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James Burnham and Arthur Koestler in Berlin, 1950, “that traumatic synecdoche of the Cold War,” as Burnham named it. Burnham was a member of the OPC, a military intelligence psy-op agency. 1/
Koestler's wife said "Burnham looks very sweet and gentle... but he is much less scrupulous about means than" her husband. Burnham was the ultimate cold war hardliner. 2/
Burnham co-founded a CIA front organization of anti-communist intellectuals in Europe. He wanted an "anti-communist united front," excluding only outright totalitarians (whether Fascists of Communists). Koestler, of course, was a monster. 3/
Burnham allegedly had a role in planning the Iran coup that removed Mossadegh. 4/
He became frustrated with the CIA's liberal efforts to placate the anti-communist left; his colleagues found him “too hard line” and even “fascist.” "You cannot have an anti-Communist apparatus without anti-Communists,” Burnham retorted. 5/
Burnham left the OPC in 1952. In 1953 he quit his positions at NYU and on the Partisan Review editorial board (before he was pushed). In 1955 he co-founded National Review. Some of NR's staff never shook the feeling he was a CIA plant to *neuter* the conservative movement. 6/6
One thing about the OPC is that it stood for the Office of Policy Coordination, which is the sort of extreme banality you'd think would have to be satire.
George Orwell's "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" is well-known and tough. (Some of Burnham's NR rivals admired parts of it). But no one seems to talk about how Orwell cribbed the setting to 1984 straight from The Managerial Revolution.
Peter Coleman - The Machiavellian Poetry of James Burnham (2004)
