The American Assembly

. . . . . . . . Good evening.

The American Assembly is a characteristically American institution. It's a private organization devoted to public affairs, and it would be difficult to find its counterpart anywhere else in the world. It was organized eleven years ago as part of Columbia University, and like other branches of that university, it has its own charter as an educational institution, and its own board of trustees. It's devoted to bringing together government officials, members of the professions, and of the academic community, people from business, labor, and agriculture, to discuss significant problems of public policy. As a basis for their discussion, a book is written, so that each member will have a common basis for the discussion to take place, and the hope is that through mutual exchange of informed opinion, we can achieve some sort of consensus upon large questions without partisanship.

The American Assembly holds two national sessions each year at Arden House, at Columbia University's campus at Hermann, New York, and then it goes to regional assemblies across the country. The emphasis in all of these is upon eliciting the views of the participants and not upon lecturing to them or giving them instruction. These regional meetings are held in cooperation with universities and colleges. Thus far, about 60 such institutions have cooperated. There have been four assemblies planned to be held with other nations. The first was in Puerto Rico with the Latin American countries. The second was with the Institute for Strategic Studies in London at Bergenstock in Switzerland.

The third was at Brighton in England, also with the Institute. And the fourth is to be held this coming April in Kuala Lumpur with the University of Malaya. And there there will be people from a number of Asian countries and about 20 Americans. By the limitations of its charter as an educational institution, the assembly cannot take positions of its own. The participants at its meetings reach their own conclusions, write their own report, and make such statements as seem to them appropriate. Our topic is cultural affairs and foreign relations. It was the subject of an assembly at Arden House in last October, and then at a regional meeting for civic coast at Palm Springs in California, and it's to be the topic in Kuala Lumpur in April. The first participants this evening are Mr. Phillips-Age Coombs,

now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He recently served as the first assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, before serving in that capacity. He was an officer of the Ford Foundation, and is the author of the concluding chapter in the book which we used at Arden House. The other participant is Mr. Albert Simmons. He is the executive vice president of the Institute for International Education in New York, before assuming that post he had long experience in government. Both have unusual qualifications for discussing cultural affairs and foreign relations. Mr. Coombs, I'm going to begin by asking you a question which, if I were to give you a free hand to answer it fully, would take all the time at our disposal. Nonetheless, in order to open the discussion,

I will ask you to say something about the range and scope of international affairs of a cultural nature. Dr. Ristin, I think it might help to put our subject in focus by saying that it is the fourth dimension of American foreign relations and foreign policy. Most discussion of foreign affairs these days focus upon the traditional three dimensions, political, economic, and military. But this fourth dimension, unlike the other three, deals directly with people and ideas. It is concerned with the development and transmission of knowledge with the development of people and their skills and insights. At this point in history, where these various revolutions that have been at work reshaping the world in the last two decades, have made people and ideas the most powerful force in the world. This fourth new dimension becomes an essential ingredient of our foreign relations.

Now, it actually takes a great many forms of bewildering assortment of forms. Foreign students going in both directions, teachers and professors, writers, artists, actors, and the like. It also embraces the sending of technical assistance to assist the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to develop their people through education, to develop their cultures. So it is a very motley assortment of tools, if you will, to work with. Though I use that term without implying that these things are used in any in videos way. They are the means by which people communicate with people of the world. This has broadened the old fashioned notion of diplomacy by which governments spoke to governments through formal political channels.

Now, more and more across a wider and wider spectrum, whole nations are speaking to whole nations through these educational, scientific, and cultural channels. Now you are doing a book on this subject, as I understand it, for the Council on Foreign Relations. And you have mentioned that this is one of four elements. What week would you assign this one as against perhaps the other three? Well, it's difficult to weigh even the other three against one another. All these four parts are interwoven in various ways in different situations. But I would say that taking the long view and considering the basic conditions that are essential to any kind of enduring world peace and law and order and independence and freedom, that this fourth component must be viewed as being in the long run on a parity of importance with the other three. But it isn't always treated that way simply because it is not bound up with the daily crises and urgencies.

