(“It was mostly your own good work and your own powers of persuasion that turned the trick,” Thomas wrote Stein. “I am happy to think I had a little to do with the proposition in certain quarters.”)94 Both donors were at pains to emphasize that their grants were intended to assist the ACCF’s international work, not its domestic agenda. Indeed, in the case of the Farfield Foundation, there is more than a hint of pique in the tone of its letter to the ACCF confirming its grant award, suggesting that the foundation’s trustees were put out by the sudden directive from the CIA that they step in to bail out the American Committee: With respect to that part of its program relating to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, it has been Farfield’s practice to support the international headquarters of the Congress, rather than individual national branches. The Directors have been somewhat reluctant to part from their usual procedure, and have done so only because they believe that
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the American Committee deserves support in its activities which relate to the international program of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.95
Arthur Schlesinger, leader of the liberal opposition to the New York intellectual majority in the ACCF, must have expressed similar views to Cord Meyer, judging by a letter penned by the latter on May 16. “Thanks for your note, and I agree with much you have to say about certain members of the present Executive Committee in the outfit in New York,” wrote Meyer.
We certainly don’t plan on any continuing large scale assistance, and the single grant recently made was provided as the result of an urgent request directly from Sidney H. and indirectly from Norman T. Our hope is that the breathing space provided by this assistance can be used by those gentlemen, yourself, and the other sensible ones to reconstitute the Executive Committee and draft an intelligent program that might gain real support from the Foundations. If this reconstitution of the leadership proves impossible we then, I think, will have to face the necessity of allowing the Committee to die a natural death, although I think this course would result in unhappy repercussions abroad.
“I much appreciate what you have done in terms of sitting on top of the loose talk,” Meyer concluded. “I hope that the two of us can get together soon to discuss this whole problem in some detail.”96
Meyer’s hopes of salvaging the ACCF were destined to be disappointed.
Indeed, rather than behaving more responsibly, the rejuvenated Committee became embroiled in a fresh round of controversies about communism and the Cold War. In the fall of 1954, it weighed in on an ongoing legal battle between Freda Kirchwey’s
(Art critic Clement Greenberg had used the
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cizing its sympathetic coverage of Owen Lattimore, the State Department Asia expert who had been hounded out of his job for alleged communist activities, and the ACCF’s leading anti-McCarthyites (among them Schlesinger) dispatched follow-up letters dissociating themselves from Stein’s comments.98 A year later, in February 1956, Arthur Miller (whom the ACCF had defended in 1954, when the American Legion of Glenwood Landing, Long Island, tried to close down a production of
“The facts, I believe, make it absolutely impossible for either the American or Soviet civilizations to honestly ‘claim’ Dostoevsky,” pronounced Miller, “and unless I am altogether mistaken all these celebrations are designed with that aim. Were he alive today I believe he would be in trouble in America for certain of his views, and in Russia for others.”99