Transcript

So, in fact, the story begins in 1967, when I began working with Mac Bundy. Mac had left the government, and was the head of the Ford Foundation, And I became his staff for this project, which at that point had no name. In 1968, I went around Europe. Basically, I went to London, Paris, Rome, and Bonn, talking to various people—in either their national academies, or in London, where my principal contact was Burke Trend, who was the Secretary of the Cabinet—and talking about this idea of, couldn't we cooperate around social matters?

We developed a plan, and had a meeting in Surrey, in the summer of '68, to which we invited a group of people. So from England, Sir Solly Zuckerman, who had been forever involved in science policy. And from France, I know Michel Crozier, the great sociologist, was there. And I don't remember the others. But from the United States we had someone from the National Academy of Science, and Howard Raiffa was brought in at that time.

We also, at that time, blocked out what this institute might be. The idea was that it would use systems analysis—which at that point was seen as really the answer to a lot of policy problems—to study common problems facing the Western and the Soviet countries.

So there was a meeting. The next winter, I guess, I met with my Soviet counterpart, a man named Boris Milner. Bundy's counterpart was Gvishiani, who, in addition to being Chairman of the Soviet Academy of Science, was also a general in the KGB. They do things that way. And Milner and I worked the thing out. There were all kinds of problems, because everywhere else in the world, the Academy of Science is a government institution, and in the United States, we had to deal with a non-government thing. So we had to work things out. We had government funding, but we were nongovernment.

What was really funny in the planning: We were making a lot of progress on what this place might be like as an institute, and who would come. And then the question was, where it should be? And I have a lovely set of photographs where I'm being shown the Chateau Henri IV at Fontainebleau, and being asked by the French people whether this would do? It was just really funny.

And then but in the end we picked Vienna, primarily because the Russians were much more comfortable in Vienna. Vienna was completely penetrated by Soviet spies, so they could keep track of their people, and they felt comfortable sending really first-rate people. The place, I guess, opened in '72. By that time, the real treaty was established. I'm thinking in the summer of '69 we went to Moscow, which was very funny, because I was still very young, and I was second in our delegation to Mac Bundy. Which was very good when it got to the toast, because that meant I would toast fifth. And it was terrible if you were twelfth, or something.

We settled a lot of the problems on that trip, and then we had the location. And we opened in '72, and Howard Raiffa became the first head of it, and away it went.