Culture, Ideology and History

Scott Lucas is head of the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, England. His most recent book is Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester University Press, 1999).

For the normally staid discipline of “diplomatic history”, it was an extraordinary moment.

 

At this year’s conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the plenary session considered the future of the “grand narrative”. Normally this would be the occasion for a collection of the profession’s great and good to conduct a respectful overview of the state of the art. There might be some tinkering at the edges—the standard call for more documents from former “enemy” countries or even from the not-so-free files of the US national archives, possibly a request for including a “missing dimension”, such as the intelligence services, in our consideration of policymaking, maybe some congratulations that historians have transcended the old disputes of the past, such as the nasty challenge of “Marxist” revisionists—but nothing fundamental would be questioned. At most, one of the panellists might be a recalcitrant holding out against the image of the United States defending national security and the Free World, but he or she would be flanked by calmer contributors and commentators.

 

But, whether through some quirk or a rogue conference organiser, all three of the panellists considering the “grand narrative” staged an assault on their profession’s representation of the United States. Frank Costigliola homed in on the grand narrative of “American exceptionalism”, the presentation of “a kinder, gentler hegemon” by those historians who meet the demands of the popular market (for example, Stephen Ambrose, the chronicler of America’s “greatest generation” of the Second World War), while those (say, Noam Chomsky) who offer a darker picture are excluded. Petra Goedde outlined her “cultural approach” with the evaluation of “politics as the public expression of a group’s customs, values or beliefs”. Penny von Eschen suggested that historians reject the grand narrative of both American exceptionalism and hegemonic power, and adopt the analysis of cultural studies to consider where “dominant power” is contested.

 

The real confrontation was still to come, however. The panellists, both implicitly and explicitly, had posed a fundamental challenge to the icon of “national security”, the dominant theme of books on US diplomatic history in the last decade. Melvyn Leffler, whose Preponderance of Power¹ on the Truman administration and the early Cold War is arguably the exemplary book of the “national security” school, rose to his feet to take up the challenge. Leffler made a series of objections, notably that historians had in fact focused for decades on ideals, values and culture in their consideration of decision making; however, he finally retied his colours to the mast with the question, “Why should [the historian] not prioritise variables?” He challenged Goedde, “You bring your cultural factors and I’ll bring my geopolitical factors [to evaluate a case study in US foreign policy] and we’ll see who comes off better.”

The Centrality of Ideology

The episode was far more than an academic squabble, more than an exercise in navel-gazing by the profession. For what I believe Costigliola, Goedde and von Eschen had done, albeit in different ways, was to raise the troublesome notion of “ideology” to explain the construction and implementation of US foreign policy in the Cold War. Moreover, they had done so in such a fashion as to critique not only their historical subjects but also mainstream scholars who had translated those subjects into “history”. If US policy towards Soviet communism were shaped for more than forty years by an exceptional notion of “freedom”, so too the story of that policy, written within years of the event, established a theme that “our” mission was the right one.

 

If one approaches anew, with no preconceptions, the seminal documents of US foreign policy in the first years of the Cold War, it is hard to see how they could be considered as anything other than ideological texts: the Truman Doctrine of 1947, with its opposing of free and tyrannical systems; the unveiling of the Marshall Plan, which called for “a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country”; Eisenhower’s first Inaugural, preaching over and over that “we who are free must proclaim anew our faith ... The enemies of this faith know no god but force, no devotion but its use”; Kennedy’s proclamation in his Inaugural, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

 

Nor were these proclamations merely a rhetorical screen for more “practical” objectives. The top-secret NSC-68 document of April 1950, the blueprint for a US offensive to vanquish Soviet communism, opened not with a statement of policy or a description of actions but with several pages of exhortation and invective:

 

Unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our own society, no other so skilfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center of military power.²

 

Yet from the 1950s there were denunciations of “moralism” in US foreign policy, notably in the critiques of Hans Morgenthau, and most ironically by George Kennan, given that Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff increasingly based foreign policy on the trumpeting of American ideological superiority. However, the succeeding generation of historians would dismiss even the qualm that Washington was not “realistic”, much less any notion that the government was pursuing a destabilising crusade.

