41ibhvr8lql_aa240_.thumbnail.jpg

(Please welcome author Hugh Wilford in the comments -- jh)

Someone once remarked that the third world war would be fought between the communists and the ex-communists. That was before Google, so my memory of the speaker and exact words is lacking. In any case, world war is exactly what goes on in Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. What we hear described as “civil society” was penetrated, manipulated, and organized by the Central Intelligence Agency for the purpose of waging political, psychological, and guerrilla war against world communism. This apparatus was dubbed “the mighty Wurlitzer” by Office of Strategic Services (OSS) honcho Frank Wisner, because he could use it to play a symphony of propaganda. Activities ranged from setting up literary magazines to training in sabotage and other mayhem. In this crusade, the OSS and its successor the Central Intelligence Agency recruited a pantheon of radical personalities.

History is not my regular job, but an invitation from the bewitching Jane to host a book salon here at Firedoglake is hard to refuse. For those steeped in the intellectual politics of that period, there is some old material, reinforced by the methods of historical scholarship, and for those not so familiar, there are plenty of surprises. I thought I was pretty well informed, but I learned some new things. Surprising or not, the author’s packaging of a lot of disparate material is useful.

Ramparts magazine, under the editorship of David Horowitz, exposes the manipulation of the U.S. National Student Association by the Central Intelligence Agency. The author regards it as a blow to U.S. national security and takes it to be the end of an era. (At the time I thought it was great. Now Horowitz has become a fervent, conservative Republican, and I work for the Federal government.)

The era began with George F. Kennan, who is often regarded as author of the pacific “containment” strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union, in contrast to those more inclined to the use of force. This caricature glosses over Kennan’s role in lighting a fire under U.S. foreign policy, urging a comprehensive, aggressive, and offensive campaign against world communism.

According to Wilford, it is Kennan who jump-starts U.S. initiative in the Cold War. Revisionist historians on the left could properly accuse him of helping to launch that war. Covert manipulation of intellectual affairs, intervention in the elections of sovereign nations, and sponsorship of what the targets would call terrorist activities, does not sit so well with Kennan’s liberal reputation. Of course, the Soviets were engaged in the very same endeavors, in the form of the Cominform, successor to the pre-war Communist International (‘Comintern’).

In this vein, we could consider that liberalism has gotten a bad rap from the militant conservatives. While the early 1950s Republicans were mired in isolationism and narrow nationalism, the Democratic Party liberals were taking the fight to the USSR. It was liberalism that promoted and manned the forward offensive posture. And Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, hero to some on the right, launched attacks on the very figures and institutions – the CIA, Secretary of State George Marshall – that were leading the U.S. side in the Cold War.

Who would be best suited in waging the war? Well it would be those who knew the communists best – ex-communists. One leading figure was Jay Lovestone, once leader of the U.S. Communist Party. Another was the academic and Marxist scholar Sidney Hook. Still another was William Phillips, former Trotskyist and editor of Partisan Review.

There would also be a role for non-communist socialists and liberals. They were better situated to persuade those hovering between the orbits of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Gloria Steinem, later a founder of modern feminism, was on the CIA payroll. Another was the historian Arthur Schlesinger, who worked in wartime intelligence and later helped found the Americans for Democratic Action. Other luminaries who appear are Allard Lowenstein, Victor Reuther, Norman Thomas, and Bayard Rustin.

Lovestone, born Jacob Liebstein, had ascended to leadership of the Communist Party-USA by the end of the 1920s. Failure to follow the dictates of Stalin nearly resulted in his liquidation. After unsuccessful attempts to set up a rival communist party, his politics shifted, he worked his way into the leadership of the AFL, and he devoted himself to driving radical influences out of the labor movement. Hook and Phillips followed similar paths in, respectively, academia and the literary world, though neither was in any position to purge anyone.

