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Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 11:38:10 -0500 (EST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (John Turmel)
Subject: TURMEL: TRAGEDY AND HOPE Chapter XVII-XVIII
by Dr. Carroll Quigley
ISBN 0913022-14-4
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION: WESTERN CIVILIZATION IN ITS WORLD SETTING
II. WESTERN CIVILIZATION TO 1914
III. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE TO 1917
IV. THE BUFFER FRINGE
V. THE FIRST WORLD WAR
VI. THE VERSAILLES SYSTEM AND RETURN TO NORMALCY 1919-1929
VII. FINANCE, COMMERCIAL POLICY AND BUSINESS ACTIVITY 1897-1947
VIII. INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE SOVIET CHALLENGE
IX. GERMANY FROM KAISER TO HITLER 1913-1945
X. BRITAIN: THE BACKGROUND TO APPEASEMENT 1900-1939
XI. CHANGING ECONOMIC PATTERNS
XII. THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT 1931-1936
XIII. THE DISRUPTION OF EUROPE
XIV. WORLD WAR II: THE TIDE OF AGGRESSION 1939-1941
XV. WORLD WAR II: THE EBB OF AGGRESSION 1941-1945
XVI. THE NEW AGE
XVII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND COLD WAR, AMERICAN NUCLEAR SUPERIORITY 1950-
1957
XVIII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND COLD WAR, RACE FOR THE H-BOMB 1950-1957
XIX. THE NEW ERA
XX. TRAGEDY AND HOPE: THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE
CHAPTER XVII: NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND THE COLD WAR:
AMERICAN ATOMIC SUPREMACY 1945-1950
THE FACTORS
Page 873
The period 1945 to early 1963 forms a unity during which a number
of factors interacted upon one another to present a very complicated
and extraordinarily dangerous series of events. That mankind and
civilized life got through the period may be attributed to a number of
lucky chances rather than to any particular skill among the two
opposing political blocs.
The Cold War is almost always described in terms which put minor
emphasis or even neglect the role of technological rivalry because
most historians do not feel competent to discuss it but chiefly
because much of the evidence is secret. Because of such secrecy, the
story of this rivalry falls into two quite distinct and even
contradictory parts:
1) what the real situation was; and
2) what prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be.
For example, the Soviet Union had an H-bomb many months before we
did when public opinion believed the opposite; the 1960 believe
throughout the world of a so-called "missile gap" or American
inferiority in nuclear missiles when no such inferiority existed.
Page 875
The balance of nuclear weapons was the central factor in the Cold
War. Cessation on nuclear testing came close to achievement in 1950
when both sides had atomic weapons but was destroyed at that time by
President Truman's order to proceed with the development of the
hydrogen bomb. By 1963, both sides had these weapons and the balance
of terror had been achieved.
Page 879
The party struggle in the U.S. found the intellectuals (including
scientists), the internationalists, the minorities and the
cosmopolitans in the Democratic Party with the businessmen, bankers
and clerks in the Republican Party. The Republicans had fallen into
the control (represented by Senators Taft, Wherry, Bridges and Jenner)
of those who were most ignorant of the real issues and were most
remote from any conceptions of national political responsibility.
Page 880
This group, to whom we often give the name "neo-isolationist,"
knew nothing of the world outside the U.S., and generally despised it.
Thus, they gave no consideration to our allies or neutrals, and saw no
reason to know or to study Russia, since it could be hated completely
without need for accurate knowledge. All foreigners were regarded as
unprincipled, weak, poor, ignorant and evil, with only one aim in
life, namely, to prey on the United States. These neo-isolationists
and unilateralists were equally filled with suspicion or hatred of any
American intellectuals, including scientists, because they had no
conception of any man who placed objective truth higher than
subjective interests since such an attitude was a complete challenge
to the American businessman's assumption that all men are and should
be concerned with the pursuit of self-interest and profit.
Neo-isolationism had a series of assumptions which could not be
held by anyone who had any knowledge of the world outside U.S. middle-
class business circles. These beliefs were seven in number:
1) Unilateralism: that the U.S. should and could act by itself without
need to consider allies, neutrals or the Soviet Union;
2) National omnipotence: that the U.S. is so rich and powerful that no
one else counts and that there is no need to study foreign areas,
customs, policies;
Page 881
3) Unlimited goals (or utopianism): the belief that there are final
solutions to the world's problems. Upholders of this view refused to
accept that constant danger and constant problems were a perpetual
condition of human life except in brief and unusual circumstances.
