Part 2
excerpted from the book
The Shadows of Power
The Council on Foreign Relations
and the American Decline
by James Perloff
Western Islands Publishers, 1988,
paperback
p127
Yetvas members of this same Establishment who were at the helm
during the Vietnam War. ambassadors to Saigon from 1963 to 1973
- Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell Taylor, and Ellsworth Bunker - were
members of the Council [on Foreign Relations]. LBJ sought John
McCloy for that particular job, but he turned it down.
One of the chief engineers of the Vietnam
fiasco was Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department's policy
planning council from 1961 to 1966, when he became National Security
Adviser. The Washington Post of August 10, 1966, called him "the
Rock of Johnson's Viet Policy." But was Rostow a hawk? A
conservative rightwinger? Like his equally prominent brother,
Eugene Victor Debs Rostow (named for the Socialist Party leader
Eugene Debs), Walt Rostow had been a member of the CFR since 1955.
He was rejected for employment in the Eisenhower administration
three times because he could not pass security checks. In, Rostow
declared that: -
Walt Rostow, chairman of the State Department's
policy planning council from 1961 to 1966, and a CFR member, in
his book 'The United States in the World Arena', 1960
It is a legitimate American national
objective to see removed from all nations - including the United
States - the right to use substantial military force to pursue
their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of
national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international
arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see
an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined.
p128
Robert McNamara who was Secretary of Defense during first half
of the [Vietnam] war... After resigning, he stated, "I am
a world citizen now," and was appointed president of the
World Bank. During his tenure there, the Bank's annual lending
grew from $1 billion to $11.5 billion; in 1978 he oversaw a $60
million loan to Communist Vietnam.
p129
Averell Harriman served as Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of State
for Far Eastern Affairs, and was later chief negotiator at the
Paris peace talks. Harriman ... was a trailblazer of trade with
the Bolsheviks. He was instrumental in bringing the Communists
to power in Romania. Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin customarily
attended Harriman's birthday parties, and even vacationed with
him in Florida.
Another critical Establishment figure
was William Bundy, appointed Assistant Secretary of State for
Far Eastern Affairs in 1964, the same year he became a director
of the CFR. The Pentagon Papers later exposed him as a major architect
of our Vietnam policy. It was he who "prematurely" drafted
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. And it was his brother, McGeorge Bundy
(CFR) who, as National Security Adviser, oversaw the mission that
resulted in the Tonkin incident. McGeorge went on to become president
of the Ford Foundation.
William Bundy was certainly no flag-waving
anti-Communist. He had once donated $400 to the Alger Hiss defense
fund. In 1972, David Rockefeller chose him as the new editor of
Foreign Affairs, replacing Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was retiring
after fifty years of service. Under Bundy's guidance, Foreign
Affairs began to repudiate Cold War attitudes. J. Robert Moskin,
writing in Town & Country, notes that "Bundy surprised
his critics by publishing articles in Foreign Affairs that questioned
the wisdom of American intervention in Southeast Asia."
Thus a grand paradox crystallized. Bundy
had helped get us into the no-win war; now he edited a journal
suggesting that Vietnam proved the futility of challenging Communism.
His apologists believe that he was being penitent after realizing
his errors in Vietnam. But there remains another possibility:
that it was planned this way.
p129
[Dean] Acheson, like [McGeorge] Bundy, attended Groton, Yale,
and Harvard Law School. At the latter he became a protégé
of the leftist professor Felix Frankfurter, who got him a job
in Washington. Even before the Soviet Union was recognized by
the U.S., Joseph Stalin hired An to represent Bolshevik interests
in America. During the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, he
alternated between private law practice and public service. In
1945, he told a Madison Square Garden rally of the Soviet-American
Friendship Society. "We understand and agree with the Soviet
leaders that to have friendly governments along her borders is
essential both for the security of the Soviet Union and for the
peace of the world."
p131
During the Vietnam War, [Lyndon] Johnson met periodically with
an advisory group he himself called "the Wise Men" -
fourteen VIP's, twelve of whom were CFR members. Acheson was chief
among these. McCloy, Lovett, and Harriman were included in the
gatherings.
