Joseph Kraft

SCHOOLFOR

STATESMEN

Most Americans have never heard of "the best

club in New York" ... which quietly incubates

a surprising share of both the men and the

ideas which make policy for the United States.

THE whole world complains that Ameri-cans are bored by foreign policy and

regard peace as the condition of being left alone.But it is no secret either that on the highest levelsof foreign affairs this country has been servedby a crop of Public Men-the Stimsons, Lovetts,and McCloys-remarkable for knowledge, dedica-tion, and breadth of outlook. How did this cropspring from such stony soil?

A part of the answer lies in the Council onForeign Relations, a private and professedly non-partisan New York organization which mostAmericans have never heard of. It has been theseat of some basic government decisions, has setthe context for many more. and has repeatedlyserved as a recruiting ground for ranking offi-cials. It has been called, among other things,"the best club in New York," "the governmentin exile," and, by a former Assistant Secretary ofState, "a place where nice men meet and talk tothemselves."

Nicc or not, the men who meet at the Councilare indisputably important. The membership(about 1,200, by invitation only, with womenand foreigners barred) includes the President,the Secretary of State, the Chairman of theAtomic Energy Commission, the Director of the

Central Intelligence Agency, the board chairmenof three of the country's five largest industrialcorporations, two of the four richest insurancecompanies, and two of the three biggest banks,plus the senior partners of two of the three lead-ing Wall Street law firms, the publishers of thetwo biggest news mag-azines and of the country'smost influential newspaper, and the presidentsof the Big Three in both universities and founda-tions, as well as a score of other college presidentsand a scattering of top scientists and journalists.

The splendor of the company they keep is notlost upon at least some of the members. JohnNason, the President of the Foreign Policy Asso-ciation, once defined the difference between hisorganization and the Council as "the differencebetween the House and the Senate."

"You mean," he was told, "the difference be-tween the New York phone book and Who's Whoin Amel'ica.'· .

More prosaically, the difference is that wherethe Council is a meeting place for the exchangeof information among experts, the Foreign PolicyAssociation disseminates information to thou-sands of people, and to other organizations, inover two hundred cities.

Only slightly less impressive than the Coun-cil's roster is the obscurity in which it has dwelt.The files at Time Inc. disclose five entries in thepast five years. The New YOl'h Times has men·tioned the Council scores of times, but, with twoexceptions, only as a site of speeches or sponsorof publications. On one occasion the Timesannounced the Council would begin publicationof a magazine which, in fact, it had already beenputting out for two years.

W HAT prompts the absence of attention is inpart the Council's indifference to publicity, andin part a rule-unbroken to this day-that allspeeches are off-the-record. But in addition theCouncil has been obscured by its similarity tothe vast multitude of other membership organi-zations scattered across the country. More thanmost it has thrived. Without turning a hair, theCouncil, not long ago, spent $6,000 on a privatedinner for Secretary Dulles. Its annual budgetaverages about $750,000, and its staff aboutseventy-five people; its home is a handsome townhouse on 68th Street at Park Avenue; and itmaintains one of the best and most accessiblespecialized libraries in New York.

But like most of the other private associations,the Council proclaims a benevolent purpose,sponsors meetings, and contributes, through pub-lications, to that mightiest of American rivers,

the flow of information. Like them too, it owesits start to happy accident.

The roots of the Council stretch clear backto the group of technical advisers who accom-panied Woodrow Wilson to Paris in 1918 towrite the peace that would make the worldsafe for democracy. Wilson's experts-ColonelEdward M. House, Professors .James Shotwell ofColumbia, Archibald Coolidge of Harvard, CliveDay of Yale, Isaiah Bowman, the geographer,and General Tasker Bliss-a reader of Vergil androrerunner of today's "in tellectual ~enerals"-made con tart with their British opposite num-bers and discovered a common denominator.

