BOOK REVIEW

Reprinted with permission from The New American magazine, September 7, 1992

Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Carroll Quigley, New York: MacMillan, 1966, 1,348 pages, hardbound.

During his speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president on July 16th, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton paid tribute to the late Georgetown history professor Dr. Carroll Quigley, whom Clinton credits with helping to form his political outlook. "As a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship," Clinton reminisced. "And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."

Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Both credentials take on special meaning in light of his obvious admiration for Dr. Quigley. For it was the professor who, in his 1,348 page work Tragedy and Hope: A History of the Word in Our Time, lauded most of the goals, and the conspiratorial brilliance, of the drive for world government in which both the Rhodes Scholarships and the CFR have played important roles.

The Professors

Prior to his years at Georgetown University's Foreign Service School, Quigley taught at Princeton and Harvard and lectured on Russian history at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and on Africa at the Brookings Institution. In Tragedy and Hope, he described the growth of the banking industry and the influence of powerful international financiers whose far-reaching aims included "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole." He also noted the influence which another professor, at another university, had on another student anxious to shape the course of world events.

"Until 1870," Quigley wrote, "there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford [University in England], but in that year ... John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford like an earthquake...." Author Kenneth Clark, in his 1964 book Ruskin Today, stated that Ruskin "saw that the state must take control of the means of production and distribution, and organize them for the good of the community as a whole; but he was prepared to place the control of the state in the hands of a single man."

Quigley noted that Ruskin "spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class," telling them that "they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline, but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world."

The Rhodes Conspiracy

Quigley asserted that "Ruskin's message had a sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years," during which time he became wealthy by exploiting the diamond and gold fields of South Africa, eventually becoming prime minister of the Cape Colony. Cecil Rhodes, Quigley noted, "contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and in South Africa," and otherwise used his wealth and political acumen to help fashion events according to Professor Ruskin's blueprint. A world government, run by men of Rhodes's calibre, was the goal, and for "this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition through the English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted."

On February 5, 1891, Cecil Rhodes and England's most sensational journalist, William T. Stead, formed a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for 16 years. Quigley described it in Tragedy and Hope, how it was organized, and who governed it. Typical of secret societies, there were circles within circles, including "an outer circle known as the 'Association of Helpers'...."

Lord Milner, another of Ruskin's trusted disciples at Oxford, was the chief Rhodes Trustee. As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, he "recruited a group of young men ... to assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939." In the period 1909-13 "they organized semi-secret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States." Quigley noted that the American branch of the Round Table Groups is "sometimes called the 'Eastern Establishment'" and has "played a very significant role in the history of the United States in the last generation."

One of the organizers of the Round Table Groups, which were to serve as "semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups," was a gentleman named Lionel Curtis. Money for the organizational work "came originally from the Rhodes Trust." At the end of World War I, "it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended. Once again the task was entrusted to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group." This "front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations...."

Institute Of Pacific Relations

Quigley asserted that after "1925 a somewhat similar structure of organizations, known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each British dominion existing on an interlocking basis with the Round Table Group and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the same country."

Quigley described how the IPR was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and sundry "firms closely allied to these two Wall Street interests .... "In addition, each year's deficits "were picked up by financial angels, almost all with close Wall Street connections." According to Quigley, "Clearly there were some Communists, even party members, involved...." Moreover, there "can be little doubt that the more academic members of IPR, the professors and publicists who became members of its governing board ... and the administrative staff ... developed an IPR party line. It is, furthermore, fairly clear that this IPR line had many points in common both with the Kremlin's party line on the Far East and with the State Department's policy line in the same area." But Quigley nevertheless concluded that "there is no evidence of which I am aware of any explicit plot or conspiracy to direct American policy in a direction favorable either to the Soviet Union or to international Communism."

Quigley gave short shrift to the exhaustive investigation of the IPR conducted in the early 1950s by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee chaired by Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV). Understandably, he failed to cite any of subcommittee's 32 conclusions, which refute his implication that nothing conspiratorial was transpiring within the ranks of the IPR. Among other things, the bipartisan subcommittee concluded:

• "The IPR has been considered by the American Communist Party and by Soviet officials as an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence."

• "Members of the small core of officials and staff members who controlled the IPR were either Communist or proCommunist."

• "During the period 1945-49, persons associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations were instrumental in keeping United States policy on a course favorable to Communist objectives in China."

• "Persons associated with the IPR were influential in giving United States far eastern policy a direction that furthered Communist purposes."

After reviewing the growth and impact of the "anglophile" network of secret Round Table Groups and related organizations, and the extent to which they had been nurtured by the large tax-free foundations, Quigley claimed that it "was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie...."

Regarding that secretive coterie, he claimed that the "relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States" reflects

one of the most powerful influences in twentieth-century American and world history. The two ends of this English-speaking axis have sometimes been called, perhaps facetiously, the English and American Establishments. There is, however, a considerable degree of truth behind the joke, a truth which reflects a very real power structure. It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communists. This is particularly true when these attacks are directed, as they so frequently are, at "Harvard Socialism," or at "Leftwing newspapers" like The New York Times and the Washington Post, or at foundations and their dependent establishments ....

Breaking the Veil of Secrecy

And how did Dr. Quigley personally feel about it all? After attempting to denigrate as a "radical Right fairy tale" the efforts of informed anti-communists who claimed that communist influences helped shape U.S. Far Eastern policy during World War II, he confirmed the longtime existence of an "anglophile network," which, he stated, had "no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies ... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."

An influential professor inspired Cecil Rhodes and his associates to spend their lives conspiring for world government. After listening to another influential professor, who had no aversion to most of the aims of the Rhodes intrigue, Bill Clinton became a Rhodes Scholar and joined the CFR. He is now vying for our nation's highest office against an incumbent president who was himself for many years both a member and director of the CFR.

Governor Clinton's nationally-televised reference to Dr. Quigley provides a prime opportunity to, as Dr. Quigley suggested, break the veil of secrecy surrounding what these Round Table Knights have in store for us.

-- ROBERT W. LEE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------