It doesn't ordinarily get into the same discussion as these other three. But I think we are making progress. This is being recognized as an increasingly important element of our foreign relations. And incidentally, it is the one of the four elements in which most of the initiative, most of the work, has to be done outside the government in what's referred to as the private sector because our national strengths in the realm of people and ideas, education and culture do not lie within the government. They lie in all kinds of institutions of a private character outside government. It seems it's clear from what Mr. Coombs has said that the exchange of students is one of the important elements in this fourth dimension. As he calls it, this is one of your major preoccupations at the Institute of International Education. Would you describe what that is and how it functions to some extent?

Surely. There are about 60,000 foreign students in this country now as we take our census during the past year. These students come from all over the world about 149 countries, as I recall, are represented in this population. This is a phenomenal growth which has taken place during the last 10 years or so since World War II. As a matter of fact, the count has been going up about 10 percent in increase each year. The Institute of International Education is a private agency which has its job, the facilitation of this flow, the providing of services, the identification of the foreign student who is a good, likely candidate for study in the United States. To assist him, the institute assists him in finding the right institution and the necessary scholarship assistance for him to come.

We are by no means responsible for the 60,000. We offer our services to colleges and universities, to our government, to foreign governments. We are likewise concerned with the movement of American students the other way in large numbers but not so large as a foreign student population here. And in general, we're concerned with the movement of people in educational exchanges, professors, lecturers, scholars of various kinds as well as students. You spoke of 60,000 foreign students in this country about how many American students are there abroad. There are about 20,000 American students abroad. This population of American students abroad is largely concentrated yet in European countries, almost two thirds in European countries. On the other hand, the phenomenal growth of the foreign student population in this country has been marked by a great surge of increase in relation to the Asian countries and Africa particularly. As the population of students here from Europe is relatively stable in the last 10, 15 years.

But as I understand it, however, more American students are going to Mexico and some of their Latin American countries particularly for work in the humanities. Is that the case? This is increasingly so, although the number of American students in Latin American universities is still relatively small. There's a large concentration of American students in Mexico and a few institutions in Mexico. But by and large, the attractions for the American student or study abroad are still centering in Europe. This comes, you spoke about this as a mixture of public and private activity, but I want to pinpoint if I can what the function of the Department of State is in this. As I remember, the first officer having to do with this was in about 1938 in the Department of State. And it was a very small office, one or two people in it.

And then during the war, it was more or less absorbed into the Office of War information and into propaganda activities. And it wasn't until after the War and the Fulbright Act that there came this new emphasis and not until 1961 that there wasn't assistant secretary of state. Now, precisely how does the State Department function in this and the light of the fact that so much of it takes place in private institutions? I think your brief historical sketch is very useful because the point should be made clear that there's nothing new about education and culture in American foreign relations. What's new about it is the fact that the government has come into the picture as well as the private sector. The flow of foreign students that Mr. Simms spoke of roughly three to one into this country as against our flow out used to be the other way. We were the ones the big sender of foreign students and indeed that's how we build our educational institutions to no small extent.

I can remember, for example, when I was in college, which is a long time ago, nearly all the professions their doctors degrees had gotten them in Germany. Exactly. And if I recall the date, it wasn't until the 1870s that the first doctor of philosophy degrees were given in this country. We were the developing country at that point and though they didn't have the term then, we were getting educational aid primarily from Western Europe. Now the shoe is on the other foot but we're still getting a good deal of cultural and educational import from the rest of the world. Now in Europe countries such as France and Germany and the Soviet Union got their governments got interested in cultural relations quite some time ago. Our government did not get interested in the field until the efforts of the Nazis to penetrate Latin America culturally woke us up to the importance of this element of foreign policy and that's where things got started in 38. But it was not until 47 when the Fulbright Act was passed and UNESCO was US membership in UNESCO was authorized by Congress that for the first time we began to make cultural affairs a permanent part of our foreign relations from the government's point of view.

