A decade later Henry Kissinger, then a professor of political science at Harvard, chaired a Council study group, of which I was a member, to examine the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations. Henry’s seminal work, published by the Council in 1957, unexpectedly became a best-seller and required reading in both Washington and Moscow. The deployment and control of nuclear weaponry would become the critical negotiating point between the United States and the Soviet Union for the next four decades.
From the early 1950s on, then, the Council’s program of speakers, study groups, and publications has provided a forum where critical issues are examined and discussed. Vietnam, the opening of China, détente with the Soviet Union, balancing world population with food resources, the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, economic development in the Third World, the expansion of NATO—these and many other issues have found their place on the Council’s agenda through the years. But the essential point is that the Council never takes a position—official or unofficial—on any foreign policy issue even though its members are free to do so.
What, then, gives the Council its strength and reputation?
There are several interrelated factors, beginning with the quality and diversity of its membership. New York City’s businessmen, bankers, and lawyers once dominated the proceedings, but during the past thirty years the membership has been broadened to include men and women from the communications industry, colleges and universities, and the not-for-profit world. In 1971 the Council had seventeen female members; there are now more than seven hundred, and 20 percent of the directors are women. Now more than thirty-six hundred strong, one-third of our members live outside New York and Washington. Increasing geographical, ethnic, professional, and gender diversity has been accompanied by a considerable broadening of the political, economic, and even cultural viewpoints represented within the Council’s membership, ranging from William F. Buckley, Jr., Condoleezza Rice, and Newt Gingrich to Mario Cuomo, Madeleine Albright, and Bill Clinton.
In short, the quality of its membership, its central location, the excellent staff and facilities, and the tradition of rigorous debate and nonpartisanship—rather than a secret pipeline into the White House and the State Department—are the reasons that the Council on Foreign Relations continues to influence the formulation of American foreign policy.
I was elected to the Council’s board of directors in 1949. At thirty-four I was its youngest member and retained that distinction for the next fifteen years. In 1970 I succeeded Jack McCloy as chairman and immediately became embroiled in a controversy that rocked the usually civil halls of the Council.
The board had selected William P. Bundy to replace Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who was retiring after more than forty years as editor of Foreign Affairs. Bill was a man of quality and culture, the younger brother of McGeorge Bundy who served both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson as national security advisor during the tumultuous 1960s. Bill was assistant secretary of defense in the mid-1960s as the Vietnam War escalated and then moved to the State Department as assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs, where he helped design our Indo-China policy.
Bill Bundy’s selection, which I strongly supported, angered many Council members who believed American involvement in Vietnam was not only a mistake but an immoral act perpetrated by corrupt and power-hungry men. They considered Bill a war criminal and went public in their efforts to deny him the position. I thought their charges were intemperate, but Vietnam had so poisoned the atmosphere that, quite frankly, it would have been impossible to choose anyone involved in the conduct of American foreign policy during those years without stirring passions. With time, Bill’s ability as a writer and his proficiency as an evenhanded editor came to be widely appreciated, even by his strongest critics. But the affair clouded my early years as chairman.
The dissension over Vietnam was only one problem facing the Council and my chairmanship in the early 1970s. If the Council wished to remain relevant, we needed to make significant reforms. In terms of structure we decided to recruit a full-time chief executive officer and selected Bayless Manning, the dean of the Stanford University Law School, to fill the post of president. Bayless and his successor, Winston Lord, who would later serve as American ambassador to China, made my fifteen-year tenure as chairman a great deal easier and more productive.
In terms of program, the Council faced much stiffer competition than it ever had from research institutions, university faculties, and think tanks. And, of course, television had expanded the global awareness of most Americans. If the Council was to remain relevant, we had to be forward looking and responsive. To meet the challenge Manning launched the “1980s Project,” a comprehensive effort to identify the issues that would dominate international affairs in the future, and over the next decade we expanded the Council’s purview beyond its traditional concerns with regional conflicts, arms control, and military balance to include human rights, environmental degradation, and the knotty issues of development economics and international trade.
When I retired as chairman in 1985, I had served as a Council board member for thirty-six years. I was succeeded by Peter G. Peterson, a former Secretary of Commerce and now chairman of the Blackstone Group. Pete has introduced a number of innovations that have strengthened the Council. One of his initiatives, in which I participate, are periodic Council trips overseas. These visits are designed to probe beneath the smooth surface of diplomacy by allowing us to assess the situation in strategic regions of the world. Our visits to Israel in 1999 and Cuba in 2001 were typical.
