CHAPTER ONE

WHAT IS THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION?

According to each issue of the official Trilateral Commission quarterly magazine Trialogue:

The Trilateral Commission was formed in 1973 by private citizens of Western Europe, Japan and North America to foster closer cooperation among these three regions on common problems. It seeks to improve public understanding of such problems, to support proposals for handling them jointly, and to nurture habits and practices of working together among these regions.

This book attempts to tell the rest of the story, according to official and unofficial commission sources and other available documents.


The Trilateral Commission was founded by the persistent maneuvering of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller, chairman of the ultra-powerful Chase Manhattan Bank, a director of many major multinational corporations and “endowment funds” and has long been a central figure in the mysterious Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Brzezinski, a brilliant prognosticator of one-world idealism, has been a professor at Columbia University and the author of several books that have served as “policy guidelines” for the CFR. Brzezinski served as the commission’s executive director from its inception in 1973 until late 1976 when he was appointed by President Carter as assistant to the president for national security affairs.


The word commission is puzzling since it is usually associated with instrumentalities set up by governments. It seems out of place with a so-called private group unless we can determine that it really is an arm of a government -an unseen government, different from the visible government in Washington. European and Japanese involvement indicates a world government rather than a national government. We would hope that the concept of a sub-rosa world government is just wishful thinking on the part of the Trilateral commissioners. The facts, however, line up pessimistically.


If the Council on Foreign Relations can be said to be a spawning ground for the concepts of one-world idealism, then the Trilateral Commission is the “task force” assembled to assault the beachheads. Already the commission has placed its members (some of whom have subsequently “resigned”) in the top posts the U.S. has to offer.
 

President Carter, the country politician who promised, “I will never lie to you,” was chosen to join the commission by Brzezinski in 1973. It was Brzezinski, in fact, who first identified Carter as presidential timber, and subsequently educated him in economics, foreign policy, and the ins-and-outs of world politics. Upon Carter’s election, Brzezinski was appointed assistant to the president for national security matters.

 

Commonly, he is called the head of the National Security Council because he answers only to the president -some say Brzezinski holds the second most powerful position in the U.S.

 

Carter’s running mate, Walter Mondale, was also a member of the commission. (If you are trying to calculate the odds of three virtually unknown men, out of over sixty commissioners from the U.S., capturing the three most powerful positions in the land, don’t bother. Your calculations will be meaningless.)


On 7 January 1977 Time Magazine, whose editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, is a powerful Trilateral commissioner, named President Carter “Man of the Year.” The sixteen-page article in that issue not only failed to mention Carter’s connection with the commission but stated the following:

As he searched for Cabinet appointees, Carter seemed at times hesitant and frustrated disconcertingly out of character. His lack of ties to Washington and the Party Establishment qualities that helped raise him to the White House -carry potential dangers. He does not know the Federal Government or the pressures it creates. He does not really know the politicians whom he will need to help him run the country.

Is this portrait of Carter as a political innocent simply inaccurate or is it deliberately misleading? By 25 December 1976 -two weeks before the Time article appeared -Carter had already chosen his cabinet. Three of his cabinet members -Vance, Blumenthal, and Brown were Trilateral commissioners; and the other non-commission members were not unsympathetic to commission objectives and operations. In addition, Carter had appointed another fourteen Trilateral commissioners to top government posts. As of 25 December 1976, therefore, there were nineteen commissioners, including Carter and Mondale, holding tremendous political power. These presidential appointees represented almost one-third of the Trilateral Commission members from the United States. Try to give odds to that!


Nevertheless, is there even the slightest evidence to indicate anything other than conspiracy? Hardly! Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the qualifications of a 1976 presidential winner in 1973:

The Democratic candidate in 1976 will have to emphasize work, the family, religion and, increasingly, patriotism...The new conservatism will clearly not go back to laissez faire. It will be a philosophical conservatism. It will be a kind of conservative statism or managerism. There will be conservative values but a reliance on a great deal of codetermination between state and the corporations.

On 23 May 1976 journalist Leslie H. Gelb wrote in the not-soconservative New York Times, “(Brzezinski) was the first guy in the Community to pay attention to Carter, to take him seriously. He spent time with Carter, talked to him, sent him books and articles, educated him.” Richard Gardner (also of Columbia University) joined into the “educational” task, and as Gelb noted, between the two of them they had Carter virtually to themselves. Gelb continued:

“While the Community as a whole was looking elsewhere, to Senators Kennedy and Mondale...it paid off. Brzezinski, with Gardner, is now the leading man on Carter’s foreign policy task force.”

Although Richard Gardner is of considerable academic influence, it should be clear that Brzezinski is the “guiding light” of foreign policy in the Carter administration. Along with Commissioner Vance and a host of other commissioners in the state department, Brzezinski has more than continued the policies of befriending our enemies and alienating our friends. Since early 1977 we have witnessed a massive push to attain “normalized” relations with Communist China, Cuba, the USSR, Eastern European nations, Angola, etc. Conversely, we have withdrawn at least some support from Nationalist China, South Africa, Rhodesia, etc. It is not just a trend -it is an epidemic. Thus, if it can be said that Brzezinski has, at least in part, contributed to current U.S. foreign and domestic policy, then we should briefly analyze exactly what he is espousing.

