Outreach is an attempt … to expand the influence of the Council…. There is a generation of people within the government who routinely talk to their friends at the Council. These are people who would not move on important issues before they checked with people they know who are members of the Council, because they know they will get a perspective, a certain wisdom that they are unlikely to get anywhere else. Now what you’re trying to do … is to get younger people in government to place the same sense of value on the Council, get them familiar with people in the Council, privately, discreetly.
—CHARLES G. BOYD, General, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)131
The most important thing about the Council is that it is an assembly point for committed people in the United States about foreign affairs writ large, a wider range of society than people who are pursuing policy. And it provides a place for both government officials from the United States and, just as importantly, officials from other countries, to come and make a public/private statement of their views on issues.
—JOHN DEUTCH, former director, Central Intelligence Agency132
I am involved in investing abroad, conversations with Council members who work in the same countries in which I’m interested give me a different perspective on some of the issues I may be addressing.
—NANCY GOODMAN, Attorney, Winslow Partners, LLC133
Membership activities over the next nearly two decades, 1995 to 2014, focused on expanding numbers and diversity of members, activities in Washington, in the corporate membership sector, and nationally, while maintaining the Council’s New York base. This process of change continued to be slow; by 2014 women still represented only about 27 percent and minorities only about 16 percent of CFR membership.134
In 1996 CFR director Robert B. Zoellick, later prominent in the George W. Bush administration and head of the World Bank, remarked on the importance of expanding the Council’s influence beyond New York to Washington and the rest of the country:
A national organization must have a significant presence in the nation’s capital as well as a major presence in the nation’s financial center. Washington is clearly the heart of policymaking and the policymaking debate. We never really had a base in Washington, now we do. We have foreign officials coming through, we have Congress, we have Council fellows; each offers opportunities to reach people that New York does not regularly reach. Looking ahead, the real challenge for the Council will be what it can do beyond New York and Washington.135
Indicating that Zoellick’s call reflected a much wider consensus, chair Peter Peterson reported in 1997 that the Council was attempting to transform “itself from a New York–based organization into a truly national body—one that better reflects the diversity of the American body politic and its concerns and interests…. Now we are reaching further into America.”136 At the same time that this outreach was ongoing, the CFR was building up its now twin bases—New York and Washington. A new building was completed and occupied in New York in 1997, one wired with the latest interactive video-conferencing technology. The CFR.org website was also established that year. In Washington, larger offices and meeting spaces were occupied in the new Carnegie Endowment building next door to the Brookings Institution. There was a large increase in meetings, and a new focus on Congress was inaugurated.137
An expansion of the “national program” was also projected during this period, aiming at building membership and programs in key cities, including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, and Boston, with Seattle and Minneapolis to be added in the near future.138 The aim was to create a solid core of Council members in each city, part of a network that could provide “real input into all our intellectual work.”139 In 2001 the first CFR national conference was staged, a two-day event with seminars conducted by CFR senior fellows and kicked off with an opening presentation by President George W. Bush’s new National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.140
By 2005 the Council’s national program had expanded to over ninety annual sessions nationwide. The program included meetings of CFR senior fellows with Council members to discuss current research and share book drafts, reports, and articles in order to spread the CFR worldview and receive feedback and insights. This both helped shape the final product and involve “national” members (those outside New York and Washington) in the CFR’s core activities. The 2005 annual national conference, attended by over three hundred members, was at the CFR headquarters in New York and focused on the occupation of Iraq.141 Two years later the CFR reported that it now had programs in fourteen different cities and 37 percent of its members lived outside New York and Washington (that is, these two cities still had 63 percent between them). This distribution was not too different than was the case in 1981, when 31 percent lived outside these two key cities.142 What had really changed was the large expansion of members in D.C. with a resulting reduction in the percentage of New York members in CFR (although not in numbers, as the organization’s overall number of members continued to expand). This growth was reflected in the Council’s purchase of its own building in Washington—appropriately enough located very close to the White House and called the “Boss” Shepherd building, named for a former mayor of the District.143 That same year, Council president Richard N. Haass, who had taken over from Gelb as president in 2003, began to refer to the organization he headed as “the leading foreign policy organization in the world.”144
In recent years, information about the CFR membership’s views on foreign policy has become available due to polling efforts by the Pew Research Center in association with the Council. In November of 2013 the Pew-CFR team sent a set of questions online to all CFR members. Almost 40 percent of the Council members, a total of 1,838, responded. At the same time, they conducted a series of telephone interviews using the same questions with 2,003 people representing a sample of the American public. The most interesting results were in the areas in which the results from the public diverged most radically from the views of the CFR members. There was a serious difference, for example, on the issue of the relative priority that should be given in foreign policy to protecting the jobs of American workers. Fully 81 percent of the public group wanted this to be a “top priority,” whereas only 29 percent of the Council members did. Results for earlier years showed an even lower result, in 1997 for example, only 16 percent of CFR members interviewed thought that protecting the jobs of U.S. workers was a top priority.145 Similarly, 73 percent of Council members believed that it was mostly helpful when U.S. companies set up operations overseas, whereas only 23 percent of the general public agreed.146 On trade issues, fully 93 percent of Council members felt that “free trade” agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership were good things.147 CFR members who responded also overwhelmingly believed that National Security Agency surveillance and drone attacks on other nations made the United States safer, although the public at large had a much lower positive response on these two issues.148 These results reinforce the general point that, even at the membership level, the Council predominately represents the views of the higher levels of the class structure, those who are part of, or allied with, the capitalist class, in contrast to the needs and perspectives of whose who depend upon wage labor for economic survival.
Corporate Membership and Program
Another key part of the CFR as organization and network is its Corporation Service Program, for corporations that, by annual subscription, become corporate members of the Council. This program was started in 1953 and offers to executives of subscribing companies (both domestic and foreign-based) a series of meetings, discussions, dinners, conferences, seminars, workshops, trips abroad, access to the CFR’s reference service, advice from members of the CFR’s fellows and research staff, and (to those corporations who subscribe at the highest level) use of the Council’s “Harold Pratt House ballroom and library.” Additionally, “Multiple executives may take part in the Corporate Conference, a yearly summit on geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges.” Benefits vary depending upon the subscription/membership level, the annual price of which in 2014 ranged from $100,000 for “Founders” to