ons whose officers are members of the Council on Foreign
Relations and related organizations. I make no effort to explore this
situation in this volume.

My confession of limitation upon my research does not embarrass me,
because two committees of Congress have also failed to make a complete
investigation of the great _camarilla_ which manipulates our government.
And the congressional committees were trying to investigate only one
part of the web--the powerful tax-exempt foundations in the United
States.

My own research does reveal the broad outlines of the invisible
government.

D.S.
May, 1962

Chapter 1

HISTORY AND THE COUNCIL

President George Washington, in his Farewell Address to the People of
the United States on September 17, 1796, established a foreign policy
which became traditional and a main article of faith for the American
people in their dealings with the rest of the world.

Washington warned against foreign influence in the shaping of national
affairs. He urged America to avoid permanent, entangling alliances with
other nations, recommending a national policy of benign neutrality
toward the rest of the world. Washington did not want America to build a
wall around herself, or to become, in any sense, a hermit nation.
Washington's policy permitted freer exchange of travel, commerce, ideas,
and culture between Americans and other people than Americans have ever
enjoyed since the policy was abandoned. The Father of our Country wanted
the American _government_ to be kept out of the wars and revolutions and
political affairs of other nations.

Washington told Americans that their nation had a high destiny, which it
could not fulfill if they permitted their government to become entangled
in the affairs of other nations.

Despite the fact of two foreign wars (Mexican War, 1846-1848; and
Spanish American War, 1898) the foreign policy of Washington remained
the policy of this nation, _unaltered_, for 121 years--until Woodrow
Wilson's war message to Congress in April, 1917.

* * * * *

Wilson himself, when campaigning for re-election in 1916, had
unequivocally supported our traditional foreign policy: his one major
promise to the American people was that he would keep them out of the
European war.

Yet, even while making this promise, Wilson was yielding to a pressure
he was never able to withstand: the influence of Colonel Edward M.
House, Wilson's all-po