HAMILTON FISH ARMSTRONG DEAD AT 80

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100540005-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 31, 2004
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 25, 1973
• Content Type: NSPR

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Approved For Release 2O 4?O9PIB oIA RDP88-0131 ROOO1OO54OOO5-1
2 5 APR 1973
'Hamilton Fish Armstrong Dead ah
t - ' John F. Kennedy to Anthony;-$1.25 a copy. Today, selling at
By GLENN FOWLER Eden (now Earl of Avon), I $2.50, it circulates 70,000
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, an Marshal Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru. copies and reaches centers of
authority on international poll- Konrad Adenauer and Gamall policy-making and scholarship
-tics and editor of the quarterly Abdel Nasser have shared their in every corner of the world.
'Foreign Affairs for 44 years thoughts in its pages. A common misapprehen-
until his retirement last fall, An Article by "X" sion that Foreign Affairs repre-
died yesterday at the New York sents official United States for-
University Medical Center after; Perhaps the best-known ar- eign policy persists because of
t cle Foreign Affairs ever ran h 1
b + 1 1
r
a long illness. He was 80 years
old on April 7.
Mr. Armstrong, a journalist
who counted many of the
world's leading statesmen
among his friends and confi-
dants, had been a patient at
'the Institute of Rehabilitation
Medicine at the medical center
for the last seven months. He
had lived his entire life at 58
? West 10th Street.
In a tribute to Mr. Arm-
Strong, Henry A. Kissinger;
President Nixon's assistant for
National Security Affairs, said
yesterday.
"Hamilton Fish Armstrong
was a friend and an inspiration.
, Urbane, concerned, wise, open'
to different opinions, he always
knew that our common values
were greater than our differ-
ences and that America could
be true to herself and to be
relevant morally and politically
to the rest of the world. This
was the spirit of Foreign' Af-
fairs, with which his nafc grew
synonymous over half a cen-
tury. The country will miss him
and his friends' lives will be
emptier without him."
Hamilton Fish Armstrong
lived in two worlds, one global
and the other intensely local.
His long career was spent
writing about and occasionally
taking part in world politics,
yet he remained first and last
a passionate New Yorker
whose only home throughout
his life. was the three-story red
brick house on West 10th Street
in which he was born.
It was as a founder and for
%S4 years the editor of the in-
fluential quarterly Foreign Af-
fairs that Mr. Armstrong left)
his stamp on the diplomatic'
scene. His wide acquaintance
with world leaders and his
ability to entice many of them
to write for his scholarly
journal placed him closer to the
nerve center of international
political activity than most of!
the participants themselves.
. The list of contributors toI Iron?i put together four issues
Foreign Affairs reads like thcj year of the magazine, whose
roster of a half-eenttu?y-long' iodate blue-gray cover soon be-
subunit conference. Leon Trot-1 tine recognized in the major
sky v:rote for it when he was; r~orld capitals. Inside were
struggling for power in ihe' -rticles intended, as the co:m-
then-vo'mg Soviet Union; Nikita: cil defined its journal's pup-I
S. Khrushchev's by-line turned pose, "to create and stimultttel
'
tip on the eve of his tour of international thought in tl.e
the United States i~ l9ti9, 11 itcd Svttcs." d~q
Ilcads of government p rQued r1 Its 4S,f~~o4( 94~?r.
from Franklin U. itoosevelt and of puhiicatinn, Foreign Affairs
had a circulation of 3,700 atj
Mg TRIM Cl at op- .e
e
appeared in 1947 when, under t e government figures who have)
the by-line "X," a person ob- written in its pages. But, far
viously having intimate knowl- from being a mouthpiece, For-
edge of the formulation of eign Affairs under Mr. Arm-
United states foreign policy strong's direction consistently
wrote the first public outline sought to reflect viewpoints
of what was to become the other than that of the United
policy of containment toward States. Students of world poli.-
the Soviet Union. It soon be-I tics came to regard it as the
came all open secret that "X? pioneer publication in the field
was George F. Kennan, then of international relations and
the State Department's chief' look- to it for forecasts of
policy planner and later briefly' events to come.
an Ambassador to Moscow. Books on Peace Prospects
ncil
C
ou
In 1922, when the
on Foreign Relations decided
to set tip a magazine of com-
ment on diplomacy, world poli-
tics and related topics. Mr.
