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ROCKEFELLER INTERNATIONALISM

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Bianca
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« on: June 26, 2007, 08:49:23 am »





                                  R O C K E F E L L E R   I N T E R N A T I O N A L I S M




Throughout the 20th century to the present day, the Rockefeller family, via philanthropy and power politics, has been pivotal in the move to create a so-called New World Order.

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Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 3 (April-May 2003)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

© by Will Banyan © 2002, 2003
(Revised January 2003)
Email: banyan007@rediffmail.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE ROCKEFELLERS' NEW WORLD ORDER VISIONS, 1920-2002
It has long been the conceit of the rich and super-rich that their vast wealth, and the political power it brings, gives them licence to the change the world. The House of Rothschild, for example, the world's richest banking dynasty in the 19th century, used its economic leverage and political influence in numerous (though not always successful) attempts to remould Europe's political landscape in an effort to prevent the outbreak of war. This gained the family a reputation in some quarters as "militant pacifists". "[W]hat Rothschild says is decisive," opined one Austrian diplomat, "and he won't give any money for war." The family attitude was best summed up in a statement allegedly made by the wife of the dynasty's founder, Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812): "It won't come to war; my sons won't provide money for it." Yet the Rothschilds' motives in preventing warfare were hardly benevolent; with the family's power and fortune resting on the stability of the international bond market, avoiding war was a matter of economic survival. "You can't begin to imagine what might happen should we get war, God forbid," lamented one of Mayer Amschel's sons in 1830, " ... it would be impossible to sell anything."1 Such is the banality of greed: good outcomes are acceptable only when they are profitable.

In the past century, however, the rich have become more overt in their efforts; in fact, using their wealth to bring about global changes has been transformed into a noble enterprise--one that usually follows a spiritual epiphany, when the decades of ruthlessly amassing a fortune are followed by a sudden desire to employ for the "common good" rather than self-indulgent material luxuries. The acknowledged pioneer of this approach is Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), one of the so-called "robber-barons" of the "Gilded Age" in the late 19th century when the US economy was dominated by the "trusts", among them Carnegie Steel. Having sold his company to fellow magnate J. P. Morgan in 1901, Carnegie devoted his remaining years and his fortune to a crusade for world peace.

Now celebrated as the father of philanthropy, Carnegie believed that only the rich minority had proven themselves qualified to change society, so the multitude must be excluded from such decisions. "[W]ealth, passing through the hands of the few," he wrote, "can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if distributed in small sums to the people themselves."2 Similar logic drives many of today's philanthropic social engineers, including Ted Turner, Bill Gates and George Soros, each of whom devotes their billions to "worthy" causes in support of their own particular visions of a "just" global society.

                     
                            JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, SR.

This naturally brings us to the Rockefeller family, which has used its fortune, originally amassed in the 19th century, to establish a philanthropic network that has had a significant influence on government policy throughout the world for nearly a century. This fact has long been recognised by researchers into the "New World Order", who contend that Rockefeller family members are among the key players, if not the primary architects and paymasters, behind the alleged secret plot to establish a dictatorial "One World Government". Back in the 1970s, for example, Gary Allen declared in his book, The Rockefeller File, that "the major Rockefeller goal today is the creation of a 'New World Order'--a one world government that would control all of mankind". Contemporary NWO researchers have been no less certain of Rockefeller culpability. The ever-controversial David Icke describes the Rockefellers as a pivotal family in the "bloodline hierarchy" that is striving to implement the "Brotherhood Agenda" of "centralised control of the planet". Were it not for the Rockefellers and their "manipulation of the United States and the wider world", writes Icke, there would be "far greater freedom" in America and the "world in general".3

That the emerging New World Order is the product of decisions made at the behest of the power-elite, among them the Rockefellers, is not in dispute here, for the evidence is considerable. However, some key issues remain unresolved, with opponents of globalisation divided over whether the NWO stems from a process in which "socialist" supranational institutions are subverting the sovereignty of all nations, including the United States, by stealth, or is in fact a process of US-led transnational "corporate capitalism", with global organisations relegated to a secondary role.4

By examining the specific proposals of the Rockefellers, we can see that for the elite architects of the NWO it has not been a case of either global institutions or a one-world market, but a careful combination of both approaches, with regional blocs as stepping-stones to the establishment of an authoritarian, market-oriented system of "global governance".5

In fact, the Rockefeller family has been at the forefront of efforts to convince, cajole and coordinate governments in support of this project throughout much of the 20th century through to the present day. Indeed, the strategies commonly associated with both the "corporate-led" and "collectivist" models of global governance--i.e., American leadership, the United Nations, free trade, neo-liberalism, international financial institutions, regional free trade blocs, population control, global environmental regulation, Atlantic Union and world federalism--the Rockefellers have supported for nearly a century either directly or through the various elite policy-planning organisations they have funded, founded or controlled.

The purpose of this article is to review the origins and evolution of the internationalist ideology of the Rockefellers, from John D. Rockefeller, Junior, through his most influential sons--John D. III, Nelson, Laurance and David--to their own offspring, covering the period from the 1920s through to the present day.
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« Reply #1 on: June 26, 2007, 08:51:45 am »




JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR, AND THE LEGACY OF WOODROW WILSON

                                     
                                                   WOODROW WILSON

The story of the Rockefellers' embrace of internationalism begins not with speculative tales of their "reptilian" origins or with John D. Rockefeller, Senior (1839-1937)--the uncompromising patriarch and founder of Standard Oil, the very basis of the Rockefellers' power--but with John D. Rockefeller, Junior (1874-1960), who controlled the Rockefeller fortune during the first half of the 20th century. This may seem at odds with prevailing orthodoxies and other more entertaining accounts, but the Rockefellers did not subscribe to the globalist ideology until Junior's time.

Despite his numerous trips to Europe and attempts to capture foreign oil markets (resulting in a clash with the Rothschilds at one point), Rockefeller Senior had shown little interest in international affairs. Besides his vast fortune (the equivalent of nearly US$200 billion in today's terms), Rockefeller's only other enduring legacy to his extended family, and by extension the New World Order, was a philosophy of philanthropy in service of his professed interest in improving humanity.

The basis for Rockefeller Senior's philanthropy, according to Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow, was his "mystic faith that God had given him money for mankind's benefit". Rockefeller was a devout Baptist, and his religion determined much of his early philanthropy. He was also influenced by Carnegie's argument that the rich should use their money to dampen social tensions stemming from growing inequality, rather than leave it to their heirs to waste on hedonistic lifestyles. Carnegie wrote in the North American Review (June 1889) that "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced". Inspired by Carnegie's missive, Rockefeller embarked upon a vigorous program of philanthropy, though he avoided direct gifts to the needy. Citing the need to "abolish evils by destroying them at the source", he poured his money into educational institutions, hoping their graduates would "spread their culture far and wide". Rockefeller was unwilling to upset the social hierarchy, subscribing to the Darwinian view that those at the bottom of the food chain were there because of personality defects and "weakness of body, mind or character, will or temperament"--though he believed that through his generosity he could create the necessary "strong personality" among the weak, leading to "the wider distribution of wealth".6 For Rockefeller, changing how people thought rather than their material circumstances was the more worthy cause.

But there were also some more pragmatic calculations behind Rockefeller's establishment of a philanthropic empire. Following Ida Tarbell's scathing history of Standard Oil in McClure's Magazine in 1902, Rockefeller was obsessed with improving his public image. By institutionalising his giving, Rockefeller hoped to "prove that rich businessmen could honorably discharge the burden of wealth" (Chernow) as well as dampen further inquiries into the origins of his fortune. The other reason, which emerged once Woodrow Wilson introduced income taxes in 1913, was that gifts to philanthropic funds were tax exempt. Hence, the incorporation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 protected much of his vast wealth from inheritance taxes. This was a real concern to Rockefeller, who opposed even the recently introduced six per cent income tax, declaring that "when a man has accumulated a sum of money ... the Government has no right to share in its earnings".

During the mid-1890s, Rockefeller gradually retired from publicly running Standard Oil, while pouring a sizeable portion of his fortune into the Rockefeller Foundation and other charitable trusts. From 1915, he turned over his remaining

                           


wealth to his only son and designated heir, Junior. Unlike his shrewd and ruthless father, Junior was shy, tormented by self-loathing and clearly burdened by the weight of his father's expectations that he would now run the Rockefeller family's business and philanthropic affairs. It was to help him manage this awesome task that in 1920 Junior employed the lawyer Raymond B. Fosdick (1883-1972) as one of his key strategic advisers.
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« Reply #2 on: June 26, 2007, 08:53:56 am »





The Persuader: Raymond B. Fosdick



It is remarkable that Fosdick's name is absent from most New World Order histories, for his relationship with Junior is crucial to any understanding of how the Rockefellers became involved in the NWO. As one of Junior's closest confidants as well as a Trustee (1921-1948) and, later, President (1936-1948) of the Rockefeller Foundation, Fosdick had a pivotal role, as it was he who had first urged Junior to embrace the liberal-internationalist creed of President Wilson. This was not surprising, for Fosdick was a lifelong supporter of Wilson, as he acknowledged in a 1956 lecture at the University of Chicago when he said, "from the first day I had met [Wilson] until he died, he had my wholehearted admiration and respect". Fosdick also claimed to have had a "long and occasionally close association" with Wilson that dated from 1903 when he had started studying at Princeton University, where Wilson was the president.9

That first meeting at Princeton proved to be the start of a long and productive association for Fosdick, with Wilson taking more than a passing interest in his career in the years that followed. During Wilson's campaign for the presidency in 1912, Fosdick was personally appointed by Wilson to be Secretary and Auditor of the Finance Committee of the National Democratic Committee. He went on to hold a variety of positions in the Wilson Administration, including Chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities in both the Navy and War departments. As a civilian aide to General Pershing, Fosdick accompanied Wilson to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. During this period, Fosdick also cultivated close relations with Wilson's enigmatic adviser, Colonel House.