Gaddis’s Cold War

Consider, for example, John Lewis Gaddis, proclaimed far and wide as the leading scholar of US diplomatic history. He endorses the original Cold War portrayal of a United States defending itself against Stalinist evil. But his unacknowledged ideological mission goes further: he has put critics of US foreign policy beyond the pale, accusing them of using “the classical Leninist model of imperialism” to turn “history into an instrument of politics”.³

 

In 1997 Gaddis summarised his legacy to scholarship in We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. It is a work whose arrogance in its presentation of his tunnel vision is breathtaking. Gaddis pays lip service to the contingency of historical interpretation by declaring that “historians are products and prisoners of their own time and place. They can no more escape their preconceptions than they can levitate benignly above their word processors or their students”.⁴ Needless to say, however, he does not pause to consider himself as “product and prisoner”, but lays out his text as truth.

 

The result gives hostages to fortune on almost every page; a couple of examples from Gaddis’s conclusion must suffice as a starting point for criticism. Under the title “The New Cold War History” (itself testament both to Gaddis’s audacity and his narrow crusade, as the book ignores the “new” history of culture, ideology and language), he sets out a few (italicised) hypotheses. One is that “the United States and the Soviet Union built empires after World War II, although not of the same kind” (p. 284), i.e., theirs was bad, ours was good “with a strong base of popular support” (p. 285). It might be objected that such “popular support” for the American protector was not evident in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, the Congo, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Australia, Panama, Iraq and other countries where the United States overtly and covertly intervened to change governments, often against the will of the people. But Gaddis skips away from the troubling thought: “the ‘third world’ did not, in the end, determine the Cold War’s outcome. What took place in Europe and Japan largely did, and there the results were decisive” (p. 286).

 

Then there is the hypothesis that “many people ... saw the Cold War as a contest of good versus evil, even if historians since have rarely done so” (ibid.), a neat means for Gaddis to counter any revisionism or new-fangled ideological and cultural criticism. Of course, Gaddis himself does not examine the history of the “common man”. He simply dons the cloak of American “common sense” (which has always resisted ideology) to claim that “democratic realism” beat “authoritarian romanticism” hands down and to set the record straight: “as long as Stalin was running the Soviet Union a cold war was unavoidable” (p. 292).

The National Security School

Or consider another mainstream historian of the Cold War, Melvyn Leffler. He initially came to prominence in the 1980s as a challenger of Gaddis’s conception of national security. Yet from the beginning, Leffler’s intervention was more of a modification than a challenge. His goal—“to elucidate the fundamental strategic and economic considerations that shaped the definition of American national security interests in the postwar world”⁵—could just as easily have been avowed by Gaddis, even if Leffler saw these considerations as long-term planning against the threats of the post-war world rather than a direct response to perceived Soviet aggression. By 1992 and his monumental Preponderance of Power, Leffler was moving away from his scepticism about the US military build-up and political confrontation with the Soviet Union. Influenced by events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leffler simply rewrote his tale as one of Truman and his “wise men” defending the West:

 

In understanding the nature of the Soviet threat in the early postwar period, in grasping the economic foundations of geopolitical success, in forging ties with moderate elites, in modulating the severity and duration of occupation regimes, in acquiescing to large doses of national autonomy within an overall integrationist strategy, and in supporting supranational mechanisms of control, Truman Administration officials manifested sagacity, sensitivity, and wisdom.⁶

 

Yet a few pages later, Leffler’s argument unravels, as these sage men who worked with “moderate elites” in Europe apparently “established linkages with discredited elites” in the developing world.⁷ Wedded to “national security”, Leffler makes artificial distinctions between the wisdom, prudence and foolishness of his subjects. He cannot admit that, ideologically and culturally as well as strategically, the “defence” of Europe and the “defence” of South-East Asia were part and parcel of the same global policy.

