In Theory and in Practice: Harvard's Center for International Affairs, 1958–1983 (review)

In 2008 the Center for International Affairs (CFIA) at Harvard University (now renamed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs) had its fiftieth anniversary. CFIA was an important and early academic think-tank. Having been set up in the mid-1950s, it was probably more significant in the 1960s than it is today. The current leadership decided to celebrate the birthday with an academic monograph detailing the first 25 years of the center's existence. David Atkinson, a staff member at the center from 2000 to 2002 who subsequently went on to a Ph.D. program at Boston University (where, at this writing, he still is), was commissioned to write the history. In Theory and in Practice is the outcome.

The book is based on a careful reading of the primary sources available to Atkinson, and he thoroughly covers the early organizing period of the mid-late 1950s and the first decade of the center's existence from 1958 to 1968. But he does not cover the 1970s and after in any depth and gives no reason for stopping in 1983. This attempt at periodization is particularly frustrating because, according to Atkinson, just at the time his study ends, the center was facing a set of serious troubles, and we never learn how they were resolved.

These problems internal to the volume do not matter much. In Theory and in Practice is an old-fashioned (in the worst sense) in-house institutional history. Atkinson is a serious and honest writer but has almost no sense of the jugular of writing in modern U.S. intellectual history or of work in the sociology of ideas or in the social history of intellectuals. He pays no attention to the secondary literature in these fields, and he is unable or unwilling to examine in any independent manner the way his former employer functioned during a crucial period of the cultural and intellectual Cold War.

The CFIA was awkwardly positioned as an organization that was supposed to do basic research but also to contribute in some way to contemporary policymaking in the struggle against the Soviet Union. The center was created to mobilize the U.S. scholarly community to play a positive role in a forward-looking foreign policy. Atkinson recognizes this issue but can get no further than to say that the center made brilliant contributions to the new field of international relations; that members of the organization offered diverse points of view about the U.S. role in foreign affairs; and that we can easily dismiss the leftist critique—paradigmatically made by Students for a Democratic Society protesters at Harvard in the late 1960s—of such think-tanks.

The center received lead funding from the Rockefeller Foundation when Dean Rusk was in charge of the foundation. CFIA also got substantial amounts of money from the U.S. Department of Defense and other government agencies for contracted research. McGeorge Bundy was instrumental in setting up the center, and Robert Bowie served as its first head. Henry Kissinger left the center in 1969 for his new job in Washington. These are only starters. One hopes that some researcher with a better eye for the historical analysis of foreign policy and the social history of ideas will make use of the book's assemblage of data.