chapter five

The Dominoes Fall

Henry Ford II resigned as a trustee of the Ford Foundation in 1976, 40 years after he assumed his first role at that foundation. His decision to leave, and the way it was interpreted by the press and then popularized by ideological groups with an axe to grind, created a myth about wayward foundations and frustrated founders that continues to reverberate to this day. In a chain of events that has grown into a movement toward time-limited foundations, Ford’s departure from his namesake foundation powerfully tipped over the first domino and set the others cascading into what now seems like free fall.

Edsel Ford, son of the first Henry Ford, established the Ford Foundation in 1936 with a gift of $25,000 and became the foundation’s first president. Because Edsel was then also the president of the Ford Motor Company and deeply involved in running it, he brought his son Henry Ford II onto the foundation board as one of the founding trustees and left to him the many responsibilities for attending to the establishment of the institution and its grantmaking. All the evidence is that Henry II viewed his obligation as being to “advance his personal agenda, drawn from the philanthropic interests of Edsel Ford, to be identified with the resolution of the important issues of his time.”1 In 1943, Edsel died unexpectedly of cancer, and Henry II was named the second president of the foundation, as well as chairman of its board of trustees. Two years after that, in 1945, Henry II became president of the auto company as well.

In his dual roles as both foundation president and board chairman, Henry II led the planning of everything about the Ford Foundation, including conceiving in 1948 the idea of establishing “The Study Committee,” which he charged with defining the mission of the foundation, and the recruitment of H. Rowan Gaither as the committee’s chair. In November 1948, he wrote Mr. Gaither and the seven other “Study Committee” members as follows:

“The Report of the Study” goes on to describe the Ford Foundation trustees’ reception of the Study Committee’s recommendations as follows:

In the opinion of the Trustees, the conclusions and recommendations of the Committee were influenced by and responsive to the best American judgment of our times.… The findings of the Study Committee are, in the opinion of the Trustees, of sufficient general interest and importance to warrant the publication of the General Report in its entirety. Publication of the Report was therefore authorized by special action of the Trustees on September 6, 1950. The opinions expressed in the Report are, of course, those of the members of the Study Committee and not necessarily those of the Trustees. Action taken by the Trustees on the Report, as well as a summary of the considerations underlying that action, has already been published in the Report of September 27, 1950, by the Trustees of The Ford Foundation.

Henry Ford II

Chairman, Board of Trustees

October, 19503

After the trustees’ approval of the Study Committee’s Report, Henry Ford II immediately set about recruiting someone to succeed him as president of the foundation and chose Paul G. Hoffman, head of the Marshall Plan in Europe, for that role. Along with many of the foundation’s trustees, Ford grew steadily unhappier with Hoffman’s leadership and, two years after hiring him, removed him from that role. Then, not surprisingly, he persuaded H. Rowan Gaither to become the foundation’s fourth president, a position Gaither held until resigning in 1956. The board chair at that point was the distinguished lawyer, banker, and federal government official John J. McCloy, who was soon to be succeeded in that role by Julius A. Stratton, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, Gaither and McCloy, in consultation with Henry Ford II, selected Henry T. Heald, then president of New York University, to become Gaither’s successor as Ford’s president. Heald held that office until 1965, after which he was succeeded by McGeorge Bundy, former national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who served as foundation president until 1979.

In 1955, as a foundation trustee, Henry Ford II, together with his friend and fellow trustee Donald K. David, vice chairman of the Ford Trustees and of the Trustees Executive Committee, played a leading role in the first major grant program implemented by the Ford Foundation—a $500 million endeavor called “The University and College Faculty Salaries and Hospital Grants Program”—that involved making grants “to every accredited college in the United States in support of faculty salaries.”4 That grant program was made necessary by the significant increase in the value of Ford Motor Company stock and the consequent public pressure on the foundation to show evidence of benefits flowing to the public in proportion to the growing endowment. Warren Weaver, a much-admired vice president of The Rockefeller Foundation, described the allocation of those grants:

The manner of distribution was surprisingly, and to many disappointingly, mechanical. Each of the country’s 630 privately-supported liberal arts colleges received a sum equal to their 1954–1955 faculty payroll. Each of 3,400 nonprofit hospitals received a sum determined by the number of births and patient days on an average annual basis.5

While it was—and still is—exceedingly unusual for a professionally staffed foundation to distribute grant funds in such a “cookie cutter” fashion, and while Ford was criticized in many foundation quarters for doing so, it goes without saying that others were overjoyed:

Note that the program was announced in a press release by Henry Ford II, who was then without any formal official foundation position other than that of trustee.7

Later on, in 1968, during the presidency of McGeorge Bundy, the foundation staff proposed investing a modest portion of the foundation’s assets to help establish in a district adjacent to the foundation a “United Nations Development Corporation, to provide office space, hotel space, and other facilities… [to] members of the international community.”8 This was the first time the foundation had ever done anything like that, but “Henry Ford II accepted the… plans for the U.N. development project without a single objection or question.”9

Henry Ford II remained on the board of trustees for 40 years. Despite relinquishing the chairmanship of the trustees in 1951, he continued to be the dominant trustee influence on the foundation’s major decision-making for another 25 years. Verne S. Atwater and Evelyn C. Walsh, authors of The Ford Foundation, describe Henry Ford II as “the key factor that enabled the foundation to function independently of the control or direct influence of the Ford Motor Company.”10 They go on to write the following:

Henry Ford II… played a critical role in organizing and selecting the leadership of the Foundation. He was also the determining factor in assuring the independence of the Foundation’s Board and staff from the inevitable public disputes caused by Foundation decisions in sensitive cultural and political issues that conflicted with the interests of the family, the Ford Motor Company and its dealers.11

Moreover, again according to Atwater and Walsh:

Nonetheless, in 1976 Ford decided that the time had come for him to resign from the foundation board. In his resignation letter written to Board Chairman Alexander Heard, he puts his reasons as follows:

I have served as a Trustee since 1943, which means that I have been involved, one way or another, in virtually every step of development from its rather informal beginnings to its present highly-structured state.

… As the son and grandson of the two founders, I have a uniquely special reason to want the Foundation to be an effective institution.… All in all, I have strongly positive feelings about my own and the family’s long-standing relationship with the Foundation.

In reflecting on my recent participation as a Trustee, however, I realize that I have not been approaching the task with quite the same enthusiasm as I once did. My interest in many of the things the Foundation is doing has waned considerably. I find it increasingly difficult to make a substantive contribution either to the policy-setting process or to the deliberations that result in giving directional thrust to the organization.

I don’t ascribe this sense of disengagement to any temporary set of conditions, either on my part or on the part of the Foundation. After 33 years I have come to the point where I have pretty much done all there is to do as a Trustee and have said all that there is to say. I think it is time for me to step aside and, accordingly, I wish to resign from the Board effective immediately.13

Ford then includes several paragraphs in his letter devoted to constructive suggestions about ways of strengthening the foundation, from “[scaling] down its activities to reflect its diminished resources”14 and resisting its practice of long-term repetitive support to some grantees, to devoting some of its grantmaking to the recognition of the importance and strengthening of America’s capitalist system and resisting the natural tendency of “large institutions” to become insular and afflicted by the “not invented here” syndrome.

