Foreign Policy history

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was established in 1816 as one of the original ten standing committees of the Senate.

These rooms, S-116 and S-117, were first occupied around 1859 with the completion of the new Senate wing of the Capitol.

Purchase of Alaska, 1867

At one point, in 1914, with an old Boston China Trade fortune behind him, he repaid his hospitality debts in Germany, where he had taken his doctorate, by a formal dinner for 100 at the famous Adlon Hotel in Berlin.

A very early demonstration of this came when former French Premier Georges Clemenceau came to New York in the fall of 1922 and picked the Council as his venue for a major speech.

One of these, a personal friend of Armstrong, was the distinguished African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, whose first of five Foreign Affairs articles, in 1925, defined the "Color Line" as the key problem of the 20th century.

Then, in 1928, Coolidge died, too early and rather suddenly, and Armstrong took over the editorship, not missing a beat.

Always following European politics closely, he managed to be in Germany in the spring of 1933 and interviewed a large number of people, including a long monologue from Adolf Hitler himself.

Over the next three years, the magazine came as close as it ever did to becoming a confirmed advocate for a particular school of thought, interventionism in the developing European war that broke out formally in September 1939.

In personal terms its effect was enormous: participants stayed in touch with government, all sorts of links were formed that unearthed later talent, and some of the participants, including Armstrong, wound up going to the historic San Francisco conference of 1945.

When the European Recovery Program was launched by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947, there were rapidly created, with full government cooperation, a number of citizens organizations to support the undertaking.

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.

New York: McGraw-Hill, for Council on Foreign Relations, 1966. (A volume in the United States and China in World Affairs series.)

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.