[R-G] Elite ‘Democratic’ Planning at the Council on Foreign Relations

[Anthony Fenton]

Elite ‘Democratic’ Planning at the Council on Foreign Relations (Part  
1 of 2)
February 27, 2008 By Michael Barker
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16649

Who are they and how did it start?

“The… Council [on Foreign Relations] was conceived, in the words of  
its incorporating charter, ‘to afford a continuous conference on  
international questions affecting the United States.’ By its first  
annual report, November 1922, it had assurance of financial support  
for the startup years and close to 300 ‘carefully chosen’ members,  
including [Elihu] Root from the old Council, but also new and  
promising figures like Herbert H. Lehman, W. Averell Harriman, and  
John Foster Dulles.”  Peter Grose, (1996) – Official Council  
historian [1]

As with many elite planning groups the Council on Foreign Relations  
(the Council) proudly refers to itself as a “nonpartisan and  
independent membership organization”. However, like other democracy  
manipulating organizations (e.g. the two bipartisan groups the  
National Endowment for Democracy and its partner the US Institute of  
Peace) little critical commentary surrounds their work. The Council’s  
activities are nonetheless decidedly antidemocratic: that is, it  
promotes an elite form of democracy, often referred to as plutocracy  
or polyarchy, as opposed to its more participatory variants. Yet,  
considering the influential role the Council has exerted over the  
development of ‘democracy’ in the United States and beyond, it is  
strange that political scientists the world over tend to overlook  
this powerful agency of US hegemony.

Remarkably, until power elite researcher G. William Domhoff briefly  
wrote about the activities of the Council in his book, Who Rules  
America? (1967, pp.71-3), it appears that no one on the Left had  
critically analysed their work. [2] Furthermore, for many years, the  
only critical book-length study of the Council’s work was Laurence H.  
Shoup and William Minter’s excellent Imperial Brain Trust: The  
Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy  
(Monthly Review Press, 1977). [3] In a recent article Laurence H.  
Shoup, (2004) states:

“One of the prime characteristics of the U.S. upper class is its high  
level of organization. One of the central organizations, accurately  
called ‘the citadel of America's establishment,’ is the Council on  
Foreign Relations (CFR). Founded in 1921, the CFR is the most  
influential of all private policy planning groups. Its great strength  
is mainly exercised behind the scenes and stems from its unique  
position among policy groups: it is simultaneously both a think tank  
for foreign and economic policy and also has a large membership  
comprising some of the most important individuals in U.S. economic,  
intellectual, and political life. The Council has a yearly budget of  
about $30 million and a staff of over 200.” [4]

Official Council historian, Peter Grose, corroborates the secretive  
nature of their work when he observed that: “From its inception, the  
activities of the Council on Foreign Relations were private and  
confidential.” Yet despite making this point, in the following  
paragraph Grose acknowledges that the “Council’s founding fathers  
appreciated that democracy involved the factor of public opinion, but  
they were uncertain at first about how such opinion was to be formed  
and expressed.” [5] There is no real contradiction here as the  
publics’ role in democratic policy making, as considered by ruling  
elites, was perhaps best expressed by former Council board member  
(1932-7) Walter Lippmann,  in 1922 wrote “the common interests very  
largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a  
specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the  
locality.” [6] Perhaps with thoughts of the Council in mind Lippmann  
(1922, p.31-2) wrote:

“[R]epresentative democracy… cannot be worked successfully, no matter  
what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert  
organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who  
have to make the decisions… [P]ublic opinions must be organized for  
the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case  
today.” [7]

Inderjeet Parmar (2005, p.17) writes that in the early 1940s members  
of the Council and the State Department “were absolutely terrified of  
public opinion which, in the main, was isolationist, pacifist and,  
still, largely anticolonialist”. [8] So it is entirely consistent  
with the Council thinking that in 1947 the globalist Council created  
a ‘Propaganda and Foreign Policy’ group – shortly thereafter renamed  
as the ‘Public Opinion and Foreign Policy’ group – that aimed to  
“research possible ideas to influence and educate the American public  
on foreign policy issues”. [9]

