A QUESTION OF INFLUENCE: THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

Few prominent institutions in American society have been as consistently pilloried as the Council on Foreign Relations. To conspiracy theorists on the right as well as to radical critics on the left the New York-based organization has often conjured up fears of a tiny elite malevolently pulling the strings of American foreign policy. The Council's private meetings, discussions, study groups, and related activities, according to the John Birch Society, have been part of a coordinated plot by "America's unelected rulers" to communize the United States. Although considerably less hysterical in tone, radical critics have also accused the Council of threatening democratic institutions. To understand how the power elite makes foreign policy, wrote sociologist G. William Domhoff, "there is no better starting point than the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).' Expanding on Domhoff's proposition, Lawrence Shoup and William Minter penned a savage indictment in 1977 of what they labeled America's "Imperial Brain Trust."' Viewing the Council in far less sinister terms, a number of moderate observers have nonetheless embraced an assumption common to these critiques: namely, that the Council on Foreign Relations has exerted an unusually powerful influence in the formulation of American foreign policy. Thus journalist Joseph Kraft praised the Council as a "school for statesmen," while conceding that it "comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite a group of men, similar in interest and outlook, shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes." More recently, in their study of American elites, Leonard and Mark Silk state flatly that if the so-called American Establishment "is to be located in its purest form, then the Council on Foreign Relations is the place."2 Given such grandiose claims, Robert D. Schulzinger's balanced and judicious study -"the first scholarly history of the Council on Foreign Relations to make use of the extensive holdings in its archives' (p. x) serves as an im-