[5] The covert partial funding of Encounter by the Central Intelligence Agency (and Britain's MI6), via such American organisations as the Farfield Foundation, and thence to the CCF, was revealed in March 1967 in the pages of Ramparts,[11] The New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post.
Influenced by his experiences in the City College of New York cafeterias of the late 1930s, where Marxists, Trotskyists and Stalinists argued freely, Kristol had already, as early as 1952, in his writings in Commentary during the McCarthy years,[13] set the tone for the neo-populist critique of liberal "new class" elites he would later seed during his almost forty-year stint (1965–2002) as founding co-editor of The Public Interest, the public-policy quarterly.
Spender's apprenticeship in the editor's chair had come over a decade before when he served as deputy to the English aesthete Cyril Connolly in editing, for its first two years, the influential literary monthly Horizon (1940–49), many of whose writers would show up in Encounter in due course throughout the 1950s and after.
After combat with the seventh army and postwar service in Berlin under military governor Lucius Clay, Lasky founded the German-language monthly Der Monat (The Month), and, amid an adult life spent largely ever since in Germany, was enlisted in 1955 back in New York to edit the first two numbers of The Anchor Review (1955–57), an annual published by the new Anchor Books imprint of Doubleday, fruit of the 1950s quality-paperback revolution spearheaded by Jason Epstein, and whose international roster of high-humanist contributors – Auden, Connolly, Koestler, Silone – made it resemble a concurrent mini-Encounter.
During his 32 years at Encounter, Lasky, with his balding head and Van Dyke beard centrally cast as an inverted Lenin, proved instrumental in the long and dedicated cultivation of contacts from among the persecuted writers of Poland (i.a.
Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert), East Germany, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, and then-Yugoslavia, and devoted extensive front-cover coverage throughout the 1960s and 1970s to the judicial travails in Russia of Andrei Sinyavsky[29][30] (aka "Abram Tertz", under which nom de plume several samizdat short stories appeared), Yuli Daniel, Joseph Brodsky[31] and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and in Poland to the case of Leszek Kołakowski,[32] the philosopher exiled to the West in 1968 by the Polish Communist Party, and who became one of the magazine's defining contributors, whose blend of intellectual history and anti-Soviet militancy made him a sort of Slavic cross between Isaiah Berlin and Sidney Hook.
As for the nations of the so-called developing world, thanks in part to Spender's early attention to matters echt-English, the aftermath of the British Empire not least, Indian affairs, especially as they involved writers and intellectuals, were prominent on the contents page, with the heterodox essayist and memoirist Nirad Chaudhuri among the earliest of the magazine's long-serving correspondents from the subcontinent.
As distinguished symposiasts from diverse spheres debated in its political sections such matters as the advisability of Britain's entry into the European Economic Community, the expansion of its tax-funded higher-education system, the aftermath of empire and the strains of assimilating the influx of immigrants from the decolonised nations, and the latest false dawn for socialists in Cuba, a rising generation of critics and scholars engaged the newly arrived high thinkers of the age – Clifford Geertz, R.D.
Poets affiliated from the 1950s with The Movement —Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain–contributed to the magazine, in many cases, in fiction and in essays also.
The biweekly New York Review of Books, founded in 1963, began to enlist from its outset a regular roster of the cream of the very sort of prestige British humanists and scientific essayists who had so distinguished themselves in the pages of Encounter in its first ten years, creating a rival outlet for them whose greater prominence in the much larger American market would only deepen after the 1967 high-profile resignations of Spender and Kermode, both of them at the very summit of Anglo-American literary life.
The then largely intra-Democratic rifts issuing from reactions to, for instance, the Vietnam War, student radicalism and the New Left, urban strife, the Great Society, the rise of Black Power and affirmative action, played out on the contents pages of the highbrow journals in a sharpening of sides among the political contributors to the liberal-to-radical (in politics if not in art and literature) New York Review in opposition to the post-1970 rightward shift of Commentary under Norman Podhoretz; the New York Review had already as of its third year (1965, when Kristol and Bell founded The Public Interest) shed the future neoconservatives who had marked its first two years.
