1968

The 17th Bilderberg Meeting convened 87 of the world’s most influential leaders at a ski lodge in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains in the most convulsive spring of the postwar era—six days after Pierre Trudeau was sworn in as the host country’s prime minister, three weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination set American cities burning, six weeks after the London Gold Pool’s collapse cracked the dollar-gold system, and days before Paris rose in the May ’68 revolt. The leaked record shows a room prescient about Prague, candid about America’s wounds—and silent, remarkably, about the monetary crack beneath its own feet. This evidence-based analysis examines what actually happened at the world’s most scrutinized private conference.

• Mont Tremblant hosted the 17th Bilderberg Meeting from April 26 to 28, 1968, with 87 participants at the Lodge—the Laurentians resort founded in 1939 by Philadelphia millionaire Joe Ryan around Canada’s first chairlift
• It was Canada’s second Bilderberg, after Lac-Beauport 1961—opening the sequence that would run through Montebello 1983, King City 1996, and Ottawa 2006
• The agenda paired East-West relations amid the Prague Spring against the internationalization of business—George Ball’s world-company paper an early manifesto of globalization—with off-agenda talks on student revolt and Johnson’s abdication
• Pierre Trudeau attended six days into his premiership, beside his predecessor Lester Pearson and the future leaders of both sides of Quebec’s sovereignty wars—while the gold crisis, weeks old, went unnamed even in the balance-of-payments annex
• No official conclusions or resolutions were released, following the conference’s traditional Chatham House Rule approach

Introduction

From April 26 to 28, 1968, 87 of the world’s most powerful figures gathered at the Lodge at Mont Tremblant—the alpine village a young American millionaire named Joe Ryan had willed into being in 1939 around the first chairlift in Canada, by 1968 the premier ski resort of the Laurentians, secluded, self-contained, and empty in late April—for what has become the most scrutinized private conference on the planet. The 17th Bilderberg Meeting continued its tradition of bringing together political leaders, central bankers, business executives, academics, and media figures for off-the-record discussions on pressing global issues—chaired by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, with Princess Beatrix observing and Prince Claus in the party, and with a host-country tableau no other year can match: the prime minister of Canada, six days into the job.

No Bilderberg ever met in a stranger season. The Tet Offensive had broken American confidence in January; the London Gold Pool had collapsed in March, forcing the two-tier gold market that was the dollar system’s first great crack; Johnson had renounced re-election on March 31; King had been murdered on April 4, with cities burning as the delegates flew in; Dubček’s Prague Spring bloomed under Moscow’s darkening watch; and days after the conference dispersed, the Sorbonne closed, the barricades rose, and France stopped. The leaked record preserves how the transatlantic establishment read that vortex from a quiet Quebec mountain—what it saw clearly, and what it did not name at all. Understanding where elite consensus forms, and where it goes silent, provides crucial context for interpreting world events.

In this comprehensive analysis, you’ll learn:

• The verified facts about the 1968 Mont Tremblant meeting, drawn from the leaked 32-page conference report, the working papers, and the participant list
• The new prime minister at the table—and the future leaders of both sides of Quebec’s sovereignty debate beside him
• How the room read the Prague Spring four months before the tanks—and the gold crisis it never named
• George Ball’s world-company paper: globalization’s manifesto, twenty years early
• The off-agenda talks on student revolt and Johnson’s abdication—delivered days before Paris exploded

The Historical Context: Canada’s Second Turn, in the Laurentians

Origins in Post-War Europe

The Bilderberg Meetings originated in 1954 at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands. Polish political adviser Józef Retinger and Dutch Prince Bernhard initiated the conference with a clear Cold War objective: strengthening transatlantic relations and addressing anti-American sentiment in Western Europe. The conference adopted the Chatham House Rule, allowing participants to use information received but not attribute statements to specific speakers—a practice that continues today. In 1968 Bernhard presided over his fifteenth conference, with Ernst van der Beugel and Joseph Johnson at the twin secretariats and Arnold Lamping deputizing for Europe—the founding machinery running at full stride as the world it managed shook.

