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Such a foundation's most difficult and elusive task would be to wed public policy and private initiative, to maintain a link with the Government without be coming bogged down in bureaucracy or timidity. For in retrospect, perhaps the CIA's most important contribution was not money but unconventional and imaginative ideas, notwithstanding failures. If the new "mechanism" can steer between a too specific, outdated cold war orientation, on the one hand, and an aimless benevolence on the other, it has a truly exciting chance not merely to provide shelter for the orphans but to modify the entire pattern of America's self-projection in the world.
There is need for a philosophical framework for all the U.S. cultural, educational, economic and propaganda activities that are presently scattered, conflicting and unwieldy. Short-term and long-term aims are often confused. The USIA, for instance, which is supposed to promote the U.S. image abroad, is frequently in conflict with State's Educational and Cultural Affairs Bureau, which is supposed to promote longer-range cultural and educational exchanges. It has been suggested that the new body should take over such existing cultural functions; more probably, it should only help rationalize them.
For the rest, it should be concerned with carrying one of the best features of American life, the voluntary organization, into the foreign field—something that has been called "private international relations." It should worry less about day-to-day crises than about the ultimate U.S. interest: the development of human resources through education, economics and politics, for that is the true American ideology. Thus the new agency might well be the best face that America can turn toward the world—and transform the embarrassment of the CIA disclosures into a major forward step.