The gaff had been blown on Encounter magazine: this splendid journal, which, as WFB puts it, "served for a vital period as the principal link between English and American intellectuals," had been funded by the CIA. "There was a near universal dismay, and editors and writers fled from Encounter as from an earthquake or a flood. Mr. Lasky stayed on." In this illuminating discussion, Mr. Lasky defends his journal ("anybody who has looked through any one single issue and thinks that anybody pulled any strings ... has three more guesses coming") and argues that "what was terribly important," in the ashes of World War II, and with the Soviet Union just over there on the other side of that Iron Curtain, "was that liberals, democrats, and socialists ... were to come to grips with the experience of what had happened to socialism in their time."