[Marxism] New book on CIA subversion inside the U.S.

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(As some of you might know, the NY Times Book Review section is edited 
by the dreadful Sam Tanenhaus, the neoconservative author of a 
flattering study of the snake Whittaker Chambers. He assigned the 
equally dreadful Nathan Glazer to review a book on how the CIA set up 
front groups that co-opted Gloria Steinem among others. It is ostensibly 
in the same vein as Saunders's "Who Paid the Piper". The problem is that 
one cannot trust Glazer, who gives the book a very positive review all 
in all. My tendency would not be to spend 28 dollars on a book that 
Nathan Glazer recommends. That is what happens when book reviews get 
politicized. Oh well.)


NY Times Book Review, January 20, 2008
A Word From Our Sponsor
By NATHAN GLAZER

THE MIGHTY WURLITZER
How the CIA Played America.
By Hugh Wilford.
Illustrated. 342 pp. Harvard University Press. $27.95.

This is a book whose content somewhat contradicts its title. “Mighty 
Wurlitzer” was the metaphor Frank Wisner, the first chief of political 
warfare for the Central Intelligence Agency, used to describe the 
C.I.A.’s “array of front organizations.” They were, he said, “capable of 
playing any propaganda tune he desired.” But Wisner rather exaggerated 
what he was able to do, as one learns from this remarkably detailed and 
researched book by Hugh Wilford, a British scholar now at California 
State University, Long Beach. For these organizations were not exactly 
“front organizations” as the term was understood by the Communist 
Information Bureau, or Cominform, the model that the young C.I.A. was 
trying to match.

The Kremlin had set up the Cominform in the early years of the cold war 
to coordinate the activities of scores of Communist-controlled 
professional, artistic and intellectual groups, and the C.I.A. decided 
to create or influence its own array of organizations and publications 
among intellectuals, labor organizations and citizen groups. But the 
leaders of just about all of these groups had minds of their own, and 
most of the organizations had been established independently of the 
C.I.A. For example, the small magazines Partisan Review and The New 
Leader, which, Wilford says, received C.I.A. funds in one way or 
another, owed nothing to the agency, either in their founding or in 
their operations. The idea of “fronts” hardly applies to them.

There were indeed fronts directly established by the C.I.A. for a 
particular goal, and the story Wilford tells of them in “The Mighty 
Wurlitzer” is fascinating, involving a surprising collection of 
well-known figures in American life. Consider the Independent Service 
for Information, set up at Harvard specifically for the purpose of 
getting some young anti-Communist Americans to attend a huge youth 
festival being organized by the Communists in Vienna in 1959. This was 
one of a series of events in which the Soviet Union promoted its 
versions of peace and progress, as contrasted with the cold-war policies 
of the capitalist United States.

A youthful Gloria Steinem had just spent a year and half in India, 
where, we are told, she befriended Indira Gandhi and the widow of the 
“revolutionary humanist” M. N. Roy, and had met a researcher who seems 
to have been a C.I.A. agent or contact. Attractive and progressive, 
Steinem was hired to run the I.S.I. and to recruit knowledgeable young 
Americans who could debate effectively with the Communist organizers of 
the festival, defending the United States against Communist criticism of 
segregation and other American failings.

Conservative student leaders certainly could have been found for this 
purpose, but they did not interest the C.I.A. or the I.S.I.: socialists 
and others on the non-Communist left had greater appeal because they 
would be more effective in reaching out to the European students who 
attended such festivals. One of those who went to Vienna was Zbigniew 
Brzezinski, then a Harvard graduate student; one of those who agonized 
over the offer of free transportation was Michael Harrington of the 
Young People’s Socialist League. The offer was withdrawn, according to 
Harrington, when he insisted that he had to be free to criticize 
capitalism and Communism equally.

The C.I.A.’s connections to the I.S.I. and a host of other organizations 
and publications was exposed in a storm of magazine and newspaper 
articles in 1967, and just about everything that had once been secret 
became public. Steinem stood up bravely: “I was happy to find some 
liberals in government in those days who were farsighted and cared 
enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,” she 
told The New York Times. And to The Washington Post she said: “In my 
experience the agency was completely different from its image: it was 
liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”

Steinem was a “witting” participant. Many others dependent on C.I.A. 
backing were “unwitting” (the terms, it seems, were in common use in the 
agency), because the money they accepted was channeled through existing 
foundations or through organizations ostensibly set up by wealthy 
individuals. Generally, it appeared that the funds were independent of 
the government. (The sums seem remarkably small for the most part, 
though I have not factored in inflation.)