 


 MORE JUST AND EQUITABLE


The Trilateral Commission met in Tokyo, Japan, in January 1977. Carter and Brzezinski obviously could not attend as they were still in the process of reorganizing the White House. They did, however, address personal letters to the meeting, which were reprinted in Trialogue:

It gives me special pleasure to send greetings to all of you gathering for the Trilateral Commission meeting in Tokyo. I have warm memories of our meeting in Tokyo some eighteen months ago, and am sorry I cannot be with you now.


My active service on the Commission since its inception in 1973 has been a splendid experience for me, and it provided me with excellent opportunities to come to know leaders in our three regions.


As I emphasized in my campaign, a strong partnership among us is of the greatest importance. We share economic, political and security concerns that make it logical we should seek ever-increasing cooperation and understanding. And this cooperation is essential not only for our three regions, but in the global search for a more Just and equitable world order (emphasis added). I hope to see you on the occasion of your next meeting in Washington, and I look forward to receiving reports on your work in Tokyo.”
Jimmy Carter

Brzezinski’s letter, in a similar vein, follows:

The Trilateral Commission has meant a great deal to me over the last few years. It has been the stimulus for intellectual creativity and a source of personal satisfaction. I have formed close ties with new friends and colleagues in all three regions, ties which I value highly and which I am sure will continue.


I remain convinced that, on the larger architectural issues of today, collaboration among our regions is of the utmost necessity. This collaboration must be dedicated to the fashioning of a more just and equitable world order (emphasis added). This will require a prolonged process, but 1 think we can look forward with confidence and take some pride in the contribution which the Commission is making.
Zbigniew Brzezinski

The key phrase in both letters is “more just and equitable world order.” Does this emphasis indicate that something is wrong with our present world order, that is, with national structures? Yes, according to Brzezinski; and since the present “framework” is inadequate to handle world problems, it must be done away with and supplanted with a world government.


In September 1974 Brzezinski was asked in an interview by the Brazilian newspaper Vega. “How would you define this new world order?” Brzezinski answered:

When 1 speak of the present international system 1 am referring to relations in specific fields, most of all among the Atlantic countries; commercial, military, mutual security relations, involving the international monetary fund, NA TO etc. We need to change the international system for a global system in which new, active and creative forces recently developed -should be integrated. This system needs to include Japan. Brazil. the oil producing countries, and even the USSR, to the extent which the Soviet Union is willing to participate in a global system.

When asked if Congress would have an expanded or diminished role in the new system, Brzezinski declared,

 “...the reality of our times is that a modern society such as the U.S. needs a central coordinating and renovating organ which cannot be made up of six hundred people.”

Brzezinski developed background for the need for a new system in his book Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1969). He wrote that mankind has moved through three great stages of evolution, and is in the middle of the fourth and final stage.

  • The first stage he describes as “religious,” combining a heavenly “universalism provided by the acceptance of the idea that man’s destiny is essentially in God’s hands” with an earthly “narrowness derived from massive ignorance, illiteracy, and a vision confined to the immediate environment.”

  • The second stage is nationalism, stressing Christian equality before the law, which “marked another giant step in the progressive redefinition of man’s nature and place in our world.”

  • The third stage is Marxism, which, says Brzezinski, “represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision.”

  • The fourth and final stage is Brzezinski’s Technetronic Era, or the ideal of rational humanism on a global scale -the result of American-Communist evolutionary transformations.

In considering our present structure Brzezinski states:

Tension is unavoidable as man strives to assimilate the new into the framework of the old. For a time the established framework resiliently integrates the new by adapting it in a more familiar shape. But at some point the old framework becomes overloaded. The newer input can no longer be redefined into traditional forms, and eventually it asserts itself with compelling force. Today, though, the old framework of international politics -with their spheres of influence, military alliances between nation-states, the fiction of sovereignty, doctrinal conflicts arising from nineteenth century crises -is clearly no longer compatible with reality.

One of the most important “frameworks” in the world, and especially to Americans, is the United States Constitution. It is this document that outlined the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. Is our sovereignty really “fiction”? Is the U.S. vision no longer compatible with reality? Brzezinski further states:

The approaching two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence could justify the call for a national constitutional convention to reexamine the nation’s formal institutional framework. Either 1976 or 1989 -the two-hundredth an anniversary of the Constitution -could serve as a suitable target date culminating a national dialogue on the relevance of existing arrangements...Realism, however, forces us to recognize that the necessary political innovation will not come from direct constitutional reform, desirable as that would be. The needed change is more likely to develop incrementally and less overtly...in keeping with the American tradition of blurring distinctions between public and private institution.

