The essay foreshadowed Kristol's next career move, which saw him become founding editor (with Stephen Spender) of Encounter, the London-based journal of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
release in 2000, the declared link between the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and certain abstract expressionist artists and critics, notably Clement Greenberg, sent art historians scrambling to revisit this pivotal moment in American cultural preeminence.
What they all have in common is that they describe aspects of that which, for various reasons, was never mentioned in Encounter, nor in connection with any of the other undertakings of the sponsor and publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1967).
It is the only one of the group of magazines associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (which included Encounter in the UK, Preuves in France and Der Monat in Germany) to have survived the end of the Cold War and into the twenty-first century, though the others were published in countries with several times Australia's population and potential markets.
A few years after its founding in 1947, the CIA began a campaign to promote international "cultural initiatives" in complex, covert association with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization of intellectuals, writers, scientists, and artists established by anti-Stalinist, social-democratic Americans and Europeans in the Berlin of 1950.
As early as 1962, Kenneth Tynan wrote a skit for 'That Was the Week That Was', showing how another impressive front for the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, operated as a Kulturkampf for NATO.
Like his fellow founder of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, he received CIA propaganda funds for much of the 1950s and '60s, via the agency's Congress for Cultural Freedom, a shop for anti-communist liberals that subsidized both Commentary and the influential Encounter.
