Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  HENRY KISSINGER’S HARVARD UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SEMINAR

  As Lucas argues, Kissinger’s Harvard Seminar illustrates the degree to which the United States’ hegemonic project integrated culture, the academy, and American foreign policy, tightening the core elements of a state-private network to wage a cold war.32 The advantage of such state-private networks was that official policy objectives could be advanced by purportedly unofficial means.33 American foundations were ideal institutional mechanisms for promoting Americanism and combating anti-Americanism.

  The Harvard University International Summer Seminar was originally formed by Harvard’s William Y. Elliott, a CIA consultant and Kissinger’s doctoral supervisor, with its initial funding ($15,000) coming from the CIA, in 1951.34 Kissinger became the linchpin of the seminar, developing its ideological rationale and recruiting the participants. By 1953, Kissinger had obtained financial support from the Farfield Foundation, a conduit for CIA finances. In 1954, the Ford Foundation began its sponsorship of the seminar, the beginning of a long relationship.35 Thus public and private finances were inextricably bound up in the origins of Kissinger’s seminar, fully exemplifying the state-private network concept.

  The aim of the Harvard University International Summer Seminar, Kissinger argued, was “to create a spiritual link between the younger generation of Europe and American values,” as Europeans were frustrated with the collapse of “traditional values” and the rise of what appeared to be an unsympathetic United States, “a bewildering spectacle of economic prosperity and seeming misunderstanding of European problems.”36 It is clear from Kissinger’s Harvard activities and, perhaps, from his own immigrant experiences of assimilating U.S. values that he appreciated the need to go beyond “facts” about America to a far deeper, more mystical underlying unity between Americans and Europeans. Negative European attitudes opened the way for “neutralism” and communism. The seminar would “assist in counteracting these tendencies, by giving inwardly alive, intelligent young Europeans an opportunity to study the deeper meaning of U.S. democracy.” The program, however, would fail if it were merely one of “dogmatic indoctrination”; therefore, it had to be focused around persuading Europeans that Americans were genuinely concerned with “abstract problems” and not just “material prosperity.” The program was to be a forum for “disagreement and criticism,” with a view to demonstrating that “self-reliance is a possibility despite the complexity of the present age and that the assumption of personal responsibility is more meaningful than unquestioning submission to an apparatus.” Like communists, democrats needed to display “the strength of their convictions.”37 The rationale of the program is not dissimilar to the Carnegie Corporation’s emphasis on the role of individuals in taking control of their own destiny. This was a program designed to empower strategic elites to dare to challenge the status quo of reflexive anti-Americanism.

  The Harvard Seminar was no blunt-edged attempt at indoctrination: the deeper abstract and philosophical meaning of life in American democracy animated the program by examining the concept of freedom, “the striving for self-realization in art against the felt pressure of convention, the quest for a reconciliation of rationalism, personal responsibility and dogmatism in religion.” The seminar aimed to produce no “absolute solutions” to policy and social problems but to generate an “elucidation of fundamental issues,” making “social problems… challenges for normative concepts.”38

  THE ROLE OF THE FORD FOUNDATION

  Given the leadership of Ford in the early 1950s—men such as Paul Hoffman, John J. McCloy, and Shepard Stone (all connected with the State Department or CIA)—the foundation provided a perfect source for privately financing the Harvard Seminar.39 Between 1954 and 1959, Ford awarded $170,000 to the seminar, bringing together potential leaders from across Europe and Asia and familiarizing them with American leaders, values, and institutions. In all, between 1954 and 1971, Ford contributed millions of dollars to the efforts of Kissinger and others to improve transatlantic relations.40 For instance, the 1954 group of forty participants, aged between thirty-five and forty years (a group that often sought refuge in “a narrow nationalism,” according to Kissinger),41 included a German diplomat, a British member of parliament, a French journalist, a Korean lecturer, and a Filipino lawyer, among others. Numbers were kept low enough to enable seminar leaders “to pay personal attention to each participant.” The success of the program depended “to a large extent on its selection process.” The seminar received around seven hundred European applications annually; final selection was based on recommendations by American and European elites: the contributors to Kissinger’s journal, Confluence; seminar alumni; “Harvard faculty with European connections”; and the recommendations of international societies such as the English-Speaking Union and various institutes of world affairs. Asians tended to be selected based on recommendations by the U.S. Information Service, Harvard alumni clubs, and university appointees.42 All recommendations were assessed for short-listing by Kissinger, his assistant, and by a national of the applicant’s country of origin, interviewed in Europe by a trusted representative.43 The final decision was made at Harvard.

