Americans Have a Right to Know About the CFR

                        by John F. McManus


There exists in our nation today a privately run organization
with only 3,000 members, several hundred of whom are U.S.
government officials. But even though this organization possesses
enormous influence over the actions of our national government,
most Americans have never heard of it.

This same organization's members dominate our nation's mass
media, multinational corporations, the banking industry, colleges
and universities, even the military. Yet its domination is
unknown to the average citizen.

The members of this small but extremely influential group are
responsible for a parade of foreign policy disasters in China,
Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, and Africa. The group
itself has always sought to lead the United States into a one-
world socialistic system led by its members and their like-minded
associates in other nations. Shouldn't you know about this
organization and what its members are planning for the l990s?

This article will introduce you to the Council on Foreign
Relations, the little-known New York City-based organization that
is both the seat of the liberal Establishment and the main force
pushing the United States into the new world order. CFR Wants
One-World Socialism.

It was a disappointed but determined group of diplomats from the
United States and England who gathered at the Majestic Hotel in
Paris on June 17, 1919. Their disappointment stemmed from the
U.S. Senate's rejection of America's proposed entry into world
government via the League of Nations. But they remained
determined to scrap the sovereignty of each of their nations, and
all nations.

The leader of the U.S. contingent at this 1919 conference was
President Woodrow Wilson's top advisor, Edward Mandell House. In
his 1912 book, Philip Dru: Administrator, House laid out a plan
for radically altering the American system via what he termed a
"conspiracy." The book supplied his ultimate goal: "Socialism as
dreamed of by Karl Marx."

The Paris gathering led to the formation of the British Royal
Institute for International Affairs and the American Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR). With Rockefeller and Carnegie money
backing it, the CFR quickly attracted influential Americans who
used their influence to labor for the one-world socialist goal.
In 1939, the organization accepted a formal invitation to
establish a relationship with the U.S. State Department. That
relationship soon grew into CFR domination of the foreign policy
of our nation. Practically every Secretary of State for the past
50 years, serving both Democratic and Republican Administrations,
has held CFR membership.


                      Explicitly Stated Goal

As early as 1922, the CFR's prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs,
brazenly called for "world government" at the expense of our
nation's independence. Repeatedly airing this subversive goal
over subsequent years, Foreign Affairs published its most
explicit call for the termination of U.S. sovereignty in Richard
N. Gardner's 1974 article entitled "The Hard Road to World
Order."

Admitting that "instant world government" was unfortunately
unattainable, the Columbia University professor and former State
Department official proceeded to champion "an end run around
national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece." He also pointed
to numerous international groups and causes, each of which he
claimed "can produce some remarkable concessions of sovereignty
that could not be achieved on an across-the-board basis."

At the time this article appeared, hundreds of CFR members were
holding high government posts. Those who were required to swear
an oath to support the Constitution of the United States should
have immediately resigned from the CFR. None did. Nor were any
asked to do so by superiors in government. Instead, the erosion
of national independence and the undermining of the Constitution
continued.

CFR members like Gardner have historically helped similarly
determined world-government advocates achieve power in other
nations. It didn't matter to them whether foreign leaders were
professed socialists, communists, or whatever, as long as they
shared Edward Mandell House' s goal of "Socialism as dreamed of
by Karl Marx." Marxism was the goal, and that has always meant
economic control of the people and world government.

Over the years, therefore, CFR members have carried out the
Marxist goals of their organization's founder when they helped
one communist thug after another take control of once-free
nations. Now that communism is no longer the favored route to
socialist world government, CFR members have thrown the weight of
their considerable influence behind socialists and "former"
communists in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. But they deserve
condemnation for the deaths of hundreds of millions killed by
communist rulers, and for the horror of life under communist
dictatorships still endured by more than a billion human beings.


                          Past Treachery

CFR members Owen Lattimore and Dean Acheson engineered the
betrayal of Chiang Kai-shek's government and the domination of
the Chinese people by the bloodiest murderers the world has ever
known.          CFR members Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk arranged for the
no-win undeclared war in Korea, the removal from command of
General MacArthur who sought victory, and the establishment of
Communist Red China as the primary military power in Asia

CFR members John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, filling top
posts in the Administration of CFR member Dwight Eisenhower,
betrayed the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956 and knowingly
aided communist Fidel Castro in his successful seizure of Cuba in
1958-59.

CFR members McGeorge Bundy, Adlai Stevenson, and John J. McCloy
saw to it that the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a miserable
failure, a huge boost for Castro, and a stunning embarrassment
for the United States.

