Part 2 of 2
“Something Rotten in Denmark”: Protesting the ArrangementAlong with Eggleston’s belief that the CIA’s constant requests for pictures were a nuisance that hindered Life’s journalism, others at Time Inc. raised ethical concerns with the relationship. In September 1951, with red peril politics and McCarthyism in full swing, Manfred Gottfried, chief of correspondents for Time’s overseas bureau, wrote a long memo to the company’s founder and president, Henry Luce, to express his unease.62
Gottfried may well have felt comfortable voicing his dissent where others might not have. Luce tolerated some dissent within his newsrooms and even allowed his journalists to develop their own editorial line. At the same time, his politics were well-known among his staff, and beyond. It was not unheard of to challenge Luce’s views within Time Inc., but it was certainly courageous. Gottfried had known Luce for a long time. He was one of Luce’s first employees. Like Luce he studied at Yale University, and was still a senior when he interviewed for the job in February 1922. A few days after the interview, Luce asked Gottfried to accompany him to his tailor, and offered him the position as he was “standing pantless in a shop stall while his trousers were being pressed.”63 Gottfried joined the skeleton staff as its first paid writer, and went on to help Luce establish the Time Inc. empire. Perhaps Gottfried’s familiarity with Luce emboldened him enough to speak out. At one point he even encouraged others within the organization to speak truth to power and challenge newsroom consensus. “There are those among you who think altogether too much about ‘writing for the boss,’” he wrote in an internal memo that was circulated widely among the writing staff. “Time never did and does not now demand servility, intellectual or otherwise, from the members of its staff.”64 Luce himself concurred: “we like dissenters,” he claimed, although they must “be the exception rather than the rule. We seek characteristic agreement leaving room for uncharacteristic dissent.”65
Kathryn McGarr argues that the private airing among journalists of their misgivings and disagreements helped them to “smooth out dissent.”66 Particular points of contestation were acceptable among this homogenous group of reporters, but wholesale radicalism would quickly earn a correspondent a reputation for being “irresponsible,” which in the closed circles of the press corps meant ostracization, loss of access, and ultimately career death. Perhaps this is what Luce meant by “characteristic agreement leaving room for uncharacteristic dissent.” For although Time Inc.’s managing editors like Gottfried “attempted to describe an open environment, there is no question that all the staff knew where Luce stood and realized he owned the printing press.”67
In his memo to Luce, Gottfried articulated four principal objections to Time Inc.’s policy of sending foreign dispatches directly to the CIA. His first argument concerned the secretive nature of the relationship, indicating a fundamental clash of values between the journalistic commitment to publicity and transparency, and the logics of state secrecy. He told Luce that he was uncomfortable with the CIA’s continued reassurances that Time Inc. would never “get caught” helping the Agency. Time’s Eleanor Welch also took precautions to help anonymize the material before it was sent to the CIA. As Gottfried put it to Luce: “There’s something rotten in Denmark if we do things at which we could, even in theory, ‘get caught.’ No one ‘gets caught’ in acts of virtue.” In remedy, Gottfried proposed that Time publish its relationship with the CIA in the magazine’s F.Y.I. section, a common practice when Time had cooperated with other government agencies. “If it turns out that we do not dare publish what we are doing, then there is something really smelly about it,” Gottfried signed off at the end of the memo.68
Tellingly, both Time Inc. and the CIA feared public exposure of the arrangement: “it would not help your overseas people to have it become generally known that there is an effective working arrangement between TIME-LIFE and the U.S. intelligence network,” Andrews stressed in a letter to Luce’s assistant, Bernard Barnes. He was right. Reflecting upon an almost identical arrangement between the CIA and the New York Times, Harrison Salisbury worried that if it were publicly known, or even suspected, that Times journalists were sharing information with the CIA, not only would they risk their reputation, but in extremis they or their sources might be confronted with a charge of espionage, which in the Soviet Union and many other countries, carried the penalty of death.69 Although this was an extreme and perhaps unlikely scenario, it was nevertheless possible, and certainly something that concerned Salisbury during his investigations, as well as Time Inc.’s own Herman Nickel in his 1977 statement to the U.S. Congress. At the very least, exposure of this relationship would damage the reputation of Time and Life’s foreign correspondents, and could deter possible future sources from talking to them. Small wonder then that Time Inc. wished to keep the arrangement secret.
