Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
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Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
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Overview
A cautionary tale, throwing sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even now, about whether America’s national-security interests can be advanced by skullduggery and deception, Patriotic Betrayal, says Karl E. Meyer, a former editorial board member of the New York Times and The Washington Post, evokes “the aura of a John le Carré novel with its self-serving rationalizations, its layers of duplicity, and its bureaucratic doubletalk.” And Hugh Wilford, author of The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, calls Patriotic Betrayal “extremely valuable as a case study of relations between the CIA and one of its front groups, greatly extending and enriching our knowledge and understanding of the complex dynamics involved in such covert, state-private relationships; it offers a fascinating portrayal of post-World War II U.S. political culture in microcosm."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300210668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 552 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Patriotic Betrayal
The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism
By Karen M. Paget
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Karen M. PagetAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21066-8
CHAPTER 1
A FIGHTING FAITH
FIRST LADY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT felt betrayed. In the late 1930s, she had put the prestige of the White House behind the American Student Union (ASU), a coalition that included liberal, socialist, and communist groups. She had seen in the left-liberal coalition a youthful constituency broadly in support of her husband's New Deal policies and one that could carry on his legacy. The ASU and its sister organization, the American Youth Congress, shared a commitment to racial equality, labor rights, and peace. Despite the presence of communist students, Roosevelt defended the coalition against charges of subversion. When in December 1939 the ASU general secretary, Joseph Lash—a socialist rather than a communist—was summoned to testify before the congressional House Committee on Un-American Activities, she had signaled her support by sitting behind the witness table, knitting quietly. After the hearing, she had invited Lash, who became her close friend and eventual biographer, and other leaders to the White House. Sometimes she had dipped into her own purse to finance their activities. On one occasion, she had confronted several young leaders and asked whether they belonged to the Communist Party, and they had denied any affiliation. She later learned they had lied to her.
It wasn't only that the students had lied to her that made Eleanor Roosevelt feel the sting of betrayal. A single event in 1939 had revealed the influence of the Soviet Union in the ASU coalition and shattered liberals' faith in it. Once committed to fighting the fascists in Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany, and Mussolini's Italy, the ASU suddenly switched its position.
On August 23, 1939, Stalinist Russia had stunned the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, and communists around the world, heretofore opposed to Adolf Hitler, had thrown their support behind it. At an ASU meeting in December, delegates, who had defended Russia's invasion of Finland on November 30, implicitly supported the pact. In the United States, socialists like Lash and New Deal liberals like Roosevelt watched in horror as their coalition partners justified Stalin's deal with the devil. The twin blows—that Stalin could ally himself with Hitler and that Moscow's foreign policy could dictate the agenda of a U.S. student organization—tore the left-liberal coalition apart.2 The consequences of the pact ripped through labor, civic, religious, and youth coalitions as liberals searched for evidence of Moscow-directed communist influence.
According to Lash, after Roosevelt's experiences with popular front organizations, she refused to work in coalition with communists; they were untrustworthy partners. She argued that Party allegiance, when kept secret, made communists resistant to persuasion, one of the essential elements of democracy. But as late as 1941 the First Lady made it clear that she distinguished between tolerance for ideas — she would debate any proposition—and secrecy. "I don't care if a young person is a Communist—if he's frank about it," she told PM's Weekly. Not every liberal displayed such broad-mindedness, and hers would diminish as her experience with communist deception grew. By 1949, she was openly opposed to negotiating or compromising with communists.
The Stalin-Hitler Pact became a cautionary tale that defined a generation of liberals. "It was 1939, not 1946 or 1947," concluded one historian, "that marked the inauguration of the ideological cold war between those who still saw the communist movement as an integral part of the American progressive tradition and those whose hostility to the communists was fundamental and implacable." Not all liberals took a firm position against communism this early, but those who did were the precursors to a bitter fight within the Democratic Party, a battle that gradually forced out left-wing activists and drove Communist Party members underground.
The emergence of a liberal anticommunist doctrine between 1939 and 1946 reshaped the American political landscape. It caused Democratic president Harry S. Truman to fire his secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, formerly Franklin Roosevelt's vice president, for advocating cooperation with the Soviet Union. It created a generation of leaders dedicated to purging communist influence in liberal organizations. It swelled the ranks of Cold Warriors willing to combat the Soviet Union by any means necessary. It put nongovernmental organizations in the service of U.S. national security objectives, and would find its fullest expression during the presidency of John F. Kennedy—ironically, since prominent liberals, including Eleanor Roosevelt, were none too sure of his political bona fides. When, later, a younger generation of liberals judged their elders harshly for elevating ends over means and compromising civil liberties, and accused them of betraying democracy—the very thing they had sought to protect—liberal anticommunist defenders responded that fighting evil sometimes required a tempering of idealism. They justified their actions by invoking patriotism, placing loyalty to the United States above more democratic values.
