The Free Europe University in Strasbourg: U.S. State-Private Networks and Academic “Rollback”

The Free Europe Committee (FEC, known from 1949 to 1952 as the National Committee for a Free Europe) was created in June 1949 in line with George Kennan’s push for a greater mobilization of the private sector in U.S. political warfare against the Soviet Union. An oft-mentioned but little-explored part of the FEC conglomerate was the Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE), established in Strasbourg in 1951. This article focuses on four Americans who played lesser-known but, in their individual ways, central roles in the formation and running of the FEUE: James Burnham (the consultant), DeWitt Poole (the diplomat), Royall Tyler (the point man), and Adolf Berle (the intellectual). By tracking their input, the impulses that led to FEUE’s formation, and its eventual demise, the article presents the university as a microcosm not just of the large-scale FEC operation but also of various strands that fed into U.S. political warfare as a whole.