Playing the CIA's Tune? The New Leader and the Cultural Cold War

Abstract

In his 1987 memoirs Out of Step, Sidney Hook suggested that the importance of the magazine Partisan Review as “the political center of … socialist anti-Stalinist activity in the United States” had been greatly exaggerated. “The real center of political anti-Communist thought and activity,” the philosopher proposed, “was the New Leader, whose editor, Sol Levitas was, until his death, the central figure. His life and work await their scholarly historian.”1 When this claim was challenged in the New York Times Book Review, Hook's fellow “New York intellectual” Daniel Bell penned a letter to the editor drawing a distinction between the primarily literary Partisan Review, which for much of its existence had appeared quarterly, and the political weekly New Leader, whose “information and reportage” served as “the factual basis for many of the opinions expressed by literary intellectuals.” Younger historians who lacked “a firsthand acquaintance with these events” needed to be aware of the importance of Levitas and his paper.2