Fosdick obviously made a substantial impression, for in May 1919 he was asked by Wilson to accept an offer from League of Nations Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond to become an Under Secretary-General to the League. A keen supporter of the League, Fosdick had enthusiastically accepted the offer and, in July 1919, took up his new appointment. It was a significant advance for Fosdick, as it made him one of only two Under Secretaries-General in the League (the other was French technocrat Jean Monnet, the future founder of the European Community) as well as the highest-ranking American in the organisation.10

But Fosdick's dream run was to be short-lived, when opposition in the US Senate to American membership in the League reached breaking point later that year as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge persisted in his attempts to "Americanise" the League of Nations Treaty. Although convinced that Lodge's actions stemmed from a "degree of immaturity in our ideas and thinking", Fosdick knew the controversy had made his position untenable and so he resigned from the League in January 1920. Declaring himself to be finally released from a "burden of silence", a bitter and disappointed Fosdick now resolved "to speak [his] faith before the world". Realising Wilson's vision of a New World Order thus became Fosdick's obsession.11

At this point, it is important to review exactly what Wilson's original New World Order vision entailed. There were four main components.

The first, and most well known, was the League of Nations, conceived by Wilson as "a community of power" and "an organized common peace", with the League acting as a global forum to settle territorial disputes through arbitration, but it would also have the power to enforce those settlements. According to Henry Kissinger, Wilson's bold vision for the League "translated into institutions tantamount to world government".12
Second, Wilson was a strong advocate of global free trade, including in his Fourteen Points a demand for complete "equality of trade" and the "removal ... of all economic barriers". Wilson was attempting to realise the vision of 19th-century British free-trade advocates Richard Cobden and the so-called "Manchester School" of economists, of a world in which war would be banished, once it was linked together by free trade. But Wilson was also concerned that American industries had "expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world". Entrenching free trade through a binding global treaty, he reasoned, would save US manufacturers.13
Third, Wilson was a supporter of regional integration at both political and economic levels, evident in his abortive "Pan-American Pact" proposal of 1914-15--the purpose of which, according to his adviser Colonel House, was to "weld North and South America together in closer union". Wilson and House also believed that the Pan-American Pact could serve as a model for political organisation in Europe, and thus the world.14
Fourth, Wilson believed the US should assume a global leadership role so it could "play the part which it was destined she should play", and lend its "power to the authority and force of other nations to guarantee peace and justice throughout the world".15
Wilson's invocation of "peace and justice" should, of course, be treated with the caution that most political rhetoric deserves, especially in view of the myriad paradoxes in Wilson's political career. It was Wilson, after all, who campaigned for the presidency in 1911-1912 with the claim that he would stand up to the "masters of the government of the United States ... the combined capitalists and manufacturers". Yet he relied heavily on the generosity of those same "masters of the government", with just 40 individuals providing a third of his campaign funds. This exclusive group included Wall Street bankers Jacob Schiff (Kuhn, Loeb & Co.) and Cleveland Dodge, the stockbroker Bernard Baruch and numerous industrialists, including the owners of the International Harvester Company (also known as the "Harvester Trust"). This was also the same Wilson who expressed his opposition to the "credit trust" of the bankers, but went on to found the Federal Reserve System, fulfilling Wall Street's dual aims of internationalising the US dollar and controlling currency and credit creation in the United States.16

Given that Wilson was captive to those same "trusts" he had so publicly attacked, it was probably inevitable that one of his most devoted followers would go on to serve one of the greatest trusts of them all.

Driven by a desire to see Wilson's ambitious model of world order become a reality, Fosdick had lobbied for US involvement in the League of Nations, founding the League of Nations Association in 1923. In January 1924, Fosdick had visited the ailing Woodrow Wilson to seek some final inspiration and guidance. He was not to be disappointed, as Gene Smith relates in When The Cheering Stopped:
[Wilson] said to Fosdick that it was unthinkable that America would permanently stand in the way of human progress; it was unthinkable that America would remain aloof, for America would not thwart the hope of the race. His voice broke and he whispered huskily that America was going to bring her spiritual energy to the liberation of mankind. Mankind would step forward, a mighty step; America could not play the laggard. Fosdick was young, and when Fosdick rose to go he pledged in the name of the younger generation that they would carry through to finish the uncompleted work.17

Sure enough, Wilson's final testament--he died a month later--reinforced Fosdick's globalist zeal. Utterly convinced that the only way to ensure world peace was through some form of world government, and that only US leadership could make it happen, Fosdick devoted his energies to trying to influence elite and public opinion in that direction. In 1928, Fosdick published The Old Savage in the New Civilization, which endorsed "a planetary consciousness" and "a collective intelligence". Fosdick argued that if nations were to co-exist without conflict, then: " ... we must have some centralised mechanism, some established procedure, by which we can determine the understandings and rules of common life ... The assertion of the absolute sovereignty of the state has become in our time the supreme anarchy."18
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« Reply #3 on: June 26, 2007, 08:56:28 am »





The Willing Pupil




The greatest asset in Fosdick's crusade to draw the US back into Wilson's scheme for world order was to be the pious, guilty and impressionable John D. Rockefeller, Junior. Though the designated heir to the Standard Oil fortune, Junior lacked his father's ruthlessness and shrewdness. Loyal to his father's prejudices, Junior had been a staunch Republican, rejecting both Wilson and the League of Nations, yet the slaughter of World War I had also seen him toy with the idea of international cooperation. He had embraced interdenominationalism, participating in the Interchurch World Movement which had sought to combine the resources of all Protestant Christian churches in an attempt to "Christianize the world". In Junior, Fosdick claimed to have found a "remarkable man" of "great sincerity ... with a lively sense of responsibility" who "wanted to be convinced, not deferred to". Not surprisingly, convincing Junior to embrace his globalist ideology became one of Fosdick's goals.19

Although Fosdick's memoirs do not admit it, he was very effective in shaping Junior's worldview. Fosdick's fawning biography of Junior suggests that his growing sense of internationalism stemmed solely from a combination of youthful globetrotting and a religiously instilled "awareness of human kinship and of the bonds that unite the world". Yet, with Fosdick working closely with Junior from the 1920s into the 1940s as one of his senior advisers, there is also a definite and otherwise inexplicable trend of Junior expressing increasingly sophisticated internationalist sentiments as well as supporting the League of Nations and funding the Eastern Establishment's premier body, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Inexplicable, only if we ignore Fosdick's tacit acknowledgement that Junior was very malleable--"his opinions were invariably marked by tolerance, and inflexibility was not part of his character"--and therefore open to his suggestions.20

Evidence of Junior's conversion to Fosdick's ideology abounds. One of Junior's initiatives during the 1920s was the establishment of International Houses for foreign university students. Junior viewed the International Houses as a "laboratory of human relationships" and a "world in miniature" through which he hoped an "atmosphere of fellowship can be developed". In a 1924 speech to foreign students, Junior spoke of his hope that "some day ... no one will speak of 'my country', but all will speak of 'our world'".

Inevitably, through Fosdick's urging, Junior became more interested in supporting the League of Nations. Fosdick introduced Junior to Arthur Sweetser, one of the few Americans still working at the League, who also encouraged his interest in the world organisation. The impact was clear, with Junior directing the Rockefeller Foundation to grant money to the Health Organization of the League of Nations, and later giving some $2 million of his own funds to establish the League Library. During the 1920s he also contributed $1,500 a year to the CFR, then dominated by supporters of Wilson, and in 1929 provided a further $50,000 towards the Council's new headquarters in New York, Harold Pratt House.21

The enduring influence of Fosdick's Wilsonian internationalism was also evident in a 1938 address by Junior, in which he made a number of observations about the impact of technological change and growing interdependence. In effect, Junior predicted the end of the nation-state, and thus charted a course that his sons would endeavour to make into a self-fulfilling prophecy:
With each passing day, with every new invention which increases the rapidity of travel and the ease of communications, cooperation between men and nations becomes constantly more important. The nations of the world have become interdependent as never before. The hands of the clock cannot be turned back. The old order of geographic isolation, or personal or national self-sufficiency, can never return. The future of civilisation will be determined by the degree of success with which men and nations learn to cooperate, to live together and let live.22

The culmination of Junior's embrace of Fosdick's internationalism was his decision in late 1946 to donate land in New York for the headquarters of the newly created United Nations (UN)--the site still used to this day. But arguably Junior's greatest legacy was the impact of his newfound globalist zeal on his children. The effect was twofold: firstly, he passed on Senior's philanthropic philosophy of using Rockefeller wealth to change society, embedding it in a plethora of institutions and organisations that gave the Rockefellers "an unrivalled influence in national affairs";23 secondly, he established in them an enduring belief in Fosdick's ideology of international cooperation and governance, itself based on Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations vision.

Junior had six children: a daughter, Abby; and five sons, John, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop and David, four of whom would go on to play leading roles in establishing the New World Order ... and it is to those Rockefeller brothers that we now turn.                 

