Comment
"THE LIBERAL CONSPIRACY"
The Liberal Conspiracy
by Peter Coleman is a rather prosaic but
diligently detailed book about an episode that has faded into history.
It
is an
account - to some extent a one-sided one - of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom. Coleman was one of its cohorts, though he does try to give a bal–
anced view. It also contains a number of errors. However, the book is full of
facts up to now known only to insiders and of gossip lifted to the level of in–
formation.
It
raises, if only indirectly, a number of interesting political ques–
tions: about Soviet propaganda, Western intellectuals, anticommunism, the
CIA, and the entire issue of secret funding and control ofcultural publications.
The book also revives baming questions about whether the leaders of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom and the editors of its magazines knew of the
role of the CIA. On the whole, the book is about a time before Gorbachev
changed the terms ofthe East-West conflict.
But the events documented in
The Liberal Conspiracy
are part of our
intellectual history, and the record should be as accurate as possible. For this
reason, let me state my own involvement in these issues. I had no official
connections with the Congress or its publications, though I knew most of its
actors quite well. I was, it might be said, a fringe player in the global propa–
ganda game. I was a member for a time of the Executive Committee of the
American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which had a stormy relation to
the Congress before it finally severed its organizational affiliation, though I
was privy neither to its internal proceedings and calculations nor its finances.
Nevertheless, so far as I knew, the American Committee did not receive
any money from the CIA, either directly or through the Congress. We
operated on a shoestring and, it seemed, were always broke. I was quite
critical of the Congress, as were many members of the American Commit–
tee, but while some of them felt it was not genuinely anticommunist, I was
more inclined to question its bureaucratic makeup and what was patently its
secret control from the top. I was shocked by - and perhaps envious of- the
nouveau riche
look of the whole operation, by the posh apartments of the
