Wilson, and public-minded businessmen and bankers with international exposure, almost all from New York itself. After some backing and filling, these two groups came together on the concept of a relatively small organization, with its members actively participating in a program of meetings and group discussions designed to enlarge the understanding of those participating, but as often as possible to result in published output.

As the Council went into action, meetings presented no problem. From the first, its ability to assemble a serious and responsible audience, many of them with great experience, attracted leading speakers both from public life and from all the callings relevant to international affairs. A very early demonstration of this came when former French Premier Georges Clemenceau came to New York in the fall of1922 and picked the Council as his venue for a major speech. Over the course of the next decade, many other senior figures followed suit, and the tradition of meetings continues to this day.

However, this was clearly not enough in the minds of the founders. They wished to reach out to a much wider audience than could simply attend meetings, so that setting up a quarterly magazine for serious individual essays quickly emerged as a central project, the head and corner stone. To become its first Editor, the Council's directors turned to Professor Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard, an active member of the Inquiry before and during the Paris conference. Only within the last decade, Coolidge has at last got a superb biography, by Professor Robert Byrnes of