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 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.


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 Wall Street Journal
A real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period.


The New York Times
[T]he most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA's] activities between 1947 and 1967.


Lewis Lapham, Los Angeles Times Book Review
[Saunders] writes with a sense of humor and an appreciation of the historical circumstances...


Washington Post Book World
Consistently fascinating.


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 Chronicle of Higher Education
[A] tale of intrigue and betrayal, with scene after scene as thrilling as any in a John Le Carré novel.


San Francisco Chronicle
Saunders...is very good on the ethical and political ironies of the CIA's cultural projects.


Kirkus Reviews
[I]mpressively detailed.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 book that draws 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 became instruments of the American government. The CIA's front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its money also organized conferences, founded magazines, ran congresses, mounted exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the world." "Many of the period's foremost intellectuals and artists appear in the book: Isaiah Berlin, Clement Greenberg, Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, Irving Kristol, Robert Lowell, Henry Luce, Andre Malraux, Mary McCarthy, Reinhold Neibuhr, George Orwell, Jackson Pollock, 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times

[T]he most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA's] activities between 1947 and 1967.

Wall Street Journal

A real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period.

Chronicle of Higher Education

[A] tale of intrigue and betrayal, with scene after scene as thrilling as any in a John Le Carré novel.

San Francisco Chronicle

Saunders...is very good on the ethical and political ironies of the CIA's cultural projects.

Washington Post Book World