Council on Foreign Relations

History and role

An Excerpt from William domhoff, (1971) The Higher Circles: the governing class in America, New York: vintage, p112-23.

To give empirical flesh to these generalizations, there is no better starting point than the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It is the key middle term, so to speak, between the large corporations on the one hand and the federal government on the other. By studying its connections in both directions, it is possible to establish the first link we are looking for in showing the specific mechanisms by which the power elite formulate and transfer their wishes into government policy. While it would be hard to under-estimate the importance of this organization in understanding the overall framework for American foreign policy, I do not want to overemphasize it, and we will see that there are other links between big business and big-government.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a nonpartisan research and discussion group dedicated to informing citizens about world affairs and creating an interest in international relations. Despite its reputed prominence and the fact that it was founded in 1921, most information on it comes from its own publications: a fifteen-year history, a twenty-five-year history and annual reports. One of the few who has written on it, Washington journalist Joseph Kraft, noted in 1958 that it was mentioned only five times in Time magazine in the period 1953-1958.’(Joseph Kraft, “School for Statesmen� (Harper’s Magazine, July,1958), p. 64.) We can go one step further and say that there never has been any research paper on it in any scholarly journal indexed in the Social Science and Humanities Index. While this may suggest it is not very important, there are several ways to establish its crucial role, including testimony by journalists and scholars, the acknowledged preeminence of its journal (Foreign Affairs), the nature of its financial backing, the composition of its leadership and membership, and the presence of its members in federal government positions.

To begin with expert testimony, CFR was called by Kraft a “school for statesmen [which] comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite - a group of men, similar in interest and outlook, shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes.�(Joseph Kraft, “School for Statesmen� (Harper’s Magazine, July,1958), p. 64, 68). Douglass Cater, a journalist from Exeter and Harvard who served on the staff of President Lyndon B. Johnson, has noted that “a diligent scholar would do well to delve into the role of the purely unofficial Council on Foreign Relations in the care and breeding of an incipient American Establishment.�(Douglass Cater, Power in Washington (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 247.) The New York Times calls it “a testing ground for new ideas, with enough political and financial power to bring the ideas to the attention of the policy makers in Washington.�(“Experts on Policy Looking to Youth� (The New York Times, May 15, 1966), p. 34.) Political scientist Lester Milbrath notes that “The Council on Foreign Relations, while not financed by government, works so closely with it that it is difficult to distinguish Council actions stimulated by government from autonomous actions.�5

Empirically speaking, such reputational testimony is the least important of our evidence. Far more important is CFR’s financing and leadership. Aside from membership dues, dividends from invested gifts and bequests, and profits from the sale of Foreign Affairs, the most important sources of income are leading corporations and major foundations. In 1957-58, for example, Chase Manhattan, Continental Can, Ford Motor, Bankers Trust, Cities Service, Gulf, Otis Elevator, General Motors Overseas Operations, Brown Brothers, Harriman, and International General Electric were paying from $i,ooo to $io,ooo per year for the corporation service, depending upon the size of the company and its interest in international affairs. (The benefits of subscribing to this corporation service are as fol¬lows: free consultation with all members of the CFR staff, subscriptions to Foreign Affairs for leading officers of the corporation, the use of the Council’s excellent library which is second to none in its field, and the right to nominate one “promising young executive� to participate in seminars which the Council conducts each fall and spring for the benefit of the corporations.)6 More generally, in 1960-61, eighty-four large corporations and financial institutions contributed 12% ($i 12,200) of CFRs total income. As to the foundations, the major contributors over the years have been the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, with the Ford Foundation joining in with a large grant in the 1950’s. According to Kraft, a $2.5 million grant in the early i 0’s from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations made the Council “the most important single private agency conducting research in foreign affairs.�7 In 1960-61, foundation money accounted for 25% of CFR income.

