WALTER LAQUEUR
189
sociologist, but since my knowledge of American sociology was even
scanter than now, I mixed him up with a popular American comic tele–
vision actor. This amused Aron (whom I came to admire greatly in later
years), but the American sociologist was outraged.
That hot summer of 1953 - we went to swim in a
piscine
in the Seine
every afternoon - was quite memorable. I met some of the French think–
ers and writers of whom I had heard so much in previous years. We went
to coffee houses in St. Germain de Pres, the museums and the bookshops.
There were interesting visitors such as Richard Loewenthal and Franz
Borkenau, a young New York editor named Irving Kristol about to
launch
Encounter,
Herbert Luthy, a young Swiss historian about to publish
a book on France that would become famous, and many others. Paris in
1953 was a very different place from ten years later.
It
was more pictur–
esque, far shabbier but intellectually much more exciting. Most people
still drove around in the vintage Citroens one knows from the old mov–
ies.
In
every other building there was a tiny BOF shop selling butter,
eggs, and cheese.
In
our little hotel in the rue Jacob there was no eleva–
tor, and our room had neither shower nor toilet.
Mike Josselson offered me the job of correspondent for the Congress
in Israel, which I gladly accepted. My work was neither arduous nor well
paid. I remember acting as host to Edmund Wilson, who was interested at
the time in only one subject, the Dead Sea Scrolls, about which I knew
little and cared less (although I had been present at the small gathering in
December 1947 when Professor Sukenik had announced the original dis–
covery). I invited Wilson to tea, together with my neighbor Abba Lerner,
a distinguished if somewhat eccentric economist. Wilson had quoted
Lerner at considerable length in
To the Finland Station,
but that afternoon
he pretended he had never heard of him. From Peter Coleman's history,
The Liberal Conspiracy,
I am reminded that I advised the Congress not to
become active in the Middle East, since it was bound to remain unpro–
pitious ground for cultural freedom. The Congress disregarded my
recommendations and did sponsor certain activities there, including a
cultural magazine in Lebanon. They were not successful. I was equally
skeptical about Congress activities in India, not only because, as George
Kennan put it at the time, in Asia the Americans were always thought to
be acting from power-lusting, money-grabbing, or war-mongering mo–
tives. Indian intellectuals had their own agenda. Either they sympathized
with Communism (admittedly not very deeply) and disliked America and
the West, or else they were Hindu nationalists combating Muslims, Paki–
stan, and keeping the Untouchables in their place. Western quarrels
among Marxists, non-Marxists, and anti-Marxists were of little interest to
