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Coming into the project after it was already well underway, he progressively took charge and turned it in effect into an operation in support of his own writing of a book, which at most fitted roughly the emerging trend of thought within the group itself. Kissinger came down to work at the Council in the 1955-56 academic year, and the following year produced Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which reached the best-seller lists for several months and attracted enormous attention. That the analysis was brilliant was generally agreed, but as time went on there came to be greater skepticism about the validity of the most striking conclusion, that there was such a thing as a "limited nuclear war," for which the United States should have the capability and the will. Half a dozen years later, in a book stemming from another Council group on the security of Western Europe, Kissinger was to reverse field and conclude that there was no feasible firebreak in the real world once the use of nuclear weapons had been initiated, hence no realistic possibility of a "limited" nuclear conflict. Yet beyond doubt his initial publication, and the work of the study group, greatly furthered serious discussion of these vital issues. Naturally enough, Kissinger at this point became a Council regular, publishing no less than twelve articles in Foreign Affairs in the period up to his entry into government in 1969. Almost equally prolific was another Harvard-trained outstanding academic, Zbigniew Brzezinski, with eight articles in this general period of the fifties and the sixties. The 1960s In this decade, there were again many senior officials who had been active members of the Council, notably Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, while John Kennedy had written for Foreign Affairs in the 1950s. Indeed, Michael Wala tells me that one sociologist's numerical study of the backgrounds of selected senior officials finds a higher proportion of these to have been Council members under Kennedy and Johnson than under Eisenhower (40 percent under Eisenhower, 42 percent under Kennedy, and a high of 57 percent under Johnson). To me, such unweighted head counts seem a very rough measure at best, and I record my personal impression, from service in all three administrations, that the degree of what might be called "Council-consciousness" was in fact considerably less under Kennedy and Johnson than it had been under Eisenhower. Certainly neither JFK nor LBJ gave any sign of paying heed to the Council. A highlight of this decade, in Council terms, was a pair of large-scale study projects, with multiple publications, one directed at the future of Western Europe, the other at the then largely ignored problem of China. The U.S. relationship with China had been frozen for years, and the general picture in many minds was one of implacable and enduring hostility, making any thaw difficult to visualize in the foreseeable future. Led by a former government servant with extensive Asian experience, Robert Blum, the Council's China project started from the premise that this prognosis was not immutable, and that in any case China needed to be studied much more thoroughly than was being done from the standpoint of its policy-relevant aspects. As he got under way, Blum enlisted not only China experts but others following public opinion. Indeed, perhaps the most important of the volumes that came out of the project was the very first, an analysis of American public opinion toward China by a first-class newspaper man, Arch Steele. Somewhat to the surprise of both the Studies Committee and many readers, Steele's book concluded that hostile feeling toward "Communist China" was by no means as strong or widespread as the political world had tended to assume, that a great many Americans were even ignorant that the regime in China was communist, and that in any case there was not much left of the extreme feelings aroused when the Communist regime took over in 1948-9 and again when Chinese troops intervened to devastating effect in the Korean War in late 1950. Thus, the Steele book in itself made a significant contribution. It was followed by other volumes of analysis of China that brought it, so to speak, into the real and discussable world to an extent that had not been the case in the 1950s. The final volume of the series, published in 1967, was started by Blum, who unfortunately died, and brought to completion by a younger Sinologist, already distinguished, A. Doak Barnett. This volume ended on a very strong note, that it was terribly important for the United States to have regularized relations with China and that this should be sought and brought about just as soon as the turbulence in China and its potentially aggressive behavior seemed to calm down this being the acute period of the Cultural Revolution. While the effect of such writings is impossible to calibrate, it would be my impression that the Council's China series exerted a very important underlying influence in making China a subject of serious discussion and in moving toward a more realistic policy toward it.
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