“‘Acrobats of the American Century.’”
Honorable dissenters.
I have long nursed a keen interest in the Cold War’s corruptions on the cultural side—who the perpetrators and who the victims and what they did in each case. I was riveted, then, when OR Books brought out Joel Whitney’s first book, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers, in 2017. As the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that now-infamous deception op, it satisfied, if temporarily, my bottomless contempt for that cowardly congregation known as Cold War liberals.
I rushed to publish a Q & A interview with Whitney in The Nation after reading the book. I gave him 10,000 words and he deserved all of them. Our exchange, still worth reading, is here and here in two parts.
Whitney now gives us Flights: Radicals on the Run, a title that describes well enough what the author is after this time. These are tributes to a dozen and a half exemplars of the honorable tradition of dissent—in America and elsewhere. Whitney tells their stories with care, choosing—if I don’t oversimplify—the passages in their lives that mattered most, their moments of truth. It is a feat to get Graham Greene and Malcolm X between the same book covers, I have to say. The sense of this lies in what these people did, the sacrifices they made, in the cause of… in the cause of the human cause.
“I read until I caught them fleeing, escaping, regrouping, crossing the border—in some cases noting what they thought about before they died, what they were fighting for,” Whitney says in the exchange that follows. “I wanted to silhouette, across my lifetime and that of my parents, the tireless persecution of the Left—the U.S.’s main political obsession—and to offer glimpses of what it may have felt like, this constant. What was exemplary in their lives, across all the subjects, was their stubbornness above all.”
P.L. Joel, your new book is impressively imaginative. You’ve put pieces on a vast variety of people—Graham Greene, Paul Robeson, Diego Rivera, et al.—between the same covers. I found myself repeatedly somewhere between fascinated and amazed. Please tell me, what was the very first thought you had when you began considering this project? What was the original intent? What were you after and why did you decide to go after it?
J.W. Thanks! The trigger for Flights as a book was probably the George and Mary Oppen essay. The Oppens were young American poets who fell in love in college, traveled the world, returned during the Depression and worked with the United Front to stop evictions in New York City and to organize dairy workers upstate. When McCarthyism visited the United States with the conservative-liberal backlash—the McCarthy–Nixon cohort on the right and President Truman in the center—the work the Oppens had done legally was effectively made illegal. I published the essay years after my book, Finks, was published, and this was because it took so long for my F.O.I.A., or Freedom of Information Act request to the government, to be fulfilled. But that essay set the tone for those that followed.
Many of the essays were written during Trump’s first term, when liberals seemed to partially reenact this maneuver of Cold War suspicion of foreignness. Trump was xenophobic toward Mexicans and Muslims, among others, and the liberals matched him to some degree on Russians and China. Suddenly Russian and Chinese media were being forced to register in the U.S. Dueling McCarthyisms, I worried. A progressive is sensitive to war drums because they signal a flood of lies and dehumanization that sustain that war.
So I looked for these parallels in stories like the Oppens'. Once I had the Oppens’ F.B.I. file, I worked out that essay and was captivated by this frame. The essays that followed are likewise framed by American figures—with “American” used broadly for North, Central, and South Turtle Island—who were persecuted by the U.S. state.
As I started to formulate, research and draft more of them, I understood this book to be about critics, artists, and truth-tellers, flaws and all, who were chased across a border, out of print, or into an early grave. Black Lives Matter influenced the essays, as did the Standing Rock protests. The action takes place in this hemisphere (other essays were saved for other collections). I tapped into the archive, reading and annotating documentaries, to see who were the acrobats of the American Century, the high-wire artists who told the truth despite enormous and sometimes casually authoritarian American pressures to clam up, shaking the wire under them.
Q. It’s more than curious to read the book now, given things as they are in the America of 2024, and to put my questions in, let’s say, my state of expatriation. But I will get to these matters later on.
I read the book one figure or pair of figures at a time, daily for however many chapters there are [seventeen]. I liked the effect as a reading experience. Even the table of contents gave the delight of anticipation. And then one met the people you write about, one a day, and thought about them until meeting the next.
