The first literary product of the Dallas Associates of the CED–at least, the first to come to my attention–is a most expensive-looking 14-page printed booklet entitled "The Role of Private Enterprise in the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Nations." The title page reveals that this pamphlet is a policy statement of The Dallas Associates of CED. It is little more than a rewrite of the speech which Dr. Donald K. David had made to the Dallas Citizens Council in November, 1958, urging business to give support and leadership to the government's foreign aid programs.[Pg 089]
Chapter 5
BUSINESS ADVISORY COUNCIL
Whereas the Foreign Policy Association-World Affairs Center is primarily interested in fostering the foreign policy desired by the CFR, and the Committee for Economic Development is primarily interested in formulating economic and other policies which, through governmental controls, will lead us into total socialism–another, smaller (but, in some ways, more powerful) organization has (or, until mid-1961, had) the primary responsibility of infiltrating government: of selecting men whom the CFR wants in particular jobs, and of formulating, inside the agencies of government, policies which the CFR wants. This small but mighty organization was the Business Advisory Council.
Daniel C. Roper, F. D. Roosevelt's Secretary of Commerce, formed the Business Advisory Council on June 26, 1933. Roper set it up as a panel of big businessmen to act as unofficial advisers to President Roosevelt. He was disappointed in it, however. The biggest businessmen in America did, indeed, join; but they did not support the total New Deal as Roper had expected they would when he made them "advisers."
Roper, however, was a figurehead. The brains behind the formation of the Business Advisory Council were in the head of Sidney J. Weinberg, Senior Partner of the New York investment house of Goldman, Sachs & Co.–and also on the boards of directors of about thirty of the biggest corporations in America. Weinberg helped organize the BAC. He recruited most of its key members. He was content to let America's big businessmen ripen for a while in the sunshine of the New Deal's "new" philosophy of government, before expecting them to give that philosophy full support.
Secretary of Commerce Daniel C. Roper pouted and ignored the Business Advisory Council when he discovered that the big businessmen, enrolled as governmental "advisors," tried to advise things that governmental leaders did not like. But Sidney Weinberg was shrewd, and had a definite, long-range plan for the Business Advisory Council. He held the BAC together as a kind of social club, keeping the big business men under constant exposure to the "new" economic philosophies of the New Deal, waiting for the propitious moment to enlist America's leading capitalists on the side of the socialist revolutionaries, determined to destroy capitalism and create a one-world socialist society.
The right time came in 1939, when World War II started in Europe and Roosevelt developed his incurable ambition to get in that war and become President of the World. Plans for America's frenzied spending on national defense began in 1939. With mammoth government contracts in the offing, Weinberg had no trouble converting the Business Advisory Council of leading businessmen into an agency for helping governmental leaders plan the policies for war and for the post-war period.