In 1965, Johnson was reluctant to heighten
our role in Vietnam any further, and explained his reasons before
the assembled patriarchs. The Isaacson and Thomas book, The Wise
Men, which is intended as a tribute to some of these men, relates:
"Acheson fidgeted impatiently as
he listened to Johnson wallow in self-pity. Finally, he could
stand it no longer. "I blew my top and told him he was wholly
right on Vietnam," Acheson wrote [to Truman], "that
he had no choice except to press on, that explanations were not
as important as successful action."
Acheson's scolding emboldened the others.
"With this lead my colleagues came thundering in like the
charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo," Acheson exulted to
the former President. "They were fine; old Bob Lovett, usually
cautious, was all out."
In effect, the Wise Men seized Johnson
by the collar, kicked his butt, and told him to escalate. They
were almost unanimous in this exhortation. William Bundy said
that this was the occasion when "America committed to land
war on the mainland of Asia. No more critical decision was made."
Each year, as the war intensified, Johnson
consulted the Wise Men, who told him to push on.
But in private they felt differently.
Halberstam notes: "As early as May 1964 Dean Acheson stopped
a White House friend at a cocktail party and said he thought Vietnam
was going to turn out much worse than they expected, that it was
all much weaker than the reports coming in . And Acheson's correspondence
from that period demonstrates pessimism about the war he did not
share with the President.
Averell Harriman played the hawk for Johnson,
so much that he received a scolding from former Kennedy aide Arthur
Schlesinger. Harriman brought Schlesinger to his hotel room, took
a stiff drink, and told him confidentially that he was against
the war.
William Bundy wrote in a memoir that he
had misgivings about the pro-escalation advice the elder statesmen
had given the President, but he did not so advise Johnson.
Referring to Acheson, Lovett, and McCloy,
The Wise Men asks:
Even in 1965, they harbored serious doubts
about committing U.S. troops to the defense of the government
of South Vietnam. Why did they fail to convey those doubts to
the President?
That, of course, is the $64,000 question!
But Isaacson and Thomas supply no satisfying answer.
In March 1968, in Science & Mechanics,
a dozen top U.S. military officers made individual statements
concerning Vietnam. They summarized how the restrictions on the
armed forces had prolonged the war, and asserted that the U.S.
could win in a few months if only it would adopt realistic strategy,
which they outlined. Such views were considered extremely dangerous
in Establishment circles.
That same month, Johnson was scheduled
to see the Wise Men again. He expected that, as usual, he would
be patted on the back and told to continue the war. But before
the conference, the Wise Men received negative briefings about
the war from three individuals whom the wily Acheson had been
consulting over the previous month.
The next morning, Johnson sat down with
the Wise Men, and received the shock of his life. Based on that
single set of briefings, they had been wondrously transformed
from hawks to doves: the war, they said, was a rotten idea after
all. Acheson, seated next to the President, bluntly informed him
that thoughts of victory were illusory, and that the time had
come for the disengagement process. The Wise Men tells us:
General Maxwell Taylor was appalled and
"amazed" at the defection. "The same mouths that
said a few months before to the President, 'You're on the right
course, but do more,' were now saying that the policy was a failure,"
recalled Taylor. He could think of no explanation, except that
"my Council on Foreign Relations friends were living in the
cloud of The New York Times."
Johnson hit the roof.
When the meeting broke up, he grabbed
a few of the stragglers and began to rant. "Who the hell
brainwashed those friends of yours?" he demanded of George
Ball. He stopped General Taylor. "What did those damn briefers
say to you?"
This, then, is the picture that now appears
to be emerging. For years, the Wise Men had prodded LBJ deeper
into Vietnam, until he had committed over a half million combat
troops. Now, in effect, they said: "It's all a mistake -
sorry about that," and left him holding the bag. It was he,
not they, who bore the fury of a rebelling America.
Johnson briefly entertained thoughts of
defiantly pushing for victory, but realized he would receive no
support from the political infrastructure surrounding him. LBJ's
March 1968 meeting with the Wise Men was his last. According to
Townsend Hoopes, then Under Secretary of the Air Force, "The
President was visibly shocked by the magnitude of the defection."
One aide reported that it left him "deeply shaken."
Five days later, a broken man, he announced on television:"...
I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my
party for another term as your President." A surprised nation
was left to conclude that this had been prompted by the good showing
Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy were making in the Democratic
primaries.
