since Langer was recalled to government service in 1950 to set up an Office of National Estimates in the CIA, the twin volumes were not published until 1953, and even then could not fully cover the actual war years.

The Council's understandings with the State Department, approved at the top, deserve special mention here. Langer and his colleagues were to have access to any and all relevant documents, subject to two conditions. One, naturally imposed by government, was that any document he wished to use should be cleared for security a condition that, with the War over, could be interpreted with considerable flexibility. The second, on which he and the Council insisted, was that any document he did refer to (in what became massive footnotes) should, upon the publicationof the study, be declassified and made fully available to other historians.

I pause over this second condition, which was, I think, introduced for the first time in the Langer project. Later, Dean Acheson, in writing his memoirs, insisted on an identical condition for any document he used and cited. Although presidential memoirs have always been a law unto themselves, it seems to me unfortunate that Secretaries of State and national security advisers have not always followed the Langer/Acheson precedent.

The two volumes produced under the Langer project are still, I believe, the standard reference on the subject, generally accepted as honest and full. And there has never been a repeat of the bitter controversy of the 1930s, apart from a natural level of criticism and revisionism about FDR's pre-war