 

The notion of a crusade for freedom has remained marginal in the analysis of US foreign policy because historians, from the inception of the Cold War, have been part of a scholarly and political environment which repeatedly declared the “end of ideology”. Interpreting (and misinterpreting) books such as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), academics, journalists and other “experts” used ideology as a device to tar the excesses of the Soviet system, linking it to the fanatical evil of Hitler’s Germany. Moreover, the “end of ideology”, and the proclamation that pragmatism and moderation had triumphed in the United States, helped intellectuals manoeuvre between communism and the “ideology” of McCarthyism, which had become another and arguably more immediate menace. Little wonder, then, that book after book from the 1950s to the present day—political science, sociology, history, literary criticism—proclaimed the virtues and sometimes the attainment of a victorious “consensus”.

 

Throughout the 1990s and the new wave of scholarship assuring readers that the United States had not only won the Cold War but won it justly, “national security” was not uncontested. Michael Hunt wrote the incisive volume Ideology and US Foreign Policy in 1987. While fragmented in its approach, Hunt’s book brought ideology in from the cold. Anders Stephanson went even further in 1993, turning commentary on a journal article into a concise assault upon the “national security” paradigm: “Everything within the discipline [of diplomatic history] that has served to undermine narrow concerns with strategy and policymaking is either ruled out of court or seized and reassembled under the extended umbrella of national security.”⁸ (David Ryan’s text, US Foreign Policy in World History, was published in 2000. I believe it is the first work to evaluate concisely the relationship between foreign policy, economics and ideology in US history since the early days of the Republic, but it has yet to receive the attention it deserves.)⁹

 

These arguments have brought some response from the gatekeepers of national security. However, as they cover themselves with a reference to “ideology”, these historians only highlight their problems in dealing with the troublesome notion. Both Gaddis and Leffler added the idea that an American “Wilsonianism” (with its comforting association of support for self-determination and liberal democracy) confronted Soviet bolshevism, but by the time their narrative revisited 1945, US ideology had disappeared. In a 1994 book, fewer than fifty pages after announcing his discovery of “ideological rivalry”, Leffler wrote:

 

The men who made US policy were anything but idealists. They cared little about human rights and personal freedoms inside the Soviet Union and the Soviet orbit. They were concerned with configurations of power in the international system and how these configurations affected US interests abroad and, more important, the American political economy at home.¹⁰

 

At the same time, Leffler was following Gaddis, albeit less stridently, in dismissing revisionist critics of US foreign policy. William Appleman Williams, supposedly an inspiration for Leffler’s work, was rebuked for “discount[ing] the real evil [presumably Moscow rather than Washington] that existed in the world”.¹¹

 

Even more striking is Leffler’s most recent attempt to capture “ideology” in his framework. He admitted that he would revise Preponderance of Power by “assigning more importance to the role of ideology both in the making of American foreign policy and, especially, in the making of Soviet foreign policy”. His conclusion, however, vividly illustrated that Leffler himself could not escape ideology’s shackles:

 

Democratic capitalist governments demonstrated that they could tame market forces, avoid another great depression, and sustain economic growth ... They demonstrated that they could forgive their enemies, rebuild them, and integrate them into a viable international economy. They demonstrated that, however grudgingly, they could relinquish their imperial heritage, grant independence to the peoples of Asia and Africa, and endure the cycles of revolutionary nationalism that swept many Third World countries during the first generation of their independence.¹²

 

Gaddis’s latest contribution claims to examine ideology but is illuminating only because of how it embodies that ideology. Scholarly critique is sacrificed upon the altar of a “natural”, common-sense recognition of US superiority: “When in 1983, Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the ‘focus of evil in the modern world’, his speech appalled most academic experts on the Cold War ... For all his superficiality, Reagan managed to anticipate the course of events better than most of us who had spent our lives studying the Soviet–American confrontation.” He concluded: “NAIVE IMPRESSION ..: THE COLD WAR HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH GOOD AND EVIL.”¹³

 

