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A second important series of publications was the institution of immediate annual reviews of the past year, again initiated in the late twenties but brought to new pitch in the thirties. By then, the annual surveys brought out by Chatham House in London, written by the great historian Arnold Toynbee, had achieved special distinction, and the Council's effort was in this general direction. In the early thirties, three of the early annual reviews were written personally by the famous editor and columnist Walter Lippmann, and the task was carried on until it was interrupted by the war. In the eventful years after the war, these annual reviews, under the title of The United States and World Affairs, were produced extraordinarily rapidly after the end of the year, in parallel with volumes containing key public documents during the year. The volumes were written for several years by John Campbell, another of the Council's leading intellectual figures. Then the effort passed to Richard Stebbins until it was suspended after 1970, as just too hard to produce in timely fashion. (From 1978 until 1993, a special issue of Foreign Affairs, on "America and the World," filled part of the gap.) Campbell, like Stebbins a pupil of Langer, was for more than forty years a pillar of the Studies Program and a reviewer of books on multiple subjects for Foreign Affairs in the general section, on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and especially on the Middle East, where his range and objectivity were particularly evident. In another direction, the Council's directors became persuaded in the late 1930s that it would serve a public purpose to set up smaller organizations modeled on the Council in as many communities as possible around the country. Organized initially by Francis P. Miller, the result was the establishment, using funds supplied by the Carnegie Corporation, of an initial thirteen Committees on Foreign Relations in cities ranging from Portland, Oregon to Houston to Denver and Des Moines. The rule was that each local committee should be entirely self-governing, seeking to enlist a broad spectrum of the occupations and interests in the community and its surrounding area. The Council simply undertook to cooperate closely with the Committees in supplying attractive speakers, including members of the Council's own staff. From the first, this loose federal structure worked extraordinarily well. The Committees took hold and in a quiet way became forces within their communities for wider understanding of international affairs. In time, the original 13 were steadily expanded so that today there are 37, which also send delegates to a lively annual conference at the Council's headquarters in New York. In my experience from several tours, the local committees have always maintained the same breadth of viewpoint and outlook that the Council itself has sought in its membership, and with that a high measure of open mindedness. Thus, the 1930s found the Council steadily expanding its range of activity, both in terms of publications and in reaching out beyond its own boundaries. The Council's studies staff, under Percy Bidwell for 20 years and then Philip E. Mosely of the Russian Institute at Columbia, also expanded its activities and refined the technique of bringing together groups of experts leavened with laymen, sometimes just for discussion and enlightenment, often to produce reports by a designated author, which were circulated at least to Council members and on a few occasions published. It was this study group technique and experience that was brought to bear as the Second World War broke out in the fall of 1939, in the Council's most ambitious study undertaking. 1939-45 This was the War and Peace Project, initiated in late 1939 and active right through to the end of the war in 1945. Like so much else in the Council's history, the idea of such a project appears to have been that of Ham Armstrong himself. In a sense, it went back to the Council's own roots, in the deep discontent felt by the participants in the Inquiry of 1917-19 about the inadequate depth of knowledge and understanding that had been available to President Wilson and to the American government generally in that postwar period. At any rate, literally within a week of the outbreak of war in early September 1939, Armstrong and his strong right hand, Walter Mallory, were in Washington offering to put the Council's organizational skills and ability to select good people to work for the government. Four study groups were formed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, to assess how the war might develop, where it would leave the world, and especially the United States, and what analyses would be useful for contingency planning. In December 1939 the State Department, which in those simpler days had literally no planning or research units or capacity and no money to pay for them anyway latched on to the offer and set up liaison with the study groups. These set to work, meeting once a month in New York, with at first six or so members each, later more, on economic, financial, security and territorial problems, with an additional group formed later to discuss peace aims.
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