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Endnotes:
1. Quotes in Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848, Penguin Books, 2000, pp. 231-232.
2. Peter Krass, Carnegie, John Wiley & Sons, 2002, pp. 242, 410-411.
3. Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File, '76 Press, 1976, p. 77; and David Icke, The Biggest Secret, Bridge of Love, 1999, pp. 1-2, 267-268.
4. The literature on both these interpretations is considerable. For recent examples of the "corporate-led globalisation" theory, see: David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press, 1995; Naomi Klein, No Logo, Flamingo, 2000; Paul Hellyer, Stop Think, Chimo Media, 1999; and Anita Roddick (ed.), Take It Personally: how globalization affects you - and powerful ways to challenge it, HarperCollins, 2001. For classic and recent examples of the "socialist one-world government" theory, see: Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Concord Press, 1972; James Perloff, The Shadows of Power, Western Islands, 1988; William F. Jasper, Global Tyranny ... Step By Step, Western Islands, 1992; Gary Benoit, "Globalism's Growing Grasp", The New American, February 28, 2000; and William F. Jasper, "Global Tyranny ... Bloc by Bloc", The New American, April 9, 2001.
5. For recent examples of this combined agenda, complete with obligatory rhetoric on protecting democracy, see: The Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood, Oxford University Press, 1995; George Soros, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, Little, Brown & Co., 2000; and Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Text Publishing, 2002.
6. Rockefeller and Carnegie quoted in Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Warner Books, 1998, pp. 467, 313-314, 469.
7. ibid., pp. 468, 566.
8. ibid., p. 638.
9. Raymond B. Fosdick, "Personal Recollections of Woodrow Wilson", in Earl Latham (ed.), The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson, University of Chicago Press, 1958, pp. 28-29. Note that Fosdick was also a trustee of all the philanthropic boards created by John D. Rockefeller, Jr, including The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, the International Education Board, The Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the China Medical Board and the Spelman Fund of New York.
10. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, Princeton University Press, 1947, p. 479; Fosdick, "Personal Recollections", pp. 29, 35, 39-41; and Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958, pp. 188-189, 195-196.
11. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation, pp. 204, 211.
12. Wilson quoted in Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 98, 112; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy, Touchstone, 1994, p. 234.
13. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, p. 24; and Wilson quoted in Ross A. Kennedy, "Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security", Diplomatic History, Winter 2001, p. 23.
14. House quoted in Charles Seymour (ed.), The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, Ernest Benn Ltd, 1926, p. 215.
15. Wilson quoted in Knock, To End All Wars, p. 112.
16. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, pp. 524-525, 490, 403, 485; Wilson quoted in Lester V. Chandler, "Wilson's Monetary Reform", in Latham, Woodrow Wilson, p. 126, and J. Lawrence Broz, "Origins of the Federal Reserve System: International Incentives and the Domestic Free-Rider Problem", Harvard University, May 1998, pp. 27-34.
17. Gene Smith, When The Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson, Bantam Books, 1964, pp. 230-231 (emphasis added).
18. Quoted in Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation, pp. 215-216, 224-225, 227.
19. ibid., pp. 215-216; Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr: A Portrait, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1956, pp. 205-207.
20. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., pp. 388-90; and John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, pp. 155-156.
21. Rockefeller quoted in Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., pp. 390-394; Harr & Johnson, The Rockefeller Century, p. 156; and "The Library Benefactor: John D. Rockefeller, Jr.", at UNOG Library website http://www.unog.ch.
22. Rockefeller quoted in Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., pp. 397-398 (emphasis added).
23. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Holt Reinhart & Winston, 1976, pp. 486-487
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« Reply #4 on: June 26, 2007, 09:59:21 am »





Rockefeller Internationalism
Part 2/6
Power-hungry Nelson Rockefeller, second son of John D. Rockefeller, Jr, had a plan for a New World Order that would make nation-states redundant.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 4 (June-July 2003)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

© by Will Banyan © 2002, 2003
(Revised January 2003)
Email: banyan007@rediffmail.com


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE PUBLICIST: NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER (1908-1979)




In the 1940s and 1950s, the American power-elite held great expectations for the five sons of John D. Rockefeller, Junior. (Reflecting the prejudices of the time, Junior's daughter Abby was excluded from these deliberations.) Books such as Alex Morris's fawning effort, Those Rockefeller Brothers: An Informal Biography of Five Extraordinary Young Men (1953), for example, openly speculated on how Junior's progeny would advance the Rockefeller philanthropic agenda. Some of these expectations were met. John D. III and Laurance both seemed content to assume a patrician lifestyle steeped in philanthropy, while attempting to influence government from behind the scenes. David, of course, took this to a much higher level, combining it with a banking career; while Winthrop took the opposite route, dabbling in business and serving as Governor of Arkansas--then a relatively obscure position on the US political landscape.

It was Nelson, Junior's second-eldest son, who decisively broke the mould. In contrast to his more reserved brothers and at odds with family expectations, Nelson aggressively pursued a career in the highest levels of the US government, first as an official and later as a politician. That he would do so was inevitable, for he was the dominant personality in the new generation. He was an extrovert and was seemingly immune from Junior's pious strictures and prohibitions. Nelson also possessed a vast appetite for power, but, in a deviation from the family tradition of trying to dampen popular fears about Rockefeller power by maintaining a low public profile, he also sought to be widely known as a powerful individual.

Thus it was Nelson who had shunted aside the eldest son, John D. III, to take centre stage in family affairs, determined to control the philanthropic network. And then, after an erratic and unfulfilling career in government, he clumsily attempted to seize the ultimate political prize: the White House. And yet, for Nelson, the rewards would be mixed with frustration, and ultimately the toll would be high for him and the family name. Even David eventually came to see Nelson not as "the hero who could do no wrong but as a man who was willing to sacrifice almost everything in the service of his enormous ambition".24
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« Reply #5 on: June 26, 2007, 10:00:56 am »






From Technocrat to Politician




Having no reservations about trading on the family name, Nelson used the doors it opened to pursue a wide-ranging career in the US government, in foreign policy positions in the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations, although his path was hardly smooth.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nelson served as Coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-44), Chairman of the Inter-American Development Commission (1940-47) and Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America (1944-45). His fortunes fell under Harry Truman, who dismissed Nelson from the State Department, apparently at the insistence of new Secretary of State Dean Acheson who resented Nelson's successful effort to have Axis-sympathetic Argentina included in the United Nations. A chastened Nelson retreated into philanthropy, pausing only to accept the token appointment as Chairman of the International Development Board (1950-51).

Under Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson's star briefly rose again. He served as the President's Special Assistant on Foreign Policy (1954-55) and as head of the secret "Forty Committee" charged with overseeing the CIA's covert operations. Nelson had been on the verge of securing a senior position in the Department of Defense; however, concerted opposition from other Cabinet members, who had convinced Eisenhower--correctly--that Nelson was intent on massively expanding the Defense budget, ensured that his career as a public official came to an abrupt end.

These experiences were salutary for the ambitious Nelson. His bruising encounters with Establishment technocrats--who clearly resented his intrusion into their realm--instilled in him a yearning for greater political power. Nelson was not content to operate behind the scenes like his brothers, nor willing to endure more humiliation as a mere functionary.

According to author Stewart Alsop, Nelson eventually realised that "there was only one way for a very rich man like him to achieve what he had always wanted--real political power and authority. That way was to run for office".25 And for Nelson, the ultimate political office he desired was President of the United States.

In 1958, drawing on his vast inheritance, Nelson launched his political career, defeating W. Averell Harriman in the "battle of the millionaires" to become Governor of New York, a position he would hold until 1973. Expecting the New York governorship to be a stepping-stone to the Presidency, Nelson campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in 1960, 1964 and 1968 but failed every time, losing twice to his nemesis, Richard Nixon.

Ironically, it was in the wake of Nixon's resignation in 1974 over the Watergate scandal that Nelson finally entered the White House, but as an appointed Vice-President to an appointed President, Gerald Ford. Ford's survival of two blundered assassination attempts meant that Nelson remained only a famed "heartbeat away" from the Presidency, never achieving his goal.26 So near, yet so far, it was no wonder that when Nelson was asked, close to the end of his life, what he wished most to have done, his reply was curt: "Been President".27
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« Reply #6 on: June 26, 2007, 10:03:38 am »






Internationalist or Imperialist?




There are two competing interpretations of Nelson's foreign policy vision during his political career. The first is of a diehard anti-Communist, dubbed by some journalists as the "Coldest Warrior of Them All", and a militarist-imperialist who believed the US should "act aggressively whenever events abroad threatened its own interests" (Chapman). Proponents of this view point to Nelson's "necrophiliac ambition" (Fitch) of providing each American family with its own nuclear fallout shelter, his calls in 1960 for a 10 per cent boost in Defense spending, his attacks on Eisenhower for letting the US fall behind the Soviet Union in the famed (but illusory) "missile gap", and his apparent eagerness to use tactical nuclear weapons against Communist insurgents.28

The second interpretation, in contrast, presents Nelson as "a leader in the campaign to submerge American sovereignty in a World Superstate".29 "I think Nelson Rockefeller is definitely committed to trying to make the United States part of a one world socialist government," declared John Birch Society founder Robert Welch in 1958.30 Far from being the ultimate Cold Warrior, Nelson is portrayed as a covert supporter of the alleged plot by the super-rich to use Communism to subvert the sovereignty of the US and of other "free nations" worldwide.

Yet these mutually inconsistent caricatures fail to capture the true essence of Nelson's world order strategy, which in the short term sought to assert America's full military power to defeat Soviet Communism, and in the long term envisaged the United States using its superpower status to create a "new world order" based on world federalism, regional blocs and international free trade. The influences on Nelson's foreign policy thinking were numerous, ranging from his father and Fosdick through to the plethora of political and specialist foreign policy advisers he employed. But it is important to realise the different sources for each approach.