Since then there has been a great proliferation both on the part of private institutions and federal agencies in this general field. There are today some two dozen federal agencies that are actively involved in exchanges of one sort or another. But until two years ago no one in the federal government was responsible for maintaining an overview of what the federal government was doing, much less what the nation as a whole was doing. And the position of assistant secretary of state for education and cultural affairs was essentially set up when the new administration came in on the advice of good many people to accomplish three tasks. The first was to oversee the operations of the state department itself in this realm, the Fulbright and Smith Hayes programs, the cultural presentations that go abroad and other programs directly run by the state department with private help.

The second task was to try to harmonize more effectively this assorted set of activities under other federal agencies to give some leadership to the general policy guidance to the whole federal government. The third task and perhaps in the long run the most important was to try to build a bridge between the federal efforts here and the private efforts to try to lay out a general road map which the nation as a whole voluntarily could follow so that we'd all be pulling in the same direction and having a more unified, more efficient national effort. Mr. Sims, this participation of government has that affected the work of the international students? Well, I think to keep this in perspective it's useful to note that something less than 10% of this population of 60,000 foreign students is financed in any way by US government programs.

What the government does do, the government has been expanding its interest in this field, it has, through the recent passage of the Fulbright Hayes Act, taken cognizance in an official way that the presence of this large number of students here is indeed a matter of national concern and interest and what happens to the students who are here is a matter of concern for our government. Now, it seems to me that the intervention of government in this field has had great implications. In the first place it's enabled us to do a lot of things in a lot of areas that would otherwise have been impossible. Federal financing has been of what most importance in this respect. On the other hand, whenever government, politics, education are mixed as they are inevitably in this kind of a situation, problems result. And I would say that the part of the unresolved problem that we have confronting us, we work with, is the resolution of the role of the university in this situation and the government and how they can work together most effectively.

And in partnership, how they can, mobilizing their resources, have a constructive effect in these countries overseas that require educational assistance or are looking for help in various ways in the educational field. I suppose it's true, is it not that other nations don't face these same problems because so much more of their exchange and their cultural activity is part of the government itself. It's true, although it's interesting to note the fact that there are about, I think according to UNESCO, about 200,000 students in this study abroad movement of students. Of this number about a quarter, considering the world as a whole, are in the United States. It is often said that the United States is carrying a relatively small part of the burden here because we are prone to compare the number of foreign students with a total number of students in our American universities and colleges.

This proportion is about 1.5%. On the other hand, this is because our educational system is so extensive and so widely available to students. There is no country which approximates the number of students that we have from abroad in colleges and universities. Other countries, I think, have this problem. The countries in the less developed areas have particular problems because they are all in the manpower context. How with desperately short skills and trained and educated people can we best husband our resources. The student who studies abroad from an African country is a student for a period of time lost to these countries. There you have, as a result, a tendency to impose much stiffer, stronger controls over the movement of students than we have. Every embassy now, practically every large embassy, certainly has a cultural attaché. That also is a fairly new development. I would say it was in the last 20 years, certainly.

What does he do and what is his relationship to the Department of State? Isn't he an officer of the United States Information Agency? Yes. This is slightly complicated to describe, but it works. That's the important thing. In Washington, the Department of State has the say on matters of educational and cultural affairs. They set policy. They preside over the programs. And the US Information Agency, which Ed Murrow heads up, is concerned with information, the voice of America, and the like. But in the field, these two are organizationally combined under what's called the US Information Service. And the cultural attaché fits into that field organization. He runs a relatively separate operation, but he reports to the public affairs officer and the ambassador.

