Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

One of the most interesting members of this Anglo-American power structure was Jerome D. Greene (1874-1959). Born in Japan of missionary parents, Greene graduated from Harvard’s college and law school by 1899 and became secretary to Harvard’s president and corporation in 1901-1910. This gave him contacts with Wall Street which made him general manager of the Rockefeller Institute (1910-1912), assistant to John D. Rockefeller in philanthropic work for two years, then trustee to the Rockefeller Institute, to the Rockefeller Foundation, and to the Rockefeller General Education Board until 1939. For fifteen years (1917-1932) he was with the Boston investment banking firm of Lee, Higginson, and Company, most of the period as its chief officer, as well as with its London branch. As executive secretary of the American section of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, stationed in London in 1918, he lived in Toynbee Hall, the world’s first settlement house, which had been founded by Alfred Milner and his friends in 1884. This brought him in contact with the Round Table Group in England, a contact which was strengthened in 1919 when he was secretary to the Reparations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference. Accordingly, on his return to the United States he was one of the early figures in the establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations, which served as the New York branch of Lionel Curtis’s Institute of International Affairs.

As an investment banker, Greene is chiefly remembered for his sales of millions of dollars of the fraudulent securities of the Swedish match king, Ivar Kreuger. That Greene offered these to the American investing public in good faith is evident from the fact that he put a substantial part of his own fortune in the same investments. As a consequence, Kreuger’s suicide in Paris in April 1932 left Greene with little money and no job. He wrote to Lionel Curtis, asking for help, and was given, for two years, a professorship of international relations at Aberystwyth, Wales. The Round Table Group controlled that professorship from its

founding by David Davies in 1919, in spite of the fact that Davies, who was made a peer in 1932, had broken with the Round Table because of its subversion of the League of Nations and European collective security.

On his return to America in 1934, Greene also returned to his secretaryship of the Harvard Corporation and became, for the remainder of his life, practically a symbol of Yankee Boston, as trustee and officer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Gardner Museum in Fenway Court, the New England Conservatory of Music, the American Academy in Rome, the Brookings Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the General Education Board (only until 1939). He was also director of the Harvard Tercentenary Celebration in 1934-1937.

Greene is of much greater significance in indicating the real influences within the Institute of Pacific Relations than any Communists or fellow travelers. He wrote the constitution for the IPR in 1926, was for years the chief conduit for Wall Street funds and influence into the organization, was treasurer of the American Council for three years, and chairman for three more, as well as chairman of the International Council for four years.

Jerome Greene is a symbol of much more than the Wall Street influence in the IPR. He is also a symbol of the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States which 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 “Left-wing newspapers” like The New York Times and the Washington Post , or at foundations and their dependent establishments, such as the Institute of International Education.

These misdirected attacks by the Radical Right did much to confuse the American people in the period 1948-1955, and left consequences which were still significant a decade later. By the end of 1953, most of these attacks had run their course. The American people, thoroughly bewildered at widespread charges of twenty years of treason and subversion, had rejected the Democrats and put into the White House the Republican Party’s traditional favorite, a war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower. At the time, two events, one public and one secret, were still in process. The public one was the Korean War of 1950-1953; the secret one was the race for the thermonuclear bomb.

XVIII. NUCLEAR RIVALRY AND THE COLD WAR: 1950-1957

“Joe /” and the American Nuclear Debate, 1949-1954.

The Korean War and Its Aftermath, 1950-1954

The Eisenhower Team, 1952-1956

The Rise of Khrushchev, 1952-1958

The Cold War in Eastern and Southern Asia, 1950-1951

“Joe I” and the American

Nuclear Debate, 1949-1954

In May 1947, at one of the earliest meetings of the Atomic Energy Commission, the members discussed a suggestion made by one of the commissioners, the Wall Street investment banker Lewis L. Strauss. Four months later, at the request of the commission, the air force was ordered to begin a continuous monitoring of the upper atmosphere to test for radioactive particles which would indicate if a nuclear explosion had taken place anywhere in the world. The monitoring service was tested on our own nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands early in 1948, and continued thereafter on funds from AEC.

Late in August 1949, a B-29, modified for this service, returned to its base in the Far East and found that the photographic plates it had been carrying to a great height were covered with streaks. As the local scientists examined these, they became convinced that the plane had passed through a heavily radioactive cloud, which must have originated farther west on the mainland of Asia. Code messages to Washington sent similar planes over the United States to collect raindrops and high-flying dust particles. These soon revealed the bad news: a highly efficient plutonium bomb (“Joe I”) had been exploded over Soviet Asia in August. President Truman, on September 23, 1949, made a public announcement: “Within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”

The news of “Joe I” brought to crisis level, and merged together, two conflicts which had been going on, more or less behind the scenes, in the American strategic community. One of these conflicts was among the scientists over the possibility of making a “super” bomb by fusing hydrogen; the other conflict, involving billions of dollars in defense contracts and the lives of millions of people, was the struggle among the armed services over American strategic-defense policies.

Discussion over “Super” had been going on for years, but only intermittently and among a few advanced scientists. In 1927 a young Austrian, Fritz Houtermans, studying physics at Gottingen, took a walk with Lord Rutherford’s assistant, Geoffrey Atkinson. Houtermans suggested that the energy of the sun came from the fusion of four hydrogen atoms to make a single helium atom. They talked about the problem and told a

Russian fellow student, George Gamow, who returned to the Soviet Union shortly afterward. In 1933 Houtermans fled from Hitler’s anti-Semitic laws to Russia. During Stalin’s purges he was imprisoned as a foreign spy and tortured to extract a confession. In 1940, when Stalin was allied with Hitler, Houtermans’s wrecked but still living body was turned over to the Germans to receive new indignities from the Gestapo.