Bilderberg: Knights of the Round Table

In spite of the historical rivalries and conflicts of Western European nations and the entrenched tradition in the United States of isolation from Europe, the North Atlantic countries have experienced unprecedented cooperation within the past two decades. The dream of a completely unified Western Europe has not yet been achieved, the conflicts have been kept within manageable limits. The Common Market and NATO have been successful. The development of Western Europe as a “Third Force” and a trade rival of the United States is a result of the success of American foreign policy.

This unprecedented period of cooperation is more than a product of simple “nation state” diplomacy. One of the key institutions that has fostered unity and cooperation within the Atlantic Community beyond the old concepts of the “nation state” has been the Bilderberg Group.

Was Ist Ein Bilderberg?

Oosterbeck is a small town in Eastern Holland. Three days in May, 1954 transformed that town into a meeting place for the power elite of Europe and the United States. The facilities of the town’s Hotel de Bilderberg were ideal for a very private conference.

Heading the list of dignitaries were David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Also in attendance were prime ministers, diplomats, socialists, intelligence agency representatives, international bankers and industrialsts from all of the NATO countries. The conference was named the Bilderberg Meeting.

Here the various “leaders” of the Atlantic community were collaborating, yet their popular constituencies knew nothing about the meeting. Only those directly concerned with their activities knew that the meeting even existed. Part of the explanation for this is that the host government for the conference provided top security. In addition, the key international newspapers and wire services cooperated by maintaining a press black-out on the conference.

Within the context of such tight security, one observer noted “this conference is considered so important, even the ‘leaks’ are watertight.” [1]

The story of Bilderberg is not just about this one meeting but rather an entire series of meetings that started in 1954 and have continued to this day. Meetings have been held at least once a year under top security at some of the most remote spots in the Atlantic countries.

The people attending these meetings come from the strategic elites which dominate both the political and the socio-economic systems of the various countries. However, the public actions of these individuals would not reveal the common basis of their cooperation in private.

These meetings were an additional confirmation of the “end of ideology” between the West European ruling classes and the so-called “Socialist” opposition. Leading “Socialists” such as Hugh Gaitskell, Gaston Defferre, Guy Mollet and Fritz Erler sat down and cooperated with their alleged political and class opponents. Within the context of Bilderberg, it is not surprising to learn that many of the operations and programs of these “Socialist” parties have been paid for by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. [2]

America’s Holy Crusade

With the end of the Second World War and the death of FDR, the “internationally-minded” individuals who controlled the commanding heights of the national economy and the executive branch of government aimed at the creation of a new world order under the guidance of American leadership and the slogans of the United Nations. They warned that the mistake of isolationism of the post World War I period must not be made again. The key objective of the new American policy was the restoration of the old socio-economic systems in Europe with slightly new window-dressing, containment of the Soviet Union and Communism, and, in general, an attempt to make the entire world safe for American investment and influence. Under this grand strategy the United States, in a sense, would become the British Empire of the twentieth century—without a direct colonial system.

In the process of achieving these objectives, it became clear that a new forum outside of the formal nation-state structures was necessary for the ruling elites of Western Europe and the United States to get together and clear up some of their “misunderstandings” in order to develop further means of cooperation. Such an interlocking system would permit the new transnational groupings to communicate in private and make the necessary decisions to manipulate the formal political structures on both sides of the Atlantic. Consequently, the Bilderberg Meeting was initiated to address the strategic issues of collective security.

Meet the Bilderbergers

The first Bilderberg Meeting in Oosterbeck witnessed many of the divisions between the ideologies of the participants. Political and economic rivals were together at one meeting in the hope that at Bilderberg there could be recognition of common interests and goals of allegedly opposing political rivalry between Europe and America.

The participants of the first Bilderberg Meeting recognized the usefulness of gathering the NATO elite in one place. Hence, the Bilderberg Group collectively agreed to continue meeting on an annual basis.

The authors have obtained from several foreign sources confidential documents printed by the Bilderberg Secretariat. The documents illustrate the development of an organization structure which coordinates the effort of both the American and European power elite. Two years after the first Bilderberg meeting a Steering Committee was formed, consisting of thirty-nine members (fifteen from the United States). The Steering Committee is “composed of persons who have proved particularly valuable to Bilderberg.” [3] In 1959 the Advisory Committee, an innor core group of the Steering Committee, was formed. Its raison d’etre was “to insure a still closer cooperation and understanding between members of the Steering Committee on both sides of the Ocean.” All the Americans on the Steering Committee are members or officers of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), of which David Rockefeller is chairman of the board. It is understandable then, that the American members of the Steering Commitee have been associated with many aspects of the Rockefeller financial, industrial and political empire. Indeed, four members of the Steering Committee were also members of the National Finance Group of the “Nelson Rockefeller for President Committee.” No Goldwaterites are Bilderbergers!

