Marvin Liebman (July 21, 1923 – March 31, 1997) was an American conservative activist and fundraiser, and later in his life, a gay rights advocate.
Early life Liebman was raised in Brooklyn, New York, by his parents, Benjamin "Benny" Liebman and Rose Schorr. His parents were Ashkenazi Jews from Galicia, a region that at the time was part of Poland and is today part of Ukraine. Liebman recalled his youth as growing amid "a polyglot collection of middle class families". He was bar mitzvahed in September 1936. Like many other young people who came of age in the Great Depression, Liebman believed the Depression proved the failure of capitalism, causing him to be interested in communism as an alternative. While in high school, he became interested in left wing politics and joined both the American Student Union and Young Communist League. At the same time, Liebman discovered his homosexuality, which he felt deeply ashamed of, causing him to remain in "the closet".
At age 19, Liebman was drafted and served in Naples and Cairo during the final years of World War II, serving in the Army Air Corps. By his own admission, an incompetent soldier who failed in his duties as a cook, Liebman never saw action. However, like many other gay Americans in World War II, his military service was a "national coming out" as he discovered other gay men for the first time, easing his feelings of shame and self-disgust. In Italy, homosexuality was not illegal, through it was considered to be shameful, and Liebman enjoyed being part of the gay subculture in Naples, where he first had sex. While in Cairo at an Air Corps base, his commanding officer discovered a series of love letters written by Liebman that revealed his homosexuality. The officer subjected Liebman to repeated private and public humiliations, forcing him to appear before the other soldiers in his unit while his officer called him a "faggot" and a "cocksucker". Liebman was finally given a blue discharge for homosexuality in 1944. Due to his blue discharge, he was disqualified from collecting veterans' benefits.
After being sent home to New York City, Liebman met and quickly married a woman named "Patsy". Their relationship, though, was never consummated and the marriage was annulled after less than six months in June 1945.Liebman, 1992 Liebman worked a variety of odd jobs while being a member of New York's gay subculture, where unlike in Naples, he was in constant danger of being arrested in police raids.
Over the next several years, Liebman became increasingly involved in Zionism, working in various volunteer and paid positions for the American League for a Free Palestine, United Jewish Appeal, Aguduth Israel and the American Fund for Israel Institutions. In 1947, he also worked with Irgun, a right-wing terrorist organization which was attempting to secure Israeli independence from Britain through a campaign of bombings aimed at the Arabs and British. During this time, Liebman began developing more conservative political views, including a passionate hatred for the Soviet Union stemming from the communist country's reportedly harsh treatment of Jewish citizens.
In 1951, Liebman met Elinor Lipper, a Russian woman who had just published her memoir, 11 Years in Soviet Prison Camps, recounting her experiences in the Gulag camps of the Kolyma. Lipper's revelation that much of the Soviet economy was based upon slave labor caused him to lose his faith in socialism as he recalled: "Her story overwhelmed me. I felt totally betrayed. What was worse, because I had believed in the Soviet Union, I felt personally responsible for what had happened to her. The change seemed quick, but it was really the culmination of five years of internal intellectual conflict that I had hidden from myself. This catharsis...was the turning point in my life".
The China Lobby In January 1952, Liebman founded a group, Aide Refugee Chinese Intellectuals (ARCI), which sought to allow the admission of 25,000 Chinese intellectual refugees languishing in refugee camps in British Hong Kong to the United States (at the time, American immigration law imposed strict quotes on the number of Asians allowed to in). Despite his conservative views, Liebman's plan to bring 25,000 Chinese intellectuals to America brought him into conflict with the right-wing nativist politicians.
After founding ARCI, Liebman discovered a talent for political organizing, applying to the right principles that were based on his experience of his "knowledge of how the left organized". The tactics that he deployed for the ARCI were subsequently used for all his political campaigns, under which he would enlist a number of prominent individuals to endorse his organization by serving as '"advisory" board members; issue letterheads with the names of these individuals attached; have a wealthy businessman serve as a treasurer and corporate fundraiser; appoint someone famous as president; and finally form a committee to "really do the work or rubber-stamp what you are doing". In this way, Liebman created organizations that were well funded with prestigious supporters that attracted attention while having a few dedicated activists being in charge. To assist ARCI, Liebman enlisted Walter Judd, a Republican congressman who once served as a Protestant missionary in China as its president. Because Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had converted to Methodism in 1930 after marrying his third wife, Soong Mei-ling, daughter of a Methodist minister, evangelical Protestants were the firmest supporters of the "China Lobby". As a Protestant missionary in the 1930s, Judd had witnessed the Chinese Civil War firsthand, which made him a staunch supporter of the "China Lobby".
