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 organizations.
The American press has carried numerous news stories on IPS activities which rarely identify the institute as a leftist organization. The New York Times and other periodicals have frequently carried opinion articles by IPS associates, again without identifying its radical character. Virtually no critical analysis of this influential Washington "think tank" has appeared. In the past twenty-five years only two solid articles have come to my attention: Rael Jean Isaac's in Midstream (June/July 1980) and Joshua Muravchik's in the New York Times Magazine, "Think Tank of the Left" (June 4, 1981). The latter was published only after protracted negotiations between author and editor.
The portrait of the IPS as an effective center of revolutionary activity painted by Isaac and Muravchik is fully supported in Steven
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