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large,” observed Chicagoan novelist James T. Farrell, who later succeeded Hook as ACCF chairman, “the New York ex-radical intellectuals are not likely to be strongly anti-McCarthy.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of the organization’s leading anti-McCarthyites and a prominent Cold War spokesperson for anticommunist liberalism (his widely read 1949 work, The Vital Center, described the non-communist left as “the standard to rally the groups fighting to carve out an area for freedom”), agreed with Farrell, complaining of “some deep sickness in certain sectors of the New York intellectuals.” “The New Leader variety of ex-Communist is really too much for me,” he told his old friend, Nicolas Nabokov, shortly after he had been hissed by the audience at an ACCF forum for giving a “mild, Anglo-Saxon address” on the subject of anticommunism. “The whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth and considerably diminished my enthusiasm for the Congress which, in this country, at least, has become an instrument for these bastards.”77

Schlesinger, a former OSS-er, was in regular contact with senior officers of the CIA, briefing them about developments within the ACCF and putting a rather different spin on events from Burnham. (The two men were bitter enemies, the ex-communist referring sniffily to the “vital left-of-center” and the liberal describing Containment or Liberation? as “an absurd book written by an absurd man.”)78 When Frank Wisner, whom Schlesinger saw frequently on the Georgetown dinner party circuit, learned about the Waldorf row over McCarthyism—the last subject he wanted to see being aired in public, with its potential for arousing anti-Americanism abroad and its sensitivity for the CIA at home—he was appalled. “I can understand how . . . a group of American private citizens interested in cultural freedom would feel that it would have to take a position on McCarthyism,” Wisner told a CIA colleague. “However, that is not the nature of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom which

. . . was inspired if not put together by this Agency for the purpose of providing cover and backstopping for the European effort.” Steps had to be taken immediately to repair the damage. Ideally, Wisner would have preferred “that the entire debate on this subject, from the beginning, be ex-punged from the record.” If this was not possible, then at the very least,

“an appeal to unity and concord . . . might be successful.”79

It is not clear if such an appeal was made, although Frances Stonor Saunders speculates that a letter from Nabokov to Schlesinger urging him

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“to do everything you can to prevent a split in the American Committee”

might have been prompted by the CIA.80 What is certain is that the Agency took a much closer interest in the ACCF’s affairs after the Waldorf dustup than it had before. (The only government officer present at the 1952 conference was a staff member of the Psychological Strategy Board, who was apparently unaware that the ACCF was an Agency front.)81 The Deputy Chief of the International Organizations Division, Cord Meyer, asked Schlesinger to send him minutes of Executive Committee meetings on a regular basis, and Michael Josselson urged the more moderate members of the ACCF, such as sociologist Daniel Bell, to try to keep the hard-liners in check.82 The latter, however, persisted in their ways. In 1954, an attempt to settle the McCarthy issue once and for all by publishing a scholarly monograph on the subject (James Rorty and Moshe Decter’s McCarthy and the Communists) led to a walkout by the ACCF’s most right-wing members, who deemed the book too critical of the Wisconsin senator. Leading the way was James Burnham, no longer obliged by his contract with the OPC to have any dealings with an organization he had come to regard as “a narrow and partisan clique.”83 Released from his ties to both the CIA and its intellectual front organization, the ex-communist was free to develop his growing interest in conservative thought, joining William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1955 and later earning a reputation as a forerunner of neoconservatism.

By September 1954, Michael Josselson, who had never been convinced about the necessity of the ACCF in the first place, had decided that enough was enough, and informed Sol Stein, the organization’s new executive secretary, that the CCF was terminating its monthly grant of $500.84