Dulles insisted that the Truman policy of containment must be replaced
by a policy of "liberation." These policies were not designed to win
conclusively and did not seek to solve the problem of the Soviet Union
but to live with it, "presumably forever." He did accept preventive
war in the form of massive retaliation if the Communists made any
further advances.
4) The neo-isolationist belief that continuance of the Soviet threat
arose from internal treason within America.
Page 882
5) Since the chief "high moral principle" which motivated the neo-
isolationists insisted that Soviet Russia and Democrats were engaged
in a joint tacit conspiracy to destroy America by high taxes by using
the Cold War to tax America into bankruptcy
6) Since neo-isolationists rejected all partial solutions, there was
little they could do but talk loudly and sign anti-communist pacts.
7) The unrealistic and unhistoric nature of neo-isolationism meant
that it could not actually be pursued as a policy. It was pursued by
John Foster Dulles with permanent injury to our allies. When Senator
McCarthy turned his extravagant charges of subversion and treason from
the State Department to the army, his downfall began. The neo-
isolationist forces still continue in an increasingly irresponsible
form under a variety of names including John Birch Society members or
more generally as the "Radical Right."
Page 885
Robert Oppenheimer was on a total of thirty five government
committees. There was a shadow on Oppenheimer's past. In his younger
and more naive days, he had been closely associated with Communists.
Certainly never a Communist himself, and never, at any time, disloyal
to the U.S., he had nonetheless associated with Communists. His
brother Frank and his wife were Communist Party workers while
Oppenheimer's own wife was an ex-Communist, widow of a Communist who
had been killed fighting Fascism in Spain in 1937. The Oppenheimers
continued to have friends who were Communists and contributed money
until the end of 1941.
Page 886
All this derogatory information was known to General Groves and
to Army Intelligence and used in 1953-1954 to destroy his reputation.
It was an essential element in the neo-isolationist McCarthyite,
Dulles interregnum of 1953-1957.
THE ORIGINS OF THE COLD WAR, 1945-1949
Page 891
IN the Soviet system, while most Russians lived in poverty, a
privileged minority, buying in special stores with special funds and
special ration cards, had access to luxuries undreamed of by the
ordinary person.
Page 900
In 1944, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau took advantage of
his close personal friendship with Roosevelt to push forward his own
pet scheme to reduce Germany to a purely agricultural state by almost
total destruction of her industry, the millions of surplus population
to be, if necessary, deported to Africa. The secretary, supported by
his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White, was deeply disturbed by
Germany's history of aggression. The only way to prevent it was to
reduce Germany's industry and thus her warmaking capacity as close to
nothing as possible. The resulting chaos, inflation, and misery would
be but slight repayment for the horrors Germany had inflicted on
others over many years.
By personal influence, Morgenthau obtained acceptance of a
somewhat modified version of this plan by both Roosevelt and Churchill
at the Quebec conference of September 1944. The error at Quebec was
quickly repudiated but no real planning was done and the Morgenthau
Plan played a considerable role in the JCS 1067, the directive set up
to guide the American military occupation of Germany. It proposed
reparations be obtained by dismantling Germany industry. The JCS 1067
directive ordered that Germany be treated as a defeated enemy and not
as a liberated country. No steps were taken to secure its economic
recovery.
Page 901
At the Potsdam conference, it was agreed that the German economy
should not be permitted should not be permitted to recover higher than
the standard of living of 1932, at the bottom of the depression, the
level, in fact, which had brought Hitler to power in 1933.
It took more than two years of misery for Germany to secure any
changes in these American objectives. Hunger and cold took a
considerable toll, and the Germans, for two years, experienced some of
the misery they had inflicted on others in the preceding dozen years.
The Germany currency reform of 1948 is the fiscal miracle of the
post-war world. From it came
(1) an explosion of industrial expansion and economic prosperity for
West Germany;
(2) they tying of the West Germany economy to the West;
(3) an example for other western European in economic expansion; and
(4) a wave of prosperity for western Europe as a whole.
