I can think of no group of people who have done more to hold our world together in these last years than you and your associates in the Congress [for Cultural Freedom]. In this country [the United States] in particular, few will ever understand the dimensions and significance of your accomplishment. —George F. Kennan to Nicolas Nabokov, 1959

Of the many important chapters in the history of the Cold War that are nowadays either forgotten, misremembered, or summarily consigned to a demonology that places them beyond the reach of rational inquiry, none has been entombed under a heavier burden of obloquy and distortion than the story of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which emerged in 1950 as the West’s most steadfast and effective focus of intellectual resistance to Stalin and Stalinism and went on to play a significant role in exposing the true nature of Communism and the fraudulent culture that had...

Religions—new ones as well as old—are made, not born, and their accents are unmistakable. These days you can hear them in the reverent introductions to scholarly editions of collected letters and in the equally reverent reviews of one imposing volume after another. Consider Thomas Hardy’s letters, now “complete” in their seven promised volumes: ardent in its high praise, the verdict on the edition was pronounced— like a benediction—well before the final volume appeared. As one reviewer put it: “Volume VI lives up to the superb quality of its predecessors, and for the same reasons: meticulousness, elegance of annotative phrasing and typography, and easily carried authoritativeness. Hardy may not always have been one of the most provocative of correspondents, but he has inspired one of the most accomplished of editions.”