Armstrong was asked to be a
member of the staff nucleus.
At the time he was a special
correspondent in Europe for
The New York Evening Post,
having joined the Post after
Army service in the first World
War and a year as a military
attache in Belgrade.
Then 29 years old, he was
named managing editor of For-
eign Affairs when it began
publication. Six years later the
original editor, Archibald Cary
Coolidge, a Harvard history
professor, died and Air. Arm-
strong took the editor's chair,
a post he held until his re-
tirement last Oct. 1 upon pub-
lication of the journal's 50th
anniversary issue.
Gave Full Time to Job
Mr. Armstrong also served
at the outset as executive di-
'ector of the Council on
Foreign Relations, a nonprofit
organization that in more than
half a century has counted
t mom? its prime plovers scores
Df leading figures in businss,
?overnment and education. But
tts the council expanded and its
activities broadened, he began
`o devote full time to Foreign
s,ffairs, which itself was fast
growing; in influence.
SS East 6: th Street, Mr. Arm-
Over the years, Mr. Arm-
strong was called upon to serve
in a number of advisory capa-
cities to the State Depart-
ment. In the Second World Warl
he was an adviser on postwar
problems and on the proposed
United Nations Charter, and
he attended the international
conference that founded the
United Nations at San Fran-
cisco in 1945.
His writing was not confined
to Foreign Affairs, for which
he wrote 49 articles, but include
a number of books, most writ-
ten in the period between the
two world wars and dealing
with prospects for peace and
world order.
His world view could bests
be described as realistic; basic-
ally he was neither an optimist
nor a pessimist, but he re-
peatedly warned that the peace
that much of the world ex-
pected to last after the first
World War was precarious
indeed.
In 1933, shortly after Hitler
rose to power in Germany, Mr.
,Armstrong was the first Ameri-
can to gain an interview with
the new Chancellor, The Hitler
phenomenon was not vet taken
seriously by most of the world's
STA~
STA
Wars?", detailing the pessimism.
that led him to predict the warj
that broke out five years later.
After the war, he wrote three
more books on aspects of inter-
national relations, including the
first of an intended series of
volumes of his memoirs, cover-
ing the years from the peace
at Versailles to the accession of
Hitler.
Mr. Armstrong's one book
that did not deal with the world
at large appeared in 1963 and
was titled "Those Days." It was
an affectionate remembrance of
a childhood in New York at
the turn of the century, and it
revealed his love for the block,
the neighborhood and the city
where, except for annual trips
abroad and special diplomatic
or fact-finding . assignments
away from home, he spent his
entire life.
"My first clear picture is of
marching men," he wrote in
"Those Days." "I am peering
down into Fifth Avenue through
a balcony railing of the old
Grosvenor, on the corner ofl
Tenth Street. It is the fall of
1896, 1 am 3 years old, and this
is the great 'sound-money' pa-
rade in which all right-thinking
New York is protesting against
the free-silver heresies of Wil-
liam Jennings Bryan."
In Armstrong was born on
April 7, 1393, in the house at
58 West 10th Street, near Sixth
Avenue, that his father, an ar-
tist who created mosaics and
stained-glass windows, had ac-
quired and expanded to accom-
modate a family that, with
Hamilton's arrival, included six
children. The father, D. Mait-1
land Armstrong, had traveled;
widely and served for a time
in Rome as Consul General to
the Papal States.
Mr. Armstrong's mother, the
former Helen Neilson, was a
descendant of the Stuvvesant
family and, as her son- wrote,
was "quite typically New York
-- the Ne`v- York of wide
political- leaders, but Mr. Aram-l brownstone houses with high
stron;'s hook, "Hitler's Reich--, stoops and high ceilings, car-.
the First Phase," published that! rimes to supplement but not)
summner, began With the words; replace the pleasures of walk.
"A people has disappeared"! Ing, constant visits back and
and predicted that Hitler would forth among relatives, large
'remain in power and would Sunday dinners followed byl
trouble the world. I long amusementless Sunday
The next year Mr. Armstrong' afternoons."
published "Europe Betaken
CIA-RDP88-O1314ROO01 00540005-1'j on t, In)194.