Staying the Course
Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA.
by Cord Meyer.
Harper & Row. 448 pp. $15.00.
Cord Meyer, a veteran of a quarter-century with the Central Intelligence Agency, has published two books. The first, Peace or Anarchy, appeared in 1947. It argued the case for the program of the United World Federalists, of which Meyer was then the young and enthusiastic president. The second, Facing Reality, now appears some thirty years later, and is an account of what happened to Meyer, and to his world, in the interim.
In 1977, Meyer retired from the CIA where, for many years, he had worked in the upper echelon of the agency’s clandestine division. His career, therefore, spanned a kind of rise and fall of the CIA; clearly he hopes that his memoir will contribute to a restoration of the agency’s public favor, perhaps even among those people who were once instrumental in its founding and growth. For Meyer comes from that amorphous but nonetheless real “Eastern elite” which dominated American foreign policy during World War II and the period thereafter. A product of Yale and Harvard, a young writer of ability, he was at home among people who knew, if not everyone, then at least a representative sampling. By 1948, Meyer seems to have met, one way or another, Dwight Eisenhower, Albert Einstein, George Marshall, Harry Truman, and many others; Reinhold Niebuhr officiated at his wedding. When, in 1951, he contemplated joining the CIA, he had a personal interview with Allen Dulles and then a talk with Walter Lippmann—who was “cautiously positive.” In those days, the agency belonged to the gentlemen, though when it came under assault in the mid-1960’s, not all of them rallied to its defense.
There is in this book a kind of parallel between institutional history and autobiography which the author probably did not intend. In retrospect, we now know that the CIA, for all its privileged origins, was not to lead a charmed life. Cord Meyer did not lead a charmed life either. He lost an eye in World War II, and his twin brother was killed in the conflict. Years later, his nine-year-old son was struck and killed by an automobile on a country road. His first marriage ended in divorce and, seven years later, his former wife was found murdered in Washington, D.C. When Meyer left the CIA in 1977, his career seems to have petered out amid the demoralization and intrigue which were then rife in the agency.
Meyer describes how his interest in world federalism grew out of his wartime experience. His hope was that the postwar world, prodded by the appearance of nuclear weaponry, would finally achieve a new level of international organization and cooperation. He was somewhat disappointed by his service on the staff of the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco conference which gave birth to the United Nations. Thinking, at first, that the prospects for a better world order were jeopardized by the insularity and apathy of democratic publics, Meyer came to conclude that the main obstacles were, in fact, the nature and ambitions of the Soviet state. Like many liberals of that time, he did battle with Communists who were intent upon subverting liberal causes and organizations.
This first-hand exposure to Communist tactics provided an understanding of similar Communist efforts in other countries. The movement to the CIA thus represented only a superficial reversal in Meyer’s attitudes, for the agency was at that time certainly a liberal institution; it was as much interested in supporting the democratic Left around the world as it was in the conduct of old-fashioned espionage. (This fundamental political orientation of the agency made it suspect on the far Right; in the 1950’s, Meyer himself was accused of Communist associations, but was cleared.)
By virtue of his organizational experiences and literary abilities, Meyer’s métier became the political and ideological side of the world struggle. Unhappily, it receives insufficient attention in this book. He recounts at some length the first of the agency’s troubles, its involvement with the U.S. National Student Association, which surfaced in 1967; he also gives an account of the activities of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, with which he became involved through the CIA in 1954. But he says nothing at all about the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its achievements. As the book progresses through various crises in the life of the CIA, especially those of the 1970’s, the writing seems to become less substantial. The tale foreshadowed in the opening parts of the book—the tale of how the CIA fell—is never quite told, and in the last few chapters, Meyer drops the story altogether and, in what is actually a separate book, devotes himself to an entirely impersonal analysis of the Soviet threat and how to counter it.
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Despite its air of sedulous non-revelation, however, the book does provide an impression of Cord Meyer himself that implicitly offers a clue both to the CIA’s travails and to his understated recounting of them. Meyer strikes one as a praiseworthy man, brave and dedicated in an unassuming, wholly matter-of-fact way. Certainly, his writing reveals no vanity or pettiness, cynicism or world-weariness. He seems, indeed, to believe that there is nothing that very much distinguishes him, either from many of his colleagues or from people in general. Thus, if he is silent on the failings either of individuals or even of a “class,” his is not the silence of a college boy who keeps secrets out of primitive loyalty to the fraternity house. Rather, his service seems not to have taken a toll of him; his supposed migration of thirty years—“from world federalism to the CIA”—has really not been all that vast.
This may be more easily understood if it is contrasted with the opposite phenomenon—the mordant sophistication of those of his former colleagues who pride themselves on having kept pace with “changes” in the world over this same period of time. Such people are bound to find Meyer quite exasperating. Conversely, because they are the kind of people that Meyer himself cannot at all understand, he does not write about them. He does not fathom why they have chosen to make life so difficult for themselves.
Americans thought, and still think, that intelligence agencies are one of those unpalatable imports from the old world. The CIA, with its origins in America’s best, was supposed to represent the proper Americanization of that unseemly European activity. The institution embodied an effort to create, almost in an instant, a homegrown tradition for coping with the need for skullduggery. No doubt, the founders responded to the romance of it, but they maintained a certain disdain, born of noblesse oblige, for what they had to do. However, they lacked the cynicism of their European counterparts, and when they came to be charged with transgressions, they assumed, being overly well-trained in the Christian tradition, that they had to search their own souls rather than those of their accusers. For the moment, perhaps forever, they have abandoned the field. They explain themselves, when what they should be explaining is how to repair the damage that has been done.
Meanwhile, for all the public fascination with the CIA and the hidden world of which it is a part, there is still very little practical sense of the stakes involved. Americans, so often accused of xenophobia, really do not take any of this seriously. It is quite impossible, for example, to have a serious public discussion about espionage; a sober assessment of the efforts of the totalitarian states to spy upon, undermine, and destabilize the free nations is simply not welcome in polite society. Even treason, of the Anthony Blunt sort in Great Britain, is analyzed as a sociological or cultural phenomenon, about which the educated man is encouraged to have an opinion. But he is not encouraged to think about the consequences of treason, or of the people who were murdered after they had been betrayed.
This whole devolution in the attitude of elites in the free world toward the maintenance of their own vital institutions can be bracketed between Cord Meyer’s two books. The author and his first work were once very welcome in all of the right places. Today, the writer and his second volume may at best be thought of as quaint in the same circles. It is precisely this which establishes the difference between those who stayed the course and those who did not.