His activities are quite broad, and I think probably these fellows are overworked as anyone I've encountered. I've seen quite a few of them out around the world. They have to worry about the so-called full-bright commissions that select students. They have to be a source of information for all kinds of foreigners who want to know about our educational system. They have to make preparations to receive the cultural presentations that come out, the performing artists, and theatrical groups, and the like. They're a pretty busy group, but I do think we need to strengthen that overseas arm much more because these programs have grown, and we haven't built enough strength in the overseas arm of this fourth dimension. We don't have a really a career service in the cultural field abroad. Well, we have one as much as the United States Information Agency has a career service, and incidentally sometimes foreign service officers take these positions. But as you know better than anyone, the US Information Agency does not yet have a formal career service. It operates under a very serious handicap, and the latest commission to study this has once again recommended a strong career service.

I think until we get that, it's difficult to get as many of the ableist people that you'd like to have in this area. That I can partly endorse because I know of the handicap there. It just seems as one question that I want to put to you because information and propaganda are sort of speak united with the work through the cultural attaché and the information agency abroad. Does this affect the work of international exchange adversely? I don't think that it does. The cultural attaché in the order of things abroad is responsible to the public affairs officer who has as his joint concern information and cultural affairs. The cultural attaché in this sense is part of the information program and part of the USIA agency. It has been contended by a number of people that this kind of a mixture is not in the best interests of our cultural activities.

However, I think having worked on both sides of the street here, that is having been in the information program and government a good many years ago, and served overseas in this program, and now having seen it worked with it on the private side. This is a rather unreal handicap as alleged by a number of people. I do think, however, that there is a role here for private agencies and for universities and colleges which is distinctive and which, certainly in a number of situations, is greatly to our advantage as a people to show the faces of our private initiative and our colleges and universities and direct contacts and relationships overseas. We in our organization are doing our best to promote this. We have three offices, for example, opened overseas now, one in Latin America, one in Africa, and one in Asia, and we intend to work closely with our colleges and universities and allowing them to spread their influence and their activities abroad. Mr. Holmes, I know where the fact that our time doesn't go forever, but I wish you would say a word or two about our relationship with UNESCO and where that fits into this whole thing as part of the United Nations.

Well, I think that the United States, just from our own point of view, not to mention a much broader point of view, should take UNESCO much more seriously than we have. It is the international equivalent of this fourth dimension. It's an extremely important instrumentality for achieving a much higher degree of international understanding and cooperation and building greater strength. As a basis for peace and general human progress, it isn't a crash operation. It doesn't deal with crises, and so it tends to end up on the bottom of the totem pole. I hope that in the years ahead the top officials of the United States government and the leaders of Congress will take this institution much more seriously.

Obviously, we've contributed a great deal to it, but I think we could do more. We ought to be putting the best people we have at the disposal of UNESCO, the best intellectuals, the best cultural people, the best scientists, because the United States has a great opportunity, I think, to work through UNESCO in pursuit of our own honorable objectives in the foreign policy field. Thank you very much. As we finish this section half hour to say a word to about the international role of universities, they have a very distinctive position because of their history. All universities in the world, so to speak, come from one source, and they have an international character just to build into them. If you look at the faculty of any American university, you will be impressed with the fact that there is enormous number of people from abroad serving on those faculties.

And I'm interested that one of the Oxford colleges should have an American and his head, an American citizen. This, I think, is characteristic. It shows that there is a commonwealth of ideas among the nations of the world, and that the universities express that commonwealth of ideas. And there is this intellectual comradeship, which has developed and which is growing, and I think the exchange among universities of the world is going to be an ever more fruitful aspect of cultural relations in international affairs. Now we're going to turn for a time from the public aspects of this to the private aspects of this question, and I want to introduce our other guests of the evening. Ms. Mildred Adams and Dr. McNeil Lowry. I became acquainted with Ms. Adams through reading her translation of the great Italian philosopher, Ortega Gassette's books.

I was impressed when I read that with the fact that in the late 20s and the early 30s, he was developing ideas of the necessity for a true Europe, a larger concept than the merely national concept. And those ideas that he was then expressing have been taken up by Monet, and by others in the political and the economic field, and seem now becoming into fruition. Do you want to say something about the way in which the individual can make his impact upon international cultural relations? Well, first I'm going to have to take Ortega away from Italy and put him in Spain. Did I say Italy? I'm sorry. And the Spaniards would be very grieved because they're extremely proud of him.

