The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

by Hugh Wilford
ISBN-10:
067403256X
ISBN-13:
9780674032569
Pub. Date:
05/01/2009
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10:
067403256X
ISBN-13:
9780674032569
Pub. Date:
05/01/2009
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America

by Hugh Wilford
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Overview

In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA's reputation has arguably never recovered.

CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his "mighty Wurlitzer," on which he could play any propaganda tune. In this illuminating book, Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America's Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.

Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA's fronts as well as the involved citizen groups—émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists—Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674032569
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 05/01/2009
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 818,877
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Hugh Wilford is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Innocents' Clubs: The Origins of the CIA Front

2. Secret Army: Émigrés

3. AFL-CIA: Labor

4. A Deep Sickness in New York: Intellectuals

5. The Cultural Cold War: Writers, Artists, Musicians, Filmmakers

6. The CIA on Campus: Students

7. The Truth Shall Make You Free: Women

8. Saving the World: Catholics

9. Into Africa: African Americans

10. Things Fall Apart: Journalists

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

What People are Saying About This

Nelson Lichtenstein

Wilford's book is superb, by far the most comprehensive work to date on the front groups through which the CIA sought to project U.S. cultural and political influence. He has an inviting, perceptive, allusive style that pulls in the reader, humanizes and harmonizes the material, and in the end generates the incisive moral or historical point. It was a pleasure to read.
Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara

Wilford's book is superb, by far the most comprehensive work to date on the front groups through which the CIA sought to project U.S. cultural and political influence. He has an inviting, perceptive, allusive style that pulls in the reader, humanizes and harmonizes the material, and in the end generates the incisive moral or historical point. It was a pleasure to read.

Allan M. Winkler

An outstanding book: lively, engaging, thoroughly researched and beautifully written. It provides a clear view of the many activities of the CIA to gain the support of Americans during the Cold War, and raises important questions about the place of such secret efforts to mobilize popular opinion in a democracy.

Allan M. Winkler, Miami University

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Fusing the perspectives of intelligence and social history, Wilford has written the first authoritative overview of the CIA's recruitment of private American citizens to fight communism. Combining meticulous scholarship with a fluent narrative style, he tells a story that will appeal to a wide range of readers. His argument, that American individualism frustrated the CIA's efforts to control, will provoke debate for years to come.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, author of The FBI: A History

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