Indeed, Time Inc.’s desire for maintaining secrecy was perhaps even stronger than the CIA’s. At one point Andrews asked Time Inc. whether the pictures the CIA copied from its archives could be reclassified from “Confidential” to “Restricted.” This would allow the CIA to share the images more easily with other government departments who requested them. This time, however, it was Time Inc.’s turn to be bashful. Roy E. Larsen, Publisher of Life and second only to Henry Luce in terms of influence at the corporation, wrote to Andrews to refuse his request. Presumably to help ensure that Time Inc.’s relationship with the CIA would never be discovered, he insisted that the more restrictive “Confidential” classification of the images should remain in place.70 It was, as Allen Grover later remarked, entirely naïve to think that Time Inc. did not “do things for which we do not want glaring publicity.”71 In this case, it was Time Inc., even more than the CIA, who demanded that their relationship be kept secret.
Gottfried’s second argument against the relationship concerned questions of power, oversight and congressional control: “The last time the CIA boys came to see me, I said ‘look here, we have no business giving you material we got for journalistic purposes, but if you have the power to tap our wires there is no way we can keep if from you.’” The CIA’s response, according to Gottfried, was that Congress would never allow them to tap the wires of a U.S. news organization. Or as Gottfried interpreted it: “the representatives of the people apparently do not think the national interest requires that CIA see our file.”72
Gottfried’s third argument warned of hypocrisy on the part of Time. Three days before he sent the letter, an article appeared in Time about the Soviet Union’s official news agency: TASS (Telegraf-noye agentsvo SSSR—Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union). The article denounced TASS as a den of Soviet spies, with almost no journalistic function beyond gathering intelligence for the government. The article alleged that Soviet spies were routinely using TASS as journalistic cover, which allowed them privileged access to U.S. policymakers and officials. A number of leading members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors demanded that the government ban all those affiliated with TASS from entering the Capitol press galleries. The government demurred, citing fears that it could be construed as an attack on the freedom of the press. Time’s line on this particular debate, however, was clear: “If Tassmen are Russian intelligence agents and not bona fide correspondents, then they are not entitled to the privileges of the working press.”73 It was surely hypocritical, Gottfried argued, to denounce TASS-affiliated journalists for their close working relationship with Soviet intelligence while simultaneously maintaining their own close working relationship with the CIA. But unlike Time, Gottfried argued, TASS “has no journalistic morals to uphold. And unlike us Tass does not fool anybody about what it is doing.”74
His final argument was less defined than the others, but instead stemmed from an inherent unease with secret intelligence agencies, and in particular the idea that journalists should be mixed up with them: “CIA makes a great point that it does not want secret information from us; it just wants a lot of helpful, harmless matter for its useful general research. Of course the World Almanac contains a lot of useful information for a spy, but he is still a spy and CIA is still the top U.S. spy ring. As long as we pretend to be honest journalists we ought not to be mixed up in it. As journalists we have a unique obligation to be candid with the public.”75
During the 1950s there were plenty of things that U.S. journalists were not candid about with the public, and to the initiated, Gottfried’s complaint was naïve. “Gott is living in a world of white knighthood and crystal purity (which I do not recognize) if he thinks we don’t do things for which we do not want glaring publicity,” responded Time Inc. Vice-President Allen Grover.76 Indeed discretion, especially on matters of national security, was considered a mark of “responsible” journalism. Those journalists who were trusted enough by foreign policymakers to be included in exclusive (and exclusively white and male) off-the-record chats and background meetings relied upon their reputations as “responsible” men who would not