Source: Boiling Frogs Post
Andrew Gavin Marshall
‘The Ultimate Networking & Socializing institution among the American elite’
The following is a sneak peak from a chapter in Andrew Gavin Marshall’s upcoming book funded through The People’s Book Project.
It is quite apparent in the history of America from the late 19th century and into the 20th
century, that the Rockefeller family has wielded massive influence in
shaping the socio-political economic landscape of society. However, up
until the first half of the 20th century came to a close,
there were several other large dominant families with whom the
Rockefellers shared power and purpose, notably among them, the Morgans.
As the century progressed, their interests aligned further still, and
following World War II, the Rockefellers became the dominant group in
America, and arguably, the world. Of course, there was the
well-established business links between the major families emerging out
of the American Industrial Revolution going into the 20th
century, followed with the establishment of the major foundations
designed to engage in social engineering. It was with the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) that the changing dynamics of the
Morgan-Rockefeller clan became most apparent.
As discussed earlier in this book,
the Council on Foreign Relations is the ultimate networking and
socializing institution among the American elite. The influence of the
CFR is unparalleled among other think tanks. One study revealed that
between 1945 and 1972, roughly 45% of the top foreign policy officials
who served in the United States government were also members of the
Council, leading one prominent member to once state that membership in
the Council is essentially a “rite of passage” for being a member of the
foreign policy establishment. One Council member, Theodore White,
explained that the Council’s “roster of members has for a generation,
under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, been the chief
recruiting ground for Cabinet-level officials in Washington.”[1]
The CIA, as previously examined, is
also no stranger to this network, since more often than not in the first
several decades of the existence of the Agency, its leaders were drawn
from Council membership, such as Allen Dulles, John A. McCone, Richard
Helms, William Colby, and George H.W. Bush. As some researchers have
examined:
The influential but private Council,
composed of several hundred of the country’s top political, military,
business, and academic leaders has long been the CIA’s principal
“constituency” in the American public. When the agency has needed
prominent citizens to front for its proprietary (cover) companies or for
other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members.[2]
Roughly 42% of the top foreign policy
positions in the Truman administration were filled by Council members,
with 40% in the Eisenhower administration, 51% of the Kennedy
administration, and 57% of the Johnson administration, many of whom were
holdovers from the Kennedy administration.[3]
The Council has had and
continues to have enormous influence in the mainstream media, through
which it is able to propagate its ideology, advance its agendas, and
conceal its influence. In 1972, three out of ten directors and five out
of nine executives of the New York Times were Council members. In the same year, one out of four editorial executives and four of nine directors of the Washington Post
were also Council members, including its President, Katharine Graham,
as well as the Vice-President Osborn Elliott, who was also
editor-in-chief of Newsweek. Of both Time Magazine and Newsweek, almost half of their directors in 1972 were also Council members.[4]
The Council also has extensive ties
to the other major American think tanks, most especially the Brookings
Institution, as well as the RAND Corporation, the Hudson Institute, the
Foreign Policy Association, and of course, the special-purpose
foundations such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of
which fifteen of its twenty-one trustees (as of 1971) were also Council
members, and its president from 1950 to 1971, Joseph E. Johnson, was
also a director of the Council during the same time period.[5]
The Council and the major
philanthropic foundations have had extensive ties not only to each
other, but in working together in constructing research and programs of
study in foreign affairs. The State Department undertook a study of 191
university-connected centers for foreign affairs research, which
revealed that the largest sources of funding came from the Ford
Foundation (which funded 107 of the 191 centers), the federal government
(which funded 67 centers), the Rockefeller Foundation (18 centers), and
the Carnegie Corporation (17 centers), and that, “for eleven of the top
twelve universities with institutes of international studies, Ford is
the principal source of funding.”[6] These foundations, aside from being
major sources of funding for the Council throughout the years from its
origins, also share extensive leadership ties with the Council. At the
top of the list is the Rockefeller Foundation, which in 1971 had
fourteen out of nineteen of its directors also being members of the
Council; the Carnegie Corporation followed with ten out of seventeen;
then came the Ford Foundation with seven out of sixteen; and the
Rockefeller Brothers Fund with six out of eleven board members also
being members of the Council. It should also be noted that the Carnegie
network extended beyond the Carnegie Corporation, and also included the
Carnegie Endowment, the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. From its founding
until 1972, one-fourth of all the Council’s directors had served as
trustees or directors of at least one of the several Carnegie
foundations. John J. McCloy had served as chairman of both the Council
and the Ford Foundation at the same time, from the 1950s until the late
60s.[7]
Of all the networks associated with
the Council, the most highly represented is the New York financial
oligarchy. This broadly refers to the capitalist class, and more
specifically the elite financial and banking groups. In a 1969 survey it
was found that seven percent of the total membership of the Council are
drawn from the propertied rich, with 33% more being top executives and
directors of major corporations. Roughly 11% of Council members had
relatives who were also members, and the most common occupation for
members of the Council, at 40%, was in business. When adding in media
corporations, the number reaches nearly 50%, with less than 1%
representing labour or working class organizations.[8]
When it comes to Council leadership,
the officers are almost exclusively drawn from membership of the ruling
capitalist class, with 22% of Council directors having relatives who
were also Council members. Financing for the Council has also been
largely drawn from this group, primarily from foundations and
corporations, as well as various investments and subscriptions to Foreign Affairs.
