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"The revitalization of the CPD grew out of an independent group called [[Team B]]. Team B was authorized in 1976 by President [[Gerald R. Ford]] and organized by then-[[CIA]] chief, [[George Herbert Walker Bush]]. The purpose of Team B was to develop an independent judgment of Soviet capabilities and intentions. Team B was headed by [[Richard Pipes]] and included Paul Nitze, [[Foy Kohler]], [[William R. Van Cleave]], Lt. Gen. [[Daniel O. Graham]] (ret.), [[Thomas Wolf]] of [[RAND Corporation]] and Gen. [[John Vogt, Jr.]] (ret.). Also a part of Team B were five officials still active in government: Maj. Gen. [[George Keegan]], Brig. Gen. [[Jasper Welch]], [[Paul Dean Wolfowitz]] of the [[Arms Control and Disarmament Agency]], and [[Seymour Weiss]] of the State Department. Team B was housed in the offices of the [[Coalition for a Democratic Majority]].
"The political base for CPD II was in the [[Coalition for a Democratic Majority]], a group formed in 1972 by the hard-line, anti-Soviet wing of the Senate, led by Sen. [[Henry M. Scoop Jackson]]. These conservative Democrats contended that communism was a great evil and that the U.S. had a moral obligation to eradicate it and foster democracy throughout the world. The 193 individual members of the revitalized CPD comprise a who's who of the Democratic Party establishment and a cross-section of Republican leadership. Eventually, 13 of the 18 members of the Foreign Policy Task Force of the CDM, lead by Eugene V. Rostow, joined the CPD. Notable among them were [[Jeane J. Kirkpatrick]], [[Leon Keyserling]], [[Max M. Kampelman]], [[Richard Shifter]], and [[John P. Roche]].
"CPD II is a nonprofit organization established to 'facilitate a national discussion of the foreign and national security policies of the U.S. directed towards a secure peace and freedom.' CPD II broadened its base considerably from the original group by including in its ranks top labor officials, Jewish liberals and [[neo-conservative]] intellectuals. It managed this feat by including in its ideology not only a strong anti-Soviet policy, but also one which promoted growth and expansion. These members donate their time to the organization. The CPD presented an alternative to the cooperative vision of empire put forth by the Trilateralists with an imperial, unilateral philosophy of power retention through military strength. President [[James Earl Carter, Jr.]] chose to follow the philosophy of the Trilaterals, but the CPD and its cohorts became dominant with the election of [[Ronald Reagan]].
(See [[Trilateral Commission]].)
"Other proponents of the CPD position are the [[American Security Council]] (ASC), the ASC's Congressional lobby group--the [[Coalition for Peace Through Strength]]--and the conservative [[think tank]] the [[Center for Strategic and International Studies]] (CSIS), home base for such notables as [[Henry Kissinger]], Jeane Kirkpatrick, [[David Abshire]] and [[Ray Cline]].
'''Government Connections'''
"Thirty-three members of CPD received appointments in Reagan's first administration, more than twenty of them in national security posts. They were: [[Ronald Reagan]], president; [[Kenneth L. Adelman]], U. S. Deputy Representative to the [[United Nations]]; [[Richard V. Allen]], assistant to the president for National Security Affairs; [[Martin Anderson]], assistant to the president for Policy Affairs; [[James L. Buckley]], Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology; [[W. Glenn Campbell]], chairman of the [[Intelligence Oversight Board]] and member of the [[President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board]]; [[William J. Casey]], director of the [[Central Intelligence Agency]]; [[John B. Connally]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; [[Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.]], asst director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; [[John S. Foster, Jr.]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; [[Amoretta M. Hoeber]], deputy asst secretary of the Army for Research and Development; [[Fred Charles Ikle]], Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Max M. Kampelman, chairman, [[U.S. Delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe]]; [[Geoffrey Kemp]], staff of the National Security Council; Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, U.S. representative to the [[United Nations]]; [[John F. Lehman]], Secretary of the Navy; [[Clare Booth Luce]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Paul H. Nitze, chief negotiator for [[Theater Nuclear Forces]]; [[Edward F. Noble]], chairman of [[U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corp]]; [[Michael Novak]], representative on the [[Human Rights Commission of the Economic and Social Council]] of the United Nations; [[Peter O'Donnell, Jr.]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; [[Richard N. Perle]], asst secretary of Defense for Intl Security Policy; Richard Pipes, staff of the National Security Council, Eugene V. Rostow, director of Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; [[Paul Seabury]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; [[George P. Shultz]], Secretary of State and chairman of the presidents Economic Policy Advisory Board; [[R. G. Stilwell]], deputy under secretary of Defense for Policy; [[Robert Strausz-Hupe]], ambassador to Turkey; [[Charles Tyroler II]], member of the [[Intelligence Oversight Board]]; William R. Van Cleave, chairman-designate of the General Advisory Committee, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; [[Charles E. Walker]], member of the [[President's Economic Policy Advisory Board]]; Seymour Weiss, member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; and [[Edward Bennett Williams]], member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
"In 1979, Ronald Reagan was initiated into the ranks of the CPD as a member of its executive committee. [[Dean Rusk]], former Secretary of State was on the original board.