Ford’s primary disappointment is clearly with what he regarded as the foundation’s unwillingness to deal adequately, presumably supportively, with America’s capitalist system. In A Time for Truth, William E. Simon, former secretary of the Treasury and later president of the John M. Olin Foundation, writes:

Those capitalists who, in the interests of “fairness,” have financed the intellectual opposition have seen their foundations literally taken over. The textbook case of such infiltration was dramatized recently when Henry Ford III [sic] resigned from the Ford Foundation. I called Mr. Ford on reading of this in the newspapers and asked him to explain how this had happened. He answered: “I tried for 30 years to change it from within but couldn’t.” Of course he couldn’t, not after he had allowed the Ford Foundation to become a veritable fortress of the philosophical opposition. One does not work from “within” the egalitarian world to change it; one can only work from without—and this absurd financing of one’s philosophical enemies must not be tolerated in the new foundations.15

Ford closes his letter with the following paragraphs, which hardly seem like the words of someone vexed by his failure to change a disappointing and intransigent institution:

The 33 years of my association with the Foundation have given me a great respect for the organization’s potential for good. The Foundation already has a magnificent record of achievement. I am confident that it is capable of still more significant contributions to the world in the years ahead.

My greatest satisfaction in all the years of my connection with the Foundation has been my association with the Trustees. The strength of the Institution is a true reflection of the caliber of those who have served on this Board. I have great admiration and a sense of deep appreciation for the members who gave of themselves so generously in the past, as well as those who are now serving. The future of the Foundation is in capable hands.

Although my formal role with the Foundation now comes to an end, my interest in its progress will continue for a long time to come. If I can ever at any time be of any help, I am at the service of the Trustees.

Best Regards,

Henry Ford II16

It is not hard to understand Ford’s decision to resign from the board. Thirty-three years of building the Ford Foundation from scratch while at the same time running the Ford Motor Company and being one of America’s leading businessmen are bound to have taken their toll. Less than three years after leaving the Ford trustees, Henry Ford II resigned from his post as CEO of the Ford Motor Company on October 1, 1979, and, eight years later, on September 29, 1987, he died. It is a source of wonder to me that he remained a Ford trustee for as long as he did, all the more so if he really had significant differences with the way the foundation was being run.

THE MYTH

I thought the [Gaither] Report was good then. I still think the Report was good.… [M]y criticism is of myself for being so stupid as a young kid, not being… sensible enough to realize, if you let this thing go you’re going to lose control.… We lost control the minute we started to enlarge the Board after the Gaither Report came out.

—Henry Ford II, in an oral history interview, 197317

Henry Ford II expressed the above sentiments 37 years after his father appointed him to the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees, 30 years after he assumed its presidency upon his father’s death, and 3 years before he resigned from that board. They are a classic example of what many call “donor remorse.” Such sentiments are often expressed by a donor when realizing that he or she made a serious error of judgment about a prior philanthropic gift—in this case, governance of an entire foundation—when little, if anything, can be done to rectify it. Ford clearly wished he had retained control of the foundation, whatever he meant by those words; even while recognizing that he had given up control, he nonetheless praised the major achievements of the foundation over the decades of his involvement, including the drafting by Gaither of what was intended to be, and actually became, the authoritative statement of the foundation’s mission.

But what did “losing control” mean to Ford? Did it mean the capacity to control single-handedly everything that the foundation did or did not do? Did he regret not having a board that would say “yes” to his every whim? Did he wonder what kind of foundation the Ford Foundation could have become had he exercised that kind of control? Did he examine his feelings about what he was prevented from achieving by not “having control”? Clearly he felt frustrated to some considerable degree, but one wonders what exactly was bugging him in 1973 when he gave vent to these feelings. Did he weigh the value of whatever he felt that he had lost against the benefits gained for society and the reputation of his family? Could what he felt be accurately described as some reflection on his inability to shape the Ford Foundation even more than he did—probably with respect to a small number of actions or inactions about which he, his friends, and associates felt strongly—in other words, more precisely in his own image?

If the Ford Foundation had indeed had a board of trustees entirely in Henry Ford II’s image, could it possibly have achieved anything like what his father hoped when he decided to establish the foundation? Would it have been anything like what Henry Ford II himself actually created by his active participation in shaping the foundation’s accomplishments—results that he later praised as socially valuable? That is extremely unlikely. Moreover, assuming Henry Ford II was not lying when he stated his approval of most of what the Ford Foundation did during his tenure, on what grounds can anyone reasonably describe his resignation from the board as a protest against what the foundation was doing or not doing?