Canada’s Place in Bilderberg History

Mont Tremblant 1968 was Canada’s second Bilderberg, in a national sequence worth stating exactly: the Manoir St-Castin at Lac-Beauport outside Quebec City hosted first in April 1961, Mont Tremblant followed seven years later, then Montebello 1983, King City 1996, and Ottawa 2006—five hostings, keeping Canada among the group’s most frequent hosts. The 1968 Canadian bench was the national establishment at a hinge of its own: Trudeau six days a prime minister, Pearson the Nobel laureate he had replaced, central bank governor Louis Rasminsky, defense chief General Jean Allard, elder statesman Paul Martin Sr.—and, extraordinarily in hindsight, the two men who would captain the opposing sides of Quebec’s constitutional wars: Jacques Parizeau, the future sovereigntist premier of the 1995 referendum, and Claude Ryan of Le Devoir, the future federalist leader of the 1980 No—both at the table nine months after de Gaulle’s Vive le Québec libre had electrified Montreal.

The Geopolitical Moment

Spring 1968 was the postwar order under simultaneous assault. In money, the March run on gold had broken the London Gold Pool—the fixing suspended in mid-March, and a two-tier market improvised, central banks trading at thirty-five dollars while the free price floated: the Bretton Woods system’s first open crack, six weeks old as the delegates arrived. In war, Tet had turned American opinion and Johnson into a lame duck. In the streets, King’s murder had set a hundred cities burning three weeks before; in Prague, Dubček’s Action Programme tested how much freedom Moscow would tolerate; in Paris, a student agitation at Nanterre was days from closing the Sorbonne and detonating the general strike no one at Mont Tremblant predicted. Ahead lay Robert Kennedy’s murder in June, the tanks in August, Chicago, and Nixon in November—the year’s second half as merciless as its first. This historical continuity provides essential context for understanding how the steering committee shapes the conference, and for the group’s broader trajectory see the origins of Bilderberg from Cold War forum to modern global network.

The 1968 Mont Tremblant Meeting: Official Facts

Basic Details

The 17th meeting convened 87 participants from fifteen Western European countries, the United States, Canada, and international organizations under chairman Prince Bernhard—some third-party tallies reach the low nineties by counting officers, the observer, and staff in attendance. The documentation survives in unusual breadth: a leaked 32-page conference report—stamped personal and strictly confidential, not for publication—rests at Public Intelligence and, tellingly, in the archives of Rome’s Istituto Affari Internazionali, alongside the participant list, the working papers, and the separately circulated texts of the two off-agenda talks. As always: no votes, no resolutions, no communiqué—the discussions confidential, the press excluded, every participant speaking in a purely personal capacity.

The Official Agenda Topics

The leaked report documents two items, plus material the agenda could not contain:

1. The Relations Between the West and the Communist Countries – On Richard Löwenthal’s pre-circulated paper “What Is Happening to Détente?”—corrected by its own author at the podium as Moscow’s grip visibly tightened around the Prague Spring
2. Internationalization of Business – On George Ball’s “Some Implications of the World Company” and two French papers including Henri Hartung’s on the social aspect—the multinational corporation theorized as an actor that plans by the world economy rather than any national one

Outside the printed agenda, two talks on April 27 were circulated separately to participants: Cornell president James Perkins on the worldwide wave of student unrest, and Bill Moyers on why Johnson had renounced re-election. And a closing annex recorded a discussion of the American balance of payments that, the report concedes, fell outside the agenda’s compass.

Why These Topics Matter

The two items map the coming decade’s twin anxieties with uncanny economy: whether the alliance could survive détente, and whether the nation-state could survive the multinational. Ball’s paper stands as an early manifesto of what would later be called globalization—the world company outgrowing national economies two decades before the vocabulary existed—delivered to a room containing Ford, Rockefeller, Agnelli, Pirelli, Olivetti, and the World Bank’s brand-new president McNamara: the thesis presented to its own subject matter. The off-agenda material preserves the year’s temperature: Moyers describing a weary, wounded president driven partly by the wish to make his peace overture credible to Hanoi, and Perkins diagnosing the revolt of a detached pre-adult class with the observation—days before the barricades—that “France is in the agony of a general student rebellion.” The threads join China and Russia in Bilderberg debates and Ball’s world company anchors the secret-world-government question at its most literal; the full sweep is mapped in what is discussed at Bilderberg meetings.

