17d05d030193283f60ac573244de53e6 полностью

“that the communists did not have a monopoly on the national liberation struggle.”67 Another important function of ISI publicity, at least as far as Steinem was concerned, was to let the American public know that not all students going to Vienna were communist sympathizers.

A key contact for Steinem in her ISI publicity work was the former psy-war supremo, Time, Inc., executive C. D. Jackson, who had secretly volunteered to coordinate a massive antifestival propaganda campaign on the CIA’s behalf, involving Radio Free Europe, Time reporters, and Austrian cabinet ministers. The two first met in late January at Jackson’s Rockefeller Center office, but only after Steinem had been made to wait for several hours. “He was blustery, a name-dropper always talking about how he wrote speeches for Eisenhower,” she recalled. “An asshole—no, a king-sized asshole.”68 Jackson, in contrast, was charmed by his young guest and offered to provide Steinem with Time photos of earlier festivals for free reproduction in ISI literature. He also came to her assistance when, three weeks before the festival was due to open, she learned that CBS had abandoned plans to produce a one-hour documentary on the subject.

“The Vienna Youth Festival itself is an extremely important event in the Great Game,” Jackson wrote the network’s president, Frank Stanton, quoting Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. “This is the first time commies have held one of these shindigs on our side of the iron curtain.” Stanton then saw Steinem in his office and assured Jackson that CBS would endeavor to broadcast a half-hour documentary instead. “Gloria Steinem asked me to help out on this, and Frank Stanton came through handsomely,” Jackson self-congratulatingly reported to Cord Meyer of the CIA.69 In fact, as Steinem later pointed out, “What [Stanton’s] letter really said was that the hour documentary had been canceled and would remain so.”70

Rather more effective were Jackson’s efforts to raise support for the

144

T H E C I A O N C A M P U S

other main part of the ISI’s program, the actual recruitment of “informed”

young Americans to attend the festival. Steinem and Bebchick were extremely successful at placing non-communists on the official U.S. delegation and obtaining credentials for others to travel independently. However, there were some outside participants who were too well known as anticommunists to be seen flying to Vienna on the plane chartered by the ISI. It was to fund the extra travel expenses of four such individuals that Jackson secured a donation from, as he put it to Steinem, “several business leaders of my acquaintance.” In the event, the free berths proved surprisingly difficult to fill. Of the four original candidates, only one remained constant: Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Harvard graduate student who would later serve as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, described to Jackson by Steinem as “a star member of the Independent Service.”71

Among those to drop out was Michael Harrington, a young socialist intellectual soon to grab national attention with his book The Other America, an exposé of the poverty of millions of U.S. citizens. The offer of free passage to Vienna had placed Harrington in a quandary. He strongly suspected State Department involvement in the ISI—“Had I dreamed that the CIA was involved,” he wrote later, “there would have been no issue”—but, as a fervent anti-Stalinist, he badly wanted to get to Vienna in order to counter the machinations of the festival’s organizers. The National Committee of the Young People’s Socialist League, after a long debate in the course of which “inevitably, someone pointed out that Lenin had accepted railroad transportation from the Kaiser when he went from Switzerland to Russia in 1917,” decreed that Harrington should accept the airline ticket, but only on the understanding that he was an independent delegate prepared to criticize capitalism and communism equally. “That did it,” recalled Harrington. “The offer of help was withdrawn forthwith and I paid my own way, having nothing to do with what turned out to be the CIA’s dirty games.”72

The festival opened in the last week of July 1959, with a parade, motor-cade, and huge fireworks display. Over the next ten days, thousands of young delegates from countries all over the world were treated to a lavish program of art exhibits and competitions, athletic games, an international fashion show, and a giant ferris wheel.73 The staging was immaculate.

“They had the Bolshoi ballet, gymnasts, and Chinese dancers with flags,”

S T U D E N T S

145

recalled one young American. “You felt you were surrounded by perfection, that history was on their side, there was so much power and momentum.”74 Still, the organizers were taking no chances, such were the dangers of defection by, or “contamination” of, eastern-bloc delegates, many of whom were traveling outside the Iron Curtain for the first time.