This, then, was not a simple case of the OPC “using” Burnham. If anything, the New York intellectual was performing a role similar to that played by the “Park Avenue cowboys” in the years immediately after World War II, trying to fasten his own anticommunist agenda onto the U.S. government. Although heartened by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Burnham remained doubtful that the liberals in charge of official policy toward the Soviet Union truly appreciated the nature of the communist threat or understood how best to combat it. “The only morsel of hope that I’ve swallowed during these months is from my southern excursion,” he told his colleague and confidant Hook in December 1948, in an oblique reference to his first contacts with the OPC. “The people there seem to understand what is, and what should be done better than any other group of which I know.” However, Burnham’s enthusiasm about America’s new secret service officers was qualified. “They do not,” he remarked to Hook, “know how to implement their knowledge and willingness. We ought to be able to find some way to help them—and ourselves—there.”24
What was really needed, Burnham believed, was the experience and expertise of intellectuals who had once been communists themselves.
With this in mind, he attempted to put Hook in touch with the OPC. He also tried to arrange a meeting in Washington between former Comintern officer Arthur Koestler and “a dozen or so persons to which you might be a severe and needed teacher.”25 Still, Burnham’s Cold War commitment continued to run ahead of that of the Truman administration. A paper he presented to the OPC in or about 1950, “The Strategy of the Politburo, and the Problem of American Counter-Strategy,” echoed his book of the
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same year,
(1953), was associated with a growing political conservatism, which manifested itself in a populist identification with “the masses” and—ironically, considering his radical background—an increasing dissatisfaction with the OPC’s NCL strategy. In short, Burnham was not merely advising official opinion—he was actively trying to shape it.
Much the same was true of Sidney Hook. Although the evidence concerning Hook’s ties to the CIA is less detailed than it is for Burnham, certain things are clear. One is that he performed consultancy work for DCI Walter Bedell Smith, who set great store by Hook’s “profound and accurate knowledge and appreciation of Communist political philosophy.”27
Hook also consulted with the Psychological Strategy Board, the body created in 1951 to oversee and coordinate official anticommunist propaganda efforts; he corresponded with its first director, Gordon Gray, and wrote Gray’s successor, Raymond B. Allen, even before Allen had taken up the position, to offer his advice on psychological warfare. “This subject has interested me for years,” Hook told Allen, “and I have watched despairingly as we have lost one round after another to the Kremlin.”28
This work never turned into full-time employment for Hook, though, as it did for Burnham. Indeed, there appears to have been some reluctance on the part of the OPC to contact Hook at all: in January 1949, Burnham expressed surprise that his colleague had not yet “heard from my friends,”
interpreting this as “a very bad sign.”29 This might have had to do with security concerns. Whereas Burnham had so far escaped investigation by the FBI, Hook had been the subject of an Internal Security Case in 1943, after J. Edgar Hoover had spotted a
“the chief carrier of Trotskyite bacilli” at NYU.30 Another possibility is that Hook had earned a reputation in government circles for being too opinionated and outspoken. In April 1948, for example, he had blasted the State Department for its “utter ineptness” in failing to adopt an “aggressive approach” in its radio broadcasting: “Whoever formulated this policy doesn’t understand the world he is living in, is abysmally ignorant of Central Europe, and ought to be retired to some field where he can do less damage to the fight for democratic survival.”31 Like his fellow profes-
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sor, Burnham, Hook assumed a distinctly didactic attitude to government officials. In September 1948, after spending a week consulting with General Lucius D. Clay and other administrators of the American occupation zone in Germany, he wrote Burnham, informing him, without any apparent irony, that “they have accepted my diagnosis of the situation in Europe.”32