Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War? There is a lot of barbed wire surrounding that question. The Cold War had battlegrounds all over the world, and it was a hot enough war in some of them, but in the main battleground, Western Europe, it was a war for hearts and minds—an idea war, an image war, a propaganda war. Global combat on these terms was the policy of the American government. There was no secret about the policy, and most of its enactments—such as the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946—were carried out in broad daylight and to public acclaim. But some were carefully shrouded, made to appear the work of individuals and institutions acting on their own, without government sponsorship, as was the case with the magazine Encounter, which was published in London and contributed to by prominent American and European intellectuals, and which was revealed, in 1967, to be a creature of the C.I.A.
It seems a contradiction, even hypocritical, for the United States to have promoted the Western values of free elections, free speech, and free markets by covert methods. Democracy means accountability; that’s what makes democratic governments different from authoritarian and totalitarian ones. But, until its cloak unravelled in the late nineteen-sixties, the C.I.A., and the people who were in on its activities, operated in secrecy. They kept the secret because they understood the logic. The target audience for cultural propaganda in the Cold War was foreign élites—in particular, left-wing intellectuals and avant-garde writers and artists who might still have some attachment, sincere, sentimental, or opportunistic, to Communism and the Soviet Union. The essence of the courtship was: it’s possible to be left-wing, avant-garde, and anti-Communist. Look at these American artists and intellectuals, happily criticizing bourgeois capitalism and shocking mainstream tastes, all safely protected by the laws of a free society. In Russia, these people would be in the Lubyanka, or somewhere north of the Arctic Circle.
In practice, though, the American creed boils down to this: you have a right to say or create what you please, but the taxpayer doesn’t have to pay for it. Highbrow criticizing and shocking are regarded by most Americans as toxic by-products of the culture of liberty: they show that we’re serious about the First Amendment, but there is no reason to subsidize them. This was one of the lessons of the congressional attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts at the very end of the Cold War; but the lesson had been learned before, in a parallel episode, at the very start of the Cold War, an episode that defined the limits of what government could openly do in the practice of cultural diplomacy.