In March 1949 a large group of U.S. fellow travelers, some of whom were outright apologists for Stalinism, organized the Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace at the opulent Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. The Waldorf Conference—the name by which it is remembered—had been initiated by the Communist Information Bureau in Moscow as part of the Soviet Union's long-term strategy to enlist credulous, ill-informed, duplicitous, or well-meaning Western intellectuals in its campaigns against fascism (in the 1930s) and later against nuclear weapons. “By the time the Cold War began in the late 1949s,” Duncan White observes, “the Soviet Union's leaders were already old hands at cultural warfare” (p. 3). Anxious to voice their concern over the use of nuclear weapons, prominent intellectuals in the United States like Leonard Bernstein, Albert Einstein, and Frank Lloyd Wright lent their names as sponsors. Still others, including Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Howard Fast,...

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