'Ultimately, culpability for the war would
be focused on the military. In 1971, Louisiana Congressman John
Rarick declared:
The My Lai massacre, the sentencing of
Lt. Calley to life imprisonment, "The Selling of the Pentagon,"
and the so-called Pentagon papers are leading examples of attempts
to shift all the blame to the military in the eyes of the people.
But no one identifies the Council on Foreign
Relations - the CFR - a group of some 1400 Americans which includes
as members almost every top level decision and policy maker in
the Vietnam War.
CBS tells the people it wants them to
know what is going on and who is to blame. Why doesn't CBS tell
the American people about the CFR and let the people decide whom
to blame for the Vietnam fiasco - the planners and top decision
makers of a closely knit financial-industrial-intellectual aristocracy
or military leaders under civilian control who have had little
or no voice in the overall policies and operations and who are
forbidden by law to tell the American people their side.
The My Lai incident, "The Selling
of the Pentagon," and the Pentagon papers have not scratched
the surface in identifying the responsible kingmakers of the new
ruling royalty, let alone in exposing the CFR role in Vietnam.
Who will tell the people the truth if those who control "the
right to know machinery" also control the government?
The war in Vietnam was not created by
conservative "hawks". It, was created by luminaries
of the CFR - whose globalism and tolerance of Communism is a matter
of record. As in the world wars, it was these two systems that
emerged as the victors. At home, nationalism - the anathema of
the CFR - hit an all-time low, as embittered young Americans lost
faith in their country. And on the other side of the world, little
North Vietnam, like North Korea and Cuba before it, was allowed
prestigious triumph against the mighty USA. Furthermore, thanks
in part to the war's sapping of the Defense budget, the Soviets,
militarily inferior at the war's outset, had reached parity with
us by its end.
p141
Richard Nixon, like Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, was not (
a member of the Establishment by birth and breeding, but his political
career became inextricably linked to it. In 1946, Nixon was a
small-town lawyer who had never held any elected office, not even
town dogcatcher. Yet six years later he was Vice President-elect
of the United States. His supersonic success compared to that
of his running mate, Dwight Eisenhower.
Nixon's political odyssey began with a
race for the House seat of California's 12th District. In the
election, he faced Democrat Jerry Voorhis, a ten-year veteran
of Congress. Voorhis was an enemy of the banking establishment;
he had introduced a bill calling for the dissolution of the Federal
Reserve System, and had denounced deficit spending and the international
bankers who profit from it in his book Out of Debt, Out of Danger.
p142
Nixon won the Congressional seat. Then in 1950 he was elected
to the Senate after a dirty campaign that earned him the nickname
"Tricky Dick."
p142
New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had also sought the Republican
"nomination in 1960; he even observed ritual by having an
article entitled 'Purpose and Policy" published in Foreign
Affairs that April. Rockefeller was an archetypal Establishment
globalist. Speaking at Harvard, he declared that "the nation-state,
standing alone, threatens in many ways to seem as anachronistic
as the Greek city-state eventually became in ancient times.
Rockefeller could not win the support
of enough grass roots part members to secure the nomination. But
he did have the power to influence Nixon.
... Since the Establishment ... had de
facto control of both parties' candidates, Nixon's defeat [by
JFK] that November did not worry them. Ultimately, it didn't bother
Nixon either, since he had only to wait for his ship to come in.
p144
In 1968, Nelson Rockefeller made his third consecutive bid for
the GOP nomination, logging another article in Foreign Affairs
("Policy and the People"). The press characterized him
as Nixon's liberal "rival," but they were patently allies.
If you can't be President, the next best thing is to have influence
over the man who is.
Nixon gave the Establishment his own signals
by writing an article for the October 1967 Foreign Affairs. Called
"Asia After Vietnam," it hinted that the door could
be opened to Communist China - a long-time CFR goal that became
reality during his Presidency. The article also showed that Nixon
was wise to globalist strategy. He wrote of the Asian disposition
"to evolve regional approaches to development needs and to
the evolution of a new world order." A "new world order"
was precisely what Nelson Rockefeller was calling for in his 1968
campaign.
p144
Between 1970 and 1972, the Establishment was rocked by the release
of new exposés. These included The Naked Capitalist by
former FBI official W. Cleon Skousen, and None Dare Call It Conspiracy
by Gary Allen. The latter, even though it sold over five million
copies, was ignored by the mass media. However, some defense of
the Council on Foreign Relations began appearing in the press.
