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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Mary McCarthy had, and has, a formidable reputation in American intellectual life. Brilliant, beautiful, much feared for her biting wit, she is a major figure in the histories of her time and in the biographies of her friends, lovers, and enemies – notoriously unstable categories. She was, with her great friend, Hannah Arendt, a certain archetype of the independent and engaged intellectual. Although she began life as a member of the provincial Seattle upper middle class, and in her final years she constructed a life in Maine not remote from the ideals of that class, its constraints, and decorous pleasures, in her youth and early maturity she lived a myth of New York bohemia: poverty-stricken, promiscuous, politically of the Left. Such is her image. It is not an inaccurate story. It is merely incomplete. For during much of that time, for fifteen or twenty years, her milieu was defined not so much by the culture of the Left, as by that of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Not that she was an official of the Agency; nor was it that she was one of those – like Arthur Schlesinger or Philip Rahv – who were more or less associated with it. She simply lived in a cultural matrix saturated with its influence, where she published in its journals, attended its conferences, stayed in the homes of those who were in its employee or who were members of the families of CIA officials. It is not, or should not be, controversial that such circumstances had an influence on her thought and work as it had on the thought and work of her contemporaries.
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5. “Sartre-bashing, of course, was a mainstay of the Congress for Cultural Freedom” (Carol Brightman, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World [New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992], 513)Google Scholar.
6. “ … the much-publicized break between Sartre and Camus over Stalin's terror in 1952. Arguing that the Communist party was still the vehicle of change for the working class, Sartre refused to abandon the Soviet Union despite the latest reports of internal repression … public opinion had sided with Sartre … In New York, it was as if Paris, that cosmopolis of artists and intellectuals, as Lionel Trilling called it, had fallen. ‘The commanding position of Stalinism in French cultural life does not prevent our having the old affinity with certain elements of that life,’ Trilling declared in “Our Country and Our Culture,” ‘but it makes the artistic and intellectual leadership of France unthinkable.’ Among anti-Stalinist intellectuals like Trilling and, by 1952, their silent partners in the CIA, the triumph of Stalinism in Paris appeared more threatening than the triumph of Mao Tse-Tung in China. Even today, Cold War veterans of the CIA's cultural affairs programs point to Sartre's 1952 defense of the Soviet Union, and Les Temps Modernes' ‘Stalinism,’ as a justification for the CIA's decision to secretly sponsor a string of European magazines more sympathetic to the American point of view” (Brightman, , Writing Dangerously, 351–52Google Scholar).
7. Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, March 14, 1952, apropos Hook et al. (Brightman, Carol, ed., Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949–1975 [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995], 5)Google Scholar.
8. Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), 4–5Google Scholar.
9. “A ‘Cultural Conference for Peace’ was held in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Poland, from August 25 to 28, 1948 … This Soviet ‘Peace Offensive’ was able to call on some of the world's most admired artists, intellectuals, and scientists, figures like Pablo Picasso (who contributed his famous Peace Dove symbol to the movement), Charlie Chaplin, and Albert Einstein, whose immense prestige made it seem as if the mind and soul of the West had risen up to condemn containment and the Marshall Plan, and to defend the Soviet Union as the victim of American aggression … [the following Spring] another even more spectacular group of pro-Soviet Western cultural luminaries gathered at the Paris ‘World Peace Conference’ (Powers, Richard Gid, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism [New York: Free Press, 1995], 207–8Google Scholar).
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12. Ibid., 203.
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17. Hook Papers, Box 124, folder 1244, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
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19. “In February 1955, Mary McCarthy and [her then husband] Bowden Broadwater set sail for the volcanic cliffs of Capri … the Broadwaters were going to rendezvous in Rome with … a former girlfriend of Bowden's, a wealthy expatriate named Carmen Angleton … In May, the three friends planned to tour Greece in a borrowed jeep … Two years later … Bowden told Mary that while they were in Greece, he and Carmen Angleton had had an affair” (Brightman, , Between Friends, 356–56Google Scholar). McCarthy was with Broadwater from 1945 to 1946. He had graduated from Harvard in 1941. There are indications that McCarthy knew Carmen in the late 1940s (Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, Postmark October 19, 1948, Vassar, Mary McCarthy Files: “There is a rather pleasant Angletonian Radcliffe girl, a niece of Allan Nevins, on the faculty”).
20. “On April 15, [1961] Carmen Angleton gave Mary and Jim a wedding supper … Dwight Macdonald … attended the ceremony” (Brightman, , Between Friends, 462Google Scholar).
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28. Ibid., 248–49.
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30. Ibid., 239.
31. “The absence of anti-American articles in Encounter and the half-dozen English-language journals published throughout the Third World was a telltale fact … Encounter … in Bob Silvers's opinion, “had a peculiar blind spot — it hardly ever contained any critical articles about the United States, as if this was forbidden territory” (Brightman, , Between Friends, 501Google Scholar).
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33. A slogan of May/June 1968 in Paris was the demand to change one's life. Later this was transformed into the satirical slogan that one should change one's house.
34. “One aspect of covert action which particularly appealed to [Dulles] was embodied in the various organizations and publications supported by CIA to combat the phalanx of Communist-dominated bodies which came into being in the postwar years. He believed strongly in the necessity of providing intellectually acceptable instrumentalities for the exchange and development of liberal thought for the center and center-left forces which were coming to the fore, or seeking means of expression, in the post-World War II world … Europe had no outstanding journals of liberal opinion; this gap was filled, at least in part, by CIA, which supported Encounter in English and Preuves in French. (The Partisan Review was also CIA supported at one time.) The funds and effort spent on the Congress of [sic] Cultural Freedom, on the Asia Foundation, and on various book publishing ventures had the same motivation … Directly through the US labor organizations the AFL and CIO, the Agency sought to build up the non-Communists, whether they were socialist oriented or uncommitted. Dulles took a particular interest in this activity” (Jackson, Wayne, G. Allen Welsh Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence: 26 February 1953–29 November 1961 [1973; rept. Washington, D.C.: Historical Staff, Central Intelligence Agency, 1994], 1: 58–60Google Scholar).
35. Colby, William and Forbath, Peter, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1978), 119Google Scholar.
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40. Ibid., 228–29.
41. Quoted in Marchetti, Victor and Marks, John D., The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 48–49Google Scholar.
42. Lasch, , Agony, 108–9Google Scholar.
43. Saunders, , Who Paid the Piper? 399Google Scholar.
44. Brightman, , Between Friends, 506Google Scholar.
45. Smith, Richard Harris, OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 368Google Scholar.
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47. Ibid., 394–95.
48. Brightman, , Between Friends, 503Google Scholar.
49. Saunders, , Who Paid the Piper? 129Google Scholar.
50. Ibid., 409.
51. Brightman, , Between Friends, 506–7Google Scholar.
52. Lasch, , Agony, 111Google Scholar.