I think that one of the great services, Ortega, as you say, was a philosopher primarily, although he himself called himself a journalist and said that he was brought up on a rotary press. One of his great services was the bringing into Spain of the best thought of Europe and also of the rest of the world. He established a magazine called Revista de Occidente, and into that he literally funneled the early sense of fine thought in various fields, including in the 20s, and this was amazing for Spain. A great deal of scientific thought, and I read when I was following the magazine with the greatest care, and I read what you might call popular articles on facets of science in Spanish, which weren't available in American magazines at that time. This was a service not only primarily for Spain, but also the whole Spanish-speaking world, and he carried it on until, of course, it died in a Spanish civil war.

And just now, this is 1962, that magazine's been dead since 1936, or been in a coma, the son of Ortega is going to revive Revista de Occidente, and he is particularly interested now in American thought. And I think there will be a larger sector of American thought appearing in that magazine than was there in the 20s. Do you feel that his thinking on this, I remember he said at one point that none of the nations would ever recover until they had a larger vision of their future than their own national. There had to be a European vision. Do you think there is a connection between that and what we call the common market and the union of Europe at this time?

I'm sure there is, because the common market is a development of a long line of thought in Europe, and while Ortega was trying to, as he said, to take Spain into Europe, and bring Europe into Spain, he was also thinking in terms of building a Europe, and along with Madariaga and several other Spaniards, and going all the way back to Juan Luis Vivas, they had a vision, and they did intend to build a Europe which would be greater than any one of the individual countries composing that small peninsula. I think it's very impressive. Our other guest is Dr. McNeil Lowry, who was trained as a scholar, and actually taught for a while, and then was drawn into the government, into the office of war information, as I remember it for some time. And then became a journalist like Ortega, and headed the Washington Bureau of an important chain of newspapers, and then went to Zurich with the Institute of the International Press Institute, and now for 10 years has been the Program Director at the Ford Foundation, and with his colleague, Dr. Hooker, was the author of one of the chapters.

And this volume on the cultural affairs and foreign relations, which is the basis of our discussion. And I would like to ask you to discuss, if you would, the role of the artist, considered the artist in the largest dimension, and in all his form, in this whole matter of cultural affairs and international. To be an effective role, Dr. Riston, I think we have to keep in mind, first of all, a very basic assumption, and that is that what the arts are about is not what foreign policy is about, and particularly not the foreign policy of one nation. In an ideal society, I suppose, the intercultural mobility of the art, between one nation and another, would come as a spontaneous reflection of the vigor of art and the arts in any particular society.

Now, if we can draw from this very general assumption, several lessons, I believe, one would be, for example, that unlike information and so-called fast media, the arts in foreign policy, if they are an aid, should have long range planning, not try to reflect competitions or crises in foreign policy. And that whatever use is made of them, because the arts always suffer when non-artistic uses are made of them, whatever use is made of them, suits the particular connection, exposure of one art to another, a very good illustration, because sometimes foreign policy objectives and artistic objectives do coincide, is the recently completed tour of the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. If you had been thinking simply of the art of the ballet in the West, this would be a time for George Balanchine to show to the Soviet Union that the Americans had made ballet a native American dance with its own technique, its own training, its own style, and particularly its superb use of music and choreography.

As a recent article by Yulanova, one of the principal dancers of the Bolshoy, since the return of Balanchine's company to the United States indicates, the Russians have used this to tell themselves, and Yulanova has made it very plain in an article in Provdda, that the whole concept of training and development of the ballet art in Russia must be reviewed. So just two artists might have decided to make this exchange. It's a happy coincidence that the United States government and its cultural presentations program decided at this time to make it, because on their own neither company would have exchanged themselves between the United States and the Soviet Union. This doesn't always happen, but where these considerations can dominate, this I think is primary rule for any effective use of the arts.