Following in Lippmann elitist footsteps, Edward Bernays, one of the  
founding fathers of Public Relations (rather: propaganda), later  
helped refine the tools for “engineering consent”.  [10] Moreover,  
the Rockefeller Foundation (which at the time was one of the most  
influential liberal foundations’), sponsored and organized a number  
of Communications Seminars between 1939 and 1940 that “acknowledged  
the need to develop ways in which to manufacture public consent for  
desired policy changes”. [11] Research undertaken by Parmar  
concerning the critical period of 1939 to 1945, demonstrates the key  
role played by liberal foundations in engineering consent to “build a  
new globalist consensus”. [12]

The work of liberal foundations’ was not limited to developing the  
means to manufacture public consent for elite profit; they have also  
played an important role in supporting many progressive causes. Yet,  
as Nicolas Guilhot (2007, p.449) writes, by no means does this mean  
that their charitable work is a disinterested apolitical aid, because  
as in the case of the funding they provided for higher education,   
liberal “philanthropists sought to ensure that social reform would be  
congruent with their own Interests”. Moreover:

“By investing in the universities, philanthropists pursued two  
specific objectives. In the first place, they obviously sought to  
foster the teaching of practical knowledge and skills serving the  
development of commerce and industry, against the prevailing academic  
traditions. But these educational and scientific investments were  
also a way of diagnosing the social upheavals caused by the  
accelerated shift from a still largely agrarian society to an  
industrial mass society characterized by the emergence of a polyglot  
and riotous urban proletariat... Aware that social reform was  
unavoidable, they chose to invest in the definition and scientific  
treatment of the ‘social questions’ of their time: urbanization,  
education, housing, public hygiene, the ‘Negro problem,’ etc. Far  
from being resistant to social change, the philanthropists promoted  
reformist solutions that did not threaten the capitalistic nature of  
the social order but constituted a “private alternative to  
socialism”. (Guilhot, 2007, pp.451-2)

Liberal foundations’ interests were not limited to education, but as  
Roelofs (2007, p.480) notes, “[t]heir influence is exerted in many  
ways” and also includes “creating ideology and the common wisdom; … 
controlling access to resources for universities, social services,  
and arts organizations; compensating for market failures; steering  
protest movements into safe channels; and supporting those  
institutions by which policies are initiated and implemented.” [13]  
As I have written about the anti-democratic practices at length  
elsewhere I will direct interested readers to my recent article Do  
Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1; Part 2).

Liberal Philanthropy and US Foreign Policy

Liberal foundations’ and their associated philanthropoids have always  
played a key role in the work of the Council. According to Shoup and  
Minter (1977, pp.94-5) the two foundations that provided the most  
support for the Council were the Rockefeller Foundation and the  
Carnegie Corporation of New York; indeed total foundation grants  
before 1936 averaged about $20,000 a year, although from 1936 to  
1946, this increased to about $90,000 a year. In later years, the  
Ford Foundation also acted as a key Council funder, and in 1954 they  
gave the Council a $1,500,000 ten-year grant. [14]

As an example of liberal foundation largesse, Grose writes:  
“Supported by a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the  
Council launched a major initiative in December 1937 to spread its  
activities and role across the United States, to replicate the New  
York Council in eight American cities.” Crucially, as Shoup and  
Minter (1977, p.30) observe, the establishment of these Council  
committees served two purposes, (1) they “influenc[ed] the thinking  
of local leaders”, and (2) “they provid[ed] the Council and the  
United States government with information about trends of thought on  
political affairs throughout the country”.