Who Attended: The 1968 Participant List

Political Leadership

The list carried a six-day-old premiership, a Nobel laureate, and the ghosts of elections to come:

• Pierre Trudeau – Canada’s prime minister since April 20, six days before the meeting, his June election already called; Lester Pearson – the predecessor he had just replaced; Paul Martin Sr.; Jacques Parizeau and Claude Ryan – the future captains of Quebec’s Yes and No; Louis Rasminsky – governor of the Bank of Canada
• Senator Henry Jackson and Congressman Charles Mathias; George Ball – paper author; C. Douglas Dillon – the former treasury secretary, and Frederick Deming – the serving treasury under secretary for monetary affairs, the two-tier system’s own manager; the veteran diplomats Robert Murphy and Arthur Dean; Thomas Gates – a former defense secretary; Bill Moyers
• Joseph Luns and Barend Biesheuvel – the Dutch foreign minister and future premier; Egon Bahr – Ostpolitik’s architect-in-waiting, with Birrenbach, Mommer, and Fritz Berg for Germany; Pierre Mendès-France – the former French premier, weeks from becoming the May crisis’s invoked alternative; Bjarni Benediktsson – Iceland’s premier, opening the three consecutive lists this series records; Enoch Powell – days after the Birmingham speech that had just ended his shadow-cabinet career; Altiero Spinelli – the federalist; Turkey’s Birgi and Türkmen; Norway’s Tidemand

Intelligence and Defense

• No serving intelligence chiefs appear under their own titles; the defense file sat with General Jean Allard – Canada’s chief of the defence staff, host-country soldier at the table—alongside former defense secretary Gates, Norway’s Tidemand, and Robert McNamara – two months out of the Pentagon and newly president of the World Bank

Technology Sector

• None in the modern sense—the era’s unbroken pattern, twenty years before the first information-age session at Telfs—though Ericsson’s Björn Lundvall and Olivetti’s Roberto Olivetti put the communications and calculating industries at the table, and the agenda’s world company was the institutional form the technology sector would one day perfect

Finance and Industry

• David Rockefeller – Chase; Henry Ford II – the world company in person; Giovanni Agnelli, Leopoldo Pirelli, and Aurelio Peccei – the Italian industrial bench, Peccei months from co-founding the Club of Rome; Otto Wolff von Amerongen; Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Jacques de Fouchier, and Wilfrid Baumgartner – France; Stavros Niarchos – the shipping magnate; Henry J. Heinz II; Emilio Collado – Standard Oil; Gabriel Hauge; Victor Umbricht
• The Benelux and Nordic bench: Jacques Solvay and Baron Snoy et d’Oppuers – Belgium, the Rome Treaty signatory; Leif Höegh – Norwegian shipping; Dieter Spethmann – Germany; with Canada’s Allen Lambert, Anthony Griffin, and the host business establishment

Media and Academia

• Bill Moyers – Newsday, delivering the Johnson talk; Claude Ryan – Le Devoir; Alberto Ronchey and Ugo Stille – Italy; Terkel Terkelsen – Denmark; Paul Lendvai – Austria; Herman Sandberg – Netherlands
• The academic bench: Zbigniew Brzezinski – Columbia, nine years from the West Wing; James Perkins – Cornell, present this year and delivering the student-revolt talk; Richard Löwenthal – the détente paper’s author; Alastair Buchan – the ISS; Raymond Vernon – Harvard’s scholar of the multinational, matched to the agenda; Andrew Shonfield; Leonard Beaton; and Willem Visser ‘t Hooft – the World Council of Churches, conscience at the table

What the Mix Reveals

The 1968 participant composition revealed three distinct patterns. First, a monetary bench without a monetary agenda: a central bank governor, two treasury statesmen including the two-tier system’s serving manager, and the dollar’s great creditors—assembled six weeks after gold cracked, for a conference that never named it.

