a mere 30,000).25 Possibly because of its relative fiscal health, there is no evidence to suggest that Ascoli ever received covert payments in the same manner as Levitas, although this is perhaps not surprising, given the apparent destruction of The Reporter’s financial records. It also no doubt helped that the Italian had what Frank Wisner would have called “conspicuous access to wealth” in the shape of his wife, Sears Roebuck heiress Marion Rosenwald.26
That said, there is abundant proof of other links between The Reporter and the Cold War secret state. During World War II, Ascoli worked alongside Nelson Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, and C. D. Jackson (although the latter never warmed to him personally, thinking him “outstanding—as a difficult character”).27 More significantly, the two most influential members of the magazine’s staff beside Ascoli, Philip Horton and Douglass Cater, were ex-OSS-ers who maintained their intelligence connections—what Horton called “the old school tie”—after the war.28
Indeed, Horton served briefly as the CIA’s first station chief in Paris before moving to Henry Luce’s Time and thence to The Reporter, where he acted as Ascoli’s second-in command. Described by the Italian as an “extraordinarily industrious intelligence officer,” Horton used his “Old Boy” contacts with the likes of William Donovan, Allen Dulles, and James Jesus Angleton to enhance The Reporter’s foreign coverage.29 Cater had helped found the U.S. National Student Association before taking up the position of the magazine’s chief Washington correspondent; a widely acknowledged expert on psychological warfare, he would later serve as a special assistant in the Johnson White House. In addition to Cater’s NSA associations, The Reporter had ties to such Agency fronts as the CCF, the American Committee on United Europe, the NCFE, and the Vietnam Lobby.30
Perhaps it is telling that Ascoli suspended publication in 1968: The Reporter’s life span nearly exactly matched that of the Mighty Wurlitzer.
The right wing of the CIA’s covert network in the news magazine world was occupied by the mass-circulation Time. Like the New York Times, Henry Luce’s weekly provided CIA officers with journalistic credentials (Philip Horton’s brief spell on the magazine before his move to The Reporter was probably designed for cover purposes); Dulles laid on regular dinners for Time foreign correspondents similar to those he gave for CBS, receiving in return postassignment debriefings and favorable publicity; and the Luce organization would come to the assistance of other maga-
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zines whose circulation figures did not match its own yet were considered worthy causes by the Agency, such as Partisan Review and the New Leader. 31 Again, there was a healthy amount of self-interest in these actions—both of these publications were useful sources of cultural and political research data for Time’s own files—and the relationship with the Agency was not without its occasional strain. Overall, though, the collaboration was extraordinarily successful, so much so it was difficult to tell precisely where the Luce empire’s overseas intelligence network ended and the CIA’s began. A good case in point was the western response to the communist-controlled 1959 youth festival in Vienna, coordinated by C. D. Jackson and Cord Meyer and largely implemented on the ground by Sam Walker, who was both a Time reporter and an officer of the NCFE.
If the Alsop brothers personified the Cold War consensus in journalism, Warren Hinckle and Robert Scheer were its antithesis. At first sight, the two men made a strange partnership. Hinckle was a rambunctious, eye-patch-wearing Irish American from San Francisco whose disrespect for authority, including the traditional ideals of the American left, was matched only by his fondness for hard drinking, fine dining, and his pet monkey, “Henry Luce.”32 Scheer was a Bronx-raised, City College–educated intellectual who had won a reputation in the nascent Free Speech Movement at Berkeley as a formidable, perhaps arrogant, radical ideologue. “If a cartoonist were to draw him,” Hinckle wrote later, “Scheer would be just a pair of eyeglasses and a beard.”33 What united the two men, apart from the attraction of opposite personalities and their youth—
neither was yet out of his twenties in the early 1960s—was a common desire to awaken the nation from what Hinckle called the “Big Sleep of Journalism.”34
