Staying Awake at the Council on Foreign Relations
Galbraith, John Kenneth
ON POLITICAL BOOKS Staying Awake at the Council on Foreign Relations BY JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH To understand the past role of the Council on Foreign Relations in American life one must...
...Finally, and partly for the above reasons, participation in matters having to do with foreign policy is greatly enjoyed...
...Had that been true, I would, of course, have remained...
...It follows not surprisingly from the foregoing that people who have participated in an active (or even marginal) way in the making or management of foreign policy remember it as the happiest time of their lives...
...Schulzinger, I think probably I could have made a mistake...
...I missed seeing the members of the staff of the Council, George Franklin, William Diebold, and others, excellent scholars and friends...
...His solution, according to Schulzinger, lacked power: it was to supply them with more movies...
...A typical offering would be one by the foreign minister of Panama called "Panama Looks North and South" By way of variety there would be one by the president of Finland entitled "Finland Looks East and West," or perhaps a less ambitious number by the Canadian minister of external affairs called "Canada Looks South ." There were the usual charges at the time that the Council was having an extracurricular and thus improper influence on the foreign policy of the United States...
...In consequence, organizations have developed to nurture the illusion and, it is hoped, a little of the reality of continuing association...
...Schulzinger says...
...Scientists could be at the Department of Agriculture...
...The reports seem to have said little and to have been little read...
...the State Department and, during and after World War II, the OSS, CIA, and Marshall plan belonged to persons of higher social position, business or financial standing, legal reputation, or academic accomplishment...
...That I think is wrong...
...And Paul Nitze later advised the members that "even if war were to destroy the world as we know it today, still the U.S...
...Additionally there was a good deal of directly commissioned writing that seems not to have had any seriously inhibiting committee discussion and review...
...The late Frank Altschul, my friend and a longtime pillar of the Council, wrote me to protest my defection...
...Robert D. Schulzinger...
...there, in the ceremony called darshan, there is a frank appreciation of the support to self-esteem that comes from being in the presence of the great...
...And, war, cold war, or detente, it is important to be keeping with the government policy of the time...
...This is routinely denied and remains the greatest hope, even illusion of their members...
...must win that war decisively...
...The foregoing quotation is from Robert D. Schulzinger's new book on the...
...This, had it been known, would have contributed to the charge that the Council was an unofficial arm of the United States government...
...As practiced, it is for many participants the least demanding intellectually of public occupations...
...It was meant to manifest the new responsibility of the United States as a power in world, especially European, affairs and to resist in a gentlemanly way the return to the isolationism or indifference of the previous century...
...Even a minor contretemps brought a crush of eager volunteers, all yearning for a piece of the action...
...The intellectual process is still a subject of doubt and uncertainty among men of money...
...Isaiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University and a long-time pillar of the Council, complained in the 1940s that "we do not seem to have in this country men who have lasting confidence about the value of work in international affairs...
...No one, with the possible exception of Walter Lippmann, who also resigned (although when seems unclear), had ever left...
...economists could inhabit the Departments of Labor or Commerce...
...The latter is not something that can be left to Congress, parliaments, and politicians and certainly not to the masses...
...Also we now have the Reagan foreign policy...
...it implies that one read it and was put to sleep...
...In this spirit, on January 12, 1954, at a televised dinner at the Hotel Pierre, John Foster Dulles proclaimed the doctrine of massive, presumably nuclear, retaliation should the Soviets seem to be adventuring anywhere beyond their borders and including, needless to say, any surrogate action by their Chinese puppets, as they were then regarded...
...John Kenneth Galbraith allowed his membership at the Council on Foreign Relations to expire...
...Some 15 or so years ago—the date seems to have disappeared from my records—in one of my recurrently negligible efforts to simplify my life, I resigned from the Council, or perhaps more accurately, I allowed my membership to lapse...
...Who could foresee that in a mere 30 years the Chinese would graduate into being, for Republicans, honorary exponents of free enterprise...
...Schulzinger's overall view of this vast outpouring that at all times and on all subjects it got squarely into the middle of the road...
...In retrospect, and after reading Mr...
...But mostly the expression was more cautious —and sensible...
...That gets the approval and applause and marks the individual as having good judgment...
...Members came to the Harold Pratt House from downtown with no evident reading or other preparation from the previous session and were thus compelled to say again what they had already said before...
...Particularly in mind were the isolationist Republicans of the old guard and the new West...
...It was an unabashedly elite community, as it so regarded itself, though not, it was suggested, always adequately appreciated by the yet more compelling big business establishment...
...I understood their significance only from my service in India...
...Such is the principal service of the Bilderburg Convocation, the Trilateral Commission, and, over the years, the best-known of all, the Council on Foreign Relations...
...And the writing in Foreign Affairs, if still lapsing now and then into high-level stuffiness, has improved...
...This is one way of putting it...
...In ensuing years the membership of the Council was enlarged to include younger people and also, after a decorous battle, women...
...Columbia University Press, $25...
...It was to these tests that the Council work was subject...
...The most striking thing about Council observations on Vietnam during the most controversial days of the war is how peripheral they were to what went on...
...There can be no enjoyment of a victory like the one achieved after you have been wholly destroyed...