Well, one illustration that occurs to me comes in the other direction. Well, one, the most obvious is the sending in the Mona Lisa here. This brings up the fact that art and architecture, sculpture, the dance, require no translation, such as Miss Adams's head to undertake with the Spanish philosopher. And with other Latin writers, it carries this message directly. Likewise, there are the treasures of Versailles, which have recently been shown at the Art Institute in Chicago, and which are now going to other great museums across the country. These things bring their message directly, and sometimes I think that we forget that music is an international language, and that while there was a time when Oriental music seemed so odd that we didn't get it. Now that we have a new scale on which Aaron Copeland and others are composing, perhaps our own music seems as odd to us as the Oriental used to.

But that's a comment that doesn't have to concern us too deeply. I'd like to make one, I hope it's not a captured comment about the Mona Lisa. I'm not sure that isn't also about the balance of payments deficits. There are going to be many Americans robbed of their excuse to go to Italy if the Mona Lisa can be seen in the United States, whether Malrow is helping Mrs. Kennedy keep American tourists in the United States, I don't know. But Dr. Laura, she doesn't stay in Italy. No, we've got Italy on the brain. He meant to say friends. I meant to say friends, I'm sorry, and Malrow's interest is entirely generous, I think, to the Kennedys in this particular incident. Well, in your chapter, you laid enormous stress, I felt, in the necessity for integrity in the program. Now I think I understand fully what that means, but I would like to have you outline a little more fully what this means to you. Well, I think we began with a very simple fact, and that is that to have integrity in the program, we must have the most active participation of the artist and the artistic directors themselves.

This would seem to be elementary, but it hasn't always happened. In fact, when Assistant Secretary Battle recently suspended the Cultural Presentation Program for Investigation and gave Mr. Roy Larson and Mr. Woolf the task of examining it and making investigation out of report, their report began by saying that they must reactivate a committee advisory committee on the arts that has always been there by legislation. And must staff it with people whom the artists themselves will take seriously, which ideally would be artists and artistic directors. The government has had very little difficulty in consulting scientists and educators about the other aspects of international exchange. The artist has somehow seemed to be suspect as this kind of consultant or participant, but only if our program has the respect of the artist in the United States, can it expect to have this respect in the artist abroad and in the public who takes the artist seriously abroad.

This is one very important consideration. The other is, as I indicated a minute ago, in trying to make what you do in the use of the arts as close to the natural organic integrity of the development of artistic styles, groups, movements as you can. This again requires the advice and requires the government to have confidence in the artist and the artistic director to do it. You spoke about the government not having so much difficulty in dealing with scientists. I must say that's a fairly new development because for a good deal of our history there was a great tension in that. Science still in the State Department doesn't have the same rank that the cultural officer has, it's a special assistant to the Secretary who handles that.

Some of the most important of the scientists, like the artist, in a sense works alone. It's his own inspiration that leads to the great developments. And some of the most fruitful of the international activities have been sparked by private groups. I suppose the most astounding thing in international science has ever occurred was the international geophysical year. It grew out of the ideas of a very few people. And one of the striking things about it, which is much like what you're saying about the artist, was that the planning was done by the people who were going to do the research. It wasn't done in vast bureaucracy. It wasn't done at a far distance, but it was done by the men who were going to be directly involved in doing the thing themselves. And being apolitical, having no extra grind, they were able to get the cooperation of people behind the Iron Curtain.

They couldn't get them behind the Bamboo Curtain that I have to concede. And one of the great tragedies was that we had this vast blackout of the great landmassive China. But it was a brilliant illustration of the fact that governments then cooperated and facilitated the work. But it was without any political motivation of a short term nature. This, I think, lies behind the treaty for setting Antarctica aside and not making it subject to claims by individual nations so that science can use that as a vast international laboratory. And I still have hopes that outer space can be taken away from this competition and developed along that line for the enrichment and enlightenment of the world. Miss Adams, are you right for the economist in London? Thank you for the plug. And that is an international circulation. I have a painful reason to know by reason of its cost.

