Melvin J. Lasky, Cultural Cold Warrior, Dies at 84

Richard Bernstein, New York Times

BERLIN, May 20 — Melvin J. Lasky, the editor of two major intellectual journals and a man at the vortex of the debates and controversies thrown up by the cold war, died Wednesday at his home in Berlin. He was 84.

The cause was heart failure, Marc Svetov, his secretary, said.

Probably no person was more associated than Mr. Lasky with the term cultural cold warrior. In a career that spanned several decades, during which he lived in London, Paris and Berlin, he edited the monthly magazine Encounter, which was not only one of Europe's leading literary and political journals but also a major force in articulating the point of view best summed up by the phrase liberal anti-Communism.The roster of writers published in Encounter included many of the leading lights of postwar intellectual life, from Arthur Koestler, Bertrand Russell and Isaiah Berlin to Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and V.S. Naipaul.

Mr. Lasky was seen as a hero by his friends and intellectual allies for his fierce and uncompromising opposition to totalitarianism. In what was a kind of personal credo, he once wrote about the intellectual's responsibility to mount an unwavering defense of individual rights, or else, as he put it, "manuscripts will be banned, books will be burned, and writers and readers will once again be sitting in concentration camps for having thought dangerous ideas or uttered forbidden words."

He was himself uncompromising in his disdain for anyone who, in his view, had muddled, morally confused thoughts about the irredeemable viciousness of Soviet totalitarianism, or who committed, in his eyes, the incomprehensible error of seeing the flaws of the democratic West as somehow comparable to those of the Communist East.

And yet, as Albert H. Friedlander has written in The Times of London, "it would be hard to establish a `party line' which the writers had to follow" in their articles for Encounter, which was lively, irreverent and consistent in its rigor and literary quality.

In 1966, The New York Times disclosed that the magazine had been secretly financed by the C.I.A., which channeled funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Mr. Lasky had helped to create to wage the intellectual battle against Communism. The disclosure quickly became one of the major scandals of the cultural cold war, seized upon gleefully by Encounter's intellectual opponents as proof of a kind of deceitfulness and hypocrisy on the part of Mr. Lasky and the magazine's other editors.

After the initial disclosures of the magazine's hidden source of funds, Mr. Lasky and the other editors, Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol, wrote a letter denying knowledge of the C.I.A.'s role, and there was never evidence that the magazine had tailored its views to suit any government agency.

Still, some former contributors, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Lionel Trilling, stopped writing for Encounter, and Spender resigned as co-editor. The magazine continued being published until 1990, but after the furor unleashed by the financing disclosures, it was always shadowed by the notion that even as it championed the virtues of the open society, it was tainted by a kind of clandestinity.

Melvin Jonah Lasky was born in New York on Jan. 15, 1920. He went to the City College of New York, a hotbed of left-wing "isms," where among his classmates were the men later to be known in New York intellectual life as "the two Irvings," Irving Howe and Irving Kristol.

During World War II, Mr. Lasky served as a combat historian in France and Germany, and no sooner had the war ended, than he showed what became his feisty and prickly approach to political controversy, taking part in a literary debate organized as a propaganda exercise in the Soviet occupied part of Berlin.

While most participants duly lambasted the "imperialistic" United States, Mr. Lasky, who with his goatee looked a bit like Lenin, compared the Communist system to Nazism.

That boldness led him to become an adviser to Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor of Berlin, who encouraged him to wage what was soon to become known as the cultural cold war. He first founded and edited the influential Berlin magazine Der Monat, and later became, with Spender, co-editor of Encounter, which had been founded by Mr. Kristol in London in 1953.

Mr. Lasky had a knack for being present at some of the major events of those years, most notably the anti-Communist workers' uprising in East Berlin in 1953 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956. He interviewed Eisenhower, Konrad Adenauer and Vaclav Havel, and knew just about everyone of note, from Thomas Mann and T.S. Eliot to Bertrand Russell and George Orwell. But his main legacy clearly was Encounter, which probably published more leading thinkers, scholars and critics than any other magazine of its day.

Among Mr. Lasky's own books are "The Hungarian Revolution" — described by a reviewer in The New York Times as "even better than the superb report of the United Nations Special Committee on Hungary" — and "Utopia and Revolution," published in 1977. In 2000, he published "The Language of Journalism," the first of a projected three-volume study of what he called "newspaper culture."

Mr. Lasky is survived by his companion of many decades, Helga Hegewisch, a popular German novelist; two children from a previous marriage, Oliver Lasky and Vivienne Freeman-Lasky; and two grandchildren.