The wisest and most effective foundation boards have been those that combine smart, disinterested, and thoughtful individuals from varying backgrounds, each of whom has the abilities necessary to inform the others’ decisions about the best courses of action for the foundation as a whole to pursue, and all of whom are willing to speak their minds in a respectful way. Such boards include a combination of nonfamily, publicly known, and admired individuals along with other members, usually scions of the founding family or close professional associates of the founding donor. The latter can serve as counterbalancers—the “sober second-thought” possessors who embody the values of the founding donor, who therefore have moral authority as representatives of donor intent by descent, and who are broadly recognized as such by the board as a whole. Such individuals can play a determinative role in decisions that effectively enable them to guide the proceedings toward better outcomes than are likely to be achieved in their absence.

If such figures are not present, some self-perpetuating foundation boards are apt to develop a lack of cohesion that causes the group to remain a collection of individuals who compete rather than cooperate with one another and who fail to serve as the institution’s memory of what the donor intended. Such foundation boards tend not to focus on carefully deliberated, strategically oriented, cumulative actions that help fulfill the foundation’s mission. When such moral authority–wielding individuals are members, however, they can and often do serve as unifying figures who help preserve the foundation’s identity and purposefulness.

Such vehicles of moral authority don’t regard themselves as “dictators.” If they try to impose their will on their fellow trustees, they cannot embody moral authority effectively, because they cannot earn the required respect and inclination to deference. To the contrary, those who try to monopolize the board’s authority are more likely to catalyze divisiveness in the board rather than cohesion around the foundation’s mission. If they are members of the founding donor’s family, their moral authority originates in the fact of their descent from the founder and, if they wield their influence in a nonpolarizing way, they can easily become the guiding influencers of the board as a whole.

Henry Ford II seems to me to have been such a figure in the first 30 years of the Ford Foundation. Despite the enlargement of the board, his views and voice dominated in the selection of the foundation’s presidents and other senior officers. His assessment of prospective fellow trustees was influential if not determinative in their election. His presence on the board ensured that the Ford Foundation would persist in a state of organizational purposefulness and balance, which is a feat that some other perpetual foundation boards have too often failed to attain and preserve.

As I read the complete text of his interview for the oral history, from which a few phrases were quoted earlier, I was struck by the many more instances of endorsement of the foundation’s actions than by the several negative examples cited. It’s hard not to wonder exactly how the Ford Foundation’s record of grantmaking might have differed had he actually retained “control” as he imagined it. In comparing what Ford said in his exit letter to Alexander Heard with his interview, I think it reasonable to conclude that the actual track record would not have been much different from what it was. If that is correct—recall that Henry Ford II was repeatedly described as the most influential member of the board of trustees—he could be accurately described as having had a decisive role in shaping the content of Ford’s actions despite, as he put it, not having “real” control.

From his reference to the “enlargement of the Board” as the cause of his having lost control, it is reasonable to wonder whether the substantive record of the foundation’s achievements, which Henry Ford II endorsed as it was evolving and praised after the fact, could have been achieved without the wisdom and governance participation brought to the board by the distinguished trustees he helped recruit but apparently later wished he had not chosen to include. Given the few disagreements he enumerates, it had to have occurred to him that the expansion of the board, while technically a loss of control to him, was a major if not the major contributor to the creation of the foundation record that he overwhelmingly praises. Moreover, in his oral history interview, he has words of affection and gratitude for almost all of the board members.

