This was bad news indeed for the Committee. Junkie Fleischmann’s Farfield Foundation had continued shelling out to the ACCF for a while after Nabokov’s 1952 festival, with John F. Dailey, Jr., of the foundation’s Wall Street office sending Hook $2,500 a month for deposit at the Rockefeller Center Chase National.85 This assistance stopped in January 1953, however, and no regular funding source was found to replace it.86 Stein, a resourceful and creative cultural Cold Warrior, managed to keep the ACCF afloat through 1953 by garnering gifts from private angels, including Dave Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (which gave $2,000) and Henry Luce (whose contributions came in the form of Time, Inc., stock).87 He even enlisted the services of a
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New York public relations firm, Harold L. Oram (a well-known fund-raiser for left-liberal causes who was associated with several other CIA front operations), in an effort to promote the ACCF among private philanthro-pists.88
Despite Stein’s hard work, the search for a regular donor to replace the Farfield Foundation proved fruitless. Especially galling was the ACCF’s failure to land a grant from the Fund for the Republic, a prominent liberal foundation run by the opinionated former chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins.89 Hook blamed a history of intellectual controversy between him and Hutchins for the Fund’s repeated rejections of ACCF grant applications, but this is probably too simplistic an explanation. The liberal philanthropies appear to have deliberately frozen out the ACCF after the McCarthy imbroglio of 1952, perhaps at the discreet bidding of the CIA. In any case, Josselson’s monthly grant of $500 was an emergency measure to tide the Committee over until the Hutchins group had reached a decision on a funding bid by Stein. When that proved unsuccessful, the intelligence officer had the pretext he needed for turning off the financial tap.
The New York intellectuals were not put down so easily, however, and resorted to a number of stratagems to ensure the ACCF’s continuation.
Even as he lobbied CCF headquarters, threatening the possibility of the ACCF’s reforming as an extremist, right-wing rump if it went out of business, Stein went over Josselson’s head with a direct petition to the chief of the Operations Coordinating Board, Edward Lilly, listing the organization’s various contributions to the international cultural Cold War effort (and conspicuously omitting mention of the 1952 Waldorf conference).90
Meanwhile, individual officers and members of the Executive Committee begged personal donations from Junkie Fleischmann with such persistence that the American Maecenas must have begun to rue the day when he agreed to front for the CIA.91
When these methods failed to secure the ACCF’s survival, its leaders went straight to the Agency itself. During a gloomy meeting of the Executive Committee, where it was reported that (according to the later recollection of Diana Trilling) “we now lacked money even for the next month’s rent,” Norman Thomas, the much-revered socialist leader and Trilling’s predecessor as chair of the organization’s Administrative Committee, declared that he “could see but a single solution: he would ‘phone
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Allen.’” (It was later disputed whether or not Thomas was acting at the instruction of the ACCF or on his own. Still, as Trilling pointed out,
“None of us could fail to know that ‘Allen’ . . . was Allen Dulles, head of the CIA,” an old family friend and Princeton classmate of Thomas.) Trilling remembered Thomas returning to the meeting “to tell us that a check for a thousand dollars would be in the mail the next morning.” In fact, correspondence in the ACCF’s papers suggests that the money was slower in materializing. On April 27, 1955, Stein wrote Thomas requesting that he make “a follow-up telephone call” to remind Dulles “of his interest in our work and suggest that speed is essential in coming to our assistance.” Believing that it “would do harm rather than good to call Allen D. without some more immediate excuse,” Thomas bided his time until the following Sunday, “on the fair chance that Dulles may be up in the country this weekend” (they owned neighboring houses on Long Island). Finally, around the same time—the circumstances are less well documented—Hook approached Cord Meyer concerning the Committee’s plight.92
These combined efforts paid off a week later, on May 9, 1955, when the ACCF was awarded $10,000 by the Farfield Foundation to fund its reception center for visiting European intellectuals, and a further $4,000 by the Asia Foundation (a CIA proprietary analogous in function to the Free Europe Committee) to help establish a similar facility for Asian visitors.93