Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe.Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001. 400 pp. $39.50.

Cultural diplomacy, long a staple of great-power foreign policy, entered America's repertoire during the early Cold War years. Previous books by Frank Costigliola, Richard Kuisel, and Frances Stonor Saunders have documented Washington's official and unofficial efforts to counter Soviet power and, especially, to mobilize the West European allies. In America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, Volker Berghahn, the Seth Low Professor of History at ColumbiaUniversity, who has written extensively on modern German history and postwar U.S.-German relations, examines the remarkable career of Shepherd Stone. As a journalist, military-intelligence officer, and foundation official, Stone conducted an almost single-handed effort to forge strong transatlantic cultural links while building a Western bulwark against European and global Communism.

Stone was uniquely suited for his historical role. Born Shepherd Arthur Cohen, the grandson of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, in 1908, he was raised in comfortable circumstances in Nashua, New Hampshire and enjoyed four happy years at DartmouthCollege, where he acquired the social skills and connections that graced his long life. Stone's second formative influence came during his years of study in Germany from 1929 to 1932 in the waning days of the WeimarRepublic. During that time the young man, who had changed his name to Stone, imbibed the cultural and intellectual riches of Berlin and Heidelberg, completed a doctoral dissertation on German diplomacy toward Poland, and also met his future wife, Charlotte Hasenclever- Jaffé. Upon returning to the United States, Stone, choosing journalism over an academic career, used his contacts to land a job at TheNew York Times, where he distinguished himself as a reporter and analyst of Nazi Germany. His contacts in Germany also enabled him to rescue his Jewish in-laws at the last minute, in 1941, from Hitler's tightening noose.

Once the United States entered World War II, Stone, serving as an army intelligence officer, participated in the Normandy landing, the American advance through [End Page 71] France and Belgium, and, in October 1944, the invasion of Germany. During his thirteen-month stint in the postwar U.S. military administration in Germany, Stone helped revive the German press and opposed the harshness of the occupation. Despite the appalling evidence of the Third Reich's crimes, including the murder of his Lithuanian relatives, Stone placed himself squarely in the "anti-Shirer camp" that sympathized with the "other Germany" and insisted that America's mission was not to punish the civilian population but to win its hearts and minds. He thus established a positive reputation among older Germans by, for example, helping to exonerate his former professor, and the future FederalRepublic president, Theodor Heuss, for having published a few articles in Josef Goebbels's Das Reich.

After briefly resuming a journalistic career, Stone returned to Germany in 1949 as director of public affairs under the U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy. For the next three years, Stone expanded his dense network of German and European social and political contacts. In this tense McCarthyist era, he tried to sell the United States to a still skeptical audience in the new, semi-sovereign West German state while continuing to monitor its press and subsidize liberal publications.

Berghahn, in his five middle chapters, interrupts his chronicle of Stone's personal career to examine the broader context of the man's endeavors. Berghahn first discusses the long Western intellectual tradition that had opposed mass democracy and that, after World War II, challenged U.S. claims to cultural as well as political leadership. He then introduces the Paris-based Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), founded by antifascist, anti-Communist intellectuals both to counter the cultural elitists and pessimists and to compete against Moscow's populist appeals by creating a European and global network of exhibitions, congresses, and publications extolling freedom and countering authoritarianism. After this, Berghahn turns to the world's largest private philanthropic organization, the Ford Foundation, which at the end of 1960 held some $69 million in liquid assets and whose trustees decided two years later to invest in a major "Conditions of Peace" project endorsed by McCloy and Stone. Stone became the head of Ford's European program, and, despite the diminished Soviet threat after Josif Stalin's death and the waning appeal of Communism after the events of 1956, he embarked on a huge and ambitious enterprise to cement America's bonds across the Atlantic. This effort included not only subsidies for the CCF and for the training of leading East European scholars but also support for the projects of selected West European luminaries such as Niels Bohr, Raymond Aron, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as for institutions such as the Free University in Berlin, St. Antony's College in Oxford, and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. Berghahn recounts the U.S. government's part in this cultural offensive, detailing the Central Intelligence Agency's support for the CCF and Ford until press revelations in the mid-1960s led to a cut off of Washington's financial backing and the demise of the CCF.

Despite Stone's many accomplishments, which Berghahn describes with a blend of respect and objectivity, these ambitious projects ultimately failed to overcome West European anti-Americanism, either in its old elitist form or in its populist manifestations in the 1960s. Stone nevertheless persisted, first by attempting to breathe life into the CCF's short-lived successor, the International Association for Cultural Freedom, [End Page 72] then as founder and director of the Berlin Aspen Institute from 1975 to 1988. Under his leadership the Institute became the meeting ground of Western Europe's cultural and political elite.

Shepherd Stone had a long and productive life that spanned almost the entire twentieth century until his death in 1990 on the eve of German reunification and the end of the Cold War. Stone's generation, formed by the ideological struggles among fascism, Communism, and liberal democracy, viewed America's unprecedented economic and military strength after World War II as a tool not only to combat global Communism but also to establish a vital, unified transatlantic community based on a network of like-minded intellectual and political leaders. However, in the explosive year of 1968, when a new postwar generation in Europe and America challenged both superpowers' definitions of politics and culture, Stone's values received their first major test. The large and diverse post-1990 transatlantic community, now extending all the way to Moscow, bears little resemblance to the closed world of the 1950s when, with men like Shepherd Stone in the lead, the United States was both suitor and paymaster to Western Europe's old liberal establishment.

Carole K. Fink,
OhioStateUniversity