The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War

The State-Private Network

Helen Laville, Hugh Wilford, Helen Laville, Hugh Wilford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134251896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This new book examines the construction, activities and impact of the network of US state and private groups in the Cold War.

By moving beyond state-dominated, 'top-down' interpretations of international relations and exploring instead the engagement and mobilization of whole societies and cultures, it presents a radical new approach to the study of propaganda and American foreign policy and redefines the relationship between the state and private groups in the pursuit and projection of American foreign relations.

In a series of valuable case studies, examining relationships between the state and women's groups, religious bodies, labour, internationalist groups, intellectuals, media and students, this volume explores the construction of a state-private network not only as a practical method of communication and dissemination of information or propaganda, but also as an ideological construction, drawing upon specifically American ideologies of freedom and voluntarism. The case studies also analyze the power-relationship between the state and private groups, assessing the extent to which the state was in control of the relationship, and the extent to which private organizations exerted their independence.

This book will be of great interest to students of Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and IR/security studies in general.

Part I

THEMES

INTRODUCTION

Negotiating freedom

Scott Lucas

In 1999, the freelance historian Frances Stonor Saunders caused a flurry of press comment with the publication of her Who Paid the Piper?, published in the US under the more prosaic title The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Edward Said proclaimed, ‘The energy and determination of her research, to say nothing of the scepticism that nurtured it, are important signs of stirring intellectual restlessness and even of a kind of incitement, which is what is needed most of all’.¹

Saunders moved on to a very different project, a study of the fourteenth-century mercenary Sir John Hawkwood,² but beyond narrating a new Cold War for the general reader she has made a unique contribution to scholarship. She carried out a dual recovery of the ‘missing dimensions’ of post-1945 history. The conflict was no longer defined through the manoeuvres of presidents, state departments and the military but also through the strategies and operations of their covert colleagues. Those strategies and operations in turn were concerned with the ever-present but little-noted battleground contested by the ‘West’ and its Soviet enemy: the global campaign to prove the superiority of a ‘total’ system which offered much more than geopolitical influence, economic strength and military dominance, a system that, in the words of NSC 68, embodied ‘the idea of freedom . . . the most contagious idea in history, more contagious than the idea of submission to authority’.³

When Who Paid the Piper? came out, the bellwethers of Cold War history in the United States – the leading professors defining the analytic terrain, the most prominent journals, the most prominent associations – were caught up in the effort to define, less than a decade after the break-up of the Soviet Union, what the US had ‘won’. The most egregious claims of historical objectivity were of the ‘We Now Know’ variety, books which soon left behind any nuanced analysis, indeed omitted much of the world outside the United States, to assert ‘objectively’ that, ‘Many people then saw the Cold War as a contest of good and evil, even if historians have rarely done so’, leaving the unstated but clear conclusion that this was American good and Soviet evil with no position (and no country) in between.⁴ Other monographs looked for a more definitive history of the American ‘national security state’ and an assessment of power transcending geopolitics and economics but, after hundreds of pages, fell into arbitrary divisions such as the ‘wise men’ who had fashioned the policy confronting the Soviet challenge in the early Cold War versus the ‘foolish men’ who somehow took the United States into the failure of Vietnam.⁵ The Groundhog Day battle of ‘orthodox’ versus ‘revisionist’ explanations of US foreign policy – had Washington secured the Free World or was it driven by a quest for economic dominance? – was played out again and again.

To be fair, there was an ongoing invocation by some historians of the need for a ‘cultural turn’ in Cold War history. That challenge was met in part by studies which examined the promotion of ‘America’ by state bodies such as the US Information Agency (USIA), which considered groups, outside but interacting with formal government structures, such as African Americans and women, and which critiqued official discourses through their construction and use of race, sexuality and pathology.⁶ Too often, however, the ‘cultural turn’ became a cultural annex. Narratives of the USIA or of international exhibitions buttressed the established conceptions of ‘official’ strategy.⁷ The non-governmental groups remained in the wings, uncertain of their role, useful for an expanded title such as ‘The Cold War And . . . ’ but threatening trouble if they raised fundamental questions about the tensions within American political culture, the points where the Cold War’s quest for ‘freedom’ became problematic at home and abroad. Theorists such as Gramsci and Said were kept at a safe distance.

