The Power Behind the Presidency
By William F. Jasper
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Source: 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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