which consequently makes this organization so important to understand in depth. Studying the Council in detail allows us to understand the goals, strategy, and tactics of the powerful, how and why they define the “national class interest” as they do; it shows how this organization develops new initiatives, forges unity around them, then shapes the public agenda and debate, including discussions among public officials, a large number of whom are CFR members. A focus on the CFR illustrates key abstractions like “capitalist class,” “ruling class,” and “ideological hegemony.” It yields a deeper understanding of specific historical events like the U.S. war on Iraq and the rapidly evolving ecological crisis, pointing out the potential vulnerabilities of this ruling class.
The Council has been pursuing a world-spanning hegemonic project since it was founded in the 1918–1921 period. One critical ingredient of such a project has been the capacity to provide intellectual leadership. Such leadership combines knowledge, experience, and a collective worldview to create and spread its vision and have the power and legitimacy to implement it. The CFR’s constant stream of interpretations, recommendations, and development priorities are meant to provide a framework for a capitalist-class agenda and a strategy that can be deployed through the vast Council network of political-economic and cultural influence at home and worldwide. In this way a particular worldview, agenda, and policy discourse become effective in the real world. A full-scale analysis of the overall CFR worldview and grand strategy of neoliberal geopolitical economics was not formally developed in Imperial Brain Trust. This worldview will be outlined in some detail in the second half of the present volume, including the Council’s key role in the development of neoliberalism as an effective doctrinal and ideological cluster, a governing philosophy.
Following the publication of Imperial Brain Trust, I continued to be interested in the CFR, and, have, over an almost forty-year period, collected a large archive of data, useful in producing Wall Street’s Think Tank. Today (early 2015), the Council on Foreign Relations has an individual membership of almost 5,000, a corporate membership of about 170, a staff of over 330, supported by an annual budget of about $60 million and assets of almost $492 million.8 It remains the largest and most powerful of all U.S. private think tanks that presume to discuss and decide the future of humanity in largely secret meetings behind closed doors in the upper-class neighborhoods of New York and Washington. During the last four decades the CFR has not only successfully continued its central position as the most important private organization in the United States, one with no real peer in the country. It has clearly succeeded in expanding its key role, and remains at the center of the small plutocracy that runs the United States and much of the world.
The reader will kindly take note that no monied interests, foundations, universities, corporations, research institutes, or think tanks have in any way funded or otherwise influenced the production of this book. It is an effort of independent scholarship, by someone who believes that the current power structure is bankrupt and fundamental changes are needed if the great majority of humanity is to survive the ecosystemic catastrophe and violent conflicts that the One Percent and their monopoly-finance capitalist system are creating for life on our planet.
I would like to especially thank Suzanne Baker, Dr. Daniel D. Shoup, Dr. Paul W. Rea, and Jennifer Ho who all took out time from their busy lives to read parts of the book and make suggestions on ways to improve it. Thanks also to Michael D. Yates and Erin Clermont, my editors at Monthly Review, who worked hard making numerous corrections and offered many helpful suggestions. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my responsibility alone.
—LAURENCE H. SHOUP
March 2015
INTRODUCTION: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE CFR
The Council on Foreign Relations in recent decades has become a much different organization than it was when it was established and incorporated in the 1918–1921 period. Nevertheless, origins do matter, and the CFR’s beginnings and first half-century of existence set key patterns that still exist today.
THE ORIGINS AND EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNCIL
The Council had its origins in the uniting of two different fledgling groups during the post–First World War era. The first, established in 1918, was the New York club called the Council on Foreign Relations. It had only 108 members, dominated by high-ranking Wall Street financiers and international lawyers. Its aims were to explore the effect of the war upon business and promote commerce. Its means were networking conferences and dinners hosting prominent foreign visitors.9 The second organization grew out of the postwar planning body—mainly made up of intellectuals—set up by President Wilson’s aide Edward House with the help of Walter Lippmann and others for the benefit of the 1919 U.S. peace delegation at the Versailles Conference. This group was called “The Inquiry.”
Attending the conference, the group of planners met separately with members of the British delegation and decided to continue the Inquiry by forming a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs with two branches, one in each country. The plan foundered on the American side, but the British group formed what became the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House). After almost dying, the long-term Inquiry project was revived by joining with the established Wall Street group. The result was the incorporation of the Council on Foreign Relations under the laws of New York in 1921. It represented a synergy of internationally oriented corporate business interests and university-based academics: men whose goal was capital accumulation and men focused on ideas. The new CFR became the sister organization to Chatham House and the two organizations have had a close cooperative relationship ever since, each helping the other in “a hundred different ways.”10
The new Council had a fifteen-man board of directors and an honorary president in the person of Republican Elihu Root, the leading Wall Street lawyer of the era. Root had not only served as counsel for many leading corporations, he personally had advised powerful political and economic actors like Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, and E. H. Harriman. One of the early revolving-door players, he had moved in and out of government and private law practice, serving as a U.S. senator, as President McKinley’s secretary of war, and President Roosevelt’s Secretary of State. In these capacities he had played a central role in designing colonial and neocolonial policies in places like the Philippines and Cuba as the United States intensified its imperialist expansion during the end of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. The president of the new CFR was John W. Davis, an attorney for the leading finance capitalist of the age, J. P. Morgan. He was later, while still president of the Council, the 1924 Democratic nominee for president.11 The new vice president, Paul D. Cravath, and secretary-treasurer, Edwin F. Gay, were also J. P. Morgan-connected. Cravath’s law firm worked for Morgan, and Gay, a former Harvard professor, was editor of the New York Evening Post, owned by Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont.12
Among the new directors of the Council was Archibald Cary Coolidge, a Harvard professor who had been part of the Inquiry and was from a prominent and wealthy Boston family, one that went back to involvement in the nineteenth-century China trade. He was asked to become the editor of the CFR’s new flagship magazine, Foreign Affairs. He only consented to take the responsibility if he could have a full-time assistant. Gay recommended one of his young reporters, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a Princeton man whose ancestors not only included Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s Secretary of State, but also Peter Stuyvesant, a major figure in the early history of New York City. Armstrong eventually took over Foreign Affairs, serving as its editor from 1928 to 1972, as well as a Council director during the same forty-four-year period.
Root, Davis, Cravath, Coolidge, and Armstrong were all representatives of the old money/prominent families/high society set, and were all listed in the Social Register (SR), long considered the definitive guide to who is in or out of the upper class.13 A very large representation of SR listees among its officers and directors was a prime characteristic of the early CFR. All seven of the Council presidents during the period 1921–1971 were from families listed in the SR, as were both honorary presidents, the first three chairmen of the board (1946–85), and the first three vice chairmen of the board of the CFR (1971–78).
Other