President of the United States. His leadership, ideals, and eloquence had struck a deep chord with many Americans, and when he went in January 1919 to the Paris Peace Conference he carried with him the fervent hopes not only of Americans but of most of the world, that a just and lasting peace might emerge with an appropriate international organization to help achieve it.

Yet by that spring, in a story told most recently in the excellent one-volume biography by August Heckscher, those great hopes were already dim. So there grew up, among a dedicated core of the British and American delegations and supporting staffs, a strong feeling that however the conference turned out, there was a new and important need for private institutions to work steadily and unrelentinglyto enlarge understanding of the problems in this field. Briefly, they had in mind a joint Anglo-American institution, but this idea soon evaporated in the face of the obvious practical difficulties although there remains today a friendly feeling between the Council and Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs, called Chatham House after the wonderful mansion of William Pitt in which it still resides in London. Instead, the American group during 1920 and 1921 proceeded to set up in New York what became the Council on Foreign Relations. This drew its 75 original members mainly from two groups: academic and professional experts, mostly from universities, who had participated in the so-called Inquiry in Paris, seeking to develop the best possible factual basis and to offer advice and recommendations to