publicize potentially damaging state secrets that they learned from these behind-closed-doors events.77 As a result, many CIA activities, and especially its covert operations, went almost entirely unreported by 1950s U.S. foreign correspondents. James Reston, for example, acknowledged that the Times had left a great deal of information about the CIA out of the newspapers during this period, including “what we knew about U.S. intervention in Guatemala and in a variety of other cases.”78 During the Iranian coup, the New York Times’s correspondent in Tehran was Kennett Love. Despite his close relationship with CIA officers on the ground, who among other things secured him an exclusive interview with the CIA-backed coup leader, General Fazlollah Zahedi, Love did not mention the Agency in any of his Times articles that reported the coup from Tehran.79
Back at Time Inc., Allen Grover’s condescending dismissal of Gottfried’s complaint as desperately naïve was also likely informed by personal experience. “I’m prejudiced” on the matter, he admitted.80 An ardent Cold Warrior, Grover was already an active participant in both overt and covert U.S. government efforts to defeat the Soviet Union. In January 1951, for example, Grover attended a meeting at the exclusive River Club in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The meeting was called by the head of CIA covert operations Frank Wisner. At the meeting Grover and a number of other leading journalists and statesmen were “‘cut-in’” on a secret CIA plot to establish a front organization named “The American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia” (ACLPR).81 Ostensibly, the committee was established as a source of guidance and funding for Russian émigrés from the Soviet Union. Covertly, the committee was funded and directed by the CIA. With this covert endowment from the U.S. government, the ACLPR worked to organize émigré communities from the Soviet Union, no easy task given the in-fighting among the many different communities that had fled the USSR. It also provided the CIA with a conduit for the sponsorship of anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Most famously, the committee established Radio Liberation (later known as Radio Liberty) in 1953, which broadcast “uncensored news and information” to the Soviet Union, working closely (though not always amicably) with its CIA-funded counterpart, Radio Free Europe, which broadcast to the Eastern bloc.82 Allen Grover sat on Radio Liberty’s Board of Trustees, while his boss at Time Inc., Henry Luce, was intimately involved with the creation of Radio Free Europe.
Grover’s support for the CIA’s arrangement with Time Inc. and the dim view he took of Gottfried’s idealistic opposition to such a secretive relationship was therefore unsurprising. As he wrote in a clearly irritated tone to his fellow managing editor John Shaw Billings: “My case for continuing to give CIA our edited foreign file is simply that it does help them, and I can’t see that it hurts us. It hasn’t yet, and I don’t see why it ever would, if everyone kept their mouths shut and didn’t beat their brains out over something that shows no sign of happening.”83
In response to Gottfried’s protest, Time Inc. initially suspended the arrangement with the CIA. Grover, however, continued to advocate for cooperation, and reinstated the arrangement over Gottfried’s protests. Undeterred, Gottfried went to see Grover and told him that he remained uneasy about it. An exasperated Grover agreed to re-suspend the arrangement pending a final decision by Henry Luce.84 As a renowned Cold Warrior and close associate with numerous senior CIA officials, Luce may have been expected to support continued cooperation with the Agency. But Gottfried’s memo helped him to see the ethical dilemma involved in such an arrangement. Still unsure, Luce asked his Deputy Editorial Director John Shaw Billings for his opinion.85 In response, Billings polled the opinion of the corporation’s most senior editors. They agreed with Gott. “Although each has a little different argument,” Billings relayed to Luce, “in principle they all come back to this proposition: It is wrong for journalists to be working for an intelligence agency.” Billings concurred: “I believe that the editors are right, and should tell the CIA once and for all—NO.”86
