From Bismarck to Adenauer

When President Woodrow Wilson went the Peace Conference in 1919, he was given a copy of a study of the Congress of Vienna, prepared specially for the Paris meet ings by the English historian C. K. Webster. Mr. Wilson refused to read it, on the grounds that neither he nor anyone else dealing with the revolutionary problems created by the First World War had anything to learn from the diplomacy of the previous century.

The President's attitude was widely shared in his own time; and it would be foolish to claim that his kind of willingness to disregard the past is dead even today. But it is certainly less prevalent. Growing awareness of the perils of international relations in a thermonuclear age, and of the frightening penalties of faulty statecraft, has reduced our self-confidence. There is evidence, in the serv ice schools and other parts of the government, of an actual eagerness to seek guidance in history and to test whether reflection upon past diplomatic methods and problems the kind of problems to which the lecturers in this dis tinguished series are invited to address themselves-might not actually help us fins solutions for some of our present perplexities.