Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Council on Foreign Relations was founded on the 29th of July, 1921, when its members filed a certification of incorporation in New York City. Its roots trace to discussions at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and an earlier series of meetings that had been taking place in New York since June 1918.
Foreign Affairs is a bi-monthly international affairs journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations since September 1922. It was launched with US$125,000 raised by founding secretary-treasurer Edwin Gay and quickly gained a reputation as the most authoritative American review dealing with international relations.
CFR study group member George Kennan published the influential 1947 article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs, introducing the doctrine of containment that shaped U.S. policy across seven presidential administrations. William Bundy also credited CFR study groups with helping lay the intellectual framework for the Marshall Plan and NATO.
Kissinger was chosen by CFR to head a study session on nuclear weapons and foreign policy following a 1950s speech by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He spent an academic year at Council headquarters, and the book he published from that research in 1957 topped national bestseller lists and launched his public career.
CFR chairman David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, along with John J. McCloy, persuaded President Carter to admit the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, into the United States for lymphoma treatment in November 1979. Carter later recorded in his memoir White House Diary that this lobbying effort directly precipitated the Iran hostage crisis.
In 2019, the Council on Foreign Relations accepted a $12 million gift from Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire with reported close links to Vladimir Putin. Fifty-five international relations scholars wrote to CFR's board and president Richard N. Haass, describing the donation as an effort to launder Blavatnik's image in the West using funds tied to the Kremlin.