The best represented industry at Bilderberg is banking. The chairmen of the boards of the Chase Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller, and of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, Gabriel Hauge, are both Steering Committee members. Three directors of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company have been participants at Bilderberg and one of them, Robert D. Murphy, chairman of Corning Glass International, is on the Steering Committee. A disproportionate share of the participants at the Bilderberg Meeting in Mont Tremblant, Canada, were international bankers. The list included: Wilfrid S. Baumbartner, honorary governor, Banque de France; Louis Camu, president; Banque de Bruxelles; C. Douglas Dillon, president of Dillon, Read and Company and former Secretary of the Treasury; Allen T. Lambert, chairman and president, the Toronto Dominion Bank; Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank.

The industrialists from both sides of the Atlantic are equally impressive. Officers and directors representing General Motors, Standard Oil (N.J.), Ford, General Electric, duPont, Alcoa and Allied Chemical were able to confer with their “competitors” in Europe. Likewise, European industrialists represented such giants as Royal Dutch Shell, Fiat, Pirelli, August Thyssen-Hutte A.G., I.C.I., K.L.M., Unilever, Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd., to name but a few.

Lobby Lawyers’ Undisciplined Power

“Lobby Lawyers, fixers for a fee” as one Washington columnist calls them, are regular participants at Bilderberg. [4] Two members of the Steering Committee, George Ball and Arthur Dean, are of particular interest to anyone interested in studying the dynamics of international jurisprudence and diplomacy.

Until 1961, Ball was a partner in the firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Ball, a firm with intimate establishment entrees. With the advent of the “New Frontier” Ball joined with other “Bilderberg Alumni,” [5] as C.D. Jackson termed them, to dominate the highest policy-making levels with the Kennedy Administration. Lobby lawyer Arthur Dean has been co-chairman of the Bilderberg Group since 1957, while also serving on the Steering Committee. Since 1919, he has been a partner in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, whose senior partners were Allen and John Foster Dulles.

Philanthropic Misanthropes

Recently more attention has been given to the tax-exempt foundations, universities and “research” organizations and their relation to the national power structure. The linkages between these institutions and national policy formation have become increasingly more evident. The dimensions of this have been well documented in the case of the CIA and its use of foundations as conduits of funds for some of its covert activities.

The CIA, unlike the FBI, is not a monolithic organization with a single leadership elite but rather since its creation under the National Security Act of 1947 has represented ideologies of both New Deal Liberalism and militant anti-Communism. Articles in the Nation, Ramparts and the Washington Post have documented the affiliation of foundations and organizations with international operations to the covert activities of the CIA. The subsidized organizations had a liberal ideology which was a good “cover” for the spy agency.

For fourteen years the National Student Association received its CIA money via the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs (FYSA). [6] President of FYSA was Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., who is a director of Corning Glass Works and trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Another director of Corning Glass Works is Robert D. Murphy. Murphy is chairman of Corning Glass International and he is a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee. Murphy has also been on the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (FIAB). [7] John Foster Dulles has been the chairman of the board of both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), whose past president was Alger Hiss.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has spent its earnings supporting the Bilderberg Group as well as the Foreign Policy Association and the Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution, located in Washington, D.C., has been represented at Bilderberg by two trustees and its chairman, Eugene R. Black, former president of the World Bank, a trustee of the Ford Foundation and a member of the boards of both Harvard University and Johns Hopkins University. Dean Rusk, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation and Secretary of State, was until 1961 a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee.

The Ford Foundation, with total assets of three billion dollars, has played an equally significant role within the Bilderberg Group. McGeorge Bundy, president of the foundation, has participated in several meetings while the former chairman of the foundation, John J. McCloy, has attended one meeting. A former president of the foundation, and former coordinator of the Marshall Plan, Paul G. Hoffman, is presently administrator of the United Nations Development Program, a trustee of the University of Chicago and a member of the Business Council. From the various foundations that Andrew Carnegie created there have been eleven trustees attending Bilderberg Meetings of which five are members of the Steering Committee.

