Hospitable World Host

Vladimir Lenin read the first issue from cover to cover. On attaining the White House, John F. Kennedy drew from the magazine's roster of contributors to help staff his Administration all the way up to Cabinet level. In the major councils of world government, it is studied as if it were the official voice of the U.S. Department of State. It is not. But in 40 years, an anniversary reached this week, Foreign Affairs quarterly has grown to be an accurate and authoritative observer of world events and, in its quiet way, one of the most influential periodicals in print.

Foreign Affairs not only observes world events but frequently anticipates and even shapes them. U.S. Presidential Candidate Kennedy's interest in Dean Rusk was first whetted by a 1960 article, ''The President''; after reading "The Broken Dia logue with Japan'' in a later issue that same year. President Kennedy was moved to appoint its author, Edwin 0. Reischauer, U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

State Department Kremlinologists regard Foreign Affairs as an indispensable source of inside dope on Moscow officialdom ; the quarterly has published more than 200 articles on Soviet Russia, some of them be neath such indisputably knowledgeable bylines as Leon Trotsky, Soviet Theoretician N. Bukharin and Nikita Khrushchev.

Community of Nations. Moderator of this global forum is Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a vigorous, white-haired, bushy-browed man of 69 who qualifies for the post both by lineage and interest. Grandnephew of Grant's Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, and son of a U.S. diplomat (D. Maitland Armstrong. U.S. consul general to Italy in 1871), Armstrong served briefly as a military attache in the U.S. consulate in Belgrade in 1919 before becoming European correspondent for the New York Evening Post. Then, in 1922, the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of Manhattan financiers, lawyers and businessmen, started Foreign Affairs on the conviction that isolationism had died with the last doughboy. The council figured that intelligent U.S. citizens would be interested in an intelligent look at the world around them. Foreign Correspondent Armstrong was hired as managing editor of the quarterly's two-man staff. (The other staffer was editor and onetime Harvard history professor Archibald Cary Coolidge.) From the start. Foreign Affairs set a standard for excellence that has not found a challenger. In the first issue. Elihu Root.

Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, alerted the country to its global destiny: ''No nation whose citizens trade and travel need consider whether or not it will be a member of the community of nations. It cannot help itself." Editor Coolidge wrote a prophetic study of the young Russian state, discreetly signing it "K" because he did not want to commit the quarterly itself to any point of view.

With the same care, Armstrong, who became editor after Coolidge's death in 1928, has preserved Foreign Affairs' role as hospitable but impartial host to all international viewpoints. A world observer of considerable vision himself--"A people has disappeared," he wrote in his 1933 book, Hitlers Reich, at a time when most of the world still considered the Nazi leader a harmless crackpot--Armstrong has yielded the floor to the world's thought molders, statesmen and diplomats.

The Right Side. For its birthday issue this week. Foreign Affairs rounded up a particularly illustrious list of contributors, including West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ("The German Problem. A World Problem"), Anthropologist Margaret Mead ("The Underdeveloped and the Overdeveloped"), Guinea's leftist President Sekou Toure ("Africa's Future and the World"). Nigeria's West-leaning Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa ("Nigeria Looks Ahead"), General Lucius D. Clay, with a plea for a strong policy on Berlin.

Now approaching 50.000 circulation--up from 5.000 the first year--Foreign Affairs is within a hair's breadth of paying its own way. But the magazine remains the same journal that was conceived 40 years ago: an international forum, still wrapped in the same blue cover, still printed on a flatbed press, still paying heads of government $150 an article. All that has changed is the world. Isolation did indeed die with the last doughboy, as Foreign Affairs' founders so clearly foresaw. "All we can really say after 40 years," says Editor Armstrong,"is that we've been on the right side of a general proposition.";

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