The Cia, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club

The Cia, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club

"The CIA, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club" is a polemical historical essay in which Howard Zinn and Marilyn B. Young trace the intertwined origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Rockefeller family's financial and philanthropic empire, and the small, self-perpetuating elite of Wall Street lawyers, bankers, and Ivy League graduates who staffed both. The authors argue that the CIA, far from being a neutral instrument of national defense, emerged directly out of the world of corporate law firms, investment banks, and family foundations that had long managed America's overseas economic interests. Figures who moved fluidly between white-shoe law practices, boardrooms, the Council on Foreign Relations, and senior posts in the OSS and later the CIA are presented as members of a single, tightly knit social class—"the boys in the club"—whose personal relationships, prep-school and university ties (Groton, Yale, Skull and Bones), and shared assumptions about American capitalism's global mission determined the direction of Cold War foreign policy far more than any democratic deliberation did. Zinn and Young use the Rockefeller family—particularly the philanthropic and financial networks built around Standard Oil wealth, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Chase Manhattan Bank—as the paradigmatic case of how private capital's overseas interests became fused with, and often indistinguishable from, official U.S. intelligence and diplomatic policy. They describe how Rockefeller family members and close associates held or influenced key government posts (State Department, intelligence agencies, international economic bodies), while simultaneously directing family business and philanthropic ventures whose profitability depended on political stability, resource access, and friendly regimes abroad. The essay contends that this revolving-door arrangement allowed private economic interests to be pursued under the cover of national security, with covert action serving as the enforcement arm of an essentially corporate foreign policy. The piece surveys a series of Cold War–era CIA covert operations as evidence of this thesis: the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, undertaken partly to protect Western oil concessions; the 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, tied to United Fruit Company interests and personal connections between company officials and CIA/State Department leadership; interventions in the Congo; and destabilization efforts against Salvador Allende's government in Chile in the early 1970s, in which corporate actors (including ITT) and intelligence operatives worked in concert. In each case, the authors emphasize that the same small circle of men—educated at the same institutions, socially acquainted, moving between government service and corporate directorships—appears repeatedly, making decisions that served the overseas investments and market access of American corporations while being publicly justified as defense against communism. Zinn and Young extend the analysis to the domestic dimension of this elite consensus, describing how foundations funded academic area-studies programs, think tanks, and media relationships that helped manufacture public and scholarly support for Cold War interventionism. Philanthropic giving, in their reading, functioned not merely as disinterested charity but as a mechanism for shaping intellectual and journalistic opinion in directions compatible with corporate and CIA interests, blurring the line between private philanthropy and state propaganda. The essay is explicitly written in the tradition of Zinn's broader historiographical project (echoing the class-based, bottom-up critique of American power found in A People's History of the United States), treating official Cold War rhetoric about defending freedom and containing communism as a rationalization overlaying a more fundamental story of class interest: an American oligarchy of interlocking corporate, financial, and governmental elites using state power, including covert intelligence operations, to protect and expand private economic dominance abroad. Marilyn Young's expertise in the history of U.S. foreign relations, particularly regarding Asia and Cold War interventionism, reinforces the essay's argument that the pattern is not incidental or scandal-driven but structural, recurring across decades and administrations regardless of which political party held office. The work concludes by framing the CIA-Rockefeller nexus as a case study in how modern democratic states can be captured by unelected, socially cohesive elites who operate largely outside public accountability, using the vocabulary of national security to mask what the authors characterize as an essentially imperial and corporate agenda. It is less a chronological institutional history than an argumentative essay marshaling selected episodes—coups, corporate ties, foundation funding, personnel overlaps—to support a systemic critique of the relationship between American capital, philanthropy, and covert state power during the twentieth century.

By Howard Zinn · First published 1975 · Genre: Political Commentary, Essay, Investigative Nonfiction · 874 words

First lines

The CIA, it is generally understood by now (1996), has a long and dirty record of violating, again and again, norms of moral behavior: overthrowing governments, installing military dictatorships, planning the assassinations of foreign leaders, spying on American citizens, interfering in foreign elections, causing the deaths of large numbers of innocent people. In 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War, some of its activities were just coming to the fore, and to quiet further inquiry an investigating commission was set up under Nelson Rockefeller. When the commission released its report, I wrote a column (June 7, 1975) for the Boston Globe.

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Tags

conspiracy theory · government corruption · corporate influence · CIA operations · American politics · power structures · wealthy elites · institutional critique · political history · covert operations · influence networks · military-industrial complex

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