The foundations which support the CFR are in turn directed by men from Bechtel Construction, Chase Manhattan, Cummins Engine, Corning Glass, Kimberly-Clark, Monsanto Chemical, and dozens of other corporations. Further, to complete the circle, most foundation directors are members of CFR. In the early 1960’s, Dan Smoot found that twelve of twenty Rockefeller Foundation trustees, ten of fifteen Ford Foundation trustees, and ten of fourteen Carnegie Corporation trustees were members of CFR.8 Nor is this interlock of recent origin. In 1922, for example, former ‘Secretary of State Elihu Root, a corporation lawyer; was honorary CFR president as well as president of the Carnegie Corporation, while John W. Davis, the corporation lawyer who ran for President on the Democratic ticket in 1924, was a trustee of both the Carnegie Corporation and CFR.

5. Lester Milbrath, “Interest Groups and Foreign Policy� in James N. Rosenau, ed., Domestic Sources of Foreign Policy (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 247. 6. Annual Report of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1957—58. 7. Kraft, op. cit., p. 68. 8. Dan Smoot, The Invisible Government (Dallas: The Dan Smoot Re¬port, 1962), pp. 168-71.

A consideration of the leadership and membership of CER is equally conclusive in establishing its relationship tothe power elite. Its founders included two lawyers and two bankers from Wall Street. The single permanent official of CFR at its outset, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and the first editor of Foreign Affairs, Archibald Coolidge, were both from well-known, upper-class families. Indeed, Hamiltons, Fishes and Armstrongs have been involved in American foreign policy since the beginnirigs of the Republic. Nor has anything changed since the early 1920’s, with fourteen of the twenty-two recent or current directors as of the early 1960’s being listed in the Social Register. Among the most prominent of the recent directors highly visible in the corporate elite are Frank Altschul, Elliott V. Bell, Thomas K. Finletter (one-time Secretary of the Air Force), Devereaux C. Josephs, John J. Mc Cloy, David Rockefeller and Adlai B. Stevenson.

The CFR limits itself to 700 New York area residents and 700 non-New York residents (no women or foreigners are allowed to join). As of the mid-sixties, 46% of the resident members and 49 % of the non-resident members, most of whom are big businessmen and lawyers, were listed in the Social Register.9 The Council’s only other formal associates are the Committees on Foreign Relations that have been formed in about thirty cities across the country. These committees come together at dinners and other occasions to hear speakers (mostly supplied by CFR) and exchange ideas. This committee program has been financed since 1938 by the Carnegie - Corporation.10 We were able to locate information on 509 committee members from twenty-nine cities ranging in size and importance from Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta to Albuquerque, Boise and Little Rock. A significant minority of those studied (41 %) were corporate executives and bankers. Twenty-one percent were lawyers, almost half of whom (44%) were also corporate directors. Thus, a small majonty (51%) were directly involved in business enterprises. Another significant group consisted of educators (22 %), most of whom were college presidents, political scientists, economists, and deans. Seven percent of those studied were editors or publishers, with the remainder being small numbers of government officials, politicians, church lead¬ers, physicians, accountants and museum directors.

Turning to the all-important question of government involvement, the presence of CFR members in government has been attested to by Kraft, Cater, Smoot, CFR histories and The New York Times, but the point is made most authoritatively by John J. McCloy, Wall Street lawyer, former chairman of Chase Manhattan, trustee of the Ford Foundation, director of CFR and a government appointee in a variety of roles since the early I 940’s: “Whenever we needed a man,� said McCloy in explaining the presence of CFR members in the modem defense establishment that fought World War II, “we

9. John F. Whitney, Jr., “The Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.� (Un¬published research paper, Texas A and I University, January, 1968). 10. Smoot, op. cit., p. 21.

thumbed through the roll of council members and put through a call to New York.�11 According to Kraft, “When John McCloy went to Bonn as US High Commissioner, he took with him a staff composed almost exclusively of men who had interested themselves in German affairs at the Council.�’2 CFR members also were prominent in the US delegation to the founding of the United Nations, and several dozen have held high posts in postwar administrations. One Annual Report spoke as follows in an obituary notice:

John Foster Dulles was a member of the Council almost from the start. He wrote an article on “The Allieri Debts� for the first issue of Foreign Affairs and six more articles thereafter, including two while Secretary of State. He participated in numerous study and discussion groups over the years and ‘spoke often at Council afternoon meetings an dinners, twice as Secretary of State.’3

