"I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity," so said John D. Rockefeller, the chairman of Standard Oil. Old man John D. Rockefeller, age 78, was not invited by President Woodrow Wilson to be a part of a secret committee in the winter of 1917-'18 to plan for the aftermath of World War I. Events might have turned out better if he had been included, for old "John D.," as the multi-millionaire was called, was the "master of disaster" - had dealt successfully with everything from huge oil derrick fires to the Ludlow Mining strike to the stock market panic of 1907. Wilson didn't call in the millionaire Rockefeller with his international connections because of Rockefeller's life-long Republican party affiliation. Would the Paris Peace of 1919 have turned out differently if the crusty oil man had sat at that long table is a conjecture open only to dreamers. What is known is that Wilson's select group of intellectuals dubbed "The Inquiry" used the global disaster known as "The Great War" as their opportunity to redefine American economic and foreign policy.

Woodrow Wilson was no pacifist; however, he did campaign for re-election in 1916 as "the president who'd kept us out of war." Confusion still reigns over the two events that ultimately drew us into the War - the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania and the Zimmerman Telegram. To date, those unprovoked catastrophes rank with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the list of unadulterated provocations. When the Lusitania went down, there were initial reports that the sinking was deliberate because of Albert L. Hopkins being aboard. Hopkins was president of the Newport News Shipbuilding facility that had laid the keels for so many of America's great battleships. Arthur Adams, president of U.S. Rubber Corporation, and Ogden Hammond, U.S. Ambassador to Spain, were mentioned as potential assassination targets; however, the international sportsman and philanthropist, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, was not considered a target.

Today there are dark conspiracy theorists at work who claim that Wilson advisor Edward M. House, a believer in one world government, actually coordinated the disaster to provoke an American response.

No proof of House's culpability has been forthcoming, but Edward M. House was one of the members of Wilson's covert group, The Inquiry.

Aside from House, who were the members of Woodrow Wilson's brain trust for reshaping America's and the world's economy following the Great War? Now we know the men who composed The Inquiry were Paul Warburg, Herbert Hoover, Harold Temperley, Lionel Curtis, Lord Eustace Percy, Christian Herter, James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University, Archibald Cary Coolidge of Harvard and Charles Seymour of Yale. Herbert Hoover's Republican credentials were not well-honed in the winter of 1917.

Like all clandestine activities, The Inquiry needed an out-of-the-way place to meet and plan. It just so happened that way up on 155th Street in New York City, out near the Polo Grounds where in the future the New York Giants and the New York Mets would play, there's a collection of Beaux Arts buildings known as Audubon Terrace. The architecturally significant buildings dating from the turn of the century include the American Numismatic Society, the Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the Hispanic Society of America, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Greek Orthodox Church.

Tucked away on a corner is the headquarters of the American Geographical Society (A.G.S.). Isaiah Bowman, Ph.D., a director of the A.G.S. and perhaps the leading geo-political thinker in America, was a confidante of Woodrow Wilson. Bowman arranged for the members of The Inquiry to meet in one of the secluded board rooms of the A.G.S. building in Audubon Terrace. No one at all would be suspicious of the important-looking men with attache cases who came and went daily from December 1917, through the spring of 1919. After all, the A.G.S. headquarters building was one of the most international sites in all of New York.

Paul Warburg was an immigrant to the United States coming from Hamburg, Germany, where his family owned the House of Warburg, one of the largest merchant banks in Germany.

Warburg was a frequenter to New York where his family did business on Wall Street and sometimes allied with the firm of Kuhn, Loeb on the underwriting of railroads. Warburg married a daughter of Kuhn, Loeb investment firm's managing partner, Solomon Loeb. Within two years Paul Warburg entered Kuhn, Loeb in New York as a liaison with the family bank, M.M. Warburg of Hamburg. Paul Warburg was one of Woodrow Wilson's first picks for the group, and in many ways, Warburg was the key economic intellectual - rivaling even John Maynard Keynes in England. Members came and went over 24 months, however, Warburg, Hoover, Percy and Christian Herter stayed the course.

Warburg had been on the famous so-called "duck-hunt" on Jekyl Island in the winter of 1910 - the clandestine gathering of financial elites who met under the guise of a sportsman's retreat, but in reality their purpose was to draw up the plans for a grand central bank for the U.S. that would be similar to the Bank of England. They used the name "Federal Reserve bank" as a less threatening moniker to allay the suspicions of an already dubious and mistrusting American public.

The Financial Panic of 1907 was, until 2008, the most perplexing of all the financial debacles. No one, not even John D. Rockefeller, saw it coming. Warburg was one of the few men alive who understood completely the notion of fractional banking theory then in play in Europe's central banks. The grand idea was seen as a panacea for smoothing banking operations in times of uncertainty.

Lionel Curtis was an Oxford-educated Brit who lectured widely in America on a theme of British Empire Federalism - a continuation of the old Cecil Rhodes Cairo to Cape Town Axis idea that was rudely interrupted by the Boer War Where did Wilson collect these zany characters that he allowed free rein to plan the grand scheme for the 20th century?

Many of the Wilson intimates were acquaintances of Edward M. House, a wealthy, but mysterious man who hailed from Houston. Some said that House's money came from his father who had been a Confederate blockade runner. One bold rumor alleged that the elder House had been entrusted in 1865 with the gold from the Texas treasury - that House was to take the gold to deposit in a London bank so that it could not be captured by the Federal army. The legend has it that the gold never made it to London. Whatever the case is, House never worked a day in his life, and he hobnobbed with the Rothchilds and the Astors and the Mellons. House became Wilson's most trusted advisor outside the cabinet, and it was House who had much in-put on the famed 14-point peace plan that Wilson took to Paris in 1919.

On the voyage over to France, Wilson's Secretary of State Robert Lansing had serious mistrust of the 23 idealists that Wilson's advisor Edward M. House insisted upon bringing along. Lansing had The Inquiry group on one of the lower decks of the U.S.S. George Washington while the State Department officials vied for Wilson's attention on the upper level. Once at Paris, House and unofficial advisors moved behind the scenes to manipulate the peace talks. Within a week both Lloyd-George of Britain and Clemenceau of France had seen enough of American idealism. Woodrow Wilson caught the influenza virus in Paris and House began to run the American end of things. Meanwhile, American millionaires Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford each launched their own international peace initiatives.

The world began to think of Americans as too idealistic to enter the arena of international diplomacy.

Back home the old man, John D. Rockefeller, the millionaire who carried his lunch to work in a paper bag, sat idly by unheard. What difference he may have made if he'd been included in the legendary small group.

Rockefeller had a different appreciation for Europe than did some of the other thinkers - and "John D." drove a hard bargain on every board that he sat on. "The Inquiry" continued to meet off and on after the war and eventually grew into an elaborate think tank that today is known as the Council on Foreign Relations.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).