[endsecrecy] CIA and the Art World
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From: Remy C. <endse...@hotmail.com>
To: endsecrecy list <endse...@egroups.com>
Subject: [endsecrecy] CIA and the Art World
Date: Wednesday, May 03, 2000 1:48 PM
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
by Frances Stonor Saunders
Frances Stonor Saunders has worked as an independent film producer on such
documentaries as the four-hour Hidden Hands: A Different History of
Modernism. Her short story, "Big Things," was published in New Writing. She
lives in London.
Hardcover - 528 pages (April 2000)
New Press; ISBN: 156584596X
List Price: $29.95
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
It is well known that the CIA funded right-wing intellectuals after World
War II; fewer know that it also courted individuals from the center and the
left in an effort to turn the intelligentsia away from communism and toward
an acceptance of "the American way." Frances Stonor Saunders sifts through
the history of the covert Congress for Cultural Freedom in The Cultural Cold
War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The book centers on the
career of Michael Josselson, the principal intellectual figure in the
operation, and his eventual betrayal by people who scapegoated him. Sanders
demonstrates that, in the early days, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
and the emergent CIA were less dominated by the far right than they later
became, and that the idea of helping out progressive moderates--rather than
being Machiavellian--actually appealed to the men at the top.
Many intellectuals were still drawn to Stalin's Russia. Saunders superbly
traces the crisis of conscience that McCarthyism and its associated
book-burning caused, and the subsequent rise of more moderate ideals. This
exhaustive account, despite neglecting some important side issues, is an
essential book. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
The New York Times Book Review, Josef Joffe
...her cultural history is entertaining, even witty.... She has spent years
wading through the files and interviewing both protagonists and critics.
The Times [London]
Saunders is right. This really is a crucial story, about the dangerous,
compromising energies and manipulation of an entire and very recent age.
The Independent on Sunday
Painstakingly researched...and jauntily written, alive to the ironies of a
campaign for cultural freedom whose boundaries were circumscribed by its
shady sponsors.
>From Kirkus Reviews
An impressively detailed, eye-opening study by film producer Saunders of the
CIAs clandestine sponsorship of artists and intellectuals during the Cold
War. Using interviews and archival data (taken mostly from sources outside
the CIA, who routinely ignored her requests under the Freedom of Information
Act), Saunders pieces together an elaborate network of CIA money-laundering
schemes that funded cultural organizations opposed to communism. Starting
with black accounts siphoned off from the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s,
Saunders details how the CIA created or used nonprofit organizations such as
the Ford Foundation to funnel millions of dollars to institutions like the
Congress for Cultural Freedom and its affiliated programs. While few will be
shocked that conservatives like Irving Kristol participated in CIA-backed
projects, laymen will be surprised at how the Boston Symphony Orchestra and
various abstract expressionist painters (via the Museum of Modern Art under
Nelson Rockefeller, its president and an adviser to Eisenhower) benefitted
from this largesse. At times the high volume of data and personalities
muddies the story, and one would expect more cloak-and-dagger spy stories in
such an exhaustive study, but thankfully Saunders does address the crucial
issue her subject raisesnamely, the consequences of intellectuals accepting
money (consciously or unconsciously) from political sources. She pays
considerable attention to old controversies, such as (CIA-backed) Encounters
refusal to publish an article by its former editor Dwight Macdonald, and
Conor Cruise OBriens attack on the same journal for its disavowed but
evident American boosterism. She can also make the CIA appear enlightened,
as when she describes how the Ivy Leaguers of the Agency supported leftist
artists over the objections of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the end, however,
Saunders has little tolerance for state-sponsored thinkers. She concludes
that when, in the late 1960s, the artists and writers involved in CIA
projects began denying rumors of their patrons background, they were (in
words taken from an interview) crummy liars. An illuminating investigation
that will surprise general readers and aid scholars and students.--
Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The Literary Review
A marvelously readable account of how the free world's thirty-year-long
cultural Cold War against Communism was both materially strengthened and
morally weakened by the practical necessity for it to be funded covertly by
the CIA....There is a gem on almost every page.
Observer
An absorbing, distressing and, at times, uproariously funny history of this
war of delusionary images, a battle for hearts and minds which was conducted
by mobilising culture.
The Scotsman
Were the events in Saunders's book not true it would take a comic genius of
Evelyn Waugh's caliber to have invented them.
Book Description
The "rivetingly told" (Times Literary Supplement) story of the CIA's Cold
War cultural operations, short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. In
The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders presents for the first time
the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural
sphere during the postwar years. In a "hammer-blow of a book" (The
Spectator, London) drawing together recently declassified documents and
exclusive interviews, the author narrates the extraordinary story of a
secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual
freedom in the West were instruments of America's secret service. The CIA's
front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its
money organized conferences, founded magazines, ran congresses, mounted
exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the
world. Many of the period's foremost intellectuals, artists, and
philanthropists appear in the book: Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Sidney
Hook, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Robert Lowell, Henry Luce, Andr
Malraux, Mary McCarthy, Reinhold Neibuhr, George Orwell, Jackson Pollock,
Nelson Rockefeller, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., and Stephen Spender, among others. While many were unwitting
participants in the CIA's cultural operation, others were willing
collaborators. In this expose of covert patronage unprecedented in modern
history, recently short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Saunders
has created "a crucial story" (The Times, London) that is "quite
unputdownable" (Literary Review).
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