114
SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION
The Rockefeller group wielded tremendous influence on the State Department. Every man who served as Secretary of State in the critical Cold War years ranging from 1952 to the end of Jimmy Carter's Presidency in 1979 had formerly been a leading figure from the Rockefeller Foundation. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer, was Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation before he came to Washington in 1952. John Kennedy's and later Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, left his job as President of the Rockefeller Foundation to come to Washington in 1961. Nixon's National Security Adviser and Rusk's successor in 1974 as Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, also came from the inner circle of the Rockefeller Foundation. Moreover, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, came to Washington from his post as Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation. But the enormous influence of this private, non-profit foundation on post-war American foreign policy was kept well in the background. Dulles, Rusk, Vance and Kissinger all understood the Rockefeller views on the importance of private sector activity over the role of government, and they understood how the Rockefellers viewed agriculture-as a commodity just like oil, which could be traded, controlled, made scarce or plentiful depending on foreign policy goals of the few corporations controlling its trade. Remarkably enough, the Dulles-Rusk -Vance- KissingerRockefeller ties were rarely mentioned openly, even though they were essential to understandinR key aspects of US foreign policy and food policy. Early Agribusiness: Rockefeller Teams up with Cargill In 1947, after the end of the War, Nelson Rockefeller founded another new company called International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC). IBEe's aim was to show that private capital, organized as a profit-making enterprise, could upgrade the agriculture of developing countries. In reaUty, IBEC was about the introduction of massscale agribusiness in countries where US dollars could buy huge influence in the 1950's and 1960's.