Can you talk about how you selected your subjects. There was by definition a process, even if it was merely happy happenstance, given that you had written previously about some or many of these figures. What went into your choices? Did you choose each person so as to convey some truth that goes to your theme? What went on, so to say, at the auditions?
A. I like the idea of auditions. I was writing into a broad frame that united these characters with those of Finks, around the question of persecution. The Gabriel García Marquez essay is an excerpt from Finks. (There were only two others, I think, that I wrote about in Finks: Frances Stonor Saunders and Paul Robeson.) In that book, I wondered what it felt like to have the weight, betrayal, and hypocrisy of secrecy and spying come down on you. The book was about a secret publishing program set up by the C.I.A. to put a leash on intellectuals, to create an acceptable level of criticism that could be leveled at the U.S. during the Cold War, beyond which you were warned not to go.
Methodologically, I read until I found key witnesses (James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Harold Doc Humes, Boris Pasternak) crying or breaking down. But in Flights, I read until I caught them fleeing, escaping, regrouping, crossing the border—in some cases noting what they thought about before they died, what they were fighting for. When the Oppens drove across the Sonoran desert in their Dodge with their friend and daughter in the car, their parakeet fainting in the heat, I saw it as a kind of provocation to American assumptions. I wanted to reproduce this cartoon-like repetition—Roadrunner versus Coyote-style—of the American state’s constant chasing of the Left.
As I wrote new essays, gradually I foresaw them as variations on that movement. Some lived, some were killed, some barely knew they were censored or spied upon. If Finks was an “emo” history, since I read until I found a tearful breakdown, Flights is an action history on subjects who had to improvise or revise plans during flight.
Q. And then the pieces themselves. Full-dress biographies were out of the question and obviously not what you were after. So: More decisions to make.
In the chapter on Robeson, you began by describing a concert he gave in Peekskill [in the Hudson Valley] in 1949—nothing like the epicenter of his story. You then went through various events in his life—his early role in an O’Neill play, the films in London, the appearances in the Soviet Union—and then returned to the Peekskill concert and the racist violence it prompted. You seem to select small moments—in the way of vignettes, even—to suggest a larger whole, theme, truth, however I ought to put it.
With Paz [Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and diplomat], you opened with his ambassadorship in India during the events of 1968, then considered his complex relationship with Mexico, and then wrote in some autobiography. It is different but the same: I saw you choose moments of telling clarity to convey something beyond themselves. I thought of the Japanese aesthetic principle called mie gakure. It means one should see what is implied in the picture but isn’t in the picture.
I am looking for your aesthetic strategy. Can you talk about this?
A. I enjoy a structure in which you turn back from an opening scene then catch up with it to depict the catharsis or crisis play by play, in a way that imitates time’s passing. But as these essays came together with a one-subject-at-time frame, I began thinking about curation, of their “being numerous.” F.B.I. versus C.I.A. persecution, or some other agency; what decade were they censored during and so on. But in the back of my mind was a Tzvetan Todorov essay called “Narrative-Men.” In this essay, Todorov distinguished between psychological fiction like that of, let's say, Henry James, and “apsychological” fiction like The Thousand and One Nights.
In the former, the protagonist’s psychology is built up before a resolution and denouement. But so-called narrative men (and women) show up in this other narrative simply to move the story forward, as in The Thousand and One Nights: Think of all the characters who turn that story of collective punishment and storytelling into a marvel, some who were added by Western translators. Likewise, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate, also has a novel in which each chapter is a pharaoh “before the throne” justifying his legacy to the gods. Narrative-men, like pages in Alice in Wonderland.
This frame flattens the distance between what happens and who it happens to. It’s a procession of characters who bear witness to the particulars of the tale, as in epics depicting generations, reincarnations, a family tree. The tale here was the real America. I was thinking about this alongside a chronological frame of Truman–McCarthy–Johnsonian persecution, onto Nixonian persecution and into our own time with Carter–Reaganite and Clinton–Bush–Obama–Trump persecution. I wanted to silhouette, across my lifetime and that of my parents, the tireless persecution of the Left—the U.S.’s main political obsession—and to offer glimpses of what it may have felt like, this constant.