We drove from Jerusalem to the Gaza Strip for a luncheon meeting with Yasser Arafat. Although the Israelis had given us permission to cross the border into Gaza, we were detained for more than an hour while heavily armed Israeli soldiers carefully scrutinized our papers. The schedule became a shambles, but Arafat—a small, canny, and charming man obviously suffering from Parkinson’s disease—met briefly with us anyway. He insisted that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and allow its incorporation into a fully sovereign Palestinian state.
Gaza was one of the most forlorn places I have ever visited. It is a ghetto, physically isolated, crammed with substandard housing, and teeming with people, most of whom have to travel long distances every day through heavily guarded border checkpoints to their jobs in Israel.
Returning to Jerusalem we met Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a self-confident, assertive man who explained why Israel would never agree to Arafat’s demands to return to the 1967 borders. Thus, despite the apparent gains of the Oslo Agreement and the Wye Accords, I came away with the impression that there is still a great distance to travel before real peace comes to the Middle East. Unfortunately, the surprising election of hardliner Ariel Sharon as Israeli prime minister and the renewed outbreak of violence in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon now threaten an even wider war.
More recently, in the winter of 2001, a group of Council members visited Cuba at the invitation of the Cuban government and with the approval of the U.S. State Department. We spent four days in Havana, a magnificent city that has escaped the worst ravages of modern urban development and maintained the quiet charm I remembered from my last visit there in the late 1950s.
Havana’s unusual calm—few cars, many pedestrians, clean streets, virtually no new construction—is not the product of planning but the direct result of Fidel Castro’s rigid dictatorship. The combination of the U.S. embargo, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended the financial subsidies that kept the country afloat for decades, and Castro’s Marxist economics has turned Cuba into a basket case. In my view the country is worse off now than it was in the 1950s; it is completely dependent on sugarcane production, tourism, and the generosity of Castro confreres like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela to make ends meet. Despite the impressive accomplishments of the regime in the areas of education and health care, Cuba faces a hard and uncertain economic future.
Our visit culminated with a
six-hour dinner meeting with Castro that began at 11 P.M. Dressed in his familiar military fatigues but without his trademark cigar, Castro harangued us continuously throughout the night. When I intervened to ask him if there were areas where he had not achieved his goals, he paused briefly but had trouble thinking of any.
Cuba remains largely isolated from the rest of the world, and its people are ensnared in an anachronistic economic and political trap. Unfortunately, I think there is little possibility for change while Castro remains in power, although he does seem willing to negotiate on many important issues.
BILDERBERG
If the Council on Foreign Relations raises the hackles of conspiracy theorists, the Bilderberg meetings must induce apocalyptic visions of omnipotent international bankers plotting with unscrupulous government officials to impose cunning schemes on an ignorant and unsuspecting world. At the risk of disappointing these conspiracy mongers, the truth is that Bilderberg is really an intensely interesting annual discussion group that debates issues of significance to both Europeans and North Americans—without reaching consensus.
Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands convened the first conference in May 1954 at the urging of Joseph Retinger, a Pole of aristocratic origins who had served with British intelligence during World War II. Retinger, a dynamic and energetic man who spoke with a heavy accent and walked with a pronounced limp, was concerned about the tense relations within the Atlantic community. He persuaded Bernhard to convene a group of prominent individuals to discuss these matters.
I was one of eleven Americans invited, and we joined fifty delegates from eleven Western European countries—a lively mosaic of politicians, businessmen, journalists, and trade unionists. I was surprised to have been invited in the first place and even more taken aback when Retinger asked me to prepare a background paper on prospects for the world economy from the American perspective. Retinger indicated that Hugh Gaitskell, a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, had agreed to address the same topic from the European point of view. I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of going up against such a formidable opponent.
Gaitskell foresaw a dreary and dismal future. By contrast, my paper predicted steady economic growth in the United States and a strong recovery in the volume of world trade. Within the year my confident forecasts had been borne out. The paper undoubtedly helped establish my credibility with a sophisticated group of senior politicians and business leaders.
The conference had served a useful purpose, and the consensus was that we should meet again the following year under the continuing chairmanship of Prince Bernhard. We also decided to call the gathering “Bilderberg” after the hotel in Oosterbeek where we had first assembled.
For the first twenty years Bilderberg meetings were marked by the sharp clash of opposing views. Once Europe recovered its economic strength, many of the old national rivalries and suspicions began to resurface, along with a strong distrust of American intentions and even accusations of an American drive for hegemony in Europe. These attitudes grew in strength during the 1960s and came to a head in the 1970s as a result of the economic disarray of those years and the steady improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations resulting from détente.
If these fissures had not been addressed, the consequences for the Atlantic Alliance might have been disastrous. While it is not Bilderberg’s role to resolve disputes among sovereign states, individual participants are free to report on what they have heard to those who do wield official power in their respective countries.
