Kissinger began. He then proceeded to lay out a list of financial requirements, the most pressing of which was “the figure for the selection process,” adding up to $20,300.1 A follow-up letter of May 7 enclosed a copy of a report “from one of our contacts in Denmark,” a leader of the “Danish youth movement,” which, Kissinger hoped, Lloyd might find “interesting as a symptom of the need for United States efforts in the psychological realm.”2
Kissinger had been put in touch with the Office of Policy Coordination by Harvard professor William Y. Elliott. An all-American tackle at Vanderbilt, poet of the southern Fugitive school, and Roosevelt brain-truster, Elliott had done his best academic work, on European political relations, in the 1920s, thereafter living off his reputation as the “grand sei-gneur” of Harvard’s Government Department and trusted counselor of six U.S. presidents.3 The 1950s found him slightly decrepit—“a glorious ruin”
was how one Harvard colleague, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described him4—
but still esteemed in Washington, where he commuted every week to consult with, among other parties, the Office of Defense Mobilization, the State Department, and the OPC. In addition to regularly advising Frank
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Wisner, Elliott helped the CIA by sitting on the board of the émigré organization AMCOMLIB, overseeing student front groups, and steering promising Harvard graduates toward secret government service.
It was in his famous class “The Development of Constitutional Government” that Elliott first noticed the Jewish refugee with the thick Bavarian accent and profound grasp of political philosophy. Kissinger was brilliant and ambitious—he graduated summa cum laude, in the top 1 percent of his class, having written a 383-page senior thesis on no less a subject than the meaning of history—and had begun work at Harvard on a doctoral dissertation about nineteenth-century diplomacy. At this early stage of his career, however, the bookish U.S. Army veteran lacked the easy self-confidence and self-deprecating wit he would later employ to such renowned effect at international conference tables. Elliott helped Kissinger overcome these deficiencies by easing his path to acceptance by an academic community that was proving slow to embrace him (fellow graduate students jealously nicknamed him “Henry Ass-Kissinger”).5 It was Elliott who provided the future National Security Advisor and Secretary of State with his principal power base at Harvard—and launchpad for his rise to global celebrity—in the shape of the university’s International Summer School.
The aim of this program, as described by Kissinger in an “Informal Memorandum for Professor Elliott,” was to create “a spiritual link between a segment of the foreign youth and the U.S.” Postwar assistance programs designed to aid European recovery had undoubtedly demonstrated the material superiority of the American way of life over the Soviet, but they had so far failed “to swing the spiritual balance in favor of the U.S.” Indeed, Americans’ generosity had if anything only served to confirm Europeans’ suspicion that the United States was “bloated, materialistic, and culturally barbarian,” a misperception that communist propagandists, already experienced in methods of appealing to “the souls of the young generation,” were quick to exploit. The need therefore was to demonstrate to young foreigners that America possessed cultural traditions and values worthy of their affiliation and, in doing so, “create nuclei of understanding of the true values of a democracy and of spiritual resistance to Communism.”6
Kissinger’s plan took shape in the fall of 1950, as he met with Elliott and other Harvard professors. Starting the following summer, he and his
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fellow graduate students would invite a group of fifty young Europeans to take part in a ten-week course under the aegis of the university’s Summer School (which was run by Elliott). The program would consist of regular Summer School courses on American history and literature; special seminars on various aspects of U.S. culture, to be addressed by a mixture of Harvard faculty and distinguished guest speakers; and a series of informal discussions, where the students would have the opportunity to present their own national viewpoints. Applications were welcomed from anywhere in Europe, with the exception of Britain, the Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland, because all these places possessed “a firm democratic tradition.” Candidates must be in their twenties and already embarked on promising careers. A meticulous selection process, including the sifting of applications by a screening committee in Cambridge and interviews held in Europe by a university representative (a role to be performed by Kissinger himself), would ensure a careful balance between the