nuclear conflict. Yet beyond doubt his initial publication, and the work of the study group, greatly furthered serious discussion of these vital issues.

Naturally enough, Kissinger at this point became a Council regular, publishing no less than twelve articles in Foreign Affairs in the period up to his entry into government in 1969. Almost equally prolific was another Harvard-trained outstanding academic, Zbigniew Brzezinski, with eight articles in this general period of the fifties and the sixties.

THE 1960s

In this decade, there were again many senior officials who had been active members of the Council, notably Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, while John Kennedy had written for Foreign Affairs in the 1950s. Indeed, Michael Wala tells me that one sociologist's numerical study of the backgrounds of selected senior officials finds aof China. The U.S. relationship with China had been frozen for years, and the general picture in many minds was one of implacable and enduring hostility, making any thaw difficult to visualize in the foreseeable future.

Led by a former government servant with extensive Asian experience, Robert Blum, the Council's China project started from the premise that this prognosis was not immutable, and that in any case China needed to be studied much more thoroughly than was being done from the standpoint of its policy-relevant aspects. As he got under way, Blum enlisted not only China experts but others following public opinion. Indeed, perhaps the most important of the volumes that came out of the project was the very first, an analysis of American public opinion toward China by