Thomas Braden

Thomas Wardell Braden (February 22, 1917 – April 3, 2009) was an American journalist, best remembered as the author of Eight Is Enough, which spawned a popular television program, and was co-host of the CNN show Crossfire. Braden was born in Greene, Iowa, and died in Denver, Colorado.

After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1940, Braden enlisted in the British Army, while the U.S. was still neutral in World War II and saw combat in Africa. When the United States entered the war, he was recruited by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied France. At the end of the war, with the encouragement of OSS director William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who thought of Braden as a protégé, he and his OSS paratrooper compatriot Stewart Alsop wrote a journalistic book about the OSS, just as it was being dissolved by Harry Truman, two years before the creation of the CIA.

After the war, Braden taught English for a time at Dartmouth (where he met Robert Frost), then moved to Washington, D.C., becoming part of a group of well-connected former OSS men, some of whom were journalists such the Alsop brothers, known as the Georgetown Set.

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, Braden joined the CIA and in 1950 became head of the International Organizations Division (IOD) of CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, the "covert action" arm of agency secret operations, working closely with Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. Believing that the cultural milieu of postwar Europe at the time was favorable toward left-wing views, and understanding that The Establishment of Western Allies was rigidly conservative and nationalistic as well as determined to maintain its colonial dominions, it was estimated that American supremacy would be best served by supporting the Democratic left. Thus the program was begun by which more moderate and especially anti-Soviet leftists would be supported, thereby helping to purge the social democratic left of Soviet sympathizers.

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