"There is no single person in this room," oneof the Britons declared at a joint meeting, "whois not disappointed with the terms we havedrafted. Our disappointmen t is an excellentthing. Let us perpetuate it."

"We decided," another of the Britons, HaroldNicolson, noted in his diary, "to create an Anglo-American Institute of Foreign Relations."

IS IT A CLUB?

THE Anglo Institute, with royal patronageand a home in the house of Pitt, was in-

corporated as the Royal Institute of InternationalAffairs, or Chatham House-a separate institu-tion with no American ties. The AmericanInstitute, after floundering to the ver~e of ex-tinction, merged with a New York gentlemen'sclub which had been set up during the war togive dinners to distinguished foreigners. Thefusion was formalized on September 21, 1921,with the incorporation of the Council on ForeignRelations, comprising 209 members, a fifteen-man Board of Directors, and a single permanentofficial-Hamilton Fish Armstrong, fresh out, of-Princeton and service as a military attache inBelgrade. The principal aim was "to create andstimulate international thought among the peo-ple of the United States."

By itself, the merger of the two groups stampedupon the Council one indelible-and in America,rare-feature. It has at all times been commonground for men of affairs and intellectuals. Thefirst board included four professors, the WallStreet lawyers John VV. Davis and Paul Cravath,the bankers Otto Kahn and Paul 'Warburg, and,as honorary chairman, the former Secretary ofState and dean of the bar, Elihu Root. Financescame mainly in large donations from the men ofaffairs, but all members paid dues and con-tributed according to their means. The programwas a joint product, expressed in a three-fold

BY JOSEPH KRAFT 65

structure that remains the heart of Councilactivi ties.

As an expression of the academic interest, theCouncil has followed from the beginning a policyof "publish or perish." Since 1928, it has broughtout an annual survey of American foreign policy-now entitled The U.S. In ws-u Affairs-andsince J927 The Political Handbook, an annuallisting of foreign countries, their governments,parties, and press. More important, the Councilbegan in 1922 the quarterly magazine ForeignAffail's.

"What we want," the directors wrote to thefirst editor, Professor Archibald Coolidge, "is areally first-rate journal with the best contribu-tions available in the U. S. and abroad."

POLICY BY "x"

W HAT they got far outran the prospec-tus. Under Coolidge and Hamilton Fish

Armstrong, who succeeded him in 1928, ForeignAffai1's emerged as the pre-eminent publication inits field ("the best thing of its kind," the Timeswrote on its twenty-fifth anniversary), soughtafter by statesmen and scholars as a vehicle fortheir thoughts; read in the chancelleries of theworld; and repeatedly cited in the press of allnations. Probably no other single article in anyAmerican periodical has had such far-reachingimpact as George Kennan's exposition of the"containment policy," published under thepseudonym X in the July 1947 issue.

The general pattern was apparent in the veryfirst number. It included articles by the Premierof Czechoslovakia, the Foreign Minister ofFrance, a former U.S. Secretary of State, and thePresident-Emeritus of Harvard. Robert Lansing,another former Secretary of State read it, andwondered "if they can keep it up." So, on the

.other side of the world, did Lenin, underscoringhis copy with special emphasis on some lineswriuen by ~ contributor who was identified as"John Foster Dulles, financial expert."

On the other hand, as a legacy from the socialdub, the Council has retained, and much ex-panded, a meetings program-talks to the mem-bers by American and foreign guests enga~ed,usually on an official basis, in some current aspectof foreign policy work. In quality the talks varywidely: fur every good one, there is probablyone that is dull and another that is superficial.The same holds true of the questions that follow.Still the program has brought to the Councilevery Secretary of State since Hughes but one(General Marshall), and, with the conspicuous

66 SC H 0 0 L FOR S TAT E S MEN

exception of Churchill, every important foreignstatesman to visit the U.S. from Clemenceau toNehru. Secretary of State Frank Kellogg un-veiled before the Council what subsequently be-came the Kellogg Peace Pact. Secretary Stimsonfirst expounded at the Council his doctrine ofnot recognizing the fruits of Japanese aggression.

