"NIGHTMARE: Post-WWII Prosperity becomes 1960s Assassinations and War": Part 2 of 5. Chapter 13 from "Our Country, Then and Now"
"The CIA and the Rockefellers," "Eisenhower is Elected as the Cold War Accelerates"
Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we continue with Part 2 of Chapter 13: "NIGHTMARE: Post-WWII Prosperity becomes 1960s Assassinations and War," with sections on "The CIA and the Rockefellers" and "Eisenhower is Elected as the Cold War Accelerates."
With Germany and Japan obliterated and Great Britain and France vastly weakened, World War II launched the US on the profound era of prosperity taking place during the 1950s. Meanwhile, the Council on Foreign Relations had prevailed on the US government, even before it entered the war, to maintain as its war aim the achievement of global military dominance. But President Franklin Roosevelt’s close relations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin opened the door for the Soviet Union to emerge as the controlling power over Eastern Europe and a rival to US financial hegemony established at Bretton Woods.
Thus emerged the Cold War, one feature of which was the virtual takeover of US society by what President Dwight D. Eisenhower later termed “the military-industrial complex.” Soon after Eisenhower was succeeded in office by President John F. Kennedy, the nation’s post-war prosperity and optimism collapsed into a nightmare of assassinations and war.
We continue with an account of how the Rockefellers, chiefly the brothers David and Nelson, gained and exercised executive control over the CIA and its covert operations. Another of their projects was to install World War II hero and icon, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as president in 1952. An “internationalist,” Eisenhower’s election successfully squelched traditional Republic Party opposition to US entanglement in foreign adventurism.
The CIA and the Rockefellers
So, was the CIA under the direction of nobody? Not exactly.
[The CIA was created as the action arm of the Rockefellers’ Council on Foreign Relations to implement their designs for US global military dominance.]
David Rockefeller’s ties to the CIA became legendary. During World War II, he served in military intelligence in North Africa and France. At the end of the war, he served as an assistant military attaché at the American Embassy in Paris, where the Rockefeller family’s Chase Bank had operated unmolested throughout the German occupation.
Later ensconced in his Manhattan office at Rockefeller Center in New York City, David Rockefeller was regularly briefed on covert intelligence operations by CIA division chiefs. [i] In 1949 he became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations. As we have seen, the CFR did the legwork during World War II in advising the government on future US global military dominance.
During the 1950s, David Rockefeller, John J. McCloy, and Henry Kissinger were referred to the “Triumpherate” in describing backroom influence over US foreign policy. [Later, McCloy was a member of the Warren Commission, helping direct its whitewash of the JFK assassination. He was chairman of the CFR at the time.]
David Rockefeller’s brother Nelson Rockefeller, future New York governor and vice-president of the US under Gerald Ford, was also heavily involved in the early days of covert operations. In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Rockefeller as Special Assistant for Cold War Planning. Part of his portfolio was monitoring and approving covert CIA activity.
Henry Kissinger was part of covert operations early on. In 1938, when Kissinger was fifteen years old, he and his family fled Germany as Nazi persecution of Jews increased. Drafted while in college, Kissinger became a US citizen, joined US military intelligence, and served in the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps. After the war he enrolled in Harvard, where he earned his bachelor’s, MA, and doctorate degrees.
Seymour Hersh reports:
“In 1952, Kissinger was named a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an operating arm of the National Security Council for covert psychological and paramilitary operations….In 1955, Kissinger, already known to insiders for his closeness to [Nelson] Rockefeller and for Rockefeller’s reliance on him, was named a consultant to the Operations Coordinating Board, the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine activity against foreign governments.” [ii]
Kissinger would retain his close working relationship with the Rockefellers as he moved toward becoming President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.
Thus the Rockefeller financial empire and the CIA were two sides of the same coin and the same power center—one side operating more or less openly and the other in the shadows. Both had the same objective: global US control. But it could only be done with propaganda leverage. The leverage was to use the US mainstream media to generate sufficient fear and hatred of the Soviet Union. The leader in propaganda was The New York Times, which covertly employs numerous CIA operatives.
Where was all this headed? Later, David Rockefeller wrote in his memoirs:
“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global, political, and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
He continued:
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world [emphasis added] if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries. [iii]
The Rockefellers and the CIA were the keepers and enforcers of “our plan.” And the US media were fully cooperating.
