Word: cfia
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...CFIA has its roots in the political and intellectual pressures of Cold War diplomacy. The election of Eisenhower in 1952 and the subsequent ascendancy of McCarthyism caused a prolonged, steady exodus from Washington of former Truman advisors and government officials who had been hunted down and indicted by Senate subcommittees. Many of these people retired to universities around the country, and a large number of them found their way to Harvard. Abruptly dislodged from the practice of internal and international politics, they were seeking, many of them, an outlet for their talents...
...later days, much of the Center's work consisted of undirected research and study by individual Faculty associates. But at the start, the CFIA was primarily a training institute for senior government officials from the United States and other non-Communist nations in Western Europe and East Asia...
BEYOND the nucleus of the 15 Fellows, there was another rationale for starting the CFIA. "There was a feeling that international affairs was underrepresented at Harvard," according to Thomas C. Schelling, who had held several high economic posts in the Truman administration and who had left Yale in 1958 to join the Harvard Center. "There was a feeling that the United States had been a very isolated country for many generations," and that foreign affairs was "an academic field that most universities weren't equipped to teach or think about...
Schelling's observation hits upon an important point. Prior to the founding of the Center, there was no mechanism at Harvard for the study of international politics and all its integral components: economics, theories of government, balance of power concepts, diplomatic strategies. The CFIA incorporated these component disciplines for the first time, giving them a new significance and a relevance to the current global power struggle...
Since the CFIA performed no military research but concerned itself instead with the economic, social, and diplomatic techniques of interventionism and policy maneuvering, it exempted itself from most self-criticism during the early period of the Indochinese escalation. Though many of those who worked at the Center during its inception may now reject their former frameworks and assumptions, the perspective necessary to do so was simply not available for some time...