Billings’s intervention, along with the support for Gottfried’s position by a majority of Time and Life’s senior managing editors, settled the matter for Luce. In January 1952 he ended the practice of sharing the magazines’ foreign dispatches with the CIA. Grover was disgruntled: “This weighty opinion of my peers—or perhaps this opinion of my weighty peers—doesn’t surprise me at all,” he told Luce, barely concealing his sardonic tone. “Nor does it shake my conviction that it is a wrong-headed opinion.” Grudgingly, Grover was forced to accept Luce’s decision, though he petulantly washed his hands of the matter by refusing to convey the decision to the CIA. Taking charge, Luce met personally with the CIA’s Alfred Clark, who had taken over from James Hunt as Time Inc.’s contact-person at the Agency, and told him that the company was ending the arrangement.87
This reveals a very different reason for why the arrangement came to an end than the one offered by Harrison Salisbury in his investigations at the New York Times. He argued that the arrangement simply wound down during the 1950s as the CIA began to professionalize. “The rationale for it had begun to vanish, the Agency had its own men in the field, they talked to correspondents in the foreign capitals, they had their own liaison with the embassies, got what they needed on the spot… it just died a natural death.”88 These files, however, demonstrate that at Time Inc. at least, it was far from a natural death. The series of arrangements that the CIA had in place with Time Inc. stopped because editors and journalists protested them, and won. Internal newsroom dissent at Time Inc. ended the arrangement abruptly, not, as Salisbury tells it, the CIA’s gradually declining appetite for the intelligence it ascertained from U.S. journalists.
Saying “No” to the CIAThis opinion of Time’s senior editorial staff ended the practice of the magazine sharing its foreign dispatches with the CIA, but it did not end Time Inc.’s relationship with the Agency completely. Life continued to allow a CIA officer to visit its picture archive every week until the summer of 1969.89 Over almost a twenty-year period, the CIA’s weekly visits to Life helped the Agency amass a vast picture archive of over 100,000 images. These images were “extremely valuable for a variety of intelligence purposes,” CIA Assistant Director James Andrews reassured Time Inc. President Roy E. Larsen.90 In the final six-month period in which the CIA reviewed Life’s files, from November 1968 to May 1969, an especially tumultuous period of international history, the CIA borrowed material from 106 different stories. All were overseas stories. Most were about foreign dignitaries and protocol, but the CIA also borrowed photographic material that accompanied a number of stories about student uprisings in France, Venezuela, Mexico, and Russia. Exactly what the CIA used these photographs for is unclear, but we do know that the Agency took a particular interest in the international student movement in this period, and had recently begun investigating foreign influence upon U.S. domestic protestors under the infamous MHChaos program.91 In the summer of 1969, Time Inc. executive Paul Welch discontinued the relationship, ending the CIA’s weekly visits to their photo archives. Reviewing the decision taken in the early 1950s to end CIA access to its foreign dispatches, Welch was confused that the CIA’s access to Life’s picture archives was allowed to continue: “It seems to me the same arguments that were persuasive in that case hold for photographs. After all, photographers are journalists…. At the very least, [the CIA] roaming through our picture collection is wrong.”92
Ultimately, Gottfried’s sense of moral unease with Time Inc.’s relationship with the CIA, shared by many of his fellow editors, won out. But it was a position that emerged as a result of extensive internal soul-searching and debate, soul-searching that we knew was occurring in other major newsrooms at the time.93 What should the CIA’s proper relationship with the U.S. press be? What limitations should journalists and media organizations impose upon this relationship? And what ethical guidelines should be in place to help guide and potentially govern this relationship? In the 1950s, the answers to these questions were not clear. The CIA was new, but engaging in profoundly influential activities across the globe, and working closely with U.S. media organizations and journalists. The nature and extent of this relationship, and the unwritten code of practice that governed it, was still evolving.