CFR members Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Henry Cabot Lodge
pushed the United States into Vietnam and drew up the rules of
engagement for our forces that made victory completely
unattainable. CFR members Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
continued those policies, presided over America's total defeat in
1973, and allowed South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to be
delivered to communist rulers. CFR stalwarts Henry Kissinger,
Ellsworth Bunker, and Sol Linowitz arranged (with Senate
approval) in 1978 to give away the U.S. canal in Panama to a
Marxist dictatorship and to sweeten the incredible deal with a
gift of $400 million to take it.

CFR leaders Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, and Warren
Christopher undermined strong U.S. allies in Nicaragua and Iran
during the 1970's and helped anti-American and Marxist leaders to
power.

CFR members George Shultz, William J. Casey, and Malcolm
Baldrige, during the 1980's, continued the policy of supplying
U.S. aid which kept communists in power in Poland, Romania,
China, and the Soviet Union. These same individuals did all they
could to assist and dignify the Marxists in El Salvador,
Nicaragua, and South Africa. Wherever communist regimes failed,
they sent more U.S. aid to the socialists and one-worlders who
came to power.

CFR leaders in the Administration of CFR veteran George Bush
continued to undermine the government of South Africa until it
fell into the hands of Marxist Nelson Mandela.

George Bush deliberately avoided the U.S. Congress and went to
the United Nations for authorization to unleash American military
forces against Iraq in 1991. He pointedly stated that his goal
was a "new world order ... a United Nations that performs as
envisioned by its founders." The UN's founders, however, included
43 current or future members of the CFR. A leader of the U.S.
delegation and the secretary general of the UN's founding
conference in 1945 was future CFR member and secret communist
Alger Hiss.

CFR member Bill Clinton has followed the Marxist game plan called
for by Edward Mandell House by crusading for socialized medicine,
an end to private ownership of fire arms, and economic unions
preceding world government through NAFTA and GATT. President
Clinton has also embarked on a deliberate program, most notably
via his April l994 Presidential Decision Directive 25, which
urges turning over control of U.S. military forces to the United
Nations.

                  Destroying Checks and Balances

Americans have always been assured that tyranny cannot be
established in our nation because of our Constitution's brilliant
system of checks and balances. In a round robin way, each of the
three branches of government has the power to check and limit the
activities of the other two. This feature of the Constitution did
not materialize by chance. In the Federalist Papers, James
Madison wrote: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative,
executive and judiciary, in the same hand, whether of one, a few,
or many, or whether hereditary, self appointed or elected, may
justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." But through
its members, the CFR is amassing exactly the kind of tyrannical
power Madison feared.

The Executive Branch is led by CFR member Bill Clinton. His top
appointees include CFR members Warren Christopher, W. Anthony
Lake, Bruce Babbitt, Henry Cisneros, Lloyd Bentsen, Donna
Shalala, R. James Woolsey, Madeleine Albright, Alice Rivlin,
Strobe Talbott, and a host of others.

The Legislative Branch's Senate has been led by CFR members
George Mitchell (the Majority Leader until he retired), Patrick
Moynihan, John D. Rockefeller IV, John Chafee, Harris Wofford,
Christopher Dodd, Larry Pressler, Bob Graham, William Cohen,
Claiborne Pell, and others. The three most important officers of
the House of Representatives are CFR members: Former Speaker
Thomas Foley,  Richard Gephardt, and Majority leader Newt
Gingrich. In addition, there are more than a dozen other members
of the CFR serving in the House.

The Judicial Branch consists of the Supreme Court and all federal
district and appeals courts. Of the nine justices of the nation's
highest court, three are CFR members: Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer.

Checks and balances? The CFR doesn't worry about them at all. But
every American should carefully consider James Madison's warning.


                      Grip on the Mass Media

Why are Americans unaware of the enormous clout possessed by the
CFR? How can it be that an organization formed to undo the
American dream and lead this nation into a one-world Marxist
nightmare can achieve such a controlling influence without the
people knowing about it? Why hasn't the supposedly tough and
courageous mass media informed the people about this subversive
takeover?