And there are other international publications, the new one, Atlas, for example, which are other journals of opinion. What role do they play in this whole matter of cultural affairs and international relations? It seemed to me extraordinarily useful, both in their quite separate ways. I would say that the economist, which has a comparatively small circulation in this country, but goes to all the right places, brings us more complete news of the world than any local publication we have. It doesn't accept the New York Times because somehow the economist has developed, perhaps because it's a weekly, it's developed a longer range form of writing about foreign affairs. As for Atlas, which is new, that gives one a real sense. That's the thing you remember, or would some fate, the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us? I think that's a myth.

Would some power, that's it. Well, Atlas does it because Atlas translates into English and presents fragments of comment from the press of the world. Now, Mr. Coombs said something about not being so much in favor of crash programs. I think that this whole thing of cultural relations, if it's any good at all, must be something beside a crash program. I also think it must go two ways. And as far as the translations are concerned, one of the reasons why, in spite of the fact that translation is by and large or rather thankless business, one of the reasons why some of us keep at it is that we believe not only that our books should go to other countries, but that their books should come to us. And I honestly think that in many ways we achieve what we're working for, more by reading what they write than by forcing on them what we write.

Well, you're stressing the fact, which I take it all of us would want to emphasize that this is not a foreign aid program. This is, we have as much to learn and strangely enough from some points of view, naturally enough from the point of view of a scholar. We have as much to learn from the underdeveloped nations as we have from the developed. I was tremendously impressed with somebody who said that nothing had ever come out of Africa by way of significant art. And yet there is now almost a cult in America of collection art from Africa. And there is a certain relationship of its primitive forms too much of modern art. Yes, for the past 30 years, first indirectly through Broncosi and other sculptors in France who felt the African influence and more recently, as you say, directly.

Well, this goes for all the other phases of their culture. It's hard to add to the plastic arts, Dr. Riston, when you're talking about African culture, except for very rudimentary forms in the dance. It's very hard. If you're going to take the best of what they've got, which is of course what they want to give us. Well, I was thinking not of Africa alone, but of Asia. And there there is a considerable literature, which is not available in this country for which we have a great deal to learn. You spoke about translations of foreign books here, but don't the Franklin publications and other things bring American books to Asian and African countries? Yes, that's an extraordinarily interesting effort to take our literature there that runs the other way and is doing a very good job. And that's, as I understand it, a private organization so that it belongs in the private sector.

And in this respect, it is characteristically American because, as I understand it, all the Russians do is done officially, isn't it? The Russians do it governmentally, but fortunately we have the kind of individual initiative which sends a lot of various people into inventing ways where they can operate in this back and forth kind of thing. I think it's one of the bits of American genius. It is true, of course, also, of the work of the private foundations in which you're deeply involved. Mrs. Vary, this is right. There's a great spectrum of activities for the same objectives that Ms. Adams had just mentioned with a private foundation. But when you examine the whole subject as Dr. Hooker and I recently had to do, we still find that we're dwarfed by government money, particularly money now that is developing in the AID program, which is a sum that even the Ford Foundation cannot begin to compete with.

But a whole area, in fact, three or four areas of the Ford Foundation's activities, are directly along the whole spectrum of the objectives that Mr. Coons stated at the outset in trying to describe what educational cultural exchange just does. Is this one or two illustrations of that? Well, we have one whole program, International Training and Research whose mission is really a two-fold one, first to put into American education. And it started at the graduate and higher educational levels now is thinking about going even lower in the educational system to put an extra dimension of knowledge about foreign areas into American education. It also tries to train personnel for overseas. This program, our International Affairs program, many aspects of the overseas development program, which parallel, but in some ways differ from the AID program, all of these.