What do these documents tell us about the relationship between U.S. journalists and the CIA during the Cold War specifically, and our understanding of this so-called era of “consensus” more generally? First, they provide clear documentary evidence that Time Inc. routinely allowed the CIA access to its reporters, their dispatches, and its photographic archive. Second, they suggest that the CIA’s involvement with the U.S. media during this period was more systematic than previously understood. We now know that at least two major U.S. media outlets, Time Inc. and the New York Times, maintained an almost identical arrangement with the CIA. Were there more newspapers and publishers that so directly colluded with the Agency? We also know that at Time Inc., at least, this arrangement was always controversial among some senior editorial staff. This corroborates Kathryn McGarr’s claim that journalists of this era often expressed misgivings about the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but they tended only to air these views in private. If there was a journalistic “consensus” on the Cold War in this period, it was certainly not governed by naïve patriotism, even at Time Inc., a newsroom well-known for its advocacy of Luce’s vision of the “American Century.” What it also shows, however, is that discretion on matters of national security, and especially the CIA, was common among journalists of this era. If Carl Bernstein or Harrison Salisbury had discovered these documents in the 1970s, they would have publicized them. The rise of the “right-to-know society” would come later.94 Yet this discretion did not mean that their private misgivings were inconsequential. Clearly, in this instance, they mattered. Luce listened to the protests and ended CIA access to Time Inc. dispatches as a result. The unwritten code of ethics that governs journalists’ relationships with intelligence agencies, and the secrets they keep, evolved piecemeal during the Cold War, and as a consequence of many internal discussions, debates, and micro-negotiations. Indeed, as McGarr argues, “the circumstances that would enable the printing of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 were years in the making.”95
This points to the contingency of newsroom ethics, and their constantly negotiated character. The investigations of Congress and the U.S. media during the 1970s into the CIA’s relationship with U.S. journalism were very public examples of those ethical boundaries being contested and shaped. Before then, however, there were many quieter conversations within newsrooms and among editors over the extent to which journalists should cooperate with intelligence agencies like the CIA, and knowingly withhold government secrets from their readers. This iterative discursive process of negotiating these newsroom ethics into existence also points to their fragility. For if those ethics were negotiated into existence, then they also might be negotiated out of existence. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law the Intelligence Authorization Act, allowing the 1977 ban on the CIA’s use of journalists “to be waived with notification to Congress and presidential approval.”96 A few years later, with the War on Terror in full swing, rumors began to circulate that CIA officers were operating in Afghanistan under journalistic cover.97 More recently, a 2022 article in the Dutch press alleged that the Dutch intelligence services, a major U.S. ally in the War on Terror, routinely recruit journalists as intelligence sources.98 Simultaneously, successive U.S. presidential administrations since 9/11 have put significant pressure on journalists and news organizations to censor stories about the U.S. intelligence community, and reveal their sources.99 This has led to a renewed “war on leakers,” with the Espionage Act being re-deployed against national security whistleblowers who now face hefty prison sentences.100
Nothing is inevitable about the idea that journalists should be independent from secret intelligence services. This idea was brought into being by journalists who shared their experiences and opinions, and occasionally voiced their dissent. If that idea is to remain powerful, then it must be continually defended.
Author BiographySimon Willmetts is an associate professor at the University of Leiden in the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, in The Hague, Netherlands. His research focuses primarily on the impact of secrecy and secret intelligence agencies upon popular culture and societal debates.
*Funding support for this article was provided by the Leiden University FGGA Starter Grant (FGGA/2023-0043) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) Fellowship.
FootnotesFunding support for this article was provided by the Leiden University FGGA Starter Grant (FGGA/2023-0043) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) Fellowship.
1 “Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists,” International Federation of Journalists, last accessed May 7, 2024,
https://www.ifj.org/who/rules-and-polic ... ournalists.
2 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 232. See also: Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (New York, 2015); and, David Hadley, The Rising Clamor: The American Press, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Cold War (Lexington, KY, 2019).
3 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (New York, 1999); Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State Private Network (Abingdon, 2006); David Eldridge, “‘Dear Owen’: The CIA, Luigi Luraschi and Hollywood, 1953,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 20, no. 2 (2000): 149–196.