"Industry was represented on the founding board of CPD by [[David Packard]] of [[Hewlett Packard]]; Richard V. Allen president of the [[Potomac International Corp]]; [[William Connell]], president of [[Concept Associates]]; [[Henry Fowler]], partner at [[Goldman, Sachs & Co.]] investment brokerage house; [[David Harper]] of [[Gateway National Bank]] of St. Louis; [[James A. Linen]], director and former president of [[Time, Inc.]]; [[Hobart Lewis]], chairman of ''[[Reader's Digest]]''; [[Sarason D. Liebler]], president of [[Digital Recording Corp.]]; [[Donald S. MacNaughton]], chairman and CEO of The [[Prudential Insurance Company of America]]; [[Thomas S. Nichols]], president of [[Nichols Co.]] and former chairman of the executive committee of the [[Olin Corp.]]; [[George Olmsted]], chairman and CEO of [[International Bank]] in Washington; [[Charles E. Saltzman]], partner in Goldman, Sachs & Co.; and [[Harold W. Sweatt]], former chairman of the board of [[Honeywell, Inc.]]
"Think tank representatives on the original board of directors included [[Donald G. Brennan]], director of National Security Studies at the [[Hudson Institute]], a conservative [[think tank ]] in Indiana; [[George Tanham]], vice president and trustee of the [[RAND Corporation]]; Glenn Campbell, director of the [[Hoover Institution]] on War, Revolution and Peace at [[Stanford University]]; [[Harris Huntington]], trustee at the [[Brookings Institution]]; Ray Cline, director of the Center for Strategic and Intl Studies; and [[J. C. Hurewitz]], director of Columbia's [[Middle East Institute]].
'''[http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm Funding]''': "The start-up grant for CPD-II came from [[David Packard]] of Hewlett-Packard. In 1984, the $300,000 budget came from 1,100 contributors, with a limit of $10,000 per year per source. Grants given by [[Richard Mellon Scaife]] (Gulf Oil) from the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Trust of the Grandchildren of Sarah Mellon Scaife to CPD between 1973 and 1981 total $300,000."
Note: See [http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm original article] for footnoted material, as well as other extensive information on CPD.
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[[Donald H. Rumsfeld]] "was a founding member of the '''Committee on the Present Danger''', which effectively undermined President [[Jimmy Carter]]'s arms control policies. He was the first major advocate of the MX missile, and he was a moving force behind the Republican right's [[Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States]], which rejected the [[CIA]]'s more moderate 1995 estimate of the ABM threat."[http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/4/reich-r.html]
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[http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.jsp?section=static&page=message Message from the President and CEO], [[Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.]], [[Center for Security Policy]], no date:
"Happily, that day has now arrived for the Center for Security Policy and its associates, as well.
"An early member of the Center's Board of Advisors, [[Richard Cheney]], is now Vice President of the United States. President [[George Walker Bush]] appointed a distinguished recipient of the Center's Keeper of the Flame Award, [[Donald Rumsfeld]], to be his Secretary of Defense. And Secretary Rumsfeld and his counterparts elsewhere in the government have invited an extraordinary number of members of the Center's [[National Security Advisory Council]] and others of the Center's colleagues to serve in top positions in the U.S. government.