Q. Staying with this, did you intend the book to work in the same way—in a sort of mosaic fashion? A reader looking for biography would pass the judgment, “Too spotty.” This would be poor reading, poor judgment, and miss your point entirely. Have you given the world a mosaic, little shards of mirror glass in words?
A. Yes, shards and tiles for a reader to piece together. The ideal reader of this may be someone trusting and empathic, open to reading a book that enacts a grieving ritual for our institutions and illusions—not unlike the Ghost Dance enacted in the late nineteenth century, as the onslaught of “progress” finally made its way to the Western tribes. I write about this in two of the essays, that of novelist N. Scott Momaday and another about Leonard Peltier and Anna May Aquash.
An ideal reader might be curious about how these are Todorov’s “Narrative Men and Women,” reenacting in their own moment a Groundhog Day of brutal American anticommunism, which mirrors fascism, defying and contradicting democratic norms we supposedly swear by. We cannot proceed (proa, the root of prose, means forward) without turning back (as in virare, the root of verse), crying a little, perhaps, dancing with our families and ancestors, and holding up our glasses (magnifying and with drinks inside) to their courage.
Q. And then to hold the book in your hand and consider it as one thing, a literary work called Flights. I thought of something Brecht once said—Brecht who favored episodic dramatic structure: “In reality, only a fragment carries the mark of authenticity.” Godard quoted this in a film he made in 2018 called The Image Book—Godard, who was nothing if not given to fragments.
Does this go to, or anywhere near, what you were trying to do? Were you after something new in nonfiction writing—some innovation in form? Or did the material you had simply tell you what to do? I am addressing Joel Whitney the writer here.
A. I tend to be maximalist, wanting to relive, rehearse, rehash the confluence of fragmentary moments from lives I read or watch in letters, images or recreated in forms biographical and literary. My editors often had to make these fit in their magazines, and I tended to follow their edits. Mostly. But yes, on this question you raise, I think a lot about Borges and his games to depict infinitely divisible moments, his forms suggesting or making each narrative potentially infinite.
These aforementioned loops imply this: We live, then re-live, re-call with nostalgia or curiosity, like Lot’s Wife. Borges wanted to use metaphorical and structural innovations to suggest that each life or fiction is an infinite labyrinth. He posited that on Night 602 of The Thousand and One Nights something magical happens: The narrator, Scheherazade, who tells stories to delay her execution by a brutal king enacting collective punishment (not unlike that going on in Gaza), finds a way to prolong her story, therefore her life, infinitely. She does so by pausing her story until the next night, then starting another as soon as she resolves it.
Borges reworks and deepens this on Night 602 by returning to the night of her first story told to the dictator-king, and retelling the story she told him, and so on, ad infinitum. Borges also wrote on why these infinite loops fascinate: “Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book The Thousand and One Nights? ... I believe I have found the reason: These inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” Nothing as drastic as this in these essays—they are literally true, only fictions in the sense of being shaped—but the characters of prior essays reappear later, and this approximates the 602 Effect, if lightly so.
Q. Asturias! I exclaimed as I read along [Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan novelist, diplomat, and Nobelist]. My mind went back to Men of maíz, El señor presidente, The eyes of the interred—classics of their time and place, a writer and his books I admire but hadn’t thought about for years. Lorraine Hansberry [playwright and activist] and Raisin in the Sun. You bring honor to these people—an honor, if I can put it this way, that is somewhat lost amid our declining culture.
This is part of the book’s appeal, at least for me. Was it your intent to give our present a past—the present as some of us understand it, I mean. Did you want to say, “History is full of dissidents, and here are a few. This is how they dissented, these are the prices they were willing to pay. Let us not forget them”?
