Encounter (magazine)
Encounter was a literary magazine founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol. The magazine ceased publication in 1990 and the operations closed in 1991. Published in the United Kingdom, it was an Anglo-American intellectual and cultural journal, originally associated with the anti-Stalinist left. The magazine received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency who, along with MI6, discussed the founding of an "Anglo-American left-of-centre publication" intended to counter the idea of Cold War neutralism. The magazine was rarely critical of American foreign policy and generally shaped its content to support the geopolitical interests of the United States government.
Spender, who served as co-editor until 1965 and then as a contributing editor, resigned in 1967, together with his replacement Frank Kermode, after the covert CIA funding for the magazine was revealed. Thomas W. Braden, who headed the CIA's International Organisations Division's operations between 1951 and 1954, said that the money for the magazine "came from the CIA, and few outside the CIA knew about it. We had placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom." Roy Jenkins observed that earlier contributors were aware of U.S. funding but believed it came from philanthropists, including a Cincinnati gin distiller.
Encounter experienced its most successful years in terms of readership and influence under Melvin J. Lasky, who succeeded Kristol in 1958 and would serve as the main editor until the magazine ceased publication in 1991. Other editors in this period included D. J. Enright.
Founding, funding and first editors
Representatives of MI6 and the CIA met in 1951 to discuss the creation of an “Anglo-American left-of-centre publication”, partly to counter the New Statesman. Three intelligence officers, Michael Josselson and Lawrence de Neufville of the CIA, and Monty Woodhouse of the Information Research Department, worked out the financing and distribution of the publication, using the CIA funded and managed Congress for Cultural Freedom as cover. Encounter launched in 1953. The CIA provided much of the funding through a dummy foundation. Funding from Britain was provided in the form of cash given to the magazine’s managing editor or cheques signed by Alexander Korda and Victor Rothschild, both of whom were aware of the set up.In 1954, the Japanologist Herbert Passin assumed the role of the magazine's Far Eastern representative, based in Tokyo, in which he acted for three years.
In 1963, Donald McLachlan, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, published an article which revealed that the UK Foreign Office was covertly funding Encounter. The article caused consternation among the UK and US intelligence services, which convinced Edward Heath, who was McLachlan's source, to tell McLachlan that the information was incorrect. The Sunday Telegraph issued a retraction in which it withdrew "any suggestion there might have been that the Foreign Office provided a subsidy and that the editorial independence of Encounter is not in question".
In 1964, the ownership of Encounter was transferred from the CCF to Cecil Harmsworth King's International Publishing Corporation. Given King's links to British and American intelligence services, this was an attempt to preserve the magazine's credibility.
The covert partial funding of Encounter by the Central Intelligence Agency, via such American organisations as the Farfield Foundation, and thence to the CCF, was revealed in March 1967 in the pages of Ramparts, The New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post. John le Carré then suggested to Kermode that the source of funding would not have been altered by the change in ownership. Spender and Kermode asked Lasky, who admitted to Kermode that he had known of the CIA connection since being told by Josselson in 1963, to resign. However, King and the magazine's trustees decided to retain Lasky, which prompted Spender and Kermode to depart in early May 1967. According to CIA official Ray S. Cline the journal "would not have been able to survive financially without CIA funds". Its bibliography shows shifting patterns of high-journalistic political allegiance, especially in the cultural sphere. Shifts on both sides of the Atlantic triggered by the rise of the "neoconservative" tendency in opposition to the prevailing left-liberalism in elite opinion are evident.
The choices for the first two Encounter co-editors, the American political essayist Irving Kristol and the English poet Stephen Spender were telling, and in retrospect, can be seen to have set in template much of the course of the magazine's evolution even over its final twenty-three years succeeding Spender's resignation in 1967, after the revelations of covert CIA-funding.