Starting with Nelson's stridently anti-Communist short-term outlook, we find a surprising source. Since his uninspiring departure from the Eisenhower Administration in 1955, Nelson had employed as his foreign policy adviser Dr Henry Kissinger, then a leading proponent of Realpolitik and a rising star in the Establishment. Kissinger is widely regarded as a proponent of world government, but this assumption stems primarily from the crude analytical tool of guilt by association, in which Kissinger's CFR membership is cited as the primary evidence of this alleged tendency. There can be no doubt that Kissinger is a particularly loathsome creature of the Eastern Establishment and an egotistical, deceitful and opportunistic character at best,31 but a world government proponent he is not. For instance, in his first CFR book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger explicitly rejected the option of world government as "hardly realistic", adding that there was "no escaping from the responsibilities of the thermonuclear age into a supranational authority".32

Despite this, Kissinger was still of value to Nelson, providing support to his more belligerent anti-Communist fantasies. According to Joseph Persico, Nelson's speechwriter of some 11 years, "Kissinger's hard-eyed vision of a world maintained by counter-balancing powers suited Nelson perfectly".33 But Kissinger's influence should not be overstated. For one, Nelson's balance-of-power thinking stemmed from his reflexive anti-Communism, which characterised the Soviet bloc as America's greatest threat. That was the balance of power in the world at that time, and thus Kissinger's unsentimental views suited Nelson.

However, in his longer-term outlook, Nelson was undeniably a Wilsonian liberal internationalist--something he had already demonstrated intermittently since the 1940s. For example, Nelson was instrumental, through the controversy generated over his push to have Argentina included in the United Nations, with ensuring that Article 51--which allows for groups of states to form alliances to repel aggression--was included in the final UN Charter.34 But at the same time, not content with the UN system that included the Soviets, and determined to "purify" Central and South America of "alien commercial influence", Nelson was a strong supporter of regionalism, particularly the goal of a Western hemisphere "united under US leadership".35 During the Eisenhower Administration, Nelson had been one of the strongest supporters of the Atlantic Union concept, despite Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's patronising dismissal of his views as "premature".36

It was also during the late 1940s and early 1950s that Nelson, in support of his goal of encouraging Western hemispheric unity--or, more precisely, establishing US economic dominance over Latin America--had established the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) and the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). The AIA was ostensibly intended to promote development in Latin America and combat "poverty, disease and illiteracy", while IBEC was supposed to encourage capital investment. The founding president of both institutions, Nelson naturally painted AIA and IBEC as being designed to achieve the desirable goal of development. Yet, in truth, Nelson was driven by a baser aim of breaking down national barriers to penetration by American companies in line with the shift in Rockefeller wealth from oil to international banking and Third World investment.37

In describing the activities of AIA and IBEC, Nelson employed language that is often employed by contemporary advocates of globalisation. "Today," Nelson stated in the late 1940s, "capital must go to where it can produce the most goods, render the greatest service, meet the most pressing needs of the people." Discussing IBEC operations in Latin America, Nelson noted that because of the "big problems" confronting "our way of life", it was essential that they demonstrate "that American enterprise can ... help to solve these problems that are vital to our everyday life and to our position in world affairs". He said the US needed to "master such problems if our system is going to survive".38 For all his rhetoric on helping people, ultimately it was protecting and extending "our system" that was paramount for Nelson.
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« Reply #7 on: June 26, 2007, 10:05:09 am »





Three Sources of Inspiration




For the most definitive expressions of Nelson's liberal-internationalist vision, we must look to his political career as presidential aspirant from the mid-1950s through to 1973. And we can see that, just as Fosdick influenced Junior, at least three sources of inspiration drove Nelson's vision during that period.
                             

                                    From Left: David, Winthrop, John D. and Nelson Rockefeller

The first main influence on Nelson was the Rockefeller Brothers Fund report of 1959, Prospect for America. Aided by David, Laurance, Winthrop and the family fortune, Nelson had mobilised nearly a hundred members of the Eastern Establishment to participate in his project, which was specifically intended for his presidential campaigns. The participants were divided into six panels: three focused on the domestic issues of democracy, education and the performing arts, while the other three dealt with defence, US foreign policy and international trade and economic development. Nelson drew heavily on Prospect for America's detailed recommendations for US leadership in establishing regional arrangements and global free trade and strengthening international institutions.
Prospect for America's policy advice reinforced the Establishment's Wilsonian liberal-internationalist consensus, recommending that America's goal should be to establish "a world at peace, based on separate political entities acting as a community", as it was now America's "opportunity ... to shape a new world order". This would consist of "regional institutions under an international body of growing authority--combined so as to be able to deal with those problems that increasingly the separate nations will not be able to solve alone". To advance the free trade agenda, the report argued that the US should encourage the formation of "regional trading systems" in "all areas of the free world", including a "Western Hemisphere Common Market" incorporating North, South and Central America. The report had also lauded the United Nations as "proof of our conviction that problems which are of world-wide impact must be dealt with through institutions global in their scope".39

The second, and less well known, influence on Nelson was Emmet John Hughes (1920-1982). He was Eisenhower's speechwriter, a Senior Adviser on Public Affairs to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (1960-1963), and Nelson's campaign manager in 1968. Although not a prominent figure, Hughes is described in some accounts as one of Nelson's more "trusted aides", serving as the "chief ideologue" or "campaign theoretician" during his abortive campaigns for the Presidency.40 Hughes was also a liberal-internationalist. In The Ordeal of Power (1963), his memoir of his time as Eisenhower's speechwriter, Hughes boasted of having inserted into Eisenhower's speeches expressions of US support for international law, the UN, disarmament and the redirection of arms spending towards alleviating world poverty--a vision revealed in Eisenhower's "The Chance for Peace" speech of April 16, 1953, where he asked Americans to support a plan to join with "all nations" in devoting the savings from disarmament to "a fund for world aid and reconstruction".41
The third influence was Rockefeller's close friend and adviser Adolf Berle (1895-1971), who also provided much input into Nelson's internationalism. In the late 1940s, Berle's Cold War vision included creating a "global Good Neighbor Policy that organized a community of liberal nations" to oppose the USSR. He opposed NATO, arguing that the "whole language of military alliance is out of date", and supported collective security through the United Nations instead. Berle also believed in the virtues of international economic integration, evident in his 1954 book The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution, which argued that the dynamic capitalist economy was rendering the nation-state redundant.
He also provided input to the Prospect for America project, devising the guidelines for the panels and stressing the need to develop "an accepted political philosophy" for US foreign policy. In addition, Berle collaborated with Kissinger in writing the final report, and his stamp can be seen in those sections which are the most forthright in arguing for supranational institutions and international economic integration.42
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« Reply #8 on: June 26, 2007, 10:07:05 am »






Nelson's "New World Order"




The culmination of these influences was effectively a slightly updated version of the Wilson-Fosdick world order model that comprised free trade, regionalism, supranational institutions, American leadership and the defeat of Communism. Nelson willingly and repeatedly endorsed this policy package in his drive for the White House. Central to Nelson's platform was the contention that global change, specifically economic interdependence, was making the nation-state redundant. As far back as 1951, Nelson had used the word "interdependence" to describe the economic relationship between the Western countries and the developing world.43 But it was in a 1960 essay in Foreign Affairs that Nelson asserted that "the central fact of our time is the disintegration of the nineteenth-century political system ... [t]he great opportunity of our time is not the idea of competition but of world cooperation".44 Similarly, in his lectures on federalism at Harvard University in 1962, Nelson claimed:
No nation today can defend its freedom, or fulfil the needs of its own people, from within its own borders or through its own resources alone. ...the nation-state, standing alone, threatens, in many ways, to seem as anachronistic as the Greek city-state eventually became in ancient times ... 45

Nelson argued that as the nation-state was becoming "less and less competent to perform its international political tasks", the prevailing structures of international order had disintegrated, leaving "an historical political vacuum".46 The old world order based on the 19th-century balance of power was no more, now that "international relations have become truly global"--a factor which demanded a "new concept of relations between nations" in the form of a "framework of order in which the aspirations of humanity can be peacefully realized ... "47

At the same time, Nelson was critical of the role of the United Nations, arguing that it "has not been able--nor can it be able--to shape a new world order as events now so compellingly command". He charged that the Soviet Union and its allies had weakened the UN. The Communist bloc, Nelson claimed, had dedicated itself to "the manipulation of the UN's democratic processes, so astutely and determinedly, as largely to frustrate its power and role". But the threat posed by the Communist bloc extended beyond damaging the UN, to attempting to realise its own "cruel design ... for world order". The Communists had "taken our words, our forms, our very symbols of man's hopes and aspirations and ... corrupted them to mislead and to deceive in their quest for world domination".48

During the 1968 presidential primaries, however, Nelson was less pessimistic about the UN, maintaining that the international organisation was not a failure. "On balance," Rockefeller stated at a Republican Party fundraising dinner in California, "the record shows that the United Nations' strength has grown..." The question for Americans, however, was twofold: "How well can the United Nations serve the United States' national interest, and how effectively can it promote a more stable world order ... ?" Nelson's answer was that both were possible. Although the US could not hope to control the UN completely, it could still act in America's "national interest" (usually a code for business interests) by maintaining world order using the resources of other member-states. UN peace-keeping operations (PKOs) he said "have made a vital contribution toward the building of a more stable world order" and had done "multilaterally what the United States might have had to do itself at much greater cost". Actions through the UN were "often the best way of controlling dangerous crises", as "unilateral actions" such as Vietnam "frequently tend to boomerang". It was "perfectly clear", insisted Nelson, that UN PKOs "have strengthened world order and ... also advanced United States policy objectives".49

It was therefore in America's interest, according to Nelson, to "take the initiative in strengthening the role of the UN as mediator and peace-maker", as the UN "can and must be utilised as a primary instrument" in the quest for a "better world". In support of this goal, Nelson advocated that the US take the lead in "bringing disputes to the UN before they 'go critical'" and "encourage strong leadership" by the UN Secretary-General, including greater emphasis on "preventive diplomacy ... quiet diplomacy, and less reliance on voting per se for the achievement of our national objectives". Insisting that the UN's peace-keeping functions needed to be strengthened, Nelson advocated encouraging "small countries" to set aside troops for UN PKOs, developing new sources of revenue for PKOs, and a greater focus on "peace-making".50

If Nelson's proposals seem strangely familiar now, it is because many of them were endorsed in UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali's 1992 report, "An Agenda for Peace". In fact, Boutros-Ghali seemed to echo Nelson with his recommendations for "preventive diplomacy" and "peacemaking" and for countries to have personnel and equipment on "stand-by" for peace-keeping operations. Yet, in spite of a brief flurry of activity during the 1990s, such proposals are as far from being realised now--especially given the Bush Administration's suspicion of UN peace-keeping--as they were in Nelson's time.

