Thus far, Schlesinger, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Age of Jackson, had received laudatory reviews throughout his short career. Now matters became more uneven, as the two contrasting reviews in the New York Times demonstrate. Certainly Schlesinger continued to have his fans, including Charles Poore in the weekday Times, who wrote that The Vital Center was “the best guide to our prospects for civilized survival we have seen in a long time.” In particular, Poore admired the “wonderful battery of ubiquitous artillery” that Schlesinger deployed as he “blows the Communists and their diminishing flotillas of fellow-travelers out of the water with deadly aim” and “blasts the medieval-minded Colonel Blimps of reaction.” On the other hand, Gerald W. Johnson, whose 1927 book on President Jackson had been effectively trashed by Schlesinger in his own more successful book, was withering in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Johnson made little attempt to hide his view that Schlesinger was jejune and an intellectual snob. “One suspects that he has associated too exclusively with the intellectuals,” Johnson chided, adding that he should have spent more time observing real politics. “The politician knows the common herd,” Johnson concluded damningly, “and the election of 1948 raised at least a suspicion that the common herd is miles ahead of the intellectuals in its grasp of the realities of the situation.” What both men agreed on, however, was Schlesinger’s ability as a stylist. For Poore, The Vital Center was “exuberant, witty and remorselessly penetrating.” And even Johnson admitted that the book had an “energy, boldness and certainly . . . a good deal more wit than is to be found in most of its tribe.”
Most reviewers concurred on the stylistic verve of the book and took a middle course on the content. “He offers few novel thoughts,” summed up the writer Irwin Ross for Commentary. “His success, rather, lies in the precision, vitality, and emotional power of his restatement of commonly accepted views. He has seldom written better prose—a lean and pliant style, edged with wit and paradox, equally capable of flashing satire and fine sonorities of exhortation.”32
Reasonably well reviewed and a modest bestseller in 1949, The Vital Center would turn out to be among Schlesinger’s most enduring works, with new editions published in 1962, when he was a member of the Kennedy administration, and in 1998, after the original had been extolled by both President Clinton and Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. (The Speaker in 1996 had quoted the line that “The conservative must not identify a particular status quo with the survival of civilization, and the radical equally must recognize that his protests are likely to be as much the expressions of his own self-interest as they are of some infallible dogma”—a plea for humility, Schlesinger drily noted, “that neither Gingrich nor I have always observed.”) Looking back, the New York Times would conclude that it was with The Vital Center that Schlesinger “solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism.”33
CHAPTER EIGHT
EGGHEAD
In June 1950, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. traveled from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to West Berlin to take up his place among the world’s leading anti-Communist thinkers. Around two hundred delegates, including illustrious names such as novelist Arthur Koestler, philosopher A. J. Ayer, and playwright Tennessee Williams, landed in West Germany for a gathering of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—an event supported by the US Military Government in Berlin and, covertly, the CIA. Gathered here, Schlesinger wrote to his former boss Averell Harriman, now special assistant to the president, were “potentially the richest intellectual resources” in the West.1
Schlesinger made the trip with Sidney Hook, the violently anti-Communist convert from Marxism. He later recalled how excited Hook was by the danger and drama of the situation. The divided former German capital had only recently come through the first major crisis of the Cold War, the Berlin airlift, so the sense of journeying to the front seemed very real. “He had this fantasy about Communist attacks from all sides,” Schlesinger recalled. “He was quite excited about it all. I think many of the [delegates] were. They thought they were going to be where the action was—especially those who hadn’t been in the war.”2
No sooner had Schlesinger and his fellow delegates arrived than a new Cold War crisis reinforced their belief in the urgency of their task. As everyone gathered at the Titania Palace on June 26, 1950, news spread that Communist forces in Korea had crossed the 38th parallel into the US-controlled South of the country—beginning what would become the Korean War. With the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra present in the hall to provide the suitably tragic-heroic soundtrack of Beethoven’s Egmont overture, delegates marched in together before standing for a moment of profound silence to remember those who had died fighting for freedom.3
Over the next four days, debates raged about a strategy for the non-Communist Left in democratic politics. The hardliner James Burnham, author of The Managerial Revolution and, like Hook, another Marxist turned vehement anti-Communist, led the way with his theory of “good” atomic bombs that could destroy all major Soviet cities in a day. Along with Hook, Burnham condemned any descent into moral equivalence, attacking Jean-Paul Sartre and his followers, who “were quite aware of French and American injustices to Negroes when they supported the Resistance to Hitler, but they can see no justice in the western defense against Communist aggression because the Negroes have not yet won equality of treatment.” Hook would remember the event as “the most exciting conference I have ever attended, before or since.” Others were more skeptical. They found the tone of the language, exemplified by Arthur Koestler’s evocation of scripture to “Let your yea be yea, and your nay, nay,” too simplistic and Manichean. “I felt, well, what sort of people are we identifying ourselves with?” the British historian Hugh Trevor Roper recalled after hearing Koestler speak. “That was the greatest shock to me. There was a moment during the Congress when I felt that we were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Satan.”
