly true, though this
depended on whether one meant the anticommunist left or the noncommunist
left. The right in this country had indicated that what it thought was evil in
communism was precisely its "progressive" appeal. Hence its methods of
fighting communism had proven to be completely ineffectual, particularly in
Europe, at least for writers and intellectuals.
Within the CIA and the Congress the political entity that was thought
to
be the effective instrument for opposing Communist propaganda became
known as the NCL, that is, the noncommunist - not the anticommunist - left.
Hence, to those accustomed to thin king of the CIA as a most reactionary
organization, staffed by the most right-wing Republicans, can-ying on the type
of anticommunism associated with McCarthy and the House Un-American
Activities Committees, this ideological twist must be a stumbling block to un–
derstanding the nature of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The truth is
just the reverse of the stock beliefs. Much of the criticism of the Congress,
particularly from the American Committee, was that it coddled neutralists
and pacifists. Actually, the Congress was a mixed bag. It had its soft and its
hard anticommunists (as did the American Committee) as well as those who
preferred to be known as noncommunists, and there were many disputes
between the two camps. Koestler, for example, left the Congress out of dis–
gust with what he regarded as its politics of accommodation. And the
American Committee voted to dissociate from the Congress after the
Bertrand Russell incident, during which Diana Trilling led the criticism of
Russell, the Chairman ofthe Congress, for his anti-Americanism. The issues
were further complicated by the frequent political shifts of the leading actors
and by the contradictions in their positions. Josselson, for instance, was con–
temptuous of the politics of the American Committee (as was Nabokov) and
referred to it as a nuisance, because it questioned the politics of the Congress.
At the same time, he criticized
Encounter
for not being politically aggressive
enough and wanted it to be less international and more British in its emphasis.