Had Eleanor Roosevelt been a more traditional First Lady, we might not have so clear a picture of how she and other veterans of 1930s student politics wrestled with the Stalin-Hitler Pact, of their sense of betrayal, or of how they subsequently sought to marry their liberal ideals to a hard-nosed anticommunism. But Roosevelt was an activist. In 1940, she joined the U. S. Committee of the International Student Service, a group of like-minded educators and New Deal colleagues, to mobilize American youth, and ensure that the American Student Union experience was not repeated. And in 1941, she offered her family's thirty-one-room summer cottage on Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, to train a new generation on the danger of communist tactics. The record of this group's actions, available in rarely perused archives, reveals important continuities with postwar developments that are usually ignored, if for no other reason than the tendency to divide history into distinct eras.
The group Eleanor Roosevelt joined had ambitious goals: to restructure the American student movement, train a new generation of leaders, and form a national student organization free of communist influence. Had they succeeded—and they nearly did—America might have emerged from World War II with a strong national union of students. Despite organizational failures, the legacy of the Roosevelt group influenced the founding of the postwar U. S. National Student Association, shaped its relationship with the government, and, most important, determined its first international activities.
The U.S. Committee was an affiliate of the International Student Service (ISS), based in Geneva. Formed in 1920 after World War I to mobilize relief to students, the ISS was largely Protestant but prided itself on religious ecumenism, including in its membership both Catholic and Jewish groups. Fiercely nonpartisan, the ISS worked with war refugees regardless of country, combatant status, or political affiliation. In the United States, ISS committee members included prominent college presidents (from Smith, Hunter, and Brooklyn Colleges, the New School for Social Research, and Rockefeller Institute) and prestigious professors, dubbed by a younger board member "the Heavyweights of Education." But the inclusion of the word student in the organization's name is misleading. Adults in Geneva and the United States ran the ISS, a practice common in the first half of the twentieth century, when few student-controlled organizations existed.
The fear that communists might fill the organizational vacuum left by the collapse over the next year of the American Student Union gave urgency to the U.S. agenda. In September 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt and committee member Archibald MacLeish, a poet and the Librarian of Congress, headlined a major conference on students and the future of democracy at International House near Columbia University in New York. The conference, attended by more than three hundred students from ninety-two colleges, marked the public launch of a campaign to revamp the American student movement.
During the conference, longtime U. S. ISS Committee board member Clyde Eagleton, an expert in international law at Columbia, approached Joseph Lash, and asked whether Lash would be interested in staffing the committee. Lash had evolved politically from a socialist skeptical of the New Deal to an ardent Roosevelt supporter, and now was working for the president's reelection. After some consideration (and the offer of a munificent salary of $4,000), Lash accepted.
That Lash was thirty-two years old and had no student status and few ties to American campuses apparently concerned no one. With his popular-front experience, he was ideally suited to spot and combat communist tactics, an overriding objective of the U. S. Committee. Lash suggested that the Committee also hire his socialist colleague from ASU days, Molly Yard (known to a later generation of feminists as the head of the National Organization for Women). Paradoxically, the fact that Lash and Yard had socialist backgrounds fueled charges in the United States that the ISS had turned pink if not red; the public rarely understood the deep antagonism between communists and socialists and more often equated the two.
Eleanor Roosevelt's address to the conference drew a derisive response from Time magazine, whose editors described the First Lady as a "friend & guardian of the Communist-riven American Youth Congress," who had taken "time off from early Christmas shopping to help launch another youth movement." Time patronizingly dismissed the conference as "an attempt to wean youth from passing angry resolutions to sober discussion."
Although written in flippant Time-ese, the article accurately captured the U. S. Committee's aversion to the protest tactics that had characterized the 1930s. In 1940, mass mobilizations, demonstrations, and campus strikes carried worrisome echoes of Nazi youth rallies. The Committee soon abandoned large conferences as too difficult to control, a view solidified by a postmortem of the September event and Lash's contention that his former colleagues had tried to take it over.
The ISS sought instead to screen, select, and train students who had the backing of campus bigwigs: presidents, provosts, and deans. This top-down approach, prevalent until the 1960s, created a subtle conservative bias in picking leaders. The students' need to acquire the imprimatur of powerful elites meant striving to please those in authority, tempering rebellious tendencies, and staying within prescribed boundaries. During the formative stages of the NSA-CIA relationship, such habits of deference, especially among undergraduates, helped camouflage CIA interest.
At the time, it seemed possible that a group of elite (mostly) men without strong ties to American students could achieve the Committee's sweeping goals. Roosevelt, who often hosted meetings in her 65th Street home in New York City, wrote the foreword to a widely circulated pamphlet outlining the omnibus ISS program in the United States, which included conferences, seminars, a Washington office, a newspaper, and leadership training institutes. The Committee also looked ahead to a postwar world and the international role American students could play in it, even though in 1940 the United States had not even entered World War II.
