A distinguished roster of speakers attend the opening day of the General Conference of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in West Berlin June 16, 1960.

“‘The past is a foreign country,’ L.P. Hartley famously wrote as he opened The Go–Between. There is a pretty tristesse in the line, as Hartley intended, and it holds if the topic is lost love, the joys and errors of youth, all the roads not traveled. But anyone who thinks the thought applies to our institutions, ideologies, and policies, as we are incessantly encouraged to assume, needs to think again. In the political context we must revert to the other noted mot (Faulkner’s) on the topic: The past is not even past. It would be hard to bring this point home more saliently now than Joel Whitney does in Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers. Whitney’s topic is “the instrumentalization…