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The Langer Histories One other project of the 1940s deserves mention here, although it was not covered in the Princeton exhibit. In 1945 the Council's Committee on Studies felt that there was a great need for the most authoritative and balanced account possible of the diplomatic background behind the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and of its wartime diplomacy. They had in mind, I am sure, not only the usual need for good history of a crucial period, but the memory of the endless and disruptive controversies of the late-1920s and 1930s over how the United States got into the First World War controversies that lacked a common base of authoritative information and did much to paralyze American policy in the 1930s. Moreover, they sensed that whatever the biases and special interests that might have played a part in 1917, the story was different for the years from 1937 through to 1941 and then to the end of the War. William Langer, just back at Harvard after serving in the estimating and analytic side of the Office of Strategic Services, and still the dean of diplomatic historians, with a high reputation for thoroughness and integrity, was the natural choice for the assignment, which he accepted for what was thought at first to be a four-year job. But since Langer was recalled to government service in 1950 to set up an Office of National Estimates in the CIA, the twin volumes were not published until 1953, and even then could not fully cover the actual war years. The Council's understandings with the State Department, approved at the top, deserve special mention here. Langer and his colleagues were to have access to any and all relevant documents, subject to two conditions. One, naturally imposed by government, was that any document he wished to use should be cleared for security a condition that, with the War over, could be interpreted with considerable flexibility. The second, on which he and the Council insisted, was that any document he did refer to (in what became massive footnotes) should, upon the publication of the study, be declassified and made fully available to other historians. I pause over this second condition, which was, I think, introduced for the first time in the Langer project. Later, Dean Acheson, in writing his memoirs, insisted on an identical condition for any document he used and cited. Although presidential memoirs have always been a law unto themselves, it seems to me unfortunate that Secretaries of State and national security advisers have not always followed the Langer/Acheson precedent. The two volumes produced under the Langer project are still, I believe, the standard reference on the subject, generally accepted as honest and full. And there has never been a repeat of the bitter controversy of the 1930s, apart from a natural level of criticism and revisionism about FDR's pre-war policies. I would say that the Langer project was a major and largely unsung public service. The 1950s In the Eisenhower administration, two long-time active members, John Foster and Allen Dulles, were in senior positions as Secretary of State and Director of Central Intelligence respectively. Moreover, as just noted, Eisenhower himself when he was at Columbia had taken an interest in the Council and chaired one study group before he was recalled to duty to command NATO. Thus his administration was I suppose an apogee in terms of truly active Council members being in senior positions in government. Yet it is striking that this by no means prevented the Council from sponsoring projects that became critical of the Eisenhower administration's policies. This was notably true on the central issue of debate within government and in the public during this period, the question of nuclear weapons and national policy. It was at a Council meeting, in January 1954, that Secretary Dulles first gave a full description of what came to be called the doctrine of "Massive Retaliation," holding the threat of nuclear weapons or wider hostilities as a deterrent to expansive or aggressive action by communists or others. Thereafter, this speech was reworked into an article in Foreign Affairs, which remains the authoritative explanation of the policy. Almost at once, the Council's Studies Committee decided that the subject needed the best examination it could have if problems of security and classification could be overcome. A substantial group of relevant experts was brought together, and shortly concluded that at the level of broad policy, nuclear weapons could indeed be assessed without serious security problems. For the important role of secretary of this group, responsible for guiding its flow and writing up a full report, Armstrong and George Franklin were responsible for selecting a young Harvard professor, recommended by Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, and William Yandell Elliott, whose images ranged from liberal to hard-line. The result was the emergence of Henry Kissinger as an important figure on the national stage.
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