"In the course of the year, officers and members of the Council and of the staff visited most of the Committees for the purpose of leading discussions at meetings, supervising Committee procedures and seeking the strengthening of Committee relations with the Council."
Although the Council on Foreign Relations had almost gained controlling influence on the government of the United States as early as 1941, it had failed to indoctrinate the American people for acceptance of what Colonel House had called a "positive" foreign policy.
In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt (although eager to get the United States into the Second World War and already making preparations for that tragedy) had to campaign for re-election with the same promise that Wilson had made in 1916--to keep us out of the European war. Even as late as the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the American people were still overwhelmingly "isolationist"--a word which internationalists use as a term of contempt but which means merely that the American people were still devoted to their nation's traditional foreign policy.
It was necessary for Roosevelt to take steps which the public would not notice or understand but which would inescapably involve the nation in the foreign war. When enough such sly involvement had been manipulated, there would come, eventually, some incident to push us over the brink into open participation. Then, any American who continued to advocate our traditional foreign policy of benign neutrality would be an object of public hatred, would be investigated and condemned by officialdom as a "pro-nazi," and possibly prosecuted for sedition.
The Council on Foreign Relations has heavy responsibility for the maneuvering which thus dragged America into World War II. One major step which Roosevelt took toward war (at precisely the time when he was campaigning for his third-term re-election on a platform of peace and neutrality to keep America out of war) was his radical alteration of traditional concepts of United States policy in order to declare Greenland under the protection of our Monroe Doctrine. The Council on Foreign Relations officially boasts full responsibility for this fateful step toward war.