Professor Nye wore a blue-striped, long-sleeved, well-pressed shirt. Young, vigorous, and prematurely balding. No coat, no tie. Oh, if Master Pappenheimer should see him. I was sure he was a Rhodes scholar. Princeton and Oxford it turns out. I was in the office later to hear his secretary phone for a squash court reservation for Friday at 5 p.m. I don't think that I could get my little brother to phone for a squash court reservation. But then I don't pay my little brother.

"I'D LIKE TO start with something that you cover only cursorily in your literature. That's how the Center began."

Professor Bowie began reading to me from a xeroxed copy of an unpublished report of the current activities of the Center. I had already read it and I knew that part. During June, 1954, a Faculty Committee on the Behavioral Sciences at Harvard issued a 500-page report that, among other things, called for the establishment of a Center for International Studies. In 1956, McGeorge Bundy, then Dean of the Faculty, formed a new Committee which again advised the creation of such a center. In 1957, Edward Mason, Dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration, was sent to Washington to recruit Bowie. In the fall of 1958, the Center began operation.

I had questions about the real reasons for the institution of the Center. In the 1954 Committee's report, of the 60 page of recommendations, only one deals with a possible Center. Moreover, the Visiting Committee judging the recommendations found the Center interesting but not essential. Since many of the major recommendations of the Committee were never followed, I wondered why Bundy decided to pick up the idea two years later.

The Ford Foundation had funded the Committee and four others like it in major universities. I wondered what they had expected to find. But more than that, the tenor of the report seemed concerned with questions far different from the present interests of the Center. The report said that the Center should look into "Cultural Differences and International Understanding." They were also interested, on a scholarly level I suppose, in "Domestic Determinants of Foreign Policy." The main problems, from the eyes of the behavioral scientists, seemed to be not enough researchers, not enough money, and not enough time to think about "questions of value."

Listen to one of the political scientists interviewed by the Committee:

I do think that there are some dangers in that we need to get our roots more back into comparative analysis of values. There aren't enough people who are really looking at the big problems, the value problems. I think this is a danger for everybody, not only in the academic world. (p. 47)

Some professors were worried that large research projects, especially if dressed up as "interdisciplinary," would get first call on foundation funds. (p. 12) Others already disliked the

... whoring after formalism- these mathematical models are a case in point. It seems to serve much like a philosopher's stone, and leads people to forget about the phenomena themselves in their concern with elegant systems and whether they can fit into them. Then there is all this interest in theory building. As X put it the other day, there is so much regard for being critical and for rigorous theory we may be preventing, or at least not rewarding, people for creating ideas at a fairly low level. (p. 56)

No radical today would say that the CFIA unconsciously disregards the big questions because of a preoccupation with, for example, game theory. Most would say that game theory is at once a way of aiding American foreign policy, as well as providing a mask for that aid. The point here is, however, that some behavioral scientists in 1954 sensed something wrong with the new scientific method, and wanted time to investigate its long-term perspectives. They did not for a minute doubt U.S. goals, but they realized that social science was becoming a whore.

After a little digging, I think I can guess why the Center was started. The crisis managers must have found it lonely in Washington under Dulles. The whole group of liberal foreign policy experts needed somewhere to polish their swords in exile. Bundy must have suggested the old idea of the Center for International Studies. They could get together and wait for better times.

There is usually a lag between newly developed social science techniques and their implementation in foreign policy. During the 1950's, the government had fallen far behind. With Kennedy's election, the New Frontier brought many of Harvard's best into the White House, including McGeorge Bundy as special assistant for National Security Affairs. The Kennedy men brought American foreign policy up to date. The first special forces went into Vietnam in 1961.

BY NOW, Vernon was getting impatient. He was playing with his keys and looking around the room. I understood that he had come for more important business and I decided to skip the next couple of questions on my list.

Later, I wished I hadn't. As the meeting progressed, the Center's representatives built up a case that the Center was actually helping the people of the world. As Nye put it, "Maybe it looks like we're painting a bowl of rose's, but we think we've got a pretty good thing going." At the end of the meeting, there was to be only a choice between what I could sense as the real activities of the Center in supporting U.S. policies, and, on the other hand, a picture that did indeed resemble roses. My one question that could have helped was about the members of the Center's visiting committee. It includes the former Ambassadors to England and Belgium, the Vice President and Director of Standard Oil, a former Secretary of the Treasury and Under Secretary of State, the President of Bell Telephone, the President of Itek, the former director of the CIA, and the President of Radio Free Europe. I had learned enough about imperialism during the last three years to suspect that the members of the visiting committee and I were on different sides. I would have liked to have seen them reconcile that to me.

I looked up suddenly, and saw Bowie's secretary advancing towards us with a tray of four cups of coffee, and big bowls with cream and sugar. She set the tray down on the table we were clustered around and slipped out quietly. The porcelain was hand painted, and with two spoonful of sugar, it was the best coffee I had ever tasted. One of them asked whether I'd like cream, Dick, and I realized that suddenly we were Bob, Ray, Joe, and Dick. I was having coffee with very important people, so I, too, was a very important person.