WILLIAM PHILLIPS
II
committees and magazines. Several glaring examples are Josselson's political
pressures on Irving Kristol when he edited
Encounter;
the rejection by
En–
counter
of Dwight Macdonald's essay critical ofAmerica, and Josselson's di–
rective that nothing be reprinted from
National Review.
The latter injunction
is especially revealing of the political coloration of the Congress - and the
CIA.
But after all these questions have been raised about the operation, a
basic one still remains: should the whole thing have taken place?At the time
I was critical of it, mainly because it was a bureaucratic enterprise pretending
to be an intellectual one. I was particularly put off by a musical event created
by transporting the Boston Symphony Orchestra to Paris, at a cost, it was
rumored, ofa haifa million dollars. It was made fun of by the French, who
described it as the greatest Parisian couturieres' ball. When I asked Manes
Sperber why so much money was wasted on this impressario's dream, which
I suspected was inspired by Nabokov, himself a composer, Sperber replied
that the Executive Committee, of which he was a member, was told that the
money was earmarked for the festival and could not be used for anything
else.
But to be truthful, I also must indicate that I was opposed to the subsidy
ofa publication like
Encounter
because it gave it a large edge in competition
with
Partisan Review.
On reflection, however, and to a large extent as a
result of my other conversations with Sperber, who reminded me of the
desperate need for some activities to counter the propaganda ofthe commu–
nists that had swamped Europe and particularly France, I have come
to
think
that some such countermeasure as the Congress, with
all
its shortcomings and
its shady funding, could be justified. (I recall that when I went to Paris in
1949, I felt as though I were in Moscow. Streets and subway stations had
Russian names, the largest unions were under communist control, most writ–
ers and intellectuals were Soviet sympathizers, and anticommunists like
Raymond Aron were treated as pariahs.) Admittedly, open financing would
have been preferable. But no foundation was prepared to do this, nor, given
the nature of our society and our government, could any official agency have
undertaken to finance openly this vast "liberal conspiracy." Congress, which
will
not support even more clear-cut operations, would never have tolerated
expenditures for such a politically and intellectually controversial enterprise.
Today the National Endowment for Democracy comes closest
to
such a po–
litical
enterprise. But since it is under Congressional supervision, it, too, could
not even think of financing an operation that is bound to be criticized by many
members of Congress.
Another nagging question is whether those in key positions at the
Congress knew or could have known about the role of the CIA, though this
issue has more to do with the characters of the people involved and our own
