WALTER LAQUEUR
Anti-Communism Abroad: A Memoir
of the Congress for Cultural Freedom
I visited the Paris headquarters of the Congress for Cultural Freedom for
the first time in May of 1953. They consisted of a small office of three or
four rooms in Avenue Montaigne, a distinguished street not far from the
Champs Elysees, better known for high couture (Chanel, Givenchy, Un–
garo, Valentino, Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Cartier) than for high culture,
but not literally so; Stravinsky's
Sacre
du Printemps
was first performed at
No. 15. The secretary general of the Congress was Michael Josselson.
Born in Reval (Tallin) and educated in Berlin, he had worked in Paris as
chief buyer for a major New York department store prior to enlisting in
the American army. He was truly polyglot and at the same time a man of
substance, not an academic but a manager in the best sense. He had good
judgment and a great deal of common sense. To me, he seemed almost
always on the verge of an emotional explosion. At the same time, he was
a charming man and good at public relations. I was a little overawed by
him in the beginning, and we became friends only much later.
By contrast, his associate and nominal boss, Nicolas Nabokov (a
composer and cousin of the writer) did not impress me greatly. I remem–
ber him rushing in and out of rooms, always in a hurry. He was
preoccupied with celebrities, and since I was quite unknown and unim–
portant, he took no interest in me. I was on my first visit to Paris; I had
not published a single book; and the few articles I had written had ap–
peared under a pen name out of consideration for my wife Naomi's
family living in the Soviet Union.
The Congress had been established a few years earlier, and I had been
recommended by George Lichtheim, who did not belong to the Con–
gress and was critical of Josselson's strategy of approaching the literary
intelligentsia. He had told Josselson that I was some latter-day Rastignac,
a young man from the provinces: unpolished, self-made, but of a certain
promise, eager to continue his education in Europe. Josselson liked to act
as a talent scout. He introduced me to some of his gurus, friends, and
colleagues. But I spoiled at least two such meetings. At lunch with Irving
Brown, the European representative of the AFL-CIO who single–
handedly did much to prevent the takeover of the European trade unions
by the Communists, I accidentally spilled a plate of very hot soup over his
trousers. Brown took it in good spirits, but it still caused a slight resent–
ment. At tea with Raymond Aron, there was a famous American
