JOURNAL IN TURMOIL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403730007-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 7
• Publication Date: February 16, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403730007-1
WASHINGTON POST
16 February 1987
I
Journal in Turmoil
At Partisan Review, Intellectuals at War Over an Unpublished Article
By Sidney Blumenthal
w:ah,Mtue Na 9taf writer
One by one the mourners file past the.
stricken Partisan Review once the most
influentia a prestigious journal of the
New York intellectuals.
PR-the very letters still evoke awe
in certain circles-had for years been
living a kind of posthumous existence,
mainly as the subject of nostalgic mem-
oirs. Yet the quarterly journal still had
its importance, if only because it stood as
a monument to the achievements of
these intellectuals, a family scattered
and shattered by death and politics.
Now, it is laid out because of a terrific
collision with Reagan's Washington, a
world that mystifies many sophisticated
New Yorkers. Today the PR board will
meet to apply its collective intelligence
to debris still falling on the magazine be-
cause of an article only about a dozen
people have read.
This disastrous encounter-of the
venerable PR with a veiled character
from the unfolding Iran arms scandal,
Michael Lede -is a tale of two cities
an two c i terent types of intellectual. "It
reveals something about the New York
intellectuals and their politics. alas,, that
they are New York intellectuals, often
quite parochial about Washington," says
Dennis Wrong, professor of sociology at
New York University and PR contribut-
ing editor.
The affair began last fall, on the eve of
the [ran-contra scandal, when the journal
that had featured Sartre and Eliot, Lio-
nel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, Del-
more Schwartz and Saul Bellow-and
Dwight Macdonald, Andre Malraux,
George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio
Silone, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Han-
nah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Susan Son-
tag and virtually the entire pageant of
midcentury intellectuals-turned to a
new writer.
A mysterious ideological adventurer,
Ledeen was even then engaged in an
exploit that would bring calamity to the
Reagan presidency, playing "a key role
in the initial contacts between the U.S.
and Israel vis-a-vis Iran," according to
the Senate Intelligence Committee re-
port.
PR had been drifting with the neo-
conservative tide. And William Phillips,
one of PR's founders and its editor, so-
licited an article from neoconservative
Ledeen on the meaning of "the national
interest" to serve as the basis for one
of PR's famous forums. Phillips wanted
it to appear in early 1987.
When Ledeen's contribution was
sent out to potential contributors to
the PR symposium, letters of outrage
and resignation came back in return.
The 8,000-word piece, a copy of
which was obtained by The Washing-
ton Post, hails "the democratic revolu-
tion" proclaimed by the Reagan admin-
istration. It then attacks the
"pseudo-democratic theory according
to which everyone is entitled to a say
in policy, regardless of his or her quali-
fications"; asserts, wrongly, that only
the executive is "constitutionally
charged with responsibility for foreign
policy"; and approvingly quotes a
French conservative on the need for
"breaking the law from time to time.."
In particular, the article urges chang.
ing the law "that prohibits American of-
ficials from working with murderers"
and the "executive order, dating to
1975, prohibiting any official of the
American government to conduct, or-
der, encourage or facilitate assassina-
tion."
Ledeen, as far as the PR illuminati
mere concerned, was one step beyond.
Many sought to cast him into outer
darkness.
Daniel Bell, a Harvard professor and
contributing editor, an eminascs grise
among the New York intellectuals, re-
fuses to comment publicly on Ledeen's
yet-to-be-published article and its com-
missioning. But his withdrawal of his
name from the PR masthead was like
the withdrawal of the mandate of heav-
en.
"People like Dan Bell and I didn't
want to be involved in such a discus-
sion," says Diana Trilling, a distin-
guished critic and the widow of Lionel
Trilling, who was the preeminent liter-
ary critic of his generation and the
moral center of the PR universe.
When Beg declined to participate in
the Ledeen symposium, she initially
urged him to reconsider, insisting that
he had an obligation to respond. He
protested that the piece had no merit.