"With the return of such highly qualified, skilled and principled men and women to high office in the U.S. government, the Center for Security Policy looks forward to playing a new and, we hope, even more influential role in the years ahead. To be sure, the Center will remain a source for ideas, information and recommendations associated with promoting the policies of peace through strength. The presence in government of so many of those who broadly share the Center's commitment to this philosophy - and who have, over the years, helped us in advancing it - should, however, enable the Center to direct less energy towards the inside-the-Beltway debate and more to educating and engaging the American people and friends of freedom around the world.
In his [http://freezerbox.com/archive/2000/04/republicans/ April 2000 article] "Lest We Forget: Neo-conservatives and Republican Foreign Policy, 1976-2000," Alex Zaitchik, who "researches security policy at the [[Institute of International Relations]] in Prague, Czech Republic," and who is also an editor at ''Freezerbox.com'', prophetically wrote:
"Most of the super-hawks that populated [[Ronald Reagan]]'s cabinet were culled from the ranks of the advocacy group '''Committee on the Present Danger'''. The Committee, formed in 1976, was organized by fanatically anti-communist [[neo-conservatives conservative]]s with little patience for the give-and-take of [[Richard M. Nixon]]/[[Jimmy Carter]] diplomacy. Once viewed as extremists with minimal influence on policy debates, Reagan's victory brought the Committee to the center of power, the reigns of policy delivered into its lap. The arms control process was hijacked, beheaded and left to rot besides the discarded corpse of détente.
"Once in power, these men geared US policy toward forcing the Soviets to accept US strategic superiority, if not humiliating defeat. Outraged by the fact of Soviet nuclear parity as enshrined in the ABM accord of 1972, they sought to move beyond the stabilizing strictures of [[Mutual Assured Destruction]] into a brave new world of [[effective first-strike]]s and laser defenses. In a series of extremely destabilizing public statements, they described nukes as effective offensive weapons. Rather than seeing the Soviet build-up of the 1970s as a rational and belated response to the American build up of the 1960s, they argued that the Soviets were preparing to use nuclear blackmail against the US and takeover the world. That this was roundly rejected as absurd by nearly every major academic and foreign policy analyst had little effect on Reagan's Defense and State Departments, where closed system intellectual incestuousness and a religious intensity kept everyone happily immune to rational criticism.
"The flagship neo-con journal, ''The Weekly Standard'', offers an analysis of the present international scene that can only be described as paranoid delusional, claiming in a recent editorial that 'it's hard to think of a time when America's international standing has been so low, when Washington's credibility was in such disrepair.' The piece goes on to compare [[Bill Clinton]]'s foreign policy 'drift' to Carter's 'weakness'; the implication being that what America needs is another maniacal spread-eagle cowboy like Ronald Reagan. There's no Soviet bogeymen to rally behind and no charismatic leader this time around, but apparently certain unnamed mortal threats and Bush Jr. will have to do. We are surrounded and our freedom in grave peril, and apparently only ''The Weekly Standard'' has the vantage point needed to see this.
"Connections between propagandists for the new Present Danger and the original Committee of the 1970s are not limited to nostalgia and borrowed catchphrases. A list of current advisors to George W. Bush reveals former members of the old Committee, most notably [[Richard Perle]], who served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense. Along with Harvard Sovietologist [[Richard Pipes]], Perle was the most vocal proponent of '[[winnable nuclear war]]' in Reagan's first Administration. Known as a hawk's hawk, he once famously described the European peace movement as an expression of mere 'protestant angst.' The millions that marched against US policy weren't really worried about getting fried in a nuclear war, you see, they were just reading too much Kierkegaard.
"That Richard Perle, an advocate of nuclear superiority and manageable nuclear exchange, is one election away from getting his corner office at the Pentagon back doesn't only worry liberals. Republicans of a less ideological bent fear that the neo-conservatives will pull a Bush White House in an extremist direction, thus keeping responsible voices away from policy formation. Moderate 'realists' like [[Alexander Haig]] either resigned or were forced out of the cold war circus of the 1980s for lack of passion, and the silencing of rational perspectives could again occur in a Bush Administration dominated by neo-conservative thinking.
