The Council On Foreign Relations (CFR): Rockefeller's Think Tank on Foreign Policy

It's for life.

Today there are over 4,000 CFR members. Over 400 of them were in the Clinton Administration. A similiar number exists in the Bush Administration. They include George Herbert Walker Bush, William Jefferson Clinton, and John Forbes Kerry, along with Richard Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfield and Paul Wolfowitz.

From their website:

"The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators, students and , civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries."

From their website:

"Historians still differ about how seriously President Wilson, though a former university president, took this exercise. The notion had been pressed upon him by Edward M. House, his trusted aide; in the modern style, House would be called Wilson’s national security adviser. But there is no question about how seriously the intellectuals took their unprecedented mission.

IT ALL STARTED as an inquiry, indeed, “The Inquiry.” To the select few who knew, this was the name of a working fellowship of distinguished scholars, tasked to brief Woodrow Wilson about options for the postwar world once the kaiser and imperial Germany fell to defeat.

The vision that stirred the Inquiry became the work of the Council on Foreign Relations over the better part of a century: a program of systematic study by groups of knowledgeable specialists of differing ideological inclinations would stimulate a variety of papers and reports to guide the statecraft of policymakers."