Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was born on Andrew Carnegie's seventy-fifth birthday. On the 25th of November 1910, the Scottish-American industrialist announced a gift of $10 million worth of first mortgage bonds to create a new institution with a singular, audacious aim: to hasten the end of war itself. The interest income from those bonds would fund a think tank unlike any other. Carnegie charged its trustees, in a deed of gift presented in Washington on the 14th of December 1910, to use the fund to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization."

  More than a century later, that institution still operates. It has sent scholars to peace conferences, published the book that gave the world the word genocide, helped draft the United Nations Charter, launched a center in Moscow only to watch Russia force it closed, and been ranked the number one think tank in the world. How does an organization built on a steel baron's fortune stay relevant through two world wars, the Cold War, and the digital age? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Carnegie's Vision, Root's Stewardship

  ›

  Elihu Root was not an obvious choice to lead a peace organization. He had served as Secretary of War under President McKinley, then as Secretary of State, and as a senator from New York. Yet it was precisely that experience at the levers of American power that made him appealing to Carnegie. "I am drawn more to this cause than to any," Carnegie had written in 1907, and he wanted his first president to be someone who understood how nations actually made decisions.

  Root accepted the role and shaped the Endowment's early identity as a serious, elite institution. The founding trustees reflected that ambition. They included Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard University; Robert S. Brookings, whose name would later grace a rival think tank; Joseph Hodges Choate, the former US Ambassador to Great Britain; former secretary of state John W. Foster; and Henry Smith Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. This was not a gathering of idealists. It was a gathering of operators.

  Root was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912, two years into his tenure. He served until 1925, giving the fledgling institution fifteen years of steady direction before handing over to his successor, Nicholas Murray Butler.

• 3. War, Libraries, and the Law of Nations

  ›

  When America entered World War I in 1917, the Carnegie Endowment's trustees unanimously declared that the most effective means of promoting lasting international peace was to prosecute the war against Germany to final victory for democracy. The declaration sat oddly with an institution founded to abolish war, but it reflected the belief that some conflicts were necessary preconditions for a lasting peace.

  In December 1918, Carnegie Endowment Secretary James Brown Scott and four other Endowment personnel, including the historian James T. Shotwell, sailed with President Woodrow Wilson on the USS George Washington to join the peace negotiations in France. The Endowment was not a bystander; it put its people at the table.

  Back home, and in the devastated territories of Europe, the Endowment funded libraries in Belgium, France, and Serbia, in cities badly damaged by the fighting. It also launched the International Mind Alcove program in 1918, placing special collections on international issues in libraries across the United States and other countries. The program ran for four decades, concluding in 1958.

  The Endowment's most lasting legal contribution from these years came on the 14th of July 1923, when the Hague Academy of International Law formally opened in the Peace Palace at The Hague. The Academy had been an initiative of the Endowment. The Peace Palace itself had been built by the Carnegie Foundation in the Netherlands in 1913 to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration and a library of international law. That building, and the Academy within it, remains a center of international legal education to this day.

• 4. Butler, Genocide, and the United Nations

  ›

  Nicholas Murray Butler became the Endowment's second president in 1925 and would hold the role for twenty years. Within months of taking office, his board approved an unusual proposal: offering aid to modernize the Vatican Library. From 1926 to 1939, the Carnegie Endowment spent some $200,000 on that endeavor. Butler also played a role in the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the multilateral treaty that formally renounced war as an instrument of national policy. For that work, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, making the Endowment the home of two Nobel laureates in its first three decades.

  The Endowment's most consequential publication came in November 1944, when it published Raphael Lemkin's book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe." That volume was the first to bring the word genocide into the global lexicon. Lemkin had coined the term to describe the systematic destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups, and it was the Carnegie Endowment that put the book in front of the world.