After reading it, Trilling decided
that "I didn't want to have any dis-
course on this level, an unworthy level,
unworthy of the Intellectual enterprise
as I define it. This was a practical ac-
tion program. Ledeen's no intellectual.
-There's been a debasement. The neo-
conservatives, they really have de-
,based the intellectual process, lily chief
,,argument against them. Sometimes
some of them say that they descended
from my husband. He'd be appalled at
the way they have factionalized and po-
larized the intellectual life."
"It is completely innocent," protests
,Edith Kurzweil, PR's managing editor.
"We hope to get to the issues. That's
'what William [Phillips] was thinking
bf."
"I alternate between feeling sorry
and annoyed with Edith and William
about their disingenuousness," says
Dennis Wrong.
Phillips himself, a frail 80 years old,
who endured more than a half-century
of intellectual controversies, last week
:fell ill with pneumonia and was placed
in a hospital's intensive care unit,
stricken with pneumonia.
Ledeen, for his part, says, "I'm not
talking to The Post anymore"-at
least not directly. All inquiries are han-
dled by his lawyer, R. James Woolsey,
who processes Ledeen's written re-
sponses. in them, Ledeen still nurtures
the belief that his article will see the
light of day:
"According to my conversations
with him [Phillips[, it has not been re-
jected but is still under consideration.
Since the piece was originally written
long before the Iran-contra story
broke, there was nothing, in it about
Iran. Mr. Phillips felt that Partisan Re-
view could not publish the piece with-
out my including something about Iran.
The piece has recently been revised
and resubmitted."
"ft's not just that Ledeen is a neo-
con, it's that he's a con," says Leon
Wieseltier, literary editor of The New
Republic and a PR contributing editor,
who quit. He was also one of Trilling's
last students.
In his letter of resignation, Wiesel-
tier called Ledeen "an intriguer and an
operator and an opportunist," and ad-
ded, if PR is embarrassed now by the
revelation that Ledeen took part in the
disgraceful Iran affair, it deserves to
be: his predilection for such activity is
well-known. You could have been
warned."
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Ledeen, in his written response, was
unaware of Bell's resignation and be-
lieved that Wieseltier "resigned for
reasons unrelated to my article." ("So
bizarre," says Wieseltier.) Ledeen ad-
ded, "I hope that the piece, once pub-
lished, attracts as much attention as it
has prior to publication."
His revised version was received by
Kurzweil last Wednesday. "I don't
know how to handle it yet," she says.
don't think we can print the piece. I
don't think we will. I really don't know
... Ledeen hasn't been informed."
..If it's published," says Wrong,
'who's going to be lcto publish the
magazute?"
Red Decade to
Reagan Decade
PR was launched in 1934, with the
hacking of the Communist Party, to
wage the ideological struggle in the
field of culture. But the restless radi-
cals who edited the journal broke with
the party line, reforming PR as an in-
dependent entity. The 'New York they
inhabited was "like the other side of
the moon," Phillips wrote in his mem-
oir. It was a life of youthful outsiders,
first- and second-generation iturni-
grants, mostly Jewish, removed from
practical politics. They were an inces-
tuous, squabbling family like no other,
at the same time provincial and cos-
mic in outlook, consumed with world-
historical events and ideologies.
The twin obsessions of the New
York intellectuals were modernism it
the arts and Marxism in politics. They
defined the anticommunist liberalism
that dominated the postwar era. And
in time the avant-garde sensibility of
the magazine was absorbed by much
of the larger American intellectual
cinlnwnity.
By the 1960s the generation of the
1930s had become middle-aged and
tenured. The aging New York intel-
lectuals were dismayed and often be-
wildered by the new generation that
dismissed their wisdom. Even the
Beatles were condemned as "anti.
thought," in the words of one eminent
figure. In this generational schism can
he found a root of neoconservatism.