Thus, hopes spurred by the plenary session of the SHAFR conference for a fundamental change of approach in “diplomatic history” may be misplaced. The high ground is still held by groups brandishing “new” documents as proof of the standard conception of an essentially defensive US foreign policy whose decisions were based on geopolitical considerations. The mission statement of the Cold War International History Project, established in Washington, D.C., in 1991 with the backing of the MacArthur Foundation, forthrightly declares that the CWIHP “disseminates new information and perspectives on the history of the Cold War, in particular new findings from previously inaccessible sources on ‘the other side’—the former Communist world”.¹⁴ The policies of past and present foes such as the Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba are scrutinised in detail; those of the US government—as a search of the CWIHP site with the keyword “CIA” reveals—do not merit a cursory glance. The Harvard Project on Cold War Studies similarly “promotes archival research in former East-bloc countries and seeks to expand and enrich what is known about Cold War events and themes” (although it does devote considerable space to declassified US documents). Its first two book-length projects have been the translation of Le livre noir du communisme (The black book of communism) and the publication Ethnic Cleansing in East–Central Europe, 1944–1948.¹⁵

Triumphalism, Past and Present

Even more disturbing is the hijacking of “ideology” or “culture” by historians to construct a new defence of American superiority. A series of essays in Diplomatic History, the leading journal for the profession, has written out the concept of US cultural imperialism.¹⁶ At the same time, there is the exaltation of an American Century based not upon economic power but upon the primacy of US values as “universal”. Introducing a collection of essays in Diplomacy History devoted to the topic, a euphoric Tony Smith wrote:

 

America’s victory in the struggles against fascism and communism between 1939 and 1989 ... has resulted for much of the globe in a fundamental reorganization of political power in a morally positive direction. For the moment, 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.¹⁷

 

Similarly, Frank Ninkovich elevated the notion of the “Wilsonian century” to justify a world made over in the American image.¹⁸

 

Does this matter? It certainly does, for these historical constructions are used not only to justify the past but to buttress the present. Emphasis on the Truman administration’s wisdom at the start of the Cold War serves as praise for US foreign policy at the end of that confrontation—witness both George Bush the elder and Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign and Bush the younger and Al Gore in the 2000 battle waving copies of David McCullough’s biography of Give ’em Hell Harry. The reincarnation of Dwight Eisenhower as a calculating genius behind a veneer of bumbling friendliness assuages doubts about the competence of Ronald Reagan and, presumably, the current occupant of the White House. The persistent treatment of the “periphery”—much of Asia, most of Latin America, and all of Africa—as territory to be defended or even saved by the United States is convenient for an administration today which divides these areas into pliant allies and “rogue states/countries of concern”.

 

Costigliola, Goedde and von Eschen have offered a starting point for recognising this interchange between historical constructions and decision-making. It is in the discourse of both areas that values are embodied, not only to rationalise or justify foreign policy but to shape it. The historical narrative, rather than being a critique, often recycles both “overt” conceptions such as freedom and democracy and “latent” meanings such as masculinised/feminised constructions of power.

 

However, my concern is that the new analysis favoured by Costigliola et al., valuable as it is, may avoid a direct confrontation with both the history and historians of the Cold War. The risk is that, breaking down the discourse of power, we are left with a “micro” examination which does not present a “macro” challenge to US foreign policy. The deconstruction of an American ideology must ultimately return to the recognition that, for more than fifty years, this ideology was aggressively and systematically promoted by the state in its effort to defeat the communist enemy. In that sense, Leffler may be right to invoke his “geopolitical” vision (albeit for the wrong reasons): language and culture were always considered as devices in pursuit of a global quest for political, military and economic advantage.

Political Warfare

How, then, can the new approach to diplomatic history, with its attention to culture and language, be reconciled with the more traditional markers of American power such as diplomacy, military strength and economics? I believe the answer lies in the recognition that the state, at the same time as it defined the political, military and economic contest with the Soviet bloc, pursued a “mobilisation of culture”. After all, as document after document reiterated (and speech after speech proclaimed), the battle was more than a clash of armies, technology and diplomacy: it was a confrontation between societies.

