The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 29, 1989 by Ronald Radosh

Writing in The Nation in 1967,

Christopher Lasch presented

what became the generally accepted judgment on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. According to Lasch, the Congress published works that served "as rationalizations of American world power," held meetings that preached "the immorality of neutralism," and worked with liberals whose views were " indistinguishable from those of the Right." The American branch of the Congress was, Lasch wrote, "a coalition of liberals and reactionaries who shared a conspiratorial view of Communism." These intellectuals may have believed in "cultural freedom," but, like their Soviet counterparts, they were not free men. Indeed, the American intellectuals were almost pathetic, since they thought they were acting and thinking independently, while in reality they were "servants . . . of the secret police." Having once served the Communists, they now served the CIA. In both cases, they served a lie.

Given the wide acceptance of Lasch's interpretation, it is about time someone came along to look at the real history and meaning of the Congress, removed from the frenzy of the 1960s. This job has been undertaken (adequately, if sometimes a bit tediously) by Peter Coleman, editor of the Australian journal Quadrant, one of the periodicals created by the Congress. [See Mr. Coleman's "The Brief Life of Liberal Anti-Communism," NR, Sept. 15.]

The Congress was founded early in the cold war, at a moment when the Soviets had the field to themselves in the world propaganda battle. As Cole-

man shows, the Congress achieved some major victories. Through the journals it funded, the conferences it convened, and the international protests it organized, it kept "the issues of Soviet totalitarianism and liberal anti-Communism to the fore in a frequently hostile environment." By the end of the 1950s, as a result of its work alone, "the propaganda of the

Soviet Union and its fellow-travelers was no longer credible."

Rather than being reactionaries or even conservatives, the Congress intellectuals were by and large liberals, social democrats, and even democratic socialists. Indeed, the very premise of U.S. support for the work of the Congress was that supporting "the non-Communist Left" would be the most effective response to the appeal of the totalitarian (pro-Soviet) Left in Europe. It was for this reason that many followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy distrusted the Congress and saw it as a hotbed of radicalism.

The Congress went through three phases: from 1950 to 1958, when conferences and rallies were held to mount an offensive against the Communists and their allies; from 1958 to 1964, when the Congress helped create a community of Atlanticist, pro- NATO intellectuals, even reaching out toward dissidents within the Soviet Union and its satellites; and from 1964 until 1968, when the Congress floundered, as Vietnam disrupted unity within the American liberal community, and the revelations of CIA funding permanently harmed the image and effectiveness of the Congress.

Throughout the book one relishes the words and actions of that brave

and noble group of postwar intellectuals, including such luminaries as Franz Borkenau, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Nicolas Nabokov, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Sol Levitas, Bertrand Russell, Boris Souvarine, Anton Ciliga, Richard Lowenthal, Manes Sperber, and Ignazio Silone, and including also the Congress's remarkable organizer (and later CIA agent within the Congress) Michael Josselson. It was these people, George Kennan wrote, "who have done more to hold our world together" than any other group. But, as he all too accurately predicted to Nabokov, "few [in the United States] will ever understand the dimensions and the significance of your accom- plishments."

Even in its heyday, Coleman shows, it was not all wine and roses for the Congress. Nicolas Nabokov favored building an organization "for war

. .with a view to action." Sidney Hook argued that with "a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people," he would be able to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses . . . of Stalin's own empire, that all [his] problems . . . will be internal." But others in the Congress favored a more subdued stance, fearing that undue militancy among American supporters would undermine the appeal of the Congress to left-leaning European intellectuals. H. R. Trevor-Roper strenuously objected to the Congress's stand against neutralism, which he said amounted to an illiberal ban on Western European Communist parties. Arthur Koestler's strong leadership was condemned by Altiero Spinelli, who argued that ex-Communists showed the same kind of "Communist intolerance" that would "reduce us all to rubble."

Later, some leading Congress figures began to drift toward neutralism themselves. Bertrand Russell, in particular, threatened several times to resign from membership and was perhaps the first European intellectual to sound the theme that America and the USSR were moral equivalents. What upset Russell, Trevor- Roper, and others was the fraudulent charge that the American Committee for Cultural Freedom was McCarthyist, a charge based largely on the refusal of the Americans to support clemency for the Rosenbergs, whom