Memories of the Roman Empire have accompanied the European Union since its inception with the 1950 Schuman Plan. Whereas the project's main architect, Jean Monnet, was a forward-looking pragmatist, several other key protagonists, in particular Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman, came from the heartlands of the Holy Roman Empire and associated it with a positive legacy. In a record kept at the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe, American diplomat John J. McCloy, a key witness and promoter of early European integration, noted at the time of the Schuman Plan discussions that "Adenauer was something like a Holy Roman Emperor (...) Adenauer had a genuine belief in the idea of Western European unity. (...) He viewed the Holy Roman Empire as one of the greatest eras in history."