Even where there is no news in Council ap-pearances, the personal impression often pro-vides special insights. Japanese Prime MinisterNobusuke Kishi, whose golfing and baseballantics must have struck most Americans asslightly comic, showed at the Council as a roughcustomer, decisive about what he wanted and ashard-boiled in his politics as any ward boss.

"Archbishop Makarios," a member said re-cently of the Cypriot national leader, "was in-teresting to me only for the impression he made:it couldn't have been worse."

Midway between meetings and publications isa third program, original with the Councilthough widely copied elsewhere. It began backin 1923 when members started meeting infor-mally in Armstrong's office to discuss currentforeign problems. Since then, the meetings havedeveloped into a highly organiied Study Groupsystem for subjecting various central problemsto detailed examination by teams of scholars,businessmen, and government officials. As thesystem works today, the Council's Committeeon Studies picks a subject and a scholar writingin the field; then assembles a group of abouttwenty-five experts from the Council member-ship, the government, and the universities. Thewriter submits papers to monthly meetings ofthe group which supplies criticism and comment.Not infrequently, he will emerge with a book,one recent product being Henry Kissinger's studyof Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a bestseller which has been closely read in the highestAdministration circles and foreign officesabroad.Book or not, a substantial body of expert opinionis in all cases brought together.

Kissinger's Study Group included two formerchairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission, aNobel Prize winner in physics, two former ci-vilian secretaries in the defense establishment,and representatives just below the highest levelfrom the State Department, the Central Intelli-gence Agency, and the three armed :services.Almost always there is a genuine exchange ofviews and a broadening of horizons for all thestudy group members. Lieutenant General JamesGavin, the Army man in the Kissinger group,attests that the best method for limiting war inEurope that he ever heard was presented to the

group in a memorandum by Professor ArnoldWolfers of Yale.

"For myself," General Gavin says, "I read moreabout the Middle East doing homework forKissinger than I'd read in years."

"Whatever General Eisenhower knows abouteconomics," says a Republican member of theCouncil who participated with Eisenhower ina 1949 Council study on European recovery,"he learned at the study group meetings." An-other participant in the same group recalls that"Eisenhower came with a vague predilection infavor of building up Europe. When he left,European aid was a ruling conviction."

THE POOL OF TALENT

LON G before the three-fold operation wasin full swing, the Council was making its

mark on America as an incubator of men andideas. Walter Lippmann worked on the annualsurveys, and so did Charles Merz, on his wayto the editor's chair at the New York. Times.Herbert Elliston, a China hand out of Yorkshire,came to this country under Council auspices towork on the surveys, then moved on to becomeeditor of the Washington Post. Herbert Feispublished his first book, Europe, the World'sBanker, under the Council imprimatur, workedon the surveys, and then in 1930 went to Wash-ington to begin a fifteen-year tenure as EconomicAdviser to the Secretary of State. A decade later,Feis, searching for a lawyer experienced in for-eign matters to do strategic buying for State, putthrough to Armstrong, at the Council, a tele-phone call that began the public career ofThomas K. Finletter.

On the level of ideas, the Council is genuinelyan open forum. But, as the Times wrote in aneditorial, it has "a uniform direction." Con-cerned about foreign affairs, the bulk of themembers inevitably opposed isolation. Workingwithin the framework of the Council, they veryearly exerted their influence for a policy ofresistance to the dictators. One of the first bookspublished by the Council was The Far EasternCrisis, a plea by Henry Stimson for a stop to] apanese penetration in Manchuria. Another,Is Neutrality Possible? by Armstrong and AllenDulles, argued for flexible neutrality regulationsin the interest of aiding the Western democraciesagainst Nazi aggression. Foreign A !fairs in itsfirst issue emphasized that "Russia is too large apart of the world to be ignored with impunity,"and suggested the possibility of a German-Sovietalliance. And at all times, even in the late

'twenties and early 'thirties, when the militaryestate was low, the Council kept in touch withthe Admirals and Generals. The study programfor 1939 included an investigation of "Mobiliza-tion of America's Resources in Time of War."General Frank McCoy told a meeting of politicalscientists that year that the Council seemed tobe "the only academic institution fully alive tothe dangers of U.S. involvement in the war."

