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America the Enemy: Profile of a Radical Think Tank
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14375 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1988 |
3,416 Words |
| Author
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Ernest W. Lefever
Ernest W. Lefever is president of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center and the author of Nairobi to Vancouver: The World
Council of Churches and the World, 1975-87, just published by
the center. |
COVERT CADRE:
Inside the Institute for Policy Studies
S. Steven Powell
Ottawa, Illinois: Green Hill Publishers, 1988
459 pp., $29.95
The American prestige press delights in exposing real or imagined dangers from the Right while often ignoring real and present dangers from the Left. Were this not the case, well-informed citizens would know as much about the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) as they know as much about My Lai and the Pentagon Papers. Put another way, sectors of the prestige press are more interested in reporting on and castigating the sins of America than the sins of the Soviet Union and its sympathizers.
Ever since the establishment of the IPS in 1963 in Washington, D.C., I have been aware that it was not the liberal think tank it claimed to be, but was committed to the agenda of the Left. During the early 1960s, I became acquainted with the cofounders, Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin, who pretended to be concerned about U.S. security and genuine stability between the superpowers. I soon learned that they saw America as the chief culprit in the nuclear "arms race." Barnet began pushing an early version of moral symmetry between Washington and Moscow. In my book, Arms and Arms Control (1962), I included two essays by Barnet and pieces by John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Henry Kissinger, Hubert Humphrey, Robert Strausz-Hupe, Morton Halperin, Fred Iklé, Herman Kahn, and Edward Teller. Barnet characterized Soviet-American arms negotiations as a "parallel monologue" marked by "intransigence on both sides." Fifteen years later in his The Giants: Russia and America (1977), Barnet went further: "The CIA and the KGB have the same conspiratorial world view," "the military establishments" in both countries are "each other's best allies," "Khrushchev and Dulles were perfect partners," and each country is "a prisoner of a sixty-year-old obsession." In 1982, he said: "The Soviet threat is the big lie of the arms race." In the final analysis, America, not the USSR, was responsible for the threat of war hanging over us.
Despite its small and unobtrusive beginning, IPS soon became a major actor in the rising New Left movement here and in Western Europe. It nourished and in turn was nourished by the Left with ideas, books, periodicals, op-ed pieces, an alternative press, and organizational skills. It became a clearing house, a lobby, a school, and a cadre with a talent for generating dozens of spinoff
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