“The Propaganda of Freedom” — A Podcast

When was the last time an American President cited the arts as a vital component of the ‘”state of the union”? John F. Kennedy did, in 1963. That’s the starting point of my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky and the Cultural Cold War (currently available at a 30 per cent discount via University of Illinois Press).

It’s also the starting point of a 30-minute “Propaganda of Freedom” podcast interview with my friend Richard Aldous (biographer of Arthur J. Schlesinger) for The American Purpose.

In the same breath that he extolled the arts, Kennedy made a counter-factual Cold War claim: that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art. In my book – and in the first part of the podcast – I trace the lineage of that seminal claim back to Igor Stravinsky (!), who insisted on the autonomy of the creative act. He had to believe that, in exile from his beloved Russian homeland in Paris and Los Angeles. So this was a polemic that travelled from Stravinsky to his friend Nicolas Nabokov to his friend Arthur Schlesinger, thence to the President’s ear. Nabokov, at the time, headed the Congress for Cultural Freedom – the CIA’s cultural Cold War propaganda instrument. It’s the same line of thought that prompted Americans – including an eminent educational theorist and the head of the New York City musician’s union – to urge Shostakovich to defect to “freedom” so he could unfetter his muse.

The second part of the podcast, beginning seven minutes in, cites Shostakovich’s claim that he was “freer” composing in Russia than were American composers – say, Stravinsky himself, free not to matter in Hollywood. That the arts mattered more for Soviets than Americans is a core contention of my book. In the podcast, I recall experiencing the Leningrad Philharmonic on its only US tour in 1962 – and discovering that “the world’s greatest orchestra” wasn’t in Boston or Chicago or Philadelphia after all. (To sample the Leningrad Philharmonic at full throttle in live performance, check out the mightiest Tchaikovsky performance I know, right here.)

Part three (11:45) of the podcast deals with American naivete and misinformation during the cultural Cold War – e.g., my discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Leonard Bernstein got better reviews in Moscow than in New York City. I also tell the story of the Soviet Embassy hosting a post-concert reception for Van Cliburn in DC following his triumph in the 1958 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow – in the wake of which President Eisenhower told Cliburn he was off to Camp David for the weekend and would have to miss his DC performance. (Vice President Nixon didn’t attend either.)

Part four of the podcast (17 minutes in) is about the state of the arts today – the devastating loss of cultural memory; the urgency of increased government arts subsidies and renewed cultural diplomacy.

My thanks to Richard for hosting this animated exchange.