Center for Foreign Policy Development

The Center for Foreign Policy Development was established in 1981, with Mark Garrison, former director of the State Department’s Office of Soviet Union Affairs, as director. The Center, an organization for research on United States policy for dealing with the Soviet Union, was founded through the efforts of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. ’37, and Garrison, who was deputy chief of mission in Moscow when Watson was ambassador to the Soviet Union. On November 17, 1983, fifty years to the day from the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the Center, with the World Affairs Council of Rhode Island, the Council for International Studies at Brown, and the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities, sponsored a lecture by George Kennan. A project called “The Public, the Soviets, and Nuclear Arms,” undertaken by the Center and the Public Agenda Foundation, has sought to analyze public attitudes toward U.S.-Soviet relations through consideration by “focus groups” representative of the public of “four futures” proposed by Professor Richard Smoke, research director of the Center. The project, which was supported by the Hewlitt and MacArthur Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation, included a campaign called “Public Summit ’88,” held in four cities (Baltimore, Nashville, San Antonio, and Seattle) which brought in 76,000 “ballots” from the public. In July 1988 twenty-six delegates from Brown traveled to Moscow for a conference on mutual security, and in November 1989 a second conference on mutual security was held at Brown. The Center supports its projects through workshops, seminars, lectures, and visiting scholars. One of the visiting scholars, spending the first semester of 1991-92 at the Center, was Sergei Khrushchev, son of former leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev