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Introduction  THESE NOTES ARE BUILT AROUND AN EXHIBIT AT THE Firestone Library of Princeton University, in the fall of 1993, of materials relating to the Council on Foreign Relations and its magazine, Foreign Affairs. Drawing on materials in the Princeton libraries, relating to such alumni of the University as Woodrow Wilson, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and Allen W. Dulles, this exhibit was a remarkable visual presentation of the Council's history up to about 1960, with frequent references to Foreign Affairs and one bay devoted to developments after 1960. It showed highlights of a fascinating and unique story of private initiative seeking to enhance public understanding of foreign policy issues and to convey useable thinking to successive American governments.
Speaking at the inauguration of that exhibit, I talked about the Council's history, with appropriate emphasis on Foreign Affairs but much also about other activities and projects carried out at the Council, seeking not to repeat but rather to embellish and give color and human touches to the contents of the exhibit in effect, program notes. Since the exhibit was based largely on the papers of individuals no longer with us, it dealt mostly with the period from 1922 to about 1960, and my remarks focused on this period, with a short last section on the years since. Let me stress at the outset a fundamental point. From the beginning the Council has seen its function as giving running room to individual ideas and writing, and to discussion and debate. It has never, as a body, taken any position on foreign policy problems. Its articulate members have never been more than a fraction of the whole, never claiming to speak in its name, and both the Council and the magazine have stressed from the first that divergent opinions were inevitable and to be welcomed. The Beginnings It is appropriate that the story told in the exhibit started with Woodrow Wilson, President of Princeton before he became President of the United States. His leadership, ideals, and eloquence had struck a deep chord with many Americans, and when he went in January 1919 to the Paris Peace Conference he carried with him the fervent hopes not only of Americans but of most of the world, that a just and lasting peace might emerge with an appropriate international organization to help achieve it. Yet by that spring, in a story told most recently in the excellent one-volume biography by August Heckscher, those great hopes were already dim. So there grew up, among a dedicated core of the British and American delegations and supporting staffs, a strong feeling that however the conference turned out, there was a new and important need for private institutions to work steadily and unrelentingly to enlarge understanding of the problems in this field. Briefly, they had in mind a joint Anglo-American institution, but this idea soon evaporated in the face of the obvious practical difficulties although there remains today a friendly feeling between the Council and Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs, called Chatham House after the wonderful mansion of William Pitt in which it still resides in London. Instead, the American group during 1920 and 1921 proceeded to set up in New York what became the Council on Foreign Relations. This drew its 75 original members mainly from two groups: academic and professional experts, mostly from universities, who had participated in the so-called Inquiry in Paris, seeking to develop the best possible factual basis and to offer advice and recommendations to Wilson, and public-minded businessmen and bankers with international exposure, almost all from New York itself. After some backing and filling, these two groups came together on the concept of a relatively small organization, with its members actively participating in a program of meetings and group discussions designed to enlarge the understanding of those participating, but as often as possible to result in published output. As the Council went into action, meetings presented no problem. From the first, its ability to assemble a serious and responsible audience, many of them with great experience, attracted leading speakers both from public life and from all the callings relevant to international affairs. A very early demonstration of this came when former French Premier Georges Clemenceau came to New York in the fall of 1922 and picked the Council as his venue for a major speech. Over the course of the next decade, many other senior figures followed suit, and the tradition of meetings continues to this day.
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