Nothing to Lose but Chains and Shame

The first I heard of Quadrant was in the Seventies and that was through a miscellany of liberal journalists’ casual slurs about CIA money and James McAuley’s 1950’s editorship. I reckon it was the Adelaide Advertiser’s resident “foreign affairs” columnist who alerted me, a self-important little bloke called Bill Guy who kept lacing his articles — always brimful of undergraduate anti-American pieties — with this accusation. I remember that he and other communist auxiliaries such as Mark Aarons on ABC radio in a programme called Broadband were always telling us about the money that this journal had received from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, expecting to elicit the usual bien-pensant faux indignation from readers and listeners and usually succeeding in doing so.

I was a law student then and my reaction was –well done, Mr. McAuley! And thank you, Mr. Foster Dulles.

In the Fifties we were at the acme of an undeclared war with a regime that was murdering its own…