The Power Behind the Presidency
William F. Jasper
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The New American, August 13, 2001
For decades, America’s presidents have been under the sway of the internationalist Council on Foreign Relations, and George W. Bush is no exception to the rule. |
The social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and pro-defense, pro-sovereignty, pro-gun constituencies who elected George W. Bush are witnessing another great betrayal by another Republican president sold to them as an honest-to-goodness conservative. The problem is, as with so many Republican betrayals in the past, that too few members of these core constituencies are willing and able to recognize the betrayal, even as it unfolds before their eyes. So disgusted, outraged, and fearful were they of the Clinton-Gore nightmare and the prospect of a continuation of that nightmare under a Gore-Lieberman administration that they rushed to the Bush-Cheney team as a godsend.
Rhetoric and style count for something, and in this respect the Bush persona is a vast improvement over that of his immediate predecessor. But the record should speak louder than rhetoric, and the record shows that on virtually every front Bush is proving to be as big an internationalist as Clinton and as duplicitous as previous Republican occupants of the Oval Office. Right out of the starting gate, George W. moved to solidify the ongoing Democratic New Deal legacy of FDR by proposing and pushing ever more government spending and bigger, more intrusive, more centralized government. There have been no rollbacks of the federal leviathan. Indeed, he has accepted and defended abusive and unconstitutional Clinton policies which Republicans roundly denounced before the White House shifted from Democrat to Republican occupation. And what should be causing immense consternation — but seems to have barely registered on Republican and conservative radar screens — is the new administration’s ardor for the United Nations, the WTO, and all other pet projects of the organized internationalists.
Warning Signs
Discerning observers have not been surprised by these developments; there were many clues that George W. Bush would be tacking hard to port while feinting to the starboard.
An important clue was provided before the presidential elections in the September/ October 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. In an assessment of the presidential race and voter attitudes, James M. Lindsay of the Brookings Institution noted that “both Al Gore and George W. Bush are internationalists by inclination....”
Those few words spoke volumes to those who understood the platform, the parlance, and the audience involved. Newsweek calls Foreign Affairs the “pre-eminent” journal of its kind, while Time calls it “the most influential periodical in print.” Its pre-eminence and influence derives not from brilliance of perception and expression or from a massive subscriber base, but from the fact that it is the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The Council, as liberal-left author Richard Rovere noted in an article for Esquire back in 1962, is “a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation.” In an October 1993 column, Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood called the CFR “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
Harwood went on to detail the CFR influence in the Clinton administration:
The President is a member. So is his secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries.... The president’s national security advisor and his deputy are members. The director of Central Intelligence (like all previous directors) and the chairman of the Foreign Advisory Board are members. The secretary of defense, three undersecretaries and at least four assistant secretaries are members....
This is not a retinue of people who “look like America,” as the president once put it, but they very definitely look like the people who, for more than half a century, have managed our international affairs and our military-industrial complex.
More than 500 CFR members held U.S. government positions during the Clinton administration, many serving in top positions in the executive branch. George W. Bush is proceeding along the same path, appointing (as the chart on page 21 shows) Council members to many top positions. The dominance by any elite organization of any branch of our government should be cause for concern by those who treasure liberty; by such means are free governments transformed into oligarchies and dictatorships. However, there is special cause for concern about the unique control and influence exercised by this particular organization.
Uncovering the CFR
In 1953, the U.S. House of Representatives established a committee (which became known as the Reece Committee) to investigate the subversive funding activities of some of the biggest and best-known tax-exempt foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.). The investigation led also to the CFR, which was, and is, thoroughly intertwined with these foundations. The Committee found that:
In the international field, foundations, and an interlock among some of them and certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon our foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisers to government and by controlling much research in this area through the power of the purse. The net result of these combined efforts has been to promote “internationalism” in a particular sense — a form directed toward “world government” and a derogation of American “nationalism.’’
Moreover, said the Committee’s report, the CFR coterie had become “in essence an agency of the United States Government” and that its “productions are not objective but are directed overwhelmingly at promoting the globalist concept.”
Anthony Lukas reported in the New York Times in 1971 how the CFR had come to wield so much power in the executive branch of the federal government, as related by John J. McCloy. McCloy, who was assistant secretary of war under FDR, recalled: “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of the Council members and put through a call to New York.” New York being the CFR’s Pratt House headquarters in New York City, of course. “And over the years,” Lukas went on to note, “the men McCloy called in turn called other Council members.” McCloy went on to become chairman of the CFR, and we are unaware of anyone who has challenged Richard Rovere’s characterization of McCloy as “chairman of the American Establishment.”
Thanks to the enormous influence the Pratt House cabal exercised in the major media, the warnings of the Reece Committee never reached a sufficient percentage of the American public to stir the level of concern needed to rout the CFR subversives from government power. Ditto for subsequent warnings by prominent American patriots.
