Westbrook Pegler
The Spokesman-Review/April 15, 1957
New York.—The mysterious cabal of supranational architects of the future who spent three days in secret session at St. Simon Island, Ga., thus far have been able to ignore the flurry of suspicion which belatedly marred their otherwise serene and impudent coup.
However, the jig is up and henceforth their privacy doubtless will be destroyed by notoriety and challenge. They tiptoed into session February 16 and tiptoed away on the 18th.
Their island is close enough to Jekyll Island to compel in the mind of the knowing observer a comparison with the silly but fateful conclave of a similar bunch who in 1908 formulated the federal reserve system on Jekyll while using only their first names. They suppressed their last names to keep their identity secret from the servants.
In the present instance, since the discovery and denunciation of the conference, efforts have been made to convince the public that the exploit was unofficial and not at all secret.
To be sure, it was not “covered” by the press, although Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, and Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, were participants but there was nothing clandestine about it.
Unfortunately for that effort to take the heat off a stealthy deal, Senator Alexander Wiley, of Wisconsin, stuck into the appendix of the congressional record a few days later a “summary” taken from the New York Times, and said in his introductory remarks, “some 70 European and American leaders concluded a private and unofficial meeting at St. Simon”
Wiley’s self-important acknowledgment of himself and of Sulzburger and McGill as “leaders” well expresses in one word the effrontery of the whole affair.
McGill, formerly sport editor of the Constitution, has become a phenomenon of journalism, politics and power in the south. He lists among his distinctions a hitch as “special adviser and consultant to the department of state.”
At the last Democratic convention in Chicago he held up a Stevenson banner on a staff when Adlai met “the press” in answer to Harry Truman’s frank verdict that he was a palooka due to be knocked through the skylight.
McGill well might boast that when the new deal Republicans were going through the gaseous rites in San Francisco, he sat on the platform with the Republican national committee.
Although this conclave was “unofficial,” the revealed roster names Viscount Kilmuir, lord high chancellor of Great Britain; Tom Dewey; Senators Fulbright and Wiley, both of the foreign relations committee; Gabriel Hague, a truly mysterious stranger to Americans who nevertheless is formally described in the roster as Eisenhower’s assistant in charge of economic affairs and by the Wall Street Journal as the expert who tells Ike “what to think”; C.O. Jackson, vice president of Time and “former special assistant to Eisenhower for international affairs and delegate to the ninth UN assembly”; and George Kennan, former ambassador to Russia.
Kennan is so mysterious that he does not even name his parents in Who’s Who in America. Kennan is a member of the colony of double-heads at Princeton which includes the Professor Oppenheimer.
Paul Hoffman, now on the UN by Ike’s appointment, was invited, but didn’t show up
The tax-free foundations did very well. Joseph E. Johnson, “honorary secretary” of the shebang, is president of the Carnegie endowment for international peace. (The bum who just shouted “remember Alger Hiss” will get a paste in the snoot if he will step outside.)
Dean Rusk, president of the Rockefeller foundation, and Henry Kissinger, described as “director of special studies” of the Rockefeller brothers fund, were a few names apart from David Rockefeller, vice chairman of the board of the Rockefellers Chase Manhattan bank. Morehead Patterson, deputy United States commissioner of disarmament of UN, is an executive of the bank’s 42nd Street store.
An American supreme court justice, apparently Frankfurter, was there, but did not register. There are unverified reports that about 20 savants refused to sign the hotel register.
This thing is an extension of a bumptious scout rally called the Bilderberg group because it held the first of its meetings in the Bilderberg Hotel in Oosterbeck, Holland, in 1954. Others have been held near Paris, and in Garmusch-Partenkirchen, German, and Fredensborg, Denmark.
They all say their only purpose is to preserve peace under the NATO arrangement. But of course they dug right in on the Eisenhower-Middle East-Suez complex, but with no results thus far admitted.
No Republicans were invited.
(Source: Google News, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=0klj8wIChNAC&dat=19570415&printsec=frontpage&hl=en)
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