 

This “total” competition was to be pursued by means of the device of “political warfare”. In May 1948, George Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff disseminated a report entitled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”:

 

What is proposed here is an operation in the traditional American form: organized public support of resistance to tyranny in foreign countries. Throughout our history, private American citizens have banded together to champion the cause of freedom for people suffering under oppression ... Our proposal is that this tradition be revived specifically to further American national interests in the present crisis.¹⁹

 

By October 1949, PPS staff member John Paton Davies (later to be run out of the State Department for allegedly being “soft” on communism in China) had developed a plan for “Political Warfare against the USSR”. Included were suggestions for aggressive radio operations, leaflet drops by balloon, and the military training for anti-Soviet elements such as airborne and parachute guerrilla units. The National Security Council adopted the conception with the comment, “[Propaganda should] sustain the hope and morale of the democratic imperatives in these countries and at the same time take full advantage of actual and potential cleavages among the Communists and ruling groups in order to weaken the Soviet grip and make [it] possible for the [satellites] to be drawn out of the orbit of Soviet domination.”²⁰ NSC-68 thus only confirmed that the US quest—culturally as well as geopolitically—was not “containment” but a supposed “liberation” of those held captive by the communist menace.

 

And to succeed, this strategy had not only to win hearts and minds abroad but to keep them onside at home. As NSC-68 was drafted, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Edward Barrett declared:

 

However much we whip up sentiment, we are going to run into vast opposition among informed people to a huge arms race ... [So] the first step in the campaign is obviously building up a full public awareness of the problem ... We should have at least the broad proposals for action well in hand before the psychological “scare campaign” is started.²¹

 

So, in April 1950, days after the policy had been presented to the National Security Council, President Truman declared, “We must pool our efforts with those of the other free peoples in a sustained, intensified program to promote the cause of freedom against the propaganda of slavery. We must make ourselves heard round the world in a great campaign of truth. This task is not separate and distinct from other elements of our foreign policy. It is a necessary part of all we are doing ... as important as armed strength or economic aid.”²²

 

The historian can trace an ideological trajectory which moves from the Truman Doctrine, through Truman’s above-mentioned “campaign of truth” to Eisenhower’s twin 1953 statements, “A Chance for Peace” and “Atoms for Peace”. This projection of Eisenhower’s “New Look” (the shorthand term for his policymaking “advance” that favoured nuclear deterrence to keep Moscow in check) was far from being a genuine search for accommodation with the Soviet Union; instead, the statements were designed to keep the Free World and the American public at psychological arms.

 

Moreover, this strategy was implemented by an evolving apparatus, working both overtly and covertly, which included some agencies which are now well known (the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency), and others which are not (the Office of Policy Co-ordination, the Psychological Strategy Board). With the Smith–Mundt Act in January 1948, Congress finally authorised the executive “to provide for the preparation, and dissemination abroad, of information about the U.S., its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other information media, and through information centers and instructors abroad”.²³ The previous month, the National Security Council had commanded the State Department to provide “information” presenting a “sharpened contrast between U.S. policies and way of life and those of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes, in terms of human value”.²⁴ This was only a beginning, however: a secret annex to NSC-4, known only to the National Security Council and high-level advisers, directed the newly created CIA to devise a covert psychological programme of special operations.

 

Ironically, it was George Kennan, the supposed father of “containment”, who led the initial efforts to turn the rhetoric of political and cultural “liberation” into reality. As his Policy Planning Staff was crafting the principles of political warfare, it was also leading the conversion of the CIA from an agency for the gathering and analysis of intelligence into one for the aggressive pursuit of covert operations. Kennan would also initiate the creation of the National Committee for Free Europe, the “private” outlet for liberation operations in Eastern Europe and the model for parallel ventures vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and China.²⁵

 

NSC-68’s language not only provided the internal justification and the public campaign for a crusade against the Soviet bloc, it mandated a comprehensive approach to political warfare. Conventional and atomic armament, economic and military aid to “friendly” powers and the development of anti-communist alliances would be accompanied by an accelerated programme of covert activity to destabilise and break up the Soviet bloc. This would not only involve paramilitary assaults upon most countries in Eastern Europe and upon China; in the long run, these would prove secondary to the psychological assault, encompassing propaganda and economic warfare, upon the “hearts and minds” of those living in the captive nations as well as those in free nations threatened by the communist menace.

