"To Deploy Literature in the Service of Their Respective National Interests, and the Willingness of Writers to Be So Deployed"

"In this context, Mary McCarthy comes off more poorly than most of the other writers chronicled in this account. With customary cockiness, she claimed that novelists could make a special contribution to the broader effort of understanding the Vietnam War amid its conflicting imperatives and narratives: 'What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.' Yet even as ­McCarthy questioned the accounts she was given by the U.S. and U.S.-supported government officials in Saigon, she credulously swallowed the self-­presentation of the North Vietnamese. In addition to suffering from poor sales of pamphlet versions of her writing about the situation in Vietnam, McCarthy was criticized by the likes of Diana Trilling, in the New York Review of Books, for committing the mortal sin of any serious and self-respecting intellectual: ordering one's capacities for genuinely liberal and open inquiry and analysis to the affirmation of static ideological purposes." 

Randy Boyagoda at First Things reviews Duncan White's Cold Warriors: The Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.