  Seminar members were “prolific” writers and speakers upon return to their homes, spreading the Harvard Seminar’s message far and wide. State Department and Institute of International Education representatives, who had observed the seminar at close quarters, also endorsed its importance.44 In 1956, Ford reported that the seminar was producing a number of positive effects on participants and for the United States in general. For example, the seminar seemed to be an excellent forum in which to “correct false impressions of the United States, notably among Asian visitors”; it attracted “influential or potentially influential people” from strategic areas; its effects were felt beyond Harvard, as “responsible” press comments suggested; that other U.S. universities were influenced by the seminar through the participation of faculty and dissemination of seminar publications; and the seminar “helps to develop understanding and a sense of common purpose between Americans and influential foreigners and among the foreigners themselves,” some of whom had set up seminar alumni clubs, including a regional seminar in India. Ford funded many of the alumni meetings and circulated seminar literature to all seminar alumni, helping to sustain the network.45

  The seminar was skillfully devised to provide a range of contacts with American life over a period of two months: seminars on politics, economics, philosophy, art, American democracy, and discussions on “America’s role in relation to other countries of the world”; evening lectures by outsiders and Harvard faculty, including a robust defense of the McCarthyite investigating committees by James Burnham; foreigners’ presentations on their own nations’ problems; and visits to American business organizations, labor unions, newspapers, and baseball games, as well as to local families’ homes. Weaved into a complex program aimed at appreciating America’s role in the world were numerous meetings devoted to such seemingly irrelevant topics as “the nature of the poetic,” French theater, the German novel after World War II, and the revival of religious art in France.46 Yet herein lay part of the strength of the seminar, which was designed to illustrate the fabric and depth of American life, and the meetings on these latter-mentioned topics helped to achieve the seminar’s objective of overcoming “national prejudices.”

  Genuine engagement between participants and seminar leaders provided a sense of ownership among the visitors.47 Kissinger outlined the detailed program to the Ford Foundation, showing the way in which the political scientist Earl Latham had led a discussion of the pluralistic character of the American political system and how the MIT economist Charles P. Kindleberger had examined economic conditions in the world system. In detailed discussions, issues such as communist China, neutrality, and world communism had been thoroughly aired.

  Social occasions were explicitly arranged to “encourage the establishment of personal friendships with Americans,” thereby creat
ing emotional bonds between elites.48 The social program, Kissinger claimed, led to a greater appreciation of American society than any formal lecture courses. For Kissinger, the program’s most “decisive” impact was the “attitudes engendered in the minds” of participants in “the crucible of informal conversations.” It was noted, for example, that “Seminar members found that an evening’s conversation with an American couple and their friends resulted in a more profound appreciation of the American society than months of reading prior to coming here.”49

  Through the intensity and close contact over eight weeks, seminar members discovered “a wealth of channels toward general international understanding.” In these ways, the Harvard Seminar, Kissinger concluded, “provided them with a unique opportunity to assess the qualities of the nation which bears the heaviest burden of responsibility in the Western World…. Each of them has carried away a deeper insight into what they had previously distrusted in America—an insight often resulting in elimination of their initial disturbance.”50 Working in the Widener Library at Harvard, participating in challenging discussions, and enjoying the performances of the Boston Symphony Orchestra dispelled participants’ initial ideas about the shallowness of American culture.51 In short, Kissinger declared the seminar an unqualified success, because it engendered among elite Europeans and Asians empathy, understanding, and appreciation of American society, its elite, and its “burden of responsibility” to the West.

  Participants’ evaluations of the seminar were overwhelmingly positive. Kissinger passed on to the Ford Foundation hundreds of letters from participants as evidence of the seminar’s effectiveness. Participants reported that the seminar was “exciting, informative, and remarkable for candour”; that it was “forming an [international] elite which is so badly needed” in building world unity; that understanding gained helped to challenge any “false accusation thrown against the American people”; that the seminar exhibited little of the stereotypical American “conformism”; and that “your method of recruiting [American] speakers who are critical and who tell us the worst as well as the best is far more disarming and successful than any sort of traditional propaganda.” Alain Clement, a journalist with Le Monde—a leading neutralist newspaper (i.e., supportive a concept of an independent Europe wedded to neither superpower)—returned a convert to American culture, Harvard, and Henry Kissinger.52 Kissinger thought that the seminar, despite his own growing responsibilities with the U.S. State Department, National Security Council, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the RAND Corporation was so effective and important that he would continue to organize it.53 Important alumni of the seminar include such leaders as Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone (1953), France’s Giscard d’Estaing (1954), and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed (1968).54 In form and content, the Harvard Seminar differed radically from the public diplomacy of the post-1989 and post-9/11 periods.55 It provided to seminar members “a sense of actively participating rather than… merely being recipients.”56 The seminar, however, was just one part of an impressive array of public diplomacy operations at the time.