The State–Private Network

To carry out this campaign, the state had to ensure its promotion by “private” groups. The American ideology of freedom would be contradicted if the campaign were seen to rest upon official promotion. The government could be accused of disseminating state propaganda which, of course, was the practice of evil Nazi and communist regimes. Instead, the US campaign had to be seen as being driven by the individual choosing to spread the American message. In this total conflict of free versus totalitarian societies, every sector—the media, labour, business, women, youth, African Americans, athletes, academics—had to do its part (freely of course).

 

By 1951, the newly founded Psychological Strategy Board, co-ordinating the US government’s efforts, had identified 105 organisations for the “research and development” of operations. They included the American Legion, the Lions Club, the Anti-Communist League, the US Davis Cup tennis team, and the Yale Glee Club. In the same year, the CIA, its sponsorship of various institutions spiralling out of control, consolidated its efforts by creating the International Organizations Division. The first head of the division was Tom Braden, an intelligence officer in the Second World War but more recently executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It is far from surprising, then, that abstract art would become one of the CIA’s favoured spheres of cultural activity in the 1950s.

 

The systematic campaign would be significant at home as well as abroad. For while both the State Department and CIA might be legally barred from operations within the United States, they could work with domestic organisations which were carrying out international activities. The CIA in particular would establish long-term relationships with leading intellectuals, the most prominent art galleries, the national students organisation, influential publishers, special women’s groups, the largest newspapers and television networks, and the best-known American universities. During a time of peace, a state–private network had been established to prosecute war by all means short of military mobilisation.

 

Inevitably, this network would influence the founding accounts of the very Cold War it was prosecuting. The foremost studies of the Soviet Union came directly or indirectly from projects funded by the CIA and other government agencies. State support for Harvard’s Russian Research Center fostered texts such as How the Soviet System Works (1951), by R. A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles and Clyde Kluckhohn, and The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–23 (1954), the debut work of Richard Pipes, later to become the hawk of hawks on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council. Books on counter-propaganda, purportedly by Evron Kirkpatrick, the president of the American Political Science Association, were actually penned by government research staff.²⁶

 

Institutes created by or sustained by government funds included Harvard and Columbia’s Russian Research Centers, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, Yale’s Department of American Studies and Institute of Human Relations, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and Johns Hopkins’s Operations Research Office. Of course, there were also frequent contributions from former practitioners, notably George Kennan, who had helped create the Cold War environment they now assessed.

 

The state was assisting in the creation of an intellectual environment. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, who in The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949) promoted the essence of the American ideology (even as he denied that it was an ideology), was a founding member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF); he was well aware that the CIA provided its funds.²⁷ Others involved with the CCF or its American branch included Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Ignazio Silone, James Farrell, Diana Trilling, Raymond Aron, Nicolas Nabokov, Mary McCarthy, Tennessee Williams and Norman Thomas (who would approach his friend Allen Dulles when funds were urgently needed for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom).²⁸

 

Editors of the CCF’s magazines in Europe included Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender, Raymond Aron, Ignazio Silone and Nicola Chiaromonte. CCF seminars and conferences would bolster the careers and reputations of scholars such as Daniel Bell. CIA money would eventually find its way to Partisan Review, the bastion of informed criticism by Lionel and Diana Trilling, Harold Greenberg, and editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv (as well as government operatives like Melvin Lasky). Another recipient of CIA funds was the New Leader, with its fervent anti-communism and promotion of émigré opinion. In Britain, George Orwell would co-operate with British intelligence services by passing them his list of “suspect” persons;²⁹ after his death, his work and reputation would be spread across the world by the CIA and MI6. (Seeking the film rights to Animal Farm, the CIA asked Orwell’s widow to name her price. She asked for an introduction to Clark Gable. The operatives and Gable duly obliged.)³⁰

 

This does not mean that the state pulled the strings of “private” puppets. Even if the state had sought total control of the American message, it had neither the personnel nor the resources to ensure this. Instead, the state relied upon private allies who were in accord with its aims. Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would be the beneficiary of state largesse; W. E. B. DuBois would be expelled from the association’s board and arrested by the government. Anna Lord Strauss, president of the League of Women Voters, would tour the world for the State Department and help lead an organisation funded by the CIA; when the prominent journalist Dorothy Thompson founded a group for “peace”, the government would encourage other women to undermine her efforts. Those intellectuals taking a firm anti-communist line would see their careers promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom; those who questioned that line faced public vilification and ostracism.

