"I thought about it for weeks and weeks," says Niles, who is now 84. "I decided that the thing to do would be to write an open letter to the President and get as many business executives to sign it as possible, because businesspeople were generally thought of as supporting the war.I worked up a draft of the letter and sent it to a few friends I knew in business."
In January 1967, Niles bought space in The Washington Post and published the letter, which was signed by 173 business executives. Shortly thereafter, he formed a group out of the signatories and called it Business Executives Move for Vietnam Peace. At the height of its influence, according to Niles, this historic initiative included roughly 4,000 members, and nearly everyone agrees it played a significant role in the movement to end the war. After the war, the organization tried to redefine its goals, even renaming itself Business Executives for New National Priorities. But it was never able to recapture its former influence.
Then, one evening in 1982, Niles had dinner with a businessman named Stanley Weiss.
For most of his life, Stanley Weiss had thought little about war, peace, or anything else having to do with national security. He was too busy living a fairy tale. In his early 20s, Weiss saw the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, in which Humphrey Bogart searches for gold in Mexico. Weiss liked the idea so much that he went to Mexico to relive Bogart's adventure. For three years, from 1951 to 1954, he prospected for gold in the Central Plains of Mexico near San Luis Potosi. He never found any. But he learned his rocks, and he learned to survive. "They were dangerous times," he says. "Everybody was always armed. You know, I tell people now that nuclear war is bad for business because being dead is bad for business.But that's where I got that line. I mean, if I'd gotten shot, I never would've had a business."
In 1954, a cab driver in Charcas, Mexico, told Weiss that he knew of a vast mound of manganese that he would show Weiss if they could form a partnership. Weiss agreed immediately: He knew that in many ways manganese -- which is essential, for example, in the production of steel -- was as good as gold. After a two-hour march along a dirt trail, Weiss saw what he describes as a "mountain of manganese," and, in fact, the mine he soon opened bore that name. Borrowing $5,000 to get started, he began shipping tons of the stuff to processors. "First I was starving to death," Weiss says, "and then I struck it rich." He was not yet 30.
In the years that followed, Weiss opened his own processing plant in El Paso, and incorporated his efforts as American Minerals Inc., of which he is still chairman. But manganese gave Weiss more than an exotic tale to tell and more than an economic power base; it also set in motion a series of interrelated events and reflections that ultimately led him to Henry Niles. The linkage began to build in 1975, when Weiss wrote a definitive text on managanese.To his surprise, he was immediately recognized as an expert on strategic minerals, and was subsequently invited to spend a year as a fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. There he began to see that if manganese was important to the nation's security, then the very idea of security must include much more than its common definition as military might. He also began to think he might have a special role to play in getting the business community involved in natonal-security issues.
Weiss spent the next year searching for groups or individuals who might already be working on programs involving businesspeople. It was a sparse landscape."I kept thinking there must be somebody who knew more about these things than I did," Weiss recalls, "but I never found anyone. There were people who said they'd help, but they never did." Then he thought of Henry Niles. Weiss had heard so many garbled and contentious impressions of what Business Executives for New National Priorities was or wasn't still doing that he decided to ask the man himself. In the spring of 1982, the two men had dinner together at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. There, Niles asked Weiss to take over what remained of the group. Weiss refused, but said he would consider starting a new organization.
Among other things, Weiss wanted the new group to be distinctly nonpartisan, unlike Niles's group, which he felt was viewed as a "left liberal" encampment. He also felt that the group should be a fully accredited trade organization, because under the Internal Revenue Service's rules, that was the only way the group could accept tax-deductible contributions from members, yet preserve its status as a political lobby. In addition, as a trade association, the new group could work more easily with established trade organizations.
During the summer and fall of 1982, Weiss refined his plans, with substantial help from a few early supporters. Niles liked the plan so much that he gave his mailing list to Weiss and discontinued his own group. From his Washington apartment, Weiss sent out a mailing to Niles's list of roughly 2,000 names announcing the formation of Business Executives for National Security and soliciting memberships. "We had a fair response," Weiss says. "Unfortunately, about 50% of the people on the list were dead and maybe another 25% had moved. If you say we got about 200 members that would be about right."
Today Weiss enjoys pointing out that by granting BENS trade-associaton status in 1983, the IRS by definition agreed that the organization was working for the basic business interests of its members. "In other words," Weiss says, "they agree that being dead is bad for business."