  “THE FAINT ODOR OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM”: THE SALZBURG SEMINAR IN AMERICAN STUDIES

  The Salzburg Seminar in American Studies57 was, in effect, the overseas counterpart of the Harvard Seminar:58 it was targeted at European men and women at the cusp of leadership positions in their own society and was run on the basis of candid exchange, criticism, and intellectual engagement—a “Marshall Plan of the Mind.”59 It began in 1947 as a cooperative venture between the Geneva International Student Service and the Harvard Student Council to improve Europeans’ understanding of American society. By the late 1960s, 6,500 fellows had attended courses at the seminar’s castle, Schloss Leopoldskron.60

  The aim of the seminar was simple: to improve transatlantic understanding (because even highly educated Europeans regarded the United States in “a distorted and negative light”)61 through “dialogue between people who count and who are going to count.” According to the president of Columbia University, the seminar was designed to have its “greatest effect upon men… who must be counted upon by the public opinion–forming groups in their respective countries.”62 It was further noted for highlighting the “unvarnished facts about the United States” and for exploring transatlantic issues “with candour and in depth.” If a “true” picture were to be painted, “it is not always flattering.” Great emphasis was placed on critical engagement among participants and American seminar faculty, the flavor of which is captured by key terms recurring through every report on the seminar: problems to “hammer out” between faculty and participants, “candour tempered by tolerance,” “seeking together,” “finding together,” avoiding propaganda.63 It was the concept of a “two-way avenue of learning” that motivated the seminar’s organizers, and this was to bear fruit.64 This was evidenced by a Czech fellow’s comment in 1967: “Your propaganda is the best propaganda, because it is not propaganda at all.”65 On the basis of that “nonpropagandistic” propaganda, European elites were to spread their understanding far and wide through their organizations, newspapers, books, and lectures.66 As Salzburg officers argued in 1960, “in Europe, more than in America, public opinion is molded by a relatively small number of people. They disseminate their reoriented ideas on American life through their newspapers and periodicals, schools and universities, trade unions…”67

  An analysis of Salzburg Seminar fellows by occupation (1951–1959) reveals its success in recruiting emerging elites: of the 2,878 participants, there were 718 graduate students; 564 teachers/academics; 376 journalists, editors, and writers; 343 government officials and civil servants; 260 lawyers; and sixty union leaders. Fellows were drawn from a range of countries: the best represented were Germany (585), Italy (478), and France (411), all pivotal continental states.68

  In their grant applications, Salzburg officers consistently differentiated their (American) ideas, methods, and outlook from those of their European fellows. Europeans were elitist in attitude, Americans more egalitarian. Europeans were constantly impressed by American openness, in contrast to their own reticence. For example, even the open-access character of the library facilities and resources at Salzburg (ten thousand books, one hundred periodicals, a wide range of newspapers) was reportedly “a source of amazement to Europeans unused to such ‘open’ procedures and is, again, an experience for them with a basic American characteristic.”69

  The Ford Foundation began financial support for the seminar in 1955 and covered 20 percent of its financial costs for the next twenty years—funding totaling almost $1 million. The State Department and the Fulbright program furnished much of the rest. The Fulbright program was inaugurated in 1946 to increase mutual international understanding through the exchange of scholars across the world. Ford believed that the Salzburg Seminar was “one of the most effective of all American Studies programmes,” affording opportunities further to connect East and West European leaders, as attested by State Department officials.70 The seminar’s board of directors included Harvard’s Dean (and later national security adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Ford Foundation president) Mc-George Bundy, Emilio G. Collado of Standard Oil, and MIT’s Walt Rostow.71

  In operation, the seminar’s schedule was intense. Run over four weeks (thrice a year), it featured morning lectures, afternoon small-group work, and evening discussions and private reading in its well-stocked library. The “seemingly informal” aspects of the program, as organizers put it, were fundamental:

  The continual extra-curricular discussion among Fellows, faculty, and staff, all of whom live under the same roof throughout the session; the recreational activities in which everyone participates; in fact, the actual teaching method itself—the constant opportunity for questions during lectures and the close association with faculty which differs so radically from the European method, all give impressions in the understanding of America as a working democracy and, as such, are as important as the actual subject matter
s taught.72

  The specific effects of the Salzburg Seminar are difficult to gauge. An internal Ford report surprised its own author as to the seminar’s effectiveness over a period of two decades. The sociologist Daniel Bell lauded the seminar as educating and bonding together European intellectuals and for launching the careers of several young scholars, such as Ralf Dahrendorf (the author, most famously, of Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society in 1959 and director of the London School of Economics from 1974 to 1984) and Michel Crozier (the author of The Bureaucratic Phenomenon in 1964). For Bell, Salzburg alumni were immediately distinguishable at the Congress for Cultural Freedom seminars he had directed during 1956–1957.73 The seminar’s president, Dexter Perkins, noted the spontaneous formation of alumni clubs—“Salzburg Circles”—that held reunions to “discuss American society,” at their own expense. He also noted that alumni had a “conception of the United States that is more sympathetic—or, at least, more objective.” The seminar also inspired the formation of the European Association for American Studies after the former’s 1954 conference of American civilization academics, a significant multiplier effect of the Salzburg initiative. The aim of EAAS was to “continue the work begun by the Seminar-sponsored conference.”74

  THE BAAS AND EAAS CONFERENCES