4 Paul Welch to Doris O’Neil, February 19, 1970, folder 31: “Public Affairs Time Inc.: US Government: Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)” (hereafter “folder 31”), box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, New York Historical Society, New York, NY (hereafter NYHS).
5 Statement of Herman Nickel in The CIA and the Media: Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First and Second Sessions (Washington, D.C., 1977), 101.
6 Harrison Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (New York, 1980), 578–579.
7 Statement of Herman Nickel in The CIA and the Media, 102.
8 Tity de Vries, “The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal: Catalyst in a Transforming Relationship Between State and People,” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (2012): 1075–1092; Joel Whitney, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers (New York, 2017); Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 225–248; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999); Tom Wicker, John Finney, Max Frankel, et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?,” New York Times, April 25, 1966.
9 Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, Book One: Foreign and Military Intelligence (Washington, D.C., 1976), 191–200.
10 Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.
11 For the transcripts of those hearings, see: The CIA and the Media.
12 Kathryn Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996).
13 Kathryn J. McGarr, City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (Chicago, IL, 2022), 231.
14 Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York, 2010), 253–260.
15 Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper, 281.
16 Stacy Cone, “Presuming a Right to Deceive: Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the CIA, and the News Media,” Journalism History 24, no. 4 (1998/99): 150.
17 Hadley, The Rising Clamor. See also: John Foran, “Discursive subversions: Time magazine, the CIA Overthrow of Musaddiq, and the Installation of the Shah” in Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, ed. Christian G. Appy (Amherst, MA, 2000), 157–182.
18 McGarr, City of Newsmen, 126.
19 Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media.”
20 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 577.
21 Hadley, The Rising Clamor.
22 See for example “The X at Bogota,” Washington Post, April 13, 1948; “CIA Watchdog,” New York Times, January 26, 1955.
23 James Reston to Robert Garst, August 10, 1954, folder “Robert Garst, 1953–55, 1958–62,” box 103, James B. Reston Papers, University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign, IL.
24 Ibid.
25 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
26 McGarr, City of Newsmen, 126.
27 Ibid., 175.
28 Brinkley, The Publisher, 135.
29 Ibid., 420–422.
30 Simon Willmetts, “Forbidden History: CIA Censorship, The Invisible Government, and the origins of the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Theory,” Intelligence and National Security 39, no. 2 (2024): 283.
31 Inderjeet Palmer, “Conceptualising the State-Private Network in American Foreign Policy,” in The US Government, eds. Laville and Wilford, 13–18.
32 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
33 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
34 “An Anniversary Letter from the Publisher,” Time, May 7, 1951.
35 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
36 Cone, “Presuming a Right to Deceive,” 150.
37 John Allen Stern, C.D. Jackson: Cold War Propagandist for Democracy and Globalism (Lanham, MD, 2012); Lucas, Freedom’s War, 163–198.
38 C.D. Jackson to James R. Hunt, February 17, 1947, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
39 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 577–578; “James Hunt Jr. Dies: Deputy C.I.A. Chief,” New York Times, December 11, 1979.
40 Roy E. Larsen to J.M. Andrews, May 12, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
41 For the full context around Salisbury’s often frustrated attempts to unearth links between the CIA and The New York Times, see: Matthew Jones, “Journalism, Intelligence and the New York Times: Cyrus L. Sulzberger, Harrison E. Salisbury and the CIA,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 100, no. 340 (2015): 229–250.
42 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 577.
43 Ibid.
44 John Bross quoted in Ibid.
45 Ibid., 584.
46 Ibid., 582.
47 Louis Menand, “When America Lost Faith in the News,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2023, last accessed July 12, 2024,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023 ... n-the-news.
48 See, for example: Eileen MacKenzie to Alfred Clark, June 15, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
49 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 578.