Anthony Lukas in the New York Times and John Franklin Campbell
in New York magazine wrote feature articles suggesting that the
CFR was a has-been collection of foreign-policy fossils, no longer
welcome in Washington with the "right-wing" Nixon in
office. Campbell even titled his article "The Death Rattle
of the American Establishment."
This was far from the truth. Richard Nixon
broke all records by giving more than 110 CFR members government
appointments. As under Eisenhower, GOP regulars were by and large
excluded from the search for administration personnel. Once again,
the faces were mostly new, but the ideology was not.
John F. Kennedy's choice for National
Security Adviser was McGeorge Bundy, who had been teaching a course
at Harvard called "The United States in World Affairs."
Nixon's choice for National Security Adviser was the professor
who succeeded Bundy in teaching that course: Henry Kissinger.
Kissinger, who advised Bundy during the
Kennedy years, was undoubtedly the most powerful figure in the
Nixon administration.
... The professor [Kissinger] authored
many articles for Foreign Affairs, including one in January 1969
on how the Vietnam peace talks should be conducted. Not surprisingly,
he later became our chief negotiator in Paris.
The Rockefellers' intimacy with Kissinger
equaled that of the Council's. J. Robert Moskin notes:
It was principally because of his long
association with the Rockefellers that Henry Kissinger became
a force in the Council. The New York Times called him "the
Council's most influential member," and a Council insider
says that "his influence is indirect and enormous - much
of it through his Rockefeller connection."
p147
syndicated columnist James Reston (CFR), 1970
It is true that Nixon rose to power as
an anti-Communist, a hawk on Vietnam, and an opponent of the New
Deal, but once he assumed the responsibilities of the presidency,
he began moving toward peace in Vietnam, coexistence with the
Communist world of Moscow and Peking, and despite all his political
reservations, even toward advocacy of the welfare state at home.
p147
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in New York magazine, 1970
The least predicted development under
the Nixon administration was this great new thrust to socialism.
One encounters people who still aren't aware of it. Others must
be rubbing their eyes, for certainly the portents seemed all to
the contrary.
p154
David Rockefeller moved to form a new internationalist organization
- the Trilateral Commission. For some three decades, CFR members
had pushed for "Atlantic Union," a bilateral federation
of America and Europe. The Trilateral Commission (TC) broadened
this objective to include an Asiatic leg.
How did the TC begin? "The Trilateral
Commission," wrote Christopher Lydon in the July 1977 Atlantic,
"was David Rockefeller brainchild." George Franklin,
North American secretary of the Trilateral Commission, stated
that it "was entirely David Rockefeller's idea originally."
Helping the CFR chairman develop the concept was Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who laid the first stone in Foreign Affairs in 1970:
A new and broader approach is needed
- creation of a community of the developed nations which can effectively
address itself to the larger concerns confronting mankind. In
addition to the United States and Western Europe, Japan ought
to be included .... A council representing the United States,
Western Europe and Japan, with regular meetings of the heads of
governments as well as some small standing machinery, would be
a good start.
That same year, Brzezinski elaborated
these thoughts in his book Between Two Ages It showed Brzezinski
to be a classic CFR man - a globalist more than lenient toward
Communism. He declared that "National sovereignty is no longer
a viable concept," and that "Marxism is simultaneously
a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive
man and a victory of reason over belief."
The Trilateral Commission was formally
established in 1973 and consisted of leaders in business, banking,
government, and mass media from North America, Western Europe,
and Japan. David Rockefeller was founding chairman and Brzezinski
founding director of the North American branch, most of whose
members were also in the CFR.
In the Wall Street Journal, David Rockefeller
explained that "the Trilateral Commission is, in reality,
a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater
understanding and cooperation among international allies."
But it was not all so innocent according
to Jeremiah Novak who wrote in the Atlantic (July 1977):
The Trilateralists' emphasis on international
economics is not entirely disinterested, for the oil crisis forced
many developing nations, with doubtful repayment abilities, to
borrow excessively. All told, private multinational banks, particularly
Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, have loaned nearly $52 billion
to developing countries. An overhauled IMF would provide another
source of credit for these nations, and would take the big private
banks off the hook. This proposal is the cornerstone of the Trilateral
plan.
