Rethinking the Cultural Cold War

Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters is a widely discussed retrospective on post—Second World War liberalism that raises important questions about the relationships between intellectuals and political power. Obsessed with the hypocrisies of liberalism, its focus is neither the cold war nor U.S. foreign policy. Its focus is the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in promoting postwar anticommunist liberalism. Saunders argues that the world of arts and letters in the so-called “Western” zone of influence was something other than it seemed to its inhabitants. Although Western liberal writers, artists, and performers extolled the virtues of the open society, they were in fact serving as foot soldiers of American foreign policy, organized and covertly supported by the CIA. Most of Saunders’s attention is focused on the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a cosmopolitan network that organized many of the most important conferences and publications in the postwar period, whose CIA cover was blown only in 1967, in a series of explosive revelations.

Saunders’s book represents an updated version of the New Left revisionism about the cold war pioneered by such writers as Christopher Lasch, Gabriel Kolko, and Richard Barnet. But, written in the wake of the Gulf War, NATO ntervention in the Balkans, and the global triumph of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Nike, and “free market values,” it is not simply another historical account of the cold war but also an intervention in current political controversies. The book has been celebrated by many left writers, in reviews in the Nation, Monthly Review, and elsewhere, and disparaged by neoconservatives in The American Spectator and the National Interest. The debate about the book has been stark. On one side are those who embrace Saunders’s caustic account not simply of the CIA but of anticommunist liberalism in general; on the other are those who embrace anticommunism and celebrate its 1989 triumph as a vindication of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Discussions of the book have the flavor of broader historical debates about “which side were you on?” This is no surprise; Saunders’s intention was to promote just such a debate.