AMERICAN CONFUSIONS, 1945-1950
Page 909
The American response to the Soviet refusal of postwar
cooperation was confused and tentative.
Winston Churchill in June 1946 spoke of the "Iron Curtain" which
Staling was lowering between the Soviet bloc and the West.
Lasting from 1947-1953, the chief characteristics of
"containment" were economic and financial aid to other nations to
eliminate the misery and ignorance which fosters communism.
Page 910
Americans, when goals are established as they are in war, work
together very effectively, but political work in peacetime, with its
ambiguous goals, is relegated to rivalry, bickering, and total
inability to relate means to goals. As a result, the means themselves
tend to become goals.
Page 911
Each service has alliances with the industrial complexes which
supply their equipment. These complexes not only supply funds for each
service to carry its message to the Congress but also exert every
influence to retain equipment by dangling before the high officers who
can influence contracts, offers of future well-paying consultant
positions with the industrial firms concerned. Most high officers
retired and then took consultant jobs with those firms.
Page 912
Four-star general Somervell retired on a disability salary of
$16,000 to join a number of firms which paid him R$125,000 a year;
three-star general Campbell retired on a disability salary of $9,000
and became an executive at $50,000 a year of firms from whom he had
previously purchased $3 billion in armaments; four-star general Clay
retired on $16,000 a year but signed up at over $100,000 a year.
These are but a few of more than a hundred general officers whose
post retirement alliances with industrial firms encouraged their
successors, still on active service, to remain on friendly terms with
such appreciative business corporations.
Page 919
Pearl Harbor was a total surprise. This last point was so hard to
believe, once the evidence was available, that the same groups who
were howling about Soviet espionage in 1948-1955 were also claiming
that Roosevelt expected and wanted Pearl Harbor. Both these beliefs,
if they were believed, were based on gigantic ignorance and
misconceptions about the nature of intelligence.
Page 921
A great deal of nuclear information (whether secret or not is
unknown) as well as uranium metal, went to the Soviet Union as part of
Lend-Lease in 1943. Major George Racey Jordan, USAAF, tried in vain to
disrupt these shipments at the time. While most of Jordan's evidence
is unreliable, the shipment of uranium to Russia is corroborated from
other sources. The export licenses for such shipments were granted at
the request of General Groves. Jordan's other evidence, most of which
was very discreditable to the New Deal (since he testified that he,
Groves, and others were under direct pressure from Harry Hopkins to
allow export of nuclear materials) was subsequently shown to be false.
Page 923
Much of the evidence on the Communist movement came from ex-
Communists such as Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, Whittaker
Chambers, John Lautner and others. The first three names mentioned are
known because they dramatized, distorted and manipulated evidence for
their own private purposes. This is particularly true of Elizabeth
Bentley who exaggerated her role.
Page 925
The House Un-American Committee was aimed more at partisan
advantage than ascertaining the nature of the Communist conspiracy.
the truth cannot now be ascertained. Numerous other accused
Communists, both in government and out, whose names were given to the
committee in the same breath as Hiss or Lattimore were almost totally
ignored.
Page 927
Others called before the committee who refused to give evidence
under the Fifth Amendment which protects against self-incrimination
were in fact Communists and Bentley and Chambers knew them as such.
Page 938
The revelation of Communist influence in the U.S. was undoubtedly
valuable but the cost in damage to reputations of innocent persons was
very high. Much of this damage came from the efforts of Senator Joseph
McCarthy, Republican, of Wisconsin to prove that the State Department
and the army were widely infiltrated with Communists.