*[[Committee for the Liberation of Iraq]]
*[[Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf]]
*[[Committee on the Present Danger/External Links]]
*[[Institute on Religion and Democracy]]
*[[Prodemca]] (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America)
*[[Project for the New American Century]]
*[[Project for the Republican Future]]
== External Links ==
*[http://www.namebase.org/main1/Committee-Present-Danger.html Committee on the Present Danger] at ''NameBase.org''.
*[http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipients/cpd.htm Committee on the Present Danger], ''MediaTransparency.org''.
*Edward Tabor Linenthal, [http://www.colorado.edu/ReligiousStudies/chernus/4820-ColdWarCulture/Readings/WarAndSacrificeInNuclearAge.pdf War and Sacrifice in the Nuclear Age: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Renewal of Martial Enthusiasm] (Chapter 2.
*[http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-19/kirkpatrick1.html Interview] with [[Jeane J. Kirkpatrick]] including questions about the Committee on the Present Danger. Same web article also includes interviews with [[Richard N. Perle]], [[Leslie H. Gelb]], [[Mary King]], and [[Lane Kirkland]].
*[http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/shepherd.shtml Mark Shepherd, Jr., Texas Instruments], Member of the National Board, Committee on the Present Danger.
*Jerry W. Sanders, [http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/357Lsum_s2_Sanders.html Peddlers of Crisis: the Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment] (extract), Boston: South End Press, 1983.
*[http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?1779 Grants from Scaife Foundations 1985-89] total $410,000.
*[http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm Committee on the Present Danger], ''PublicEye.org'', Updated July 1989.
*Mike Moore, [http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/1993/a93/a93Moore.html Apocalypse then], ''The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists'', 1993.
*Philip H. Burch, [http://ideas.repec.org/h/rpe/volume/burch.html Reagan, Bush and Right-Wing Politics: Elites, Think Tanks, Power and Policy]: Part A: The American Right Wing Takes Command: Key Executive Appointments. Part B: The American Right-Wing, at Court and in Action: Supreme Court Nominations and Major Policy Making, ''Ideas.Repec.org'', 1997.
*Daniel Brandt and [[Public Information Resource]] web site, [http://www.mahlers.com/wompusgsc.htm A Brief History Of The United States Global Strategy Council], April 2, 1999.
*Jim Lobe, [http://www.fpif.org/pdf/gac/0111hawk.pdf Hawks Take Aim at Iraq], ''fpif.org'', November 30, 2001.
*[[William J. Bennett]], [http://www.avot.org/stories/storyReader$26?print-friendly=true Open Letter], [[Americans for Victory Over Terrorism]] (AVOT), March 12, 2002: "Our committee will model itself on organizations such as the former '''Committee on the Present Danger''' and the [[Committee for a Free World]]."
*[http://veracity.univpubs.american.edu/weekly_site/weeklypast/102902/102902_bulletinboard.html American University ''American Weekly'' calendar announcement]: "Thurs 31 Oct [2002] '''Committee on the Present Danger''' 6-8 p.m., SIS Lounge, a former Pentagon official and member of the Committee on the Present Danger will share her unique perspective on such questions as: What was the nature of the Soviet threat? Was détente an illusion? Did we win the Cold War? Contact Drew Nickels at drew.nickels@american.edu."
*Tom Barry, [http://www.presentdanger.org/frontier/2002/1031neocon_body.html PNAC'S Present Dangers As Blueprint for Bush Doctrine], ''PresentDanger.org'', October 31, 2002.
*Jim Lobe, [http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15481 All in the Neocon Family], ''AlterNet.org'', March 27, 2003: [[Norman Podhoretz]], "like Kristol Sr. ([[Irving Kristol]]), helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. He and [[Midge Decter]] created a formidable political team as leaders of the '''Committee on the Present Danger''' in 1980, when they worked with Donald Rumsfeld to pound the last nail into the coffin of detente and promote the rise of Ronald Reagan."
*W. Campbell, [http://www.liberalslant.com/wc061703.htm Toking Up to Run The World], ''LiberalSlant.com'', June 17, 2003.