In Brzezinski’s Technetronic Era then, the “nation state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”


Understanding the philosophy of and monitoring the Trilateral commission is the only way we can reconcile the myriad of apparent contradictions in the information filtered through to us in the national press. For instance, how is it that the Marxist regime in Angola derives the great bulk of its foreign exchange from the offshore oil operations of Gulf Oil Corporation? Why does Andrew Young insist that “Communism has never been a threat to Blacks in Africa”? Why does the U.S. funnel billions in technological aid to the Soviet Union and Communist China? Why does the U.S. apparently help its enemies while chastising its friends?


These questions, and hundreds of others like them, cannot be explained in any other way: the U.S. Executive Branch (and related agencies) is not anti-Marxist or anti-Communist -it is, in fact, pro-Marxist. Those ideals which led to the heinous abuses of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini are now being accepted as necessary inevitabilities by our elected and appointed leaders.


This hardly suggests the Great American Dream. It is very doubtful that Americans would agree with Brzezinski or the Trilateral Commission. It is the American public who is paying the price, suffering the consequences, but not understanding the true nature of the situation.

 


 ELEMENTS OF CONTROL


This book will carefully document the economic nature of the driving force within the Trilateral Commission. It is the giant multinational corporations -those with Trilateral representation -which consistently benefit from Trilateral policy and actions. Polished academics such as Brzezinski, Gardner, Allison, McCracken, Henry Owen etc., serve only to give “philosophical” justification to the exploitation of the world.


Don’t underestimate their power or the distance they have already come. Their economic base is already established. Giants like Coca-Cola, IBM, CBS, Caterpillar Tractor, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Deere & Company, Exxon, and others virtually dwarf whatever remains of American businesses. The market value of IBM’s stock alone, for instance, is greater than the value of all the stocks on the American Stock Exchange. Chase Manhattan Bank has some fifty thousand branches or correspondent banks throughout the world. What reaches our eyes and ears is highly regulated by CBS, the New York Times, Time magazine, etc.


The most important thing of all is to remember that the political coup de grace is over -the virtual domination of the White House.


Fortunately, these commissioners are not infallible they make mistakes. They misjudge. They over-and under-estimate. They create crises to manage and then find menacing backlashes from those very crises.


“Management by crisis” has brought about the energy crisis, the International monetary crisis, and the banking crisis. All are clearly man-made, but all certainly threaten the creators. In the end, the biggest crisis of all is that of the American way of life. Americans never counted on such powerful and influential groups working against the Constitution and freedom, either inadvertently or purposefully, and even now, the principles that helped to build this great country are all but reduced to the sound of meaningless babblings.
 

Back to Contents

 

 

CHAPTER TWO


THE POWER STRUCTURE OF THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION
PART I


A bare membership list of the Trilateral Commission does not suggest its massive political and economic power nor its outstanding scope and global ramifications. Understanding of the power base requires analysis of its membership.
The basic Trilateral structure is a power pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid we can identify a “financial brotherhood,” comprising several old-line American families, the so-called American aristocracy, controlling major New York financial installations. Below this highest level is the executive committee for the United States, linked to executive committees in Europe and Japan. Then comes the Trilateral Commission itself: 109 members from North America, 106 from Europe, and 74 from Japan.

 

Because these Trilaterals control the executive branch of the U.S. government, they also control U.S. policy. Furthermore, one of their ongoing projects is to dominate nine “core countries” in Europe and Japan, which, by virtue of their productive ability, account for 80 percent of world output. The “core” group will then dominate the remaining 20 percent of the world. The American multinational corporations (MNCs) provide country by country liaison, intelligence, and financial conduits, the sinews to bind a global New World Order to the directions of the commission.


As the Washington Post has phrased it:

Trilateralists are not three-sided people. They are members of a private, though not secret, international organization put together by the wealthy banker, David Rockefeller, to stimulate the establishment dialogue between Western Europe, Japan and the United States.

But here is the unsettling thing about the Trilateral Commission. The President-elect is a member. So is Vice-President-elect Walter F. Mondale. So are the new Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, Cyrus R. Vance, Harold Brown and W. Michael Blumenthal. So is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is a former Trilateral director and, Carter’s national security adviser, also a bunch of others who will make foreign policy for America in the next four years. 1

 

COMPOSITION OF THE POWER PYRAMID


In outline form then, the Trilateral power pyramid has five levels and looks like this:

There are 109 North American commissioners (as of October 1977): of these 12 are Canadian and 97 are American citizens. American commissioners can be divided into three operational groups as follows:

The common link among Trilateral operators is administration of power rather than power holding. Lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, and trade unionists come and go in the halls of power. They retain administrative positions only as long as they are successful in using political power to gain political objectives. Operators do not, by and large, create objectives -this is an important point. One should label this group of operators “the hired hands.” As Senator Mansfield once said of Congress, “To get along, you must go along.” Trilateral operators are at the pinnacle of success in “going along.”
 

Consequently, we find the following Establishment law firms well represented in Trilateralism:

CENTER FOR LAW AND SOCIAL POLICY
Paul C. Warnke
Philip H. Trezise

CLIFFORD, WARNKE, GLASS, McILWAIN & FINNEY
Paul C. Warnke


COUDERT BROTHERS
Sol M. Linowitz
Richard N. Gardner

O’MELVENY & MYERS
Warren Christopher
William T. Coleman, Jr.


