Rulers and Conspirators By Jonathan Marshall Pacific Research, May-June 1977

Review of: Laurence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy. New York, Monthly Review Press, 1977. 334 pp. Carl Ogelsby, The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate. Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1976. 355 pp. Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up. Berkeley: Westworks, 1977. 80 pps. Traditional political scientists still claim that the United States is a truly democratic country, open to minority voices and the beneficial competition of plural interest groups. Radical power theorists have always aimed their guns at this naive notion, ridiculing the idea that Americas inarticulate masses have the same kind of political strength as the propertied upper class. Three new books extend and refine the radical critique of power in American society, marshalling new historical evidence to support their models of power. They are exciting, not only as fine examples of radical research, but also in their diversity. Each book offers a competing analysis, adding fuel to a healthy ongoing debate concerning the real nature of the workings of the American political system. Shoup and Minter offer the most familiar kind of analysis, basically Marxist in inspiration, and deeply influenced by the sociological Works of G. William Domhoff, who has long stressed the significance of the institutional organization of Americas upper class. In particular, Shoup and Minter extend Domhoffs early work on the role of the Council of Foreign Relations in directing the course of Americas foreign policy. In this brilliant work of historical sociology, they convincingly locate the Council and its membership within the upper reaches of the American class structure and at the center of a network of think tanks, foundations and policy institutions, while demonstrating its historical importance through an analysis of its impact on specific foreign policy decisions. Shoup and Minter show that the Council, founded in 1921, grew out of an alliance of sophisticated New York capitalists (who ran a business club of the same name) and a group of internationalist, often Anglophile, foreign policy advisors to Woodrow Wilson. They shared a commitment to combatting widespread public isolationist sentiment in order to expand American influence overseas. The organization was influential almost from the start, establishing Foreign Affairs as the leading journal of its kind, attracting world leaders to its private meetings, and sending increasing numbers of its members into the highest levels of government service. But the CFR climbed to the apex of its influence during World War II when it literally took over the State Departments postwar planning apparatus. This incredible coup -by a private organization -permitted the Council to define Americas national interest and specific peace aims for the government. The CFR planners expressed the national interest generally in terms of the "Grand Area" strategy: the U.S. must at the least have unrestricted access to the markets and raw materials of Latin America, the Far East and the British Empire, and would fight to preserve them. The goal was no less than world hegemony: as one CFR member sitting on a postwar planning 13 committee put it, the U.S. "must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a Pax Americana." These imperialist aspirations led the United States first into war with Japan (which threatened our access to the resources of Asia), and later into conflict with the Soviet Union, which resisted American attempts to renege on agreements concerning postwar Eastern Europe. More specifically, CFR planners drew up the original blueprints for the IMF, World Bank, UN and the Marshall Plan, and designed the "soft" peace for Germany after World War II.

The CFR retained its central role in foreign policy making after the war, despite the vast proliferation of the governments own foreign policy apparatus. By mobilizing ruling class opinion on the definition of the "national interest" and by suggesting specific plans for implementation of its goals, it exercises continuing influence on the direction of Americas foreign policy. Shoup and Minter briefly examine the CFRs impact on the Guatemalan intervention of 1954, the Cuban Missile Crisis, policy toward Southern Africa, and the Nixon administrations reversal of China policy. Most convincingly of all, they demonstrate how the CFR transmitted its early insistence on the economic importance of Southeast Asia into National Security Council decisions during the 1950s to raise the level of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, culminating in the commitment of half a million troops by the Johnson administration. Yet it was also the Council, sensitive to the growth of the public protest and a serious balance of payments crisis, which successfully called on President Johnson to limit Americas commitment by 1968, halt the bombing of North Vietnam, and seek a negotiated settlement. What of the future of the CFR? In recognition of the fundamental changes in the international order since World War II, including the rise of OPEC, the gradual coalition of Third World powers, and the everincreasing complexity of relations with and among the socialist nations, the Council is now engaged in a searching re-examination of the foreign policy alternatives for the United States, an effort known as the "1980s project." At the same time, in recognition of the United States declining leadership rote, CFR president David Rockefeller has formed the Trilateral Commission, bringing together elites from the U.S., Western Europe and Japan to coordinate strategy among the advanced capitalist nations. Whether their common interests will outweigh their rivalries and mutual jealousies, and whether the CFR can, in fact, devise successful long-range strategies for the Unites States in the next decade, remain to be seen. What is certain is that the upper class elites represented in the CFR will continue to exercise a predominant influence over American foreign policy in the years to come, unless fundamentally opposed by a radical challenge to their power and policies. CONSPIRACIES FROM DALLAS TO WATERGATE Academics who brand revisionist histories of American foreign policy with the pejorative label "conspiracy theory," will no doubt treat Shoups and Minters analysis in the same way. But theirs is really a discussion of the concrete manner in which upper class power is translated into actual political influence through institutional organization and planning. Carl Ogelsbys The Yankee and Cowboy War, on the other hand, is quite frankly an attempt to make sense of what the author sees as a series of connected conspiracies "from Dallas to Watergate." Ogelsbys preoccupation with conspiracies is as unwelcome in many radical circles as it is in traditional academic ones, where conspiracy theories are generally treated as unscholarly manifestations of paranoia. But this kind of a priori disregard for conspiracy theories is distinctly unscientific; theories should not be dismissed without first being tested against reality. And Ogelsby makes a strong, but not wholly convincing, case for his theories on just such empirical grounds. Ogelsby focuses on two major events: the assassination of John Kennedy and the Watergate affair. The latter was undeniably a conspiracy, the only remaining questions being how far it extended and to what end. The former is still much more controversial; however, Ogelsby builds a convincing case that President Kennedy met his death in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963 at the hands of more than one man, and that Lee Harvey Oswald may well have been a patsy rather than the trigger man. He explores Oswalds apparent work, under cover of being a communist defector, for U.S. intelligence agencies--a story at odds with the one accepted so uncritically by the Warren Commission. He also details surprising evidence that Oswalds killer, Jack Ruby, had strong links with corrupt elements of the Dallas police force, the Teamsters Union, and Syndicate members tied closely to Cuban gamboling, who worked with the CIA at the Bay of Pigs and elsewhere to overthrow Castro. Ogelsby argues at length that the Bay of Pigs invasion provoked a rift between Kennedy and more militant anti-communists such as Richard Nixon, E. Howard Hunt and CIA covert action personnel. Such a rift may have provided some hardliners (Cuban exiles, Mafiosi, etc.) with a motive to kill Kennedy. In this context, Ruby provides a link between the two worlds. Ogelsby does not claim to know who pulled

