Harris, Jr., was black), and such commitments did not necessarily go hand in hand with Cold War anticommunism. Indeed, if anything, civil rights activism was still more closely associated with communist front groups than New Deal–style liberalism. Also, only a handful of the NSA’s officers were witting about the true source of the 1950 international survey’s funds, and the officers in general were reluctant to become too closely involved with the U.S. government. Erskine B. Childers, for example, the vice-president in charge of the NSA’s international affairs in 1949–50, resisted attempts by the State Department to use American student delegations to international meetings for intelligence-gathering purposes.21 He also asked some awkward questions about the two angels of the survey. “I never saw a written report of the solicitation, or a covering letter from them transmitting the funds, or anything else,” he told a fellow officer in December 1950, the same month the NSA was preparing for the meeting at Stockholm. “I’m still a little peeved about this, as you can see.”22
Enter NSA’s newly elected national president, Allard K. Lowenstein. A contradictory, driven personality, made up of equal parts intense charisma
S T U D E N T S
131
and profound insecurity, Lowenstein would later acquire a reputation as the pied piper of 1960s American youth, whipping up protest against the apartheid regime in South Africa, organizing white support for voter registration drives in Mississippi, and eventually leading the opposition to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s conduct of the war in Vietnam. In 1950, however, while already known for his outspoken attacks on racial segregation—as a student at the University of North Carolina in the late 1940s he had campaigned against Jim Crow in Chapel Hill’s fraternity houses—
Lowenstein was an ardent supporter of the U.S. crusade against communism in all its forms, writing Secretary of State Dean Acheson that the
“Communist-dominated” IUS’s monopoly of international student politics “must not continue” (before signing off with sophomoric grandilo-quence, “With all the confidence of the Student in his Master and the Citizen in his Statesman, I await your reply”).23 The slowness of NSA officers like Childers and his successor as International Affairs Vice-President, Herbert Eisenberg, to sign up to the movement for a new student international greatly vexed Lowenstein, who traveled to Stockholm intent on forcing western student leaders to choose sides in the Cold War.
“When the Communists say they want peace we know too well what peace they want, and why,” the twenty-one-year-old firebrand told the conference in a widely reported speech. “It is about time that in our deliberations we took stock and faced facts.”24 His address was a bravura orator-ical performance, the most impressive some in the audience could remember ever having witnessed at any international meeting, but it failed to carry the day. Indeed, as Eisenberg reported to the NSA’s Executive Committee shortly after returning home, the other delegates adopted a resolution officially “regretting” Lowenstein’s speech, an expression tantamount to formal censure. Lowenstein’s insensitivity to the mood of the meeting was summed up by the fact that he read his speech from notes clearly written on U.S. Senate notepaper.25
The suspicion that Lowenstein was acting at the behest of the U.S.
government in seeking to split the International Union of Students has clung to his reputation ever since. Critics of his legacy, noting his later association with such front operations as the Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, have speculated that he was already a CIA agent in 1950 and that his presidency of the NSA was crucial in bringing about closer relations between that organization and the Agency.26 More
132
T H E C I A O N C A M P U S
sympathetic observers have pointed to evidence suggesting that, at least at this early date, Lowenstein was free from such ties. First, there was his own later denial of a relationship. “I am not now and have never been an agent of the CIA,” he insisted in 1967. “I’ve never even visited Vienna, Stockholm, Peoria, Ill., or any place else on funds provided by the CIA.”27
There had, Lowenstein admitted, been a “suspicious offer” of money from an “unknown source” for him to attend the Stockholm meeting.28 He turned down that funding, however, and paid his own passage to Sweden.
Two CIA officers privy to details of the Agency’s dealings with the NSA have explicitly backed up these claims. “There was no formal contact, there had never been any effort to recruit him,” stated one. “He was too loud, too intent on holding forth,” explained the other. The suggestion that Lowenstein was deliberately left out of the loop because he was