PRESIDENTS AND LONG-SERVING CFR DIRECTORS, 1976–2013
As will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, the top leadership, together with the board of directors, make the important strategic decisions in the CFR. The role of the presidents, on the other hand, is that of day-to-day manager of all Council activities. If it is clear that the top leadership of the CFR has been and is dominated by members of the capitalist class, what about the secondary leaders, the presidents and directors of the organization during this period? There have been a total of five presidents who served longer than one year: Bayless Manning, Winston Lord, Peter Tarnoff, Leslie Gelb, and Richard N. Haass. A brief biography of each of these five individuals follows. Additionally, there have been 167 CFR directors during the period 1976–2013. Biographies of all of these directors would be tedious, and unnecessary in any case. This is because there are two major categories of director that stand out, those clearly members of the capitalist class, and those best described as part of a class of professionals hired to serve the capitalist class. Below is a short list of the longest-serving directors, which will serve as a manageable sample illustrative of the whole. The Appendix includes a list of the CFR directors from 1921 to the mid-1970s, as well as the 167 directors who served during the 1976–2013 period.
Based on career patterns, the capitalist-class sector, consisting mainly of finance capitalists and corporate capitalists, make up almost two-thirds of the total number of directors. The second group is characterized by their professional knowledge, their connections, and their intellectual skills. They make up a professional class, specializing in developing creative solutions to the problems faced by capitalism and their system, and promoting the system’s legitimacy. This latter group is divided, about equally, into two groups: first, career academics, and second, lawyers, government officials (including military officers) and journalists. Many of these professionals are in the process of being assimilated into the capitalist class, and their membership in and service to the CFR often assists their advance to that level of wealth and status. One key way is gaining invitations to serve on corporate boards, where high pay is the norm; another is setting up a consulting or other business that serves corporations and the wealthy. Of the 167, only three individuals were connected to organized labor: Lane Kirkland and Thomas R. Donahue, as salaried leaders of the AFL-CIO, and Glenn E. Watts, the head of the Communications Workers of America.
THE CFR PRESIDENTS
The role of the president of the Council, a paid position, is to manage the organization and its staff in accordance with the desires and will of the board of directors and top leadership. There are two striking things about the five CFR presidents as a group: their service in government and their professional-class status as organic intellectuals for the capitalist class. Only one, Winston Lord, could be called a member of the capitalist class prior to his tenure as president of the CFR. This illustrates a central aspect of the CFR, its role in marrying the intellect of a variety of corporate connected professionals with the power of the capitalist class, under the leadership of the latter.
Bayless Manning, President, 1971–1977
Bayless Manning served as Council president from 1971 to 1977. He was a Yale University graduate who later taught law at Yale, then became a law professor and dean of the Stanford Law School. His expertise was in corporate law. David Rockefeller and Cyrus R. Vance reportedly chose Manning to serve as CFR president. After he resigned this position, he joined the New York corporate law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Winston Lord, President, 1977–1985
Winston Lord succeeded Manning and was president of the Council until 1985. Lord’s family is part of the old plutocracy; his mother, Mary Pillsbury Lord, was a Pillsbury of the flour fortune. He became an expert on China, going into the government as part of Henry Kissinger’s staff at the National Security Council during the Nixon administration. He then became director of policy planning at the State Department in the mid-1970s and an adviser on China. While CFR president, he became President Reagan’s ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989. In 1993 President Clinton appointed Lord an Assistant Secretary of State. He occupied that position until 1997. His wife, Betty Bao Lord, was a CFR director from 1998 to 2003.
Peter Tarnoff, President, 1986–1993
Peter Tarnoff was Council president from 1986 to 1993. Tarnoff had been a Foreign Service officer who rose through the ranks, becoming a special assistant to both Secretary of State Muskie and Secretary of State Vance. He later became the executive director of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. President Clinton appointed Tarnoff to the position of Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs while he was CFR president. He then resigned as CFR president to serve in the government from 1993 to 1997.
Leslie H. Gelb, President, 1993–2003
Leslie H. Gelb succeeded Tarnoff and served as Council president until 2003. Prior to becoming president of the CFR, Gelb had a career in both the State and Defense Departments, then was hired by the New York Times as a national security correspondent, editorial page editor, and columnist. In between government postings, he taught at the college level and was associated with the Brookings Institution and Carnegie Endowment. He wrote a number of books before and after serving as CFR president, including Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy.80
Richard N. Haass, President, 2003–Present
In a feature article in the Financial Times, Richard N. Haass was called “one of the most prominent members of the US foreign policy establishment … president of the Council on Foreign Relations, the influential New York think tank.” He and his wife live on the Upper East Side of New York, near the CFR headquarters and Central Park, and also have a 300-year-old country house north of Manhattan.81 Haass was a Rhodes Scholar, and earned a master’s and doctorate from Oxford University, later teaching at the college level. Prior to being named CFR president, Haass was in and out of government, first as Special Assistant to George H. W. Bush and as part of the National Security Council. He received the Presidential Citizens Medal for helping to develop plans for the first invasion of Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. During the Clinton years he was out of government, working as a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and as a vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. When George W. Bush took office, Republican Haass was again brought into government, this time as Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State and a close adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He left that position to become president of the Council.
In 2007 Haass was asked to join the board of directors of the Fortress Investment Group, a global investment management firm with over a thousand institutional and private investors. According to Forbes, in 2011 alone he received $210,000 in compensation from Fortress, including stock grants. He is the author of eleven books on American foreign policy, including The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course.82
Haass in April 2013 wrote positively about Margaret Thatcher, the British conservative leader, stating that the United States should “take to heart” how she got “Britain’s economy back on track.” Haass sums up the central elements of Thatcher’s program that he favors as follows: “privatization, lower taxes on income, a reduced role for trade unions—in short, the successful trimming of the role of government in the economy.”83
CFR CAPITALIST-CLASS DIRECTORS
One hundred and three, 61.7 percent, or almost two-thirds, of all 167 CFR directors during the 1976–2013 years have been capitalists: they had assets of over $10 million, were longtime officers or directors of major U.S. corporations, or a principal of a major law firm. They inherited or married wealth or made all or key parts of their careers as power wielders in the capitalist-class-dominated corporate world. A number of these individuals are also known to be billionaires or near billionaires. One pattern for capitalist-class CFR directors has been a close connection to one of the big New York or regional commercial