Coleman, Peter. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom
and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: The Free Press,
1989. 333 pages.
Peter Coleman is a former member of the Australian parliament and
editor of the Australian journal "Quadrant," one of the literary magazines
established in the 1950s by the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.
This explains his interest in exposing and apologizing for the "liberal
conspiracy" of post-war intellectuals who fed at the trough of the Western
spymasters. He inadvertently exposes them because even though the facts were
well-established, they have never been coherently compiled. But Coleman would
rather apologize for them, as most of these "idealistic, courageous, and far-
sighted" men did not know that the CIA regarded them as just another front.
From 1950 until the exposure of the CIA's penetration of domestic
foundations in the mid-1960s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom spawned
international seminars, regional programs, and about two dozen cultural,
literary, and political magazines throughout the Western world (the flagship
was England's "Encounter"). Many leading intellectuals were involved: Sidney
Hook, Arthur Koestler, Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald,
Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, and Ignazio Silone. After CIA funding ended in
1967 the Ford Foundation tried to take up the slack, but CCF was never
quite able to recover from the embarrassment.
ISBN 0-02-906481-3
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