It’s used because it’s the subject of the book, not because he approves of it. Quite the opposite. The point of the book is that propaganda is used to maintain complicity in a democratic society, in order to influence people to support policies that are against their own interests. The Niehbur quote illustrates that US intellectuals were quite open about this.
I haven’t read Necessary Illusions, but I posted this before the CIA explained this PDF arrived with bin Laden’s documents. I was mistakenly connecting the promotion of this work with the supposition that the CIA was broadly interested in the influence Niebuhr had on Comey (and Obama, McCain, …) in the previous era of American politics.