What then was the real cost of his loss of control? Judging from the examples he offers in his interview and his exit letter to Alexander Heard as a guide, they appear to be almost all instances of omission rather than commission. With very few exceptions, they were things he would have liked for the Ford Foundation to do but that he had not succeeded in persuading the board to undertake. One of the rare exceptions was the foundation’s decision to support public interest law firms with full-time litigators who could bring suit against corporations as well as government, which apparently played a role in his calculus about whether to continue serving on the board. Of the cases in which the foundation declined to pursue something that Ford promoted, perhaps the most significant was his desire for more grantmaking in support of America’s capitalist system, whatever that meant to him. Depending on the precise question, one can reasonably argue on both sides of it but, compared to the social benefit of the almost countless other foundation activities that Ford endorsed, a “support of capitalism” program would likely have been a minor addition to the foundation’s large grants portfolio.

Moreover, it is not clear what “support of capitalism” can mean in the context of a foundation program. One could easily argue that efforts to rectify the failures of the capitalist market system by providing jobs, job training, educational opportunities, and affordable housing, for example, are indeed ways of supporting the continuing dominance of the capitalist system. Those and many other similar initiatives indeed were and still are the bread-and-butter of Ford Foundation programs.

It is well known that, during the Ford Foundation presidencies of McGeorge Bundy, Franklin Thomas, and Susan Berresford, Ford in fact made many grants for the purpose of correcting the negative social by-products of America’s capitalist system and the shortcomings of its welfare state—and thus of strengthening and preserving both. There is Ford’s major support of the founding of The Urban Institute in Washington, which is regarded by many as America’s leading centrist-liberal social policy think tank. There is Ford’s support in founding the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, headed still by Robert Greenstein, a leading centrist-liberal research and advocacy organization. There is Ford’s support for the founding of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, which experiments with ways of making America’s welfare programs more effective, and which is credited by members of Congress and most observers as having crafted and run the randomized controlled trials that generated reliable evidence of better and worse ways of moving welfare recipients to work. Those trials are now regarded as having provided the persuasive impetus to the Clinton administration’s Welfare-to-Work legislation in the late 1990s as well as the establishment and growth of the Earned Income Tax Credits thereafter.

There is also Ford’s leading role, especially in the Bundy years, in establishing the countrywide network of community development corporations in many major metropolitan areas as well as the Center for Community Self-Help, which obtained Ford funds to catalyze billions of dollars for minority and low-income citizens to buy homes. In addition, there is the widely celebrated recent Grand Bargain initiative by a dozen or so foundations, to which Ford gave $125 million, the largest single contribution to that effort, to help resolve Detroit’s bankruptcy in 2014 (and, in the process, to rescue the Detroit Institute of Arts, to whose collection Henry’s father, Edsel, had made enormous contributions that might otherwise have ended up on the auction block). At the same time, the Ford Foundation has also had other major programs and lines of grantmaking to defend civil rights, advance urban development, confront poverty, champion education, and uphold human rights. All of these major initiatives and many others are aimed precisely at helping our country perfect and, thus, defend its capitalist system. It may well have been the case that Henry Ford II was not enthusiastic about the Ford Foundation’s programs aimed at correcting the socially unjust functioning of aspects of America’s capitalist system, preferring instead energetic Ford Foundation efforts to defend the capitalist system against “a creeping tide of socialism.” However, if correcting the socially unjust by-products of America’s capitalist system isn’t what Henry Ford II had in mind, it is not at all clear from anything in the record what he did have in mind—and that is precisely the point. His inability or unwillingness to articulate or advocate a clear program of action may well explain why the Ford board didn’t take on such initiatives and why he later expressed frustration.

Henry Ford II’s resignation as a trustee of the Ford Foundation was widely reported in the press with a short, sensationalist explanation for his motives that was, at best, one-sided and, at worst, substantially misleading. (As late as 2003, a Detroit newspaper was still describing the episode, against volumes of evidence, as beginning when Henry Ford II “stormed out of a board meeting of the Ford Foundation”18—something that manifestly never happened.) The headlines were seized upon by critics of foundations in general, as well as of the Ford Foundation in particular, and broadcast widely to make that foundation the poster child for the great risk that donors supposedly undertake when they consider creating perpetual foundations: at some point after their deaths, allegedly, their foundations would likely depart from donor intent. That myth continues to persist despite the paucity of evidence to support it. For example, Adam Meyerson, the highly respected president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, which is the leading association of mostly conservative philanthropists and foundations, wrote recently, “The Ford Foundation is one of the best examples of donor neglect.”19

