“It has been decades since the late historian Christopher Lasch wrote his famous essay “The Cultural Cold War” in the Nation, which showed that many postwar American intellectuals had accepted funds from the CIA, and argued that they were as compromised as those artists and intellectuals in Europe and those within the Soviet bloc who prospered by accepting KGB sponsorship.
With “The Mighty Wurlitzer” (Harvard University Press, 342 pages, $27.95), Hugh Wilford has given us the first comprehensive and thorough report of how the CIA — modeling its policies on the Comintern’s creation of Communist front groups — created their own fronts, with recipients who included not only the white male writers and artists who made up much of the postwar cultural establishment, but women, African-Americans, students, the labor movement, Catholics, and journalists.” Read the review at the New York Sun.