A. Yes. Asturias the novelist was chased out of his country multiple times by U.S.–backed fascists, but he invented a way of telling stories that influenced many others, from García Marquez to Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie: Let us not forget him. They chased him [Asturias] over a border. They confiscated Hansberry's passport, spied on her as her breakthrough play was coming out, and censored her great speech about theater and radicalism, about how the working class needs to be at the center of the movement, about how American liberals need to be convinced to become American radicals. Which means something exciting: A mere writer can be a great threat. What was exemplary in their lives, across all the subjects, was their stubbornness above all.
Across the chapters these figures meditate on the primacy of the working class, a fact the Democrats forgot in 2024 (losing the White House in something of a landslide as a result). Most of the figures in this book are tethered to the working class, know it is the root of their political gift. They are persecuted for adhering in their art to a kind of social realism and at the same time, adding surrealism to invent—in Asturias and García Marquez’s case—magical realism, forms derived from communists, anti-colonialists, Marxists.
But we teach history and art history and literary history as if this censorship that happened to all of these figures only happened outside the U.S., as if the limits on aesthetics was spontaneous and consensus-based rather than state-curated and coerced. It was rampant and here we go doing it, making the same mistakes as when the earliest of these essays takes place, perhaps 1940, Diego Rivera. “Whatever is allowed to remain unconscious returns later as fate,” is the clearest thing Carl Jung ever said, if he said it. It’s very newsy and very tired to say, “This is unprecedented.” Nothing is truly new. If we can spend so much energy, blood, and treasure on getting it wrong, forgetting deliberately, betraying our principles, it should be clear how easy it would be to get it right. Nothing matters but that, even if the essays are (hopefully) not didactic.
Q. So many Latin Americans in the book. I count seven, eight if we include Jennifer Harbury. Is there a reason for this related to the book’s theme? You’ve done a lot of travelling in Latin America. Does it come simply to that?
A. I took part in a Habitat for Humanity trip to Guatemala during my final year of college. It was eye opening. But I chose to live and teach in Costa Rica for two years, two years after the first trip, because, as U.S. Americans we can rarely imagine what citizenship divorced from military service or war can be, and I was fascinated by Costa Rica's decision to abolish its military. The shorter trip made an immediate impression, while the longer was richer in day-to-day experience, a conglomeration of unforgettable, almost infinite details, and the mystery of living in a second language.
Between the two and afterward, I read Rigoberta Menchú, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Gabriel García Marquez, Claribel Alegría, Pablo Neruda, and so on. I delved into the political history of figures like Neruda and Che Guevara and Fidel. I learned about Jennifer Harbury months before she launched her famous hunger strike; people were already talking about her when I was there in early 1994. Later, when I traveled to Antigua, I got into an argument with a Guatemalan elite who worked for U.S.A.I.D. and regurgitated the propaganda that Harbury never really married Efraín Bámaca Velázquez, her guerrilla husband, whom the Guatemalan army tortured to death; she was a spy, and so on.
All told, these readings and experiences established that when it comes to certain issues, certain regions, certain inherited enemies, certain tax-funded American massacres, coups and crimes, you cannot trust your government or media, since they are the perpetrators—they are the ones before the throne pretending to deserve entry—and you can never forget where you really learned this skepticism.
Q. Between Finks and Flights you seem to be developing a certain set of preoccupations. Can you talk about these, if I have it right? A writer’s past, and one can go all the way back, determines not only his or her character but what he chooses to write about. I invite you to speak as personally or autobiographically as you like.
A. Finks deals with the secret uses of literary magazines, which I discovered in my tenure as a founder of one. It was mostly about a C.I.A. program, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, well before my time, but not my parents' time. Flights is in some ways an extension of that, in the sense that I saw writing its predecessor how an institutional history can only come to life through characters intertwined in that institution. So for that purpose, the Flights characters have no specific Cold War institution to encircle, with staff, etc., whom we have to keep up with. In Finks, some of the heroes or victims start the book as collaborators and come to their senses, or not. Where Flights is entirely told from the point of view of the victims, victims who on some level we might call heroic—and many were survivors, to say the least.
