The CIA and the (Jewish) Liberals: Some Fresh Perspectives

Paul Buhle

Paul Buhle's largely Jewish memory book, Images of American Radicalism (Christopher), recently appeared in paperback. He teaches radical history at Brown University.

Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Seymour M. Lipset: the core of Jewish neo-conservative pioneers. What do they have in common with liberal Cold Warriors like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Arthur Koestler, Leslie Fiedler, Isaiah Berlin, Dwight Macdonald, Elliot Cohen of Commentary, Sol Levitan of the New Leader, and William Phillips of the Partisan Review? These notables, along with a circle of professors and literary critics, offered a public face for the CIA through the CIA's own pet intellectual creations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, 1950-1967) and the more short-lived American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF, 1950-1957).

The story of this cooperation between the Cold War liberals and the CIA hasn't been a secret since Ramparts magazine published the then-scandalous revelation in 1967, followed by an in-depth essay by Christopher Lasch in the New York Review of Books. But somehow the message has been lost or forgotten until now, with recent further Freedom of Information Act discoveries, capped by British author Frances Stonor Saunders' controversial volume, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The revelations in 1967 certainly did nothing to stop the CIA's covert activities on the culture front. The CCF and its lavish international conferences had another decade to run, and the publication of hundreds of CIA-funded or CIA staff-written scholarly volumes on many political subjects (with their financial sources carefully hidden) had scarcely begun.

More striking, however, is the extent to which the CIA's backing of Cold War liberals has been forgotten in accounts of the demise of the Left as an important force in late-twentieth-century American politics. To this day, intellectuals assert that the bright and brimming promise of American liberalism was lost because leaders of the New Left were too stubborn or irrational to place themselves on the side of the labor movement and the liberal Cold Warriors. Driven away by the anti-Americanism of the New Left, the anti-Semitism of Black Power, and the cultural unruliness of the emerging culture, Cold War liberals claim they had no choice but to leave their historic home on the Left and become the neo-conservatives they are today.

Yet the evidence of these liberals' involvement in CIA activity suggests they had already left the Left. So set had they become through a combination of personal career advancement, knee-jerk anti-communism, and post-socialist assumptions that not even the most polite movement could have kept them aboard the foundering liberal ship. Just look at the money trail. According to Saunders, the Cold War hard-line but social-democratic New Leader was pulled back from collapse in the early 1950s by an injection of $10,000 from CIA subsidiaries and regular further advances from friendly sources. In 1965, the quarterly Public Interest (co-edited by Bell and Kristol) entered the fray considerably rightward, with $10,000 from the same sources. The line had already changed while the New Left was still in babyhood.

A New Generation

The issue was not just the money, however. The great appeal of the Congress for Cultural Freedom at the time was probably the celebrity and personal connections it fostered more than anything else, a chance for a new generation to make its mark. McCarthyism had destroyed Popular Front intellectuals more thoroughly than their own disillusionment with Russian Communism had, including the majority who'd jumped the Communist Party ship but refused to testify against their friends and their own past liberal-left involvements. Some of the formerly highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, prestigious actors, playwrights, cultural impresarios, and novelists were finished, along with the political vision of a Democratic Party big enough for the New Deal and the Popular Front. …