Meanwhile Buchman and his colleagues saw many friends and public figures in the Eastern states of America. News of what had been happening through his work in Europe had already reached many of them. 'New hope for the moral and spiritual regeneration of the German people is held out to the world and to Germans themselves by the Moral Re-Armament movement, as a result of experience during its summer-long conference at Caux,' the New York Times correspondent had written.23

Buchman spent the late winter and spring in California. There he decided to mark his seventieth birthday, 4 June 1948, which was also the tenth anniversary of the launching of Moral Re-Armament, with a full-scale assembly to articulate the need for an ideology for democracy in the Americas. During this winter, too, a former residential club in Los Angeles was bought as a base for operations on the West Coast. The assembly itself was held at Riverside, some fifty miles outside the city.

Eighty-one Senators and Congressmen signed the invitation to the assembly, and a group of Dutch business men chartered a KLM plane to transport the European delegates. From Italy, France and Austria and from various German provinces came politicians from government and opposition who had been at Caux. Others included Denmark's 1947 Prime Minister, a British peer, the President of a regional Miners' Union in Britain and a Papal Chamberlain. From Asia came distinguished Indians, a Buddhist scholar and the former Japanese Ambassador to the United States, Kensuke Horinouchi, recalled before the war because he disagreed with the war party at home, but now re-established as President of the Foreign Training Institute, which was creating Japan's new diplomatic service.

The visitors were welcomed by a message of support from Paul Hoffman, the administrator of the Marshall Plan, who stated, 'You are giving the world the ideological counterpart of the Marshall Plan.'24 After the assembly the European delegates lunched with Secretary of State Marshall and Paul Hoffman in Washington. Marshall told the guests that, while Hoffman's work concerned material things and was an obvious necessity, a spiritual regeneration throughout the world was absolutely vital.25

Buchman stayed on in California after the assembly and then travelled back to Europe. In Paris on 6 August, between trains, he for the first time met Robert Schuman, who had been Prime Minister till the month before. Of this occasion Schuman said, 'Unhappily I had not enough time with Dr Buchman, barely twenty minutes, but he is a personality who made a deep impression on me.'

355