10
PARTISAN REVIEW
Of course, there is still the question of who was right, the hard anticommu–
nists or the NCLers - a complex question to answer, that depends on how
one's aims are defined. For though a gentler policy would attract more writ–
ers, their support would be gained, as Diana Trilling said in one of her letters
to the Congress, for a position that might turn out
to
be politically undesirable
and might boomerang.
The central question is that of hidden funding by the CIA This actually
raises several moral, political, and intellectual issues that are seemingly
different but interrelated: that of secret funding in general, specific funding by
the CIA, the matter of intellectual probity, and the efficacy of such an ac–
tivity. As for secret funding, it seems to me to violate the very nature of a
free intellectual enterprise, particularly when the financing is by a well-orga–
nized arm of the government, with its own political agenda. Perhaps political
groups are not so compromised. But literary magazines and organizations of
writers, in particular, must have their own spontaneous beginnings and must
be rooted in an intellectual community in order to be authentic. In addition,
they have to make their own mistakes, and not be corrected by an outside
agency. The CIA may not be the evil force painted by political propaganda,
and it should be assumed that a great power must have an intelligence ser–
vice. But at best it is clearly not an intellectual enterprise. Moreover, writers'
organizations and literary magazines set up in this way are bound to have a
limited effectiveness, if only because their origins and lush financing are sus–
pect. True enough, it is very difficult to measure the efficacy of the Congress
and its publications. However, all the evidence points to only partial success,
especially in the later phases, and one perhaps not commensurate with the
money and effort put into it. Magazines such as
Preuves
and
Tempo Presente
had small circulations and apparently little influence. Some of the adherents of
the Congress simply constituted a paid bureaucracy. Others, who belonged to
a noncommunist left, retained their neutralism, pacifism, and anti-Ameri–
canism.
As
a matter of fact, it is clear that the decisive shift in European in–
tellectual opinion - from fellow-travelling to anticommunism - particularly in
France, came as a result of changing political circumstances, and to a large
extent as a result of the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago
by Alexander
Solzhenitsyn.
On the question of control by the CIA, it has been claimed that the
officers of the Congress and the editors of its publications were free to pursue
their own judgements, and that, as Coleman also claims, they were free
because their views coincided with those of the CIA. But the fact that they
were chosen for this reason by the CIA itself indicated that leaders and poli–
cies were not freely selected or arrived at. Coleman cites many instances of
what amounted to orders by Josselson and others to the heads of the various