The University & The Press

The university as a strategic institution within American society provides both the technical manpower and the ideological justification for the warfare-welfare corporate state. Since the legal and political power of the university system clearly rests in the hands of the ruling class, it follows that as an institution, the university’s primary function is to serve the interest of wealth and power rather than free inquiry. Aside from the myriad of schools that serve essentially parochial power structures, it is the handful of elite universities that supply the academic mercenaries for the maintenance of Empire. These mercenaries form the academic procession to Bilderberg each year. They have included the presidents, trustees and faculty members of Harvard, M.I.T., Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Columbia, Yale and Cornell, to name a few. The last three mentioned universities had their presidents, Andrew Cordier, Kingman Brewster, Jr., and James Perkins respectively, as Bilderberg participants.

One of Harvard’s “overseers,” David Rockefeller, is a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee and also manages to be a life trustee of the University of Chicago and chairman of the Rockefeller University. - Another overseer of Harvard is C. Douglas Dillon, a Bilderberg participant and a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA). Four other Bilderbergers are also IDA trustees, one being James Perkins, former president of Cornell University and a trustee of the Rand Corporation, the leading military “think tank” in the United States.

The key media of mass communications have been well represented at the Bilderberg meetings. The major newspaper of record, The New York Times, has sent several key individuals to the conference. The list included the late Arthur Hays Sulzberger, C.L. Sulzberger, James Reston, Max Frankel and Thomas Wicker. The chairman of the board of The Washington Post, Frederick S. Beebe, has attended one meeting. C.D. Jackson of Time, Inc. played an important role in the early Bilderberg meetings. Gardner Cowles of Cowles publications has been at several, and in addition, such newsmen as Joseph Kraft and Joseph C. Harsch have attended.

Bilderberg Format and Agenda

The meetings are held for three days in rather remote locations offering many of the major comforts of life. At the conference the participants are housed in one location (usually a hotel) and are protected by a vast security network. The discussions are organized around previously arranged topics, and a few background papers are sent to each participant. Over the years the topics discussed have centered around the political, economic, and military problems of the Atlantic alliance. The issues of the third world and the question of underdevelopment have been discussed at Bilderberg. The following are the agendas from two Bilderberg Conferences:

1963

I.— The balance of power in light of recent international developments. This item will cover changes in power relations—political, economic and military—between the Communist and Western countries and inside each group. II.— Trade relations between the U.S.A. and Europe in the light of the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the Common Market. III.— Trade relations between the Western World and the developing countries.

1967

I.—(a) Do the basic concepts of Atlantic cooperation remain valid for the evolving world situation? (b) If not, what concepts could take their place? II.— The technological gap between America and Europe with special reference to American investments in Europe.

Within the narrow political limitations on the invitations, i.e., “anyone who belongs to a country that believes in defending Western ethical and cultural values, and himself shares these ideals,” [8] the political debate can be quite varied. In the discussion of point one at the 1967 meeting, one Bilderberg document read: “that 98 interventions (speeches) occurred among 72 speakers, consisting of 86 different positions, the number of conflicting positions is greater than the number of speakers but not all the speakers managed to defend the same position twice.” [9] However, this division took place before the Russian actions in Czechoslovakia and the winds of detente were changing the Cold War images of the world.

The discussions at Bilderberg are limited in scope since some participants are still afraid to make known their opinions and the people invited generally share a common point of view. Some participants who do not believe in German reunification have been afraid to make their views known during discussions on Germany. The American delegation to Bilderberg seems to be the most monolithic as compared to other countries. Individuals that have major moral objections to Vietnam or NATO policy have never been invited. Joseph E. Johnson, a key official on the American Steering Committee and President Emeritus of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which is ostensibly dedicated “to hasten the abolition of international war...,” said he would never invite Linus Pauling to a Bilderberg meeting because of Pauling’s manner in objecting to the war in Vietnam during a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. [10] While making the statement this member of the Steering Committee could not find the time to raise any moral objections to the activity of the American military forces in Vietnam.

The participants are invited because they are known to the Steering Committee through similar activities and life style. The backbone of the American group have been consistently been hawkish on most questions of foreign policy. In the Eisenhower period and the early sixties, these individuals were part of the web of interests that were concerned with developing new weapons, testing atomic bombs, and increasing the defense expenditures, i.e., the myth of negotiating from strength. This program meant trying to convince the American people that radiation from atomic weapons was not a major health hazard and atomic warfare was a method to defend freedom, i.e., “the willingness to engage in nuclear war, when necessary, is part of the price of freedom.” [11]

The major advances in policy that the Bilderberg meetings have created have been in the area of European integration, directly contributing to the Treaty of Rome and the Common Market. [12] The major stress of the Bilderberg conferences has been in fostering increased cooperation and unity within the Atlantic Community.

American graduates of the Bilderberg meetings have played important roles in the making of American policy. This has been evident in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, where Bilderberg “alumni” included Dean Rusk, George W. Ball, George McGhee, Walt Whitman Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Arthur Dean, Paul Nitze and Henry A. Kissinger. These individuals have all played a consistent role in stressing the hard line and seem unaware of the dangers of the “military industrial complex.”