Key to the ISS agenda was a six-week leadership institute, first held in the summer of 1941 at the Roosevelts' summer home in Campobello. The U. S. Committee took care in its choice of students, enlisting the anthropologist Margaret Mead to devise a two-page questionnaire to screen applicants. Once the list was winnowed, finalists underwent personal interviews. They were asked to elaborate on statements such as "The course of history is fixed and it is beyond the power of any individual to change it" and "The last generation got us into this mess, and we can't do anything about it," as well as more provocative questions like "Are there appeasers in the State Department?" Thirty out of eighty students made the cut, many of them from East Coast colleges. The ISS provided scholarships to those who couldn't afford the room and board.
Getting to Campobello took almost as much commitment as meeting the goals of the Committee. Located near the Maine-Canada border, the isolated island was accessible only by ferry (once the fog had lifted), following a long journey by bus, train, or car. In July 1941, Roosevelt drove herself from New York, being careful to go slowly, as she noted in her "My Day" syndicated newspaper column, because her mother-in-law was along. Despite its natural beauty, Campobello lacked modern amenities like electricity and indoor toilets. Former Smith College president William Allan Neilson, then seventy-two, endured these hardships for the entire session, surely a measure of his devotion to the enterprise.
Many prominent New Dealers ferried out to Campobello Island that summer. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter lectured on the role of law in civilized society. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau schooled the students in international finance. Other guests included Roosevelt stalwarts such as White House adviser Lauchlin Currie and Archibald MacLeish. Students also heard from Louis Fischer, a journalist who later wrote a seminal essay about his years covering the Russian Revolution and living in the Soviet Union. The listeners included his son George Fischer, a future founder of the U.S. National Student Association and perhaps the only American student who was once a member of the Soviet Young Pioneers. Other academics who made the trek included U.S. ISS Committee members Clyde Eagleton and Austrian émigré Walter Kotschnig, from Smith, who stepped off the ferry too soon and splashed down, suitcase and all, in the Bay of Fundy.
But the curriculum consisted of more than lectures. The second half of the course, "The Student as Student," distilled the lessons of the American Student Union. The Campobello students held mock conventions in order to develop skills for combating such communist tactics as noisy floor demonstrations and microphone grabs. Lash schooled the younger students on why communists, often the minority in organizations, wielded disproportionate influence: communist cadres were indefatigable, came to meetings early, stayed late, and never lost focus. He argued the need for liberal cadres, "capable of coping with the 'professional revolutionists' who staffed the communist-inspired and -directed groups in the United States."
The students hammered out principles to guide a new national student organization: its membership base must be comprised of student governments, not national groups like the YMCA that might have chapters on campus. It must focus on "student" (that is, educational) issues and avoid politics and ideology. It must be structured regionally to dilute the influence of big cities that produced left-wing agitators. After days of discussion, George Fischer and Louis Harris (of the University of North Carolina, the future pioneering pollster), among others, turned the discussion into a written statement of principles. After the war, the new U. S. National Student Association would adopt these principles of nonpartisanship, student government affiliation, a focus on student issues, and a regional structure.
The thorniest question for the Campobello students was whether to ban communists from their future organizations. It was an issue, Lash later wrote, that "the group never fully came to terms with." Exclusionary provisions flew in the face of the liberal commitment to civil liberties. Shifting alliances also affected the debate. A few weeks earlier, the Nazis had violated the nonaggression pact by invading the Soviet Union, and Stalin's allegiance had shifted once again. While the reversal brought about a new level of disgust for American communists who followed Moscow's changing line, the Soviet Union was now an official U. S. ally, which tended to undercut the rationale for a ban.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Patriotic Betrayal by Karen M. Paget. Copyright © 2015 Karen M. Paget. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, ix,Prologue, 1,
PART ONE COOPERATION OR COMBAT,
1 A Fighting Faith, 11,
2 Apostolic Catholics, 26,
3 Behind the Scenes, 43,
4 Enter the CIA, 61,
5 Allard Lowenstein and the International Student Conference, 79,
PART TWO DENIAL OPERATIONS,
6 The Counteroffensive, 97,
7 The Battle for Members, 115,
8 Opening the Spigot, 130,
9 The Spirit of Bandung, 144,
10 Shifting Battlefields, 156,
PART THREE COMPETITIVE COEXISTENCE,
11 Hungary and the Struggle Against Nonalignment, 173,
12 Debating Democracy in Red Square, 186,
13 Courting Revolutionaries, 196,
14 Gloria Steinem and the Vienna Operation, 214,
15 Social Upheavals, 228,
PART FOUR LOSING CONTROL,
16 Showdown in Madison, 243,
17 Pro-West Moderate Militants, 256,
18 A Pyrrhic Victory, 270,
19 The Persistent Questioner, 280,
20 Lifting the Veil, 295,
PART FIVE THE FLAP,
21 Philip Sherburne Takes on the CIA, 313,
22 The Game Within the Game, 330,
23 Hide-and-Seek, 344,
24 Do You Want Blood on Your Hands?, 360,
25 The Firestorm, 370,
26 The Enemy at Home, 388,
Cast of Characters, 403,
Chronology, 409,
Notes, 413,
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms, 505,
Acknowledgments, 509,
Index, 511,