When the Council got its own building in 1929, a Council director, Paul
Warburg, contributed a significant portion, and John D. Rockefeller II
contributed even more. When the Council moved into a larger building in
1945, the house was donated by Mrs. Harold Pratt, whose husband had made
his fortune from the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil enterprise, and John D.
Rockefeller II contributed $150,000 for upkeep of the house. Between
1936 and 1946, funding from the major foundations averaged roughly
$90,000 per year, mostly from the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Carnegie Corporation, who continued their funding into the 1950s, 60s
and 70s. In 1953, the Ford Foundation made its first major contribution
to the Council at $100,000 for a study of US-Soviet relations which was
chaired by John J. McCloy. In that same year, McCloy became Chairman of
the Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller-owned Chase
Bank.[9]
Among the top corporations and banks
represented in the Council (as of 1969/70) were: U.S. Steel (founded by
J.P. Morgan in 1901 after acquiring Andrew Carnegie’s steel companies
for a hefty sum), Mobil Oil (now merged with Exxon), Standard Oil of New
Jersey (later to be Exxon Mobil), IBM, ITT, General Electric, Du Pont,
Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan and Co. (now merged with Chase into
J.P. Morgan Chase), First National City Bank, Chemical Bank, Brown
Brothers Harriman, Bank of New York, Morgan Stanley, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman
Brothers, and several others.[10]
The New York financial oligarchy
could previously be divided into separate groups, notably among them,
the Rockefeller group, Morgan group, Harriman group, the Lehman-Goldman,
Sachs group, and a few select others. The Rockefeller group included:
Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Bank of New York, Equitable Life,
Metropolitan Life, Mobil Oil, Kuhn, Loeb, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and
McCloy (law firm), and Standard Oil. The Morgan group included: J.P.
Morgan and Co., Morgan Stanley, New York Life, Mutual of New York,
Davis, Polk (law firm), U.S. Steel, General Electric, and IBM. As
Laurence Shoup and William Minter examined in their book on the Council:
At the Council’s origin and until the
early 1950s, the most prominent place within the Council was held by
men tied to Morgan interests. Since the 1950s the Rockefeller interests
have taken the major role in directing Council affairs.[11]
The Council, while always
representative of Rockefeller interests, had seemed to officially pass
from Morgan hands into those of the Rockefeller family in 1953. Three of
John D. Rockefeller II’s sons, John D. III, Nelson, and David joined
the Council in the late 30s and early 40s, and David became a director
in 1949. From 1953 until 1971, George S. Franklin became executive
director of the Council. Franklin was a college roommate of David
Rockefeller’s, and they were related by marriage, and he had worked at
the law firm of Davis, Polk (within the Morgan group), before becoming
an assistant to Nelson Rockefeller. In 1950, David Rockefeller became a
vice-president, and John J. McCloy, a long-time representative of the
Rockefeller group, became chairman of the Council in 1953, as well as
chairman of the Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. It could also be said that the
Rockefeller group overtook the Ford group around this time, as
indicative of McCloy taking position as chairman of the Ford Foundation
in the same year (while also being a trustee of the Rockefeller
Foundation). In the following years, several leadership positions in the
Council were drawn from organizations within the Rockefeller group.