The answer, very simply, is that the CFR dominates the mass
media, which only rarely reports anything about the organization.
The names of hundreds of media executives and journalists can be
found on the CFR membership roster. On October 30, 1993,
Washington Post columnist Richard Harwood detailed the CFR's
domination of his own profession in his column entitled "Ruling
Class Journalists." While never condemning what he was reporting
and likely steering ambitious individuals toward the Council,
Harwood characterized CFR members as "the nearest thing we have
to a ruling establishment in the United States." He wrote: "In
the past 15 years, council directors have included Hedley Donovan
of Time Inc., Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker, Philip Geyelin of
The Washington Post, Karen Elliott House of the Wall Street
Journal, and Strobe Talbott of Time magazine, who is now
President Clinton's [Deputy Secretary of State]. The editorial
page editor, deputy editorial page editor, executive editor,
managing editor, foreign editor, national affairs editor,
business and financial editor and various writers as well as
Katharine Graham, the paper's principal owner, represent The
Washington Post in the council's membership. The executive
editor, managing editor and foreign editor of the New York Times
are members, along with the executives of such other large
newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, the
weekly news magazines, network television executives and
celebrities, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Jim Lehrer, for example,
and various columnists, among them Charles Krauthammer, William
Buckley, George Will and Jim Hoagland."

The Council repeatedly denies that it sets policy for our nation.
Yet, while discussing our nation's changing foreign policy, CFR
Chairman Peter G. Peterson stated in the organization's 1989
Annual Report that "the Board of Directors and the staff of the
Council have decided that this institution should play a
leadership role in defining these new foreign policy agenda."

Our question is simply: How can an organization define an agenda
for the nation without taking a stand or advocating a policy? The
answer is that it can't. Any claim from the CFR that it is merely
a debating forum open to all ideas is absurd. Even Richard
Harwood knows this. In his Washington Post article mentioned
previously, he wrote that the CFR journalists he listed "do not
merely analyze and interpret foreign policy; they help make it."

The actual content of meetings held at the group's headquarters
and elsewhere remains a closely guarded secret. According to CFR
bylaws, it is an "express condition of membership" that members
refrain from disclosing in any way what goes on at Council
meetings. Any action contravening this rule "may be regarded by
the Board of Directors in its sole discretion as ground for
termination or suspension of membership."

Yet, cabinet officials, members of Congress, high-ranking
military officers, and other government officials repeatedly
participate at CFR functions. Such "confidential" gatherings
under the aegis of a private organization (especially one founded
by an individual whose goal was "Socialism as dreamed of by Karl
Marx") are totally inconsistent with proper conduct in a free
country.

No CFR member is ever directly instructed to hold any particular
view. Instead, government officials and media personalities
supply important respectability for favored positions, and render
varying degrees of disdain or contempt for the opposite view.
Ambitious politicians, journalists, corporate executives,
professors, and others dutifully follow the lead set for them,
frequently without ever knowing whose attitude they are
parroting. In this way, an agenda is indeed set and policies are
established. As a rule, slight variations on most topics are
tolerated, even welcomed. But advocacy of any position outside
carefully drawn limits earns scorn and ridicule. For example,
discussion about increasing or decreasing U.S. funding for either
the United Nations or a variety of foreign aid projects is
tolerated, even welcomed. But anyone who calls for U.S.
withdrawal from the world body, or who recommends that all
foreign aid be terminated, jeopardizes his or her reputation with
the nation's most prestigious power brokers.

Those who read CFR publications and study the editorial stance of
CFR-controlled media organs know exactly which are the favored
attitudes. The CFR and several like minded groups can be expected
to support the following: more pacts, treaties, and agreements
that compromise U.S. sovereignty; continued praise for and
reliance on the United Nations; piecemeal transfer of U.S
military forces to UN supervision and command; more and newer
forms of foreign aid; undermining and isolation of any national
leader who does not favor socialism and world government under a
"new world order"; and submission to the radical demands of
environmental extremists, population planners, and human rights
crusaders who will never be satisfied until the United States no
longer exists as a free and independent nation.

Some who follow the lead of the Establishment are undoubtedly
committed to the world government and socialism advocated by Marx
and the CFR's founders. But most who toe this line are self-
promoters who are interested only in re-election, advancement,
and recognition. They care little or nothing about the
Constitution, their fellow citizens, and freedom in general.


                       The Shadows of Power

A thoroughly revealing history of the Council on Foreign
Relations and its responsibility for America's decline is
available in researcher James Perloff's superb book, The Shadows
of Power. Unlike others who have sought to warn the American
people about the pervasive power of the CFR, Mr. Perloff studied
the organization's publications from its inception in 1921. The
evidence he supplies to support his condemnation is taken from
the CFR itself. His important book concludes that the CFR is a
major participant in an ongoing conspiratorial drive to use the
U.S. government and the wealth of the American people to create
power over mankind for a few diabolically driven individuals.

Mr. Perloff is careful to point out that only some of the CFR's
members are completely committed to the sinister goals he
exposes. He believes that many CFR members, and many others who
follow the group's lead, would readily switch their allegiance
should widespread awareness be created about this powerful
organization's history and designs.