The "better world" that Nelson had in mind to replace the existing system of nation-states was essentially a limited world federation that united all the non-Communist states. In his 1968 book, Unity, Freedom & Peace, Rockefeller argued that if the federal idea--as applied by the "Founding Fathers ... in their historic act of political creation in the eighteenth century"--could be applied "in the larger context of the world of free nations", it would "serve to guard freedom and promote order in the free world".51

In his Harvard lecture, Nelson revealed that he had "long felt that the road toward the unity of free nations lay through regional confederations in the Western Hemisphere and in the Atlantic, perhaps eventually in Africa, Middle East, and Asia".52

To achieve this goal, Nelson endorsed the extension of the European Economic Community (EEC) to embrace "the North Atlantic Community as a whole".53 "European political unity would be an important first step" in forming an "Atlantic Community", he claimed.54

Furthermore, by encouraging similar developments in the Americas, the US could take the lead in the formation of a "Pan American Economic Union", which would result in "the creation of the greatest free-trading area in the world".55

But Nelson was equally clear that regional arrangements were a means to an end; that because of the Communist threat and global problems, "our advances toward unity must now extend to action between regions as well as within them".56

Thus, the new regional arrangements should be seen as steps towards global integration:
Unity in the West implies an act of political creation--comparable to that of our Founding Fathers--and perhaps of even greater originality, daring and devotion. In our time, the challenge leads us, compels us, inspires us, toward the building of our great North Atlantic alliance, our "regional grouping" into a North Atlantic Confederation--looking eventually to a worldwide Union of the Free.57

Earlier at Harvard, he had argued that the peril of not unifying on such lines was more dramatic:
The historic choice fast rushing upon us then, is no less than this: either the free nations of the world will take the lead in adapting the federal concept to their relations, or, one by one, we may be driven into the retreat of the perilous isolationism--political, economic and intellectual--so ardently sought by the Soviet policy of divide-and-conquer.58

Nelson Rockefeller also advocated the long-time liberal-internationalist argument that the US should promote global free trade to strengthen the free enterprise system and thus link together the other non-Communist parts of the world. He said there should be a "continuation and expansion of a liberal US trade policy" on the grounds that it not only helped developing countries but it benefited the US economy.59 And in an argument that continues to be heard today as "open regionalism", Nelson argued that the formation of regional free trade groupings could be a means to establish global free trade:
The regional arrangements in Europe and the Hemisphere should be used as patterns for the economic organization of other parts of the world. For the key fact is that no nation is capable of realizing its aspirations by its own efforts. Regional groups pursuing ever more liberal trade policies towards each other could thus be a step towards the goal of a free world trading system.60

Taking this argument further, in a speech to the Executive Club in Chicago in 1964, Nelson recommended that Washington should use its political influence to "establish rules under GATT, assuring that regional economic accords will move toward progressive trade liberalisation rather than further partitioning of world trade into compartments sealed off by preferences and discrimination".61

Nelson also endorsed the formation of a "world central bank" that would "preclude crises and contribute to world-wide economic advance", suggesting that the role of the International Monetary Fund be "broadened in that direction".62

Above all, the most consistent theme in Nelson's internationalist ideology was the importance of US leadership. The United States, he argued in numerous forums, should take the lead in the building of a worldwide federation, as the US had come into existence "for the sake of an idea" that "man should be free to fulfil his unique and individual destiny--a belief based upon our dedicated faith in the brotherhood of all mankind".63 "The upheaval in the world will subside only with the emergence of a more or less generally accepted international system", he wrote in 1968. "The goal is order ... though we cannot create order by ourselves, it surely cannot come about without us."64

America was too interconnected with the world to escape its obligations, Nelson argued; in fact, "the true interests of America are interdependent with the interests of free world nations". The implications were obvious:
We must assume a role of leadership worthy of the United States and commensurate with our own best interests as well as those of the free world as a whole.65

Even the demise of Communism would not free the US of this burden:
[W]e face tasks which would be essentially the same even if Communism had never existed. We are required to work with the peoples of the world to develop a real world community.66

Though his hopes of reaching the White House were fading by the 1970s, Nelson Rockefeller still sought political relevance and did so by embracing the latest fad of environmentalism, and again inserted an internationalist bent. In his book, Our Environment Can Be Saved (1970), Nelson invoked the obvious international political implications for pre-empting environmental degradation, arguing that preventing the impending "environmental crisis" could "become an area of increased cooperation between nations". To that end, he recommended that the US should "help coordinate international planning for environmental controls".67
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« Reply #9 on: June 26, 2007, 10:09:22 am »





The Accidental Vice-President


       From Left: Kissinger, Rockefeller and President Ford

Yet, as fate would have it, the political and personal self-destruction of his nemesis, Richard Nixon, presented Nelson with an unexpected prize, and in December 1974, after a lengthy and revealing confirmation process by a suspicious Congress,68 he became Vice-President in the short-lived Ford Administration. Despite Nelson being next in line for the Presidency, his foreign policy pronouncements were few and far between in that period. With his protégé Henry Kissinger commanding foreign policy as Secretary of State, Nelson had anticipated exercising control over domestic policy. However, Nelson fell foul of Ford's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, who was determined to keep the Vice-President powerless.69

Although eventually appointed Vice-Chairman of the Domestic Council, Nelson found himself largely sidelined from decision-making. When describing his actual position, Nelson would quip: "I go to funerals. I go to earthquakes."70 His input into US foreign and national security policy was limited to serving on the Commission on the Organization of Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy in 1974, and more controversially as Chairman of the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States in 1975.71

In the final analysis, though, Nelson's somewhat marginal role in the Ford Administration is in itself of no consequence, for the Wilsonian liberal-internationalist agenda was adopted by Ford and Kissinger anyway, although this is more attributable to the machinations of David Rockefeller. Under the aegis of the Trilateral Commission, David had mobilised the Establishment against the Realpolitik of the Nixon Administration with profound effect. Gone was Nixon's previous talk of a "safer world" through an "even balance" of all the great powers and disdain for the United Nations.72 In its place was an uncharacteristic (especially for Kissinger) embrace of international law, institutionalised cooperation among the industrial powers (rather than alliances), and notions of a "world community" and growing global "interdependence".73 Indeed, as the head of the Council on Foreign Relations' "1980s Project" observed in 1976, "President Ford's fulsome statements at the Western summits of Rambouillet and San Juan and many of Kissinger's recent speeches could have been lifted from the pages of [the Trilateral Commission's journal] Trialogue ... "74 Rockefeller Internationalism had again made its mark, but, in a major irony, Nelson, despite being the Vice-President, had only a peripheral role.

His marginal role was reinforced when, in November 1975, at Ford's insistence, Nelson withdrew his candidacy for Vice-President in the 1976 presidential elections. It was Rumsfeld's doing; believing Rockefeller to be an electoral liability, the zealous Chief of Staff pushed to have Nelson dumped from the Republican presidential ticket. Instead of the Vice-Presidency being the final stepping-stone to the Oval Office, as Nelson undoubtedly hoped, it became a dead-end in his political career.

According to David Rockefeller, "Ford's decision devastated Nelson" and caused him to lose all interest in politics. Moreover, "Thwarted when the greatest political prize seemed within his grasp", Nelson ended his political career an "angry and deeply bitter man". He returned to the family fold where, in one last grasp at power, he tried--and failed--to wrest control of the RBF from his brothers.75

The end for Nelson Rockefeller was sudden and suitably controversial, the 70-year-old ex-politician reputedly dying in the midst of a sexual tryst with one of his female staffers. Nevertheless, Nelson's passing in 1979 was the cause of much pious reflection from the corporate-controlled US media and some of his former beneficiaries. Time magazine claimed that "He was driven by a mission to serve, improve and uplift his country", while the New York Times lauded Nelson's "enlightened internationalism" and "extraordinary standard of concern and effort in service of the country".76

Less restrained was Henry Kissinger, who eulogised his departed benefactor as the "greatest American I have ever known", a "pragmatic genius" who "would have made a great President". In fact, it was "a tragedy for the country" that Nelson had not achieved his goal. Kissinger also claimed that Nelson's impact on American domestic and foreign policy was greater than many people supposed:
... in the final accounting it was often Nelson who worked out the agenda which others then implemented as national policy. The intellectual groundwork for many innovations was frequently his ... Destiny willed it that he made his enduring mark on our society almost anonymously in the programs he designed, the values he upheld, and the men and women whose lives he changed.77

If we put to one side Kissinger's fawning and somewhat inaccurate eulogy, Nelson Rockefeller's rise and demise reveals that his contribution to the New World Order was marginal at best. There can be no doubt that had Nelson been President of the United States, even if only for a few years, he would have set in motion the globalist plans he had endorsed throughout the 1960s. Fortunately--though some Establishment figures might disagree--it was not to be.

