WALTER LAQUEUR
191
yet in the final analysis it was the contest for the hearts and minds of peo–
ple that was more important than any strategic blueprints were. However,
historians have paid little attention to the "liberal conspiracy" that was not
really a conspiracy at all but a small organization operating with a tiny
budget and a handful of administrators.
It
was a strange coalition of anti–
totalitarians of the left, right, and center which, through a network of
periodicals, meetings, and work groups tried to influence the intellectual
climate of the 1950s and 1960s.
Only now, twenty years after the Congress has ceased to exist, ten
years after the Communist empire has disintegrated, is it possible even to
begin assessing its effectiveness. While it existed, the Congress was at–
tacked not only by Communists but also by third-world radicals,
European neutralists, and anti-Americans of every possible hue. For those
who believed that the Cold War was entirely (or mainly) the fault of the
West, the Congress was, of course, an abomination, a war-mongering in–
stitution, a major obstacle on the road to world peace, and a sworn
enemy of the forces of progress. When the Congress was disgraced as the
result of the revelations about its CIA funding, its demise seemed com–
plete.
It
never recovered its initial impetus, although it continued to exist
under the auspices of the Ford Foundation for more than another decade.
When it was finally dissolved in January of 1979 it seemed to have been a
failure . But perspectives and assessments tend to change in the light of
subsequent events. As I see it, the Congress had indeed outlived its use–
fulness in Europe by the 1970s, but today, as one rereads its publications
of the 1950s and 1960s, and if one compares them with what its critics
had to say, there is no doubt about who was right in that historical con–
frontation.
In
addition to Peter Coleman's
The Liberal Conspiracy,
there is Pierre
Gremion's
Intelligence de l'Anticommunisme:
Le
Congres pour la liberte de la
Culture a Paris 1950-1975.
Several essays on the Congress by Edward
Shils have appeared in
The American Scholar
and in
Encounter.
Both Cole–
man's and Gremion's studies are judicious, well-informed, and reliable.
They bring much that is new even
to
those who thought they knew all
that there was to know. Those who were personally involved with the
Congress may not agree with all of Coleman's and Gremion's observa–
tions, since all history is based on documents but documents seldom
contain the whole story. This is true even with regard to a relatively small
organization such as the Congress. Those who wrote many letters and
memoranda inevitably figure more prominently than those who didn't
but were of equal importance.
The Congress was founded at a conference in Berlin in July of 1950,
following the Soviet takeover in Eastern Europe and a major Soviet cam-
