Wall Street's Think Tank. Laurence H. Shoup

public support were all closely linked to the CFR.²⁵ Allen W. Dulles, a SR listee and a central figure in the U.S. government’s anti-communist crusades of the 1950s and early 1960s as CIA director (a leader of coups in Iran and Guatemala, as well as failed attempts to overthrow the Cuban Revolution), was continuously a director of the CFR from 1927 until he died in 1969. He was also successively the Council’s secretary (1933–44), vice president (1944–46), and president (1946–50). Allen’s brother John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, was also a CFR member, and chose the Council as the venue to announce the U.S. government’s “massive retaliation” nuclear doctrine against the USSR on January 12, 1954. This doomsday policy evidently gave rise to some doubts within the Council, which convened a group to study the question. A young Harvard University academic named Henry A. Kissinger was invited to chronicle the work of the group and spent the 1955–56 academic year at the CFR.²⁶ The resulting famous 1957 book by Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, suggested a modification of the Dulles-Eisenhower policy toward one that suggested gradual escalation, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.²⁷ Kissinger himself later retreated from this doctrine, taking a more sober view of the dangers to humanity represented by nuclear escalation. The junior academic met the Rockefellers and other powerful men at the Council and was on his way toward later prominence. Kissinger and the CFR also played a central role in the shift in U.S.-China policy during the 1969–72 years, moving away from a more dogmatic anti-communist policy to a more flexible one in which China could be used as part of a complex geopolitical power game involving the USSR and other states.²⁸

       War over Southeast Asia and Vietnam

      The U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the resulting foreign-policy disaster of 1964–73 also reflected the anti-Soviet perspectives dominant in the CFR. But more important, it involved the longtime interest of Council leaders and planners in Southeast Asia as an important geopolitical and geoeconomic region, one where U.S. “vital interests” were so involved that the area was strategically important to keep within the U.S. sphere of influence. The CFR was able to set the basic assumptions, alternatives, and framework for policy that gained capitalist-class consensus, eventually resulting in a U.S. military adventure with an immense loss of human life and treasure. Setting the framework for policy began with the War-Peace Studies in 1940–41, but intensified in the 1950s when the Council had no less than five different study groups focused on Southeast Asia. Typical was the 1959–60 study group headed up by CFR members Harlan Cleveland and Russell H. Fifield, whose conclusions were summed up by Fifield in a 1963 CFR book called Southeast Asia in United States Policy, stating that the area was “of great strategic, economic and demographic significance … of special significance in the world balance” because of the importance of its raw materials and markets.²⁹

      The U.S. government, led by Council men, naturally adopted the imperialistic CFR perspective and went to war based on this analysis and the resulting consensus view of the national capitalist class interest.³⁰ After several years of intense military engagement, and with the war not going well, the Council’s inspired consensus began to fall apart, leading to a remarkable turnaround in U.S. policy in early 1968. CFR men, including Chairman John J. McCloy, were dominant in the private “Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam” that for several years had advised President Lyndon Johnson to escalate the war, but then in 1968 urged Johnson to de-escalate and seek a negotiated peace.³¹

      THE PASSING OF THE OLD GUARD: FINE-TUNING THE CFR

      By the late 1960s and early 1970s the CFR was facing an aging problem, as a number of key directors and a large number of members were near or past normal retirement age. Some length-of-service records of some of the directors, almost all of them members of the old plutocracy, were extraordinary: Whitney Shepardson was a director for 45 years (1921–66); Hamilton Fish Armstrong for 44 years (1928–72); Allen Dulles for 42 years (1927–69); Frank Altschul 38 years (1934–72); and William A. M. Burden for 29 years (1945–74). One CFR fellow wrote an article about the Council in New York magazine in 1971, focusing on how the organization—“the citadel of the establishment”—was increasingly out of touch:

      If you can walk—or be carried—into the Pratt House, it usually means you are a partner in an investment bank or law firm—with occasional “trouble-shooting” assignments in government. You believe in foreign aid, NATO, and a bipartisan foreign policy. You’ve been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years, and you know it.

      But today your favorite club is breaking up, just on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary. The same vulgar polarizations that have popped up elsewhere—young against old, men against women, hawks against doves—have at last invaded the secluded Pratt House and citadel of the establishment itself.… The Council’s leaders, and most of its members, are affluent New Yorkers from the financial and legal community—the establishment heartland.… Increasingly, they look and act like fossils.… The Council is stuffy and clubby and parochial and elitist, but it is a place where old moneybags and young scholars are able to sit down and learn something from each other. It is pompous and pretentious, but it still draws men of affairs out of their counting-houses and into dialogue with men of intellect. It is quaint, but not quite yet a museum-piece. It would be a pity, I thought, if it should die.³²

      Although the CFR was hardly “breaking up,” or in any way losing its power, there was an atmosphere of crisis during the early 1970s due to the dissent of some of the younger members against the Vietnam War, and the fact that the Council was still an all-male organization with a high average age among its members. With 1,467 members in 1970, the CFR was a large organization, but it was soon to become much larger, this being necessary to acquire younger members, admit its first women, and gradually create a more diverse Council.

      The other central issue was bringing into the Council a representative group from the large nouveau riche plutocratic class that had rapidly grown up during the post–Second World War economic boom. This boom had greatly increased the number of millionaires in the United States, reportedly by as much as ten times between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s. The Council is an organization of, by, and for the plutocracy—and, as indicated by its history, membership, and top leadership, very attuned to the need to incorporate the leading capitalist class families. Therefore the newly rich element of the United States had to be, as much as possible, brought into the fold. To be sure, in the 1960s and 1970s the top leadership of the CFR was still dominated by members of the old plutocracy, as measured by listings in the SR. The membership also had a large representation from America’s richest old plutocratic families. For example, a quick review of the Council’s 1970 Annual Report finds four members of the Rockefeller family, and also top men from the Morgan, DuPont, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Cabot, Duke, Roosevelt, Whitney, Dodge, Milbank, McCormick, Payson, Houghton, Schiff, Reid, Guggenheim, Root, Watson, Harriman, Aldrich, and Dillon families.³³ These and other plutocratic families are the ones listed in the SR and discussed in such classic studies of U.S. wealth as Ferdinand Lundberg’s America’s Sixty Families,³⁴ as well as more recent works like Millionaires and Managers by S. Menshikov, Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips, and The Founding Fortunes by Michael Allen. The newly rich tend to look up to and get their prompts from the old rich, so as the CFR organization was fine-tuned after 1970, much remained the same, the old and new plutocracy met, mingled, and merged at the Council, resulting in an organization more representative of the U.S. plutocracy as a whole, and therefore more united, strengthened, and even more powerful.

      This brings up a key, and still very relevant point, namely that the CFR is not only a place where the capitalist class meets to discuss its own and our planet’s future; it is also a place where others outside the circle of great wealth, especially intellectuals, are brought into the dialogue and assimilated in order to assure capitalist-class hegemony. As this book will illustrate in depth, this blending together of leading men and women of wealth and economic power with men and women of brainpower is a central part of what makes the CFR unique and so important. The Council is both a membership organization and a think tank, marrying action and reflection. Its life and activities are made possible through a membership that is a delicately balanced combination of leaders of capitalist businesses, leaders of status-quo