But Nelson's failure to get into the Oval Office effectively reduced him to little more than a publicist of the Rockefeller family's New World Order vision. He promoted the policies for global government, but was never able to order their implementation. As Nelson was unable to secure the high office he craved and was largely detached from those philanthropic institutions--especially the RBF and Rockefeller Foundation--that gave the Rockefellers their real power, the bitterness of his final years should come as no surprise.

As we shall see in the following parts, it was those Rockefeller brothers who were the most heavily involved in philanthropic pursuits, including the foundations, think-tanks and policy-planning organisations supported by Rockefeller money, who have had the most impact on formulating the NWO ideology and implementing it. And the leading Rockefeller in that endeavour has been, of course, David ...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Endnotes:
24. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, Random House, 2002, p. 191. It should be noted that, somewhat improbably, the impetus for David's moment of clarity was Nelson's divorce of his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark, in 1961-and not his ruthless drive for political power or his bullying of his siblings for control of Rockefeller finances to fund his numerous campaigns. Moreover, David's explanation overlooks how politically costly Nelson's divorce was to his 1964 campaign.
25. Stewart Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait, Doubleday, 1960, p. 80.
26. As Jonathan Vankin notes, "If not for a couple of jammed pistols, Nelson Rockefeller would have fulfilled his dream of becoming President-without winning a single vote"; see Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: From JFK to the CIA Terrorist Connection, Dell Publishing, 1992, p. 259.
27. Quoted in Cary Reich, The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958, Doubleday, New York, 1996, p. xvii.
28. Stephen Chapman, "Rocky as St Sebastian", The New Republic, February 10, 1979, pp. 12-14; Robert Fitch, "Nelson Rockefeller: An Anti-Obituary", Monthly Review, June 1979, p. 13.
29. Gary Allen, The Rockefeller File, '76 Press, 1976, p. 50.
30. Robert Welch, The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, Western Islands, 1961, p. 113.
31. For a scathing review of Kissinger's myriad sins, including possible war crimes, see Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Text Publishing, 2001.
32. Henry A. Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations/Harper & Brothers, 1957, pp. 219-221.
33. Joseph Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller, Simon & Schuster, 1982, pp. 82.
34. Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait, pp. 88-89.
35. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Holt Reinhart & Winston, 1976, pp. 230, 236-238.
36. George E. G. Catlin, The Atlantic Commonwealth, Penguin, 1969, p. 49.
37. Blanche W. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare, Penguin Books, 1981, pp. 295-296.
38. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today, Lyle Stuard Inc., 1968, pp. 593-594.
39. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports, Doubleday, 1961, pp. 24, 26, 34, 35, 188, 228 (emphasis added).
40. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers, pp. 340, 344; Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller, p. 71.
41. Emmet John Hughes, The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years, Atheneum, 1963, pp. 102-113 (including speech quote), 218-221.
42. Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era, The Free Press, 1987, pp. 304-305, 311-312.
43. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Widening Boundaries of National Interest", Foreign Affairs, July 1951, p. 527.
44. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", Foreign Affairs, April 1960, p. 383.
45. Nelson A. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism: The Godkin Lectures at Harvard University 1962, Harvard University Press, 1962, pp. 63-64.
46. ibid., pp. 67, 64.
47. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Policy and the People", Foreign Affairs, January 1968, pp. 237-238.
48. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism, pp. 64-66.
49. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "The United Nations: A Balance Sheet", Vital Speeches of the Day, October 15, 1968, pp. 18, 21, 20.
50. ibid., pp. 19, 21.
51. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom & Peace: A Blueprint for Tomorrow, Vintage, 1968, p. 133.
52. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism, pp. 75-76.
53. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", p. 383.
54. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "Our Foreign Policy: What Is It?", Vital Speeches of the Day, April 15, 1964, p. 405 (emphasis added).
55. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", pp. 383, 386.
56. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism, p. 76 (emphasis in original).
57. Rockefeller, Unity, Freedom & Peace, p. 146 (emphasis added).
58. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism, pp. 68-69.
59. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", p. 384.
60. ibid., p. 386.
61. Nelson A. Rockefeller, "World Trade: The GATT Conference", Vital Speeches of the Day, June 1, 1964, p. 495 (emphasis in original).
62. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", pp. 386-387.
63. Rockefeller, The Future of Federalism, p. 82 (emphasis added).
64. Rockefeller, "Policy and the People", p. 240 (emphasis added).
65. Rockefeller, "World Trade", p. 497 (emphasis added).
66. Rockefeller, "Purpose and Policy", p. 390 (emphasis added).
67. Nelson Rockefeller, Our Environment Can Be Saved, Doubleday, 1970, pp. 152-153.
68. The confirmation process revealed that Nelson's personal fortune then stood at $US179 million (an IRS audit later raised it to $218 million), which was considerably higher than the sums he had hinted at; but Nelson was no billionaire, unlike the real super-rich of the 1970s, John Getty and Aristotle Onassis. See Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, pp. 485-486.
69. Michael Turner, The Vice President As Policy Maker: Rockefeller in the Ford White House, Greenwood Press, 1982, pp. xv, 158-163.
70. Quoted in Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller, pp. 261-262.
71. Turner, The Vice President As Policy Maker, pp. 146-149.
72. "An Interview with the President: 'The Jury Is Out'", Time, January 3, 1972, p. 9 (emphasis added).
73. See, for example, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "International Law, World Order, and Human Progress", Department of State Bulletin, September 8, 1975; Secretary Kissinger, "Building International Order", Department of State Bulletin, October 13, 1975; and Secretary Kissinger, "The Industrial Democracies and the Future", Department of State Bulletin, December 1, 1975. It should be noted that Kissinger quickly dropped this rhetoric once he was out of power.
74. Richard Ullman, "Trilateralism: 'Partnership' For What?", Foreign Affairs, October 1976, p. 11.
75. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 337.
76. Time and New York Times quoted in Chapman, "Rocky as St Sebastian", p. 12.
77. Henry Kissinger, "Nelson Rockefeller: In Memoriam", in Henry Kissinger, For The Record: Selected Statements, 1977-1980, Weidenfeld & Nicolson & Michael Joseph, 1981, p. 171.
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« Reply #10 on: June 26, 2007, 10:11:44 am »





Rockefeller Internationalism




                                     

Philanthropist, plutocrat and former banker David Rockefeller has been promoting his "one world" vision among global powerbrokers since the 1960s, while dismissing claims that he's part of a cabal out to control the planet.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 5 (August-September 2003)
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

© by Will Banyan © 2002, 2003
Email: banyan007@rediffmail.com


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THE "PROUD INTERNATIONALIST": DAVID ROCKEFELLER (1915 - )
Most analysis of the role of David Rockefeller in the New World Order is usually ridiculed by smug commentators in the "responsible" press as the stuff of fantasy. For these oracles, descriptions of Rockefeller as "one of the foremost partisans of world government under the UN" (Jasper), the "éminence grise of international power politics" (Wilkes) and "one of the most high profile, and most obvious, New World Order manipulators on the planet" (Icke)1 are not to be taken seriously. Indeed, to contend that the billionaire ex-banker, philanthropist and founder of the Trilateral Commission could have any global designs is taken as a sign that one has fallen for the infantile ravings of the "black helicopter crowd". Perhaps, it is implied, only those afflicted by a peculiar mental malady could believe or contemplate such claims.

Back in 1996, for example, high-rating US national radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh openly mocked these beliefs in his so-called "Kook Test":


Do you believe that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other famous members of the New World Order provide daily instructions to agents of the FBI, CIA, BATF, and National Organization of Women?

Do you believe that the feminist movement was the brainchild of David Rockefeller for the purpose of having men and women at war with each other on a daily basis so as to distract them from the real conspiracy of the CFR?

If you have answered even one of these questions "yes", then you are a kook and have passed the test.
David Rockefeller himself has often scoffed at such claims. In a letter to the New York Times in 1980, he took issue with the "nonsensical defamation" he claimed to have been subjected to over the years. "I never cease to be amazed by those few among us who spot a conspiracy under every rock, a cabal in every cornerÉ", David wrote, lamenting that he was usually "singled out as the 'cabalist-in-chief'". Eighteen years later, David's mirth remained intact. "It's so absurd I can't help but, to some extent, find it amusing", he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1998, commenting on conspiracy theories about himself and the Trilateral Commission.2

Yet curiously, David's key role in promoting global political and economic unity is not only explicitly recognised but is openly celebrated within the power-elite. According to one recent tribute, because of his "contributions to enterprise and humanity" David had become "one of the world's most respected citizens". The speaker, Thomas d'Aquino, President and CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, addressing an elite gathering in 2002, had no qualms praising David's "impressible urge to promote international cooperation and understanding" and his "passionsÉfor the promotion of international cooperation" and "inter-American cooperation".3 Equally unrestrained was Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine, who venerated David in 1999 as an "informed, observant, experienced, modest, and generous citizen of the world, interested in the welfare of all".4

At celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Trilateral Commission's US group in 1998, a roster of adoring Establishment heavyweights repeatedly toasted the "sense of vision" (Berthoin), "farsightedness and leadership" (Ogata), "great munificence" (Black) and "sense of obligation" (Kissinger) of their Honorary Chairman. The "first global history of mankind is about to start", claimed Georges Berthoin, a former European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and it was all due to David Rockefeller, the "gentleman-pioneer of the trilateral world".5 Similarly, at a book signing for David's new autobiography, Memoirs, held in late 2002 at the United Nations headquarters in New York, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan hailed the plutocrat's contribution to world order:
I think without internationalists like you, the international system we have been trying to build, the international system we have today, wouldn't be here. So, thank you very much, David.6

But we need not take their word for it. After years of denying and ridiculing such charges, David Rockefeller has finally put an end to the speculation, making the following admission in Memoirs:
For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidentsÉto attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as "internationalists" and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.7

David Rockefeller's bold confession, finally given late in his life, is clearly momentous but it also warrants further scrutiny, for his account in Memoirs omits much important detail. Only by examining David's statements, articles and speeches over the past 40 years can the true extent of his vision of "a more integrated global political and economic structure" be understood. And such examination also reveals that David has not been an idle dreamer, but has used his position as arguably the most powerful and influential Rockefeller of the latter half of the 20th century to advocate a revamped version of the Wilson-Fosdick world order model.
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« Reply #11 on: June 26, 2007, 10:13:39 am »





The Heir Apparent



One of the more common observations made by biographers of the Rockefeller family is that of all John D. Rockefeller, Jr's offspring, it is David, despite being the youngest, who has emerged as the true heir to the vast reservoir of political and economic power originally amassed by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. As Peter Collier and David Horowitz observe in their book, The Rockefellers, in contrast to his siblings it was David who "was the most serious, the one who was conscious of his birthright from the beginning".8 Even Senior seemed to sense that his genes had finally re-emerged under David, and he doted on his youngest grandson with a degree of affection he had not given to his own son.