PR, however, did not join the united
front against the new. Phillips viewed
the fresh currents of the 1960s as a
hopeful revival of the earlier radical
spirit. And PR began to publish sym-
pathetic pieces. But Phillips' move
was belated, occurring in the 1970s,
when what he was allying himself with
was already fading.
In his 1983 memoir, Phillips disso-
ciated himself from the "extreme posi-
tions" of the neoconservatives. The
reviews by neoconservatives, in re-
turn, were ferocious. And, according
to a Phillips friend, he was shaken. It
was then that PR began drifting right-
ward, slowly fitting itself to the fash-
ions of the neoconservatives, from
"Star Wars" to the Reagan Doctrine.
Finally, in the weeks before the
Iran arms scandal threw neoconserva-
tism into a tailspin, PR beckoned Le-
deen.
Ledeen's Washington
The Iran-contra scandal differs
from Watergate in part because of the
appearance of new Washington types.
Michael Ledeen used the glamor of
intellect to impress the powerful, and
the glamor of power to unpress'the in-
tellectual. When he played power poli-
tics with the truly powerful, as in the
Iran arms deal, and when lie entered
intellectual combat with the genuinely
intellectual, as in the PR fracas, he
was undone.
But Ledeen had conie to conquer
Washington.
He was part of a sniall wave of neo-
conservative intellectuals who arrived
at National Airport in the late 1970s
to undermine the Carter administra-
tion, The neoconservatives instantly
provided hint with an informal net-
work. They got him jobs, grants, in-
troductions, published his articles, in-
vited him to parties and arranged for
him to speak at conferences. When
Reagan won the presidency, they
sought influence and appointive office;
they no longer saw themselves as
alienated critics.
Ledeen appeared to others as enig-
matic and yet knowing. His academic
career began as a student of fascism
at the University of Wisconsin. In
1977, he published a biography, "The
First Duce," about Gabriele D'Annun-
zio, an Italian ideological adventurer,
"a poet-warrior," as Ledeen put it,
who was a precursor of Mussolini.
[)'Annunzio considered politics a form
of theater and believed in the rule of a
charismatic leader at the :rest of mas-
ses mobilized by myth and symbols.
D'Annunzio, Ledeen ~~rote, "pos-
,vssed the key to modern politics,"
providing it "comnnon point of depar-
ture" for "r,idicals of both Right and
Left."
Ledeen s scholarship, however, did
not earn hunt tenure at Washington
University at St. Louis, where he
taught. He left amid accusations of
plagiarism, a charge he has denied.
But his research into Italian politics
proved to be useful.
his Italian career-or charges
about it-surfaced in the case of
Francesco Pazienza, a political intrigu-
er.
Pazienza was a deputy to the chief
of Italian military intelligence and a
leading member of a clandestine or-
ganization called P-2, a parallel hierar-
chy of right-wing generals, colonels
and politicians, which attempted to
stage what the Italian press has called
"a silent coup" through "a strategy of
tension." When the influence of P-2
was exposed in 1981, the Christian
Democratic government fell. Indict-
ments charged P-2 members with
cringes that included "subversive asso-
ciation with the ails of terrorism" and
its cover-up.
In 1985, Pazienza was convicted in
absentia of a long list of crimes, rang-
ing front covering up the right-wing
role in the 1980 Bologna train station
bombing that killed 80 people to abuse
of his intelligence position to "criminal
associations of a Mafia type." Pazien-
za, in an interview with Jonathan
Kwitny of The Will Street Journal,
claimed that Italian military intelli-
gence, then under the control of P-'?,
paid Ledeen at least $120,000, some
of it to a Bermuda bank account, and
that Ledeen operated under the code
name Z-3-charges Ledeen has de-
nied.
The indictment against Pazienza
notes that, "in collaboration" with "the
well-known American 'Italianist' " Le-
deen, Pazienza "succeeded in extort-
ing, also using fraudulent means, in-
formation-then published ... in the
international press-on the Libyan
business of Billy Carter, the brother of
the then president of the United
States."