 

Of course, historians of the national security school are not part of the formal state–private network that was established during the early Cold War. Significantly, the old pattern of funnelling CIA money to private outlets was disrupted in 1967 when, as the atmosphere of Vietnam gone wrong was leading to public scepticism about the wisdom and probity of official behaviour, the press documented the arrangements. Yet the network was never abolished, merely put on a quasi-public footing. Propaganda operations such as Radio Free Europe were brought to acceptability with overt state funding, while later ventures such as the Reagan-era National Endowment for Democracy would provide a surface notion of accountability, even if many of its activities remained in the shadows.

 

More importantly, as Peter Novick has eloquently argued, the “professionalisation” of history in the United States set parameters on acceptable and unacceptable notions of the Cold War.³¹ The national security school, enjoying a prominent position in professional organisations, and extensive support from universities and foundations, has projected a self-image of providing a “natural” account of events since 1945. (Significantly Gaddis and Leffler, apart from dipping into some of the “new” documents released after the Cold War, have shown little engagement with European scholarship on the United States and the Cold War.)

 

This is not a plea to replace one set of historians with another which is “correct”. Far from it: as Costigliola, Goedde and von Eschen have demonstrated, it is not only foreign policy but also historians’ accounts of that policy which is constructed by language, ideology and culture. The problem with the “national security” narrative is that it tries to elide that construction, never acknowledging that if one believes in the US foreign policy of the present, then one must defend the foreign policy of the past.

Today’s Ideological Crusades

This issue of ideological construction has not receded with the end of the Cold War, but has become even more prominent in the last decade. With the disappearance of the Soviet menace, the aggressive promotion of American “freedom” has required the identification of new enemies. Two different strands have been notable in mid-1990s thought. The first is Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” theory, which holds that the West must rediscover its virtues to stave off evil others such as Islam. In a twist on the “end of ideology” thesis, Huntington elevates culture as the site of the battle, even as he distances himself and the West from troublesome charges of pursuing ideology or profit: “The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.”³²

 

The second strand, even as it tries to distance itself from Huntington’s thesis, shares ideological ground with it. It is also striking in that it comes from the heart of the state–private network. In 1994, Anthony Lake, foreign service officer, university academic, and at the time national security adviser in the Clinton administration, wrote:

 

Our policy must face the recalcitrant and outlaw states that not only choose to remain outside the family but also assault its basic values. There are few “backlash” states: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. For now they lack the resources of a superpower, which would enable them to seriously threaten the democratic order being created around them. Nevertheless, their behavior is often aggressive and defiant. The ties between them are growing as they seek to thwart or quarantine themselves from a global trend to which they seem incapable of adapting.³³

 

Lake claimed that “this is not a clash of civilisations”, but his next sentence used language which could have been taken directly from the apocalyptic vision of NSC-68: “Rather, it is a contest that pits nations and individuals guided by openness, responsive government and moderation against those animated by isolation, repression and extremism.” Only the labels for the ideological menace had changed: “The enemies of the tolerant society are not some nameless, faceless force. They are extreme nationalists and tribalists, terrorists, organised criminals, coup plotters, rogue states and all those who would return newly freed societies to the intolerant ways of the past.”³⁴

 

So, just as Acheson stigmatised communism as the latest threat to the West after Islam, both Huntington and Lake revived Islam (and other “alien cultures”) as the menace after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is this artifice of fixed characteristics—good versus evil, rational versus irrational, defensive versus aggressive—that the “objectivity” of most US diplomatic historians has supported. Unless one questions the very construction not only of Lake’s supposedly “moderate” revision of the clash of civilisations thesis, but also of the purportedly wise, sensible and benevolent foreign policy of the past, then there is no way to posit, for example, that the greatest threat to international stability and wellbeing may lie not in Islamic fundamentalism or Balkan nationalism, but in “Americanism”, nor to assert that it is the Bush administration’s positions on national missile defence, environmental treaties, germ warfare, the death penalty and the worldwide sale of arms, that define the “rogue state”.

