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and Barnet Newman an “avant-garde huckster-handicraftsman.”49 Dwight Macdonald ended his brief spell as an editor of the London-based Encounter in 1956–57 by sending the magazine a blistering attack on U.S. culture entitled “America! America!” and then, when the CCF suppressed the piece, denouncing the organization in Dissent. True, this properly notorious incident shows that the editorial freedom supposedly enjoyed by the CCF’s magazines was in fact mythical. Yet at the same time Macdonald’s protests, and the negative publicity for the CCF that resulted, demonstrated that the Agency was by no means in control of Cold War intellectual discourse.50

The row over “America! America!” is reminiscent of the difficulties that the CIA experienced with the CCF’s U.S. section, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. On one wing of the organization were upper-class bohemian dissenters like Macdonald, individuals who were highly sensitive about their intellectual independence and just as likely to sound off about American “mass culture” as the threat of communism. On

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the other were New York Jewish intellectuals reared in the American communist movement but now so bitterly anticommunist that they even flirted with support for Joseph McCarthy, individuals like Macdonald’s predecessor as the American editor of Encounter and founding father of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol. This situation was typical of the sort of difficulties that the Agency tended to experience with its earliest front organizations, which often contained personalities whose Cold War zeal exceeded that of the professional spies. That said, it is also possible to discern a larger political significance in the clash between the ACCF and the CIA, with the former embodying a kind of embryonic neoconservative consciousness that was at odds with the predominantly liberal politics of the Agency officers housed in the International Organizations Division. In any case, the history of the ACCF gives the lie to simplistic depictions of Cold War American intellectuals as so many ventrilo-quist’s dummies and the CIA as their “animating performer.”51

Nor was the CIA necessarily able to dictate how foreign intellectuals would respond to its cultural blandishments. While the Boston Symphony Orchestra might have won plaudits for its performance at Paris, the most common response of French intellectuals to the CCF’s 1952 “Masterpieces” festival—“cette fête américaine”—was one of haughty disdain.

“Dear sirs, you have made a big mistake,” Serge Lifar, head of the ballet troupe at the Paris Opera, told the event’s organizers. (He may have been piqued that his dancers had not been invited to perform.) “From the point of view of spirit, civilization, and culture, France does not have to ask for anybody’s opinion; she is the one that gives advice to others.”52

Inadvertently enflaming the cultural anti-Americanism of European elites was not the only trap awaiting the CIA. Forced to operate at one remove from the recipients of its patronage, the Agency often had to watch as foreign intellectuals spent CCF money on pet projects that had little or nothing to do with the Cold War. This tendency was especially pronounced in Britain where, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed, there was no shortage of “English intellectuals with outstretched hands making eyes at affluent American widows.”53 Sometimes this kind of local appropriation could be quite subtle: Encounter’s British editor Stephen Spender, for example, tried constantly to reduce American influence over the magazine and turn it into a vehicle for Bloomsbury literati such as himself. At other times, it was more crude, with officers of the CCF’s Brit-

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ish national affiliate taking friends out to lunch at expensive Soho restaurants and joking that American taxpayers were paying the bill.54

But what about “blowback,” the influence of CIA patronage on domestic American culture? In 1978 Allen Ginsberg wrote a sketch in which he imagined encountering T. S. Eliot on the fantail of a boat in Europe. “And yourself,” the Beat poet asks the high priest of literary modernism. “What did you think of the domination of poetics by the CIA? After all, wasn’t Angleton your friend? Didn’t he tell you to revitalize the intellectual structure of the West against the so-to-speak Stalinists?” Eliot admits that he did know of Angleton’s “literary conspiracies,” but insists that they are

“of no importance to Literature.” Ginsberg disagrees.