>First off, the journal founded in 1954, by Howe and Coser, Geltman and
>others from the Shactmanite and Partisan Review mileus, was supported
>financially by Joseph Buttinger, an Austrian Socialist exile from when the
>Nazis took over there in '34 after heroic resistance by armed workers
>militias. (Not all socdems are weanies.)Buttinger's wife, btw, Muriel
>Gardner, was the real model for , "Julia, "
This comes from LBO #92:
>More substantively, a reader pointed out a compelling account of
>Dissent's earlier work for the war machine, in Eric Thomas Chester's
>Covert Network: Progressives, the International Rescue Committee,
>and the CIA (M.E. Sharpe, 1995). The IRC traces its origins to 1933,
>when a group of U.S. socialists organized relief efforts for Jews
>and leftists suffering the first wave of Nazi persecutions.
>Prominent among them was Jay Lovestone, who'd been expelled from the
>Communist Party five years earlier for ideological sins, and who by
>the early 1930s had grown close to the passionately anti-Communist
>David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment
>Workers Union. This was the right-wing social democratic milieu that
>would later embrace Uncle Sam and bring a good bit of the left
>aboard for the Cold War.
>
>In its early days, the IRC worked closely with European radicals.
>Among them was Joseph Buttinger, a member of the Austrian
>underground. Buttinger was married to Muriel Gardiner, an heiress to
>the Swift meat fortune who'd gone to Vienna to study psychoanalysis.
>After the war, Buttinger shed his revolutionary politics and went to
>work with, if not literally for, the CIA (and Lovestone became the
>conduit for the CIA's support of right-wing unions abroad).
>
>Among Buttinger's passions in the 1950s was promoting the Diem
>regime in Vietnam. In 1959, he wrote a critical review for Dissent
>of the novel The Ugly American, which portrayed U.S. intervention in
>Vietnam as a lost cause. Buttinger argued that it was the Communists
>who'd "lost all hopes of victory," that Diem's economic policies had
>eliminated hunger, and that a boom was imminent. (Vietnam was the
>star of the U.S. economic development establishment in the 1950s,
>and South Korea was considered hopeless.) As Chester writes: "Five
>years after Diem's authoritarian regime had first come to power,
>Buttinger continued to present a glowing picture of the Diem regime,
>while ignoring its many faults. Rather than provide its readers with
>an account of U.S. policy in Vietnam by a critical observer with
>expert insight, the editors of Dissent published a detailed defense
>of official actions by a participant in the very events being
>analyzed, a participant with intimate, albeit covert, ties to the
>intelligence community." And one whose wife, Chester reports, dipped
>generously into her fortune to keep the magazine afloat.