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PARTISAN REVIEW
For a long time after 1965, I rarely saw Leo, but whenever I was in
London we had dinner. He did not mellow with age but became more
rigid, and this affected his judgment. Our political discussions became dif–
ficult, but we still had many common interests such as literature and
French films of the thirties and forties. Leo became a hawk about Israel in
the 1970s, without ever having been interested in Jewish affairs. He died
in 1993 after a long and painful illness which he bore with great fortitude.
Leo never became well known outside of a small circle of
cognoscenti.
Yet
in his native Poland he was a legendary figure. Shortly before his death,
he revisited Warsaw for the first time in fifty years and was given a hero's
welcome. The last issues of
Survey
were guest-edited by friends of Leo. At
the very time when the Soviet empire collapsed and almost everyone in
Moscow made it known that what the contributors to
Survey
had been
saying for decades had been correct, the publication ceased to appear.
For a long time, there had been rumors that the Congress for Cul–
tural Freedom was financed by the CIA or, to be precise, received a
considerable part of its budget from grants channeled by the CIA through
various American foundations to Josselson in Paris. It is my impression
that no more than three or four people knew the exact nature of the rela–
tionship between the CIA and the Congress. Like the rest, I did not
know, nor did I try very hard to find out. What is more, the amount of
financial support was very modest, and the publications' editors' salaries
were anything but princely. In fact, throughout its history, the Congress
had great difficulty finding and keeping first-rate editors at the salaries it
could pay. Peter Coleman's book states that the annual allocation for
Sur–
vey
in 1966 was $45,000. I would imagine that in the earlier years when I
was editor, it received little more than half that sum, but I did not pay
much attention to the financial aspects of
Survey's
operation.
At the height of the Cold War, gaining necessary financial support
seemed more important than the nature of its source. Similar allocations
were made by governments in every major (and many minor) countries,
but these nations were less open than the United States and affairs were
handled more discreetly. The sources of the Congress funds did not im–
pinge on the editorial freedom of its publications. For example, Mike
Josselson and a number of other leading figures opposed the Vietnam War
from the beginning. When the Congress played a significant role in the
destabilization of the Franco regime in Spain, it put out a journal called
Censorship,
which denounced political and cultural censorship worldwide.
From 1965 to 1967, with the shift of public opinion in America,
revelations about the CIA were made in various publications such as
The
New York Times, The Nation, Ramparts,
and
The New York Review of
Books.
The revelations caused much commotion, especially in Britain and