The risk was that, as some scholars highlighted the place of ‘culture’ in the Cold War, they also sought to contain it. Examinations in the journal Diplomatic History, issued just before and after Saunders’ book was published, set up a target of alleged theories of ‘cultural imperialism’ fostered by ‘supporters and descendants of the New Left [who] often settled in university towns’ and reassured the reader that ‘we will discover that we needn’t be afraid of Steven Spielberg after all’.⁸ However culture was incorporated into the Cold War, the notion of a successful ‘End of History’ must not be threatened:

If … democratic government is the only unchallenged form of state legitimacy virtually everywhere in the world, if social questions such as the rights of women and minorities are so widespread on almost everyone’s political agenda, if economic questions concerning the relative roles of state and society everywhere have common themes, then surely it is because of the worldwide impact of a philosophical – some might prefer to say an ideological – conviction that mobilized American resolve to win the struggles against fascism and communism….⁹

The present volume is thus part of a continuing response to a Cold War history that presents itself as official, triumphal or definitive. Even before 1999, scholars (most of them based outside the US, and some of them represented in this volume) were examining aspects of the American state–private network through the study of subjects ranging from New York intellectuals, to women’s groups, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the American Federation of Labor, to abstract expressionists. Who Paid the Piper?, accompanied by other significant but less controversial monographs and articles, built upon this foundation by placing the state–private network at the heart of a general American campaign for hearts and minds during the early Cold War.

This is only the start of the challenge posed by this collection, however, for we are five years in real time and a generation in both scholarship and context beyond Who Paid the Piper? The book was never intended to be a comprehensive analysis of the organisation and dynamics of American ‘political culture’, of which the government’s Crusade for Freedom was only a part. As Saunders has freely admitted, she was only concerned with the covert dimension of the network (and, within this, only those areas of the covert campaign focusing on ‘high culture’) and her emphasis was on documentation, rather than critique, of that network.

The obvious injunction is that filling in ‘missing dimensions’ should not end in a two-dimensional depiction of the cultural Cold War. Tensions and contradictions between the actors in the state–private network, in the ideology and interests of that network, in its ‘cultural production’ and in the reception of that production must be examined. They should be examined not in a search for an easy resolution of freedom versus its totalitarian foe, but with the recognition that the creation and projection of ‘America’, and thus the construction of the Cold War (and, beyond this volume, of later conflicts such as the ‘War on Terror’), was always in flux.

Some criticism of this process can be met easily. One scholar, introducing a collection of essays on the cultural Cold War in western Europe, framed it as ‘presentation . . . from which one side (the Russians, their satellites and their friends in the west) have strangely vanished. No sight or sound of them. It is America vs. Amerika’. Another review of work on ideology, culture and US foreign policy asserted: ‘To deal only with the United States and leave out the Soviet Union in discussing the role of Cold War political warfare has about as much resonance as one hand clapping’.¹⁰ The implication – that scholars raising the notion of the state–private network are ignorant of or unwilling to examine any nefarious Soviet counterpart – is a diversion. The well-documented existence of Soviet cultural campaigns has not been ignored by the authors in this volume; rather, they have examined how the perception of those campaigns helped shape the US state–private network and its initiatives. At the same time, recognition of efforts of ‘the Other’ can only be part of the story; the direction of the American crusade for freedom, and the issues that it raised, went far beyond a simple confrontation with Moscow. Making this argument in no way reduces these authors to proponents of ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us’.

A similar response can be made to the charge that this scholarship is ‘anti-American’. The rights or wrongs of strategy or operations can be debated, but the purpose of these essays is not to derogate the US government or the private groups and individuals who worked with the government in the development of cultural campaigns. Consideration of the ‘America’ promoted by the network, far from constituting a condemnation of the concept, is a recognition of the power and the appeal of the ideals and practices of that ‘America’ to both producers and recipients.

