THE SCARLET AND BLACK

May 14, 1971

Nasser: Manning Captains U.S. Empire

by Alan G. Nasser

Bayless Manning, newly
elected president of the Coun-
cil on Foreign Relations, will

~ be the main speaker at Com-
mencement on Friday, May
28. Who is Bayless Manning?
More important, what is the
Council on Foreign Relations?
Who staffs it, who supports
it, and whatare its objectives?
The answers to these ques-
tions suggest that the honor
and praise implied by such an
invitation are entirely inap-
propriate to the president of
the Council on Foreign Rela»
tions (CFR). Let me explain.

CFR is a “nonpartisan" re-
search and discussion group
specializing in the interna-
tional aspects of U. S. politi*
cal, economic, strategic, and
financial problems. It also
publishes the very inﬂuential
journal Foreign Affairs (more
on this later), and a number of
widely read books, such as
Henry Kissinger‘s best seller
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign
Policy. But CFR is more than
a research and discussion g1“
cup and sometime publisher
of books. A brief look at both
its financial backing and the
composition of its leadership
and membership suggests that
it is a key connection between
the political Establishment
and the owners and managers
of the largest U. S. corpora?
tions and financial institu-
tions.

Big Money

CFR’s most important and
reliable sources of income are
giant corporations and major
foundationsi ChaseManhattan,
Ford Motor, Bankers Trust,
Gulf, General Motors Over-
seas (sic) Operations, Brown
Brothers, Harriman, and
International (sic) . General
Electric, among many others,
pay as much as $10,000 per
year for CFR's "corporation
service.“ And the Ford, Rock-
efeller, and Carnegie Founda-
tions have been major contri-
butors. In fact, it was through
a joint contribution ($2.5 mils
lion) from these three in the
early 1950’s that CFR emer-
ged as the most important
single private institution con-
ducting research in foreign
affairs. In 1950. 61, contribu-
tions from corporations, fin-
anclal institutions, and foun-

' dations accounted for almost
40 percent of CFR's income.
. And it is important to recog-
nize the interlocking and
_ overlapping interests of the
banks, corporations,andfoun-
dations. The foundations which
support CFR are directed by
men from corporations such
- as‘ Bechtel Construction and
Monsanto Qlemiml and banks
.such as Chase Manhattan, all
, of which reap ﬁintasiic pro-
‘ _ fits from their overseas oper-
» ations. And finally, to com-
‘plete the circle, most founda-
tion directors are members
of CFR. In 1960-62 twelve of
' 'twenty Rockefeller Foundation
Trustees. ten of fifteen Ford
‘trustees, and ten of fourteen

Carnegie trustees were mem-
bers of CFR. These kinds of‘
interlocks are nothing new fori
CFR. In 1922, former Sec’y
of State Elihu Root, a corpor-
ation lawyer, was both honor-
ary president of CFR and
president ofthe Carnegie Cor-
poration. And John W. Davis,
corporation lawyer and Dem-

~ ocratic presidential candidate

in 1924, was a trustee of both

CFR and the Carnegie Cor-
‘ poi-ation.

CFR's relationship to Big

Money is also manifest in its
leadership and membership.
Among its founders were two
Wall Street lawyers and two
Wall Street bankers. Long-
estabiished upper- class fam-
ilies provided CFR with its
first single permanent offi-
cial, Hamilton Fish Armst-
rong, and the first editor of
its journal Foreign Affairs,
Archibald Coolidge. Things
are no different now. In 1960-
62, fourteen of CFR's recent
or current directors were lis-
ted in the Social Register.
And here are some of CFR's
most prominent recent direc*
tors, all top-ranking mem-
bers of the Corporate Elite:
Frank Altschul, Thomas K.
Finletter, Devereaux C. Jos-
ephs, John J. McCloy, and
the kingpin of the U. S. ruling
class, David Rockefeller.

So much for CFR's leader-
ship. What about the “rank
and file"? Of CFR's fourteen
hundred residents (half of
whom are from New York),
six hundred and seventy two
(about 48 percent) of them,
mostly big businessmen and
lawyers, were listed in the
Social Register. Finally. th-
ere are the Committees on
Foreign Relations, formed by
CFR in about thirty cities
across the country, and fin-
anced since 1938 by the cart
negie Corporation. Of five
hundred nine committeemem-
bers studied by G. William
Domhoff, 41 percent were
corporation executives and
bankers, and 21 percent were
lawyers, 44 percent of whom
were also corporation direc-
tors. Thus, 51 percent were
directly involved in business
enterprises. (Bayiess Mann~
ing's credentials are impec-
cable. Heisa corporation iaw<
yer and an expert on interna».
tional trade and investment.)

Power Elite

You may suspect from the
above that CFR consists en-
tirely of men. You're right.
Women are not allowed to
join.