In a March 26, 2012, Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, Marta Tellado, the Ford Foundation’s vice president for global communications at that time, expressed disagreement with Adam Meyerson’s view of Henry Ford’s role at the Ford Foundation, to which Mr. Meyerson responded as follows: “When Henry Ford and his son Edsel established the Ford Foundation (Henry Ford II referred to his grandfather and father as its two founders), they left future trustees with no instructions on its purposes. The language in the charter, ‘to administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare,’ offered no guidance about principles or priorities and would be consistent with a very broad range of philanthropic strategies.”20 If, as Mr. Meyerson says, the founders of the Ford Foundation neglected to specify their intent as to the mission of their foundation and to establish boundaries to ensure future fidelity to their intent, how can Henry Ford II’s resignation from the foundation’s board of trustees be accurately described as a prime example of “departure from donor intent”? That, I assume, is the reason that Mr. Meyerson decided to refer to what happened as an example not of a violation of donor intent but as an example of “donor neglect.” If that is indeed the proper interpretation of Henry Ford II’s role at the Ford Foundation and his decision to resign from its trustees, then it would seem hardly accurate for others to blame the Ford Foundation for any departure from donor intent since donor intent had never been established. The Ford family could have shaped the philosophical and philanthropic direction of the Ford Foundation but voluntarily chose not to do so.

Moreover, if Henry Ford II was indeed the dominant force in shaping the Ford Foundation’s first 33 years of existence, surely it is a misstatement to characterize the foundation as having violated the intent of its founding donors, which has negative ethical connotations. It is of course possible and appropriate that persons of differing ideological views can rightly criticize the Ford Foundation for some of its program initiatives, but what seems clear from the foregoing is that those initiatives did not come about by means of violating donor intent!

The many examples of Henry Ford II’s primary role in molding and shepherding the foundation should convince any fair-minded reader of the contrary. Similarly, any reader of his resignation letter is likely to conclude that even “donor neglect” is not an accurate description of Ford’s relationship with the foundation. Were there differences between Henry Ford II and the foundation’s senior staff with regard to particular policies? Of course there were. Such differences occur in all organizations and are, in healthy ones like the Ford Foundation, signs of vigor and strength rather than evidence of decline and weakness. The fact that Ford remained a trustee for so many years suggests that any differences he had with the foundation’s leadership and policy were less important to him than were the foundation’s many achievements. One is forced to credit to Mr. Ford those achievements and the people who created them, even if at times those accomplishments were often the result of differences among them.

Nonetheless, the myth took hold and sounded an alarm to countless wealthy individuals who were considering setting up foundations, including John M. Olin.

JOHN M. OLIN AND HIS LIMITED LIFE FOUNDATION

John M. Olin—a prominent, well-connected, and very successful businessman—happened to be visiting Cornell University, his alma mater, as a trustee, during the protests against the Vietnam War that took place in April 1969. That Saturday of Parents Weekend, students armed with guns took over Willard Straight Hall.21 The saga ended after negotiations between the students and Cornell officials, when the students “emerged from the Straight carrying rifles and wearing bandoleers.”22 Their image, captured by Associated Press photographer Steve Starr in a Pulitzer Prize–winning photo, appeared in newspapers across the country and on the cover of Newsweek magazine under the headline “Universities Under the Gun.”23

John Olin was profoundly upset both by what he saw and by what he regarded as the attitude of Cornell students, as well as students elsewhere, toward America’s capitalist system. According to James Piereson, whom Mr. Olin later chose as president of the foundation he created, that experience significantly influenced the businessman:

