Supporting the indispensable

I sat in on only one meeting of the board of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the uneasy successor to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which had collapsed in 1967 amid the disclosure that the CIA had been funding its activities. This was in Paris in June 1970, the twentieth anniversary almost to the week of the foundation of the Congress in the British sector of occupied Berlin. Representing Quadrant, the Australian monthly, I sat among the observers with the other editors: Melvin Lasky (Encounter), Leopold Labedz (Survey), François Bondy (Preuves), Rajat Neogy (Transition)—recently released from a Kampala prison—and Hoki Ishihara (Jiyu).

The morning began slowly with dispiriting reports on cultural freedom from India and Indonesia to Uganda and Nigeria and some proposals for estimable seminars. But the meeting flared into life in a...