“plasticity” of participants and “the possibility of a more immediate impact on the home countries.” According to an invitation issued to possible applicants, all expenses connected with attending the program were to be paid by the Summer School.7
Where, though, to find this money? Although Elliott undertook to inquire how Harvard’s Cambridge neighbor, MIT, raised the funding for its summer foreign student program, there is no evidence in the professor’s papers to suggest that he approached genuinely private sources in the buildup to the 1951 pilot seminar. Instead, there is the correspondence between Kissinger and H. Gates Lloyd and an earlier letter from Elliott that suggests the OPC was informed of the Harvard project from its inception. “I very much hope that some progress may be made on the lines that we were discussing before I next come down to Washington,” the professor wrote Lloyd in November 1950 (at precisely the time Kissinger began making arrangements for the following summer with his Harvard colleagues). “I think it is probably not very useful for me to come down until I have some word from you that matters have been arranged so that some actual organizational plans can be undertaken.” Like several other OPC
operations launched around this time, prior to the creation of the dummy foundations, seed money for the International Summer School came in the form of “one-year grants from individuals” (as Elliott told another correspondent). Later, money started to flow from conduits like the Farfield
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Foundation—a Farfield grant arrived in late January 1953, a few weeks after Elliott had entertained Julius Fleischmann at Harvard’s New York club—and front organizations such as the American Friends of the Middle East.8
The first seminars proved, by general agreement, a tremendous success. Through a mixture of flattery and cajolery, Kissinger attracted an impressive roster of guest lecturers, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, John Crowe Ransom, and Walter Reuther. He also laid on an exhausting program of social activities, including trips to baseball games, beach parties, and showings of Marx Brothers movies. Each seminar was accompanied by a cocktail party, and twice a week Kissinger and his wife, Ann Fleischer, hosted informal dinners for the students. Perhaps reflecting his own immigrant origins, the budding statesman took great care to avoid “the appearance of condescension and purposeful indoctrination,” always emphasizing that the seminar was “a two-way process” (although the possibility of the foreign students giving public lectures to local audiences was ruled out for fear of the mutual offense they might cause).9 Judging by the enthusiastic letters of thanks written to the school’s organizers by participants after their return home, the Kissinger charm offensive worked. Even students
“who were uncommitted and often a bit critical,” so Elliott reported, were transformed into “friendly champions abroad who could refute, by personal experience, the misrepresentations of the United States.”10 Corporate America was similarly impressed. Although initial attempts to attract funding from such philanthropies as the Sloan and Carnegie Foundations were rebuffed, Elliott succeeded in obtaining a grant from the Ford Foundation in 1954. The Harvard International Summer School had joined the Fulbright exchange program and the Salzburg Seminar (whose origins can also be traced to Harvard) as a vital tool of Cold War U.S. cultural diplomacy.
The venture also proved highly profitable for Henry A. Kissinger. As well as bringing out the less pompous, ponderous side of his personality, it placed him in charge of a pot of patronage he could use to build and defend his position at Harvard. (“Academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small,” he was reputedly fond of saying.) Elliott’s wooing of the foundations also provided his graduate student, who was just embarking on his doctoral dissertation, with a further career opening. In 1954
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launched under Kissinger’s editorship, with backing from the Rockefeller Foundation and contributions from various luminaries who had passed through the Summer School as lecturers or students (the project was devised, according to Elliott, “as a continuation of the Seminar”). Perhaps most important for Kissinger, his traveling abroad to interview applicants and inviting illustrious Americans to lecture at the seminar allowed him to collect “a repertoire of people,” as one Harvard professor recalled, “who could turn out to be his host later.” Among the future foreign leaders who passed through the Harvard program were Valéry Giscard D’Estaing of France, Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan, and Bülent Ecevit of Turkey; Americans invited to speak included Richard M. Nixon. “I was very much embarrassed to hear myself described as the guiding genius of the Seminar,”