SIMPSON, THACHER & BARTLETT
Cyrus R. Vance


WILMER, CUTLER & PICKERING
Gerard C. Smith
Lloyd N. Cutler
 

PROPAGANDISTS AND TECHNICIANS


Quite distinct from the operators, although their functions often overlap, are the propagandists (the media) and the technicians (academicians and research controllers). These groups provide the intellectual linkage between the power holders (we consider these next) and the power administrators (the operators).


Technicians design the plans needed to promote and implement objectives. They explain ideas to the public and even conceive ideas within limits. Technicians and propagandists achieve personal success only insofar as they have ability to conceive and promote plans within the overall framework welcome to the power holders. A media source distributing unwelcome news or a researcher developing unwelcome conclusions is politely so informed -and usually takes the hint. Trilateralist technicians are experts at “getting the message.”


We find the following “think tanks” linked to Trilateralism:

ASPEN INSTITUTE FOR HUMANISTIC STUDIES
Maurice F. Strong
Robert S. Ingersoll


BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
William T. Coleman, Jr.
Henry D. Owen
Gerard C. Smith
C. Fred Bergsten
Graham T. Allison, Jr.
Philip H. Trezise
Bruce K. MacLaury


CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION
Paul C. Warnke


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Richard N. Gardner


GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
David M. Abshire
William E. Brock
William V. Roth, Jr.
Gerard C. Smith

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Graham Allison
Robert R. Bowie


HOOVER INSTITUTION ON WAR, REVOLUTION AND PEACE
David Packard


HUDSON INSTITUTE
J. Paul Austin


MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT)
Carroll L. Wilson


MITRE CORPORATION
Lucy Wilson Benson


RAND CORPORATION
J. Paul Austin
Graham Allison
William T. Coleman, Jr.


WORLD WATCH INSTITUTE
C. Fred Bergsten

These “think tanks” are financed by foundations which are also linked to Trilateralism:

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
Cyrus R. Vance
W. Michael Blumenthal
Robert V. Roosa
Lane Kirkland
John D. Rockefeller IV


TWENTIETH CENTURY FUND RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION
J. Paul Austin


FORD FOUNDATION
Andrew Brimmer
John Loudon


CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
William A. Hewitt
Hedley Donovan
Thomas L. Hughes

BORDEN FOUNDATION
Zbigniew Brzezinski


ROCKEFELLER BROTHERS FUND
David Rockefeller


ROCKEFELLER FAMILY FUND
David Rockefeller
John D. Rockefeller IV


WOODRUFF FOUNDATION
J. Paul Austin


WORLD PEACE FOUNDATION
Robert B. Bowie

The following media outlets are also linked to Trilateralism:

NEW YORK TIMES
Cyrus B. Vance
CBS
Arthur B. Taylor
Henry B. Schacht

LOS ANGELES TIMES
Harold Brown


TIME. INC.
Hedley Donovan


FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE
Samuel P. Huntington
Thomas L. Hughes
Richard N. Cooper
Elliot L. Richardson
Marina von Neumann Whitman
Richard Holbrooke
Zbigniew Brzezinski

FOREIGN AFFAIRS
William M. Roth
C. Fred Bergsten


CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Emmett Dedmon

 

POWER HOLDERS

 

So, by elimination, we are left with a third group:

However, even the power holders are not the ultimate power base that is an even smaller group, the American aristocracy itself. Power holders lay down guidelines for the propagandists and the research directors, and pass through objectives to the operators for implementation. Remember, a Richard Nixon goes to see international banker David Rockefeller, not the other way around. Henry Kissinger accepted a gift of $50,000 from power holder Nelson Rockefeller, not the other way around.

 

Jimmy Carter is invited to have lunch with David Rockefeller, not the other way around. A widespread myth in American society is that the president has completely independent power, that he is not beholden to some power base. Indeed, the president has power; but presidential power can in fact be applied only within carefully framed guidelines, and this has been the case at least since the days of President Grant.


So our Trilateral analysis looks like this:

When we look at Trilateralists in the three Trilateral areas we can identify some differences, but these are not really of major distinction. Academics and industrialists are equally represented from all three areas. Media representatives and bureaucrats are more prominent from Europe. There are more American and European politicians than Japanese politicians. The diplomats are more likely to be European than American or Japanese.


So let’s look more closely at these American commissioners, at names rather than numbers.

 


 THE TRILATERAL LEGAL ESTABLISHMENT


Nine of the American Trilateral commissioners are Establishment lawyers, from highly influential major law firms. The “revolving door” area between so-called public service and private gain, where attorneys alternate between private practice and the federal payroll, clouds more precise identification. For some reason, probably accidental, two of the nine lawyers are partners in the major Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers: senior partner, William T. Coleman Jr. (also a director of David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and a former secretary of transportation); and Warren Christopher, who was a partner from 1958 to 1967 and again from 1969 until joining the present Carter administration as deputy secretary of state.