Page 939
McCarthy was not a conservative, still less a reactionary. He was
a fragment of elemental force, a throwback to primeval chaos. He was
the enemy of all order and all authority, with no respect, or even
understanding, for principles, laws, regulations, or rules. As such,
he had nothing to do with rationality or generality. Concepts, logic,
distinctions of categories were completely outside his world. It is
clear he did not have any idea what a Communist was, still less
Communism itself, and he did not care. This was simply a term he used
in his game of personal power. Most of the terms which have been
applied to him, such as "truculent," "brutal," "ignorant," "sadistic,"
"foul-mouthed," "brash," are quite correct but not quite in the sense
that his enemies applied them, because they assumed that these
qualities and distinctions had meaning in his world as they did in
their own. They did not, because his behavior was all an act, the
things he did to gain the experience he wanted, that is, the feeling
of power, of creating fear, of destroying the rules, and of winning
attention and admiration for doing so. His act was that of Peck's Bad
Boy but on a colossal scale. He sought fame and acclaim by showing an
admiring world of schoolmates what a tough guy he was, defying all the
rules, even the rules of decency and ordinary civilized behavior. But
like the bad boy of the schoolyard, he had no conception of time or
anything established, and once he had found his act, it was necessary
to demonstrate it every day. His thirst for power, the power of mass
acclaim and publicity, reached the public scene at the same moment as
television, and he was the first to realize what could be done by
using the new instrument for reaching millions.
His thirst for power was insatiable because like hunger, it was a
daily need. It had nothing to do with the power of authority or
regulated discipline, but the personal power of a sadist. All his
destructive instincts were against anything established, the wealthy,
the educated, the well-mannered, the rules of the Senate, the American
party system, the rules of fair play. As such, he had no conception of
truth or the distinction between it and falsehood, just as he had no
conception of yesterday, today, tomorrow as distinct entities. He
simply said whatever would satisfy, momentarily, his yearning to be
the center of the stage surrounded by admiring, fearful, shocked,
amazed people. He did not even care if their reaction was admiration,
fear, shock, or amazement and he did not care if they, as persons, had
the same reaction or a different one the next day or even a moment
later. He was exactly like an actor in a drama, one in which he had
made the script as he went along, full of falsehoods and
inconsistencies, and he was genuinely surprised and hurt if a person
whom he had abused and insulted for hours at a hearing did not walk
out with him to a bar or even to dinner the moment the hearing session
was over. He knew it was an act; he expected you to know it was an
act. There was really no hypocrisy in it, no cynicism, no falsehood,
as far as he was concerned, because he was convinced that this was the
way the world was. Everyone he was convinced, had a racket; this just
happened to be his, and he expected people to realize this and to
understand it.
Page 930
Of course, to the observant outsider who did not share his total
amorality, it was all false, invented as he went along, and constantly
changed, everything substantiated by documents pulled from his
briefcase and waved about too rapidly to be read. Mostly these
documents had nothing to do with what he was saying; mostly he had
never looked at them himself; they were merely props for the
performance, and to him, it was as silly for his audience to expect
such documents to be relevant as it would be for the audience in a
theater to expect the food that is being eaten, the whiskey that is
being drunk, or the documents which are read in that play to be
relevant to what the actor is saying.
Every time he spoke, with each version he became a larger more
nonchalant hero. In 1952, he intimidated the Air Force into awarding
him the Distinguished Flying (given for twenty five combat missions)
although he had been a grounded intelligence officer who took
occasional rides in planes.
Since laws and regulations were, for McCarthy, nonexistent, his
business and financial affairs are, like his life, a chaos of
illegalities.
Page 931
He seized upon Communism. "That's it," he said. "The government
is full of communists. We can hammer away at them." Without any real
conception of what he was doing, and without any research or knowledge
of the subject, on February 9, McCarthy waved a piece of paper and
said "I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the Communist
Party still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.
Page 932
On Feb 20th, in an incoherent speech in the Senate was six hours
of bedlam, as case after case was presented filled with contradictions
and irrelevancies. According to Senate Republican Leader Taft, "It was
a perfectly reckless performance." Nevertheless, Taft and his
colleagues determined to accept and support these charges since they
would injure the Administration. Few people realize that in five years
of accusations, McCarthy never turned up a Communist in the State
Department although undoubtedly there must have been some.
Page 933
He claimed that "the top Russian espionage agent" in the U.S.,
Alger Hiss's boss in the State Department, "the chief architect of our
Far Eastern policy" was Professor Owen Lattimore. The trouble was
Lattimore was not a Communist, not a spy, and not employed by the
State department.
In July, the Tydings subcommittee condemned McCarthy for a "fraud
and a hoax." McCarthy had the power of an inflamed and misled public
opinion. Tydings was beaten in Maryland in 1950. Benton from
Connecticut who introduced the resolution to expel McCarthy from the
Senate in 1951 and whose charges were fully supported by the Senate's
investigation of McCarthy's private finances, was defeated in 1952.
