The Press: High, Grey Brow

Nineteen twenty-three was a year in which a U.S. Ambassador could complacently declare: “The national American policy is to have no foreign policy.” Many Americans agreed with him—but not the editors of the year-old quarterly, Foreign Affairs. Last week, Foreign Affairs celebrated its 25th anniversary in a U.S. which had come a long way from 1923.

Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong had packed the anniversary issue of his grave, grey Foreign Affairs with a roster of big names: Henry L. Stimson, Sumner Welles, Anthony Eden, the Earl of Halifax, Historian Arnold Toynbee, World Bank President John J. McCloy.

World Forum. Nobody ever accused Foreign Affairs of being exciting reading; the magazine and its readers are much too serious to worry about boring anybody. A forum for high, grey brows, Foreign Affairs offered “a broad hospitality to divergent ideas.” In its sober rag pages, chancellors, premiers and secretaries of state, in & out of office, have debated the issues of their day. France’s Premier Poincare, Germany’s Chancellor Wilhelm Marx, Czechoslovakia’s President Thomas Masaryk discussed war guilt. Colonel E. M. House and Massachusetts’ intransigent nationalist Henry Cabot Lodge argued the merits of the League of Nations. Britain’s Viscount Grey chose Foreign Affairs for his declaration on freedom of the seas during the London naval conference, and Foreign Minister Georges Bidault had recently argued France’s case for control of the Ruhr.

But there had never been any doubt about the views of its editor. A crusading and widely respected internationalist, Armstrong contributed many a cogent article to its pages. He was one of the first to cry havoc over Hitler’s Reich, as early as 1937 (in We or They) had convinced many Americans that democracy could not safely live in a world with fascism. Long before Pearl Harbor, he urged all-out aid to the Allies. At the San Francisco Conference, he was a State Department adviser.

Policy Planner. A quick, diffident man with a thick thatch of greying black hair and a scrubby mustache, Armstrong is a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, a grandnephew of the Hamilton Fish who was President Grant’s Secretary of State, and a second cousin of Isolationist Ham Fish. He was 29 and foreign correspondent for the New York Evening Post when the Council on Foreign Relations* started Foreign Affairs and made him its managing editor. Six years later Armstrong became editor. With the help of one editorial associate and a secretary, Armstrong puts out the magazine in the Council’s Park Avenue headquarters, across the street from the building recently purchased by the Russian Government. (Says Armstrong: “They keep the shades down; we don’t.”)

The circulation is currently at an all-time peak, but is still pretty small. But among the 20,000 people who pay a stiff $1.25 a copy are many key legislators, editors, and Government officials. Pundit Walter Lippmann is devoting 14 columns to a rebuttal of an article in Foreign Affairs signed by “X,” who is actually the State Department’s Chief Policy Planner George F. Kennan (TIME, Sept. 22).

When, last week, Ohio’s Senator Taft gave Armstrong’s newest proposal (to form a group of like-minded nations within the U.N. Charter) his guarded approval, Armstrong said: “I feel like the man who said to an old antagonist: ‘This is the first time you have agreed with me in 50 years—I must be wrong!’ “

* Founded after World War I by a group of U.S. delegates to the Versailles Conference, to “create and stimulate international thought” in the U.S. Its present membership: a solid slice of U.S. conservatives in the business and professional world, with a handful of liberals around the edges.