 

Other attorney Trilateralists are well known in and around the halls of power: George S. Franklin, Jr. started out in a Wall Street law firm, soon became associated with the Rockefeller family, and is today coordinator of the Trilateral Commission. George W. Ball, member of the New York law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Ball, was recently chairman of the international banking firm Lehman Brothers International. Gerard C. Smith, formerly with the Washington firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering is now ambassador-at-large for non-proliferation matters. Lloyd N. Cutler has also been a partner in Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering since 1962.


Cyrus R. Vance, secretary of state, was formerly partner in the venerable firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett of New York, whose then partners aided the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution 2 in the same way as Cyrus Vance is today pressing the African Marxist guerrilla cause upon Rhodesia and South Africa. It is truly extraordinary how influential pro-Bolshevik actions in a mere handful of prestigious law firms can persist unpublicized and uninvestigated for over five or six decades. Commissioner Paul C. Warnke, presently director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was formerly a partner in the firm of Clifford, Warnke, Glass. McIlwain & Finney of Washington, D.C. In brief, Trilateral attorneys are from the major old-line Establishment law firms.


POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT


A sizeable group of twenty-seven Trilateral commissioners can be categorized as professional politicians and professional bureaucrats, thus reflecting the Trilateral need to control domestic government in order to fulfill Trilateral internationalist objectives. President of the United States James Earl Carter, Jr., and Vice-President Walter Frederick Mondale are longstanding Trilateralists. Carter was brought in by David Rockefeller in 1973, as reported in the Times (London):

Governor Jimmy Carter, the 1976 Democratic Presidential candidate, has for reasons known only to himself professed to be an innocent abroad, but the record is somewhat different. As Governor of Georgia, a state aspiring to be the centre of the New South, he led the state trade missions abroad. While in London in the autumn of 1973 he dined with another American visitor, but by no means an innocent, Mr. David Rockefeller of Chas(J Manhattan Bank.

Mr. Rockefeller was then establishing, with the help of Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski of Columbia University, an international study group now known as the Trilateral Commission. He was looking for American members outside the usual catchment area of universities, corporation law firms and government, was impressed by the Governor, if only because he had ventured abroad, and invited him to join. Governor Carter, perhaps because he was already eyeing the White House from afar, was only too happy to accept.

In any event. five senators also are Trilateral commissioners:

  • Senator Lawton Chiles. Democrat, Florida

  • Senator Alan Cranston. Democrat. California, Senate majority whip

  • Senator John C. Culver, Democrat. Iowa

  • Senator John C. Danforth, Republican, Missouri

  • Senator William V. Roth, Jr., Republican, Delaware

This neatly reflects the Democratic majority in the Senate. three Democrats and two Republicans; and it is notable that the Senate majority whip -a key Senate post -is a Trilateralist.


The following six Congressmen are Trilateralists:

  • John B. Anderson, Republican. Illinois. Chairman House Republican Conference

  • John Brademas. Democrat, Indiana; majority whip

  • William S. Cohen. Republican. Maine

  • Barber B. Conable, Jr. Republican. New York

  • Thomas S. Foley. Democrat. Washington; chairman, House Democratic Caucus

  • Donald M. Fraser, Democrat, Minnesota; chairman, Democratic Conference and Americans for Democratic Action

Trilateralists also occupy key posts in the House, i.e., chairman of the House Republican Conference, majority whip, chairman of the Democratic Conference, and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. In sum, Trilaterals have a lock on the legislative process. The significance of this lock on the legislative process is brought into focus when we examine the political ideology of Trilateralism as expressed by Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki in The Crisis of Democracy.

. The democratic political system no longer has any purpose.
. The concepts of equality and individualism give problems to authority.
. The media is not sufficiently subservient to the elite.
. Democracy has to be “balanced” (Le., restricted).
. The authority and power of the central government must be increased.

Weighing these totalitarian ideas which form the political philosophy of the commission against congressional membership in the Trilateral Commission, the reader will be tempted to ask, were these the political policies espoused by these politicians when elected to office? Two present state governors are commissioners: John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and James R. Thompson of Illinois. So are two former state governors, William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania, and Daniel I. Evans of Washington.


Finally, there are the permanent professional bureaucrats including,

  • Elliot Lee Richardson, now ambassador-at-large with responsibility for the UN Law of the Sea Conference (a major Trilateral objective)

  • Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan and reportedly close to the Rockefeller family

  • Russell E. Train, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

  • Richard Charles Holbrooke, now assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs

  • Gerald L. Parsky, former assistant secretary of the treasury for international affairs

  • Richard N. Gardner, now ambassador to Italy

  • George Bush former director of the Central Intelligence Agency

  • Anthony Soloman, now under-secretary of the Treasury for monetary affairs

  • Philip H. Trezise, former assistant secretary of state for economic affairs

  • Lucy Benson, under-secretary of state for security assistance

We can identify twenty-seven Trilateralists now or recently in the executive branch of the United States government and always in top policy making positions. Just how closely this elite monopolizes top administration jobs in Republican and Democratic administrations can be illustrated by looking back to President Ford’s cabinet shuffle of November 1975. Under media headlines of “sweeping changes” in the cabinet, Ford “discarded” Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, who is now Secretary of Energy in the Carter administration.

