17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

To a certain extent, then, the “AMSAC Afros” were doing the same thing African American leaders had always tended to do with white patronage—that is, apparently accepting it on one set of terms, then actually using it according to another, turning it to the limited advantage of their own race. They were, in other words, “putting on”—a skill that perhaps helps explain why they were so much better than other front groups at maintaining the appearance of unwittingness. Still, it is very much open to question whether the advantages to AMSAC of its covert contract with the CIA outweighed the disadvantages: the loss of organizational independence, the suspicion of many Africans, and the allegations of race betrayal from other African Americans after the secret had been revealed. “It’s a nasty deal and I don’t like it myself,” says college principal Dr. A. Herbert Bledsoe (a character clearly based on famous integrationist black leader Booker T. Washington, whose enormous personal success was largely derived from his ingenious courting of white patrons) in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. “But I didn’t make it and I know that I can’t change it. . . . After you win the game you take the prize and keep it and protect it: there’s nothing else to do.”127

T E N

Things Fall Apart

J O U R N A L I S T S

In 1977, a few years after breaking open the story of the Watergate cover-up with his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein interviewed retired columnist Joseph W. Alsop for a piece on the CIA and the American news media he was researching for Rolling Stone magazine. Although Alsop did not care much for the kind of adversarial investigative journalism Bernstein practiced—his relations with younger colleagues had soured during the Vietnam War, a cause he supported passionately long after most of the U.S. press corps had turned against it—he proved surprisingly expansive on the subject of his own dealings with the American intelligence community. Yes, he had performed certain “tasks”

for the Agency, such as a trip to Laos in 1952 at the request of Frank Wisner, who suspected that existing U.S. coverage of political unrest there was based on anti-American sources, and a visit the following year to the Philippines, whence he filed reports praising Edward Lansdale’s protégé Ramón Magsaysay. No, his actions were not the result of bribery or cajolery. “I never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement,”

he explained. “I didn’t have to.” Senior CIA officials such as Wisner and his successor as Deputy Director/Plans, Richard M. Bissell, Jr.—the

“Founding Fathers,” Alsop called them—“were close personal friends.” Indeed, he had known Bissell since childhood: the two had grown up near each other in Connecticut, and both attended Groton. “It was a social thing, my dear fellow,” Alsop told Bernstein, in his famously patrician drawl. Moreover, in a time of national emergency—a struggle to the death

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with communist totalitarianism—it was “the right thing to do, . . . my duty as a citizen.” True, attitudes might have changed since the 1950s, Alsop conceded, meaning that journalists now “would be outraged by the kinds of suggestions that were made to me.” Nevertheless, he was still proud to have been asked to cooperate with the CIA, “and proud to have done it. . . . The notion that a newspaperman doesn’t have a duty to his country is perfect balls.”1

Although the intimacy of his bonds with the Washington foreign policy establishment was unique, Alsop was by no means the only U.S.