‘That ’58 Chevy’

A decisive voice in this debate was the chairman of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, John J. McCloy. McCloy personally brought Kissinger down from Harvard in the late 1950s, to shape the policy options being readied for the nation by the ‘Wise Men’ of McCloy’s Council on Foreign Relations. McCloy, a Wall Street lawyer, was at the time chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Chase Manhattan, as we have noted earlier, was the bank of ‘Big Oil.’ The large U.S. oil multinationals and their New York bankers viewed the entire world market as their domain in the 1950s, not the narrow confi nes of the United States. Saudi Arabia, in a certain sense, was more ‘strategic’ for them than Texas. As we shall see, this difference was to become crucial.

The post-1957 U.S. policy debate was tilted to the advantage of the international banks of Lower Manhattan and Wall Street, through the infl uential national television and newspaper media which they controlled. Their control of then-emerging network television, centered in New York, where it enjoyed intimate links with the big international banks of McCloy and friends, and their control over select news media such as the New York Times, were central to the success of these New York interests in promoting policies which went directly counter to the best interests of the nation and its citizens at this critical turn. It was in this period that these interests were popularly identifi ed as the liberal East Coast establishment.

‘THAT ’58 CHEVY’

The Iowa farmer or the skilled machinist in Cincinnati had little idea of what was at stake at the end of the 1950s, the last days of the Eisenhower presidency. But by that time, the large, internationally oriented New York banks had already begun preparing to abandon U.S. investment for greener pastures abroad.

Henry Ford once stated that he would gladly pay the highest wages in industry, sell the world’s cheapest car, and in the process become the world’s richest man—all by using the most modern technology. Unfortunately, by the early 1960s most infl uential voices in the U.S. policy establishment had forgotten Ford’s lesson. They were too obsessed with making a ‘quick buck’ by the typical merchant’s game of ‘buy cheap, sell dear.’ By the end of the 1950s, the U.S. establishment had walked away from investment in rebuilding American cities, from educating a more skilled labor force and from investing in more modern factory production and improving the national economy.