 

Ford also installed Trilateralist Elliot Lee Richardson as Secretary of Commerce, who is now Ambassador-at-Large in the Carter administration and previously had been undersecretary of state in the Nixon administration. Trilateralist George Bush was a Nixon appointee to CIA, and David Packard, a businessman Trilateralist, was an ardent Nixonite and formerly deputy secretary of defense.


In brief, top administration jobs -Republican and Democrat -are being filled from a talent pool dominated by the Trilateral Commission. This selective process of filling top Executive Department slots with Trilateralists has been deliberate and ruthless. Before President Carter formally took office, numerous Trilateralists were appointed as follows:

  • Zbigniew Brzezinski -assistant to the president for national security affairs

  • Cyrus Vance -secretary of state

  • Harold Brown -secretary of defense

  • W. Michael Blumenthal -secretary of the treasury

  • Andrew Young -ambassador to the United Nations

  • Warren Christopher -deputy secretary of state

  • Lucy Wilson Benson -under secretary of state for security affairs

  • Richard Cooper -under secretary of state for economic affairs

  • Richard Holbrooke -under secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs

  • W. Anthony Lake -under secretary of state for policyplanning

  • Sol Linowitz -co-negotiator on the Panama Canal Treaty

  • Gerald Smith -ambassador-at-large for nuclear power negotiations

  • Elliot Richardson -delegate to the Law of the Sea Conference Richard Gardner -ambassador to Italy

  • Anthony Solomon -under secretary of the treasury for monetary affairs

  • C. Fred Bergsten -assistant secretary of the treasury forinternational affairs

  • Paul Warnke -director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

  • Robert R. Bowie -deputy director of intelligence for national estimates

If these appointments were from a single ethnic group, or graduates of a single university, or residents of a single state, or even members of a single club, the public outcry would have been immediate and deafening. In fact, their commonality is far more serious: Trilateralists represent a political philosophy alien to the American tradition. The Crisis in Democracy is devoted to the theme that the American system needs to be discarded and totalitarian central authority substituted. Why was there no public outcry? Simply because media reporting was superficial and stifled, people did and presently do not know.

 


 TRADE UNIONS


Six prominent American trade unionists are Trilateralists (as of October 1977.) Three early Commissioners were

  • I. W. Abel, president United Steel Workers of America

  • Lane Kirkland, prominent in the AFL-CIO efforts to elect Jimmy Carter as president

  • Leonard Woodcock, formerly president of United Auto Workers Union and more recently chief U.S. envoy to China for the Carter administration

Three recent union Trilateralists are

  • Glenn E. Watts, president of Communications Workers of America

  • Martin J. Ward, president of United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the U.S. and Canada

  • Sol Chaikin, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union

These prominent trade unionists need to read some modern history: a close association of unions and big business is the hallmark of a fascist economy. Notably, George Meany is not a Trilateralist and has retained an outspoken criticism of Wall Street globalists. Remember, too, that Meany has been a persistent critic of the Wall Street construction of a Marxist world. while all the businessmen Trilateralists, including such self-styled “conservatives” as David Packard, have been outspokenly pro-Soviet when it comes to subsidizing the Soviet military machine with American technology and aid.

 


 THE MEDIA


Trilateralist media representation, although not large in numbers, is highly influential. Of five media commissioners, three are relatively insignificant: Doris Anderson, editor of Chatelaine Magazine; Carl Rowan, columnist and Arthur R. Taylor, formerly head of the CBS network, dismissed in October 1976.


Two media Trilaterals are highly influential:

  • Emmett Dedmon is editorial director of the Chicago Sun-Times, published by Field Enterprises

  • The chairman of Field Enterprises, Inc. is Marshall Field V. who is also a director of First National Bank of Chicago

  • Marshall Field V operates Field Enterprises under an exhaustive agreement with his half brother “Ted.” Frederick W. Field

  • Field ownership is significant because of Trilateral connections with the First National Bank of Chicago

In any event Chicago Sun Times is the sixth largest newspaper in the U.S. (daily circulation 687.000.)


Another influential media Trilateralist is Hedley Donovan, editor-inchief of Time. member of the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. According to the U.S. Labor Party:

Donovan played a central role in the “faking of the President, 1976. Under his Trilateral direction, Time functioned as a black propaganda vehicle throughout the campaign and post-election period, painting Carter as an “outsider” with no connections with the corrupt politics of Washington, D.C. and Wall Street. This “image building” provided the crucial cover for the planned vote fraud, and Time played a crucial cover-up role as widespread evidence of the Nov. 2 fraud surfaced.

