When was the Foreign Policy Establishment Established?

I just finished reading Walter Isaacson & Evan Thomas’s classic history of American foreign policy, The Wise Men. What a timely read when the consensus commentary on President Trump’s foreign policy views him as doing away with the old order of things. That received opinion is a consensus, in our divided time, because both folks who want that to happen and those who lament it describe military threats to Greenland in that way.

But how many people on either side of that divide have a firm grasp on what is being replaced? If the shallow commentary I see in my Facebook newsfeed is any indication, not many. I’m not aware of a single person in my social network who is familiar with the name Henry Stimpson. So this lucid passage is particularly helpful:

On both the left and the right, there is a tendency to treat “the Establishment” as a gigantic conspiracy that needs to be exposed, as if it were a mysterious Masonic cabal. Wide-eyed right wingers distribute leaflets filled with exclamation points and arrows that purport to show the insidious reach of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Zealots on the left use the same ominous tones in revealing the influence of the power structure, disagreeing with the right only on whether it is a conspiracy of capitalist imperialists or Communist one-worlders.

Those with greater insight can also be sharply critical. John Kenneth Galbraith, no stranger to its hallowed precincts, takes great joy in unleashing his irreverent wit on “the Establishment.” In a celebrated 1966 speech to the Americans for Democratic Action, the acerbic professor blamed the deepening Vietnam entanglement on “the foreign policy syndicate of New York—the Dulles-Lovett-McCloy communion, with which I am sure Secretary Rusk would wish to be associated and of which Dean Acheson is a latter-day associate.”

On the other hand, there are those insiders who speak with reverence of the bygone elite. “For the entire postwar period,” writes Henry Kissinger, “foreign policy had been ennobled by a group of distinguished men who, having established their eminence in other fields, devoted themselves to public service.” Citing McCloy, Acheson, Harriman, and Lovett among others, he goes on to call them “an aristocracy dedicated to the service of this nation on behalf of principles beyond partisanship.” Paul Nitze mentions the same names when speaking of the “golden age of the Establishment,” noting: “I have never seen such a panoply of first-class people, who never thought of putting their interests before the nation’s.”

The English journalist Henry Fairlie first popularized the phrase “the Establishment” in a 1955 article describing the circle of powerful men who dominated Britain. Six years later, in a mock-serious parody called “Notes on the Establishment in America,” Richard Rovere deftly poked at those who took the notion seriously while, with the other edge of his pen, executing a delightful drypoint of the subject at hand. Recounting a purported conversation with Galbraith, who “had for some time been surreptitiously at work in Establishment studies,” Rovere described his discovery of the chairman emeritus of the Establishment. “Suddenly the name sprang to my lips. John J. McCloy.”

It is a notion that rankles McCloy. “Oh, no, not me,” he protested years later. “I was not really a part of the Establishment. I was from the wrong side of the tracks.” As Rovere dryly noted in his essay: “Naturally, Establishment leaders pooh-pooh the whole idea; they deny the existence of the Establishment, disclaim any connection of their own with it.” For McCloy, it is the latter reaction. “Yes, of course,” he says when asked if there was ever such a group. “They were Skull and Bones, Groton, that sort of thing. That was the elite. Lovett, Harvey Bundy, Acheson, they called on a tradition, a high tradition. They ran with the swift. I always had in mind, even to this day, that I was not really a part of that.”

In fact, however, one of the salient features of the tradition McCloy invokes is that it has not been a closed circle admissible only by birthright. In many ways it is meritocratic, at least for those eager to accept its style. The two men Rovere cites as putative Establishment chairmen, McCloy and Dean Rusk, were both from poor backgrounds. The cultivation process was a mutual one: Just as they sought admission to what they considered a special elite, the group sought to groom them and others for inclusion in its tradition of high-minded service.

Among those who most vehemently disparage the idea that there is an Establishment is McGeorge Bundy. (Clearly it would be futile for him to disclaim any connection if it did perchance exist: his father, Harvey Bundy, was a longtime aide to Secretary of War Stimson; McGeorge Bundy coauthored Stimson’s memoirs; he edited a collection of Acheson’s speeches; his brother Bill married one of Acheson’s daughters; he served as Kennedy’s and Johnson’s National Security Adviser; and he was president of the Ford Foundation.) The notion is far too nebulous to be of any use, Bundy contends, and the differences among those usually included under the Establishment rubric are far greater than the similarities. And yet, it turns out, it was Bundy who wrote a memo for Lyndon Johnson entitled “Backing from the Establishment,” which set the stage for the formation of the group that became known as the Wise Men. “The key to these people,” Bundy advised, “is McCloy.”

When Bundy was seeking Lovett’s advice during the Cuban missile crisis, the elder statesman nodded toward a photograph near Bundy’s desk and intoned that “the best service we can perform for the President is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson would.” That, in fact, might be the truest touchstone of Establishment credentials: reverence for the tradition exemplified by Henry Lewis Stimson, the consummate American statesman and Wall Street lawyer who served as Secretary of War under both William Howard Taft and Franklin Roosevelt and as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover.

In its twentieth-century incarnation, the tradition began with the group of internationalists who acted as an informal brain trust for Woodrow Wilson at Versailles and returned home to found the Council on Foreign Relations. The founding father of the line was Elihu Root, who served as William McKinley’s Secretary of War and Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State. Root was revered as a mentor by Stimson, just as Stimson became the mentor for such men as McCloy and Lovett.

These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations, and proper clubs. “The New York financial and legal community,” former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in 1965, “was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Opposing this tradition is a populist strand that has run through American history since Jonathan Edwards led the Great Awakening against the sophistication that was blossoming in the eighteenth century and Andrew Jackson spearheaded a popular revolt against John Quincy Adams. In fact, the division between populists and the Establishment has been a more fundamental one in U.S. politics than that between left and right, liberal and conservative. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, like many of their predecessors, rode to the White House in large part by tapping an anti-Establishment vein in the populace.

This populist resentment of the Establishment—shared by the Old Left, New Left, Old Right, and New Right—accounts for much of the hostility faced by Acheson, McCloy, and their colleagues. For it is another defining characteristic of their group that they were decidedly nonpopulist, serving in the executive branch while remaining proudly aloof from the pressures of public opinion and its expression in Congress.

This book was published in 1986, so it has a very post-Vietnam perspective. Yet, its documentation of the etiological past of the foreign establishment provides an insight that transcends our 24-hour social media news cycle today. The funny thing about populists is that they occasionally come to power, and then they have to do more than talk. They have to govern. We’ll soon see if kidnapping heads of state while leaving their regime in power is a more promising approach. As we watch this extreme contrast play out, let’s keep the day-to-day headlines in their proper context of American foreign policy.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.