"As a teenager I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship.
And as a student at Georgetown, I heard the call clarified by
a professor I had named Carroll Quigley, who said America was
the greatest country in the history of the world because our people
have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow
can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal
moral responsibility to make it so."
When Bill Clinton spoke these stirring words to millions of Americans
during his 1992 acceptance address before the Democratic National
Convention upon receiving his party's nomination for President
of the United States, the vast multitude of his television audience
paused for a micro-second to reflect: Who is Carroll Quigley and
why did he have such a dramatic effect on this young man before
us who may become our country's leader?
Carroll Quigley was a legendary professor of history at the Foreign
Service School of Georgetown University, and a former instructor
at Princeton and Harvard.
He was a lecturer at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces,
the Brookings Institution, the U. S. Naval Weapons Laboratory,
the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the
Naval College.
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Quigley was a closely connected elite "insider" to
the American Establishment, with impeccable credentials and trappings
of respectability.
But Carroll Quigley's most notable achievement was the authorship
of one of the most important books of the 20th Century: Tragedy
and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time.
No one can truly be cognizant of the intricate evolution of networks
of power and influence which have played a crucial role in determining
who and what we are as a civilization without being familiar with
the contents of this 1,348-page tome.
It is the "Ur-text" of Establishment Studies, earning
Quigley the epithet of "the professor who knew too much"
in a Washington Post article published shortly after his 1977
death.
In Tragedy and Hope, as well as the posthumous The Anglo-American
Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, Quigley traces this network,
in both its overt and covert manifestations, back to British racial
imperialist and financial magnate Cecil Rhodes and his secret
wills, outlining the clandestine master plan through seven decades
of intrigue, spanning two world wars, to the assassination of
John Kennedy.
Through an elaborate structure of banks, foundations, trusts,
public-policy research groups, and publishing concerns (in addition
to the prestigious scholarship program at Oxford), the initiates
of what are described as the Round Table groups (and its offshoots
such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council
on Foreign Relations) came to dominate the political and financial
affairs of the world.
For the ambitious young man from Hope, Arkansas, his mentor's
visionary observations would provide the blueprint of how the
world really worked as he made his ascendancy via Oxford through
the elite corridors of power to the Oval Office.
The Conservatives Discover Carroll Quigley
Published in 1966, Tragedy and Hope lay virtually unnoticed by
academic reviewers and the mainstream media establishment. Then
Dr. W. Cleon Skousen, the noted conservative author of the 1961
national best-seller, The Naked Communist, discovered Quigley,
and the serious implications of what Quigley had revealed. In
1970, Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary
on Dr. Carroll Quigley's Book Tragedy and Hope.
This was soon followed by None Dare Call It Conspiracy. This
slim volume by Gary Allen (and Larry Abraham) provided the massive
paradigm shift of grassroots, populist conservatives from mere
anti-Communism to a much larger anti-elitist world-view.
Millions of copies of these books came into print, and the conservative
movement changed forever.
Copies of Tragedy and Hope began disappearing from library shelves.
A pirate edition was printed. Quigley came to believe that his
publisher Macmillan had suppressed his book. Dr. Gary North, the
esteemed writer well known to readers of LewRockwell.com, has
an interesting discussion of these curious facts in the chapter,
"Maverick 'Insider' Historians," in his book, Conspiracy:
A Biblical View, available on-line.
However some persons believe Carroll Quigley was simply amplifying
earlier research in conservative authors Emanuel Josephson's Rockefeller
'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules The World, and Dan Smoot's
The Invisible Government, or that of the radical sociologist C.
Wright Mill's The Power Elite, which had outlined these same elite
networks of power.
I disagree with that narrow assessment. Although there is much
to disagree with in interpretation in Quigley's book, the originality
and titanic scope of the work cannot be doubted or disparaged.
In a book much praised by Murray Rothbard, author Carl Oglesby's
The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies From Dallas To Watergate,
has a fascinating discussion of Quigley within a wider framework
of American power politics and subterranean intrigue.
And in a volume hailed by Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, before
he morphed from Trotskyist man of letters to Neocon mouthpiece,
had some insightful musings along the line of Quigley in his Blood,
Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies.
YouTube Potpourri
I'm becoming convinced that every piece of film ever produced,
no matter how small or insignificant, eventually ends up on YouTube.
That site is simply amazing.
With this in mind, here is a YouTube potpourri of items I discovered
that introduce the viewer to the incomparable Carroll Quigley
and his book, Tragedy and Hope. These brief videos focus upon
the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United
Nations, and the North American Union.
After viewing them, I hope you will be prompted to read Quigley's
book and unlock many mysteries that have puzzled your understandings
of the world about you.
The first two clips are from an ancient documentary filmstrip,
The Capitalist Conspiracy, by Fed critic and Ron Paul supporter,
G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island:
A Second Look at the Federal Reserve.
Carrol Quigley, part 1
Carrol Quigley, part 2
More on Carrol Quigley
The Roots of the U. N. and the Rockefellers
Presidential Candidates for the North American Union
The David Rockefeller and Dick Cheney Show
Lou Dobbs vs. the NAU, the CFR and David Rockefeller