the trigger, but he does make two assertions: Kennedys death caused a significant shift in American foreign policy by bringing Lyndon Johnson to power, and second, that the conspiracy to kill Kennedy could only have been successful because intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies, from the Dallas police to the CIA and FBI~ had so much to hide. The first point is still debatable, but the second goes far toward explaining how so many agencies could take part in the coverup (for reasons of bureaucratic selfprotection) without necessarily having been in on the original, smaller assassination conspiracy. Without knowing the actual conspirators, therefore, we can still see how corrupting the alliance of intelligence and organized crime has been and that the power of this combination still represents a serious threat to the stability of our political system. 0glesbys other chapters deal with Watergate. One analyzes in depth the possibility that the White House engineered a plane crash killing E. Howard Hunts wife Dorothy. The case is soberly presented but is, by his own admission, inconclusive (though worthy of further official investigation). Another highly suggestive but still inconclusive chapter argues that the CIA used James McCord, a member of the Watergate burglary team, to overthrow Nixon. Most interesting of all, however, is Ogelsbys discussion of the career of Howard Hughes, from his early battles with Pan American Airways and the greedy bankers who wished to take TWA from him, to his involvement with organized crime figures in Las Vegas and his political involvement with Nixon, which triggered off the events leading to the Watergate burglary. Oglesbys individual chapters are always interesting and provocative, but his overall theoretical framework leaves much to be desired. Not content merely with providing a detailed examination of the conspiracies, Ogelsby tries to fit them into a theoretical mold which explains them in terms of an alleged competition between established Northeastern elites and raw entrepreneurial tycoons of the Southwest and Far West. "The Dallas-to-Watergate outburst is fundamentally attributable to the breakdown taking place with the incumbent national coalition, the coalition of the Greater Northeastern powers with the Greater Southwestern powers, . . . of Yankees and Cowboys." In this perspective, the "Texas Johnson and the Southern California Nixon" supported a militarist foreign policy and indirectly bolstered the forces which led to the Kennedy assassination, an act symbolic of the power shift from Yankees to Cowboys. Unfortunately, this schema does violence to the very facts Ogelsby considers crucial. The CIA militarists who supported the Bay of Pigs invasion and similar acts of aggression--against the apparent hesitance of Kennedy--were led by Easterners like the patrician Allen Dulles (former president of the Council on Foreign Relations) and the Boston University-educated E. Howard Hunt. The militarists favoring escalation in Vietnam -the Bundys, Rostows, and so forth -were generally full-fledged members of the Yankee elite. It was Henry Kissinger who guided Nixons war policies, not some cabal of Southwestern entrepreneurs. Peter Dale Scott approaches the same set of problems--the JFK assassination and Watergate--without such unrealistic theoretical preconceptions. His brilliant work, Crime and Coverup, although only 80 pages long, is almost too complex to summarize and is so crammed with information and suggestive leads that it repays several readings. Basically it details the shifting alliances of the CIA, syndicate gangsters, private intelligence firms, and lobbyists for the Teamsters and Caribbean dictators as these groups became involved in fomenting assassination plots (against Castro and possibly Kennedy), blackmailing presidents, and burglarizing Watergate. Researchers may find his densely factual book more useful than the average interested reader because of his frequent failure to summarize his conclusions clearly. For example, a fascinating and massively detailed section on Jack Ruby delves into his incredible background in organized crime and Teamster union activity, extending back to his Chicago days in the 1940s, but fails to tell us what this means. We are left with the suspicion that Ruby was too important to have simply shot Oswald out of patriotic motives without authorization or ulterior purposes, but beyond this Scott fails to substantiate his claim that the Ruby case makes everything "relatively clear." All the high level connections and intrigues he

refers to leave us bewildered. On the other hand, the reader may come away convinced that where there is such a dense cloud of smoke there must be fire, and if nothing else, Scotts book should convince many of the need not only to reopen the Kennedy assassination inquiry, but also to pursue numerous other leads which would provide a better understanding of the criminal underworld of American politics -what Scott calls "parapolitics." Scott concludes at the end of his essay that the frightening events he has outlined were not the work of a single conspiratorial agency but had their "collective origin in one such quadrant -the dark quadrant of parapolitics where CIA, private intelligence and Mafia operations overlap. The longer we ignore this area the more powerful it will surely become, as our dearly won rights under national constitutions are increasingly overshadowed by new multinational realities, in a global system where freedom and democracy are rare." Scotts warning should be taken to heart, and it provides a useful corrective to the more traditional class analysis of radicals like Shoup and Minter. Those who would oppose the power and abuses of the American state will have to fight not only the domination of CFR-type elites, but also the conspiratorial groups who twist American politics covertly to serve their intrigues. All three books go far in helping us to understand these powerful threats to our freedom, and in so doing give us important guidance for political action.