"A Politico-Cultural Counterpart to the Marshall Plan"

"Despite the genuine threat to attendees' physical safety (the Soviets had kidnapped and 'disappeared' several critics from Berlin's Western sector), the event attracted such luminaries as A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Herbert Read, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carlo Schmid, as well as five honorary presidents–the eminent philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain. Delegates also included 'the cream of the anti-Stalinist left,' such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, some of whom had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Indeed, one of the forum's organizers, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had been incarcerated by both Hitler and Stalin."

At The American Interest, Michael Allen and David E. Lowe look back to the 1950 creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.