Senator Barry Goldwater put it less mercifully.
In his book With No Apologies, he termed the [Trilateral] Commission
"David Rockefeller's newest international cabal", and
said, " It is intended to be the vehicle for multinational
consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing
control of the political government of the United States.
Zbigniew Brzezinski showed how serious
TC [Trilateral Commission] ambitions were in the July 1973 Foreign
Affairs, stating that "without closer American-European-Japanese
cooperation the major problems of today cannot be effectively
tackled, and... the active promotion of such trilateral cooperation
must now become the central priority of U.S. policy."
p156
After Watergate tainted the Republican Party's image, it became
probable that a Democrat would win the 1976 Presidential election.
Candidate James Earl Carter was depicted by the press and himself
- as the consummate outsider to the Washington Establishment.
He was, the story went, a good ol' boy from Georgia, naïve
to the ways of the cigar-puffing, city-slicker politicians. People
magazine even showed him shoveling peanuts in denims.
Typical of press comment at that time
were the words of columnist Joseph C. Harsch of the Christian
Science Monitor, who asserted that Carter
has that nomination without benefit of
any single kingmaker, or of any power group or power lobby, or
of any single segment of the American people. He truly is indebted
to no one man and no group interest.
But Harsch belonged to the CFR, whose
members are loath to disclose the power of the group, or of its
kingmaker, David Rockefeller.
In 1973, Carter dined with the CFR chairman
at the latter's Tarrytown, New York estate. Present was Zbigniew
Brzezinski, who was helping Rockefeller screen prospects for the
Trilateral Commission. Brzezinski later told Peter Pringle of
the London Sunday Times that "we were impressed that Carter
had opened up trade offices for the state of Georgia in Brussels
and Tokyo. That seemed to fit perfectly into the concept of the
Trilateral.'" Carter became a founding member of the Commission
- and his destiny became calculable.
Senator Barry Goldwater wrote:
David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski
found Jimmy Carter to be their ideal candidate. They helped him
win the nomination and the presidency. To accomplish this purpose,
they mobilized the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the
intellectual influence of the academic community - which is subservient
to the wealth of the great tax-free foundations - and the media
controllers represented in the membership of the CFR and the Trilateral."
Seven months before the Democratic nominating
convention, the Gallup Poll found less than four percent of Democrats
favoring Jimmy Carter for President. But almost overnight ...
he became the candidate.
p157
In June of 1976, when the Los Angeles Times described a "task
force" that had helped the candidate [Jimmy Carter] prepare
his first major foreign policy (which began: "The time has
come for us to seek a partnership between North America, Western
Europe, and Japan"). The Carter advisors enumerated by the
were: Brzezinski, Richard Cooper, Richard Gardner, Henry Owen,
Edwin 0. Reischauer, Averell Harriman, Anthony Lake, Robert Bowie,
Milton Katz, Abram Chayes, George Ball, and Cyrus Vance. There
was one problem with the above list. Every man on it was a member
of the CFR. We alluded earlier to Cooper's Foreign Affairs article
proposing an international currency, and Gardner's piece calling
for "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece
by piece."
In a speech in Boston, candidate Carter
said: "The people of this country know from bitter experience
that we are not going to get changes merely by shifting around
the same group of insiders .... The insiders have had their chance
and they have not delivered." After the election, top Carter
aide Hamilton Jordan remarked: "If, after the inauguration,
you find a Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski
as head of National Security, then I would say we failed. And
I'd quit. But that's not going to happen." But it did happen,
and Jordan did not quit. Carter simply shifted around "the
same group of insiders," turning, like his predecessors,
to the institutions built by Wall Street and the international
banking establishment.
The new President appointed more than
seventy men from the CFR, and over twenty members of the much
smaller Trilateral Commission. Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledges
in his White House memoirs: "Moreover, all the key foreign
policy decision makers of the Carter Administration had previously
served in the Trilateral Commission... " (Carter is considerably
less candid in his own memoirs: he does not even mention the Commission.)
p158
Vice President Walter Mondale (CFR-TC) had flown his colors in
the October 1974 Foreign Affairs, where he encapsulated much of
the Establishment line in a single sentence: "The economic
cooperation that is required will involve us most deeply with
our traditional postwar allies, Western Europe and Japan, but
it must also embrace a new measure of comity with the developing
countries, and include the Soviet Union and other Communist nations
in significant areas of international economic life."