John W. Davis, Robert Roosa, and Bill Moyers were all Council leaders
who were connected with the Rockefeller Foundation.[12]
As the years and decades passed, the
Rockefeller group became even more powerful and dominant within the
American establishment and indeed around the world, firmly establishing
itself alongside the Rothschild family as the principle dynastic rulers
of the globalized world. Of course, there were and still are several
connections between these dynastic ruling families, perhaps so much so
that it may be difficult to entirely differentiate between them. Both
were involved in the founding and remain involved in the leadership of
the Bilderberg Group. In the 1970s, however, it became apparent that the
Rockefellers had certainly become the most influential dynasty in
America, if not the world (as America was and remains the imperial
hegemon of the world). More specifically, David Rockefeller arose as
perhaps the most influential man in America, if not the world.
David Rockefeller graduated from
Harvard in 1936, and then went to school at the London School of
Economics, where he first met John F. Kennedy, and had even dated JKF’s
sister, Kathleen.[13] During World War II, David Rockefeller served in
North Africa and France, working for military intelligence.[14] In 1947,
he became a member of the board of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, a major international think tank, a job that was
offered to him by the Carnegie’s President, Alger Hiss. Other members of
the board included John Foster Dulles, who in 1953 would become
Secretary of State; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in 1953 would become
President; and Thomas J. Watson, the CEO of IBM.[15] Thomas J. Watson
had previously overseen IBM’s deep business relationship with Hitler in
providing the technological machinery for organizing the Holocaust.[16]
In 1949, David joined the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. In
1946, he had joined Chase Bank, and through the years rose up to
becoming President in 1960, and became Chairman and CEO of Chase
Manhattan in 1969.
David Rockefeller had long family
ties to the Dulles brothers, whom he knew personally since his college
years.[17] Allen Dulles had been the CIA Director and John Foster Dulles
was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. David was also associated with
Richard Helms, former top CIA official, as well as Archibald Roosevelt,
Jr., a former CIA agent who worked with Chase Manhattan, and whose
brother, Kermit Roosevelt was another CIA agent who had been responsible
for organizing the 1953 coup in Iran.[18] David Rockefeller also
developed close ties with a former CIA agent, William Bundy, who was
close to CIA Director Allen Dulles, and who later served in both the
Defense Department and the State Department in the JFK and Lyndon
Johnson administrations, where he was a pivotal adviser on matters
related to the Vietnam War. In 1971, one year following David
Rockefeller becoming Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, Bundy
was invited by David to become the editor of Foreign Affairs,
the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, which he
then ran for 11 years.[19] David had also been extensively briefed on
covert intelligence operations by various CIA division chiefs at the
direction of Director Allen Dulles, David’s “friend and confidante.”[20]
Thus, in the early 1970s, David
Rockefeller has risen to a position of great influence as Chairman of
the Council and Chase Manhattan, placing him at the centre of the
network which defines, designs, and profits from America’s imperial
interests. Thus, the international situation in the late 1960s and early
1970s, of a general feeling of American imperial decline, competition
increasing and cooperation decreasing between the major industrialized
nations, and the general independence and liberations struggles
throughout the ‘Third World’ and at home had created a general sense of
oligarchic uncertainty. Of particular interest, and much more so to a
banker, was the international functions of the debt market, specifically
for the ‘Third World’ nations. As examined in Holly Sklar’s book, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management:
West European and Japanese firms
invaded the U.S. market and competed for the growing Third World market.
