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black robes marching in a procession up to a giant statue of the Great Owl Moloch, and public displays of drunkenness, the ‘Grovers’ are usually entertained by serious speakers at their ‘lakeside lectures’. “There is a famous photograph taken in 1995 of past and future presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush casually dressed, giving one of these lectures to fellow Grovers. It is claimed that every Republican president since Herbert Hoover has been a member, and most, but not all, Democrats.”

The Round Table One of the oldest but now defunct, the Round Table was unique among secret societies as it had the distinction of having been founded and sustained with African money via its founding father, Cecil John Rhodes. According to Burnett and Games, the Round Table was the secret society behind the then dominant British Empire which helped it maintain its control over the world. “This became the template for all future secret groups that never bothered themselves with the immature practice of dressing up in robes, but wore suits and wielded control over financial and commodity markets.” The Round Table was the brainchild of Cecil Rhodes who made his fortune in South Africa and gave his name to Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe. “The history of the Round Table,” according to Burnett and Games, “was first published in 1966 by Prof Carroll Quigley in his massive book, Tragedy and Hope. A professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Quigley devoted only 30 pages of his 1,300-page book to the Round Table, yet said later that those 30 pages cost him his US government contracts to lecture. At the time his book was published, one of his brightest students at Georgetown was the future president, William Jefferson Clinton. “Quigley revealed: ‘I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for 20 years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims, and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies, but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known’.” So what was the Round Table? This secret group was first written about by Prof Quigley in his earlier book called The Anglo-American Establishment. Though written in 1949, the book was not published until 1981, four years after Quigley’s death. He revealed that the Round Table was founded “one wintry afternoon in February 1891” when “three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London... These men were organising a secret society that was, for more than 50 years, to be one of the most important forces in the formulation and execution of British imperial and foreign policy”. The three men were Cecil Rhodes, William T. Stead (a famous British journalist), and Reginald Baliol Brett (friend and confidant of Queen Victoria and future adviser to both King Edward VII and King George V). A fourth man was soon added – Alfred Milner who would take over the leadership of the group when Cecil Rhodes died in 1902. The Round Table aimed to “unite the world, and above all the English-speaking world, in a federal structure around Britain”. According to the group, “the goal could best be achieved by a secret band of men united to one another by devotion to the common cause and by personal loyalty to one another... This band should pursue its goal by secret political and economic influence behind the scenes and by control of journalistic, educational and propaganda agencies”.

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Opponents? Not quite: Both George Bush and his 2004 Democratic ‘opponent’ John Kerry are Skull & Bonesmen – same stable Below: The Grand Master: David Rockefeller, founded the Trilateral Commission in 1972 while still chairman of the CFR
When Rhodes died, according to Burnett and Games, “two things happened that bore great importance for the future of the AngloAmerican ‘special relationship’. Firstly, Milner took over leadership of the Round Table, and secondly, the massive fortune left in Cecil Rhodes’ will, enabled the setting up of the Rhodes Scholarships, which allowed selected students from all over the world to study at Oxford University [in England]. “These students would each have ‘impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life, the dream of the founder [Cecil Rhodes]’ – one-world government. The most famous of these students would be Bill Clinton [the 42nd president of the USA].” Membership of the Round Table was reserved exclusively for Britons. But later, Milner hired George Louis Beer, a historian at Columbia University, as his American correspondent to rewrite the story of the American War of Independence, and, as a bonus, honoured him with the first non-British membership of the Round Table. But Milner came unstuck when he tried to encourage Beer to set up an American subsidiary of the Round Table. The Columbia historian rejected the idea, because he knew that no American would join a movement to federate the British Empire. Instead, Beer pressed himself into the creation of the American version of the Round Table, totally independent of Milner’s Round Table, called the Inquiry, whose influence “would eventually dwarf that of its British counterpart. It would be linked with modern, present-day secret groups such as the Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, and dwarf those too”.

The Inquiry In fact, the man credited with the actual founding of the Inquiry in 1917 was Colonel Edward Mandell House, the anonymous author of what became the influential book, Philip Dru: The Administrator. Mandell House, like Louis Beer, was an anglophile, and a first generation American of English ancestry. He joined ranks with the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Beer, and impressed upon his (House’s) friend and protéégéé President Woodrow Wilson with the ideas of setting up an “intelligence agency” for foreign affairs. The president agreed and funded the group through the secret President’s Fund for National Safety and Defence. The only condition President Wilson put down was that the “intelligence agency” should not be based in Washington DC. So Mandell House and his friends found a small office in the New York Public Library and pitched their camp there. Later, their colleague, James T. Shortwell, another historian of Columbia University, gave the group its name: the Inquiry. Soon Mandell House, an energetic man, had built the Inquiry into an organisation of 100 scholars who “gathered information and discussed the likely future state of the world after the defeat of the [German] Kaiser. They were committed to the concept of globalism with its removal of all economic barriers between nations and the creation of ‘a general association of nations’. Among the Inquiry researchers was the young Allen Dulles, future head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).” One other major contribution of Mandell House was the ideas in his novel, Philip Dru: The Administrator, which he wrote and published anonymously in 1912. “It was such an influential book,” say Burnett and Games, “that President Woodrow Wilson reorganised the United States’ financial structure in accordance with that described in it. “Wilson’s legislative programme similarly followed that outlined

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