Other Carter appointees who were in both
the CFR and Trilateral Commission: Defense Secretary Harold Brown;
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; Deputy Secretary of State
Warren Christopher; Under Secretary of State Richard Cooper; Assistant
Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke; Under Secretary of the Treasury
Anthony M. Solomon; Deputy Secretary of Energy John Sawhill; Special
Assistant to the President Hedley Donovan; Ambassador at Large
Henry Owen; and several others. And of course there were "plain"
CFR members like Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal, HEW
Secretary Joseph Califano, SALT negotiator Paul Warnke, and dozens
of others.
p170
Ronald Reagan has been billed as a thoroughgoing conservative.
But history bears witness that, like Eisenhower's and Nixon's,
his conservatism rarely goes beyond his speeches.
Campaigning in 1980, Reagan said he intended
to balance the budget by 1983. Jimmy Carter's annual federal deficits
ranged from $40.2 billion to $78.9 billion. Under Mr. Reagan,
the red ink came to a record $127.9 billion in fiscal 1982, then
skyrocketed to $208.9 billion in 1983.
... Reagan's annual deficits have actually
exceeded the annual budgets of Lyndon B. Johnson, who had a Vietnam
War to pay for as well as the Great Society. He has chalked up
more government debt than all the Presidents before him combined.
It is true that Congress shares in the responsibility for this,
but the blame cannot simply be offloaded on them; the President's
own budget proposals have contained estimated deficits in the
$100-200 billion range since fiscal 1983.
Reagan is touted as an enemy of taxation
and big government. Yet during his first term, although he did
cut tax rates, he also pushed through the largest single tax increase
in our nation's history, as well as boosts in the gasoline and
Social Security taxes. And big government got bigger: the civilian
work force in the executive branch grew by nearly 100,000 between
1981 and 1986.
In 1983, Walter Heller, former economic
advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was prompted to write
a column in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Mr. Reagan
Is a Keynesian Now." In 1984, economist Richard Parker echoed
this conclusion in the Los Angeles Times, noting: "While
he proclaims Reaganomics' success, Reagan also owes Americans
a shocking confession: He's become a born-again Keynesian."
That same year, economist Lester Thurow observed in Newsweek that
"President Reagan has become the ultimate Keynesian."
He continued:
Not only is the Reagan Administration
rehabilitating exactly the economic policies it pledged to bury
when entering office, it is applying them more vigorously than
any Keynesian would have dared. Imagine what conservatives would
be saying if a liberal Keynesian Democratic president had dared
to run a $200 billion deficit.
p178
In 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway inserted the following statement
in the Congressional Record:
In March, 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests,
the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary
organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world
and employed them to select / the most influential newspapers
in the United States and sufficient number of them to control
generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.
These 12 men worked the problem out by
selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process,
to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling
the general policy of the daily press throughout the country.
They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25
of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries
were sent to purchase the policy, national and international,
of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers
was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished
for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding
the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies,
and other things of national and international nature considered
vital to the interests of the purchasers ....
This policy also included the suppression
of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests served.
p181
What we have operating in America is an Establishment media.
As erstwhile New York Times editor John
Swinton once said: "There is no such thing as an independent
press in America, if we except that of little country towns."
The Times itself was bought in 1896 by
Alfred Ochs, with backing from J. P. Morgan, Rothschild agent
August Belmont, and Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb. It was subsequently
passed on to Ochs' son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger (CFR), then
to Orville E. Dryfoos (CFR), and finally to the present publisher,
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (CFR). The Times has had a number of CFR
members in its stable of reporters, including Herbert L. Matthews,
Harrison Salisbury, and Lester Markel. Currently, executive editor
Max Frankel, editorial page editor Jack Rosenthal, deputy editorial
page editor Leslie Geib, and assistant managing editors James
L. Greenfield, Warren Hoge, and John M. Lee are all in the Council.
The Times' friendly rival, the Washington
Post, was bought by Eugene Meyer in 1933. Meyer, a partner of
Bernard Baruch and Federal Reserve Board governor, had joined
the CFR in 1929. Meyer began his reign at the Post by firing its
editor for refusing to support U.S. recognition of the Soviet
Union.
