Mises Media

David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973 as a body more elite than the CFR, and it placed its people in office. Rothbard runs through the Carter appointments post by post, from Brzezinski and Vance to Volcker at the Fed, closing on a 1984 field in which every front-runner was a Trilateralist.

Kissinger rose through a Council on Foreign Relations study group and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, receiving $50,000 from Nelson Rockefeller three days before taking office under Nixon. Rothbard covers the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia and the $8 million the CIA funneled into Chile to bring down Allende, with copper and ITT interests at stake.

Johnson kept the hawks and replaced doves as they were ousted. Rothbard details the July 1965 meeting at which escalation was decided and the committee of power-elite figures formed to back it, along with Ellsworth Bunker’s role in the invasion of the Dominican Republic and the sugar interests it protected.

Rothbard traces Kennedy’s foreign policy appointments back to Lovett, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Lehman Brothers, then to the Bay of Pigs and the sugar company interests entangled with it. The chapter closes on Kennedy’s last foreign policy act: the green light to oust and murder South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm.

After Arbenz nationalized uncultivated United Fruit holdings, Eisenhower assigned the CIA a counter-revolution. Rothbard maps the interlocking boards behind it—Sullivan and Cromwell, the Schroder bank, International Railways of Central America—and the Council on Foreign Relations study group whose report hinted that drastic action would be necessary.

Rothbard reads the Second World War through rival interests: Rockefeller pressure for war with Japan over oil and rubber, Morgan commitment to Britain and France. He then follows the postwar Eastern Establishment, its “Cowboy” Sun Belt challengers, and the CIA operation in Iran that cut five American oil companies in for 40 percent of the new consortium.

The Council on Foreign Relations emerged from a 1921 merger, Morgan-dominated from top to bottom, with Elihu Root as honorary president and Morgan’s chief counsel as president. Rothbard recounts the founding of its journal Foreign Affairs, and how after World War II the Rockefellers displaced the Morgans as the senior partners of the Eastern Establishment.

Rothbard traces the Milner Group from Rhodes’s 1891 society through its command of British postwar planning and the expert delegation at Versailles, to the founding of the Institute of International Affairs in Paris in 1919. Its first American member had come to notice by attacking the American Revolution and praising the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Established at the end of 1913, the Federal Reserve made Allied loans and wartime deficits possible by centralizing reserves and backstopping the banks. Rothbard traces the five-year campaign by Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, then follows Benjamin Strong’s Morgan ties and the inflation undertaken to prop up the pound—setting the stage for the collapse of 1929 to 1931.

Rothbard shows the Progressive Party ploy that delivered Wilson the presidency, the Morgan men who surrounded him, and the influence of Colonel House. With the Morgan empire financially precarious by 1914, the firm became fiscal agent for Britain and France; Rothbard argues American entry, which foreclosed a negotiated peace, was the most fateful act of the century.