  The following April, James T. Shotwell, director of the Endowment's Division of Economics and History, served as chairman of the semiofficial consultants to the US delegation at the San Francisco conference to draft the United Nations Charter. Shotwell pushed successfully for an amendment establishing a permanent United Nations Commission on Human Rights, a body that still exists. Butler stepped down in December 1945 after twenty years, the last living member of Andrew Carnegie's original board.

• 5. Alger Hiss and the Postwar Turbulence

  ›

  John Foster Dulles was elected chairman of the board of trustees to succeed Butler in that role, serving until fellow board member Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States in 1952 and appointed Dulles Secretary of State. The Endowment's board was a revolving door between the institution and the highest levels of American foreign policy.

  Alger Hiss succeeded Butler as president of the Endowment in 1946. His tenure lasted only three years. In 1949, Whittaker Chambers denounced Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union, and Hiss resigned. James T. Shotwell stepped in as interim president while the institution steadied itself. The episode became one of the defining confrontations of early Cold War America, and the Carnegie Endowment was at its center.

  Joseph E. Johnson, a historian and former State Department official, was appointed by the board of trustees in 1950 to take the helm and steer the organization through the McCarthy era. In 1947, the Endowment had moved its headquarters closer to the United Nations in New York City, while its Washington office at Peter Parker House became a subsidiary branch. That New York phase would last until the early 1970s.

• 6. Foreign Policy, Moscow, and the Global Turn

  ›

  Thomas L. Hughes became the sixth president of the Carnegie Endowment in 1970 and promptly moved headquarters back to Washington, D.C., closing the European center in Geneva in the process. Eight years later, in the spring of 1978, the Endowment acquired full ownership of Foreign Policy magazine. Under Carnegie's stewardship, the publication shifted from a quarterly academic journal to a bi-monthly glossy covering the intersection of globalization and international policy. The Endowment published Foreign Policy for thirty years before selling it to The Washington Post in 2008.

  Morton Abramowitz became the seventh president in 1991 and turned the Endowment's attention toward Russia in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. The Carnegie Moscow Center opened in 1994 as a platform for Russian scholar-commentators working in a newly open intellectual environment. The center aimed to promote disinterested social science research and provide a free forum for debate on national and global issues. From 2006 until December 2008, it was led by Rose Gottemoeller, the former Deputy Secretary General of NATO. Dmitri Trenin headed the center in its final years.

  Then came February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. In April of that year, the Russian government ordered the Moscow Center to close. In April 2023, Russia's Ministry of Justice added the center to its list of "foreign agents," and in July 2024, the organization was designated "undesirable" by the Russian state. Carnegie responded by opening the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, Germany, in April 2023, which now publishes the digital journal Carnegie Politika.

• 7. Building a Global Network

  ›

  Jessica Mathews joined the Carnegie Endowment as its eighth president in May 1997 with a clear ambition: to make Carnegie the world's first genuinely multinational think tank. She would serve for eighteen years, longer than any president since Nicholas Murray Butler. In 2000, she announced the creation of the Migration Policy Institute, headed by Demetrios Papademetriou, which became the first independent think tank focused entirely on international migration.

  The global expansion accelerated after 2006. The Carnegie Middle East Center opened in Beirut, Lebanon, in November of that year. Carnegie Europe followed in Brussels in 2007, founded by Fabrice Pothier. The Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy was established at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2010. In late 2011, in partnership with the al-Farabi Kazakh National University, the Al-Farabi Carnegie Program on Central Asia opened in Kazakhstan. Carnegie India then opened in New Delhi in April 2016. In October 2020, the Beirut center was renamed the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, in honor of the scholar Malcolm H. Kerr.

  Matthews stepped down in February 2015. William J. Burns, the former US Deputy Secretary of State, became the ninth president before departing when President Biden nominated him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a former California Supreme Court justice and Stanford professor, became president on the 1st of November 2021. In the University of Pennsylvania's 2019 Global Go To Think Tanks Report, Carnegie was ranked the number one think tank in the world, a standing that reflects how far the institution had traveled from the solitary Washington office Andrew Carnegie funded on his seventy-fifth birthday.