Theodore White, in recounting how Lyndon Johnson won the Presidency in 1964, wrote as follows about the relationship of the Council to government:

Its roster of members has for a generation, under Republican and Democratic administrations ‘alike, been the chief recruit¬ing ground for Cabinet-level officials in Washington. Among the first eighty-two names on a list prepared for John F. Kennedy for staffing his State Department, at least sixty-three were members of the Council, Republicans and Democrats alike. When, finally, he made his appointments, both his Secretary of State (Rusk, Democrat) and Treasury (Dillon, Republican) were chosen from Council members; so were seven assistant and undersecretaries of State, four senior members of Defense, . . . as well as two members of the White House staff (Schlesinger, Democrat; Bundy, Republican) 14

Now that we have located the CFR in sociological space as. an institution controlled by members of the upper class, we are in a position to see what it does and how effective it is in shaping foreign policy. As to what the CFR does, in addition to serving as a talent pool and training ground for government service, it is a tax-exempt, non-partisan organization which sponsors education, discussion and research on all aspects of foreign affairs. As part of its educational effort, it brings before its exclusive membership leading scholars and government officials from all nations to make off-the-record speeches and to answer questions from the members. And, as Kraft notes, this not only educates the members, it gives them a chance to size up important leaders with whom

11. Kraft, op. cit., p. 67. 12. Ibid.., p. 68. 13. Annual Report of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1958—59, p. 4.’ 14. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1965), pp. 67-8.

they will have to deal.15 Also under the heading of education, CFR publishes Foreign Affairs, by far the most important journal in its field, and three annual surveys: Political Handbook of the World, The United States in World Affairs, and Documents on American Foreign Relations.

Despite the importance of speeches and publications, I think the most important aspects of the CFR program are its special discussion groups and study groups. These small groups of about twenty-five bring together businessmen, government officials, military men and scholars for detailed discussions of specific topics in the area of foreign affairs. Discussion groups explore problems in a general way, trying to define issues and alternatives. Such groups often lead to a study group as the next stage. Study groups revolve around the work of a Council research fellow (financed by Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller) or a staff member. This group leader usually presents monthly papers, which are discussed and criticized by the rest of the group. The goal of such study groups is a detailed statement of the problem by the scholar leading the discussion. In 1957-58, for example, the Council published six books which grew out of study groups. Perhaps the most famous of these was written by Henry Kissinger, a bright young McGeorge Bundy protégé at Harvard who was asked by the CFR to head a study group. His Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was “‘a best seller which has been closely read in the highest Administration circles and foreign offices abroad.�’6 As 40 his study group, it included “two former chairmen of the Atomic Energy Commission, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, two former civilian secretaries in the Defense Department and representatives just below the highest level from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency the three armed services.�17 When economist Percy of the CFR staff led a discussion on foreign tariff, issue that will be discussed later, the study group included ten corporate representatives, ten economists, two communications experts from MIT’s Center for International Studies, a minor Defense Department official and a foreign service officer.18

It is within these discussion groups and study groups, where privacy is the rule to encourage members to speak freely, that members of the power elite study and plan as to how best to attain American objectives in world affairs. It is here that they discuss alternatives and hash out differ ences, far from the limelight of official government and mass media. As The New York Times says of these unpublicized luncheons and closed seminars: “Except for its annual public Elihu Root Lectures, the Council’s talks and

15. Kraft, op. cit., p. 66. A perusal of any annual report of the CER will show that a foreign official visiting in New York who is anyone at all will be speaking or meeting with members of the Council. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Percy W. Bidwell, What the Tariff Means to American industries (published for the Council on Foreign Relations by Harper & Row, New York, 1956).