With Judd, well known as an advocate of racial equality due to his sinophilia as well as being an anti-communist, the ARCI soon attracted generous donations from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Soon, the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were covertly funding the ACRI as Liebman found that they both wanted to "expand their intelligence network in Hong Kong", a city where many spies for Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and both Chinese regimes operated. In February 1952, Liebman traveled to Hong Kong to open an office for the ACRI, which was soon besieged by thousands of refugee applications from Chinese scholars, doctors, lawyers, scientists and other intellectuals living in the refugee camps. Due to congressional opposition, Liebman switched the focus of ACRI to supporting the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. At the same time, Liebman began to associate with the Committee for a Free Asia, a CIA-sponsored front organization that was active in a long stretch of Asia from Japan to Pakistan. Eager to work for the CIA, in 1952 he took a briefcase of cash worth $25,000 to Hong Kong to pay for anti-Communist pamphlets that were to be smuggled over the border to the People's Republic of China. In the early 1950s, he was a leader of the so-called "China Lobby", serving as secretary of the Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the United Nations. After 1949, Taiwan's government continued to hold China's seat at the United Nations (UN), and many world governments felt that China's seat should be given to communist China. The ideological basis of this organization was that the Kuomintang's defeat in the Chinese Civil War was only temporary, and that from his base in Taiwan, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would one day return in triumph to reclaim the mainland of China and end the rule of the "Red rebels" who had defeated him in 1949. As such, it argued that it was proper for the Republic of China continued to hold China's UN seat since the People's Republic was merely an illegitimate regime which was just "temporarily" controlling the mainland of China. Founded in 1953, the Committee of One Million survived until the accession of the People's Republic of China to the United Nations in 1971, with Lee Edwards taking over as secretary from Liebman in 1969. The Committee of One Million, which took its name from a petition Liebman organized and was supposedly signed by one million Americans, became the premier organization of the "China Lobby". Much of the literature produced by the Committee of One Million was more anti-Communist than pro-Kuomintang, as Liebman found it easier to denounce the People's Republic rather than glorify the Republic of China.
In 1957, he founded Marvin Liebman Associates, Inc. For the next 11 years, Liebman's firm developed direct mail fundraising programs and provided public relations expertise to the anti-communist and conservative movements in the U.S. and abroad. Its extensive list of clients included the Committee of One Million, Aid Refugee Chinese Intellectuals, the American Emergency Committee for Tibetan Refugees, the American-Asian Educational Exchange, the American African Affairs Association, and the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters. In addition, Liebman was an early supporter and co-founder of Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union.
International Cold Warrior In May 1957, Liebman attended the third summit of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League in Saigon. Though ostensibly a grass-roots organization, the Asian People's Anti-Communist League was in reality created and controlled by the intelligence services of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Vietnam. The purpose of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League was, as its founding charter put, to wage "political and psychological warfare" against communism in Asia. The preferred methods of the League were as its pamphlets described it: "infiltration, instigation, economic manipulation, public demonstrations, terrorism, subversion, guerrilla warfare and assassination". The chairman of the League, Ku Cheng-kang, was a member of the Kuomintang's Supreme National Defense Council and was an adviser to Chiang. As the League was against the non-alignment concept championed by several Asian leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Sukarno of Indonesia under which the Third World nations were to be neutral in the Cold War, instead advocating that for an alliance of Asian states with the United States, the League was approved by the U.S. government. However, some of the League's activities such as the attempts to provoke guerrilla war in China went beyond what the U.S. government was willing to contemplate. In an attempt to find more allies, the League reached out to the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an alliance of anti-Communist emigres from Eastern Europe founded by Nazi Germany in 1943 which continued after the war. The leader of the Bloc was Yaroslav Stetsko, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalist group which had collaborated with Germany during World War II and whose members had killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. The Bloc was committed to starting a guerrilla war in the Soviet Union, an idea that had received support from the CIA and MI6 for a time, but by the middle of the 1950s, both American and British intelligence had written off the Bloc as the attempts to parachute agents into the Soviet Union always ended in failure.