York Evening Post, owned by Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont.12
Among the new directors of the Council was Archibald Cary Coolidge, a Harvard professor who had been part of the Inquiry and was from a prominent and wealthy Boston family, one that went back to involvement in the nineteenth-century China trade. He was asked to become the editor of the CFR’s new flagship magazine, Foreign Affairs. He only consented to take the responsibility if he could have a full-time assistant. Gay recommended one of his young reporters, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a Princeton man whose ancestors not only included Hamilton Fish, President Grant’s Secretary of State, but also Peter Stuyvesant, a major figure in the early history of New York City. Armstrong eventually took over Foreign Affairs, serving as its editor from 1928 to 1972, as well as a Council director during the same forty-four-year period.
Root, Davis, Cravath, Coolidge, and Armstrong were all representatives of the old money/prominent families/high society set, and were all listed in the Social Register (SR), long considered the definitive guide to who is in or out of the upper class.13 A very large representation of SR listees among its officers and directors was a prime characteristic of the early CFR. All seven of the Council presidents during the period 1921–1971 were from families listed in the SR, as were both honorary presidents, the first three chairmen of the board (1946–85), and the first three vice chairmen of the board of the CFR (1971–78).
Other leading capitalists, not listed in the SR, were also on the Council’s founding board. Two examples are Otto Kahn and Paul M. Warburg, both major Wall Street investment bankers with Kuhn Loeb and M. M. Warburg, respectively. Both were economic competitors with J. P. Morgan—Kuhn Loeb was considered the second most prestigious U.S. investment bank behind Morgan, for example—but they worked together with Morgan-affiliated men in the CFR. Kahn’s wealth was legendary; in 1919 he had a 127-room castle built on his Long Island estate, then the second-largest private residence in the entire country.
Coolidge, Gay, and Professor Isaiah Bowman of Johns Hopkins University were the most prominent representatives of the Inquiry-affiliated and scholarly sector of the CFR on its first board of directors. But the professional-class intellectuals have never held the top office at the CFR, and have always been, down to the present, a minority on a decision-making board of directors dominated by members of the capitalist class. An interesting aspect of this upper-class control is the shift, in the early 1950s, in the top leadership of the Council. Until 1953 the final decision maker, president until 1946, then chairman of the board after then, was always Morgan-connected. For example, Morgan partner Russell Leffingwell was chairman from 1946 to 1953. Beginning in 1953 and continuing until 1985, the chairman of the CFR was Rockefeller-connected: first John J. McCloy from 1953 to 1970 and then David Rockefeller from 1970 to 1985. Both McCloy and Rockefeller also served as chairman of the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank while they chaired the Council.
One area where the intellectuals had greater influence was the implementation of the long-standing CFR goal of guiding American opinion and political-economic strategy toward a large, even dominant role in world affairs. Gay expressed the general perspective as early as 1898 when he wrote: “When I think of the British Empire as our inheritance I think simply of the natural right of succession. That ultimate succession is inevitable.”14 In a Council-published history of the organization, written by member Peter Grose, CFR president Leslie H. Gelb stated that from an early date “Council members have shared the conviction that Americans must know the world and play a leading role in its affairs.”15
THE CFR PROGRAM, 1921–1970
From almost the outset, the Council organized a meeting and study program, operating out of its headquarters on the prestigious Upper East Side of New York. The meetings program was mostly to create a “continuous conference” on world politics and U.S. foreign policy, hosting domestic and foreign leaders in mainly off-the-record sessions for CFR members. The first major meeting was the appearance by former prime minister Georges Clemenceau of France in November 1922. From 1921 to 1938, every U.S. secretary of state made at least one important foreign policy address at the Council.16 When a new CFR headquarters building—a house donated by the Pratt family whose fortune stemmed from Standard Oil—was opened in April 1945, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, a Council member, traveled to New York “to bear witness, as every secretary of state during the past quarter of a century, to the great services and influence of this organization.”17
Central to this “service and influence” was the studies program, the CFR think tank. This was, over the years, its most important activity, providing ongoing strategic thinking about how to solve the practical problems relating to the expansion of U.S. economic and political power abroad. Here is where the theoretical ideas of Council scholars were applied to the needs of industrial and financial interests as well as the state. The work of the CFR gradually became “a program of systematic study … to guide the statecraft of policymakers.”18 The way that this worked was that representatives from key sectors of society—especially academic intellectuals, corporate leaders, and government personnel—would be assembled in a study group that would focus on an issue, a nation, or a region. Following regular meetings for a year or more, one member of the group would take responsibility to write a book or article, representing his own personal view, but also coming out of the collective work and thinking of the group. As an organization dominated by the largest and most powerful industrial and financial groups—first J. P. Morgan and Kuhn Loeb, later the Rockefeller economic empire—it was natural for the CFR to promote an expansionist American foreign policy, aimed at maintaining a status quo at home by expanding abroad. More specifically, the powerful saw an increase in trade and investment as the solution to domestic problems like unemployment. As CFR director Bowman expressed it in 1928, foreign raw materials, imports, and exports were required “if we are to avoid crises in our constantly expanding industries.”19 Not surprisingly, one of the very first Council publications aimed at encouraging economic expansion abroad. This was Foster Bain’s 1927 volume, Ores and Industry in the Far East, which came out of a 1925–26 study group at the CFR.20
The Second World War and the War-Peace Studies
The Council and its program reached one of its historic peaks with its work on setting U.S. foreign policy and war aims during the Second World War. This war and the subsequent Cold War were decisive events, marking a turning point toward full-blown U.S. imperialism and beginning a process of organizing the global political economy in a top-down fashion with the United States as the hegemonic power.
The CFR, its leaders, and members were at the center of efforts that defined the monopoly capitalist class “national interest” during this era, working out the strategy to implement the ensuing policy goals. During the war, this work was conceived and carried out by a special Council study group, called the War-Peace Studies. Almost 100 men worked on this Rockefeller Foundation funded effort, engaging in organization, research, analysis, discussion, and writing from 1939 until 1945, producing a total of 682 memoranda for President Roosevelt, the State Department, and other branches of the U.S. government. Midway through the war, a number of the CFR planners were brought into the State Department part-time to help officials set postwar policy.21 Collectively, the body of work produced by the War-Peace Studies defined the U.S. “national interest” in a status-quo fashion, based on the percentage of the world necessary for the country to prosper without fundamental changes in the capitalist property ownership and “free market” system. Not surprisingly, most of the world was seen as needed as economic living space for such a system, meaning that the United States would have to go to war with and defeat Japan and Germany and then begin to reorganize the world as an informal empire beneficial to American and allied capitalist interests.
Postwar Focus on Containing and Overthrowing the Soviet System
Following the Second World War, the continuing existence of the USSR and its allies stood as a partial roadblock to U.S.