In fact, hardly any aspect of our operations in the Foundation does not touch this. Even when, in my own program, we make grants to theater directors, they often want to work with particular directors abroad, and they are cultural emissaries, whether they like it or not, in working with those directors. And you bring directors from abroad to this International Affairs program, doesn't it? You have, I don't suppose you have to work through the Institute of International Education because you have your own worldwide organization. The International Affairs program, however, chooses to work through the Institute of International Education in many ways. I know, of course, that the Rockefeller Foundation and many other great philanthropic foundations in America have their programs abroad. Rockefeller, really, has almost concentrated its work in the humanities and the arts in the international field rather than in the American field.

We've spoken a good deal about Africa and about Asia, but as I remember it in the volume on cultural affairs and international relations, you laid great emphasis upon the fact that we ought, really, to pay more attention to Europe. Do you want to explain why you take that point of view? Because most people think we know all about Europe and Europe knows all about us, we can take it yet for granted. I think there are two reasons. The first is that many problems within, let's say, the Atlantic Community, the NATO Alliance, which we assumed because of common heritage and common understanding, common motives in the foreign policy and security fields would go together, we have found that it's not quite that simple as recent discussions between the President and Mr. McMellan and the goal of indicated. Also, our own tradition, if we're thinking about the arts and culture, is, of course, much closer to the European tradition.

But recently, there's been a much more urgent reason, I think, and that is that we began with the idea that the newly developing powers would revolt politically and culturally against colonialism. We found they did revolt politically against colonialism, but culturally, they still maintain ties with France, Germany, United Kingdom, and they take their own view often of the United States from these educational and cultural ties with the European nations. A few anti-American people in France and Germany, Italy and United Kingdom, can have a strong influence on the attitude of emergent countries. So from both points of view, I think the idea of curtailing our activities in Europe is bad. Naturally, I would not argue against attempting to develop them in other parts of the world, and that is, of course, started. Now, one other point that I wanted to draw from you, if I can, in the conclusion of your chapter and that of Dr. Hooker, you said that there were certain broad conclusions regarding the arts and humanities program, one of two of those that you'd like to summarize.

Well, I have a slightly different feeling, though I know it's a very thorny question. From that expressed both by Mr. Cooms and Mr. Sims about the autonomy of the cultural affairs officer abroad, as you would like, I would like to see a foreign service in the whole USI development. I think sometimes the cultural affairs officer, when he's filtered through the public affairs officer, something is lost, and he is, by his situation, encouraged to try to relate his programs to the current live objectives of the public affairs segment, and that means information and the fast media often. I think whether or not cultural affairs in the USI and State Department are concentrated in Washington, which is an old chestnut of an argument, as you know very well, that abroad, the cultural affairs officer ought to have equal stays on the embassy staff and in the USI with the public affairs officer. This would not mean a radical shift of personnel off, because often some of your people in the USI abroad have been the most interested and devoted in the cultural affairs realm.

This is a specific conclusion, but I think it's a rather basic one. It is, however, less general and less urgent in my mind than two I've already touched on, one that we think about the arts from an artistic point of view, rather than a political one. And secondly, that we use the artist and the artistic director himself to the fullest extent. I think it must also be said that whatever we do about the cultural affairs officer, as long as we have the concept of the country team, his work can be greatly impaired unless the ambassador is drawn in and has a deep and genuine interest in the work of the cultural affairs. And here to four, the training of our ambassadors has been such that that has been very rare. I remember one of the firsts that impressed me was Dwight Morrow when he went to Mexico and brought back the great muralists to this country.

And I think one of the things we must do is to look forward to the training of our ambassadors to take a larger interest in this than they ever have before. You ask a question. Is there any good to be got out of the pattern of the British Council? The British Arts Council, as I understand it, is a private organization which is partially supported by the government and which goes on in and out of administrations as a steady feeder in of British culture. Well, I think that there is much to be learned from that. I want to thank you Miss Adams and Mr. Lowry for participating in this. The whole discussion of the relationship of cultural affairs to international relations could go on indefinitely, but our time is up. Thank you very much indeed. Music

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