ADVERTISING COUNCIL
The Advertising Council, 25 West 45th Street, New York 36, N. Y. (with
offices at 203 North Wabash Avenue, Chicago; 1200 18th Street, N. W.,
Washington; 425 Bush Street, San Francisco) serves as a public relations
operation to promote selected projects supported by the Council on
Foreign Relations and its interlocking affiliates.
The Advertising Council was created in 1942 (then called War Advertising
Council) as a tax-exempt, non-governmental agency to promote wartime
programs of government: rationing, salvage, the selling of war bonds,
and so on.
The Advertising Council's specific job was to effect close cooperation
between governmental agencies and business firms using the media of mass
communication. A governmental agency would bring a particular project
(rationing, for example) to the Advertising Council, for help in
"selling" the project to the public. The Council would enlist the aid of
some advertising agency. The agency (giving its services for nothing, as
a contribution to the war effort) would prepare signs, newspaper mats,
advertising layouts, broadcasting kits and what not. The Advertising
Council might then enlist the free services of a public relations firm
to get this material into newspapers and magazines; get it inserted in
the regular ads of business firms; get it broadcast, free, as
public-service spot announcements by radio networks; get it inserted
into regular commercials on radio broadcasts; get slogans and art work
stamped on the envelopes and business forms of corporations.
The Advertising Council rendered a valuable service to advertisers,
broadcasting organizations, and publishers. Everyone wanted to support
projects that would help the war effort. The Advertising Council did the
important job of screening--of presenting projects which were legitimate
and urgent.
Even the advertising agencies and public relations firms, which
contributed free services, profited from the arrangement. They earned
experience and prestige as agencies which had prepared nationally
successful campaigns.
* * * * *
The Advertising Council continued after the war to perform this same
service--selecting, for free promotion, projects that are "importantly
in the public interest." Indeed, the service is more valued in peace
time than in war by many advertisers and broadcasting officials who are
badgered to support countless causes and campaigns, most of which sound
good but some of which may be objectionable. Investigating to screen the
good from the bad is a major job. The Advertising Council does this job.
The Council is respected by industry, by the public, and by government.
It is safe to promote a project which the Advertising Council claims to
be "importantly in the public interest."
Thus, officials of the Advertising Council have become czars in a most
important field. They arbitrarily decide what is, and what is not, in
the public interest. When the Advertising Council "accepts" a project,
the most proficient experts in the world--leading Madison Avenue
people--go to work, without charge, to create (and saturate the media of
mass communication with) the skillful propaganda that "sells" the
project to the public.
Officials of the Advertising Council are aware of their power as
moulders of public opinion. Theodore S. Repplier, head of the
Advertising Council, was quoted in a June, 1961, issue of _Saturday
Review_, as saying:
"There are Washington officials hired to collect figures on about
every known occupation, to worry about the oil and miners under the
ground, the rain in the sky, the wildlife in the woods, and the
fish in the streams--but it is nobody's job to worry about
America's state of mind, or whether Americans misread a situation
in a way that could be tragic.
"This is a dangerous vacuum. But it is also a vacuum which explains
to a considerable degree the important position the Advertising
Council holds in American life today."
Note, particularly, that the Advertising Council is responsible to no
one. If a business firm should decide on its own to include some "public
service" project in its advertising, and the project evoked public
indignation, the business firm would lose customers. The Advertising
Council has no customers to please. Yet, the Advertising Council is a
private agency, beyond the reach of voter and taxpayer indignation
which, theoretically, can exercise some control over public agencies.
* * * * *
Who are these autocrats who have become so powerful that they can
condition, if not control, public opinion? They are the members of the
Public Policy Committee of the Advertising Council. Here were the 19
members of the Advertising Council's Committee, on June 23, 1958:
_Sarah Gibson Blanding_, President of Vassar College; _Ralph J.
Bunche_, United Nations Under Secretary; _Benjamin J.
Buttenwieser_, partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co.; _Olive Clapper,_
publicist; _Evans Clark_, member of the _New York Times_ editorial
board; _Helen Hall_, Director of Henry Street Settlement; _Paul G.
Hoffman_, Chairman of this Public Policy Committee; _Charles S.
Jones_, President of Richfield Oil Corporation; _Lawrence A.
Kimpton_, Chancellor of University of Chicago; _A. E. Lyon_,
Executive Secretary of the Railway Labor Executives Association;
_John J. McCloy_, Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; _Eugene
Meyer_, Chairman of the _Washington Post & Times-Herald_; _William
I. Myers_, Dean of Agriculture at Cornell University; _Elmo Roper_,
public opinion analyst; _Howard A. Rusk_, New York University
Bellevue Medical Center; _Boris Shishkin_, Assistant to the
President of AFL-CIO; _George N. Shuster_, President of Hunter
College; _Thomas J. Watson, Jr._, President of International
Business Machines Corporation; _Henry M. Wriston_, Executive
Director of the American Assembly.