Coincidentally, David recalls in Memoirs that it was in 1937, at the funeral service for Senior (who died at the age of 97), that he learned not only that was he the deceased monopolist's "favorite" but that Senior had "always thought" David was "most like him[self]". Having received this confirmation of his status from Senior's trusted valet of some 30 years, John Yordi, David admits to having been ecstatic: "I thought it would have been Nelson, but I couldn't pretend I wasn't pleased."9 It is noteworthy that David starts Memoirs with this incident, as it is one of the few admissions to his true status.

Lacking Nelson's hunger for publicity and overt power, David's career path took a somewhat different course. Educated at Harvard, the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Chicago, David became the only one of Junior's children to have earned a PhD. The subject of his dissertation, essentially an attack on government regulation of business activity, was "Unused Resources and Economic Waste" (1940). Upon completion of his studies, and contemplating a career in politics, David returned to New York in 1940 to work as secretary to New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. In mid-1941, tiring of local politics and seeking "administrative experience", David started work with a new government body, the Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare Services. This proved to be short-lived, though, and with the outbreak of the war David enlisted in the US Army, going on to serve as an intelligence officer in North Africa and France.

Returning to the US in 1946, David went to work for the "family bank", Chase Manhattan. He started as a low-ranking officer, but, thanks to the Rockefeller family's controlling interest, he rapidly rose through the ranks and in 1969 became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. David ran the bank until his retirement in 1981, but continued to play a role as Chairman of the bank's International Advisory Committee.

Although David later liked to boast that he was "the first member of the family since Grandfather who has had a regular job in a company and has devoted a major part of his life to being in business", it was apparently "not an easy decision" as he still desired to work with government or in philanthropy, particularly on international affairs.10 But, in truth, neither avenue has ever been closed to him.
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« Reply #12 on: June 26, 2007, 10:15:12 am »





The Education of an Internationalist




David attributes much of his internationalist fervour to the influence of his parents, his overseas travelling experiences and his changed world outlook following World War II. He writes that it was his parents who first impressed on him "the importance of the world beyond the United States". His father, Junior, "was a staunch supporter of the League of Nations" and, through the Rockefeller Foundation, "one of the principal funders of health, education, and cultural endeavors around the world".11 But there were other influences, including David's education at Harvard University and the University of Chicago during the 1930s, and his early membership of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1949 and the Bilderberg Group from 1954.

It was at Harvard, under the guidance of Professor Gottfried von Haberler (1901-1995), that David received more vigorous indoctrination into the benefits of free trade. Described by David as a "staunch supporter of free trade", Haberler would have given compelling guidance - for the Austrian professor was, according to one biographer, "one of the first economists to make a rigorous case for the superior productivity and universal benefits of 'free' or politically unrestricted international tradeÉ" At the University of Chicago, these views were reinforced when another free trade proponent, the economist Jacob Viner (1892-1970), tutored David. Lauded by David as an advocate of "unobstructed trade as a means of generating economic growth", Viner was one of the leading free trade theorists of his time. He was also an advocate of using international institutions to manage the world economy. Fittingly, David includes Haberler and Viner among those academics to whom he owes an "intellectual debt", hailing them as "truth seekers" whose example he has attempted to follow.12

David joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1949, his surname ensuring election to its board of directors. David naturally understates the CFR's influence on his thinking, merely observing that he found it to be the "best place" for pursuing his "interest in global affairs". Tellingly, David admits his motivation for joining the CFR was his determination to "play a role" in the process of ensuring the US provided leadership in building "a new international architecture" following World War II. While David correctly identifies the wide range of views among the CFR's members, for him the Council's enduring value has been its role in devising schemes for world order that conform with his Wilsonian vision. For example, marking the CFR's 75th anniversary in 1997, David hailed the Council's role as America's "premier school for statesmen", observing that it was from the CFR's War and Peace Studies project that America's post-war plans for a "just and durable international system" had emerged, and from more recent CFR studies that "awareness of global economic interdependence gained particular prominence in national policy discussions".13

In 1954, David was selected by President Eisenhower to be one of the founding US members of the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderbergers have long been controversial, with many researchers attributing to the annual secret gathering a role in establishing the European Union and facilitating the planning of a world government.14 David insists, naturally, that the "truth" is that Bilderberg is no more than an "intensely interesting discussion group" which does not reach a consensus. What Bilderberg discusses, David does not say, preferring to characterise the cabal as a unique networking opportunity. Bilderberg, David said in 1990, gave him "an opportunityÉto become acquainted with some of the leaders of Europe and the United States on a very informal basisÉone got to know them on a first-name basis".15 Other Bilderbergers, however, such as former British politician Denis Healey, admit there is a Bilderberg consensus, with most Bilderbergers believing that "a single community throughout the world would be a good thing".16 Such a consensus would have obviously reinforced David's globalist inclinations, making the Bilderbergs more than merely an unusually well-connected social rendezvous.

This is but a small sample of the influences on David's globalist outlook, but it also illustrates his reliance on the ideas of others. Despite his PhD, David is not quite the theoretical mastermind behind the New World Order that he appears to be. Instead, like most plutocrats intent on changing the world, he appropriates the ideas of others, usually Establishment academics and technocrats, incorporating them into his own global vision when it suits his purposes. But, David admits, he has "never been particularly dogmatic" in his political or economic beliefs, preferring to support "effective people andÉpractical policies".17 Thus, for David, ideas or protégés can be discarded once they are no longer useful to him or his ultimate goal of "a more integrated global political and economic structure".
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« Reply #13 on: June 26, 2007, 10:16:38 am »






A Modern-Day Medici




David Rockefeller's globalist inclinations would be of little interest if not for his uniquely powerful position in the US political sphere. In attempting to describe David's power, academics and journalists have used many superlatives, and it is instructive that these descriptions are similar. David Rockefeller is "[t]he single most powerful private citizen in America today", observed Florida State University academic Thomas R. Dye in his 1976 book, Who's Running America? The journalist Bill Moyers, in his 1980 TV special, The World of David Rockefeller, described the plutocrat respectively as "the unelected if indisputable chairman of the American Establishment" and "one of the most powerful, influential and richest men in America", who "sits at the hub of a vast network of financiers, industrialists and politicians whose reach encircles the globe". And in 1998, NewsMax.com described David as "one of the world's most influential private figures".18

David has always rejected such assessments, insisting that his power is limited and that he has no real leverage with world leaders or government officials, merely good access to them. In an interview with Forbes magazine in 1972, for example, David downplayed the idea that he had any such power:
I have no power in the sense that I can call anybody in the government and tell them what to do. Because of my position I'm more apt to get through on the telephone than somebody else, but what happens to what I suggest depends on whether they feel this makes sense in terms of what they are already doing.19

Dye disputes this, claiming that the real reason for David's elaborate denial is simple: with it already well known that he "exercises great power", the plutocrat has "no reason to try to impress anyone" by openly admitting it. In fact, David's position and behaviour are similar to that of the Medici banking family that unofficially ruled 15th-century Florence by subverting the elaborate electoral system through a combination of deception, corruption and violence. The Medicis were effectively the shadow government of Florence - a fact acknowledged in the Florentine expression, "the secret things of our town". That was because, as Tim Parks notes in the New York Review of Books, the Medici family leadership understood that "to hold power for any length of time, one must appear not to hold it".20 Although not known for emulating their more controversial practices, David Rockefeller is like the Medicis, his shadowy yet powerful political role one of the "secret things" of Washington, DC.

David's preference for this behind-the-scenes political role stems from his profound distaste for normal democratic politics. Although clearly interested in power, David, after working for Mayor La Guardia, apparently found the idea of having to depend on the whims of the voting public unattractive. "The danger in that field," he later commented, "is that you spend all of your time running for office."21 Unstated, of course, is the plutocrat's probable discomfort at the prospect of being publicly accountable in any way for his actions - something that would be an affront to the enormous power this Rockefeller saw as his due.

Instead, David found a surer route to power by fulfilling the family tradition of using philanthropy as a "bridge" between the private and public sectors. David typically presents his motives behind his philanthropy as benevolent, an embodiment of Junior's belief that "philanthropy was about being a good neighbor". "I have tried to emulate Father by contributing to a variety of not-for-profit organizations throughout my life," he writes in Memoirs.22 But this is disingenuous, for David's actual motives for embracing philanthropy in fact have more in common with Andrew Carnegie's view that the wealthy have an exclusive right to shape society.

