Attribution (front or state): Front (Congress of Cultural Freedom)
Author/publication: Encounter (Paris)
Publication date: August 1963
Remarks: If there was one signal difference between propaganda from East and West in the Cold War, and in particular in clandestine subsidiaries like the one that birthed Encounter magazine, it was that the Westerners acknowledged their social ills. This issue, published under the editors Melvin Lasky and British poet Stephen Spender, came out near the peak of Encounter’s readership, four years after its founding editor and a contributor to this issue, Irving Kristol, parted the left-center publications to strike a conservative course. Ostensibly, this issue is little different from the World Student News issue that we saw before. It is entirely possible that Communist international periodicals would have published James Baldwin in translation, whose face we see on the cover. Here, though, the best clue of Western origin lies in the names and article topics below. Not only was Kristol, himself a former Communist, an avowed and vocal critic of the USSR. Diana Trilling was of the same New York intellectual school. W. H. Auden and Marilyn Monroe, meanwhile, would have appeared in Communist papers only for satire’s sake. And considering how popular Monroe was among the young, international audience that the Soviets hoped to persuade, dragging her through the mud was unwise and unlikely.
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