The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles and the Rise of America's Secret Government

by David Talbot

The top corporate executives, government leaders, and high-ranking military officers moved fluidly in and out of one another’s worlds, exchanging official roles, socializing in the same clubs, and educating their children at the same exclusive schools. Mills called this professional and social synchronicity “the fraternity of the successful.” Within this system of American power, Mills saw corporate chiefs as the first among equals. Long interlocked with the federal government, corporate leaders came to dominate the “political directorate” during World War II. The United States had largely become a democracy in form only. More than half of a century before the John Roberts–era Supreme Court that legally sanctioned corporate control of the electoral process, Mills recognized that the shift toward oligarchy was already well under way: “The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has [now] reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds.”