Irving Kristol and the New York intellectuals
Irving Kristol edited the political articles in Encounter from 1953 until 1958, and though still a self-described liberal at the time, he was already laying the foundations of his eventual stance, from the late 1970s until his death in 2009, as the "godfather of neoconservatism." Influenced by his experiences in the City College of New York cafeterias of the late 1930s, where Marxists, Trotskyists and Stalinists argued freely, Kristol had already, as early as 1952, in his writings in Commentary during the McCarthy years, set the tone for the neo-populist critique of liberal "new class" elites he would later seed during his almost forty-year stint as founding co-editor of The Public Interest, the public-policy quarterly.Stephen Spender and the English literary legacy
cut a larger figure in strictly cultural circles, though with strong political engagements of his own – he was, at 44, one of England's leading men of letters of his generation, having been a prime constituent of the 1930s "MacSpaunday" generation of young English poets whose other members included Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis. During his brief Communist phase in the 1930s, he had served in the Spanish Civil War with the anti-Franco International Brigades and later contributed to the essay collection The God That Failed edited by Richard Crossman. The other contributors who had become disillusioned with Communism included Louis Fischer, André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright; Koestler and Silone would in turn become from its outset regular contributors to Encounter. Spender's apprenticeship in the editor's chair had come over a decade before when he served as deputy to the English aesthete Cyril Connolly in editing, for its first two years, the influential literary monthly Horizon, many of whose writers would show up in Encounter in due course throughout the 1950s and after.Spender's range of cultural contacts, in and out of the academic world, combined with the high-stakes sense of Cold War cultural mission driving the Paris-based CCF, enabled Encounter to publish, especially during its first fourteen years prior to the revelation of the early CIA funding and the defections so provoked, an international range of poets, short-story writers, novelists, critics, historians, philosophers and journalists, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The long tail of the Bloomsbury, World War I, and Bright Young Things generations of the early 20th century was a marked feature of the early years of Spender's tenure as the editor of the Encounters literary pages, with contributors such as Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Mitford, Bertrand Russell, Edith Sitwell, John Strachey, Evelyn Waugh, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf – Virginia in posthumous diary form, her surviving husband Leonard as a political essayist and reviewer.
Oxbridge and London academics
Encounter provided a prime forum for academics from the colleges of Oxford, Cambridge, and London Universities—Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and A. J. P. Taylor among them—who discussed European history and the intellectuals helping to shape it. Trevor-Roper used the magazine as an outlet for his attacks, one on Arnold Toynbee's best-selling ten-volume Study of History, and on The Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P. Taylor.Early outings by Encounter belletrists came when Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh playfully debated over successive issues the fine points of upper-class vs. lower-class English usage, as did C. P. Snow and others, if less playfully, Snow's depiction within of a yawning chasm of mind between the "Two Cultures" of the hard sciences and the humanities. Among the magazine's early luminaries in aesthetics and the history of art were Stuart Hampshire and Richard Wollheim.
Political contours
On the political side of Encounter, Kristol brought on board many members of the group usually known as The New York Intellectuals, both journalist, literary and polemical or social-scientific, among whom he had passed the years of his apprenticeship: the sociologists Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, who, respectively, would later serve as his successive co-editors at The Public Interest, Sidney Hook, and, not least, the ideological hummingbird and scourge of "Midcult" Dwight Macdonald, who spent a year in London as associate editor, a tenure with which he would later attempt to make a retrospective reckoning in his "Politics" column in Esquire for June 1967 in what he would describe several months later as his "Confessions of an Unwitty CIA Agent". Mainline Americans for Democratic Action-style left-liberal Democrats such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith rounded out the American contours in politics, while the early English contributions in politics came largely from the social-democratic, anti-Communist, anti-unilateral nuclear disarmament wing of the Labour fold, as represented by C.A.R. Crosland , R.H.S. Crossman, and David Marquand, with occasional contributions from Conservative journalists such as Peregrine Worsthorne and the young Henry Fairlie broadening the coverage.Encounter provoked controversy, with some British commentators arguing the journal took an excessively deferential stand towards United States foreign policy. Cambridge literary critic Graham Hough described the magazine as "that strange Anglo-American nursling" which had "a very odd concept of culture indeed". The Sunday Times referred to Encounter as "the police-review of American-occupied countries".
Discussing the Encounter of the 1950s, Stefan Collini in 2006 wrote that although Encounter was not "narrowly sectarian in either political or aesthetic terms, its pages gave off a distinct whiff of Cold War polemicizing".