The Reece Committee investigation threw some revealing light on the historical blackout which the Council on Foreign Relations has ordered and conducted.
Men who run the Council do not want the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt to undergo the critical analysis and objective study which exposed the policies of Woodrow Wilson after World War I. The Council has decided that the official propaganda of World War II must be perpetuated as history and the public protected from learning the truth. Hence, the Council sponsors historical works which give the socialist-internationalist version of historical events prior to and during World War II, while ignoring, or debunking, revisionist studies which attempt to tell the truth.
Here is how all of this is put in the 1946 Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation:
"The Committee on Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations is concerned that the debunking journalistic campaign following World War I should not be repeated and believes that the American public deserves a clear competent statement of our basic aims and activities during the second World War."
In 1946, the Rockefeller Foundation allotted $139,000 to the cost of a two-volume history of World War II, written by William L. Langer, a member of the CFR, and S. Everett Gleason. The generous grant was supplemented by a gift of $10,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Langer-Gleason work was published by Harper and Brothers for the Council on Foreign Relations: Volume I in 1952 under the title, The Challenge To Isolationism, 1937-1940; Volume II in 1953, under the title, The Undeclared War.
The CFR's stated purpose in bringing out this work was to head off the revisionist historians like Charles Callan Tansill, Harry Elmer Barnes, Frederic R. Sanborn, George Morgenstern, Frances Neilson. The truth, however, is not easy to suppress. Though written by and for the CFR, to perpetuate that organization's version of history, the Langer-Gleason volumes contain a wealth of information which helps to prove the basic thesis of this present volume.
One thing that the ill-fated Reece Committee found out in 1953-55, when trying to investigate the foundations, is that the tax-exempt organizations are set up, not for the purpose of doing some good in our society, but for the purpose of avoiding the income tax.
Rene A. Wormser, in Foundation says:
"The chief motivation in the creation of foundations has long ceased to be pure philanthropy–it is now predominantly tax avoidance.... The increasing tax burden on income and estates has greatly accelerated a trend toward creation of foundations as instruments for the retention of control over capital assets that would otherwise be lost....
"The creation of a new foundation very often serves the purpose of contributing to a favorable public opinion for the person or corporation that endows it...."