However, this was clearly not enough in the minds of the founders. They wished to reach out to a much wider audience than could simply attend meetings, so that setting up a quarterly magazine for serious individual essays quickly emerged as a central project, the head and corner stone. To become its first Editor, the Council's directors turned to Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard, an active member of the Inquiry before and during the Paris conference. Only within the last decade, Coolidge has at last got a superb biography, by Professor Robert Byrnes of Indiana. Somewhat austere in manner, he was the pioneer in America, before the turn of the century, of scholarship on Russia and Eastern Europe, indeed of international studies generally. Director of Harvard's Widener Library for a time, he was all his life a voracious traveler and inquisitor as well as a meticulous scholar of documents. At one point, in 1914, with an old Boston China Trade fortune behind him, he repaid his hospitality debts in Germany, where he had taken his doctorate, by a formal dinner for 100 at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin. He also proclaimed that he would oppose any Harvard appointment relating to European history if the candidate did not have a working command of at least French, German and Russian.

Then 57, he was persuaded to accept the editorship on a half-time basis, provided the Council would find a qualified younger man to work in New York full-time and handle all the mechanical work of putting out a magazine, while also participating fully in the editing.

So a second principal character came on stage, where he will remain for the rest of my remarks. Casting around, the Council's leaders consulted Edwin F. Gay, one of the original Directors and then the distinguished Editor of the New York Evening Post. Gay strongly recommended a man who had been one of his reporters in Europe, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, whom Coolidge had encountered on one brief occasion, stoutly expounding a view at odds with official orthodoxy. A graduate of Princeton in 1916 and then only in his late twenties, Armstrong had spent the war years covering dangerous fronts, particularly in the Balkans, had wound up in uniform as acting military attache in Belgrade, been in Paris loosely attached to the American delegation, and then traveled extensively all over Europe as a war and peace reporter for the Evening Post. He had also been one of the juniors participating actively in the setting up of the Council.

At once, Ham Armstrong — I am not being colloquial or familiar, just using the label everyone came to use for a landmark figure — accepted the post and came back in June 1922, having already bagged two important articles by top European statesmen. As agreed, Coolidge remained in Boston, where he continued to teach at Harvard and conduct his scholarly work, while Armstrong ran the New York office, handling all the final publication problems. He was also responsible for the distinctive format of the magazine, the choice of a very special light blue paper cover (from a remarkable Italian papermaker), the logo of a man on a horse designed by his sister Margaret, and lettering by another sister, Helen. It was typical of the sense of style that Armstrong, son of a painter, Old New York and Hudson Valley to his fingertips, brought to this and all else throughout his life.

From the first, Foreign Affairs was a hands-on operation, no outside referees, the Editors free to seek advice in any quarter (with an Editorial Advisory Board consulted individually to taste but rarely brought together in most editorships), but in the end totally responsible for all decisions on content. Directors of the Council, never exactly weak or without strong views, must frequently have been put off by the articles printed, but none has ever for a moment intervened, or so far as I know ever thought of doing so.

The modus operandi of the two Editors was surely unique in the history of American magazines. They communicated not by telephone but by daily letters which in those days, posted by five in the afternoon, would reach the other before nine the following morning! (Comment on this is superfluous.) In the Armstrong papers, which are the centerpiece and highlight of Princeton's Mudd Library collections — as they were of the exhibit on the Council and Foreign Affairs — a special feature is the full originals, mostly handwritten, of both men's letters during the time they worked together. Although Coolidge's papers were given to the Harvard library system, an exception was made for these letters in order to bring the whole file together in one place.

Very different in outward personality, the gregarious and lively Armstrong and the more staid and reserved Coolidge shared not only a thirst for travel and seeing things and people at first hand, but a wide range of interests, an obsessive concern for care and accuracy, openness of mind, and a passion for anonymity and letting authors speak as they themselves wished. They were, in short, great editors.