In understanding the importance of Bilderberg, it is important to remember that this is not just a series of meetings. All the people who have attended the conferences get annual reports, and have almost automatic entree into additional contacts with fellow participants. To help this process along, the organization provides up-to-date addresses of all participants in the meetings. Hence, Bilderberg has contributed to the creation of a transnational or international group. Perhaps Bilderberg has been more important in creating new forms of organization beyond economic cooperation.

Bilderberg participants comprise a self-conscious elite which takes the position that “political decisions of great magnitude are rarely understood by the public at large,” [13] hence, the Bilderberg group has become an intervening factor that has helped maintain the Atlantic Community. Unfortunately, the more basic issues of peace in the world and disarmament have not been aided by the Bilderberg group. Against the madness of the arms race and atomic weapons, the agents for peace have been the anti-war groups and such international conferences as Pugwash. [14]

The political limitations placed on the Bilderberg meetings has meant that individuals and groups seeking significant change in the Atlantic Community that would have either brought the world closer to peace or limit the military-industrial complex were not invited. Compare the function and membership of the Bilderberg meetings with the Pugwash Conferences sponsored by Cyrus Eaton. The Bilderberg meetings are a place where the sophisticated members of the ruling class and their retainers can meet to circumvent the formally constituted political institutions of their respective governments, i.e., congress, parliament, etc. The Jeffersonian principal that “...the ultimate power in society [must be] in the people themselves” has been reversed by the contemporary Hamiltonianism of the liberal-imperialist Bilderberg clique.

Conclusion

“... has been the fashion of most social scientists to use a pluralist model of American society in which there is no power elite or goverring class. In writing their articles and books, these men conveniently omit all the data that would suggest other models of American society, and the curse of neo-Marxism and economic determinism descends on the heads of those who point out the intimate relations between economic and political power in America.

The issues raised in this article are not settled by talking about the “sincerity” of Juhn Foster Dulles. Nor can they be settled by treating each new atrocity of American foreign policy as an “accident” caused by a lack of communications. Rather, one must see that foreign policy (for the last two decades, at least) has been made by people who wanted to make the world safe for American investment and trade. The overwhelming majority of the American people and even the Congress have been made impotent in the formulation of American policy. The Bilderberg Group is one manifestation of a trans-national closed elite which has implemented its privately formulated plans by careful manipulation of information and the mass media.

Footnotes

1. “Even the Leaks are Watertight,” Daily Sketch (London), April 3, 1967. 2. “Aid by C.I.A. Put in the Millions; Group Total Up,” New York Times, February 19, 1967, p. 1. 3. Joseph H. Retinger, Bilderberg Meetings (unpublished confidential report, November 1966), p. 14. 14. Edith Kermit Roosevelt, “Lobby Lawyers: Hidden World of Secret Pressures,” Manchester [N.H.] Union Leader, October 31, 1968, p.20. 5. Alden Hatch, H.R.H. Bernhard Prince of the Netherlands (London: George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1962), p. 223. 6. New York Times, loc. cit. 7. “President Revives Intelligence Board,” New York Times, May 5, 1961, p.3. 8. Retinger, op. cit., p.8. 9. “Max Kuhnstamm’s Summary of Discussion Which Took Place at the Bilderberg Conference in Cambridge, England—April 2, 1967,” Confidential correspondence from Max Kuhnstamm to H.R.H. Bernhard. 10. From interview with Joseph E. Johnson, August 15, 1968. 11. Rockefeller Brothers Fund Report, 1958. 12. Hatch, op. cit., p. 223. 13. Retinger, op. cit., p. 4. 14. Barbara Ward Jackson, “A Stevenson Memorial,” Saturday Review, July 9, 1966, p. 19. ¶ [For a complete list of Bilderberg participants from 1955–1968, see Congressional Record, Extension of Remarks, September 15, 1971, pp.E9615–E9624. For more background information on this subject, the authors especially recommend Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Co., 1966), pp. 131-133, 581-583 & 928-956. Many of the sources cited above are unpublished. If the reader is interested in following them up, he can contact the authors c/o Outlook, 208-A Mercer Street, New York, N.Y. 10012.]

Eugene Pasymowski received his B.S. from Villanova University and his M.A. from Antioch College. He is presently on the staff of the Rugters University Bureau of Community Services. Carl Gilbert received his B.A. and M.A. from Temple University. He is currently completing work on his Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Toronto, and is on the political science faculty of the University of Hartford.