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among some sponsors elsewhere who felt that their trust had been be–
trayed.
The Saturday Evening Post
published a piece by Thomas Braden,
the senior CIA official responsible for the channeling of CIA funds . He
stated that he was far from ashamed of having contributed to the appear–
ance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Paris, the founding of
Encounter,
and other such ventures, declaring, "I am glad the CIA is im–
moral." (Among the many other recipients of CIA funds were various
student organizations, the American Friends of the Middle East, the
American Society for African Culture, the African-American Institute,
the Synod of Russian Bishops Abroad, and the International Commission
ofJurists.) By that time I was no longer associated with the Congress in
any way, but the defensive tenor seemed to me as idiotic as the accusa–
tions were hypocritical; what was immoral about
Encounter
or the Boston
Symphony Orchestra?
In a private letter to Shepard Stone (the President and Chief Execu–
tive of the Congress at the time), George Kennan put it very well:
The Congress is an institution of great value which should have a
permanent place, it seems to me, in the life of our Western world.
The flap about the CIA money was quite unwarranted and caused far
more anguish than it should have been permitted to cause. I never felt
the slightest pangs of conscience about it.... This country has no
ministry of culture and the CIA was obliged to do what it could to try
to fill the gap. It should be praised for having done so, and not criti–
cized. It is unfair that it should be so bitterly condemned for its
failures and then should get upbraided for when it does something
constructive and sensible. And the Congress would itself have been
remiss if it had failed to take money which came to it from good in–
tent and wholly without strings or conditions.
There is a stronger argument to be made: what had been permissible
and indeed inevitable in the 1950s, in view of the immediacy of the dan–
ger and the urgency of the needs, was no longer feasible ten years later.
While it is true that greater efforts might have and should have been
made to obtain funding from other sources, it is unlikely, given the
American system, that the U. S. Congress would have allocated funds to
foreign operations over which it had no control. Those on the far left
would have opposed it because of the anti-Communist orientation of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom. Others would have been reluctant to
fi–
nance liberals and social democrats with whose ideas they had no
sympathy. Above all, there was a general aversion to spending on cultural
diplomacy, an attitude that persists today. Public diplomacy was always
