Hamilton Fish Armstrong was born, the youngest of seven children, April 7, 1893, in a house on West 10th Street. His parents, D. Maitland Armstrong (1836-1918) and Helen Neilson (1845-1927) named him for his great uncle, who was Grant's Secretary of State. His father was an artist, working especially with stained glass, and a one-time Consul General to Italy. Armstrong grew up in New York City and received his education at Gilman Country School in Baltimore, Maryland, and at Princeton University from which he received the A.B. in 1916.

Following his graduation Armstrong worked in the business department at The New Republic before entering the army in 1917. Commissioned a second lieutenant in October 1917, Armstrong advanced to first lieutenant and became Military Attache to the Serbian War Mission to the United States in December 1917. In November 1918, he received orders to Belgrade to become Assistant Military Attache to Serbia where in January 1919 he became Acting Military Attache.

Upon his military discharge in June 1919, Armstrong returned to New York to work on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post, becoming the paper's special correspondent to Eastern Europe in 1921. His time in Serbia kindled in him a lifelong interest in foreign affairs, and in 1921 he became involved with the newly-formed Council on Foreign Relations, created to ensure that the United States' growing role in world affairs be informed and responsible. In 1922 Armstrong accepted a position as managing editor of the Council's magazine, Foreign Affairs, at the request of editor Archibald Cary Coolidge. Upon Coolidge's death in 1928, Armstrong became editor, a position he held until his retirement in 1972. Armstrong also served as the first Executive Director of the Council (1922-1928) and as a Council director from 1928 until 1972.

As editor, Armstrong travelled frequently, visiting with policymakers including King Alexander of Yugoslavia, Raymond Poincaré, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Neville Chamberlain. He was also well acquainted with many prominent Americans, such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Henry A. Kissinger. He belonged to many important committees and foundations: member of the President's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees; three times delegate to the International Studies Conference (1929, 1933, 1935); trustee and twice president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation; trustee and once president of the New York Society Library; and trustee of the New York International House.

Armstrong held many prominent positions during the Second World War. From 1942-44, he served on the United States State Department's Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policies, which produced the original plans for the United Nations. In 1944, he became the special assistant to the United States ambassador in London with the personal rank of minister, before serving in 1944 and 1945 as special adviser to Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, working on the charter for the United Nations. At the San Francisco Conference in 1945, he was one of three senior advisers to the United States delegation.

Armstrong wrote prolifically, penning numerous magazine articles–forty-nine for Foreign Affairs alone–and thirteen books (he edited five others). His books include The New Balkans (1926), Where the East Begins (1929), Hitler's Reich: The First Phase (1933), Europe Between Wars? (1934), Can We Be Neutral? (1936) with Allen W. Dulles, "We or They:" Two Worlds in Conflict (1937), When There Is No Peace (1939), Can America Stay Neutral? (1939) with Allen W. Dulles, Chronology of Failure (1940), The Calculated Risk (1947), Tito and Goliath (1951), Those Days (1963), and Peace and Counterpeace: From Wilson to Hitler (1971). He edited The Book of New York Verse (1918), Foreign Affairs Bibliography (1933) with William L. Langer, The Foreign Policy of the Powers (1935), The Foreign Affairs Reader (1947), and The Foreign Affairs Fifty-Year Reader (1972).

His activities received much recognition, both at home and abroad. His time in Serbia earned him the Order of the Serbian Red Cross (1918), the Order of St. Sava Fifth Class (1918), and the Chevalier of Order of the White Eagle with Swords (1919). He was awarded the Order of the Crown (Rumania) in 1924 and the Order of the White Lion of Czechoslovakia in 1937. In that year he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor of France and became a commander in 1947. He was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1972. He received honorary degrees from Brown (1942), Yale (1957), the University of Basel (1960), Princeton (1961), Columbia (1963), and Harvard (1963).

Armstrong married three times. Helen MacGregor Byrne became his wife in 1918, and they had one daughter, Helen MacGregor (later Mrs. Edwin Gamble) on September 3, 1923. Armstrong and Byrne divorced in 1938. Armstrong married Carman Barnes in 1945, a marriage which ended in a 1951 divorce. In that same year Armstrong married Christa von Tippelskirch. Armstrong retired from Foreign Affairs in 1972, the fiftieth year of its publication, and died after a long illness on April 24, 1973, at the age of 80.