Within this combustible atmosphere, Schlesinger underperformed. In fact, Koestler’s call to intellectual arms had to some degree been a reaction to Schlesinger’s own poor speech. “Schlesinger was there, and he made a dry-as-dust, unemotional statement,” the CIA’s representative, Lawrence de Neufville, reported. “After that we had Koestler who spoke from the heart, and he moved many people. It was a crusade—Koestler had changed the tone.”4
Schlesinger’s subdued performance reflected his failings as public speaker. He rarely extemporized, almost always reading from a prepared text. A forceful and colorful writer, in person his lack of both physical presence and a larger-than-life stage personality meant he was rarely a charismatic force other than in the university lecture hall. “I found his lectures anything but dull,” Harvard undergraduate at the time Harold Burstyn recalls, “but there’s a substantial difference between public speeches and classroom lectures. I suspect that his ironic tone and lack of fireworks would have affected the response to his public presentations.” Superb if deploying the critic’s scorn, Schlesinger struggled to convey the sincerity required of a politician. More often than not he stuck to writing speeches while leaving others to deliver them.5
On the substance of the conference, however, Schlesinger returned to America convinced that the meeting had been the beginning of something important. “The Berlin Conference was very useful, I think,” he told Harriman, “and, properly developed could become [invaluable] in combating the Communist ‘peace’ drive in Europe and in fighting neutralism in general.”6
Schlesinger had spent much of the conference in the company of his friend Nicolas Nabokov, the minor composer and cousin of the more famous Vladimir. The two had met in Washington in 1946 at Joseph Alsop’s stag dinner and immediately hit it off. “He overflowed with vitality,” Schlesinger remembered, “was a notable raconteur in half a dozen languages, also a notable mimic, and had, what was rare in an artist, a penetrating and ironical political intelligence.” In Berlin, the two men went exploring together and sought out those who, like Nabokov afte
r the revolution, had managed to flee the Soviet Union. “According to these Russian escapees, Schlesinger recorded, “Soviet indoctrination has been sufficiently successful to give the Russian people as a whole a profound conviction that any American initiative is ultimately a mask for American expansion.” Schlesinger dismissed this notion as nonsense. Nabokov in contrast recognized that the very exercise they themselves were engaged in was something of an exercise in American cultural expansion, commenting to A. J. Ayer that they were being gently “manipulated” by the “occult forces” of the Americans paying for the conference. As it turned out, this fact was one that Nabokov was happy to exploit. In Berlin that summer, the Soviet exile delivered one of the most aggressive speeches of the conference. “Out of this Congress we should build our first fighting organization,” he declared. “If we do not, we will sooner or later be hanged. The hour has long struck Twelve.” It was a pitch to lead the movement.7
A series of exposé articles in the New York Times in the late 1960s revealed that the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Subsequent release of documents and research by historians, notably Frances Stonor Saunders, demonstrated not only that the intelligence service funded CCF, but that it was in fact a CIA front organization, led by a CIA agent, Michael Josselson. “At its peak,” Saunders writes, “the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’ ” The way in which the CIA achieved this end was by recruiting a “consortium” of American artists and public intellectuals who would, knowingly or not, work alongside the CIA “to promote an idea: that the world needed a pax Americana, a new age of enlightenment, and it would be called The American Century.” Appropriately enough, Henry Luce, the originator of the phrase “American Century,” helped establish the most famous beneficiary of the CIA’s cultural largesse. In March 1949, Alfred Barr, founding director of MoMa, which had strong links to the CIA, wrote to Luce encouraging him to promote Abstract Expressionism as representative of American “artistic free enterprise.” The August edition of Life then featured an extravagant article on Jackson Pollock, with photographs of him at work by Arnold Newman. “It made Pollock famous,” Louis Menand says, “the ‘action painter,’ the very type of the modern American culture hero.”8
The CIA revelations embarrassed Schlesinger and other prominent CCF members. For many observers, the question became a simple, perhaps simplistic, binary: were you a CIA dupe or a CIA stooge? “It [is] very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened,’’ gloated Norman Birnbaum, a Georgetown lawyer and founding editorial board member of New Left Review, pointing out that the revelations “placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations.”9
Some reacted by blaming the system. Nabokov (who died in 1978 before Saunders’s revelations), complained after the original New York Times exposé, “Had the American government then [1950] had the courage and foresight to establish a worldwide fund . . . to subsidize legally and overtly—as did the Marshall Plan in the domain of economic reconstruction—the indispensable anti-Stalinist, anti-Communist, and, in general, anti-totalitarian cultural activities of the Cold War, the whole ugly mess of 1966 or 1967 would not have taken place. Many reputations would have been spared [and the Cold War] fought out, at least in the world of the intellect and culture, openly and frankly.”10