Given the Rockefeller Foundation’s involvement with the  
aforementioned Communications Seminars (1939-40) it is particularly  
interesting that Grose notes that in 1939 the Foundation funded (to  
the sum of $350,000 a secret Council project that was launched in  
collaboration with the US State Department. [15] This Rockefeller- 
funded project was later known as the War and Peace Studies Group – a  
project that aimed to development a concrete plan for US domination  
in the post-war world. [16] Grose continues:


“Over the coming five years, almost 100 men participated in the War  
and Peace Studies [Group], divided into four functional topic groups:  
economic and financial, security and armaments, territorial, and  
political. These groups met more than 250 times, usually in New York,  
over dinner and late into the night. They produced 682 memoranda for  
the State Department, which marked them classified and circulated  
them among the appropriate government departments.”



Writing from a (far more) critical perspective, F. William Engdahl  
(2008) offers more details of their work:



“The core of the War & Peace Studies, which were designed for and  
implemented by the US State Department after 1944, was to be the  
creation of a United Nations organization to replace the British- 
dominated League of Nations. A central part of that new UN  
organization, which would serve as the preserver of the US-friendly  
postwar status quo, [17] was creation of what were originally  
referred to as the Bretton Woods institutions—the International  
Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and  
Development or World Bank. The GATT multinational trade agreements  
were later added.



“The US negotiators in Bretton Woods New Hampshire, led by US  
Treasury deputy Secretary Harry Dexter White, imposed a design on the  
IMF and World Bank which insured the two would remain essentially  
instruments of an “informal” US empire, an empire, initially based on  
credit, and later, after about 1973, on debt.” [18]



Subsequently, Grose observes that, during the 1950’s, liberal  
foundations continued to provide massive support to the work of the  
Council: “from the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation  
came $500,000 each, topped by $1.5 million from the new Ford  
Foundation in 1954.” Between 1940 and 1970 David Rockefeller also  
served as “an active Council member”, and from 1950 to 1970 he was  
the vice-president of the Council. In 1970, Rockefeller then became  
chairman of the Council’s board (a position he maintained until  
1985), “succeeding [former chair of the Ford foundation] John J.  
McCloy, who had served for 17 years.” In his autobiography, David  
Rockefeller (2002, p.407) recalls:



“After World War II the Council played an important role in alerting  
Americans to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and in crafting  
a bipartisan consensus on how to deal with the worldwide expansion of  
Communism. In 1947, Foreign Affairs, the Council’s distinguished  
journal, published the famous ‘X’ article, ‘The Sources of Soviet  
Conduct’ (written anonymously because George Kennan was serving in  
the State Department at the time). It outlined the doctrine of  
containment… [This] article became the defining document of U.S. Cold  
War policy.”



At around the same time that Rockefeller became chair of the  
Council’s board, former CIA analyst, William Bundy, amidst much  
controversy, became the new head of Foreign Affairs: [19]  it is  
noteworthy to point out that William’s brother, McGeorge Bundy, was  
well linked to liberal philanthropy’s inner circles as he served as  
the president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979. Moreover, it  
is vital to note that the activities of  the Rockefeller, Carnegie  
and Ford Foundations’ – a grouping often referred to as the big three  
– were closely enmeshed with the CIA and US foreign policy elites  
during this period. Unsurprisingly, Victor Marchetti and John  
Marks’ (1980, p.237) in their book The CIA and the Cult of  
Intelligence noted that the CFR “has long been the CIA’s principal  
‘constituency’ in the American public. When the agency has need  
prominent citizens to front for its proprietary companies or other  
special interests, it has often turned to the Council [on Foreign  
Relations] members.” In 1977, Shoup and Minter also wrote that since  
its founding, the “directorship of the CIA has been in the hands of a  
Council leader or member more often than not”. [20]

Part 2 to follow…

Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University,  
Australia. He can be reached at Michael. J. Barker [at]  
griffith.edu.au. Most of his other articles can be found here.



Endnotes

[1] The CFR’s website provides links to the following books detailing  
their history: Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs  
(Columbia University Press, 1984); Michael Wala, The Council on  
Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War  
(Berghann Books: 1994); Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The  
Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (Council on Foreign  
Relations: 1996).

