"Mel had ample opportunity to display that courage in 1967 when it was revealed that a large part of the funding for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and hence for Encounter, came from the CIA. The revelation could not have come at a worse moment. Anti-establishment and anti-American sentiment were boiling over across Europe and America (plus ca change ...). The fact that Encounter, far from being conservative, was an audaciously liberal, albeit anti-totalitarian, organ mattered not a whit. Overnight, readers and authors fled from the magazine. Mel's efforts to salvage and reconstitute Encounter over the next decade or so were indeed courageous. Although the magazine never quite regained its cachet, it did retain its wide-ranging intellectual verve. Encounter had struggled financially for many years. Finally, in 1991, it closed. It was the end of an era. Nothing even remotely approaching Encounter's intellectual seriousness and range has appeared in England to take its place. "
From The New Criterion.
