Happy Days: The Secret History of Post-War America
Hunting for Tom Clancy's Ur-Text in the Frank Wisner Papers
Happy Holidays, Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
I hope this time of year has been restful and restorative for you all; it has been nice to be back in Arkansas for the break, first semester of graduate school went well and I appreciate you all sticking with me as I navigated a new life over the last semester with slightly less time for my passion: Hunting for Tom Clancy with my crew.
So let’s get to Happy Days. As you may recall, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time these last couple of months in the well-lit subterranean special collections library at the University of Virginia.
The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia is a sunlit bunker, one I found myself hunkered in for many blissful hours this semester. The library a treasure trove of historical documents housed underground across the street from Edgar Allan Poe’s room on the West Range; one enters at ground level and proceeds down a wall-hugging spiral staircase to a clean, well-lit, hardwood-and-glass lined cavern illuminated by skylights.
A wraith-like statue of longtime District of Columbia fixer Clark Clifford—sculpted by Pat Oliphant— greets the visitor at the bottom of the staircase; art exhibits adorn lobby.
I spent many hours going through the papers of Frank Wisner , a legendary American spy who set up a foreign propaganda apparatus so well-organized that they called it “The Mighty Wurlitzer” for its ability to play any tune CIA wanted.
Frank Wisner also instituted a domestic propaganda operation he ran through Georgetown’s Vibrant Cocktail Circuit; there’s a thick folder of correspondence between Wisner and the Alsop brothers—first cousins of Eleanor Roosevelt—who produced the influential Matter of Fact syndicated column, as well as regular features for The New York Herald Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, and Newsweek. Entirely with the sanction of the DCI, Wisner would send the Alsops ideas for stories and supply information to give the pieces some color; the brothers, Joe and Stewart, would dutifully publish them. Stewart was in OSS during the war and knew the score.
Wisner in the mid-1950’s was at the height of his powers, feeling the weight of responsibility that came with running a secret war on a daily basis, along multiple fronts: political assassinations, manipulation of trade unions, guerrilla wars, coups in Iran and Guatemala. Yet what occupied Frank the most was the war for the mind. He waged that war ruthlessly, building a portfolio of friendly agents and institutions that encompassed propaganda in all manner of media—radio, television, leaflets, books, magazines, literary journals.
I’ve photographed but not yet processed the Alsop files that are inside the Wisner papers, but it is voluminous and at one point includes Wisner recommending Alsop read a Tom Wolfe review of a Norman Mailer book; he communicated with Alsop almost up until the day of his death. The man kept his agents close.
To give you an idea of what this meant in the 1950’s media environment: having it would be a bit like a well-bred robber baron heir with intelligence connections who’d once interned for CIA serving as the Anchor of a major American television news channel while also hosting the national New Year’s party.
Or maybe it would be more like having a direct line into the son of a Voice of America Director and Ambassador to Seychelles, who happened to have a highly rated television program for no real reason at all.
This system of planting friendly or pliable correspondents in the American and foreign media was started in the late 1940’s by Frank Wisner—it would eventually be run by Cord Meyer—and in my opinion, never really stopped, it just phase shifted.