Encounters with the World

By LANCE MORROW

PEACE AND COUNTERPEACE: FROM WILSON TO HITLER. Memoirs of Hamilton Fish Armstrong. 585 pages. Harper & Row. $12.95.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong has known everyone concerned with U.S. foreign policy from Woodrow Wilson to Henry Kissinger. Graduating from Princeton in 1916, he began his own career at roughly the moment when the country was seriously launching itself into the larger world. He traveled the ruined Balkans after World War I, then went to Paris, hoping to join the secretariat of the fledgling League of Nations. "Enemies had been beaten, dynasties toppled, peoples freed, visible results of victory won at frightful cost," Armstrong writes in these memoirs, recalling the hopeful mood that was to seem later the most inadequate innocence. "Surely the nations had suffered enough and learned enough to be ready to try living by a code of rational behavior. It was exhilarating to realize that the experiment was to be made in my lifetime."

During the decades that saw the League's failure, the disintegration of Europe, the second World War and then the cold war, Armstrong was a reflective and sometimes provocative presence. When Harvard Historian Archibald Cary Coolidge started the quarterly Foreign Affairs in 1922, Armstrong became its managing editor and, at Coolidge's death in 1928, its editor. There he remained until he retired recently, to be replaced by William Bundy (TIME, Sept. 13).

Foreign Affairs was and is an unusual journalistic enterprise. Its circulation is only 73,000, but guided by Armstrong's intelligence, it became a sort of house organ for world leaders. In the first issue--which Lenin read carefully--former U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root proclaimed America's global destiny. Other contributors have included Leon Trotsky, Nikita Khrushchev and, in 1967, Richard Nixon, who explained the necessity for stabilized relations with mainland China.

By turns chatty and analytical, this personal journal runs from Princeton days to the first rumbles of World War II. It does not make any broad assessment of the era or attempt to assess the influence of Foreign Affairs. The narrative suffers sometimes from a certain headlong quality: Armstrong travels to, say, Eastern Europe, sketches in only a few lines to describe the large and impossibly complex issues there, then reboards the Orient Express to plunge on.

Yet the book is fascinating because of the astonishing variety of Armstrong's encounters: Serbian patriots, Yugoslavian royalty, Poincare, Clemenceau, Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt. He savors characters like Rumania's giddy and theatrical Queen Marie, who once told him, "Like clowns [royal families], amuse people, even with their funerals." One night in Madrid, Ernest Hemingway, otherwise charming, kept threatening to seek out Novelist Louis Bromfield and beat him up for some obscure slight.

In 1933, when Hitler seemed to most of the world a mildly ominous crank, Armstrong interviewed him at the Berlin Chancellery. He had "nice, wide-open eyes," a large nose and an "insignificant appearance." His forelock flapping over his eye, Hitler delivered a strange monologue about Germany's need to rearm, and then at the door told Armstrong he had enjoyed "our animated talk." Armstrong soon produced a short, foreboding book called Hitler's Reich--The First Phase, warning accurately of what was to come. Later, he visited Mussolini in Rome. Asked to assess his fellow dictator to the north, Il Duce "looked at me with big serious eyes and sighed a sigh that might have been for the woes of the world but probably was regret that he was being copied by an inferior artist."

Between wars, Armstrong sought to draw America out of its isolationism into civilized involvement with the rest of the world. Properly pursued, that was and still is sound and enlightened policy. Like many Americans, however, Armstrong would eventually disapprove of one of the most tragic outgrowths of that policy, the Viet Nam War. It was an involvement that went too far and was not civilized enough.

--Lance Morrow

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