[2] The Council’s work had however been examined by the conservative  
writer, Emanuel M. Josephson in his book Rockefeller,  
'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules the World (Chedney Press,  
1952). The Council also get a brief mention (on one page) in Horace  
Coon’s groundbreaking Money to Burn: Great American Foundations and  
Their Money (Transaction, 1938).

[3] In the past few years Laurence H. Shoup has continued to draw  
attention to the antidemocratic nature of the Council within the  
pages of Z Magazine, e.g. Election 2008: Ruling Class Conducts its  
Hidden Primary (2008), and The CFR Debates Torture, Part 1 & Part 2  
(2006). Another useful treatment of the Council is provided in G.  
William Domhoff’s The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made  
in America (Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 1990), pp.113-151. Although the  
Council is bipartisan, here bipartisan can be left, right, or  
neither, a profile of their work has been compiled by Right Web  
(although it requires updating).

More recently Inderjeet Parmar has written about the Council, see  
Liberal-Imperial Brain Trust: The Political Significance of the  
Princeton Project on National Security (Paper prepared for  
presentation at the International Studies Association annual  
convention, Chicago, 2007); Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy:  
A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on  
Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs,  
1939-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). The Council’s Archive is based  
at Harold Pratt House, 58 East 68th Street, New York City.

[4] In 2007, the Council has 4330 members.

[5] Shoup and Minter (1977, p.12) illustrate how the idea for the  
Council was “primarily that of British historian Lionel Curtis” who  
prior to the founding of the Council “had been in charge of setting  
up a network of semi-secret organizations… called the Round Table  
Groups” (which were “established by Lord Milner, a former British  
secretary for war, and his associates in 1908-1911”). For a detailed  
insider-account of the history of the Round Table Groups, see Carroll  
Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (Books in Focus, 1981).  
Chapter 1 of this book can be found online. (In 1984, John G. Albert,  
who at the time was based at the US Air Force Academy, reviewed this  
book concluding that “its message is forcefully argued and casts a  
long shadow over previous interpretations of the events of the first  
half of this century”. Military Affairs, Vol. 48 (1), p.47.)

Corporate interests rated highly within the Council’s work right from  
the start: Grose writes: “For all their grumbling, the captains of  
finance among the membership clearly welcomed the intellectual  
stimulation and diversity, the unique synergy of interests envisioned  
at the start. They did all right by their Council. Members who were  
directors of large corporations seized the opportunity to inject the  
concerns of business into the reflections of scholars.”

Michael Wala (1994, p.xii) observes: “That the Council is without  
outside control and has refrained from publicity, remaining by choice  
in the background, has helped to foster the development of  
conspiratorial theories about its influence and function over the  
last three decades.”

[6] Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace and Company,  
1922), p.310

[7] Lippmann (1922, pp.43-4) writes: “Without some form of  
censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible.  
In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between  
the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be  
limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks  
wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can  
misconceive what they see, no-one else can decide how they shall  
misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at  
what.” He famously notes that the “manufacture of consent”, was  
“supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy”, but “it  
has not”. In fact, he notes that it “has improved enormously in  
technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of  
thumb.” Lippmann then observes that “persuasion has become a self- 
conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.” (Lippmann,  
1922, p.248)

It is noteworthy that, in 1914, Lippmann played an important role at  
the newly created publication The New Republic. This is because, as  
Bill Clinton’s mentor, Carroll Quigley (1966, p.938), points out,  
that it was around then that “the [J.P.] Morgan firm decided to  
infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States.”  
He adds that: “The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over  
but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of  
Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so  
that they could ‘blow off steam,’ and (3) to have a final veto on  
their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went  
‘radical.’” This relates to Lippmann, as Quigley continues by noting  
that the “best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing  
publication was The New Republic,” a magazine founded by Morgan  
partner Willard Straight and his wife Dorothy (whose money supported  
the magazine until 1953) (p.939).