Whereas the C.I.A. created the I.S.I. for a specific purpose, its 
relationship to the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of 
Industrial Organizations, the subject of an important chapter on 
American trade unions, was utterly different. The labor organizations 
had existed before the C.I.A. and had long been fighting Communists on 
their own — in American unions as well as in international trade union 
organizations. During the cold war they found common cause with the 
agency in battling Communist influence in foreign unions. But they had 
their own exceptionally qualified officials to conduct their foreign 
activities. In the A.F.L., probably the most important was Jay 
Lovestone, described by Wilford as “a particularly fanatical and 
ruthless anti-Communist.”

This remark illustrates Wilford’s somewhat cool attitude toward what 
many saw, with some legitimacy, as a worldwide conflict between tyranny 
and freedom. Lovestone had been the leader of the American Communist 
Party until he was expelled by Stalin himself. Clearly he knew a great 
deal about Soviet Communism and would not brook any interference or 
accept any guidance from C.I.A. officials, who in those early days were 
often from Ivy League colleges. Lovestone called them “fizz kids.” Of 
course Lovestone was not dependent on C.I.A. money — the A.F.L. had its 
own resources. But the C.I.A. was eager to support an organization like 
the A.F.L. in its anti-Communist work. Similarly with Walter and Victor 
Reuther in the C.I.O.

“Newly available evidence,“ Wilford concludes, “shows that the old 
imagery of puppet masters and marionettes fails utterly to capture the 
complexities of partnership between the Lovestoneites of the A.F.L. and 
the ‘fizz kids’ of the C.I.A.” This will hardly be surprising to the 
knowledgeable. And Wilford explains that the C.I.A.’s involvement with 
the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an influential cold-war 
association of writers and scholars dominated by New York intellectuals, 
was very much the same story.

Even when C.I.A. control was greatest, many American anti-Communists saw 
themselves not as doing the agency’s bidding but as pursuing common ends 
— contesting Communist influence among intellectuals, trade unionists, 
blacks, women’s groups, student groups and the like. There seem to be 
few cases where the C.I.A. wanted a group to do things that its leaders 
did not want to do. Rather, the issue that created conflict was 
generally the C.I.A. insistence on hiding its involvement — concealing 
the source of money and swearing “witting” leaders to secrecy, with 
penalties if they revealed what they knew (though there seem to be no 
cases, at least in this book, where any penalties were imposed).

After the C.I.A.’s activities were exposed, there were few who said they 
had been used, though rather more who said they were sorry to have kept 
the C.I.A. connection secret. Norman Thomas is one who, according to 
Wilford, expressed regret. Along with Victor Reuther, Allard Lowenstein 
and Bayard Rustin, Thomas was involved with the C.I.A.-sponsored 
Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, which lent 
“international credibility to a 1966 ballot effectively rigged against 
the socialist former president, Juan Bosch.” This is one of those 
passages that lead a reader to wonder if Wilford has fully grasped the 
nature of the conflict between socialists and Communists at that time. 
After all, Thomas and Rustin were socialists; there must have been other 
reasons than Bosch’s socialism that caused them to oppose him.

Thomas was an acquaintance of Allen Dulles, the director of central 
intelligence, and could call on him when there was a financial 
emergency. Likewise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a former member of the 
O.S.S., the predecessor to the C.I.A., personally knew senior officers 
of the agency and would brief them on cultural developments he was aware 
of. He frequently saw Frank Wisner, the manager of the Mighty Wurlitzer, 
“on the Georgetown dinner party circuit,” and they would commiserate 
about the debates New York intellectuals insisted on having over 
McCarthyism, which the C.I.A. found unhelpful. It was a time, as Wilford 
writes, “when the alliance between cold-war anti-Communism and liberal 
idealism still appeared natural and right.” That alliance explains much 
that current readers may find surprising in this book. It explains as 
well the outrage many writers have expressed about the C.I.A. connection 
over the past few decades.

There is a great deal to be learned from this book. Wilford has 
consulted an astonishing number of scholarly and popular accounts, along 
with the papers and records of some of the central participants and 
organizations. He’s done a remarkable job of research. If, on occasion, 
he doesn’t appear in full command of the story, I would trace that to 
his inability to see the degree to which the Communists were pariahs to 
the anti-Stalinist left. So, when he writes that “much of the American 
left had rejected the Dewey commission’s finding that Trotsky was 
innocent of the charges leveled against him by Stalin,” one wonders just 
what “left” he could possibly have in mind. I suspect it is those who 
were Communist-influenced or sympathetic to the Soviet Union. There 
aren’t many such slips, however. Wilford has mastered an enormously 
complex tale in almost every detail.

Nathan Glazer, a professor emeritus of sociology and education at 
Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “From a Cause to a Style: 
Modernist Architecture’s Encounter With the American City.”

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