Trilateral disdain for the First Amendment is a factor working strongly against generally sympathetic media attention. On the other hand, Trilateralist intervention in day-to-day media operation, by use of the traditional telephone call, is probable, given the numerous Trilateral corporate directors in the media:

  • Henry B. Schacht is a director of CBS

  • Sol Linowitz is a director of Time

  • J. Paul Austin is a director of Dow Jones

  • Harold Brown is a director of Times-Mirror Corporation

  • Archibald K. Davis is a director of Media General. Inc.

  • Peter G. Peterson is a director of Great Book Foundation and National Education TV

  • William M. Roth is a director of Athenum Publishers

  • Cyrus Vance is a director of the New York Times

Their presence is ominous. However, any persistent intervention to kill or reorient stories will backfire. Most media people are professionals rather than propagandists.


Other Trilateral influence, albeit indirect, stems from appointments such as that of Sharon Percy Rockefeller to the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB); Sharon is the wife of Commissioner John D. Rockefeller IV, governor of West Virginia. The CPB “closed shop” is already under fire in the media interesting as a minor example of the basic game plan to blur the distinction between “public” and “private” for Trilateralist profit.

 


 ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS


The media may be a Trilateral weak spot but its numerous links with the academic and research world are its strong points. The academic-research world is not only the “brains” of Trilateralism but the suppliers of many capable operators, that is, academics dissatisfied with the rewards of academe who search for the bright lights and the ego-satisfaction of power manipulation.


Among the more obvious of such academics are:

  • Henry Kissinger (Harvard)

  • Arjay Miller (Stanford, formerly Ford Motor)

  • Paul McCracken (University of Michigan)

  • John C. Sawhill (president. New York University)

  • Harold Brown (president, California Institute of Technology and director of Schroders, Ltd.)

  • Hendrik S. Houthakker (Harvard)

  • Zbigniew Brzezinski (Columbia)

  • Marina von Neumann Whitman (Manufacturers Hanover Bank and University of Pittsburgh)

  • Gardner Ackley (Michigan)

  • David M. Abshire (Georgetown)

  • Graham T. Allison, Jr. (Harvard)

  • Robert Bowie (now deputy director of intelligence for National Estimates)

  • Gerald L. Curtis (Columbia)

  • Carroll L. Wilson (MIT)

Finally, and by no means least, Bruce King MacLaury, head of Brookings Institution which provides the policy input for the Carter administration and Thomas L. Hughes, president of the ever-present Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
 

 

CONTROL OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH BY TRILATERALISTS


This massive infiltration of government from the top down by an alien philosophy is typified by the National Security Council whose four members have a statutory function to advise the President with regard to “the integration of domestic foreign and military policies relating to the national security.” Its four members are all Trilateralists:

  • JIMMY CARTER

  • WALTER F. MONDALE

  • CYRUS R. VANCE

  • HAROLD BROWN

Similarly the Council on International Economic Policy, has eleven members including three Trilateralists:

  • Cyrus R. Vance

  • W. Michael Blumenthal (Chairman)

  • Harold Brown

What does it all add up to? The Greek newspaper Exormisis summed it all up even before the 1976 election:

“A new kind of fascism emerges with Carter. The oppression will not have the form we used to know, but it will be the “de-politicization” of all citizens in the U.S., and the generating of all power in the executive branch, that is, the Presidency, without the President giving any account to the Congress or anybody else except the multi-nationals, which have financed Carter’s campaign...The accession to power of Carter, who tries to present himself as the protector of the poor and the weak, would mean a new era of dictatorial policies. “

 

CANADIAN TRILATERALISTS


North America” for Trilateralism includes only the United States and Canada, with a seeming distinct preference for Quebecois Canadians. A glaring omission from the commission is Mexico -there are no Mexican commissioners. Mexico, in spite of its enormous economic potential, is delegated to the “rest of the world” category. The twelve Canadian Trilateralists as of October 1977 are divided as follows:

Politics and Government     3
Corporations                      3
Research Institutions          2
Banking 2
Trade Unions                     1
Legal Establishment          1
Total                               12

From the viewpoint of Canadian independence, Canadian Trilateral membership is disturbing because it includes two members of Parliament, Gordon Fairweather and Mitchell Sharp (former Canadian minister of foreign “ affairs), along with the directors of three quasi-official research institutions, Peter Dobell, Michael Kirby, and Louis A. Desrochers (founding director of the Institute for Research on Public Policy).

 

Claude Masson, head of the Division of Planning and Research at the Department of Trade and Commerce, Ottawa, is also a Trilateralist.

 

In brief, there is a heavy Canadian representation from the equivalents of Brookings Institution. Canadian corporate representation includes

  • Robert W. Bonner (British Columbia Hydro)

  • Maurice F. Strong (Petro Canada)

  • Jean-Luc Pepin (director of American multinationals in Canada, Le., Westinghouse Canada, Ltd.

  • Collins Radio Company of Canada, Ltd.

  • Celanese Canada, Ltd.; and others)

Finally, Canadian banking Trilateralists are Michel Belanger, of the Montreal Stock Exchange, and Alan Hockin, formerly with Morgan Stanley and now executive vice president of Toronto Dominion Bank.

