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Armstrong's own papers cover everything under the sun. As an old working reporter he did daily long notes of what he had seen and done, he wrote and received letters from all corners of the country and the world, using the phone hardly at all as far as one can tell, and he edited and worked over articles with great intensity. (Many files on individual articles remain at the Council, in addition to those in the Princeton papers.) And in just about all that the Council itself set in motion, apart from Foreign Affairs, he was inspiration, gadfly, avid participant, and often recorder of how things came to be. The initial issue, published in September 1922, had one other lasting trademark, legible 12-point type, at that time from the Caslon font the present Editor James Hoge brought back in 1993 in a modern version. But of course the contents were the real test. The lead article was by the elder statesman and ex-Secretary of State Elihu Root, a pithy essay on the theme that America was now a world power and desperately needed a much more informed public both to follow international matters and to work in government. This was a much more original and striking thought than it might seem today: the fact was that foreign policy, with rare exceptions, had depended heavily on Presidents and the White House, operating with all too little regard to public opinion until they had to present a finished project to the Congress and the public. After the rejection of the League of Nations, it was obvious by 1922 that this method of policymaking was outmoded and almost bound to fail although the lesson has had constantly to be relearned by later Presidents and equally obvious that a much more professional approach was needed within government, in the press, and in private quarters generally. Incidentally, Root was the first of eleven Secretaries of State, past, present or future at the time of writing, who have contributed articles to Foreign Affairs. In one issue, that of January 1963, there were in fact three such articles, two by past Secretaries (Dean Acheson and Christian Herter), the third by Henry Kissinger, whose day was yet to come. Other articles in that first issue were by senior European statesmen of the time, with one article by a rising New York lawyer named John Foster Dulles, pointing out the difficulties of the reparations situation. Coolidge himself contributed the first of many articles on Soviet matters, using various letter initials rather than his name a device of course utterly transparent but reflecting a desire not to have the magazine appear as simply an outlet for its Editors. He need not have worried. Part of the effort of the two men, in the early years, went into putting the magazine on the map, not by a modern-style public relations effort but simply by sending copies to influential people, who might then be induced to contribute or enlist others. Hence, via a friend from his days with Russian War Relief in Moscow during the war, Coolidge sent a copy of the issue to Karl Radek, Lenin's brain trust, which Radek in due course returned, reporting that he had given it to Lenin to read, and that the latter had marked it up. That copy preserved today in a modest wooden case in the Council's downstairs reception room is in fact heavily marked up, with individual comments in Radek's writing and much sidelining in another hand, presumably Lenin's. This sidelining is not, curiously, in the Coolidge article on Soviet policy, but in the Dulles assessment of Europe's economic difficulties. William Hyland, Editor from 1984 to 1992, tells the story that when he showed the issue in its case to Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking in 1989 at the Council, Gorby reacted quickly to the mention of Radek that "he was a traitor." Stalin's ghost lives on. So does Coolidge's emphasis on articles about Russia. Over the next 45 years as Armstrong proudly noted in his memoir, Peace and Counterpeace the magazine printed no less that 248 such articles, surely far more than any other non-specialist publication in the West. In that very first issue, the two editors laid down their credo in words that have been carried in every issue of the magazine since then. It was not to represent "any consensus of beliefs" (nor was it to be a house organ for work done at the Council). Sharp disagreements among contributors were fully expected, and "mere vagaries" to be avoided. In essence: Foreign Affairs can do more to inform American public opinion by a broad hospitality to divergent ideas than it can by identifying itself with one school. Whether the magazine has always lived up to this high ideal can of course be debated. But the original Editors certainly worked hard in this direction. For example, though themselves dismayed by the defeat of the League of Nations, they had no hesitation in getting two leading opponents of the League and card-carrying isolationists, Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and William E. Borah, to write articles, in 1924 and 1934 respectively. When a few conservative senior members of the Council objected to an invitation to speak extended to another isolationist, Senator Smith Brookhart of Iowa, Armstrong boiled over, saying in effect, how could you possibly combat a man's arguments unless you understood them, and why should anybody be afraid of hearing from a different viewpoint?
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