In September 1960, after the publisher of the magazine Musical America asked the presidential candidates for their views about music, then-Senator John F. Kennedy sent a letter declaring, “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts. The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth is also the age of Shakespeare.”
Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War serves as an intellectual successor to Kennedy's hypothesis about the relationship between civil society and creativity. Menand's book is not about why culture evolved as it did in the Cold War, or even how it evolved. Rather, he presents a series of curated examples of the “random acts of cross-pollination” that were possible only...