The international dimension of this campaign led to Lovestone’s collaboration with the budding U.S. intelligence community. In the wake of World War II, communists dominated labor movements and politics in France, Italy, and Greece, among other places. They had serious opportunities to gain political power without resort to armed takeover. The U.S. government was ill disposed to surrender Western Europe, after winning it from Hitler.

The wartime Office of Strategic Services and related agencies were run by Waspy, patrician Eastern-establishment types. They were in no position to insert themselves directly into labor affairs. They needed Lovestone, and he needed their financial support. Their views often did not coincide. Lovestone regarded his handlers as fools, dilettantes, and incompetents.

In the European intellectual world, the war had helped to cement the standing of those who had opposed fascism before it was cool, in other words to those sympathetic to Bolshevism. There was gratitude towards the U.S.S.R. for siding (eventually) with the Allies against Hitler. The crimes of Stalin had not yet attained the same visibility as the Nazi holocaust, a situation that Sidney Hook sought to remedy. He had written authoritative books on Marxism and could appeal to the dominant social-democratic sentiment. The discredited royalists and the right, like the America Firsters in the U.S., had been soft on Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.

Hook and others organized academic conferences and sponsored émigrés to nourish a space for anti-communist, liberal thought and scholarship. This included financing magazines such as Encounter and the Partisan Review. As a college student majoring in English, I positively devoured PR. It was the perfect combination of radical politics and modernist art. The magazine actually headquartered at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where I was a student. Its editors included Richard Poirer, one of my professors, and Thomas R. Edwards, my departmental adviser.

PR typified a little-appreciated contribution of the Wurlitzer: the finance and promotion of modernist, bohemian, avant-garde literature and art (though not so much in music). Anything other than the hoary socialist realism was evidently indigestible to Soviet culture. The content of this art was often radical and critical of capitalism, but it could also be anarchic, nihilistic, mystical, or anti-rationalist: a wonderful playground for imaginative young minds.

I met Phillips once too. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia had set the campus activism ablaze. The English Department had a faculty meeting to discuss the situation. As one of their pet pupils, I was included. Phillips was a savvy political counselor, guiding the clueless professors towards a properly sympathetic posture.

The OSS and CIA were themselves salted with literary types and art patrons. CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton wrote poetry and Cord Meyer wrote short stories. A British, Angleton-like figure can be seen in The Good Shepherd. Nelson Rockefeller, who did psy-war during World War II, was a great patron of modern art, but not just any modern art. He commissioned the communist painter Diego Rivera to create a mural for Rockefeller Center, then realized his error when the mural included a depiction of Lenin and a Mayday parade. The mural was destroyed.

The fruitful collaboration of patrician intelligence chiefs, labor activists, non-communist socialists, and liberals was disrupted by the fulminations of Senator Joseph McCarthy, as noted above. Of course, McCarthy’s crusade was cut short in what is usually seen as the triumph of liberal values. And so it was, but not exactly in the popular sense.

An important theme in Wilford’s history goes to who was running whom. The tools of the Mighty Wurlitzer were intellectuals and activists – cultural and political leaders in their own right. They had interests, concerns, and strategic views not necessarily synonymous with those of their paymasters. Or did they. How much independence, if any, was exercised, and which ends were best served?

The whole story raises other interesting questions in the areas of political morality and history. Such as: Would it have been better for the U.S. to openly sponsor cultural activities, as it often does today?Would the reputations and impacts of CIA-supported intellectuals have fared better without covert backing?Was it, is it defensible to interfere with democratic elections in other countries?Of all the keyboardists on the mighty Wurlitzer, who were the players and who got played?Did the operation of the Wurlitzer effectively restrain Soviet power and enhance U.S. national security?Are similar operations undertaken today? By whom, to what end, and for good purpose?

All in all, The Mighty Wurlitzer is great fun as a guided tour of the underbelly of postwar U.S. politics and culture.

Some useful reviews of TMW are by Mike Kazin and Nathan Glazer.

Max B. Sawicky is an economist with the Federal Government. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of his employer or colleagues.