[39] Another sign of the times came in 1972, when Daniel Bell, firmly of the social-democratic, anti-Stalinist, Old Left/Menshevik tendency, resigned from his co-editorship of The Public Interest, rather than strain his long friendship with Irving Kristol, who had recently left the Democratic fold and come out, for Richard Nixon, easing into his final four decades in the ideological orbit of, e.g., the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
One of the prime set-pieces among the hawk-vs-dove needle-matches underway came with a six-instalment series in which the eminent diplomat-historian — and "containment" theorist of the first years of the Cold War — George F. Kennan,[46][47][48] then in his early seventies, squared off against his critics in the form of several interviews he had granted to George Urban of Radio Free Europe, with detailed rejoinders — and another mutual follow-up round — in succeeding issues by the veteran historian of the Russian empire at the University of London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Hugh Seton-Watson,[49] by Richard Pipes of Harvard[50][51] — the latter due in several years for a post helping Ronald Reagan plot strategy toward the Soviet Union — and Leopold Labedz,[52][53] Polish-born editor of Survey, a quarterly journal of Soviet-bloc affairs.
The exchanges, marked each time on the part of Kennan's critics by a ritual and almost incantatory deference to his stature and role as almost Old Testament wise man, grew increasingly testy on both sides, with Seton-Watson accusing Kennan of allowing his aristocratic-utopian hand-wringing over Western cultural degeneracy to vanquish his sense of the moral urgency and legitimacy of the west's need to better defend itself against a newly hardened foe, with Pipes accusing him of an overly-optimistic estimate of relaxation in Soviet military strategy since the death of Stalin, charges amplified by Labedz.
The range of literary figures, some young and others established, whose first contributions to Encounter came during the 1970s included novelists Martin Amis, Italo Calvino, Elias Canetti, Margaret Drabble, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Paul Theroux, D.M.
The final decade for Encounter, the 1980s, was marked by regular elegy for old and distinguished friends of the magazine who had aged along with it, chief among them the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler[54][55] and the French political philosopher and journalist Raymond Aron.
[56][57][58] Longtime social-democrat friend of the magazine Sidney Hook died at 86 in July 1989, missing by less than six months the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, previewed his memoir Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century[59] in Encounter in the mid-1980s.
As Brezhnev gave way to Andropov, then to Chernenko and finally to Gorbachev, such contributors as former Labour cabinet secretary (Lord) Alun Chalfont[60][61][62] were dedicated to exposing what they saw as the errors of assorted unilateralist disarmers in the peace movement and foes of nuclear deterrence such as the English historian E.P.
Encounter's range of political contributors edged closer to the stateside neoconservative orbit found in the 1980s grouped round, such as Commentary, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and the American Spectator.
[63] Though the literary side of Encounter throughout the 1980s featured a far smaller proportion of writers at the forefront of their national literatures as had its 1960s incarnation under Stephen Spender, and a 1983 change in cover design scrapped its austere "Continental" template in favour of a glossy look more characteristic of proverbially "slick" periodicals familiar from American newsstands, given the lofty heights from which it would recede, it still sustained its nonpolitical autonomy and ample proportions when the English poet Anthony Thwaite was replaced in 1985 by Richard Mayne, an English journalist, broadcaster, translator from the French, the magazine's Paris correspondent and "M." columnist, and former assistant to Jean Monnet, architect of the European Economic Community.
[65] Thanks to the uncommon distinction, disciplinary and geographic range of the contributors it brought together in one venture, especially during the years 1953–67 prior to the CIA-funding revelations, Encounter earned regard as a high-water mark in postwar periodical literature.
"[69] In a review in 2011 in The New Republic of a posthumous collection of essays by Irving Kristol, Franklin Foer wrote that "Encounter... deserve[s] a special place in the history of the higher journalism... [it] was some of the best money that the [CIA] ever spent.