In 1976, Bilderberg faced a scandal that almost resulted in its collapse. Early that year in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it was alleged that Prince Bernhard had approached the Lockheed Corporation with an offer to use his official position to influence Dutch defense procurement policies in return for a significant financial consideration. As the year wore on, the evidence against Bernhard accumulated, including indications that he had met with intermediaries during Bilderberg events. The 1976 conference was canceled, and it appeared for a time that Bilderberg was finished.
Although there were several indignant resignations and a few others who thought the meetings had outlived their usefulness, many more believed we should try to find a way to keep them going. A specially appointed committee recommended that Bilderberg be continued but that meetings be modified to involve younger participants who would help diversify the political viewpoints represented.
Lord Alec Home, the respected former British prime minister, accepted the chairmanship, and the 1977 meeting in Torquay, England, was an outstanding success. Lord Home was the first in a line of distinguished chairmen: Walter Scheel, the former president of the Federal Republic of Germany; Lord Roll of Ipsden, chairman of SBC Warburg; Lord Carrington, a former British foreign secretary; and, most recently, Etienne Davignon, the chairman of the Société Générale de Belgique. I am pleased to report that as the new millennium begins, a reinvigorated Bilderberg continues to thrive.
“CONSORTING WITH REACTIONARIES”
Bilderberg overlapped for a time with my membership in a relatively obscure but potentially even more controversial body known as the Pesenti Group. I had first learned about it in October 1967 when Carlo Pesenti, the owner of a number of important Italian corporations, took me aside at a Chase investment forum in Paris and invited me to join his group, which discussed contemporary trends in European and world politics. It was a select group, he told me, mostly Europeans. Since Pesenti was an important Chase customer and he assured me the other members were interesting and congenial, I accepted his invitation.
Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer were founding members of the group, but by the time I joined, they had been replaced by an equally prominent roster that included Antoine Pinay, a former French president; Giulio Andreotti, several times prime minister of Italy; and Franz-Josef Strauss, the head of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria and a perennial contender for the chancellorship of the Federal Republic of Germany. The discussions were conducted in French, and usually I was the sole American present, although on a few occasions when the group assembled in Washington, Henry Kissinger, at the time President Nixon’s national security advisor, joined us for dinner.
Members of the Pesenti Group were all committed to European political and economic integration, but a few—Archduke Otto of Austria, the head of the house of Hapsburg and claimant to all the lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire; Monsignor Alberto Giovanetti of the Vatican and a prominent member of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic organization; and Jean-Paul Léon Violet, a conservative French intellectuel—were preoccupied by the Soviet threat and the inexorable rise to power of the Communist parties of France and Italy.
Pesenti set the agenda for our thrice-yearly meetings, and Maître Violet, who had close connections with the Deuxième Bureau of the Service des Renseignements (the French CIA), provided lengthy background briefings. Using an overhead projector, Violet displayed transparency after transparency filled with data documenting Soviet infiltration of governments around the world and supporting his belief that the threat of global Communist victory was quite real. While all of us knew the Soviets were behind the “wars of national liberation” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I was not personally convinced the Red Menace was quite as menacing as Maître Violet portrayed it to be, but my view was a minority one in that group. Even though I found the discussions fascinating, the ultraconservative politics of some participants were more than a bit unnerving. My Chase associates, who feared my membership could be construed as “consorting with reactionaries,” eventually prevailed upon me to withdraw.
FURTHERING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
I also had a personal hand in the formation of a number of other organizations with an international orientation. I am particularly proud of two: the International Executive Service Corps (IESC), a partnership between the federal government and American corporations that provides technical assistance to the private sector in the developing world;
and the Emergency Committee on American Trade (ECAT), which seeks to preserve and expand American involvement in foreign trade.
By the early 1960s the problem of poverty in many developing nations had become acute, as had the Communist challenge, which invariably accompanied the process of European decolonization in Asia and Africa. Although the U.S. government had responded forcefully to this challenge, IESC grew out of my conviction that the U.S. private sector could share their knowledge and expertise directly with businessmen in other countries. My own experience had convinced me there was a critical need for them to acquire modern management skills, which were even more urgently needed than capital.
With this in mind, when I spoke at the thirteenth International Management Congress in 1963, I called for the establishment of a Business Executive Corps that would be analogous to the Peace Corps created by President Kennedy a few years earlier. The audience responded positively, and I received several hundred letters about it afterward. With the active involvement of Sol M. Linowitz, the CEO of Xerox, and others, we created the IESC to provide technical advice and managerial assistance in developing countries around the world. President Lyndon Johnson formally launched IESC at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in June 1965.
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