Second, the world company met its theorists: Ball’s paper, Vernon’s scholarship, and the multinationals themselves—Ford, Fiat, Chase, Pirelli—debating their own implications.

Third, futures stacked on every bench: Brzezinski toward the NSC, Biesheuvel toward the Dutch premiership, Bahr toward the Eastern treaties, Parizeau and Ryan toward their referendums, Peccei toward the Club of Rome—and Trudeau already arrived, six days in. This network effect—bringing together people who rarely interact in public forums—constitutes Bilderberg’s primary function, regardless of claims that Bilderberg is a secret world government.

The New Prime Minister and the Crisis Not Named

The year’s first storyline is the host tableau. Trudeau had won his party’s leadership on April 6, been sworn in on April 20, and called his election for June 25—and on April 26 he sat down at a Bilderberg table in his own Laurentians, six days a prime minister, beside the predecessor he had replaced and a national establishment that included, unknowably, the two future field commanders of Quebec’s sovereignty battles. Nine months after de Gaulle’s balcony cry in Montreal, the constitutional question that would dominate Canada for a generation was embodied at the table without appearing on the agenda—and the fringe literature that has since cast the meeting as the cradle of manufactured Quebec nationalism finds no support in a record that shows no such discussion at all: the claim belongs to conspiracy theory, not history, per the standard of our evidence-based analysis of Bilderberg criticism.

The second storyline is the great silence. The balance-of-payments annex—itself an admission that money had forced its way into a conference built to exclude it—discusses the American deficit structurally, reciting the reserve arithmetic of two decades: gold down from some twenty-five billion dollars to eleven or twelve, foreign-held dollars up fourfold. What it never mentions, six weeks after the event, is the event: no Gold Pool, no two-tier market, no Bretton Woods by name—with the system’s own operator, Deming, in the room. Beside that silence stands the record’s clarity elsewhere: Löwenthal amending his own détente paper as Moscow tightened its grip, a British voice judging Czechoslovakia graver for the Soviets than Yugoslavia’s old defection, a Canadian dismissing the détente hope as an “illusion”—pessimism the August tanks would vindicate—and a Dutch participant tracing America’s tarnished image among the young to Vietnam, social disintegration, and the murders of Kennedy and King. The room read politics with precision and money with averted eyes: the same establishment blindness this series documents again, unchanged, at Woodstock three years on.

Analysis: What We Can and Cannot Conclude

What We Know With Certainty

Based on official sources and verified reporting:

• The meeting occurred April 26-28, 1968 at the Lodge, Mont Tremblant, with 87 participants—the 17th Bilderberg and Canada’s second—documented by the leaked 32-page report, the working papers, and the participant list
• The agenda ran on Löwenthal’s détente paper and the Ball-Hartung business papers, with the Perkins and Moyers talks circulated separately and the balance-of-payments annex appended
• Trudeau, Pearson, Parizeau, Claude Ryan, Rasminsky, Allard, Jackson, Dillon, Deming, Mendès-France, Powell, Bahr, Biesheuvel, Benediktsson, Rockefeller, Ford, Agnelli, Pirelli, Peccei, Niarchos, McNamara, Brzezinski, and Visser ‘t Hooft appear on the documented roster; Kissinger—then a Harvard professor months from the Nixon White House—does not
• The record shows Prague read with documented skepticism and the gold crisis unnamed even in the monetary annex
• No resolutions, votes, or policy statements were produced

Probable Indirect Influences

While causation cannot be proven, circumstantial patterns suggest informal coordination:

Ball’s world-company thesis, endorsed by the room that embodied it, is consistent with Bilderberg’s broader role as an incubator of the pro-integration, pro-multinational Atlantic consensus the next decades executed—discussion, not decision, but discussion among the deciders. Perkins’s student-revolt diagnosis opened the introspective thread the group pursued for three straight years, at Marienlyst, Bad Ragaz, and Woodstock. And the détente pessimism rehearsed the guarded dual-track posture the alliance formalized after August. Frames, not commands: the tanks, the elections, and the barricades belonged to others.

