If Meyer thought that the “hot-heads” of the ACCF might cool down after these ventings, he was very much mistaken. “Any time they come across anybody who disagrees with them and has what they call a ‘soft attitude,’ they are immediately galvanized into action,” observed James Farrell of his colleagues on the Committee. “Like many husbands and wives, they come to life when they have a good argument.” The most spectacular flare-up of all came a month after the Miller fiasco, in March 1956, when one of the CCF’s honorary chairmen, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, protested the imprisonment of Morton Sobell, a suspected accomplice of husband and wife “atom spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, as a gross miscarriage of justice, akin to the “atrocities” perpetrated by “other police states such as Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia.”100 Without consulting the CCF, the ACCF fired back a public response challenging Russell’s account of the Sobell case as “totally mistaken” and questioning the propriety of “an officer of the Congress for Cultural Freedom” making “false and irresponsible statements about the process of justice” in the United States.101 This was not the first time that the Briton and the New York intellectuals had come to blows. Several spats with the
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Honorary Chairman—a touchy man at the best of times—threatening to resign his post.102 On both occasions, Russell allowed himself to be dissuaded by more moderate members of the ACCF, acting at the behest of Michael Josselson in Paris, who feared losing the prestige of Russell’s name in Asia. After the public reprimand of 1956, however, not even the famously charming Nicolas Nabokov could prevail upon Russell to stay with the CCF. “I do not want to have anything to do with people who be-have like your friends of the American Committee,” the philosopher loft-ily told the composer. Thanks to the actions of the ACCF, the CCF had lost, as Josselson put it in a furious letter to Hook, one of its “biggest attractions.”103
By now, the NYU professor was tiring of his role as an intermediary between the international CCF and its rebarbative American affiliate. On the one side, Hook faced constant recrimination from Josselson, who appears to have blamed Hook personally for the out-of-control behavior of his fellow New York intellectuals. On the other, when Hook did try to restrain the ACCF, he was accused of taking a “pro-Paris” position, and worse. During a meeting of the Executive Committee on October 12, 1955, Hook was dismayed when Sol Stein introduced a resolution calling on the CCF to intervene in Indonesia against the communist-backed President Sukarno. Hook vehemently opposed this proposal, believing it to be an “open foray into politics” that had nothing to do with cultural freedom, and succeeded in striking any reference to it from the minutes.104
After the meeting, Diana Trilling viciously attacked Hook, describing his actions as “one of the most shocking experiences of my intellectual career” and strongly implying that he was acting directly on instructions from the ACCF’s mysterious backers in government: Who and what is the authority from whose eyes and ears this sin of ours must be kept, Sidney? Of whom are we are so afraid that we cannot talk or commit speculations, even our mistakes, to paper for fear of the punishment that will ensue? Are we free men and women joined in a free democratic enterprise or are we the pitiable puppets of the Kremlin, trembling lest we take a wrong line or vote the wrong way?105
Caught between New York, Paris, and Washington, it is perhaps no wonder that, after Russell’s resignation, Hook began considering his own position in the CCF.106
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As it turned out, though, it was Hook’s successor as ACCF chairman, James Farrell, who was first to snap. The novelist and critic, one of the best exponents of the “proletarian” literary genre of the 1930s, had never felt comfortable as chair of the ACCF, partly because he feared that his new administrative duties might distract him from his writing, and partly because he felt at odds with the “anti-Communist snobbery” of the “old Bolsheviks” in the organization.107 The strain began to show during a CCF-sponsored tour of the Middle East in the summer of 1956. In June, Farrell wrote Radio Free Europe from Jerusalem, extending a “hand of friendship” to communist writer Howard Fast, who had just publicly re-canted his Stalinism; Hook intervened, cabling RFE to request that it