50 Percy Knauth to John Shaw Billings, October 24, 1950, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
51 Ibid.
52 Allen Grover to Franklin A. Lindsay, November 27, 1950, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
53 Franklin A. Lindsay to Allen Grover, December 15, 1950, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
54 James M. Andrews to Roy E. Larsen, April 23, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
55 Simon Willmetts, “Ways of Seeing War: Hollywood, the OSS, and the Logistics of Perception,” in Cultures of Intelligence in the Era of the World Wars, eds. Simon Bell, Philipp Gassert, Andreas Gestrich, and Sönke Neitzel (Oxford, 2020), 271–294.
56 Doris O’Neil to Paul Welch, February 19, 1970, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
57 Allen Grover to Roy E. Larsen, November 6, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
58 Allen Grover to Roy E. Larsen, November 6, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
59 Suzie Eggleston to Bernard Barnes, March 17, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
60 Bernard Barnes to Suzie Eggleston, April 25, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
61 James M. Andrews to Roy E. Larsen, April 23, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
62 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
63 Brinkley, The Publisher, 170.
64 Manfred Gottfried, quoted in Sheila M. Webb, “Creating Life: ‘America’s Most Potent Editorial Force,’” Journalism and Communication Monographs 18, no. 2 (2016): 77.
65 Ibid., 78.
66 McGarr, City of Newsmen, 111.
67 Webb, “Creating Life,” 77.
68 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
69 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 578–579.
70 Roy E. Larsen to James M. Andrews, May 12, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
71 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
72 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
73 “The Press: Newsmen or Spies?,” Time, September 17, 1951.
74 Manfred Gottfried to Henry Luce and Allen Grover, September 20, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS. Emphasis in original.
75 Ibid.
76 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
77 McGarr, City of Newsmen.
78 Reston to Garst, August 10, 1954, Reston Papers, University of Illinois Archives.
79 Kennett Love, The American Role in the Pahlevi Restoration on 19 August 1953, folder 30, box 38, Allen W. Dulles Papers, MC019, Public Policy Papers, Department of Special Collections, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
80 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
81 “Memorandum for the Deputy Director of Plans,” August 21, 1951, Wilson Center Digital Archive, last accessed July 12, 2024,
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org ... liberation.
82 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, 44.
83 Allen Grover to John Shaw Billings, November 12, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
84 Allen Grover to Roy E. Larsen, November 6, 1951, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
85 Memo with handwritten note addressed to Allen Grover, January 3, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
86 John Shaw Billings to Henry Luce, January 3, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
87 Allen Grover to Henry Luce, January 3, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
88 Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor, 578.
89 Paul Welch to Doris O’Neil, February 19, 1970, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
90 James Andrews to Roy. E Larsen, April 23, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS. See also: “CIA Use of Life Pictures,” memo from Bernard Barnes to Suzie Eggleston, April 25, 1952, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
91 Paul Welch to Doris O’Neil, February 19, 1970, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
92 Paul Welch to Ralph Graves, June 27, 1969, folder 31, box 3972, The Time Inc. Annex Files, NYHS.
93 Reston to Garst, August 10, 1954, James B. Reston Papers, University of Illinois Archives.
94 Michael Schudson, The Rise of the Right to Know: Politics and the Culture of Transparency, 1945–1975 (Cambridge, MA, 2018).
95 McGarr, City of Newsmen, 212.
96 Alicia Upano, “Will a History of Government Using Journalists Repeat Itself Under the Department of Homeland Security?,” The News Media and the Law (Winter 2003), excerpted by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, last accessed July 12, 2024,
https://www.rcfp.org/journals/the-news- ... nment-usi/.
97 Ibid.
98 Joep Dohmen, “Inlichtingendiensten Ronselen Journalisten,” NRC, October 14, 2022, last accessed July 12, 2024,
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/10/14/in ... n-a4145255.
99 Adam Liptak, “Reporter Jailed After Refusing to Name Source,” New York Times, July 7, 2005.
100 Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman, eds., Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy (New York, 2020).
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
