Cummings, Richard. The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream.
New York: Grove Press, 1985. 569 pages.
Until his tragic death in 1980, Allard Lowenstein was an ex-congressman
from New York who was best known as a pro-civil rights and anti-war "dump
Johnson" activist. He gave charismatic speeches to legions of well-scrubbed
idealistic white students during the mid-1960s; his basic message was to
work within the system rather than subscribe to the politics of alienation
and confrontation. This was fine as far as it went. But the evidence shows
that until the 1967 National Student Association scandal, which revealed a
long history of CIA funding and put Lowenstein on the defensive, he was
working for what he might have called the "good-wing" of the CIA. This
"good-wing" funded culturally-diverse (and divisive) democratic left
movements in the Third World in order to present an alternative to Communist
organizing and a politics based on class analysis. Lowenstein spent time
in Africa, Spain, and Portugal meeting with various left-wing reformers.
Ironically, by 1974 he had become interested in the RFK assassination.
Cummings' biography will be regarded as the seminal work on Lowenstein
for years to come. He had access to Lowenstein's papers, spent hundreds of
hours in interviews, and demonstrates a broad familiarity with the literature
on the CIA. Further revelations that might outdate this monumental effort
could come from the CIA's files, but that isn't likely anytime soon.
ISBN 0-394-53848-X
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