profound instability remained. In the turbulent postwar years the Council teemed with study and discussion groups 27 in the first five postwar years, by Michael Wala's count. Many of the study groups dealt with the problems of Europe, including one chaired by Dwight Eisenhower, then President of Columbia, but Japan and the U.N. family of institutions came in for a full share.

In all probability these groups made at least general contributions to the framework of thinking that underlay the Marshall Plan and NATO, although I do not believe that anything organized by the Council played any significant role in framing the Plan itself. Three of the original key figures in putting it together, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, and George Kennan, were members of the Council, as were manywho worked in it, but Acheson, Clayton and Kennan were not at this time involved in Council activities.

Certainly, among the membership of the Council, sympathy and support for these undertakings was the predominant view. When the European Recovery Program was launched by Secretary of State George Marshall in June 1947, there were rapidly created, with full government cooperation, a number of citizens organizations to support the undertaking. The most prominent of these, the Committee for the Marshall Plan (CMP), had a large number of Council members in its makeup. In accordance with its founding principles, the Council itself never took a position on these matters, but then, as in the last period before the outbreak of the Second World War, there was a very strong sentiment among individual