KISSINGER AND THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT

KISSINGER AND THE SHADOW GOVERNMENT
From: KISSINGER: THE SECRET SIDE OF THE SECRETARY OF STATE - by GARY ALLEN, 1976

"Kissinger has grown up in the foreign policy group which revolves around the Council on Foreign Relations. Here he came to know, and work with, the whole cluster of top men in banking and industry who make up the true core of the so-called 'Eastern Establishment'." So says columnist Joseph Harsch, and of course, he should know, since he is a member of that selfsame CFR.

So much does Kissinger owe to the Council on Foreign Relations that he said at a party honoring a retiring high official of the organization: "You invented me".

Is it significant that the Council on Foreign Relations -- after this abbreviated as CFR -- invented Henry K? It is if you want to understand how the executive branch of the American government is really run.

The CFR, headed by David Rockefeller and under the control of his lieutenants, is America's "Shadow Government" or "Invisible Government". Administrations, both Democrat and Republican, come and go, but as we shall see, the key appointments in both always go to members of the mysterious Council on Foreign Relations.

This organization, headquartered in New York City, is composed of an elite of approximately 1,600 of the nation's Establishment Insiders in the fields of hight finance, academics, politics, commerce, the foundations, and the communications media. The names of most of its members are household words, but few ordinary Americans have ever heard of this organization. Even fewer are aware of its goals.

Despite the fact that the key moguls of the mass media are members of the CFR, its first fifty years of existence went uncommented except for a single article in Harper's, a feature in the Christian Science Monitor, and an occasional perfunctory announcement in the New York Times.

Such anonymity can hardly be accidental -- especially when you realize that the membership of the Council on Foreign Relations includes top executives from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Knight newspaper chain, NBC, CBS, Time, Life, Fortune, Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, and many others.

For several years now a handful of conservative authors has been laboring to expose the activities of the CFR. Until recently these efforts, though cumulative, could be ignored. Four years ago, however, it began to be apparent that George Wallace was planning to seize upon the Council as an electoral issue.

Obviously anticipating this, two very similar articles on the CFR appeared in the New York Times and New York magazine. The strategy was to admit that the Council on Foreign Relations has long acted as an unelected secret government of the United States, but to maintain that it has voluntarily withdrawn to the sidelines for reasons of altruism.

Contrary to what the Times wanted its readers to believe, the CFR (with Kissinger in charge of American foreign policy) was just reaching its zenith of power. Still, as John Franklin Campbell put it in New York for September 20, 1971:

Practically every lawyer, banker, professor, general, journalist and bureaucrat who has had any influence on the foreign policy of the last six Presidents -- From Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon -- has spent some time in the Harold Pratt House, a four-story mansion on the corner of Park Avenue and 68th Street, donated 26 years ago by Mr. Pratt's widow (an heir to the Standard Oil fortune) to the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. . .

If you can walk -- or be carried -- into the Pratt House, it usually means that you are a partner in an investment bank or law firm -- with occasional "trouble-shooting" assignments in government. You believe in foreign aid, NATO, and a bipartisan foreign policy. You've been pretty much running things in this country for the last 25 years, and you know it. [more]