During this period, McCarthy violated more laws and regulations than
any previous senator in history. When a reporter once said "Isn't that
a classified document?" McCarthy said, "It was. I just declassified
it."
Page 934
Eisenhower was soon boasting that 1,456 Federal workers had been
"separated" in the first four months of the Eisenhower security
program. 2,200 at the end of the first year. Nixon said "We're kicking
the Communists and fellow travellers and security risks out of the
Government by the thousands." It was soon clear that no Communists
were kicked out and that security risks included all kinds of persons.
For a while, the Administration tried to outdo McCarthy by
demonstrating in hearings that China had been "lost" to the Communists
because of the careful planning and intrigue of Communists in the
State Department. But they failed to prove their contention.
Page 935
There is considerable truth in the China Lobby's contention that
the American experts on China were organized into a single
interlocking group which had a general consensus of a Leftish
character. It is also true that this group, from its control of funds,
academic recommendations, and research of publication opportunities,
could favor persons who accepted the established consensus and could
injure, financial or in professional advancement, persons who did not
accept it. It is also true that the established group, by its
influence on book reviewing in the New York Times, the Herald Tribune
and the Saturday Review, a few magazines including the "liberal
weeklies" and in the professional journals, could advance or hamper
any specialist's career. It is also true that these things were done
in the United States by the Institute of Pacific Relations, that this
organization had been infiltrated by Communists, and by Communist
sympathizers, and that much of this group's influence arose from its
access to and control over the flow of funds from financial
foundations to scholarly activities. All these things were true, but
they would have been true of many other areas of American scholarly
research and academic administration.
On the other hand, the charges of the China Lobby that China was
"lost" because of this group is not true. Yet the whole subject is of
major importance in understanding the twentieth century.
Page 936
Lattimore, because he knew Mongolian, tended to become
everybody's expert. Many of these experts which were favored by the
Far East "establishment" in the Institute of Pacific RElations were
captured by Communist ideology. Under its influence, they
propagandized, as experts, erroneous ideas and sought to influence
policy in mistaken directions.
Behind this unfortunate situation lies another, more profound,
relationship, which influences matters much broader than Far Eastern
policy. It involves the organization of tax-exempt fortunes of
international financiers into foundations to be used for educational,
scientific, and "other public purposes." Sixty or more years ago,
public life in the East was dominated by the influence of "Wall
Street" referring to international financial capitalism deeply
involved in the gold standard, foreign exchange fluctuations,floating
of fixed-interest securities and shares for stock-exchange markets.
Page 937
This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated
by J.P. Morgan and Company from the 1880s to the 1930s was
cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern
seaboard, high Episcopalian and European-culture conscious. Their
connection with the Ivy League colleges rested on the fact that large
endowments of these institutions required constant consultation with
the financiers of Wall Street and was reflected in the fact that these
endowments were largely in bonds rather than in real estate or common
stocks. As a consequence of these influences, J.P. Morgan and his
associates were the most significant figures in policy making at
Harvard, Columbia and Yale while the Whitneys and Prudential Insurance
Company dominated Princeton. The chief officials of these universities
were beholden to these financial powers and usually owed their jobs to
them.
The significant influence of "Wall Street" (meaning Morgan) both
in the Ivy League and in Washington explains the constant interchange
between the Ivy League and the Federal Government, and interchange
which undoubtedly aroused a good deal of resentment in less-favored
circles who were more than satiated with the accents, tweeds, and High
Episcopal Anglophilia of these peoples. Poor Dean Acheson, in spite of
(or perhaps because of) his remarkable qualities of intellect and
character, took the full brunt of this resentment from McCarthy and
his allies. The same feeling did no good to pseudo-Ivy League figures
like Alger Hiss.
Page 938
In spite of the great influence of this "Wall Street" alignment,
an influence great enough to merit the name of the "American
Establishment," this group could not control the Federal Government
and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions
thoroughly distasteful to the group. The chief of these were in
taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but
culminating above all else with the inheritance tax. These tax laws
drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-
exempt foundations which became the major link in the Establishment
network between Wall Street, the Ivy League and the Federal
government. Dean Rusk, Secretary of State after 1961, formerly
president of the Rockefeller Foundations, is as much a member of this
nexus as Alger Hiss, the Dulles brothers, Jerome Green, etc.