 

The approach of Costigliola, Goedde and von Eschen is to be praised precisely because, through the scrutiny of language and representation, it strikes at the “good versus evil” artifice. It is, however, only a beginning. It is not enough to crack open the door for a peek at the construction of “national security”. That door has to be taken off its hinges. By doing so, historians might meet the challenge of Edward Said: “Is there any role, or any possibility of a role in the post–Cold War era of globalisation for ... intellectual resistance and even freedom?”³⁵

Endnotes

1. Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).

 

2. “NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security”, 14 April 1950, US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, volume I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 237–92.

 

3. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War”, Diplomatic History 7, no. 3 (summer 1983), pp. 172, 179.

 

4. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. viii.

 

5. Melvyn Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–48”, American Historical Review (April 1984), p. 348.

 

6. Leffler, Preponderance of Power, p. 502.

 

7. Ibid., p. 509.

 

8. Anders Stephanson, “Commentary: Ideology and Neo-realist Mirrors”, Diplomatic History 17, no. 2 (spring 1993), pp. 284–95. See also David Campbell’s excellent Writing Security: US Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).

 

9. David Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History (London: Routledge, 2000).

 

10. Melvyn Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The US and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), pp. vii, 49.

 

11. Melvyn Leffler, “New Approaches, Old Interpretations, Prospective Reconfigurations”, Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (spring 1995), p. 194.

 

12. Melvyn Leffler, “Bringing It Together: The Parts and the Whole”, in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), p. 57.

 

13. John Lewis Gaddis, “On Starting All Over Again: A Naive Approach to the Study of the Cold War”, in Reviewing the Cold War, ed. Westad, p. 35.

 

14. See the CWIHP website at [http://cwihp.si.edu/].

 

15. See the HPCWS website at [www.fas.harvard.edu/~hpcws/index_f.htm].

 

16. See, for example, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Shame on US? Academics, Cultural Transfer, and the Cold War: A Critical Review”, Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (summer 2000), pp. 465–94, and subsequent commentaries.

 

17. Tony Smith, “Making the World Safe for Democracy in the American Century”, Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (spring 1999), pp. 174–88.

 

18. Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

 

19. Policy Planning Staff Memorandum, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”, 4 May 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, document 269 [www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/intel/260_269.html].

 

20. NSC-58/2, 8 December 1949, Minutes of Meetings of the National Security Council with Special Advisory Reports (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America), reel 2.

 

21. Barrett to Acheson, 25 April 1950, US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, volume I (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 225–6.

 

22. “Truth as a Weapon in Cold War”, Times (London), 21 April 1950.

 

23. US Information and Educational Exchange Act, Public Law 402, 80th Congress, 2nd session (January 1948), 62 stat. 6.

 

24. Circular, 8 December 1947, US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1947, volume IV (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), pp. 630–2.

 

25. See Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–1956 (New York: New York University Press, 1999), p. 67.

 

26. See Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 113–7.

 

27. On Schlesinger’s knowledge of CIA support, see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), p. 91.

 

28. See Lucas, Freedom’s War, pp. 111–2.

 

29. See Peter Davison, ed., Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living, vol. 20 of The Complete Works of George Orwell (London: Secker and Warburg, 1996), pp. 240–59, 318–27. For further discussion of Orwell’s connections with British intelligence, see Scott Lucas, “The Socialist Fallacy”, New Statesman, 29 May 2000, pp. 47–51. For a defence of Orwell against the charge of informing, see Christopher Hitchens in his exchange of letters with Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books, vol. 22, nos. 1–3 (6 January–3 February 2000).

 

30. See Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, pp. 290–3.

 

31. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 

32. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).

 

33. Anthony Lake, “Confronting Backlash States”, Foreign Affairs (March/April, 1994), p. 45.

 

34. Anthony Lake, “US Credibility at Stake in Haiti Moves”, remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations, 14 September 1994, quoted in Ryan, US Foreign Policy in World History, p. 193.

 

35. Edward Said, “Hey, Mister, You Want Dirty Book?” (review of Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?), London Review of Books, 30 September 1999, p. 56.