One aspect of the relationship between the CIA and the Committee, however, continued to trouble the witting long after the organization itself had ceased to exist. In a brief memoir entitled “Right or Wrong?” written in 1974, Dorothy Bauman, the principal link between the world of male intelligence officers and that of female voluntary workers, spoke with pride of the Committee’s many achievements: its transcendence of negative anticommunism, its forging of links between women in the United States and abroad, and its efforts to build democratic institutions in decolonizing countries. “With today’s questioning of all of the CIA’s activities,”
wrote Bauman, “it seems to me only fair to tell of one operation that was
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highly constructive and successful and where no overt pressure from the CIA was ever used on a group of competent, individualistic women.” Yet running throughout the piece is a palpable sense of guilt. Bauman’s acceptance of the CIA’s injunction that she conceal the true source of the Committee’s funds from most of its members was, she later realized, a terrible mistake. “I was so new at anything of this kind,” she explained, “that I concurred in what the agency said was vital—namely, to have as few people as possible know where the money came from.” The fact that she “did not insist at the start that all members of the committee be informed, so that they would have had the opportunity to withdraw if they did not approve of taking funds,” was a cause of “everlasting regret.” On the larger question of the morality of secret subsidies, she did not offer a firm view.
“Whether ethically it was wrong not to divulge the true source of funds,”
she told the reader, “I leave to your judgment.”69
Another question remains: to use the imagery of much recent scholarship about American women in the early years of the Cold War, were members of the Committee of Correspondence “contained” or “liberated”
by the covert patronage of the CIA?70 Although it is clear that their work with the Committee enabled some women to escape the patriarchal constraints of postwar U.S. society and forge rewarding new relationships with their counterparts in the developing world (who themselves no doubt used the opportunity to advance their position within their own societies), these benefits came at a tremendous cost. The decision of the witting to hide the truth of the organization’s funding from the unwitting, and the feelings of hurt and betrayal that resulted from the revelations of 1967, destroyed the unstated, yet powerful, sense of sisterhood that had for a time bound these women together. Similarly, the pressures to pursue particular national objectives that inevitably accompanied secret government subsidies contradicted the internationalist spirit that had originally inspired the Committee’s founders, undermining the women’s claim to embody a universal spirit that transcended male power politics. Finally, and perhaps most damaging of all, the acceptance of covert official patronage violated the principle of voluntary association on which so much public activity by American women, at home as well as abroad, was predicated. Ultimately, the women of the Committee of Correspondence had allowed themselves to be manipulated by men.
E I G H T
Saving the World
C A T H O L I C S
The early years of the Cold War were good ones for American Catholicism. Between 1940 and 1960, the nation’s Catholic population doubled; church leaders, such as the charismatic Bishop Fulton Sheen, enjoyed unprecedented popularity; ordinary Catholics were better educated, wealth-ier, and more upwardly mobile socially than they had ever been before.1
There were several reasons for this newfound acceptance and confidence, including a general easing of religious and ethnic intolerance on the part of native-stock Protestant Americans; but high on the list of contributory factors was the Cold War itself. With their frequent attacks on godless communism, Catholic clerics had long constituted “the backbone” of the anticommunist movement in America.2 Now, with the whole of society mobilizing against Marxism-Leninism, pronouncements that might once have sounded fanatical or self-interested seemed instead prophetic and patriotic. To be sure, Cold War Catholic anticommunism retained a whiff of the lunatic fringe, a tendency personified by notorious red-baiter Joe McCarthy. However, as the 1950s wore on, the pantomime politics of McCarthyism gave way to the cooler Cold War engagement of another Irish-American politician, John F. Kennedy, whose victory in the 1960
presidential election signified that Catholics had finally arrived in the U.S. establishment.
On their own, these were reasons enough for Catholics to have featured in CIA front operations against communism, but there was an additional, tactical consideration that made their participation all but inevita-
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