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In 1978, a grassroots campaign for a National Peace Academy propelled a bill backed by then-Sens. Jennings Randolph, D-W.Va., Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., and Spark Matsunaga, D-Hawaii, to establish a U.S. Commission on Proposals for the National Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Matsunaga chaired the commission, which held 12 hearings across the country and heard from more than 300 witnesses. Peace research, the commission concluded in its 1981 report, was a substantive, pragmatic field with scientifically testable theories and hypotheses, but its “translation into readily usable form has been inadequate.”

The three senators introduced a peace academy bill and then-Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Kan., prompted by Mennonites in his district, proposed its counterpart in the House. The lawmakers’ timing, however, was less than ideal. The nuclear freeze movement had taken off with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House, and the peace politics of the time tended to turn on whether Reagan or his Soviet counterparts were most likely to plunge the world into an inferno.

The peace academy proposal went nowhere until 1984, when then-House Foreign Affairs Chairman Dante Fascell, D-Fla., persuaded the Senate Armed Services Committee to include it in the Defense authorization bill. Because Fascell and other academy champions were supporters of Cold War items then on the national security agenda—including missile defense and aid for the Nicaraguan Contras—the Reagan administration mostly held its nose and confined its formal objection to a note saying it opposed the academy on budgetary grounds.

When Congress created and funded the U.S. Institute of Peace anyway, Reagan deferred the money, let pass a 1985 deadline for submitting names for a board of directors to lawmakers, and proposed a slew of changes designed to emasculate the organization. Congress reinstated the funding, reminded the president of his duty to appoint directors, and rejected the administration’s changes, at which point Reagan bowed to the inevitable, albeit in his own style. “In the real world,” he pointedly told the institute’s directors at their first meeting in February 1986, “peace through strength must be our motto.”

Glickman, who now heads the Motion Picture Association of America, said he worried at the time that Reagan’s selection of a board, and their choice of a staff, would subvert the institute’s peace agenda. Today, Glickman says, he looks at the institute’s legacy and “likes to think that’s somewhere where I may have done something to make the world a better place.”