This book chronicles a World War II veteran's lifelong search for peace through strengthening democracies and the international institutions that unite them. James Huntley began a promising social service career in Washington State, but the Korean War convinced him to begin a quest for world peace that he continues to this day. As a young diplomat, he helped the Germans take their place among the democratic nations and later worked on the foundations of NATO and the European Union. He conceived of the private multinational Atlantic Institute, reluctantly leaving the diplomatic service to help world leaders bring it about, and later headed the Atlantic Council of the United States. He has devoted his career to study and networking in foundations, research organizations, and nonprofit groups that prod democracies to unite for peace.
An Architect of Democracy
Building a Mosaic of PeaceBy James Robert HuntleyNew Academia Publishing
Copyright © 2006 James Robert Huntley
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-9777908-5-2 Contents
List of IllustrationsForeword by Brent ScowcroftPreface1 At the Iron Curtain2 Growing Up and Outward3 Pearl Harbor Changed Us Forever4 Deutschland under the Allies5 Borderland Stories6 Academic Retooling and Atlantic Immersion7 Into the Jaws of the Bureaucracy8 The Unification of Europe and the Ambiguities of Atlanticism9 The Atlantic Institute10 Foundations and Society's Third Sector11 The Mother Country and the Atlantic Colleges12 Atlantic Jack of All Trades13 The Knowledge Industry14 The Far East and the World in the Mid-Seventies15 Japan and the Atlantic-Pacific System16 The Atlantic-Pacific System17 Back to the Beltway: 1983 and Beyond18 Towards a Global Community of Democracies19 The Bottom LineAppendicesA Institutional Evolution of a Democratic World (1947-2004)B Atlantic Congress: Declaration and Resolution on the Atlantic Institute (1959)C A Draft Declaration on Modern Philanthropy (1972)D Mid-Atlantic Clubs: What Are They? (1974)E The Challenge of Building an International Community (1980)F Excerpts from an Address to the British Parliament by President Ronald Reagan (1982)G Declaration of London: A Community of Democracies, (1982)H The Next Century Initiative: Building a New Democratic Order (1992)I Final Warsaw Declaration: Toward a Community of Democracies (2000)J EU-U.S. Summit Declaration on Democracy (2005)Index
Foreword
A Snapshot in Time: Washington DC in 1963. On Labor Day, 1963, I arrived in Washington for my new assignment, heading the North American office of the Atlantic Institute. The post of director general of the Institute had not been filled when I left Paris; my appointment to Washington had been agreed earlier by Lodge, when still DG, and General Lauris Norstad, then chairman of the Atlantic Council's board.
Lodge's vacated position was first offered to General Alfred Gruenther, a marvelous soldier who had been Eisenhower's chief of staff at NATO and later Supreme Allied Commander Europe himself. He refused and instead became head of the American Red Cross. I got to know Gruenther well and admired him a great deal. It was said that at NATO parade-reviews, Gruenther, as SACEUR, would greet each contingent in its own native language-including Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish-a rare and valuable sensibility.
Ambassador Walter (Red) Dowling was appointed the new director general of the Atlantic Institute at the end of October 1963; he and I met in Washington and developed a good working relationship. I was uncomfortable, however, with my own replacement in Paris and became even more uncomfortable with most of my new associates in Washington. My replacement as A.I. executive officer in Paris was a less able, retired U.S. ambassador, with no background, nor even stomach, for the job-which was to act as chief of staff and energizer, as I had done. In a couple of years he would be replaced by a gifted and able young academic, Gregory Flynn, who proved excellent at understudying a succession of directors general. But until Flynn's advent and that of Ambassador John Tuthill (who replaced Dowling in 1966), and until relations between the Institute and the Atlantic Council of the United States (ACUS) had been rendered more or less stable, the entire enterprise-American and European-was on rocky ground.
General Norstad, chairman of the Atlantic Council and former SACEUR, kept a loose and more or less unholy alliance on the ACUS board of directors (involving Europe-firsters, Atlantic federalists, and pragmatists) from boiling over. The board represented these and other trends in current thinking about foreign affairs. There were always too many directors (more than 40 to start with, and 125 by the time I became president in 1983). Most were distinguished figures in their own right and each expected to be listened to. Some were former cabinet officers; many were retired ambassadors, with some business people and a few academics. About the only thing they all could agree to was that the Atlantic Alliance was a matter of paramount importance to the United States. How the future of Atlantic relations should play out was continually a subject of debate-sometimes rancorous and often inconclusive. My job, in part, was to keep these controversies from affecting the work of the Institute in Paris and to develop a distinct and useful A.I. program in the United States.
This difficult and unwieldy ACUS amalgam did not deter Richard Wallace, who had headed ACUS as director general since its inception in 1961. Nor did it deter a small clique of board members and volunteers in the office from pressing continually for adoption of policies and programs that would point ACUS in the direction of Clarence Streit's dream: a strong federation of Atlantic democracies.
The immediate goal of the "federalists" on the Atlantic Council Board and staff was to prod the Kennedy administration to follow through on the principal resolution o the Atlantic Convention of January 1962. This meeting had been authorized by a Resolution of Congress and financed by a congressional appropriation. Many European MPs took part, with other elites, but no members of Congress did so. Unable to convince the convention that a Streitian federation was the immediate solution to Alliance disunity (and Streit himself was there, pleading eloquently), the American federalists fell back on a "punting" solution. The meeting eventually proposed formation by NATO governments of the Special Governmental Commission to propose measures that would turn the alliance into a "true community." The latter term was doublespeak for a federation. While most governments were decidedly cool, that of the United States was hostile. The Atlantic federal pattern ran contrary to the Atlantic Partnership model of the administration. The "true Atlantic Community" proposal of the federalists had no chance of going anywhere, but the federal clique running the ACUS persisted for two or three years to mouth the mantra. This greatly annoyed old warhorses, such as Dean Acheson and Lauris Norstad, and deflected the council from doing much positive about the state of American political opinion. Precious time was wasted on such infighting.
I favored an Atlantic federation as a long-term aim. But after my experience in Europe and in government, I was convinced that an Atlantic federal union was an entirely unrealistic program goal for any serious citizens group that wanted to influence the policy of the United States. I felt-and still do-that some kind of transatlantic union would eventually result if groups like the Institute and the Council (plus a number of others) would simply work on the practical objectives of mutual understanding and solidarity among the peoples around the North Atlantic, brought about largely through elite/expert dialogues to achieve consensus on specific problems and opportunities facing the NATO and OECD countries and widespread publication of the results. I also believed that the education systems of the Atlantic countries should and could be retooled to make it clear to students at all levels what the real shape and mission of the modern Atlantic community were, mining its especially rich history. My approach was essentially a nonpolitical one, stressing the nurturing of healthy trends in Atlantic societies that could be brought into historical convergence. I adopted the term "social tissue" to describe what we were...