The interrogations in these essays should and do start from other premises. One of the central issues raised by Who Paid the Piper? concerned the relationship between the hegemony of the state and the autonomy of private groups. Saunders, in the telling of her tale, usually worked from the basis of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) control of its private allies. Hugh Wilford, extending his research on American intellectuals, offered the memorable corrective: ‘It might well have been the case that the CIA tried to call the tune; but the piper did not always play it nor the audience always dance to it’, while Giles Scott-Smith applied and extended Gramscian theory in his book on the Congress for Cultural Freedom.¹¹ Both continue their critiques in this volume, Wilford through his attention to an ideological negotiation beyond ‘neoconservatism’ and ‘liberal anti-communism’, Scott-Smith with the essential injunction that the relationship between the state, private sector and ‘political culture’ needs to be considered before 1945, and even before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Yet, even as these essays confirm that evaluation of the state–private network has gone beyond the simple notion of ‘control’, they raise further challenges. There is always the danger that the state recedes once more before the autonomy of private groups and prominent intellectuals and political culture remains the undifferentiated output of a simple connection between official programme and private actor. Tony Shaw offers one response with the notion of a shared ‘ideological worldview’, a concept represented by Inderjeet Parmar as a Gramscian ‘state spirit’ projected through corporatism, parastates and epistemic communities.

An alternative, possibly complementary, approach is to critique the homogeneity of shared ideals, structures or operations. Helen Laville offers a triple shift with her identification of a voluntarism predating but reconfigured in the Cold War, her transcendence of traditional ‘elite’ approaches with her case study of women’s organisations and her establishment of a cooperative model marrying American exceptionalism to internationalism. Far from bringing cohesion, however, the ideological/voluntarist impulse to maintain a ‘private’ sphere caused tension in the state–private network.

As Laville notes cogently, the basic fact of covert support by the state undermined any conception of the ‘private’.

Laville’s constant but never-resolved relationship between cooperation and cooptation should be juxtaposed with Ali Fisher’s consideration of the negotiations of the state–private network. Fisher’s previous work on the formation of American Studies in Britain moved beyond the dichotomy of the state and private by positing a triangular relationship between the state, the foundation providing funds and ‘local’ academics.¹² In this volume, Fisher develops this critique of a systematic bloc, suggesting a ‘double production’ of political culture. The first transmission is the state’s construction of an ideal cultural framework and operations to project ‘America’; the second is the negotiation of that construction with another cultural producer such as a foundation. This double transmission in turn is re-shaped by the reception and negotiation of structure and operations by the local ‘private’ organisation – in Fisher’s cases academic communities, but these just as easily could be a labour union, a women’s group, a student association or a media outlet – in its own consideration and projection of America.

Other essays in this volume can be read as evaluations of this more complex approach to the state–private network. Andrew Johnstone and Karen Paget, like Scott-Smith, take scholarship beyond the Cold War and beyond a simple assertion of US-led ‘internationalism’. Johnstone reintroduces the catalyst of an influential individual, in this case Clark Eichelberger, moving between the base of his private organisations and his discussions with state officials to project and, arguably, limit the internationalist vision during the Second World War. Like Laville in her study of women’s organisations, Johnstone suggests that, in the interaction between Eichelberger’s personal interests and the objectives of the state, the internationalist vision gave way to a more ‘nationalist’ construction of the world. Paget, breaking the bind of studies of the National Student Association (NSA) limited to its post-1950 collaboration with the CIA, considers the development of individual and group interests within the NSA’s forerunners. From 1942, well before the formation of the ‘national security state’ that would shape policies and networks in the Cold War, there was a complex, often shadowy, interaction between student representatives, private sponsors and the government. Paget’s conclusion, linking the pre- and post-Cold War periods, is a telling extension of Laville’s cooperation/cooptation argument: beyond the struggle for control and any debate of hegemony vs autonomy, what was essential in American political warfare was the ‘appearance of independence’.

Elke van Cassel’s examination of the interchanges behind the p...