It‘s no wonder, then, that
Joseph Kraft (of Des Moines
Register fame)describes CFR
as "a school for statesmen
which comes close to beingan
organ of what C. Wright Mills
has called The Power Elite-
3 group of men, similar in
interest and outlook, shaping
events from invulnerabie po~
sitions behind the scenes."
And Douglass cater, who ser-
ved on LBJ's smff, pinpoints
CFR's role "in the care and
breeding of an incipient Am—
erican Establishment." All
of this suggests that CFR is
an organ of the power elite
through which they (the elite)
formulate the general con-
tours of U.S. foreign policy.
That CFR also plays a major
role in supplying the person-
nel to carry out this policy is

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suggested by the positions of
responsibility rheld by its
members in the federal gov
ernment. Kraft and Theodore
White have documented this,
and the same point is made
by John J. McCloy, Wall St-
reet Lawyer, former chair—
man of Chase Manhattan, TrA
ustee of Ford Foundation, dir-
ector of CFR, and a govern-
ment appointee in many roles
since 1940: "Whenever we
needed a man, we thumbedth-
rough the roll of Council mem-
bers and put through a call to
New York." And political sc-
ientist Lester Miibrath notes
that CFR works so closely
with the government that “it
is difficult to distinguish
Council actions stimulated by
government from autonomous
actions." It is morally repub
sive to contemplate the Col-
lege honoring the foreign pol-
icy establishment of the U.S.
government, especially when
the horrors of U.S. foreign
policy are most apparent.

Outrage

it is unthinkable that CFR’s
research into how best to
attain U.S. economic, finan-
cial, and political objectives
overseas is oblivious to the
immense profit interests of
giant U.S. corporations and
banks in Europe, Canada, and
the Third World. We know,
for example, that CFR laid
the groundwork for the Mar-
shall Pian, which resulted in
control by U.S. multinational
corporations of most of the
dynamic sectors of Europe‘s
economy of the future (tele-
communications, transistor-
ized circuits, computers). Has
CFR nothing to do with US.
governmentebusiness exploit-
ation of Third World count-
ries like Guatemala, Brazil,
Liberia, Thailand, whose
wealth is sucked out in return
for little or nothing as the
number ofstarvingandilliter
ate increase astronomically7
We know that most if not all
U.S. counter-revolutionary
intervention in the Third
World after (and before) World
War II has been carried out
in the name of anti‘Communr
ism. And it was a special CFR
briefing in early 1947 that

convinced Undersecremry
of State Robert Lovett that
“it would be ourprincipaltask
at State to awaken the nation
to the dangers of Communist
aggression."

The myth of "Communistag-
gression" has been the U.S.‘s
principal Shibboleth in the
long history ofits brutal inter-

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ventionist foreign policy. And
it was shortly after World
War II that the entire nation
was manipulated into theantl~
Communist paranoia that en-
abled both the military-indus-
trial complex to develop, and
the U.S. political economy to
extend its tentacles to the
farthest reaches of the globe,
thus establishing the most
powerful and violent empire
in human history. One of the
first (and certainly the most
widely-read and inﬂuential)
official defenses of post-war
anti-Communism was George
Kennan's "Sources of Soviet
Conduct," originally pub-
lished by, you guessedit. CFR
in its journal Foreign Affairs
(July, 1947). In fact, CFR has
a distinguished history of
pioneering and propagating
crucial U.S. foreign policy
fantasies. (Keenan himself
admitted, at Geneva in 1967,
the fantastic nature of his
1947 article. He even con-
fessed that no one in the poli-
tical Establishment believed
it‘when it was written!)
“Sometimes CFR's propa-
ganda involves outright decep-
tion on issues of the greatest
importance. Not iongagoAss’t
Sec'y of State for Far Eastern
Affairs William Bundy recom-
mended to all Americans two
Foreign Affairs articles
(April 1965, 1966) on the situ-
ation in Vietnam, written by
George A. Carver, Jr. In the
1966 article, "The Faceless
Vietcong," Carver presented
a summation of the evidence
for the administration's ab-
surd contention that the NLF
of South Vietnam was a "con-
trived political mechanism of
the Communist Party ofNorth
Vietnam." Now what neither
Bundy nor CFR bothered to'
mention was that Carver was
a CIA officiall Foreign Afr
fairs identified him only as
a ”student of polltiwl theory
and Asian affairs." Senator
Fulbright later questioned the
morality of permitting CIA,
analysts to present official
statements and conclusions to
American readers in the guise
of independent scholarship
(N.Y. Times 4/30/66).
The principal thrust of pre-
sent U.S. strategy in Vietnam
is the potentiaTiy genocidal
policy of "forced urbaniza-

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tion,"'whereby civilian-occu-
pied territories throughout the
countryside are mercilessly
bombed, forcing the popula-
tion to ﬂee to the cities,where
they are herded into govern—
ment controlled centers. This
supposedly separates thepeo-
ple from the guerillas and
frustrates the Maoiststrategy
of a liberated countryside iso-
lating and eventually over-
whelming the cities. This
grotesque strategy was cooly
invented and outlined by Sam—
ual Huntington of Harvard Un-
iversity, in the July 1968 issue
of CFR's Foreign Affairs. By
any reasonable standards, this
makes Huntington a garden
variety war criminal. Itaiso
makes CFR an accomplice in
war crimes, even by the very
liberal criteria of Telford
Taylor. And Grinnell is hon-
oring CFR's president.
Really, the whole thing is an
outrage.

Kennedy Liberal

Two final points. 1) It should
be clear once again that the
language of the College's "po-
litioal neutrality" is mere
rhetoric. CFR is a bastion of
liberal ideology, much malig-
ned by conservatives for its
"internationalism." Poor
conservatives. They don't
realize that imperialism is
international by definition, 2)
Don't expect to see a physical
ogre at Commencement.
Manning will be charming,
affable, pro- student, a Ken-
nedy liberal. Heprobably des-
pises Nixon, Agnew, and Mit~
chell. No matter. Kennedy
liberalism is.perfectiy con—
sistent (as JFK himself knew)
with overseas imperialism.
And Manning will oppose the
’war. After all, we are losing,
and a good businessman knows
when to cut his losses. There
are better ways than Vietnam
to defend the‘empire.

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