It has been in other forums, in little-noticed speeches to elite gatherings, that David's true intentions have been revealed. Like Carnegie, David considers an active political role by the rich to be a matter of duty rather than a mere whim, as he stated to one gathering that "the opportunities for possessing wealth carry with them comparable responsibilities".23 In fact, he told the New York Economic Club in 1996, philanthropy performs a vital social function in which the rich and businessmen in general are able to realise their "responsibility to society beyond that of maximising profits for shareholders". Although "making profits must come first", as profits are "the most important instrument we have to promote the broader welfare of our society", David maintained that the captains of industry should style themselves as "business statesmen" and be "vocal and visibleÉspeaking out on community, industry and national issues".24

This also includes active involvement in the non-profit area, supporting various organisations whether dealing with domestic or international issues. There is "nothing wrong with perpetuating one's name by endowing an organization or building", David told the Sid W. Richardson Foundation in 1985, but with government in retreat in many areas, "the private area must take up the slack".25

Unless the business class is actively involved in resolving "societal problems", he warned the New York Economic Club, the public may become "disenchanted with business" and "demand that government resume its previous role as the arbiter of our economic life".26

And thus David's real agenda becomes clear: the rich must govern, limiting the role of elected officials; but the multitude must be placated lest they clamour for the return of democracy, threatening the reign of the plutocrats.
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« Reply #14 on: June 26, 2007, 10:19:34 am »






Emperor of the Establishment




But what is the source of David's power? It is not just his personal fortune, currently a meagre US$2.5 billion and a pittance compared to the US$30 billion or more of today's super-rich such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. One obvious source has been his executive positions at the Chase Manhattan Bank. But the primary basis, as Dye explains, is in David's enduring role as "director of the vast Rockefeller empire"; that is, his leadership of "the Rockefeller network of industrial, financial, political, civic, and cultural institutions".27 At the centre of this network are the remnants of the vast fortune originally amassed by John D. Rockefeller, Sr, and then dispersed into an abundance of family trusts and philanthropies. This includes the Rockefeller Foundation (2001 market value of assets, US$3.1 billion) and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) (2002 market value of assets, US$670 million). As a former Vice-Chairman (1968-1980), Chairman (1980-1987) and now an Advisory Trustee of the RBF, David has always been at the hub of this network.

Outside of this hub is a plethora of public institutions including foundations, non-government organisations and various government advisory boards that David has been involved with, usually in a leading role. His myriad positions include: Honorary Chairman of Rockefeller University; Chairman Emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; Chairman of the Americas Society; Director of the US-USSR Trade and Economic Council; Chairman of the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Chairman of the US Advisory Committee on Reform of the International Monetary System; Honorary Chairman of the Japan Society; a director of International House; a trustee of the University of Chicago; a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Library; President of the Board of Overseas Study at Harvard; and now, an honorary jury member on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's International World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.

This impressive range of institutions that David has been involved in also includes a raft of policy-planning organisations devoted to international political and economic affairs. David's role in these organisations has never been marginal, and his positions include: Director, Chairman and Honorary Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR); founder, North American Chairman and Honorary Chairman of the Trilateral Commission; a life member of the Bilderberg Group; Chairman and Director of the Institute for International Economics (IIE); founder, Chairman and Honorary Chairman of the Council on the Americas; and a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP). He is also a co-founder of the Dartmouth Conference, the International Executive Service Corps and the Global Philanthropists Circle.

At a recent "book party" for the retiring plutocrat, former US Trade Representative Carla Hills celebrated David's pivotal role in maintaining this network:
Had [David Rockefeller] not been the founder, long-time chairman and benefactor and even often all of the above, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Council of the Americas, the Institute for International Economics, the Trilateral Commission, the White House Fellows Program, and I could name so many more, might not exist. And if they did, they might not assuredly be as effective as they are today.28

True to his Medici-like preference for avoiding public scrutiny, David has rejected formal government appointments, including offers to be Secretary of the Treasury and of Defense, and numerous ambassadorial positions. In Memoirs, David cites "political considerations" and his devotion to Chase Manhattan as his reasons for declining these offers. David also believed, not without good reason, that through his Chase chairmanship he could "accomplish much that would benefit the United States as an 'ambassador without portfolio'". At the panel discussion on Memoirs, held in October 2002 at Johns Hopkins University, David elaborated further, noting that his position at Chase provided him with "a rather unique opportunity to play a quiet but hopefully useful role". And on the Charlie Rose Show, David added that he could achieve much more outside of government as he was not limited to four-year terms, thus enabling him to do "a lot of interesting things" over decades.29

As a self-appointed "ambassador without portfolio", for example, David has used his unique access to visit countless heads of state, ostensibly on business for Chase or as part of CFR delegations but often as an unofficial emissary for Washington. David has had private meetings with hundreds of national leaders - a privilege usually only afforded to senior officials or other heads of state. The list includes Nikita Khrushchev, Alexi Kosygin, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Deng Xiaoping, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Zhou Enlai and the Shah of Iran. The product of these associations is a network of power and influence, with David at its centre - ultimately embodied in his massive electronic Rolodex, located in his office in the Rockefeller Center, reputed to contain 150,000 names.30

 

Continued next issue


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Author's Note:
In Part Four we will continue to examine David Rockefeller's internationalist vision, focusing on his most controversial creation: the Trilateral Commission.

Endnotes:
1. William F. Jasper, Global TyrannyÉStep By Step: The United Nations and the Emerging New World Order, Western Islands, 1992, p. 283; John Wilkes, "Hit-job on Margaret Thatcher", in James Gibb Stuart, Hidden Menace to World Peace, Ossian, 1993, p. 159; and David Icke, Éand the truth shall set you free, Bridge of Love, 1995, 2nd edition, p. 173.
2. David Rockefeller, Letter to the New York Times, August 25, 1980; and Rockefeller, quoted in Ellen Sorokin, "Trilateral Meeting to discuss terrorism", The Washington Times, April 6, 2002.
3. Thomas d'Aquino, "Tribute to David Rockefeller, Honorary Chairman, The Americas Society", On the Occasion of a Presentation to David Rockefeller, Honorary Chairman, Americas Society, during a meeting of the Chairman's International Advisory Council of the Americas Society to Vancouver, June 6, 2002, pp. 1-2, at The Americas Society website, http://www.americas-society.org.
4. Neil L. Rudenstine, "Pitching into Commitments", Remarks in Honor of David Rockefeller, Marshall Award Dinner, New York Public Library, May 17, 1999, in Neil L. Rudenstine, Pointing Our Thoughts: Reflections on Harvard and Higher Education, 1991-2001, President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2001, p. 217.
5. Georges Berthoin, Shijuro Ogata, Conrad Black and Henry Kissinger, "Toasts to the Trilateral Commission Founder and Honorary Chairman, David Rockefeller", on the occasion of the US Group's 25th Anniversary Evening, December 1, 1998, at http://www.trilateral.org.
6. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "Remarks at book signing by David Rockefeller", December 17, 2002, at http://www.un.org.
7. David Rockefeller, Memoirs, Random House, 2002, p. 405 (emphasis added). Despite its immeasurable significance, NWO researchers seem either unaware of or to have ignored David's admission. One of the few exceptions is Richard C. Sizemore, "David Rockefeller: His Memoir Revelations", January 1, 2003, at http://www.Sanspap.com.
8. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976, p. 222.
9. Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 4 (emphasis added).
10. Rockefeller, quoted in Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr, Warner Books, 1998, p. 662; and Rockefeller, Memoirs, pp. 122, 145.
11. Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 406.
12. ibid., pp. 80, 89, 91-92; Joseph T. Salerno, "Biography of Gottfried Haberler (1901-1995)", Ludwig von Mises Institute website, http://www.mises.org; and "Jacob Viner, 1892-1970" at The History of Economic Thought website, http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/.
13. Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 406; David Rockefeller, The Council at 75, September 1997, at the CFR website, http://www.cfr.org.
14. See, for example, Mike Peters, "The Bilderberg Group and the project of European unification", Lobster 32, December 1996.
15. Rockefeller, Memoirs, pp. 410-411; and Rockefeller, quoted in James A. Bill, George Ball: Behind the Scenes in US Foreign Policy, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 54.
16. Healey, quoted in Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures with Extremists, Picador, 2001, p. 299.
17. Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 486.
18. Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America?: The Carter Years, Prentice-Hall, 1976, p. 157; Moyers, quoted in Larry Abraham, Call It Conspiracy, Double A Publications, 1985, p. 37; and "David Rockefeller to the Rescue", NewsMax.com, October 16, 1998, http://www.newsmax.com.
19. Rockefeller, quoted in Dye, Who's Running America?, p. 160 (emphasis added).
20. ibid.; Tim Parks, "Mad at the Medicis", New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003.
21. Rockefeller, quoted in Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, p. 225.
22. Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 488.
23. David Rockefeller, "Giving: America's Greatest National Resource", Vital Speeches of the Day, March 15, 1985, p. 328 (emphasis added).
24. David Rockefeller, "America After Downsizing", Vital Speeches of the Day, September 12, 1996, p. 42 (emphasis added).
25. Rockefeller, "Giving", pp. 330, 331.
26. Rockefeller, "America After Downsizing", pp. 41-42 (emphasis added).
27. Dye, Who's Running America?, pp. 153, 157.
28. Carla Hills, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Riordan Roett and David Rockefeller, Memoirs: The Rockefeller Family in International Affairs, Panel discussion on David Rockefeller's new book at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, October 31, 2002.
29. Rockefeller, Memoirs, pp. 485-487; Carla Hills et al., Memoirs: The Rockefeller Family in International Affairs, ibid.; Interview with David Rockefeller, Charlie Rose Show, October 21, 2002.
30. See "A Wealth of Names", January 10, 2000, at http://www.Forbes.com.
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