"In 1938, with the financial assistance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Council began to organize affiliated discussion groups in a few American cities....
"Each Committee is composed of forty or more men who are leaders in the professions and occupations of their area–representatives of business, the law, universities and schools, the press, and so on. About once a month, from October through May, members come together for dinner and an evening of discussion with a guest speaker of special competence.... Since the beginning in 1938, the Carnegie Corporation of New York has continued to make annual grants in support of the Committee program."
The following information about the Committees on Foreign Relations is from the 1960-61 Annual Report of the Council on Foreign Relations:
"During the past season the Foreign Relations Committees carried on their customary programs of private dinner meetings. In all, 206 meetings were held....
"The Council arranged or figured in the arrangement of about three-quarters of the meetings held, the other sessions being undertaken upon the initiative of the Committees. Attendance at the discussions averaged 28 persons, slightly more than in previous years and about the maximum number for good discussion. There was little change in membership–the total being just under 1800. It will be recalled that this membership consists of men who are leaders in the various professions and occupations....
"On June 2 and 3, the 23rd annual conference of Committee representatives was held at the Harold Pratt House. Mounting pressures throughout the year ... made it advisable to plan a conference program that would facilitate re-examination of the strategic uses of the United Nations for American Policy in the years ahead. Accordingly, the conference theme was designated as United States Policy and the United Nations. Emphasis was upon re-appraisal of the United States national interest in the United Nations–and the cost of sustaining that interest....
"In the course of the year, officers and members of the Council and of the staff visited most of the Committees for the purpose of leading discussions at meetings, supervising Committee procedures and seeking the strengthening of Committee relations with the Council."
Chapter 2
WORLD WAR II AND TRAGIC CONSEQUENCES
Although the Council on Foreign Relations had almost gained controlling influence on the government of the United States as early as 1941, it had failed to indoctrinate the American people for acceptance of what Colonel House had called a "positive" foreign policy.
In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt (although eager to get the United States into the Second World War and already making preparations for that tragedy) had to campaign for re-election with the same promise that Wilson had made in 1916–to keep us out of the European war. Even as late as the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the American people were still overwhelmingly "isolationist"–a word which internationalists use as a term of contempt but which means merely that the American people were still devoted to their nation's traditional foreign policy.
It was necessary for Roosevelt to take steps which the public would not notice or understand but which would inescapably involve the nation in the foreign war. When enough such sly involvement had been manipulated, there would come, eventually, some incident to push us over the brink into open participation. Then, any American who continued to advocate our traditional foreign policy of benign neutrality would be an object of public hatred, would be investigated and condemned by officialdom as a "pro-nazi," and possibly prosecuted for sedition.
The Council on Foreign Relations has heavy responsibility for the maneuvering which thus dragged America into World War II. One major step which Roosevelt took toward war (at precisely the time when he was campaigning for his third-term re-election on a platform of peace and neutrality to keep America out of war) was his radical alteration of traditional concepts of United States policy in order to declare Greenland under the protection of our Monroe Doctrine. The Council on Foreign Relations officially boasts full responsibility for this fateful step toward war.