FINDING THE MAN

WIT H the coming of hostilities, theCouncil's assembled pool of talent and

information came into sudden and dramaticplay. Stimson went to Washington as Secretaryof War, taking with him the small nucleus ofmen, many unknown then, who were to foundthis country's modern defense establishment.

"Whenever we needed a man," John \1cCloy,the present Council chairman who served Stim-son as personnel chief, recalls, "we thumbedthrough the roll of Council members and putthrough a call to New York."

At least as important, the Council providedfor the U. S. government the first organizedframework for postwar planning. Less than afortnight after the guns began pounding inEurope, and a full two years before Pearl Har-bor, Armstrong and the Council's executivedirector, Walter Mallory, journeyed to Washing-ton with a proposition. State lacked the appro-priations to set up a planning division; Congresswas bearish about any official move that hintedat U. S. intervention; there was a danger that,if it finally did get going with a sudden jolt,postwar planning might be out of the hands ofState. Why not, they asked, let the Council be-gin the work, privately, with the understandingthat its apparatus would be turned over to Stateas soon as feasible?

R Y J 0 SE P H K R AFT 67

Secretary Hull was in favor. Accordingly, inDecember 1939, the Council, with financial aidfrom the Rockefeller Foundation, establishedfour separate planning groups-Security andArmaments; Economic and Financial; Political;Territorial-comprising about a dozen men eachincluding research secretaries of the highestcaliber (Jacob Viner of Princeton and AlvinHansen of Harvard in the economic group, forexample). A fifth group was added in 1941 toconsider the prohlems of the exiled governmentsof the occupied European countries which theState Department, because the United States wasneutral, had to treat gingerly. In 1942, the wholeapparatus with most of the personnel was takeninto the State Department as the nub of itsAdvisory Committee on Postwar Planning Prob-lems. Up to that point, the five groups had pro·duced a total of 150 planning studies.

Their impact, given the amorphous quality ofdecision-making in the U. S. government, is diffi-cult to measure. It appears that Council studiesplayed a considerable part in shaping the Char-ter of the United Nations; the American decisionnot to remove the Japanese Emperor; and themeans by which .Japan's former island baseswere at least temporarily acquired as U. S. bases.The relatively mild American position on Ger-man reparations, taken at the Moscow ForeignMinisters Conference in 1943, was blocked outon the basis of the Council's study of theproblem.

And one major action is beyond cavil. OnMarch 17, 1940, the Council's Territorial groupissued a study, warning that Germany mightacquire Greenland through occupation of Den-mark and pointing out that the U. S. could safe-guard Greenland by defining it as an area"within which the Monroe Doctrine is presumedto apply." Germany, in fact, occupied Denmarkon April 9, 1940. Three days later, President

ELMER DAVIS 1890-1958

HIS c?lleagues--:-hehad. n? peer~-recognized Elmer Davis as the greatest journalistof hIS generatIOn. HIS integrity, courage, and common sense helped guide thecountry through one of the most troubled periods of its history; and he set astandard which the best of American newspapermen, magazine writers, andbroadcasters have been trying to live up to ever since. He will be especiallyremembered by Harpers readers as the man who contributed more articles to themagazine than any other free-lance writer-sixty-seven of them, including someof the most memorable we have ever had the privilege of publishing.-The Editors

68 S C H 0 0 L FOR S TAT E S MEN

Roosevelt, holding the Council memorandumin his hand, announced the extension of ourprotection to Greenland "which has been recog-nized as being within the area of the MonroeDoctrine."