 


 FORMATION OF A TRILATERAL ADMINISTRATION


The creation of a Carter administration image of anti-Establishment arianism while simultaneously creating a Trilateral administration is typically the deceptive operational approach taken by this self-appointed elite. Take the first half dozen appointments and look at their associations and allegiances. The administration was at some pains to show a competition for posts and promoted the idea that anti-Establishment and non-Establishment persons would be appointed. See, for example, the Wall Street Journal on 2 December 1976 concerning the meeting of sixteen candidates in Plains, Georgia. The initial sequence of appointments went like this:

APPOINTMENT NUMBER 1
Bertram Lance: president of National Bank of Georgia (Atlanta) to be director of Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This is a vital, central post for plans to centralize the U.S. economy. Lance is not a Trilateral and has since departed.


APPOINTMENT NUMBER 2
Cyrus Vance: Secretary of State, Trilateralist. At the time of taking office, Vance was a partner in Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett; a director of IBM, Pan American World Airways and Aetna Life Insurance; a member of the Democratic party, Foreign Policy Task Force, Council on Foreign Relations (vice-chairman of the board), and the Trilateral Commission; and also a former deputy director of defense.


APPOINTMENT NUMBER 3
W. Michael Blumenthal: secretary of treasury, also a Trilateralist. Who is Blumenthal? Like Henry Kissinger, he was born in Germany and came to the U.S. at the age of twenty-one. At the time of taking office, he was chairman of Bendix Corporation and formerly in the Kennedy administration as deputy for the secretary for economic affairs, member of the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Affairs, and the Initiative Committee for National Economic Planning (with Irwin Miller and Robert McNamara.)


After this third appointment, there was definite feedback in newspapers and radio that the “liberals” felt they had been betrayed because appointments and rumors of appointments did not include them. The result? Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, vice president of IBM, strongly pushed for commerce secretary as Appointment Number 4 dropped out, and the next two appointments went to big government liberals.


APPOINTMENT NUMBER 4
Brock Adams: transportation secretary. Also a Trilateralist.


APPOINTMENT NUMBER 5
Congressman Andrew Young as ambassador to U.N. Trilateral.


APPOINTMENT NUMBER 6
Zbigniew Brzezinski: executive director of Trilateral Commission was appointed national security adviser.

Who is Brzezinski? By explicit statement, Trilateralists reject the Constitution and the democratic political process; in Between Two Ages, Brzezinski (Carter’s sixth appointment) wrote as follows:

The approaching two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence could justify the call for a
national constitutional convention to reexamine the nation’s formal institutional framework. Either 1976 or 1989 -the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution -could serve as a suitable target date culminating a national dialogue on the relevance of existing arrangements...Realism, however, forces us to recognize that the necessary political innovation will not come from direct constitutional reform, desirable as that would be. The needed change is more likely to develop incrementally and less overtly...in keeping with the American tradition of blurring distinctions between public and private institutions.

According to Huntington of Foreign Policy magazine, an “election coalition” may be abandoned after political office has been achieved; a politician does not have to keep his word to the electorate. Jimmy Carter is a supreme example of Trilateralism in practice. When Brzezinski refers to “develop(ing) incrementally and less overtly” he is specifically recommending a deceptive “salami-type” approach to abandonment of the Constitution. Perhaps some readers may consider this to be the essence of subversion. If so, they had better do something about it, because no one in Congress has yet plucked up enough courage to even call for an investigation of Trilateralism.


As individuals, Trilateralists live in a make-believe world. They are part of the same crowd that squandered $300 billion and fifty thousand American lives over a decade in Vietnam, then scuttled out, tail between legs, while then Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller forbade public discussion and investigation of the Vietnam debacle. Have you seen a congressional investigation or public inquiry into this, the most scandalous waste of lives and materials in American history? Furthermore, Trilateral ambitions are greater than Trilateral intellects. While priding themselves on an international outlook, Trilaterals are, in fact, quite close-minded and provincial in outlook. Their writing reflects this predictable pattern:

a. It has limited, repetitive, and shallow themes and keywords such as “interdependence, cooperation, global.“
b. Opportunism is presented as altruism.
c. It espouses an amoral view of human motivation. (This author has personally heard a prominent Trilateralist call on a select audience to take pecuniary advantage of government handouts.)

Trilaterals represent an elite, kept afloat by sheer audacity and by the traditionally slow reaction of citizenry in a still reasonably free society. Unfortunately, reaction to elitism is usually stimulated only by overt oppression.
The basic game plan of the Trilaterals? To blur the separation between “private wealth” and “public service” for Trilateral advantage; public wealth is to be oriented to private Trilateral ends.

 


 ENDNOTES: CHAPTER TWO

1. Washington Post, 16 January 1977.
2. See Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York:
Arlington House Publishers, 1974).
3. Times (London), 24 July 1976.
4. Michel J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki The Crisis of Democracy (New York: University Press, 1975).
5. U.S. Labor Party, The Trilateral Commission’s Coup d’Etat (New York: Campaign Publications, Inc., 1977), p. 13. .
6. Exormisis, 23 July 1976.
7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 246.

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