More than fifty years ago, the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate
the Left-wing political movements of the United States. This was
relatively easy to do since these groups were starved for funds and
eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The
purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really
three-fold:
1) to keep informed about the Left-wing or liberal groups;
2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so they could blow off steam;
3) to have a final "veto" on their actions if they ever went radical.
There was nothing really new about this decision, since other
financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier.
The best example of the alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing
publication was "The New Republic" a magazine founded in 1914 by
Willard Straight using Payne Whitney money. The original purpose for
establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive
Left and to guide it in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was
entrusted to Walter Lippmann.
Willard Straight, like many Morgan agents, was present at the
Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
Page 940
The first New Republic editor,Herbert Croly wrote, "Of course,
the Straights could always withdraw their financial support if they
ceased to approve of the policy of the paper;and in that event, it
would go out of existence as a consequence of their disapproval." The
chief achievement of The New Republic in 1914-1918 and again in 1938-
1948 was for interventionism in Europe.
Page 942
Straight allowed the Communists to come into the New Republic.
The first to arrive was Lew Frank.
Page 944
Frank joined a "Communist Research Group" which met in the
Manhattan home of the wealthy "Wall Street Red," Frederick Vanderbilt
Field.
Page 945
To Morgan, all political parties were simply organizations to be
used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps.
Like the Morgan interest libraries, museums and art, its
recognition of the need for social work among the poor went back to
the original founder of the firm, George Peabody. To this same figure
may be attributed the use of tax-exempt foundations for controlling
these activities as in the use of Peabody foundations to support
Peabody libraries and museums. Unfortunately, we do not have space
here for this great and untold story, but it must be remembered that
what we do say is part of a much larger picture.
Our concern at the moment is with the links between Wall Street
and the Left, especially the Communists. Here the chief link was the
Thomas W. Lamont family. Tom Lamont was brought into the Morgan firm,
as Straight several years later, by Henry P. Davison, a Morgan
partner. Each had a wife who became a patroness of Leftish causes and
two sons, of which the elder was a conventional banker, and the
youngest was a Left-wing sympathizer and sponsor.
HUAC files show Tom Lamont, his wife Flora, and his son Corliss
as sponsors and financial angels to almost twenty extreme Left
organizations, including the Communist Party itself.
Page 946
In 1951, the McCarran Committee sought to show that China had not
been lost to the Communists by the deliberate actions of a group of
academic experts on the Far East and Communist fellow travellers whose
work in that direction was controlled and coordinated by the Institute
of Pacific Relations (IPR). The influence of the Communists in the IPR
is well established but the patronage of Wall Street is less well
known.
The IPR was a private association of ten independent national
councils in ten countries concerned with affairs in the Pacific. Money
for the American Council of the IPR came from the Carnegie Foundation
and the Rockefeller Foundation. The financial deficits which occurred
each year were picked up by financial angels, almost all with close
Wall Street connections. There can be little doubt that the IPR line
had many points in common both with the Kremlin's party line on the
Far East and with the State Department's police line in the same area.
Clearly there were some Communists, even party members, involved but
it is much less clear that there was any disloyalty to the U.S. There
was a great deal of intrigue both to help those who agreed with the
IPR line and to influence U.S. government policy in this direction,
but there is no evidence of which I am aware of any explicit plot or
conspiracy to direct American policy in a direction favorable either
to the Soviet Union or to international Communism.
Page 948
It must be confessed that the IPR had many of the marks of a
fellow traveller or Communist "captive" organization. But this does
not mean that the Radical Right version of these events is accurate.
For example, Elizabeth Bentley testified on the IPR and identified
almost every person associated with the organization as a Communist.