seminars are strictly off the record. An indiscretion can be grounds for termination or suspension of. membership.....�19 Such discussions also help to reduce the effect of political changes. In Kraft’s language: “e.g the Council plays a special part in helping to bridge the gap between the two parties, affording unofficially a measure of continuity when the guard changes in Washington.�20 Given its privacy as to discussions (it is quite open about everything else), can we know the relationship between CFR and government policy? Can we go beyond the fact that CFR conducts research and discussions and that its members hold responsible positions in the federal govern¬ment? It is not only secrecy which makes this question hard to answer; there is also the problem that CFR as an organization does not take a partisan stand. To even begin to answer such a question completely would require a large number of studies of various decisions and their outcomes. In lieu of such studies, the most important and easy of which would be on the origins of the bipartisan foreign policy of postwar years, several suggestive examples will have to suffice, along with the general testimony of Kraft (“It has been the seat of some basic government decisions, has set the context for many more�) and The New York Times (“Discussion groups, scholarly papers and studies sponsored by the Council laid the groundwork for the Marshall Plan for European recovery, set American policy guidelines for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and currently are evolving a long-range analysis of American attitudes toward China�).21 More concretely, Kraft claims that CFR action was responsible for putting Greenland out of bounds for the Nazis, for shaping the United Nations charter, and for softening the American position on German postwar reparations, among others. One of the most impressive evidences is that four CFR planning groups, set up in 1939 with aid from the Rockefeller Foundation, were taken (along with most of. the personnel) into the State Department in 1942 “as the nub of its Advisory Committee on Postwar Planning Problems.�22 And it was supposedly a special CFR briefing session in early 1947 that convinced Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett of Brown Brothers, Harriman that “it would be our principal task at State to awaken the nation, to the dangers of Communist aggression.�23

Despite the ‘fact that the CFR is an organization most Americans have never heard of, I think we have clearly established by a variety of means that it is a key connection between the federal government and the owners and managers of the country’s largest

19. “Experts on Foreign Policy Look to Youth,� op cit., p. 34. 20. Kraft, op. cit., p. 68. 21. Ibid., p. 64; “Experts on Foreign Policy Look to Youth,� op. cit., p.34. 22. Kraft, op. cit., p. 67. Much of Kraft’s information on CFR involve¬ment in specific issues seems to be drawn from CFR’s self-published 25-year history. It contains further details and information on other issues as well. See The Council on Foreign Relations, A Record of Twenty-five Years, New York, 1947. 23. Quoted in Kraft, op. cit., p. 68

financial institutions and corporations. It is an organization of the power elite. If it is not all-embracing in its importance, it is certainly a considerable understatement to speak of CFR members and members of similar power elite associations, as one scholar does, as “external bureaucrats� who supply the government with information, perspectives, and manpower.24 Inmy view, what knowledge we have of CFR suggests that through it the power elite formulate general guidelines for American foreign policy and provide the personnel to carry out’ this policy. But I also know that the evidence I have presented is not enough for those scholars who prefer to analyze actual decisions. Then, too, skeptics can point out that CFR has no policy (other than the all-important policy of international involvement, as opposed to isolationism, for which it is called “Communist� and “Un-American� by older-fashioned, nationalistic critics). Furthermore, skeptics can say that CFR’s members have other institutional and associational affiliations that may be more important in determining their outlook. For all of these reasons, I will let the case for.

CFR rest at this point, noting the presence of its directors and members only in passing, and instead emphasizing the direct corporate connections of important decision-makers In closing this discussion of the CFR as an organization of the power elite, it should be noted that Kraft is among the skeptics. Despite all the comments we have quoted from him on the importance of CFR, he con¬cludes that “even that cock will not fight� as far as the CFR being part of any power elite. This is because CFR has assumed “semi-official duties only in emergencies,� because it “has never accepted government financial support� and because its recommendations “have subsequently all stood test at the polls or in Congress.� Furthermore, there are “divergent views within the Council, and such an organ¬ization is necessary because issues are too complicated for the ordinary citizen, who is all wrapped up in his private life. Kraft’s concluding sentence seems to be a challenge to those who might criticize—he quotes Voltaire, asking, “What have you got that’s better?�25

24. Chadwick F. Alger, “The External Bureaucracy in United States Foreign Affairs (Administration Science Quarterly, June, 1962). 25. Kraft, op. cit., p. 68.