Somewhat opposed to this interpretation, and more pronounced in works about the cultural Cold War that have appeared since the publication of the Saunders book, is a tendency to play down both the CIA’s affinity for modernism and the control the Agency exerted over the artists who received its secret subsidies. Which of these interpretations—the revisionist or the “post-revisionist”—is correct? What were the CIA’s aesthetic tastes, and how much control did the Agency exert over American high culture?
“Suddenly, there were limousines, parties with lashings of smoked salmon, and so on,” recalled Jason Epstein of the 1950s, when the Congress for
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Cultural Freedom appeared on the U.S. literary scene. “People who couldn’t normally afford the bus ticket to Newark were now flying first class to India for the summer.”12 American writers stood to benefit from the clandestine largesse of the CIA in several ways. First, there were travel expenses for attending international meetings of the CCF. The Agency wanted to show off the cream of American literary talent to European intellectuals and thereby forge a sense of Atlantic cultural community.
For their part, novelists, poets, and critics such as Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, and Dwight Macdonald were happy to travel in comfort to glamorous destinations (but often privately scornful of the quality of intellectual discourse at the CCF’s meetings).13 Thanks to rising rents and the decline of old bohemian neighborhoods, the existence of the freelance writer was becoming increasingly precarious. Literary prizes and fellowships donated by such CIA pass-throughs as the Farfield Foundation made life for the writers a little bit easier. Also welcome were book contracts with one of the publishing houses in which the Agency had an interest, such as Frederick A. Praeger (another area of specialization for Howard Hunt).14
In addition—and, when the New York Times published details of the Agency’s covert cultural operations in 1967, most controversial of all—
there was secret support for literary magazines. Some of these, like the London-based, Anglo-American monthly Encounter, were creations of the CCF and, as such, received regular subventions (in Encounter’s case, from MI6 as well as the CIA: the latter funded the magazine’s American editorship, the former its British). Other publications, whose existence predated that of the CCF, only received occasional help, often to stave off the threat of imminent financial collapse, a chronic threat in the permanently cash-strapped world of independent publishing.
One such publication was Partisan Review, the principal literary vehicle of the New York intellectuals and one of the most influential little magazines of the twentieth century. Born in the 1930s, and only recently de-ceased (in 2003), Partisan Review went to the grave with its editors insisting that it had never been subsidized by the CIA. William Phillips, who had helped found the publication in 1934 and was still editing it when he died in 2002, was especially sensitive on this point, threatening several writers who had suggested the possibility with legal action.15 Yet there is now indisputable evidence that Agency money did find its way to Partisan
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Review on a number of different occasions. In 1953, shortly after the magazine had been forced to retrench when its chief “angel,” real estate speculator Allan D. Dowling, went through an expensive divorce, Phillips obtained a grant of $2,500 from the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, on whose Executive Committee he served throughout the 1950s. As already noted, further Agency funds percolated to Partisan Review later in the decade, when the ACCF suspended its active organizational life and bequeathed half of its remaining monies to the magazine. A Farfield “grant for expenses” and aid from the Congress for Cultural Freedom ($3,000 a year over a three-year period in the form of free foreign subscriptions) followed in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, well-placed admirers inside or close to government, such as C. D. Jackson and Sidney Hook, helped Partisan Review with other financial matters—the preservation of its tax-exempt status, for example, and bids for Rockefeller Foundation support.16
Despite his later protestations, Partisan Review founder William Phillips was fully witting of the covert official interest in his magazine. Indeed, documents among the Henry Luce papers at the Library of Congress (the publisher of Time bailed out Partisan Review during its funding crisis in the early 1950s with a gift of $10,000) indicate that “Luce’s assistant” Allen Grover arranged direct personal contacts between Phillips and Walter Bedell Smith when the latter was Director of Central Intelligence. “Mr.
