17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

“not use statement for time being.” Shortly afterward, “terribly tired and worn out,” Farrell “got boiled on beer” in Beirut and “wrote an incoherent letter on the back of a menu” to the notoriously isolationist Chicago Tribune, stating that U.S. foreign aid was wasted on its recipients and that Indian intellectuals in particular believed that their best policy was “to flirt with Communists, insult us, and perhaps get more money out of us.”108

After returning home, perhaps sensing that the Executive Committee was gearing up to ask for his resignation, Farrell (again, it would seem, in his cups) telephoned the New York Times shortly before midnight on August 27 to report that he was voluntarily giving up the ACCF chair-manship. The following day he composed a more sober explanation of his decision, citing the organization’s failure “to sink our roots deeply into American life,” its lack of understanding of conditions abroad, its obsession with fighting an increasingly insignificant communist threat at home, and its tendency to subjugate culture—ostensibly its primary concern—to politics.109 The whole sorry episode provoked a predictable response from Josselson, who berated the rest of the ACCF leadership for failing to contain the damage caused by Farrell’s outbursts. However, one cannot avoid the suspicion that the CCF director was secretly pleased by the ACCF

chairman’s actions, which, as one observer remarked, appeared “calculated, with deliberation or not, to injure the Committee.”110 Indeed, a cable from Farrell to Josselson suggests that the former might have been “put up” to his resignation: “Have broken up American Committee,” wrote Farrell. “Your advantage. . . . Have kept my word.”111

Whether or not Josselson willed it, Farrell’s resignation, coming so soon after the Russell affair, sounded the death knell of the American Commit-

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tee for Cultural Freedom. In 1957, it suspended its active life, bequeathing its remaining funds—the remnants of the Asia Foundation grant and a few Time, Inc., shares—to the New Leader and the New York intellectuals’

premiere cultural organ, Partisan Review. Even in this moribund state, however, the ACCF remained the focus of ex-communist factional infighting. In 1960, for example, after the organization had been reactivated as a tax shelter for Partisan Review, one of its directors, Diana Trilling, became embroiled in a feud with the magazine’s editors over what she perceived as their wavering on the communist issue, leading to her noisy resignation from the ACCF board.112 The same year Sidney Hook participated in his last meeting of the CCF’s Executive Committee. “My inactivity by this time was not unwelcomed,” he later wrote, “since I was regarded by the Parisian directorate as a representative of the obnoxious American Committee for Cultural Freedom.”113

The CIA’s difficulties with the ACCF illustrate even more vividly than its experience with the Free Trade Union Committee the potential pitfalls of front operations. Like the Lovestoneites, the New York intellectuals seem not to have had many qualms about accepting secret subsidies. Otherwise, though, they were almost impossible to manage. As former communists themselves, they shared Lovestone’s belief that they had a much better understanding of the Cold War enemy than the U.S. government, claiming what almost amounted to ownership rights to anti-Stalinism. This conviction was reflected in the persistence with which they advocated certain Cold War tactics—all-out political warfare, alliance with conservative elements, noncooperation with liberal “anti-anticommunists”—

even in the face of obvious official disapproval. Nor did it help that, despite their willingness to accept covert patronage, they were extremely sensitive about their intellectual independence. In much the same way that the doctrine of “free trade unionism” motivated the FTUC to resist not just communism but excessive CIA interference in labor affairs as well, so the New York intellectuals’ allegiance to the concept of cultural freedom often placed them at loggerheads with U.S. government policy in the cultural Cold War.

Just as with the Lovestoneites, the New York intellectuals’ marriage to the CIA was an entirely expedient union, brought about by a short-lived

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