According to Pazienza. Italian mili-
tary intelligence, under P-2, gathered
information about Billy Carter and
gave it to Ledeen, who in turn coau-
thored a piece with Arnaud de Burch-
grave, now editor in chief of The
Washington Times, breaking the "Bil-
lygate" story in The New Republic.
In Italy, during the transition be-
tween the Carter and Reagan presi-
dencies, Ledeen and Pazienza set
themselves up as the liaison team be-
tween the Italian government and the
incoming administration, then-U.S.
ambassador Richard N. Gardner told
The Washington Post two weeks
ago-a charge Ledeen denied.
Almost as soon as the new team
was in Washington, then-Secretary of
State Alexander Haig named Ledeen
a consultant on international terror-
I.,111.
lie was by then widely acknowl-
edged as an expert of the school that
believed that a "terror network" run
by the Soviets was the fount of inter-
national terrorism. Every hijacking
and car bombing became an illustra-
tion of global geopolitics, rather than
intractable regional strife.
oL
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403730007-1
Ledeen's resume, a wonderfully il-
luminating document for future histo-
rians of the Reagan epoch, lists his vo-
luminous publications and concludes
with details of his television appear-
ances, from "Nightline" to the "Mac-
Neil-Lehrer NewsHour," where he
has appeared as an expert. He wore
his articles the way Oliver North wore
his medals; they were his credibility,
which made all else possible, including
an appearance-after the scandal
broke-on "This Week With David
Brinkley."
His public persona, in the mean-
time, helped sustain his secret activi-
ties as NSC consultant. He was ap-
pointed to the position in 1983 by
then-national security adviser Robert
C. McFarlane, on whom Ledeen lav-
ished praise in the acknowledgements
of his 1985 book, "Grave New World":
"Robert C. McFarlane, who through
friendship and the force of his example
showed me the meaning of intellectual
courage and discipline ..."
According to the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee report, it was Le-
deen who established the irutial coo-
tacts with the Israeli government 'antl
Iranian arms dealer Ghorbanifir.
McFarlane, in his testimony, says Le-
deen "had been acting on his own
hook"-a charge Ledeen has denied.
The Collision
Even as Ledeen was becoming enQ-
broiled in the scandal, he was trying to
advance his reputation as a thinker.
When the chance of appearing in PR
loomed, he jumped. PR still carried
the imprimatur of an honored past.
His unpublished article blames for-
eign policy "chaos" on the press, on
Congress ("One cannot conduct for-
eign policy with more than 500 secre-
taries of state") and on lawyers and
judges ("... they give opinions on the
legality of proposed policies, and
therefore they can often eliminate
certain policy options before they
even enter the broad debate").
These forces, he wrote, inhibit
"those few persons who are seeking to
advance the national interests of the
United States." Who these "few per-
sons" are, Ledeen does not say.
The piece was sent out to PR con-
tributors in anticipation of a lively
symposium. "You may agree or dis-
agree," says managing editor Kurz-
weil. "It's a viable position."
"This is like sending 'The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion' [a classic an-
ti-Semitic tracts to get some thought
on Jewish culture," says Dennis
Wrong. "I still may very well resign
myself. I can't bring myself to say to
William [Phillips) to pack it in, which
may well be the very best thing after
this long and brilliant history. William
doesn't know how sad this is."
Paradoxically, the Ledeen affair has
restored PR for the moment to its old
role: shaping the temper of the intel-
lectuals in an uncertain period. But it
has done so by sheer inadvertence.
"Why did it have to come to this?"
says author and critic Irving Howe,
editor of Dissent magazine and con-
tributor of many significant pieces to
PR. "I felt it was like finding out a
cousin was involved in public malfea-
sance. It's still a cousin. You feel em-
barrassment and shame, which goes
beyond political differences. It's a pa-
thetic ending."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403730007-1