According to Quigley: “The original purpose for establishing the  
paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide  
it quietly in an Anglophile direction.” He states that “[t]his latter  
task was entrusted” (in 1914) to Walter Lippman (p.939). The Morgan- 
connection is particularly relevant to this article because Quigley  
describes the Council on Foreign Relations as a “front for J.P.  
Morgan and Company”. He adds that the New York branch of the Council  
“was dominated by the associates of the Morgan Bank. For example, in  
1928 the Council on Foreign Relations has John. W. Davis as  
president, Paul Cravath as vice-president, and a council of thirteen  
others, which included Owen D. Young, Russell C. Leffingwell, Norman  
Davis, Allen Dulles, George W. Wickersham, Frank L. Polk, Whitney  
Shepardson, Isaiah Bowman, Stephen P. Duggan, and Otto Kahn.” (p.952)  
Moreover, Shoup and Minter (1977, p.23) write that the “election of  
Herbet Hoover to the presidency in 1928… increase[d] the Council’s  
influence on foreign-policy formulation.” This is because Hoover  
himself had been a Paris member of the Royal Institute of  
International Affairs (the Council’s British-based predecessor), his  
secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, was a Council member, and  
Stimson’s economic adviser had also been a Council staffer.

It is important that the Council’s leadership reflects the power  
dynamic of the New York financial community, as “until the early  
1950s, the most prominent place within the Council was held by men  
tied to Morgan interests.” However, thereafter Rockefeller linked  
individuals had played a more important role in directing the  
Council’s affairs. See Shoup and Minter (1977, p.104).

[8] Indedjeet Parmar, Catalysing Events, Think Tanks and American  
Foreign Policy Shifts: A Comparative Analysis of the Impacts of Pearl  
Harbor 1941 and 11 September 2001, Government and Opposition 40 (1),  
2000, pp.1-25.

In a manner eerily similar to the Project for a New American  
Century’s (2000, p.51) ‘need’ for “‘some catastrophic and catalyzing  
event – like a new Pearl Harbor” (i.e. 9/11), Parmar notes that in  
1941 Council members recognized in order to put their globalist plans  
into action: “Americans ‘need a shock (preferably a military one)’ to  
galvanise them into action, to bring them to their ‘senses’ and to  
recognize that the European war was their concern.” In December 1941,  
this shock came in the form of Pearl Harbor.For more on the  
similarities between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, see David Ray Griffin,  
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush  
Administration and 9/11 (Interlink, 2004).

[9] Michael Wala (1994, p.158) also highlights that the group was  
“initiated” by Lester Markel, who at the time was the Sunday editor  
of the New York Times. Markel went on to become the founding chair of  
the International Press Institute (1951-4), a media group whose  
activities, as I note elsewhere, are closely entwined with the  
democracy manipulating community. The mainstream media itself are  
also intimately tied to the work of the Council: for example, “[i]n  
1972, three out of ten directors of the New York Times Company and  
five out of nine editorial executives were Council members” (Shoup  
and Minter, 1977, p.66).

[10] Stewart Ewen (1996) writes in his classic book PR: A Social  
History of Spin that: “During the First World War, Bernays served as  
a foot soldier for the U. S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)- 
the vast American propaganda apparatus mobilized in 1917 to package,  
advertise and sell the war as one that would ‘Make the World Safe for  
Democracy.’”

[11] Michael Barker, “The Liberal Foundations of Media Reform?  
Creating Sustainable Funding Opportunities for Radical Media Reform,”  
Global Media (In Press).

It is no secret that the foreign policy establishment had contempt  
for the wider public; as Michael Wala (1994, p.11) points out:  
“’Public opinion,’ for the members of these groups, had a limited  
definition and was synonymous with a small group of people having the  
means to inform and influence large parts of the public.” Moreover,  
as far as the Council was concerned the only members of the “public  
that had to be educated” were “those members of society who had  
influence on the media and politics and to experts in a number of  
important fields” (p.12).