Since the war, the government has maintainedami expanded its permanent bureaucracy in theforeign field, and the Council's semi-official rolehas, perforce, diminished. Special projects con-tinue. In 1947, just before taking over as UnderSecretary of State to George Marshall, Robert A.Lovett asked the Council staff to arrange for hima briefing session on U.S. foreign policy prob-lems.

"I came away from the session," Lovett recalls,"with the firm conviction that it would be ourprincipal task at State to awaken the nation tothe dangers of Communist aggression."

And, of course, Council members continue todrift in and out of the government. When JohnMcCloy went to Bonn as U.S. High Commis-sioner, he took with him a staff composed almostexclusively of men who had interested themselvesin Gennan affairs at the Council.

But increasingly the Council has tended toplace major emphasis on the study groups. Inthe last few years, with the appointment of anew Director of Studies, Professor Philip Mosely,and a $2,500,000 grant supplied by the Ford,Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations, theCouncil has become the most important singleprivate agency conducting research in foreignaffairs.

"Our aim," Mosely says, "is to study the prob-lems before they become issues."

IS IT UNDEMOCRATIC?

THE more unofficial role being assumed bythe Council tends to neutralize one area

of criticism. Charges that the Council is the"Rockefeller Foreign Office" (by a BaltimoreMcCarthyite) or an "outpost of the British Co-lonial Office" (by a prewar isolationist) may bedismissed out of hand. But it is undeniable thatthe Council, acting as a corporate body, hasinfluenced American policy with wide-rangingeffects upon the average citizen. Set against thetotal public, the Council can hardly be called arepresentative body; its active membership is,by force of circumstance, Eastern; and, by anyreckoning, either rich or successful. Its transac-lions are remote from public scrutiny, and, infact, refractory to any detailed examination.Thus, in theory at least, the Council comes close

to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills hascalled the Power Elite-a group of men, similarin interest and outlook, shaping events from in-vulnerable positions behind the scenes.

In practice, even that cock will not fight. TheCouncil has assumed semi-official duties only inemergencies; it has never accepted governmentfinancial support; such recommendations as ithas made have subsequently all stood test at thepolls or in Congress; if its membership sharesthe fellowship of success, it is at least broadenough to include divergent views on every cur-rent foreign-policy issue. Moreover, the Councilplays a special part in helping to bridge the gapbetween the two parties, affording unofficially ameasure of continuity when the guard changesin Washington. For example, Governor AverellHarriman of New York, a former Ambassadorto the Soviet Union, and, not impossibly, afuture Secretary of State, recalls that his firstexchange with the current Administration onSoviet problems took place at the Council in aconversation wirh Robert Bowie, formerly Mr.Dulles' Director of Policy Planning.

Indeed, it may be claimed that something likethe Council appears to be required by the pecul-iar problem of American leadership. On theone hand, the business of managing nationalaffairs is becoming daily more massive and com-plex. Who, for example, can profess to morethan a rudimentary grasp of the budget? Onthe other hand, in this country, richness of op-portunity preoccupies many men with their ownprivate pursuits and "better living." The sizeand mobility of our population break up thedeep fellowship and sense of collective purposethat imbues leadership in such countries asBritain.

"The duties of the citizen," as Walter Lipp-mann once wrote, "come to seem very nearly re-mote to the career of the individual."

At bottom what the Council does is to re-establish the connection. It draws persons who,in John McCloy's wry phrase, are "more thansalesrnen,' affords them the stimulation of abroad sampling of expert views, subjects themto the serious study of international problems,and gives them-for even stuffiness has its virtue-a style. To its great credit, it has helped to pro-duce a type of American Public Man, exemplifiedat its best by Henry Stimson. Perhaps, if theCouncil did not now exist, it would not inVoltaire's phrase have to be invented. But Vol-taire also asked, in another connection:

"What have you got that's better?"

Harper's Magazine, July 1958