The CFIA has its roots in the political and intellectual pressures of Cold War diplomacy. The election of Eisenhower in 1952 and the subsequent ascendancy of McCarthyism caused a prolonged, steady exodus from Washington of former Truman advisors and government officials who had been hunted down and indicted by Senate subcommittees. Many of these people retired to universities around the country, and a large number of them found their way to Harvard. Abruptly dislodged from the practice of internal and international politics, they were seeking, many of them, an outlet for their talents.

But that is only part of the story. The years following World War II had seen an unprecedented increase of Federal involvement in University life, and dozens of high-powered, think-tankish research centers began springing up at Harvard and across the nation, funded by the government and by private foundations. These centers were never very far removed from academic life; they bridged departmental structures with their inter-disciplinary, relevance-oriented outlook, and served as research-money conduits for scores of interested professors.

MUCH OF THIS activity had also been threatened in the early '50's by McCarthyites, who conceived of foreign affairs scholarship within universities as Communist-oriented, as when they took on the Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1953; but as soon as the federal and academic establishments came to their senses, discovering that the bulk of expelled officials and accused Communist's were not Communists at all, the study of foreign affairs was ready to proceed without further interference.

At about that time, in 1956, McGeorge Bundy, who was then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, initiated a Faculty committee study on the feasibility of a center for international studies within the University. Bundy, a man with formidable connections in government and society, received Ford Foundation money with which to conduct the study, and finally brought the Center to reality in 1958 with initial Ford and Rockefeller foundation grants. Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning Robert R. Bowie agreed to become the director of the Center, and by the time Bundy left Cambridge to join the Kennedy Administration in early 1961 (he has since served as head of the Ford Foundation), a permanent nucleus of Faculty associates was established at the Center and its program was well under way.

In its later days, much of the Center's work consisted of undirected research and study by individual Faculty associates. But at the start, the CFIA was primarily a training institute for senior government officials from the United States and other non-Communist nations in Western Europe and East Asia.

This undertaking, the Fellows' Program, consisted of bringing fifteen men together for one year at Harvard; a weekly seminar program, combined with unlimited access to the scholarly and intellectual resources of the University, would facilitate, it was hoped, "a franker, more productive discussion of foreign policy problems than would be possible if the same individuals were negotiating across tables for their governments," according to Edward S. Mason, former deputy assistant Secretary of State and another of the principal founders of the Center.

Mason, who was then dean of the School of Public Administration, had wanted the Fellows Program to become part of that school, but Bowie insisted that such a non-degree-granting program would be best off with an identity and a physical quarters of its own. It was within the framework of the Fellows' Program that the Center took shape.

BEYOND the nucleus of the 15 Fellows, there was another rationale for starting the CFIA. "There was a feeling that international affairs was underrepresented at Harvard," according to Thomas C. Schelling, who had held several high economic posts in the Truman administration and who had left Yale in 1958 to join the Harvard Center. "There was a feeling that the United States had been a very isolated country for many generations," and that foreign affairs was "an academic field that most universities weren't equipped to teach or think about."

Schelling's observation hits upon an important point. Prior to the founding of the Center, there was no mechanism at Harvard for the study of international politics and all its integral components: economics, theories of government, balance of power concepts, diplomatic strategies. The CFIA incorporated these component disciplines for the first time, giving them a new significance and a relevance to the current global power struggle.

But the increased coordination and relevance of foreign studies which the Center made possible was underlined and dominated by the decisive trend of American foreign policy thinking in the late '50's: unreconstructed cold warriorism. This was the era of Stalinism versus freedom and democracy, of confrontation politics, drawing the line, negotiating from strength. The United States, emerging unscathed as the world's most powerful nation after World War II, could have used its extraordinary might to promote a peaceful detente with a much weakened and brutalized postwar Soviet Union, but chose instead to promote distrust, interventionism, and encirclement.

As soon as the Allies forced Russia to barter for European spheres of influence as early as October 1944, they made inevitable the occupation of Eastern as well as Western Europe; as soon as they tampered with the internal affairs of Vietnam and Korea as early as 1945, they insured Communist support for national liberation movements in those countries; when they agreed to bomb Hiroshima to terrorize the Russians in Potsdam as well as to defeat the Japanese in Japan, they engendered the cost and deadliness of a prolonged arms race. Far from being victimized and put upon by Cold War hysteria, America had probably done more to create and sustain that hysteria than anyone else.

SO GREAT and utterly self-hypnotic was the hysteria that tracing the blame for it could only have occurred in retrospect. Until the extension of the Vietnamese conflict in the late '60's, there did not exist a single, prolonged and potentially divisive use of American overseas military power that might have spurred a serious controversy within the Center about the ramifications of American policy. The early period was one in which the fundamental goals of that policy, as opposed to the tactical wisdom of this or that particular intervention, went largely unquestioned.

Since the CFIA performed no military research but concerned itself instead with the economic, social, and diplomatic techniques of interventionism and policy maneuvering, it exempted itself from most self-criticism during the early period of the Indochinese escalation. Though many of those who worked at the Center during its inception may now reject their former frameworks and assumptions, the perspective necessary to do so was simply not available for some time.

Be this qualification as it may, it does not alter the fact that the Center's early work lent objective support to U. S. policy goals. Of the 15 Fellows who visited the Center each year, just less than half were American officials, and the rest were almost exclusively from Britain, France, West Germany, South Korea, Japan, and other nations vital to the success of the Free World Rim Strategy. They had come here to study concrete situations, relevant theories, and game strategies; their purpose was to improve the efficacy of their governments, governments friendly to American-influence and dependent on American support in the fight against Communism and insurgent nationalism. The intent was as simple as that.

What can it have meant, in 1960, for the Ambassador from South Korea to the United States (who had previously served as chairman of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff) and a Colonel with the U. S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam, to meet in weekly Center seminars to discuss "political-military relations"? for an assistant secretary in the British Board of Trade to meet with a deputy chief for Economic Research in the American CIA and discuss "problems of economic development"? for an Eastern European specialist in the Department of State and the chief of the Soviet Bureau in the West German Foreign Ministry, to meet and discuss "the emerging structure of Europe"? can all this have meant that the CFIA, by bringing these men together in Cambridge, was sponsoring disinterested academic research? Or was it really consolidating Cold War strategy on a cross-government scale?