Eisenhower is Elected as the Cold War Accelerates
War hero Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander for D-Day, first NATO commander, lately president of Columbia University, was recruited by both the Democratic and Republican parties to be their 1952 presidential candidate.
It was Nelson Rockefeller who persuaded Ike to go Republican.
Eisenhower’s main competitor at the Republican National Convention was US Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft had opposed US entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbor and was opposed to the creation of NATO and involvement of the US in post-World War II entangling alliances. Taft represented a long-standing Republican opposition to global entanglement that had prevented US entry into the League of Nations.
Taft was anathema to the Rockefeller globalists, who were now pushing the “American Century.” [iv] Eisenhower and Taft ran a close one-two on the first convention ballot, though Eisenhower did not have a majority among five different candidates. But he won on a revised count.
The Republicans were desperate to have their own president after being shut out of the White House for twenty years. While Truman had not neglected the big banks and Wall Street, Eisenhower was close pals with the financial big shots, down to the choice of his favorite golfing partner in Senator Prescott Bush [v] of Brown Brothers Harriman, a bank that had been cited for collaboration during wartime with the Nazis.
At a time of Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare redux, [vi] Eisenhower was an anti-communist icon. Still, the president was criticized because the peacetime growth of what he would later call the military industrial complex actually declined from Truman years. Eschewing all-out total war against the Soviets, Eisenhower had embraced the “containment” strategy espoused by State Department adviser George Kennan. But even with containment instead of open warfare, the Soviets were the enemy.
The Soviets still had the largest land-based military force on the planet, the Red Army, which had crushed the Nazis in an awesome display of force. True, Stalin had kept the Red Army mostly at home in Russia during the post-war years, but there was no way the US could send another army to fight in Europe on the scale of the two world wars. The public wouldn’t stand for it, and Congress wouldn’t pay for it. But what about the Europeans?
Et voila, NATO. From the start, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a British-instigated but US-directed military alliance intended to utilize mainly European national armies as ground forces if another war broke out. Insofar as it would obviously be France and Britain that would bear the burden, and neither gave any indication of wanting to fight the Red Army on European soil, the solution was to rely on the US Air Force armed with nuclear weapons. Western Europe, especially West Germany, became, in essence, a US air base.
But saber-rattling was still allowed and made for good press. It was US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a former Wall Street lawyer and long-time Rockefeller crony, who now invented the term “brinksmanship,” a byword for threats to carry out massive retaliation if the Soviet Union overstepped its bounds.
Dulles denounced neutrality as immoral. It was “us” vs. “them.” But this quickly became a standoff, as the Soviets acquired their own nuclear arsenal. Thus, the potential of military conflict shifted away from Europe to Asia and the so-called “Third World,” where, post colonialism, the non-aligned movement gained adherents among nations wishing to keep its distance from US financial power.
No one in power within the US, even for a second, thought of coming to some kind of compromise or accommodation with the Soviets. They were the communists; we were the “Free World.”
But Eisenhower, with his “New Look,” reminded people of the need for a “balance between minimum requirements in the costly implements of war and the health of our economy.” [vii] In a speech on April 16, 1953, he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” [viii]
[i] As an example of David Rockefeller’s access see his December 8, 1958, letter to CIA director Allen Dulles on the subject of the “Russian economic warfare problem.” <https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R003800180005-9.pdf>
[ii] Seymour M. Hersh, “The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile,” The Atlantic, December 1982.
[iii] <https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9951.David_Rockefeller>
[iv] A phrase coined by famed American propagandist Henry R. Luce in a Look Magazine editorial in 1941.
[v] Father of future president George H.W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush.
[vi] The first Red Scare came at the time of the Palmer Raids in 1919-1920.
[vii] Ambrose and Brinkley, p. 132.
[viii] Ibid, p 132.
This ends Part 2 of 5.
Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. He has recently been named a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is a member of the League of St. Jude.
Books Available from the Three Sages:
Richard C. Cook, Our Country, Then and Now. ORDER HERE
Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World. ORDER HERE
Dr. Lewis Coleman: 50 Years Lost in Medical Advance: The discovery of Hans Selye's stress mechanism. ORDER HERE