Even allowing for such fallings out, the basic mood of CIA-press relations during the 1950s and early 1960s—the so-called Golden Age of covert operations—was one of harmony. The pervasiveness of the Cold War consensus that supported the Mighty Wurlitzer is perhaps best illustrated by the example of a journalistic medium not mentioned so far: the news magazine. Three publications in particular spanned the spectrum from political left to right as well as from small to mass circulation. The New Leader was a long-established, New York–based journal that mixed leftist politics in the domestic sphere with unbending anti-Stalinism in the foreign—a sort of political equivalent to the New York intellectuals’ literary flagship, Partisan Review. Presided over by Russian social democrat Sol Levitas, who fled the Soviet Union in 1923 disguised in a Red Army colonel’s uniform, the magazine also served as an American mouthpiece for the Menshevik émigrés who had proved such a thorn in the side of AMCOMLIB. Although never commanding a large audience—its readership was heavily concentrated in the New York labor movement and similar circles in western Europe—the New Leader did enjoy a reputation as an important center of anti-Soviet expertise and activism. Its editors and chief contributors were consulted frequently by government officials such as George Kennan, Allen Dulles, and C. D. Jackson.18 The publication was also valued as a propaganda counterweight to McCarthyism, its mere existence giving lie to European perceptions that American anticommunism was necessarily uninformed and reactionary. As Jackson explained to Dulles, “The particular tone of voice with which Levitas speaks to a particular group of people here and abroad is unique and uniquely important.”19
Combined with its chronic financial difficulties—Levitas spent much of his time as the magazine’s business manager writing begging letters to
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potential private patrons—these attributes were enough to put the New Leader in line for covert subsidies from the CIA. During the early 1950s, Irving Brown generated extra revenue for the magazine by the simple expedient of arranging for thousands of new European subscriptions to be taken out free of charge.20 On at least three separate occasions during the same period, Tom Braden resorted to the more direct method of personally handing sums of about $10,000 to Levitas.21 Meanwhile, the National Committee for a Free Europe provided the publication with an annual grant of $25,000.22 Although this subsidy was cancelled in 1955, additional covert funding was secured thanks to a “Save the New Leader” drive launched by former OPC officer Franklin Lindsay, which by the end of 1956 had netted the magazine donations totaling $45,000.23 These various ploys were intended, as C. D. Jackson put it, “for all of us to have our Levitas and let him eat, too.”24 The New Leader was no mere functionary of the CIA: its coverage of the Cold War actively shaped official attitudes as much as it was shaped by them, while its Menshevik blend of social democracy and zealous anticommunism put it at odds with such Agency fronts as AMCOMLIB (whose association with Russian monarchists it deplored) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which it deemed insufficiently resolute in the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds—the hard-line stance of the unruly American Committee for Cultural Freedom was more to its liking). Still, the magazine survived the 1950s only because the CIA wanted it kept alive, for intelligence and propaganda purposes.
Moving from the left wing of the Cold War consensus to its center, one encounters another news magazine with intimate ties to the U.S. intelligence community. Like the New Leader, The Reporter was strongly identified with the personality of a political refugee, in this case its founder and chief editor, domineering Italian antifascist Max Ascoli. In other respects, however, the two magazines were very different. The Reporter was not launched until 1949, and therefore lacked the factional, socialist pre–Cold War history of the New Leader. The younger publication consciously styled itself as a mouthpiece for the liberal anticommunist politics of the postwar Washington foreign policy establishment—what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “a charter member of the Reporter family,” had dubbed the “Vital Center.” As such, it managed to achieve a respectable readership of 200,000 (the circulation of the New Leader hovered around
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