Admiral Chester Ward, who was himself a member of the Council for 16 years, resigned after concluding that the group had been formed for the “purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.” In his 1975 book, Kissinger on the Couch, coauthored with Phyllis Schlafly, he wrote that the most influential clique within the CFR “is composed of the one-world-global-government ideologists — more respectfully referred to as the organized internationalists. They are the ones who carry on the tradition of the founders.”
Concerning the influence of Foreign Affairs, Admiral Ward said: “By following the evolution of this propaganda in the most prestigious scholarly journal in the world, Foreign Affairs, anyone can determine years in advance what the future defense and foreign policies of the United States will be. If a certain proposition is repeated often enough in that journal, then the U.S. Administration in power — be it Republican or Democratic — begins to act as if that proposition or assumption were an established fact.”
The CFR’s globalist bent was evident from the first issue of Foreign Affairs (September 1922), which told readers that “our government should enter heartily into the existing League of Nations” and should recognize the new Bolshevik dictatorship under Vladimir Lenin.
An article in the second issue (December 1922) deplored the division of the world into “independent states” and proclaimed, “the real problem today is that of world government.” The Council’s 1944 position paper, American Public Opinion and Postwar Security Commitments, attacked America’s “sovereignty fetish” and our refusal to join “anything approaching a super-state organization.”
The aims of the CFR were again made clear in the Council’s 1959 position paper entitled Study No. 7, Basic Aims of U.S. Foreign Policy. This document proposed that the U.S. seek to build “a new international order,” and proposed steps that “maintain and gradually increase the authority of the U.N.”
The one-world policies of the CFR have not changed over the years, and the power of the Pratt House coterie to implement those policies has continued to grow. Senator Barry Goldwater recognized this in his autobiography, With No Apologies, noting:
When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller’s protege, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller’s protege.
When George Bush Sr. took over the White House, he put Brent Scowcroft (CFR) into the Kissinger-Brzezinski National Security Advisor slot. When Clinton came in, first Anthony Lake (CFR) and then Samuel Berger (CFR) replaced Scowcroft. Under the new Bush administration, the elder George Bush, with his deep CFR connections, is back in the picture, reassuring the Saudis about the president’s intentions toward the Middle East and receiving frequent briefings from Central Intelligence — briefings CIA sources refer to as the “President’s daddy’s daily briefing,” according to Reuters. And under the new president, Berger has been replaced by Condoleezza Rice (CFR). She, in turn, is backed up by Secretary of State Colin Powell (CFR), who has been lavish in his praise of the United Nations and has let it be known that the Bush administration will not be sympathetic to any UN bashing GOP stalwarts concerned about threats to U.S. sovereignty. Colin Powell, it may be recalled, won the warm endorsement of radical world government advocate Strobe Talbott (CFR).
While still editor at large for Time magazine and before joining the Clinton State Department, Talbott paid a visit to Colin Powell at the Pentagon. He was very pleased with the internationalist sympathies of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell, according to Talbott, agreed that “the U.N. as a whole needs more power and resources for peacekeeping, including an ability to call on American troops to serve under the world body’s flag. Powell’s subordinates might wince at the thought.”
Internationalism by Design
George W. Bush is not only an “internationalist by inclination,” as James M. Lindsay says, he is also an internationalist by pedigree — his father being a veteran Insider of both the CFR and its sister organization, the Trilateral Commission. More importantly, he is an internationalist by association. Besides his official CFR appointments noted in the accompanying chart, he has adopted as his unofficial advisers long-time CFR Insiders Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Brent Scowcroft, Robert Blackwell, Stephen Hadley, Martin Feldstein, and Robert Kimmitt.
What we are witnessing with the Bush administration is a process described by Dr. Carroll Quigley, a mentor of Bill Clinton and a professor of history at Georgetown University. In his magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope, Prof. Quigley, who sympathized with the CFR internationalists and was granted access to their secret records, noted that early in the 20th century the Pratt House brain trust had devised plans to take control of both major political parties “behind the scenes.” Quigley agreed with these plans, believing that “the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”
The Clinton administration rascals have been thrown out, but there have been no “profound or extensive shifts in policy.” Any positive changes initiated or proposed by the Bush team are shallow, ephemeral, and easily reversible. The Bush plan to adopt the so called Free Trade Area of the Americas, modeled after the radical, sovereignty-destroying European Union superstate, is, all by itself, proof-positive that Pratt House is running the White House. George W.’s embrace of UN environmental treaties and his reversal on the fraud known as “global warming” hint at future cave-ins on the dangerous UN effort for global civilian disarmament, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN’s International Criminal Court, and a host of other subversive projects dear to the hearts of his fellow “internationalists.” It is time for conservatives to recognize the internationalist agenda of the Bush administration and realize that George W. Bush is helping a power elite behind the throne to hijack our nation and destroy our freedoms.
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