By Mark Rhoads -
In 1986, Evan Thomas and Walter Issacson wote a book called The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. The six men were two lawyers, two bankers, and two diplomats. Those profiled in the book were former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Charles E. Bohlen, former special envoy and New York Gov. W. Averll Harriman, former Ambassador George F. Kennan, former Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett, and U.S. High Commissioner to Germany John J. McCloy.
The six advised every president from FDR to LBJ and shaped the containment policy to hold the Soviet Union expansion in check and they helped create NATO, the Marshall Plan, The World Bank, and other institutions that helped to defend America during The Cold War.
There was a time when "The Establishment" described a brain trust of experienced foreign policy experts who eventually laid the ground work that made it possible for the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union to collapse. Unlike now, the establishment was not something conservatives feared even though they sometimes were critics of prevailing policy. The reason was that the establishment of the post-World War II era was pro-American and pro-western values and pro-democracy.
The original 1945 charter of the United Nations was a model for western values even though the behavior of the UN in 2016 has long abandoned the good principles of that charter. But over recent decades, the pro-western ideals of the Ivy League schools have been corrupted and have morphed into a strange collection of anti-democratic and anti-American values. In the 1950s, there was also a conservative establishment led by economists such as Milton Friedman and cultural critics such as William F. Buckley, Jr.
That respected conservative establishment helped to create erudite public-policy forums and publications that guided President Ronald Reagan as he shaped his policies. Oddly enough, the basic premise of both the liberal and conservative establishments was that America was a force for good in the world and a beacon for freedom to the rest of the world. But the modern liberal establishment no longer believes that.