Moreover, European nations began to give aid and loans to Third World
nations, becoming an alternative source of aid and strengthening
economic ties to their former colonies. Third World nations began to use
U.S. aid to repay debts to Western Europe or relied on U.S. aid to
offset chronic balance-of-payments shortages incurred, in part, through
buying European products. In effect, the U.S. saw itself as paying for
Third World importation of European and Japanese goods… In short, the
problem from the perspective of the U.S. was that the situation then
unfolding gave Third World borrowing nations too much freedom to
manipulate the system, to the partial advantage of Western Europe and
the Third World and to the definite disadvantage of the U.S. … In
particular, the U.S. was concerned with extending its economic (and
political) hegemony over the emerging Third World
politically-independent nations without creating undue tensions with
Western Europe and Japan.[21]
Naturally, these concerns raised the
importance and the increasing potential behind institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, themselves
products of the Council on Foreign Relations. Various proposals began to
emerge in ‘reforming’ these institutions to meet the changing
international circumstances. One proposal was to increase the practice
of what was referred to as ‘tied’ aid: “aid to a country under the
conditions that it be used by the country to buy U.S. goods and
services.” Another proposal favoured cooperation among the major
industrial nations, a “consortium approach to aid, which involved
increased coordination among donor nations about scheduling payments due
them by recipient nations.” Further, “each donor nation would refuse to
grant aid except on terms identical to those of other donor nations in
the consortium.” A third proposal, gaining in popularity, was referred
to as “program aid,” which was “aid given with definite stipulations,
often within the context of an overall program of economic planning, to
which a recipient nation had to agree in order to obtain the aid or
loans.”[22] George Ball, a long-time Council member and Bilderberg
participant, was Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said in 1967 that, “the political
boundaries of nation-states are too narrow and constricted to define the
scope and activities of modern business.”[23]
This was the context in which
Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a member of both the Council on Foreign
Relations and the Bilderberg group, had written his book, Between Two Ages,
in which he called for the creation of a ‘Community of Developed
Nations.’ David Rockefeller had taken note of Brzezinski’s writings, and
was “getting worried about the deteriorating relations between the
U.S., Europe, and Japan,” as a result of Nixon’s economic shocks. In
1972, David Rockefeller and Brzezinski “presented the idea of a
trilateral grouping at the annual Bilderberg meeting,” which was
rejected on the idea of not wanting to admit the Japanese into the
Bilderberg group. Many Europeans did not want to include the Japanese at
the high table. In July of 1972, seventeen powerful people met at David
Rockefeller’s estate in New York to plan for the creation of the
Commission. At the meeting were Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, the
President of the Ford Foundation, (brother of William Bundy, editor of Foreign Affairs)
and Bayless Manning, President of the Council on Foreign Relations.[24]
So, in 1973, the Trilateral Commission was formed to address these
issues. Initial funding to set up the Commission came from David
Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation.[25] For the first several years,
most of the Commission’s funding came from foundations, with increasing
support from major corporations, which contributed roughly 12% of its
funding in 1973-76, to roughly 50% in 1984.[26] Thus, in the 1970s David
Rockefeller rose to an even more prominent international position,
simultaneously holding a leadership position within the Bilderberg
Group, and being Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, the Council on
Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was the Executive
Director of the Trilateral Commission, and at the same time served as a
director of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Trilateral Commission
acted as an organization through which ‘hegemony of consent’ could be
organized, particularly that of socializing elites from the ‘trilateral’
nations to one another, integrating their views, ideologies,
objectives, and methods just as think tanks like the Council on Foreign
Relations have done within the United States. As the CFR acts
domestically, the Trilateral Commission acts internationally (at least
with the leading industrial nations of the North). The first European
Chairman of the Commission, Max Kohnstamm, emphasized the role of
‘intellectuals’ in the construction of hegemony within the Commission:
This, which must be done by
absolutely first-rate intellectuals will tend to become irrelevant
unless it is done in constant checking with those who are in power or
who have a considerable influence on those in power. It seems to me that
the linkage between the kind of people we must get for our Trilateral
Commission and the intellectuals doing the indispensable work of
thinking about the elements for a new system is of the greatest
importance. A Trilateral Commission without the intellectuals will
become very soon a second-class negotiating forum. The intellectuals not
being forced to test their ideas constantly with the establishment of
our world will tend to become abstract and therefore useless… [It must
be] the joint effort of our very best minds and a group of really
influential citizens in our respective countries.[27]
In a 1972 speech at the Bilderberg
meeting at which David Rockefeller proposed (alongside Zbigniew
Brzezinski) the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, he stated
that the Commission would be “bringing the best brains in the world to
bear on the problems of the future… to collect and synthesize the
knowledge that would enable a new generation to rebuild the conceptual
framework of foreign and domestic policies.”[28]
