[Marxism] Intellectual whore for the CIA croaks

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 22, 2004
Melvin J. Lasky, Cultural Cold Warrior, Dies at 84
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

BERLIN, May 20 — Melvin J. Lasky, the editor of two major intellectual 
journals and a man at the vortex of the debates and controversies thrown 
up by the cold war, died Wednesday at his home in Berlin. He was 84.

The cause was heart failure, Marc Svetov, his secretary, said.

Probably no person was more associated than Mr. Lasky with the term 
cultural cold warrior. In a career that spanned several decades, during 
which he lived in London, Paris and Berlin, he edited the monthly 
magazine Encounter, which was not only one of Europe's leading literary 
and political journals but also a major force in articulating the point 
of view best summed up by the phrase liberal anti-Communism.

The roster of writers published in Encounter included many of the 
leading lights of postwar intellectual life, from Arthur Koestler, 
Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin to Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis 
Borges and V.S. Naipaul.

Mr. Lasky was seen as a hero by his friends and intellectual allies for 
his fierce and uncompromising opposition to totalitarianism. In what was 
a kind of personal credo, he once wrote about the intellectual's 
responsibility to mount an unwavering defense of individual rights, or 
else, as he put it, "manuscripts will be banned, books will be burned, 
and writers and readers will once again be sitting in concentration 
camps for having thought dangerous ideas or uttered forbidden words."

He was himself uncompromising in his disdain for anyone who, in his 
view, had muddled, morally confused thoughts about the irredeemable 
viciousness of Soviet totalitarianism, or who committed, in his eyes, 
the incomprehensible error of seeing the flaws of the democratic West as 
somehow comparable to those of the Communist East.

And yet, as Albert H. Friedlander has written in The Times of London, 
"it would be hard to establish a `party line' which the writers had to 
follow" in their articles for Encounter, which was lively, irreverent 
and consistent in its rigor and literary quality.

In 1966, The New York Times disclosed that the magazine had been 
secretly financed by the C.I.A., which channeled funds through an 
organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Mr. Lasky 
had helped to create to wage the intellectual battle against Communism. 
The disclosure quickly became one of the major scandals of the cultural 
cold war, seized upon gleefully by Encounter's intellectual opponents as 
proof of a kind of deceitfulness and hypocrisy on the part of Mr. Lasky 
and the magazine's other editors.

After the initial disclosures of the magazine's hidden source of funds, 
Mr. Lasky and the other editors, Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, 
wrote a letter denying knowledge of the C.I.A.'s role, and there was 
never evidence that the magazine had tailored its views to suit any 
government agency.

Still, some former contributors, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Lionel 
Trilling, stopped writing for Encounter, and Spender resigned as 
co-editor. The magazine continued being published until 1990, but after 
the furor unleashed by the financing disclosures, it was always shadowed 
by the notion that even as it championed the virtues of the open 
society, it was tainted by a kind of clandestinity.

Melvin Jonah Lasky was born in New York on Jan. 15, 1920. He went to the 
City College of New York, a hotbed of left-wing "isms," where among his 
classmates were the men later to be known in New York intellectual life 
as "the two Irvings," Irving Howe and Irving Kristol.

During World War II, Mr. Lasky served as a combat historian in France 
and Germany, and no sooner had the war ended, than he showed what became 
his feisty and prickly approach to political controversy, taking part in 
a literary debate organized as a propaganda exercise in the Soviet 
occupied part of Berlin.

While most participants duly lambasted the "imperialistic" United 
States, Mr. Lasky, who with his goatee looked a bit like Lenin, compared 
the Communist system to Nazism.

That boldness led him to become an adviser to Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the 
American military governor of Berlin, who encouraged him to wage what 
was soon to become known as the cultural cold war. He first founded and 
edited the influential Berlin magazine Der Monat, and later became, with 
Spender, co-editor of Encounter, which had been founded by Mr. Kristol 
in London in 1953.

Mr. Lasky had a knack for being present at some of the major events of 
those years, most notably the anti-Communist workers' uprising in East 
Berlin in 1953 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956. He interviewed 
Eisenhower, Konrad Adenauer and Vaclav Havel, and knew just about 
everyone of note, from Thomas Mann and T.S. Eliot to Bertrand Russell 
and George Orwell. But his main legacy clearly was Encounter, which 
probably published more leading thinkers, scholars and critics than any 
other magazine of its day.

Among Mr. Lasky's own books are "The Hungarian Revolution" — described 
by a reviewer in The New York Times as "even better than the superb 
report of the United Nations Special Committee on Hungary" — and "Utopia 
and Revolution," published in 1977. In 2000, he published "The Language 
of Journalism," the first of a projected three-volume study of what he 
called "newspaper culture."

Mr. Lasky is survived by his companion of many decades, Helga Hegewisch, 
a popular German novelist; two children from a previous marriage, Oliver 
Lasky and Vivienne Freeman-Lasky; and two grandchildren.


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