serious and responsible liberals.” As it happened, the Congress for Cultural Freedom passed off without any major hitch; indeed, it was considered one of the OPC’s first big successes, with President Truman himself reported to be “very well pleased.” Nonetheless, Wisner was deeply unhappy about one aspect of the conference. Several months earlier, when giving the operation the go-ahead in April 1950, he had insisted that Lasky and Burnham keep a low profile in Berlin, because both were closely associated in European eyes with U.S. officialdom and might provoke suspicion about the Congress’s backing. Burnham obeyed this edict, presumably because, as an OPC employee, he had received an explicit command; but the exuberant Lasky, at this stage unaware of the CIA connection, was all too visible at the gathering. Wisner was “very disturbed” by this “non-observance” of his directive and insisted on Lasky’s exclusion from the new organization as a condition of continued funding by the OPC. Initially Josselson, who like Burnham had remained discreetly behind the scenes in Berlin, defended Lasky, claiming that “no other person here . . .
could have achieved such success.” When it became clear, however, that Wisner really would withhold OPC funds if his demand was not met, Josselson backed down and advised Lasky to take a “well-earned vacation.”41
Another early casualty in the OPC’s takeover of the CCF was Arthur Koestler. Having dominated the June 1950 rally, the Hungarian-born writer was now determined to have his say in shaping the Congress as a permanent entity. Not surprisingly, given his training in the Münzenberg apparatus, he thought that the new organization should concentrate on full-frontal political warfare, staging Popular Front–style mass rallies in western Europe and propagandizing behind the Iron Curtain.42 For this reason he backed Louis Fischer, another former Comintern officer (and a fellow contributor to the classic statement of disillusioned ex-communism,
Gradually, however, it became apparent that the CCF’s emergent bureaucracy did not share Koestler and Brown’s vision. In particular, Michael Josselson believed that, rather than engaging in spectacular political confrontations, the organization should adopt a “soft-sell” strategy, winning intellectuals to the western cause in the Cold War by fostering a
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sense of cultural community between America and Europe. Fischer was dumped in November 1950 (Brown, for one, detected prejudice against ex-communists in the decision)43 and Josselson’s friend, Russian-born composer Nicolas Nabokov (cousin of the novelist, Vladimir), chosen instead. Not only did Nabokov share Josselson’s preference for cultural as opposed to political warfare, he was also the favored candidate in Washington, where during the war years he had been adopted by the set of anticommunist Russophiles surrounding George Kennan. Plans for a mass rally in Paris in the summer of 1951 were abandoned in favor of a festival celebrating western cultural achievements of the twentieth century.
Koestler resigned from the CCF in July, telling a friend that he had been
“made to withdraw in a gentle and effective way.”44
A similar fate awaited James Burnham. Although he had agreed to stay out of the limelight in Berlin, the New York intellectual exerted a powerful influence on the CCF during the first months of its existence, consulting with the OPC over Nabokov’s appointment, helping establish affiliates in Asia, and managing the CCF’s affairs in America.
Like Koestler, Burnham wanted the new organization to use Comintern-style political tactics in the struggle for hearts and minds.45 Reflecting his emerging political conservatism, he also thought that the CCF should function as a true “anti-Communist front,” embracing the “non-Socialist Right as well as [the] traditional Left.”46 He was therefore dismayed by signs that key personnel within the Paris secretariat, such as Director of Publications François Bondy (ironically, one of Burnham’s own nominees), intended to appeal solely to the center-left. Another of Burnham’s contacts in the CCF offices, Louis Gibarti (once one of Münzenberg’s top propagandists and the man credited with recruiting Kim Philby as a Soviet agent), echoed Brown by reporting a growing hostility in CCF
circles toward former communists who had traveled to the political right.47 By the summer of 1951, the CCF had, after a period of political and tactical uncertainty, emerged as an organization of the noncommunist left, concerned chiefly with cultural diplomacy as opposed to political warfare. This development reflected the rise of Josselson’s influence over the Congress’s affairs, and the decline of Burnham’s.