ANNIVERSARY OF KING ALEKSANDAR'S ASSASSINATION (2): The oak tree witness to a country's drama

From the publication by Ambassador Dragan Bisenic "The American chair of King Aleksandar"

Hamilton Fish Armstrong was born on April 7, 1893 in New York in a distinguished and wealthy family. His grandfather was Secretary of State under President Grant. He started collecting aid for Serbia in 1912 as a Princeton student when he organized a lottery to buy cars to help Serbia, which was then in the Balkan wars. He did this together with his best friend, Allen Dulles, who between the two wars would be a member of the Board of Directors and a lawyer of the American-Yugoslav Society, which would be chaired by Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Dulles' role will be extremely important when, as head of the CIA under President Eisenhower, he becomes one of the creators of military and economic aid to socialist Yugoslavia.

Hamilton Fish Armstrong graduated in 1916 from Princeton. After graduation, he worked as a journalist for the business section of The New Republic magazine, and then in 1917 he joined the army. He became a military attache in the Serbian military mission in the USA on December 1, 1917. In November 1918, he was assigned to the post of assistant military attache in Serbia, and then in January 1919, he became the American military attache in Belgrade. After being demobilized in June 1919, he worked as a special correspondent for Eastern Europe. The time he spent in Serbia marked the beginning of his lifelong interest in foreign policy, and in 1921 he became involved in the work of the newly formed Council on Foreign Relations, created to "ensure that the growing American role in the world is responsible and based on knowledge."

In 1922, at the request of Harvard professor Archibald Curry Coolidge, editor-in-chief of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, Armstrong accepted the position of executive editor. He succeeded him as editor-in-chief in 1928 and held that position until his retirement in 1972. Armstrong was also the first executive director of the Council on Foreign Relations between 1922 and 1928. As editor he traveled frequently, visiting important statesmen, including Aleksandar Karadjordjevic, Raymond Poincaré, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. He loved to travel, to meet leading statesmen in the world, from where he drew vitality, attractiveness, and above all relevance for his magazine. Every year he visited Yugoslavia, first King Alexander, and then Prince-regent Pavle Karađorđević.

All the time of his activity until 1941, he was active in the Fund for Aid to Serbia, which operated from 1912 to 1922, and later also in humanitarian organizations that helped Yugoslavia. He was the president of the American-Serbian Society and in 1922 he played a decisive role in winning over the Carnegie Foundation for the decision to build the University Library in Belgrade. He was also the creator of the policy "Balkans - for the Balkan peoples", which he presented in his book New Balkans.

Armstrong was the secretary of the Fund for Aid to Serbia, which in 1923 built the American House for Aid to Yugoslav Children left orphaned in the war in Selc, near Crikvenica, and financed the memorial that was erected in 1928 in memory of the doctors and other medical personnel who gave their lives for Serbia.

He received numerous awards for his selfless help to Serbia. During his stay in Serbia, he was awarded the Serbian Order of the Red Cross (1918), the Order of St. Sava of the fifth order (1918), and then became the bearer of the Order of the White Eagle with Swords (1919). Later, he was awarded the Order of Saint Sava of the First Order (1926).

He wrote a lot, publishing numerous articles in magazines, 49 of which were for Foreign Affairs. He also published 13 books, while he edited five others. A large part of his works refers to Serbia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans. He was particularly involved in the research of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War, so in a series of articles in American newspapers, magazines, and Foreign Affairs, which he published after 1926, he documented that Serbia was not responsible for the Sarajevo assassination, nor for the outbreak of the war. He also published a number of articles about King Aleksandar Karađorđević, as well as the importance of Kosovo for Serbia. 

Hamilton Fish Armstrong was a member of numerous important American committees and bodies. The most important of these was his chairmanship of the War and Peace Study Groups of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1937. These groups became the State Department's Peace Planning Groups that shaped the postwar world, of which Fish Armstrong was again co-chairman. In those groups, the question of whether or not to rebuild Yugoslavia as a state after the war was discussed, where the prevailing view was that Yugoslavia needed to be rebuilt. It can be said that these groups played a decisive role in the creation of the world after World War II, and because of this, the Council on Foreign Relations has gained a reputation as one of the informal groups that run the world. It is precisely because of these groups that the Council on Foreign Relations is considered the "secret rulers of the world".

In addition to this, he was a member of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Refugees, a three-time delegate to the International Study Conference (1929, 1933, and 1935), a member of the board of directors and twice president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, president of the New York Library. In 1944, he was special US ambassador to London in the rank of minister, before becoming special adviser to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, he was one of the three leading US representatives at the San Francisco conference.

He was awarded the Order of the Crown of Romania (1924) and the Order of the White Lion of Czechoslovakia (1937). In the same year, he received the French Legion of Honor and became a Knight of the British Empire in 1972. He was awarded honorary doctorates at Brown (1942), Yale (1957), Basel (1960), Princeton (1961), Columbia (1961) and Harvard (1963). 

Armstrong was married three times. The first time with Helen Byrne in 1918, with whom he had a daughter, and they divorced in September 1938, after he discovered Helen's relationship with his best friend Walter Lippmann. Later that year, after Lippmann also divorced, Helen married him, and the two friends never spoke for the rest of their lives. Armstrong remarried in 1945 to Carmen Barnes, but that marriage also ended in 1951, the same year Armstrong married Christa von Tippelskirch. After half a century as an editor, he retired from the magazine Foreign Affairs in 1972.

When he died on April 24, 1973, at the age of 80, then-US President Richard Nixon issued the following statement: "Hamilton Fish Armstrong was a distinguished scholar, diplomat, and editor. His vast knowledge combined with his extensive practical experience made him a valuable advisor to several generations of American leaders. As an inspiring editor of the magazine Foreign Affairs, he gave a strong push for a more peaceful and stable world. Mrs. Nixon and I send our deepest condolences to his family."

Secretary of State in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, announced on the occasion of his death that Armstrong was his "friend and inspiration" and that he was "urban, wise, measured and open to different opinions". On April 26, 1973, the St. Petersburg Times wrote in its obituary that he was a "political authority" and that he "counted among his friends many of the world's leading statesmen," and the ability to include many of them as contributors to his magazine "brought him in the focus of international political activities".

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Most likely, we will never know exactly why this chair was so important to Peter II Karađorđević, so he moved it so carefully with him from Belgrade to London and Cairo. Memory of father? Pledge? Remember the childhood addiction to objects? 

King Peter II brought the chair from London to Cairo in September 1943. Namely, the refugee government had a plan to permanently move from London to Cairo, in the belief that the allied invasion would follow in the Adriatic and that the king would return to the country with the allied troops. But when, after the Tehran Conference, on December 10, 1943, lying in bed, Churchill announced to King Peter that the Allies had placed their cards on Tito, it became clear to him that there was no to returning to the country, and he probably no longer saw the point in carrying this chair any further. This is how this oak witness to the drama of a country remained in Egypt.

When I informed the president of the Council about the existence of the chair, he said that it is probably the only remaining piece of such chairs in the world and asked for a photo since this year marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Council for Foreign Relations. In addition, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Foreign Affairs magazine, as well as the 140th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Serbia and the USA. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia is planning an exhibition dedicated to Hamilton Fish Armstrong and it will be titled "Chair" after this rare piece of furniture that summarizes the destinies of the truly great people of a generation who built Serbian-American friendship. It will be possible to see the life path of our forgotten American friend and the oak of Cairo, the witness of our broken history who, by chance, stands before us again.

Today, this chair is located in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.

The End