The Fracture of the 1960s

This chapter examines the increasingly fraught press environment of the 1960s and its effect on the CIA, as the Cold War consensus slowly began to unravel. In an effort to garner support, the Central Intelligence Agency began more systematic efforts to provide briefings to members of the press. The New York Times Washington Bureau, first under James Reston and then under Tom Wicker, had a standing arrangement for briefings by the CIA. Once that arrangement ended, the New York Times published an unprecedented series of articles exploring the CIA’s activities. In 1967 a radical publication, Ramparts, revealed the agency’s decades-long foray into supporting private organizations and student groups to use culture as a weapon in the Cold War. The CIA survived each crisis, but its position continued to deteriorate, and there emerged a growing faction in the press skeptical of the agency and national security arguments against publishing stories.