What Remains Speculation

The report’s anonymization leaves its best lines unattributed—the American who delivered the balance-of-payments statement is unnamed, though Deming and Dillon both sat in the room, and the inference tempts but cannot bind. The fringe claim that the meeting engineered Canadian or Quebec nationalism has no documentary basis. The list carries the era’s transcription caveats, examined in our guide to official vs leaked Bilderberg attendee lists. And the year predates all organized tracking—Jim Tucker’s pursuit began at Montebello in 1983—leaving the leaked papers as the record, with the narratives inherited by Daniel Estulin’s chronicles uncorroborated by them.

The Legacy of Founding Figures

Understanding Bilderberg’s evolution requires acknowledging its architects. Founding figures like Józef Retinger built the forum in 1954; Mont Tremblant shows the founding order meeting the year that would eventually unmake it. Bernhard chaired his fifteenth conference with eight to run; van der Beugel and Johnson steered; Ball of the first meeting‘s generation supplied the weekend’s most consequential paper—the world company that named the coming order. Everything this series has traced backward converges here: the introspective trilogy about to begin, the monetary blindness repeated at Woodstock, the détente argument running to the Ostpolitik cliffhangers, all seeded in one Laurentian weekend—the arc traced in Bilderberg’s complete history.

The 1968 meeting demonstrated both continuity and adaptation. Core principles—privacy, diversity of viewpoints, and transatlantic focus—held through the most violent spring the group ever convened in.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where and when was Bilderberg 1968 held?

A: The 17th Bilderberg Meeting was held April 26-28, 1968, at the Lodge at Mont Tremblant in Quebec’s Laurentian mountains—the resort founded in 1939 by Joe Ryan around Canada’s first chairlift, secluded and off-season in late April.

Q: Did Prime Minister Trudeau really attend days into office?

A: Yes—he was sworn in on April 20, 1968 and appears on the participant list of a meeting that opened April 26, with his June 25 election already called. His predecessor Lester Pearson attended alongside him.

Q: Did the meeting debate the gold crisis?

A: Remarkably, no. Six weeks after the London Gold Pool collapsed and the two-tier market was created, the closing balance-of-payments annex discusses the American deficit in structural terms without naming the Pool, the two-tier system, or Bretton Woods—despite the presence of the treasury’s own monetary under secretary. The silence prefigures the group’s documented non-discussion of the system’s collapse at Woodstock in 1971.

Q: How did the room read the Prague Spring?

A: With documented skepticism. Löwenthal corrected his own paper to note Moscow’s tightening grip; speakers judged the Czechoslovak events graver for the Soviets than Yugoslavia’s defection and saw Eastern populations straining against Soviet control; a Canadian dismissed the détente hope outright. The invasion came less than four months later—the pessimism proved right, though no one predicted the tanks.

Q: What were the off-agenda talks?

A: On April 27, Cornell president James Perkins analyzed the global wave of student unrest—observing that France was already in the grip of a general student rebellion, days before the Sorbonne closed—and Bill Moyers explained Johnson’s renunciation, describing a weary, wounded president. Both texts were circulated separately from the printed report and survive.

Q: Do minutes of the 1968 discussions exist?

A: A 32-page internal conference report—summarizing the sessions without attribution—leaked and survives at Public Intelligence and in the Istituto Affari Internazionali archives, with the participant list, the working papers, and the Perkins-Moyers texts. See do Bilderberg meeting minutes exist?

Q: What’s the relationship between Bilderberg and other elite forums?

A: Both Bilderberg and the World Economic Forum in Davos convene global elites, but Davos is a large, on-the-record public event while Bilderberg is smaller, older, invitation-only, and entirely off the record—and in 1968 Davos did not exist: Klaus Schwab’s first symposium came in January 1971. See also the Trilateral Commission—four years from conception, with Brzezinski already at this table—the Council on Foreign Relations, and the 5 key differences between Davos and Bilderberg.