I also wanted to bring the F.B.I. and client militaries like the Guatemalan army into the story. But what threads I used in Finks, I applied in Flights.
I think I inherited some of the writerly obsessions you suggest from my father. On his mother’s side, we’re from Quaker abolitionist stock, and therefore are used to standing athwart history not to stop its progress, as William F. Buckley wanted to do, but to stop its reaction. American history is the history of the counterrevolution. The Quakers were certainly used to persecution and my family members in Rhode Island, named Buffum, harbored people on the run from capitalist enslavement. One relative visited John Brown in prison, heard his testimony, and gave him a recently translated Hans Christian Andersen story of Arctic explorers who freeze to death. At its end the Angel of History gently closes their eyelids like a curtain.
And when I was nine or so, my stepfather brutally attacked my mother and we fled in the middle of the night from Duchess County, New York, to my grandmother’s in Connecticut—across a border, if you like. My earliest efforts as a writer were attempts to understand and depict the before and after of this traumatic event, fleeing, and everything changing for us afterward: psychologically, financially, socially, and so on. Yet, though I cite the abolitionist relatives, I also have relatives who resorted to violence, including one who went into flight for using violence in Ireland to end British occupation—an assassination, in fact—and I have relatives who violently sent Miwoks into flight in Point Reyes, California.
Q. As I suggested earlier, it is interesting to read Flights just now. I assume this was not by design—or maybe I am wrong about this—but the book arrives as an increasing number of Americans are saying Basta! I’ve had enough! and expatriating—taking flight. I am not talking about fully-vested retirees buying seven-figure houses in Portugal or the Costa del Sol. I am talking about the descendants of people you know very well—those honorable souls who, during the Cold War, were either forced into exile or exiled on their own. I fit the profile well enough, I suppose.
Can you address these people, this moment?
A. Most U.S. Americans came here in a program not unlike Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, built on slow then fast waves pushing indigenous folks out, violently and catastrophically and immorally and, today, illegally. So even with sympathy for the economic and political refugees of our moment (Edward Snowden being one of the latter), it helps to remember what order of sympathy and relief we must reserve for those like, say, poet Mosab Abu Toha and other Palestinians who have been chased across borders, out of print, or into their early graves under American bombs ordered up, paid for and rationalized by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, whose legacies will be haunted by these atrocities forever. Our precarity in the neoliberal Squid Game is not equal—some fear for the lives, some that their Social Security checks won’t stretch. But the system that sends us into flight is mostly unconcerned which of us it has to trample or disenfranchise next, to fill its pockets. So it seems.
As we speak, as a result of Kamala Harris’s historic defeat in the presidential election, I’ve been hearing the old saw about moving to Canada. In Flights, I show how much of that impetus during the Cold War was in the other direction: to Mexico, where the undesirables pass through and come from. Yet I heard it, too, in 2000, when George W. Bush “won:” Canada. But quite a number of runaway slaves went the other way, south to Mexico to get out of this American nightmare. All sympathy. The U.S. economy and political culture definitely push people out. If we’re white we get to be called ex-pats. If we’re indigenous Americans from Guatemala or some place where the U.S. was doing anticommunist murder through proxies, we are “illegals”— ”Undocumentd” in its liberal lingo.
When I was an expat in Buxup, a tiny village of Guatemala, in 1994, I lost nearly twenty pounds with something like amebic dysentery. Rachel, the Habitat for Humanity liaison from Michigan, fed me crackers and electrolytes and told me the story of Ursula LeGuin’s short masterpiece on political self-exiles, “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas.” Something about hearing it in that tiny village where the US–funded massacres had barely stopped—there were several massacres just a stone’s throw in several directions—526 Mayan villages supposedly decimated beyond recognition—something in that site and story together goaded me with the promise that, as Arundhati Roy said, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
Courtesy of Consortium News.
fwiw this interview made me go out and buy the book. Looking forward to many hours of infuriating/inspiring/informative reading!
Wow! Just wow. Gratitude.