...Returning or going on, as they must, to financially more remunerative or professionally more secure occupations, or losing office with political change, they continue to cherish their great moments...
...Better that, we now know, than the fringe...
...One consequence is a great competition to be in on any action...
...That is because, the outcome of almost any action or series of actions being largely unknown, the individual who knows little is not greatly handicapped as compared with the individual who knows much...
...Next in this catalog of cultural characteristics is the nature of foreign policy...
...But also it opens on far horizons, a view of different and exciting worlds...
...The membership, all male, continued to include numerous graduates of the foreign policy commune in Washington, along with Columbia and Harvard professors, members of the New York philanthropoid community, general good citizens of means, journalists and lawyers, and bankers and businessmen with a professional or financial interest in foreign affairs...
...In the war years, Hanson Baldwin addressed for the Council the problems created by the American troops in the English countryside—their higher pay, better food as compared with their British counterparts and neighbors, and their general "cliquishness...
...During the World War II years a special enterprise, the War and Peace Studies reports, was prepared for the State Department, to be circulated on a confidential basis...
...Foreign Affairs in those days is described by Mr...
...There is also, to be sure, the cruder type of political ambassador, the unbuttoned fertilizer manufacturer, but he is tolerated, not accepted, and is regarded by the better people as something of an aberration...
...All are held, especially by the radical right, to have a large and deeply sinister influence on American foreign policy...
...ON POLITICAL BOOKS Staying Awake at the Council on Foreign Relations BY JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH To understand the past role of the Council on Foreign Relations in American life one must first have a view of the cultural anthropology of American foreign policy...
...In earlier years I had served on a study group or two...
...And often it was banal...
...the work of an intelligent and diligent scholar who appears to have read all of the Council publications over the years, an assignment for which, one hopes, he will find due reward in Heaven...
...I would prefer the point I made earlier that here, as in professional foreign-policy discussion generally, the test of the truth is what the largest number already believe or wish to believe...
...The articles ghostwritten for important people, including numerous heads and high ministers of state in other countries, could not be read by anyone...
...Meetings of great solemnity, if of no great consequence, convey to the participant the rewarding feeling of continuing relevance...
...The Council on Foreign Relations began with the alumni of the Versailles Conference after World War I as the instrument for a continuing association with foreign policy of those involved in that unhappy passage...
...The meetings of the great foreign visitors, though normally off the record, would not have been printed anyway...
...It is Mr...
...Perhaps it did have an instinct for the seemingly safe, non-controversial center, as Mr...
...In the past it has been the principal association with the American government of the man of distinction...
...In the spring of 1945, the Council moved to its present, handsome and spacious quarters in the Harold Pratt (of Standard Oil) House at 68th and Park Avenue in New York, opposite Hunter College, and facing, as right-wing nuts would discover to their joy, the building that would house, until recently, the Soviet delegation to the United Nations...
...I do not include here the modern career officers, from my experience a superior cadre of public servants, although the foreign service, also, in an earlier time, reflected the general belief that foreign affairs was the only fit public career for a gentleman...
...Some subjects, in the same spirit, were simply avoided...
...What is regularly required for attention and success is a compelling certainty of manner and speech and a strong instinct for articulating what most at the moment already believe...
...He has then grouped the resulting ideas, as some are loosely called, into a chronology—the twenties, the depression years, preparing for World War II, planning for peace and so forth, down to a reflection on the whole field, "The Limits of Expertise...
...This, with its evil-empire rhetoric, its talk of limited nuclear war and of prevailing in protracted nuclear war, its terrible fixation on our unfortunate small neighbors in Central America, not to mention the military descent on Beirut and Grenada, makes one yearn for the old foreignpolicy establishment...
...On occasion it and other Council publications attract attention in a highly commendable way, as in the declaration in April 1982 by McGeorge Bundy, George E Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard Smith against the first use of nuclear tactical weapons and more of late that is a step up from the banality and boredom of earlier times or the digressions into assertive bravery of those who spoke for massive retaliation or victory in nuclear death...
...And there is a certain, if morbid, excitement in the association with matters that can cost others, and in these days perhaps everyone, their lives...
...The usual method of Council study over the years was to empanel a group of members with some interest or assumed expertise in the particular subject—relations with Europe, Latin America, Japan and China, Russia, policy toward the defeated axis powers, nuclear weaponry and arms control—and have the whole enterprise guided by a reasonably literate scholar who would work the product into a report or book...
...It must be noted that David Rockefeller, long a power in the Council, was moved here to a sharp rebuke...
...The rare exception was the participant who wished to advertise the unique vigor of his views, including his bravery in contemplating or advocating comprehensive disaster...
...The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs...
...Schulzinger as soporific...
...I could not help observing during my tours with the State Department, as I am sure have others, that there were always far more people yearning for participation than there were available crises to employ them...
...Surely somewhere in the country and the world there is a role for individuals—informed, responsible, affluent, and above all experienced—who are effective voices on foreign policy...
...The author implies that would have been unfair...
...From this it extended its interest to relations with Canada, Latin America, and Japan, China, and the Pacific, and to meetings to hear speakers from at home and abroad, and to the publication of the journal Foreign Affairs...
Vol. 16 • August 1984 • No. 8