Page 949
This Radical Right fairy tale, which is not an accepted folk myth
in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United
States as a well-organized plot of extreme Left-wing elements,
operating from the White House itself and controlling all the chief
avenues of publicity in the United States. This plot, if we are to
believe the myth, worked through such avenues as the New York Times,
Herald Tribute, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Atlantic
Monthly, and Harper's Magazine and had at its core the wild-eyed and
bushy-haired theoreticians of Socialist Harvard and the London School
of Economics. It was determined to bring the U.S. into World War II on
the side of England (Roosevelt's first love) and Soviet Russia (his
second love) and, as part of this consciously planned scheme, invited
Japan to attack Pearl Harbor all the while undermining America's real
strength by excessive spending and unbalanced budgets.
Page 950
This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth.
There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international
Anglophile network which operates to some extent in the way the
Radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network,
which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to
cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently
does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have
studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the
early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no
aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life,
been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both
in the past and recently, to a few of its policies but in general my
chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I
believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
The Round Table Groups have already been mentioned several times.
At the risk of some repetition, the story will be summarized here
because the American branch of this organization (sometimes called the
"Eastern Establishment) has played a very significant role in the
history of the United States in the last generation.
The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying
groups whose original purpose was to federate the English-speaking
world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes. By 1915, Round Table
groups existed in seven countries including England, South Africa,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and the United States.
Page 951
Money for their activities originally came from Cecil Rhodes,
J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families and associates of
bankers Lazard Brothers and Morgan, Grenfell and Company.
The chief backbone of this organization grew up along the already
existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan Bank in New
York to a group of international financiers in London led by Lazard
Brothers.
Lionel Curtis established in England and each dominion a front
organization to the existing local Round Table Group. This front
organization called the Royal Institute of Public Affairs, had as its
nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group.
Page 952
In New York, it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations and
was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very
small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were
dominated by the large number of Morgan "experts" including Lamont and
Beer, who had gone to the Paris Peace Conference and there became
close friends with the similar group of English "experts" which had
been recruited by the Milner group. In fact, the original plans for
the Royal Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1928, the Council on Foreign Relations was dominated by the
associates of the Morgan bank. Closely allied with this Morgan
influence were a small group of Wall Street lawyers whose chief
figures were Elihu Root, John W. Davis, the Dulles Brothers, John J.
McCloy.
Page 953
On this basis, there grew up in the 20th century a power
structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into
university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.
The American branch of this "English Establishment" exerted much
of its influence through five American newspapers (New York Times and
Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Boston
Evening Transcript). It might be pointed out that the existence of
this Wall Street Anglo-American axis is quite obvious once it is
pointed out. It is reflected by the fact that such Wall Street
luminaries such as John W. Davis, Lewis Douglas, Jock Whitney and
Douglas Dillon were appointed to be American ambassadors in London.
This double international network in which the Round Table groups
formed the semi-secret or secret nuclei of the Institutes of
International Affairs was extended into a third network for Pacific
Affairs in 1925 by the same people for the same motives.
Page 954
The chief aims of this elaborate, semi-secret organization were
largely commendable: to coordinate the international activities and
outlooks of all the English-speaking world into one; to work to
maintain peace; to help backward, colonial, and underdeveloped areas
toward prosperity along the lines somewhat similar to those taught at
Oxford and the University of London.
These organizations and their financial backers were in no sense
reactionary or Fascistic persons, as Communist propaganda would like
to depict them. Quite the contrary, they were gracious and cultured
gentlemen who were much concerned with the freedom of expression of
minorities and the rule of law for all and who were convinced that
they could forcefully civilize the Boers, the Irish, the Arabs, and
the Hindus, and who are largely responsible for the partitions of
Ireland, Palestine, and India. If their failures now loom larger than
their successes, this should not be allowed to conceal the high
motives with which they attempted both.
It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so
exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the
framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow
travellers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be
recognized that the power of these energetic Left-wingers exercised
was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the
power of the international financial coterie, and, once the anger and
suspicions of the American people were aroused as they were in the
1950s, it was a fairly simple matter to get rid of the Red
sympathizers. Before this could be done, however, a congressional
committee, following backward to their source the threads which led
from the admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers, through Alger
Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank,
fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking tax-exempt
foundations. The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece
Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. It soon became clear
that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation
went too far and that the "most respected" newspapers in the country,
closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough
about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile. An interesting
report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of
tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly.. Four years
later, the Reece Committee's general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a
shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called "Foundations:
Their Power and Influence."
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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