 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
About | History | Staff | Employment | Editorial Guidelines | Newsstand Finder | International Editions | Advertising | Press Contacts | Contact Us | Privacy Policy
Two years later, of course, the United States did go to war and cooperation intensified. Several of the secretaries of the groups went to work directly for State. But the impetus came all along from the participants, who churned out a stream of papers, eventually something like 700. Those on economic matters highlighted the fundamental importance of economic cooperation between the United States and Britain, and the territorial group expanded its reach to include issues of possible future boundaries, trusteeships and population trends. The fifth group, on possible peace aims, made a particular point of extensive research on the views and problems of occupied countries, through their governments-in-exile. It has been wisely said that no contingency plans are ever adopted as written, but that the exercise is often invaluable in flagging the questions that must be faced. So it was for this extraordinary exercise, I am sure. In personal terms its effect was enormous: participants stayed in touch with government, all sorts of links were formed that unearthed later talent, and some of the participants, including Armstrong, wound up going to the historic San Francisco conference of 1945. In terms of direct collaboration with government, I suppose it was the furthest north, not only for the Council but for any private organization at any time in American history. One other individual who bulks large in the Council's history played a big role in the War and Peace Project. A workhorse on the economic study group, William Diebold went on to become a charter member of the select guild of world-class economists, reviewer of economic books in Foreign Affairs, writer himself of several, and constant goad and guide to the Council's varied projects in his field. Postwar Study Groups Thus galvanized, the study-group method was used extensively in the postwar period, it being obvious to all that the United Nations could not assure peace and that profound instability remained. In the turbulent postwar years the Council teemed with study and discussion groups 27 in the first five postwar years, by Michael Wala's count. Many of the study groups dealt with the problems of Europe, including one chaired by Dwight Eisenhower, then President of Columbia, but Japan and the U.N. family of institutions came in for a full share. In all probability these groups made at least general contributions to the framework of thinking that underlay the Marshall Plan and NATO, although I do not believe that anything organized by the Council played any significant role in framing the Plan itself. Three of the original key figures in putting it together, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, and George Kennan, were members of the Council, as were many who worked in it, but Acheson, Clayton and Kennan were not at this time involved in Council activities. Certainly, among the membership of the Council, sympathy and support for these undertakings was the predominant view. When the European Recovery Program was launched by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947, there were rapidly created, with full government cooperation, a number of citizens organizations to support the undertaking. The most prominent of these, the Committee for the Marshall Plan (CMP), had a large number of Council members in its makeup. In accordance with its founding principles, the Council itself never took a position on these matters, but then, as in the last period before the outbreak of the Second World War, there was a very strong sentiment among individual Council members and this was reflected in their actions. Between the spring of 1947 and the spring of 1948 there was undoubtedly a sea change in popular and congressional attitudes toward the Plan, so that whereas large poll majorities were at first opposed, Congress finally accepted and fully funded the Marshall Plan in the spring of 1948. What active Council members did was further the idea and help its dissemination to the American people at large, always an important function the Council had aspired to fulfill. In any case, I believe almost every school of history has recognized that the Marshall Plan was at once the most generous and the wisest single move by the United States in the postwar era. In that same eventful spring of 1947, the country found a rationale for its basic policy toward the Soviet Union through an article published in Foreign Affairs. The story of George Kennan's "X" article has long since passed into history. The sequence ran from James Forrestal asking Kennan to set down his view of the Soviet Union anew, following the general lines he had spelled out in a famous "long telegram" of February 1946; Kennan writing such a paper and delivering its essence at a Council meeting; George Franklin, the Council's Executive Director, calling the session at once to the attention of Ham Armstrong; and Armstrong quickly arranging to publish in the July 1947 issue the resulting article, reluctantly accepting the very temporary anonymity of the author, who had just taken on the Policy Planning role at State. That July 1947 issue remains a collector's item, and the reprints of the article are by a considerable margin still at the top of the Council's circulation of reprints, with demand continuing at a steady rate.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Copyright 2002-2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy | Contact Us | FAQs | Webmaster |
|
|