Of these 19, 8 are members of the Council on Foreign Relations--Bunche,
Buttenwieser, Hoffman, McCloy, Roper, Shishkin, Shuster, Wriston. The
remaining 11 are mostly "second level" affiliates of the CFR, or under
the thumb of CFR members in the business world.
* * * * *
Some Advertising Council projects really are "in the public interest."
The "Stop Accidents" campaign and the "Smokey Bear" campaign to prevent
forest fires are among several which probably have done much good.
There has never been an Advertising Council project which insinuated
anything to remind anyone of the basic American political idea written
into our organic documents of government--the idea that men are endowed
by God with inalienable rights; that the greatest threat to those rights
is the government under which men live; and that government, while
necessary to secure the God-given blessings of liberty, must be
carefully limited in power by an inviolable Constitution. But there have
been many Advertising Council projects which were vehicles for the
propaganda of international socialism.
The Advertising Council has promoted Law Day, which is an annual
occasion for inundating America with "World Peace Through World Law"
propaganda, designed to prepare the people for giving the World Court
jurisdiction over American affairs, as a major step toward world
government (see _The Dan Smoot Report_, September 14, 1959, "The World
Court").
The Advertising Council has promoted the "mental health" project, which,
superficially, appears to be an admirable effort to make the public
aware of the truth that we have more mentally ill people than we have
facilities for--but whose underlying, and dubious, purpose is to promote
the passage, in all states, of "mental health" laws fabricated by
international socialists in the World Health Organization and in the U.
S. Public Health Service. These laws, to "facilitate access to hospital
care" for mentally ill people, provide no new facilities, prescribe no
better treatment, nor do anything else to relieve the suffering of sick
people.
The new "mental health" laws, which the Advertising Council is helping
to persuade people in all states to accept, eliminate the constitutional
safeguards of a person accused of being mentally ill, thus making it
easier for bureaucrats, political enemies and selfish relatives to
commit him and get him out of the way.
The Advertising Council has touted ACTION--American Council to Improve
Our Neighborhoods, Box 462, Radio City Station, New York 20, N. Y.--an
organization for urban renewal. Of the 66 persons on the ACTION Board of
Directors, a controlling majority are:
known members of the Council on Foreign Relations--such as Philip
L. Graham and Stanley Marcus;
known members of important CFR affiliates--such as, Sidney Weinberg
of the Business Advisory Council;
union bosses like Harry C. Bates, Ben Fischer, Joseph D. Keenan,
Jacob S. Potofsky, Walter Reuther;
bureaucrats in charge of various "Housing Authorities," including
Dr. Robert Weaver, Kennedy's present Housing Administrator whose
appointment was challenged in the Senate because of Dr. Weaver's
alleged communist front record;
"liberal" politicians dedicated to the total socialist
revolution--such as, Joseph S. Clark, Jr., U. S. Senator from
Pennsylvania;
officials of construction and real estate firms which can make
mammoth profits on urban renewal projects and who are also
"liberal" in their support of all governmental controls and
subsidies, the tools for converting capitalism into socialism--such
as, William Zeckendorf;
representatives of organizations also "liberal" in the sense
indicated above--such as, Philip M. Klutznick of B'nai B'rith, and
Mrs. Kathryn H. Stone of the League of Women Voters.
* * * * *
The Advertising Council supports United Nations propaganda.
The 1959 annual report of the United States Committee for the United
Nations pays special tribute to the "radio-TV campaign, conducted
through the cooperation of the Advertising Council and the National
Association of Broadcasters." Here are some passages, from this tribute,
which show how the Advertising Council gets one-world socialist
propaganda into millions of American homes:
"Perry Como read the UN spot personally to his audience of
33,000,000."
"Jack Paar ... [showed] a filmed visit to the UN by his daughter,
Randy ... following a splendid statement [by Paar]. This 7-minute
segment of the show reached a minimum of 30,000,000 viewers."
"The campaign received tremendous recognition also on Meet the
Press, the Today Show, I Love Lucy, the Desilu Playhouse, and the
Jack Benny Show, among many others."
"Broadcast kits went out to every radio and television station in
the country."
A recent accomplishment of the Advertising Council was its saturation
bombing (1961) of the American public with propaganda in support of
Kennedy's Youth Peace Corps.