200
PARTISAN REVIEW
the stepchild of American policy makers, deemed at best a luxury which
America could ill afford. Could the large foundations have stepped in?
Attempts to court them in the late 1950s were unsuccessful. Furthermore,
it is likely that under the tutelage of private foundations, the Congress's
seminars and publications would have had less freedom than under the
CIA. Such are the ironies of history. That there was such freedom seems
difficult for many to accept. A recent essay by Margery Sabin, "The Poli–
tics of Cultural Freedom: India in the 1950s"
(Raritan,
Spring 1995),
contends that "intellectuals from America such as Hannah Arendt, Ed–
ward Shils, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Bell, John Galbraith and others,
took for granted the benign character of whoever they thought was sub–
sidizing their travel to Milan and did not welcome having their
discussions of principles disrupted by low-minded charges that Western
freedom concretely meant submitting to American power for dollars."
With the CIA revelations, the campaign of attacks that had plagued
the Congress from its beginnings reached a crescendo. In a
Nation
article,
"Literary Bay of Pigs," Alexander Werth derided the journals that had
"done their best to keep the Cold War going." Conor Cruise O'Brien,
Jason Epstein, Christopher Lasch, and countless lesser lights denounced
the deep moral corruption of the anti-Communist liberal intellectuals, es–
pecially the ex-Communists among them. The issue was no longer what
the subsidies had been used for, let alone who had been right in the
ideological debate; by secretly accepting government money, the Con–
gress had automatically disqualified itself. It was no longer necessary to
discuss seriously the political issues involved, because any cause supported
by the American government was
a priori
reprehensible. As Alexander
Werth put it, "that there was something fishy about
Encounter
should have
been clear to any person of minimum intelligence." Others were equally
scathing. Theodore Draper was denounced because he had dared to sug–
gest that Castro was not a democrat but belonged to the Soviet orbit. As
for the lack of cultural (and other) freedom in the Soviet empire, all kinds
of mitigating circumstances were advanced. The anti-anti-Communists
had regained the high moral ground.
I missed most of these articles when they first appeared, and reading
them today, they are strange and embarrassing. How sure the authors
were of their cause, how triumphant, how mordant, and how mistaken
from a perspective of thirty years later. In each period of history, there are
tests according to which individuals and groups are judged. Anti-fascism
was one, anti-Stalinism another. There was, of course, much more to the
Congress for Cultural Freedom than Communism and anti-Communism,
but this was the issue which annoyed its critics the most. It seems not to
have occurred to them that one day the Soviet archives would be opened
