{"id":1640,"date":"2020-01-05T11:39:14","date_gmt":"2020-01-05T16:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1640"},"modified":"2020-01-05T11:39:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-05T16:39:22","slug":"jfks-cold-war-cultural-dogma-and-where-it-came-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/01\/jfks-cold-war-cultural-dogma-and-where-it-came-from.html","title":{"rendered":"JFK’s Cold War Cultural Dogma — and Where It Came From"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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During the cultural Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered eloquent speeches claiming that only \u201cfree societies\u201d fostered great creative art. But no one scanning centuries of Western literature and music could possibly believe that. Among countless counter-examples was the Soviet Union at that very moment. Its film-makers included Tarkovsky, its poets Akhmatova, its novelists Solzhenitsyn, its composers Shostakovich — all of whom were acclaimed in the West as of 1963, the year of Kennedy’s most ambitious cultural pronouncements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A crucial intellectual source of this curious Cold War dogma was a minor Russian-born composer exiled in the US: Nicolas Nabokov, General Secretary of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. His link to the Kennedy White house was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whose once influential book The<\/em> Vital Center<\/em> (1949) supported an equation between a citizen’s freedom of speech and an artist’s freedom of expression. But artists can suffer from \u201ctoo much freedom\u201d \u2013 a condition of rootlessness such as afflicted Igor Stravinsky in Los Angeles, or Aaron Copland when he complained that American composers were \u201cworking in a vacuum.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this is the subject matter of my book-in-progress Cold War Quartet: JFK, Stravinsky<\/em>, Shostakovich and the Culture Warrior<\/em> \u2013 the first outcome of which is a long article published this weekend in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>. You can read it here<\/a><\/strong>. For an excerpt, read on:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was Nabokov\u2019s longtime association with Arthur\nSchlesinger that brought him into contact with the Kennedys. Doubtless, as General\nSecretary of the CCF, his activities would not in any event have gone wholly\nunnoticed in the Oval Office. But it was Schlesinger, as special advisor to the\nPresident, who facilitated a direct relationship. Nabokov was first received at\nthe White House in 1961 during a visit to fund-raise for CCF programs; the\nFirst Lady gave him a tour. At Schlesinger\u2019s suggestion, Nabokov compiled for\nMrs. Kennedy a list of cultural personalities worthy of White House notice. A\nyear later, thanks to Schlesinger, Nabokov helped to plan a White House dinner\nhonoring Stravinsky\u2019s 80th<\/sup> birthday. In the Green Room, Nabokov\nobserved Kennedy asking Stravinsky what he thought of the leading Soviet\ncomposers. Stravinsky, Nabokov later recalled, \u2018turned to the president, in his\nmost courtly manner, and replied: \u201cMr. President, I have left Russia since 1914\nand have so far not been in the Soviet Union. I have not studied or heard many\nof the works of these composers. I have therefore no valid opinion.\u201d And the\npresident looked at me over Stravinsky\u2019s shoulder and smiled approvingly.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStravinsky, to his chagrin, had been conspicuously preceded\nat the White House by Pablo Casals. Nothing like this had occurred under Dwight\nEisenhower. A declared outsider to high culture, Eisenhower had called \u2018freedom\nof the arts\u2019 a \u2018basic freedom,\u2019 versus using artists as \u2018tools of the state\u2019 \u2013\nbut without JFK\u2019s patina of erudition and experience. At the Kennedys\u2019 Camelot,\nJackie\u2019s high-cultural aspirations were tangible, and her husband made the arts\na pronounced American cause. No less than the Russia hands Bohlen and Kennan,\nthe White House doubtless deferred to Nabokov\u2019s expert understanding of Soviet\nmusical life. In fact, Kennedy\u2019s core arts manifestos were drafted by\nSchlesinger. This connects the dots. In The\nVital<\/em> Center<\/em> (1949), Schlesinger\nhad reframed liberal democratic politics in terms of a fierce individualism,\nrejecting the collectivism of the Soviet-based cultural front. High culture,\nconcomitantly, was an elite exercise in art for art\u2019s sake. Nabokov, the\nauthority on Soviet culture, furnished empirical proof that, absent unfettered\nindividualism, the creative act was nullified. Surely Nabokov was, in effect,\nthe source of the President\u2019s elaborated views on \u2018free societies\u2019 as a necessary\nprecondition for high creative achievement, and of his blunt dismissal of\npolitical art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNabokov found the Kennedys a little gauche and likened the\nFirst Lady\u2019s idea of hostessing to a mixture of Dior, Chanel, Saint-Lauren, and\nBroadway. In settings more intellectual than the White House, however, he was\nthe proverbial life of the party. His conversational aplomb is on full display\nin Tony Palmer\u2019s superb 2008 Stravinsky documentary, as he elegantly frames the\ncomposer\u2019s \u2018inherent quality of irony\u2019: \u2018Stravinsky on one side was a hedonist,\nenjoying all the pleasure of life \u2014 loving to eat, good wine, and for a very\nlong time pretty girls. On the other side, he was a rigorously ritualistic and\nreligious person \u2014 like ancient people are.\u2019 He is also observed sipping Scotch\nwith Stravinsky while conversing in four languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNicolas Nabokov seemed the very embodiment of cosmopolitan\ncharm. But his worldliness can be read as a destabilizing rootlessness.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the cultural Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered eloquent speeches claiming that only \u201cfree societies\u201d fostered great creative art. But no one scanning centuries of Western literature and music could possibly believe that. Among countless counter-examples was the Soviet Union at that very moment. Its film-makers included Tarkovsky, its poets Akhmatova, its novelists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-qs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1647,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions\/1647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}