Henry R. Labouisse (1904-1987) was a distinguished American diplomat and international public servant. He served as director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from 1954 to 1958 and as executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) from 1965 to 1979. He also served as a United States government official working on the formation and implementation of foreign economic policies during World War II and the 1960s. Henry Richardson Labouisse was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 11, 1904. He was one of two sons of Henry Richardson Labouisse and Frances Devereaux (Huger) Labouisse. He married Elizabeth Scriven Clark on June 29, 1935 and they had one daughter, Anne (Farnsworth). Elizabeth Labouisse died in 1945. Labouisse remarried on November 19, 1954, to Eve Curie, daughter of the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. Curie was a renowned author and journalist. They met in 1951, while he was on the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) staff and she was a secretary with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Labouisse earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1926 and graduated from Harvard University Law School in 1929. He was admitted into the New York State bar the following year. Labouisse was an associate and member of the New York City law firm Taylor, Blanc, Capron and Marsh, and its successor firm Mitchell, Taylor, Capron & Marsh, from 1929 to 1941. When the United States entered the Second World War, Labouisse chose to serve his country by accepting a position in the State Department. He began there in 1941 and rose through a variety of positions over the next several years, most concerned with forming and implementing foreign economic policy. His first position was as assistant chief of the Division of Defense Materials in December 1941. He was promoted to chief of the division in February 1943. Later in 1943, he was made deputy director of the Office of Foreign Economic Coordination, and in January 1944 he was appointed chief of the Eastern Hemisphere Division. In March 1944, he was transferred to the Office of European Affairs, where he was special assistant to the director. Labouisse was appointed chief of the Foreign Economic Administration mission to France in November 1944 and served concurrently as minister for economic affairs at the American Embassy. He became special assistant to Under Secretary of State, William L. Clayton, in November 1945. Through his work with the undersecretary, and his previous work coordinating aid to various European reconstruction points, Labouisse played an important role in the aid efforts that culminated in the Marshall Plan. In July 1946, he returned to his role as special assistant to the director of the Office of European Affairs. Labouisse then served as the principal State Department officer working with the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) during the initial implementation of the Marshall Plan. He traveled to Paris in March 1948 as head of the mission to establish the ECA as the agency to administer United States economic aid to Europe. He returned to Europe in May 1948 as the head of the United States delegation to the Geneva meeting of the Economic Commission for Europe. Labouisse then served as coordinator of foreign aid and assistance in the State Department from June 1948 until October 1949, when he became director of British Commonwealth and Northern European Affairs. He held this post until September 1951. He began arguing for a tougher stance on aid in 1949, one that would force European economies to adjust to market forces. In September 1951, Labouisse was named head of the ECA's mission to France, journeying to Paris as head of the Marshall Plan mission. When the ECA was replaced by the Mutual Security Administration and the Foreign Operations Administration, Labouisse headed the Paris missions of both agencies from 1951 to June 1954. Labouisse left United States government service in 1954 to work for the United Nations. He was appointed director of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in June 1954 at the request of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. The UNRWA was established in December 1949 to carry out relief and works projects in cooperation with local governments. When Labouisse assumed his directorship, the UNRWA was responsible for the care of 887,000 Arab refugees who had fled Palestine in 1948. Labouisse oversaw the improvement of the standard of living in the refugee camps, raised the standards of health, education, and vocational training, and established a grant program that allowed refugees to make a down payment on a farm or shop. He left the UNRWA in 1958. Labouisse was appointed as a consultant to the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development in May 1959. He headed a survey mission to Venezuela in September 1959 to assist in the formulation of a program of economic development. He was recalled from that mission by Hammarskjöld to serve as special advisor to the secretary-general during the Congo crisis in 1960. In December 1960, Labouisse was appointed as the International Bank's special representative for Africa and also headed a mission to Uganda to study economic problems. He returned to United States government service in January 1961, when he was appointed Director of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) by President John F. Kennedy, which was created to coordinate nonmilitary foreign aid programs. Labouisse had been considered for the post by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in February 1959, but his appointment was rejected by Republican national chairman Meade Alcorn on the grounds that Labouisse had registered as a Democrat several years earlier. In May 1961, President Kennedy began to work with Congress to reorganize the foreign aid programs into a single agency. The ICA was eliminated during the reorganization, and Labouisse was named United States Ambassador to Greece. He held that post from 1962 to 1965. Labouisse was appointed the second Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in June 1965, following the death of the first director, Maurice Pate. During his directorship, Labouisse oversaw the emergency relief efforts for several major conflicts and naturals disasters, and fought to alleviate poor conditions in developing countries. UNICEF provided relief to both sides in the Nigerian civil war in 1968 and to Cambodia in 1979, after the country was invaded by Vietnam. Labouisse retired from his position with UNICEF in December 1979, although he continued to work as a consultant on the Cambodia and Thailand operations for most of 1980. After his retirement, Labouisse continued to be active in various organizations, including serving as Chairman of the Board of the American Farm School in Thessaloniki Greece from 1980 to 1985 and as trustee of the school from 1965 to 1985. Labouisse died on March 25, 1987.