The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – Take Two

J. Edgar Hoover

When Jamie Bernstein told me about her father’s FBI file – and its disclosure of hate mail and picketers generated by the FBI in 1970, in the wake of the Bernsteins’ Black Panthers fundraiser — I was impressed but unsurprised. A year before, J. Edgar Hoover had called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The FBI responded with a covert counter-intelligrance program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance and infiltration.

I claim no expertise about the Black Panthers. But I did live through the sixties and seventies, including momentous years in Berkeley and Oakland. Before that, in 1970, I graduated from Swarthmore College, where my last two years were tumultuous. One day a gentleman in his thirties turned up and participated in a meeting at which he ludicrously suggested that our student demonstrations were insufficiently violent. Nobody paid any attention to him or thought twice about it. Some time later a nearby FBI office was raided in Media, Pennsylvania. Those files disclosed FBI agents infiltrating Swarthmore student meetings both on and off campus. We also learned that the campus switchboard operator was an FBI informant.

Someone should write a book about the relationship between the intelligence community and the American arts during the Cold War. At Tanglewood, an informant — another switchboard operator — fingered Aaron Copland with no idea who he was. The same was true of Joe McCarthy, when he interrogated Copland in 1953; his ignorance was risible.

My book on the cultural Cold War, The Propaganda of Freedom, is a study in mutual incomprehension. The White House, the CIA, and the State Department relied upon Nicolas Nabokov as their in-house expert on the state of the arts in Soviet Russia. As General Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Nabokov enjoyed access to limitless funding, covertly furnished by the CIA. He also wrote widely about Soviet music. He was a minor composer of consequence, a cosmopolite, a charming and well intentioned raconteur. He was also a man disinherited by the Russian Revolution and traumatized by exile. He could only view the Soviet Union as a cultural and intellectual wasteland. He particularly demonized Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he considered a lesser composer than his friend Vittorio Rieti. And — notwithstanding the achievements of Shostakovich or Tarkovsky or Solzhenitsyn — this became the counter-factual American propaganda line: that absent “freedom,” creativity was inconceivable.  Any reasonably informed observer of Soviet music in those years (I even include myself) could have told the CIA that Nabokov’s Orwellian USSR was a fantasy. Soviet Russia was no North Korea.

Relying on Nicolas Nabokov for insight into Soviet culture was kindred to relying on Cuban exiles for advice on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Or thinking that the Bernsteins were a threat to American wellbeing.

To read a follow-up blog, click here.