>I doubt that the barage of anti-communist literature, which wasn't as
>subtle as promoting abstract expressionism had a great impact on
>participanats in the festival themselves (many of whom were
>Communists) -- it's like distributing piles of anti-Chavez lit at the
>WSF in Venezuela last year.
You're missing the point. As they said of themselves, 'Never before have so many Young Republicans distributed so much Socialist literature with such zeal.' This is parallel organizing: Of course we're for socialism, just not that kind of nasty socialism practiced in those countries where they've uh ... actually taken power away from the bourgeoisie. And of course we're for desegregation and black voting in the U.S., it's just that, see, these black people aren't used to civic participation... that part was to burnish the U.S. image. Also, the Vienna World Youth Festival was the first one held in a non-communist country, which made it a big target for CIA activities. Steinem thought--I'm basing this on her quotes--that she was fighting the good fight, and that the CIA was a bastion of liberalism and reasonableness. She talks about how no-one else would fund U.S. non-communists to go to the festival because it was a red festival. Where this fits into this thread is that she was part of the Great Game, but a do-gooder, dutifully reporting on not just U.S. but Argentine, Italian etc. communist youth to her paymasters. Did they get jailed or shot later? How would she know? She thought communism was bad, nasty, violent--she was a garden variety anti-communist liberal. (Still is, in my view.)
>If Steinem had been nobody, her action would have been of no
>consequence, but given her prominence in the US feminist movement, she
>has cast a shadow over it. And I'm sure she wasn't the only feminist
>who was employed in that capacity.
Sure. But she was a 'nobody' when she took these actions. If you mean retrospectively, then yes. Indeed, some male chauvinist leftists tried to say the Steinem exposé proved all feminism was a CIA plot. But it's a stretch if you are attributing to the CIA the intention of making feminism look bad--at the time they didn't know there would be a radical feminist movement.
Look, she never claimed to be a feminist before 1969. In 1967 she says the CIA should've been supplanting itself with private funds (presumably to avoid further exposures). Four years later her sources of funding for Ms. are 'private,' i.e. Clay Felker, NY Magazine. The subtlety of promoting abstract expressionism's got nothing on the subtlety of the first issues of Ms. Magazine which claimed to be taking feminism mainstream and paid a lot of real feminists to write for it. Of course, they were edited to death. Pat Mainardi (Politics of Housework) writes entertainingly about that.
Jenny Brown