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?

With the decline in importance of the Fellows' program in the early '60's, the significance of the Center's scholarly activity shifted to the field of arms control. The major specialists in this field were Schelling and Morton H. Halperin, a close associate of Henry A. Kissinger (also on the Center staff) who joined Kissinger and the Nixon administration as a part-time consultant to the National Security Council in 1969. Their major contribution to arms control theory was the incorporation of diplomatic strategy as a factor in non-proliferation. Here again, however, their work was inevitably undertaken within the context and limitation of American arms policy.

In Schelling's judgment, the arms control work at the Center in theearly '60's had several positive effects on government policy:

the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system might have been developed years ago "except that something got into Secretary McNamara." That something, he said, was that CFIA associates had made contact with several key people working under him;

at the prodding of the Center, Walt Rostow and Henry Rowen persuaded the American negotiator at Geneva, Llewelyn Thompson, to propose the "hot line" to the Russian delegate; the proposal was accepted ("Neither is known as being a dove," Schelling said of Rostow and Rowen, "but both were very strong for arms arrangements with the Russians. I would guess Rowen did more to keep nuclear weapons out of Western Europe than anyone you can name.");

a series of seminars including Rostow, Bowie, and Carl Kaysen (deputy to Bundy in the Kennedy administration, now director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton and often mentioned as a candidate for Harvard's presidency), which studied ways to "rationalize arms control within the nation's security policy (italics supplied)."

But how did these policies, which on their surface undermine the possibility of a massive American arms buildup, actually serve America's "defense"? The answer lay not so much in the strategy as in the conditions under which the strategy could be applied.

BY FAR the most relevant policy tool which the Kennedy government inherited from the Cold Warriors was the doctrine of preventive warfare. This doctrine, in turn, was conceived with the psychological potentialities of the atomic bomb fully in mind. To repeat an important point, there is growing evidence that the decision to use the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made within the framework of the Potsdam negotiations, not the then-foreseeable Japanese capitulation.

There followed a time, during the fanatical period of the early '50's, when Americans believed the most effective use of the bomb lay in increasing the physical stock of atomic weapons. By the end of the '50's, however, this policy was rejected in place of the older political approach; the stockpiling had reached frightening proportions on both sides, and far exceeded the amount necessary for total annihilation.

This fear was part of the rationale for also seeking to prevent other nations from becoming nuclear powers; but behind that rationale was the more basic theorem that the possession of atomic weapons, even in their nonuse, was an incalculable political asset. In a proliferating world community, the U. S. and the Soviet Union would have grown progressively less powerful and influential; but if nuclear weapons could be kept out of everyone else's hands, the two would continue to flourish. The new application of the balance of power concept was indeed conceived, as Schelling pointed out, in terms of a mutual U. S. -Soviet interest.

What is more, the new arms control policy did not apply to conventional warfare, through which the atomic powers could enforce their will on non-nuclear nations by virtue of their prior nuclear monopoly. In a study undertaken at the bidding of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1965, Halperin applied this doctrine to the Chinese Communists. The Chinese, he writes,

... have been and remain committed to the use of force and the threat of force as a major instrument of foreign policy. This will require the United States to engage repeatedly in a test of will and nerve with the Chinese Communists in which an important component will be the need to communicate restraint combined with an indication of what the United States is prepared to do in the event of Chinese expansion of a local conflict in a way that seems detrimental to American interest.

An arms agreement inhibiting Chinese nuclear development would be desirable, he added, but

If the West is able successfully to launch guerrilla actions and to promote counter-insurgency measures, there is a real question as to whether arms control agreements inhibiting insurgency would be in Western interests.

It does not take much imagination to guess where such a doctrine might have led policy planners in the early days of Johnson's Vietnam escalation, and whether or not it was the author's conscious intent to encourage land war in Indochina, his research on the subject raises the most crucial possible question about the work of the Center: What is its objective role within the context of American policy?