Today the Post is run by Meyer's daughter,
Katharine Graham (CFR). Managing editor Leonard Downie, Jr., editorial
page editor Meg Greenfield, and deputy editorial page editor Stephen
S. Rosenfeld are all Council members.
The Washington Post Company owns Newsweek,
which is a descendant of the weekly magazine Today, founded by
Averell Harriman, among others, to support the New Deal and business
interests. Newsweek's editor-in-chief Richard M. Smith and editor
Maynard Parker both belong to the CFR, as have a number of its
contributors. Both Newsweek and the Post have donated money to
the Council.
Time magazine maintains the same kind
of rivalry with Newsweek as the New York Times does with the Post:
they compete for readers, not in viewpoint. Time was founded by
Henry Luce (CFR-IPR-Atlantic Union), who rose as a publisher with
loans from such individuals as Dwight Morrow and Thomas Lamont
(both Morgan partners and CFR members), Harvey Firestone (CFR),
and E. Roland Harriman (CFR).
Time's longtime editor-in-chief was Hedley
Donovan (Trilateral Commission member, CFR Director, trustee of
the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
and eventually Special Assistant to President Jimmy Carter). The
current editor-in-chief, Henry Grunwald, is in the CFR, along
with managing editor Henry Muller. Time, Inc., which also publishes
People, Life, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, has several
Council members on its board of directors.
The CFR also has interlocks with the major
TV networks. William S. Paley, chairman of the board at CBS for
many years, belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations, as does
the chairman today, Thomas H. Wyman, and eleven of the fourteen
board members listed
for 1987. CBS news anchor Dan Rather is
in the CFR. CBS helped finance the Trilateral Commission, and
the CBS Foundation has contributed funds to the Council.
NBC is a subsidiary of RCA, which was
formerly headed by David Sarnoff (CFR). Sarnoff had financial
backing from Kuhn, Loeb and other Rothschild-linked banking firms.
He was succeeded by his son Robert, who married Felicia Schiff
Warburg, daughter of Paul Warburg and great granddaughter of Jacob
Schiff. RCA's chairman of the board now, Thornton Bradshaw, is
a CFR man, as are several other board members. The Council has
had a number of NBC newsmen on its roster over the years, including
Marvin Kalb, John Chancellor, Garick Utley, and Irving R. Levine.
There are CFR figures on ABC's board,
and in its news department, including Ted Koppel and David Brinkley.
The Council on Foreign Relations also
has links to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the
Associated Press wire service, PBS, and other major news sources.
The Council's annual report for 1987 notes that 262 of its members
are "journalists, correspondents, and communications executives."
p191
Admiral Chester Ward a former Council [on Foreign Relations] member
CFR [Council on Foreign Relations], as
such, does not write the platforms of both political parties)
or select their respective presidential candidates, or control
U.S. defense and foreign policies. But CFR members, as individuals,
acting in concert with other individual CFR members, do.
p204
A U.S. financial cave-in would probably draw the whole planet
into its vortex, as did the Great Depression In the long run,
a new world order under one government would be offered as a global
panacea. This would incorporate / Free World countries with Communist
states.
p205
For decades, the Council on Foreign Relations has advocated regional
alliances against the Soviet Union, but with the footnote that,
in the end, the USSR should be brought into "the community
of nations." This would be preceded by a fusion of Eastern
and Western Europe, a favorite Foreign Affairs theme.
p205
In the fall of 1953, Norman Dodd, Director of Research for the
Reece Committee [of Congress] was invited to the headquarters
of the Ford Foundation by its president H. Rowan Gaither (CFR).
According to Dodd, Gaither told him: "Mr. Dodd, all of us
here at the policy-making level have had experience, either in
O.S.S. or the European Economic Administration, with directives
from the White House. We operate under those directives here.
Would you like to know what those directives are?" Dodd replied
that he would. Gaither said: "The substance of them is that
we shall use our grant-making power so to alter our life in the
United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet
Union."
p208
Thomas Jefferson
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed
to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions,
begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through
every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate systematical
plan of reducing us to slavery.
The
Shadows of Power
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