[12] Indedjeet Parmar, `To Relate Knowledge and Action': the Impact  
of the Rockefeller Foundation on Foreign Policy Thinking during  
America's Rise to Globalism 1939-1945, Minerva,40 (3),  2002, pp. 
235-263;  The Carnegie Corporation and the Mobilisation of Opinion  
During the United States’ Rise to Globalism, 1939–1945, Minerva, 37  
(4), 1999, pp.355-378; Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment  
for International Peace and the Mobilisation of American Public  
Opinion, 1939–1945, Review of International Studies, 26 (1), 2000, pp. 
35-48.

[13] Roelofs (2007, p.502) concludes that “the pluralist model of  
civil society obscures the extensive collaboration among the resource- 
providing elites and the dependent state of most grassroots  
organizations. While the latter may negotiate with foundations over  
details, and even win some concessions, capitalist hegemony  
(including its imperial perquisites) cannot be questioned without  
severe organizational penalties. By and large, it is the funders who  
are calling the tune. This would be more obvious if there were  
sufficient publicized investigations of this vast and important  
domain. That the subject is ‘off-limits’ for both academics and  
journalists is compelling evidence of enormous power.”

Liberal foundations also played a key role in ‘supporting’ the  
development of modern day medicine, see Richard E. Brown, Rockefeller  
Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (University of  
California Press, 1979).

[14] Shoup and Minter, 1977, pp.95-6. Liberal foundations continue to  
support the Council’s work, e.g. the Ford Foundation’s 2006 Annual  
Report (p.62) notes that they gave the Council a $200,000 grant for  
“research, seminars and publications on the role of women in conflict  
prevention, post-conflict reconstruction and state building”.

[15] Michael Wala (1994, p.33) notes, that in May 1943, the Council  
established a Peace Aims Group that “was financed through a special  
fund from the Rockefeller Foundation”. This Group “organized meetings  
attended by representatives of occupied European countries and by the  
Allies. At these meetings, they could express their peace and  
reparations proposals, thus providing the State Department with  
important information for the coordination of its foreign policy  
aims” (pp.33-4). After the war, the Rockefeller Foundation then  
provided the Council with $55,000 to establish a group known as the  
Economic Co-operation Administration (ECA) that was administered by  
Paul G. Hoffman (who went on to become the first president of the  
Ford Foundation). “Dwight D. Eisnehower became the chairman of that  
study group on ‘Aid to Europe,’ and ‘whatever General Eisenhower  
knows about economics,’ journalist Joseph Kraft quoted a member of  
the group as stating, ‘he has learned at the study group meetings.’  
The Rockefeller Foundation went even further and suggested that the  
study group ‘served as a sort of education in foreign affairs for the  
future president of the United States.’” (Wala, 1994, pp.125-6)

[16] Also of interest, James Martin (1981) pointed out that the  
influential liberal historian, Charles A. Beard, “had opened up  
another sore while writing his book with a famed article in the  
Saturday Evening Post for October 4, 1947, ‘Who's to Write the  
History of the War?,’ in which he revealed that the Rockefeller  
Foundation, working with its alter ego, the Council on Foreign  
Relations, had provided $139,000 for the latter to spend in  
underwriting an official-line history of how the war had come about,  
in an effort to defeat at the start the same kind of ‘debunking’  
historical campaign which had immediately followed the end of World  
War I.” Also see Shoup and Minter (1977, pp.118-125) for more details  
on the work of the War and Peace Studies Group.

[17] For a brief account of the integral role played by the Council  
in the creation of the United Nations, see Shoup and Minter (1977, pp. 
169-72).

