Foreign Affairs at 70

William G. Hyland

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1992

William G. Hyland leaves the editorship of Foreign Affairs with this issue.

In the period that followed the "X" article the Cold War added a long list of byproducts for Foreign Affairs readers, who had to cope with a new alphabet?NATO, SEATO, IMF?and new areas of concern as the Cold War widened beyond eastern Europe. One could still find familiar authors?Hanson W. Baldwin, Barbara Ward Jackson, Raymond Sontag, Henry M. Wriston?but also new ones?Henry Kissinger, John C. Campbell, A. M. Rosenthal?and some world leaders?Paul?Henri Spaak, Lester B. Pearson, Félix Houphouët?Boigny, Habib Bourguiba.

On the occasion of its thirty?fifth anniversary, Foreign Affairs was treated to praise in the press. The New York Times wrote:

The plain blue?gray covers of that publication are recognized throughout the world as containing authoritative articles on every aspect of international relations, contributed by leading statesmen, politicians, thinkers and writers from the four corners of the globe. . . . Hamilton Fish Armstrong . . . can look on his work with deep satisfaction; and the Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs, can take well?justified pride in this constantly recurring contribution to American scholarship.

If 1947 was a watershed, then 1957 also qualified as a turning point. It was the year of Sputnik, and it was the start of a long bitter crisis that ended with the most hair?raising confrontation over Cuba, where 42 Soviet missiles were deployed in secret in the fall of 1962.

On the very eve of that confrontation Foreign Affairs marked its fortieth anniversary. In a lead article Mr. Armstrong, drawing on his own personal experience, compared the situation in late 1962 with that of 40 years earlier. Among the new factors he noted that the United States had returned to normal relations with its former enemies much earlier; that there was also in existence a much stronger international organization, the United Nations, and, above all, American policy had shifted from the "static to the active, from the conservative to the creative." Considering the crisis that was about to break, Mr. Armstrong offered a pertinent observation:

Of course the fundamental change for American diplomacy was that this time the American people as a whole, looking at the world with eyes opened by a second terrible experience, saw that their interests and responsibilities reached to every part of it. This meant that their leaders could enter without hesitation into a policy of active international cooperation; and with the public behind them, they did so. . . . Without steady public backing, a Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy could not have pursued a strong foreign policy, and if he had tried would have ended like Wilson in frustration.

Armstrong could not know how valid his point would be in the months and years that followed. Strong public support was in some measure crucial to President Kennedy?s masterful handling of the Cuban missile crisis. In October 1962 there were no demonstrations, no political hectoring by the opposition party on television, no congressional waffling. But when that same public endorsement faltered in the 1960s, the Vietnam War turned into a political disaster for Kennedy?s successors.

Vietnam was also a crisis of sorts for Foreign Affairs. By and large ever since Pearl Harbor the editorial content of the journal had seemed in line with the official policy of the United States; to be sure, there were dissenting articles?especially on nuclear affairs?and criticisms?on China policy for example. Vietnam sorely tested the consensus. In a preface to a collection of Foreign Affairs articles, written several years later, the editors noted that: "The ?credit? for the movement to discredit the Vietnam War must go largely to those American liberal intellectuals who began fairly early to register their discontent with their country?s involvement in Southeast Asia." The problem was aptly summed up in Foreign Affairs by Irving Kristol in July 1967:

Our intellectuals are moving toward a significant ?confrontation? with the American ?establishment? and will do nothing to strengthen the position of their antagonist. Which is to say that the American intellectual class actually has an interest in thwarting the evolution of any kind of responsible and coherent imperial policy.

But for any imperial policy to work effectively ... it needs intellectual and moral guidance. It needs such guidance precisely because, in foreign affairs, one is always forced to compromise one?s values. In the United States today, a relative handful of intellectuals proffers such guidance to the policymaker. But the intellectual community en masse, disaffected from established power . . . feels no such sense of responsibility. It denounces, it mocks, it vilifies.