As the legend goes, two cousins by marriage picked up a Washington newspaper one day in 1943, noted that the Russians had beaten the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad, and forecast that the United States would emerge as one of the winners of World War II.

While this was reason enough to exhale, or perhaps anticipate a celebratory end to the bloodiest war in human history, the men were pensive. If there was to be a lasting peace after the war, thoughtful people would have to figure out a way to “win” that peace, they knew. The failure to guarantee security following World War I—a failure that aided the rise of fascism and Adolf Hitler—had plunged the world into conflict yet again. How could we avoid that scenario this time around, they asked each other?

The cousins decided the world needed a well-educated cadre of academics, diplomats, and teachers to help keep it from tearing itself apart again. So they— Paul Nitze and Christian Herter—opened an independent graduate school in Washington, D.C., called the School of Advanced International Studies a year later. They welcomed 23 people into its inaugural class.

Nitze would emerge as the face of the new institution. Eventually, it would be dubbed the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Though Herter is lesser known, he should be no less remembered, say many educators and leaders at SAIS. Herter is credited with setting the tone for SAIS’ approach to the study of foreign policy.

Herter’s long association with politics—he had been a U.S. congressman and would go on to become governor of Massachusetts and the secretary of state under Dwight D. Eisenhower—had taught him the importance of foreign policy and its practical application: diplomacy. He and Nitze agreed that the world would suffer if the U.S. isolated itself after the war. They advocated for an outward-looking and open-handed diplomatic strategy that would help the nation project its power peacefully.

“Herter was an internationalist at a time when internationalism wasn’t very popular, especially in the years between the world wars,” says Francis J. Gavin, director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS and Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor. “He believed in an engaged foreign policy. He created SAIS in part because he wanted the United States to remain engaged with the world, and he wanted to prepare the next generation to be engaged in that way.”

In the years to come, as SAIS grew and the nation entered into an uneasy nuclear peace with the Soviet Union, Herter’s values came to the fore.

“SAIS was a Cold War institution,” says Michael Mandelbaum, a professor emeritus of American Foreign Policy; he held the Christian A. Herter Professorship from 1990 until his retirement in 2016. “That informed its ideas on diplomacy. I gave a talk about Herter’s legacy that explored that connection, though I never met him. [Herter died in 1966.] He had an effect on how we’ve gone about teaching foreign policy.”