[18] F. William Engdahl (2008) adds that “State Department planning  
head, George F. Kennan wrote in a confidential internal memo in 1948,  
‘We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its  
population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern  
of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of  
disparity without positive detriment to our national security.’”  
Engdahl also notes: “Maintaining the role of the US dollar as world  
reserve currency has been the foremost pillar of the American Century  
since 1945, related to but more strategic even than US military  
superiority. How that dollar primacy has been maintained to now  
encompassed the history of countless postwar wars, financial warfare,  
debt crises, and threats of nuclear war to the present.” In addition,  
Joan Roelofs (2003, p.74) writes: “The new international monetary  
institutions, created in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, were  
not to be jeopardized by U.S. economic instability. Consequently,  
after War II, the ‘Managerial Presidency’ was enlarged to include a  
Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The CEA’s role was in  
institutionalize Keynesian economic planning for economic stability  
and to implement the Employment Act of 1946.”

After the successful War and Peace Studies, the next time that the  
Council would convene a group to study the entire international  
system was in 1973, when the 1980’s Project was initiated “to plan  
for and create the current neoliberal world system we now have.” See  
Laurence H. Shoup, Behind the Bipartisan Drive Toward War: The  
Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Z  
Magazine, March 1, 2003. For a detailed examination of the 1980s  
Project, see Shoup and Minter, 1977, pp.254-84.

[19] David Rockefeller (2002, p.408) writes he “strongly supported”  
the selection of William Bundy as the new head of Foreign Affairs,  
even though this “angered many Council members”, who “considered Bill  
a war criminal” owing to his former employment as assistance  
secretary of defense in the mid-1960s (a period during which the  
murderous scale of the Vietnam ‘War’ was escalating). David’s ability  
to overlook Bundy’s blood soaked past is entirely consistent.  
(Incidentally, the protests against William Bundy’s promotion were  
headed by Richard Falk, but the three others individuals joining Falk  
in the initial protest were Richard Barnet, Richard H. Ullman, and  
Ronald Steel, see Shoup and Minter (1977, p.46).) As Peter Collier  
and David Horowitz note in their excellent book The Rockefellers: An  
American Dynasty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), pp. 
416-7: “If the new military regimes that began appearing on the  
already bleak political landscape of Latin America dealt harshly with  
their opposition, they also brought a certain stability. It was for  
this reason that David welcomed the new conservatism of Washington’s  
alliance with the Latin republics. Writing in Foreign Affairs… in  
1966, David observed that the revised and scaled-down version of the  
Alliance for Progress  was better than ‘the overly ambitious concepts  
of revolutionary change of the program’s early years, because it  
created a climate more attractive to U.S. business.’” Following this  
line of reasoning it is not surprising that in 1979 David  
Rockefeller, the banker of the deposed (formerly US-backed) Shah of  
Iran, worked with Henry Kissinger to “put public and private pressure  
on the Carter administraton to allowed the deposed Shah of Iran into  
the country [US], assertedly for both humanitarian reasons and reason  
of state”. They succeeded in convincing the President to allow the  
Shah to come to the United States, an event that “precipitated the  
seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran and the taking of fifty- 
three hostages”. See Leonard Silk and Mark Silk, The American  
Establishment (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp.224-5. For a full  
account of David Rockefeller’s involvement in the Iran hostage  
crisis, see Robert Parry, Original October Surprise, Consortium News,  
October 29, 2006. For details of how the Trilateral Commission  
initially succeed in getting Carter elected president, see Shoup, The  
Carter Presidency and Beyond: Power and Politics in the 1980s  
(Ramparts Press, 1980).

Given David Rockefeller’s involvement in the fall of the Carter  
Presidency, it is interesting to note that the Rockefeller-created  
Trilateral Commissionbrought Carter to power in the first place.  
Stephen Lendman’s (2008) review of F. William Engdahl's new book  
Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation  
(Global Research, 2007), titled Agribusiness Giants seek to gain  
Worldwide Control over our Food Supply, which provides a useful  
summary of David Rockefeller’s decidedly antidemocratic history.  
David’s brother Nelson Rockefeller, another influential member of the  
Council, has a similarly antidemocratic background, see Gerald Colby  
and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon:  
Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperPerennial,  
1995) – see their interview on Democracy Now. has been attributed as  
being the group that

[20] Shoup and Minter, 1977, p.61.