Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace

A peace conference in 1949 at the Waldorf Hotel in NY. Reactionaries protested outside, and ex-communists and Trotskyites managed to secure a hotel room above the conference. This was led by Sidney Hook, and included "Mary McCarthy and her third husband, journalist Bowden Broadwater; the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell; Nicolas Nabokov; journalist and critic Dwight Macdonald; Italian journalist and former Munzenberg ally Nicola Chiaromonte; Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Partisan Review editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv; Arnold Beichman, a labor reporter friendly with anti-Communist union leaders; Mel Pitzele, another labor specialist; and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union." This affair was funded by the CIA, and Michael Josselson was there on Frank Wisner's orders to see what came of their investment. Dubinsky threatened to shut down the hotel with union workers if they didn't accommodate the protesters, and he gave Nabokov CIA money to pay for the expenses. Melvin Lasky also attended, and had developed a relationship with Sidney Hook.

"Taking advantage of its Trojan horse position within the Waldorf, the group intercepted mail addressed to the conference’s organizers and sabotaged their attempts to win over the press by doctoring official statements and releases."

A counter-committee to oppose the peace conference included "Benedetto Croce, T.S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, André Malraux, Jacques Maritain, Bertrand Russell, and Igor Stravinsky. even the nobel Prize winner Dr. Albert Schweitzer enlisted, apparently untroubled that his name also appeared in the enemy camp as one of the “sponsors” of the Waldorf conference".

They intended to disrupt the conference but were instead given speaking time by the conference organizers. William Hearst ordered his editors to attack the conference, and "Henry Luce, owner-editor of the Time-Life empire, personally oversaw a two-page spread in Life magazine which attacked the degradations of the Kremlin and its American “dupes.” Featuring fifty passport-sized photographs, the piece was an ad hominem attack which prefigured Senator McCarthy’s unofficial blacklists." This Life article accused Dorothy Parker, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Wallace of being communists. The FBI investigated people based on their attendance of the conference, and pressured editors to turn down Howard Fast's novel Spartacus, forcing Little, Brown to drop the book.

It was followed by the World Congress of Partisans for Peace in Paris.