Key Takeaways

1. Documented Facts: The 1968 Mont Tremblant meeting occurred April 26-28 with 87 participants—the 17th Bilderberg and Canada’s second, documented by the leaked 32-page report, working papers, and participant list.
2. The Six-Day Prime Minister: Trudeau attended within a week of taking office, beside Pearson and the future captains of Quebec’s sovereignty wars.
3. The Gold Silence: Six weeks after the two-tier market, the monetary annex never named the crisis—the establishment blindness repeated in 1971.
4. Prague Read Right: The room’s documented skepticism about détente—one voice calling it an illusion—was vindicated by August’s tanks.
5. The World Company: Ball’s paper theorized globalization to the men who ran it—the year’s most consequential text.
6. The Year in the Room: King’s murder, Johnson’s abdication, and France’s gathering rebellion all surface in the record—days before Paris proved the last reading prophetic.
7. No Evidence of Direct Control: The barricades, the tanks, the elections, and the monetary improvisations belonged to students, soviets, voters, and central banks; the room read some and missed others. Influence operates through informal consensus-building and networking rather than directive decision-making.

Conclusion: Mont Tremblant in Context

The 1968 Mont Tremblant meeting is the establishment’s candid mirror in the year the world cracked. The people who managed the dollar system, the multinationals, and the alliance withdrew to a Quebec ski lodge between King’s murder and the Paris barricades—and the 32 pages preserve exactly what they saw and what they would not look at: Prague’s danger named, America’s wounds admitted, the young diagnosed on the eve of their revolt, and the monetary crack beneath the table left unspoken with its own manager present. As a document of elite perception under maximum stress, no year in the series is more revealing.

The verdict is the series’ steady one, sharpened by the season: the room resolved nothing, commanded nothing, and was surprised by nearly everything within months—yet its two chosen subjects, the survival of détente and the rise of the world company, turned out to be the decade’s actual architecture. Reading well and ruling are different things; 1968 shows the group doing the first, and history doing the rest.

Viewed from a distance, Mont Tremblant 1968 stands at the head of the passage this series has traced: after it came the introspective trilogy, the last all-male list, the firsts of Knokke, and the long turbulence. The story continues at the 1969 meeting at Marienlyst—eleven days after de Gaulle, in Hamlet’s shadow.

Sources

• The leaked 1968 Bilderberg Conference Report (32 pages, “PERSONAL AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL”) and the 1968 participant list, archived at Public Intelligence and the Istituto Affari Internazionali; Wikispooks, “Bilderberg/1968”
• George Ball’s working paper “Some Implications of the World Company,” Richard Löwenthal’s “What Is Happening to Détente?,” Henri Hartung’s paper on the social aspect, and the separately circulated remarks of James Perkins and Bill Moyers of April 27, 1968 (Public Intelligence Bilderberg archive)
• LBMA, World Gold Council, and Federal Reserve History on the March 1968 London Gold Pool collapse, the suspension of the fixing, and the two-tier gold market; standard Bretton Woods reserve statistics on the postwar decline of US monetary gold
• The Canadian Encyclopedia and Bank of Canada records on Trudeau’s April 6 leadership win, April 20 swearing-in, and June 25 election, on Pearson, and on Rasminsky; Ville de Mont-Tremblant heritage records and resort histories on Joe Ryan’s 1939 founding of the Lodge
• Standard records of the 1968 calendar: Tet, Johnson’s March 31 renunciation, the King assassination of April 4, May ’68 in Paris, the Kennedy assassination of June 5, the August 20-21 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Nixon’s November election; World Economic Forum records of the first 1971 Davos symposium; fringe Quebec-conspiracy claims (henrymakow.com and related sites) — cited only to be identified as unsupported by the documentary record
• Wikipedia, “List of Bilderberg meetings” and participant biographies (Trudeau, Pearson, Parizeau, Claude Ryan, Mendès-France, Powell, Bahr, Biesheuvel, Brzezinski, Peccei, Niarchos, McNamara); Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary — cited only to date the tracker tradition’s start at 1983