Udo J. Keppler

Those advisers, whether they served Democratic or Republican presidents, were men of similar backgrounds and outlook. For a long time the policymaking elite has been drawn from an Eastern-based upper class educated at Ivy League colleges and law schools, entrenched in the Wall Street law firms and the major banks, and directly or indirectly connected, through a network of interlocking directorates but especially through its control of finance, to the giant manufacturing corporations. If one can speak of an American ruling class—big capitalists, high-level executives and managers, highly paid corporation lawyers, and heads of the military bureaucracy—this WASP-ish élite, strategically located at the heart of the economy and endowed with the advantages of genteel birth and what passes for cultivation, constitutes its most highly developed sector.