That seems like cant on the part of Nabokov, who knowingly was on the CIA payroll as CCF general secretary. Others, such as the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, had greater justification in making a similar argument. Berlin had known vaguely that CCF was getting some kind of US government money. “He knew about our involvement,” the CIA’s Lawrence de Neufville later said, “I don’t know who told him, but I imagine it was one of his friends in Washington.” Berlin, as a Russian emigre, had no embarrassment about being called a Cold War intellectual or even taking American money. “I did not in the slightest object to American sources supplying money—I was (and am) pro-American and anti-Soviet, and if the source had been declared I would not have minded in the least,” he explained. What bothered Berlin, however, was that publications such as Encounter that claimed to be independent, “over and over again, turned out to be in the pay of American secret intelligence.”11
Schlesinger was less agitated than his friend Berlin. As a former OSS officer, he well understood the nature of cultural propaganda, had routinely been kept on the CIA’s books as a consultant after the war, and would have been naïve given his wartime service not to have seen a connection between the agency and CCF. Certainly when he had concerns about the political direction of the CCF branch in the United States, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, he turned immediately to his CIA contacts, presumably on the grounds that they were in a position to act. In 1952, for example, he wrote a long memo with enclosures to his wartime OSS friend Frank Wisner, appointed that year as head of the CIA Directorate of Plans. The memo presented “a rather alarming picture,” wrote Wisner, who immediately ordered an investigation. Schlesinger still claimed later that while he had been aware of the CIA’s initial investment in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the full extent of its involvement surprised him. “[I] assumed the foundations were paying,” he maintained. “Like everyone else, I thought they were bona fide . . . I didn’t know it was the CIA paying for it all.”
The extent to which Schlesinger did or did not know about CIA involvement, however, had no impact on his essential view about the episode. When cooperating with Saunders on her book, he made a forceful defense that agency involvement could only have led to corruption “if people were persuaded to do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. And that simply wasn’t the case.” He himself had quickly become disillusioned with the organization for political reasons, but not because he was concerned about CIA activity. “I still do not see how people who used the Congress to press views they honestly held could be corrupted by the fact, unknown to them, that the Congress was financed by the CIA,” he wrote in 1997. “The Congress was not involved in covert action in that sense [regime change]. It was doing no more than providing means of expression to people who felt that Stalinism was a bad thing. Was that so terrible? Suppose it had been Nazism?”12
The reason for Schlesinger’s memo to Wisner, and for his broader unease with the CCF project, was a growing alarm about the political witch hunt popularly known as McCarthyism. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was established in 1938 to look out for Fascist sympathizers, but once committee hearings got going, its focus quickly moved to left-wing radicals, which, it charged, had penetrated the US government. Schlesinger sympathized with that view. His tough experience inside OSS during the war, not least the confrontation with a named Soviet spy, Maurice Halperin, left him with a profound belief that the security of the state had been compromised.
When HUAC investigated Hollywood after the war, Schlesinger was quick to condemn the “imbecility” of the hearings, writing loftily in the New York Times Magazine that “the private political views of a Hollywood writer . . . hardly seem to be the proper consideration of the United States Government or a committee of Congress.” But when it came to HUAC’s most famous case of Soviet penetration, Schlesinger showed his true colors, and they weren’t red.
In 1946, when he was living in Washington, DC, and researching a Life article about the American Communist Party, Schlesinger had interviewed the brilliant, brooding Time editor and writer, Whittaker Chambers. During that interview, Chambers confirmed Schlesinger’s belief that Soviet penetration of the US government was extensive, and he named the State Department official Alger Hiss as an example. U
nable to use the libelous information in the article, Schlesinger told Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and asked him to pass it along to his contacts in the State Department. Graham told Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, who in turn told Secretary of State James F. Byrnes. Hiss, when confronted, denied everything, but was not given his accuser’s name.13
How Hiss found out that Chambers was that accuser also came about inadvertently through Schlesinger and his researcher, Barbara Kerr, a colleague from his Office of War Information days. At a drunken New Year’s Day celebration in 1948, Kerr got into a fierce row with Dean Acheson’s former assistant, Edward Miller, about Truman’s “Loyalty Order” introduced the previous year. Kerr said these tests were a waste of time, because Communists such as Alger Hiss continued working for the government. Miller angrily accused her of lies and malicious slander. Nonsense, she replied, telling him that she had heard Whittaker Chambers name Hiss. Miller stormed out, telling Kerr that he would be informing Hiss and advising him to sue. Afterwards, another Acheson assistant who had been present at the dinner, John Ferguson, asked Kerr why she had been so certain. She showed him the transcript of Schlesinger’s 1946 interview. In August that year, Chambers would name Hiss in an executive session of the House Un-American Activities Committee. When Dean Acheson was asked by Hiss’s lawyer, William L. Marbury, how his client’s name had come into the public domain, he replied, “Everyone knew the name of Chambers. Arthur Schlesinger was mentioning it at every cocktail party in Washington.”14
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