Encounter (magazine) - Founding and First Editors

Founding and First Editors

Such precedents lay not far from the launch in October 1953 of Encounter, the monthly Anglo-American journal of politics and culture, sponsored by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization of largely center-left artists and intellectuals founded in 1950 and dedicated, in line with its title, to countering on behalf of the non-communist West the overtures and influence in culture of the Soviet Union, still under the Communist Party rule of Joseph Stalin until 1953.

The at-the-time undisclosed back-channel partial funding of Encounter by the Central Intelligence Agency (and Britain’s MI6), via such American organizations as the Farfield Foundation, and thence to the CCF, has been a source of epic controversy since that funding was revealed in 1967 in the pages of Ramparts, the New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post, to the point where recall of the actual contents of the magazine, and of its extraordinary, interdisciplinary and international range of distinguished authors, have often figured as relative footnotes. In point of fact, the unfolding contents of Encounter over its thirty-seven years, from 1953 through 1990, in both its political and cultural, if not formally demarcated, halves, afford an unsurpassed, satellite’s-eye vantage from which to view both developments of enduring significance in world literature and in shifting patterns of high-journalistic political allegiance, most notably in the latter sphere, in the shifts on both sides of the Atlantic triggered by the rise of the “neoconservative” tendency in opposition to the prevailing left-liberal tendencies and organs of elite opinion presaging the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire, and the struggles in the western democracies over the role of the market vs. that of the central state.

The choices for the first two Encounter co-editors, the American political essayist Irving Kristol (1920–2009) and the English poet Stephen Spender (1909–95) were telling, and in retrospect can be seen to have set in template much of the course of the magazine’s evolution even over its final twenty-three years succeeding the resignation in 1967, after the CIA-funding revelation, of Spender.