The incident led to some soul-searching on his part about the future of higher education and the free enterprise system in the United States. He saw clearly that the students at Cornell, like those at most major universities, were hostile to businessmen and to business enterprise, and indeed had begun to question the very ideals of the nation. He wondered if this situation could be reversed if these students, and the faculty members who encouraged them, could better understand the free enterprise system and our heritage of limited government.24

Olin’s weekend at Cornell may well have been the catalyst for the substantive programs he chose as the focus of his foundation, but it was hardly the only significant factor that shaped his vision. In his article, Piereson mentions two others:

He was greatly influenced by Julius Rosenwald, an early advocate of the idea that foundations should spend their assets within a generation of their donor’s demise. Olin was also guided by another event that took place in 1977—Henry Ford II’s highly publicized resignation from the board of the Ford Foundation. [Ford’s resignation in late 1976 was not widely reported until early 1977, and many sources thus cite the later date.]… The lesson Olin took from this public flap was that his foundation would likely come under the sway of people who did not share his principles. If this could happen to the Ford Foundation while a member of the family still served on the board, it could certainly happen to the John M. Olin Foundation after he died.

His answer was to instruct his fellow trustees to liquidate the assets of the foundation over their working lifetimes. With the exception of Bill Simon, the trustees were John Olin’s business associates; all of them understood what he was trying to accomplish. Most were roughly a generation younger than he was. The expectation was that the foundation might last for perhaps 25 years after Mr. Olin’s death, just as Julius Rosenwald had recommended.

Mr. Olin had another reason for choosing to sunset his foundation: He wanted to influence contemporary thinking about economics and public policy, in the hope that the severe problems he saw could be corrected. It made little sense, in his view, to establish a perpetual foundation if these more immediate problems could not be ameliorated. His wish to end the foundation at some point has thus required the foundation to allocate the assets to current problems, rather than to those that might arise way out into the future.25

And “influence contemporary thinking about economics and public policy” he most assuredly did. Over the 23 years following John Olin’s death in 1982 at the age of 90—which triggered the payment of his $50 million bequest to the Olin Foundation—the foundation steadily emerged as “perhaps the premier philanthropic institution supporting conservative causes during its existence.”26 It was able to achieve that impact in a comparatively short period of time because its decision to spend down its assets freed it to grant as much money as it thought necessary to achieve its goals. Its original bequest had been augmented in 1993 by another $100 million bequest by Olin that he specified would come to the foundation when his wife died, which occurred that year. Thus, according to James Piereson, in many of the years between 1993 and 2005, the year it chose to end grantmaking, the Olin Foundation was able to spend about $20 million a year, much more than the minimum annual foundation payout required by the Internal Revenue Code for a foundation with its level of assets.27

In essence, the Olin Foundation kickstarted a large number of organizations that became key to the intellectual and policy infrastructure that flowered in the United States, as well as in England, starting during the Reagan administration and continuing through the George W. Bush administration. Its momentum enabled it to flourish during the Clinton and Obama administrations as well. The spreading and strengthening of conservative ideas in political discourse among Republican scholars, activists, journalists, and business people undoubtedly have contributed to the creation of the dominance of conservative officeholders in the US Congress and in many of the state legislatures. That movement was accomplished substantially by the foundation’s grantmaking strategy.

In a 2002 overview of the foundation’s program focuses, James Piereson elaborates on the relationship between its extraordinary influence and its limited lifespan:

Of course, we are prominent as one of the few foundations committed to developing and promoting conservative ideas. Our interests are diverse and include law, economics, foreign affairs, education, journalism, and public policy. About half of our grants go to university programs of various kinds. We have invested heavily in law and economics programs at leading law schools, in an effort to promote a deeper understanding of markets at those institutions. We have also supported programs designed to instruct federal judges in economics and economic reasoning.

A large share of our funds go to leading market-oriented think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution. We support a wide range of programs and projects, including books, fellowship programs, television documentaries, opinion journals, and so forth. We have made a strong effort over the years to bring conservative ideas into the intellectual mainstream of the nation, which is what John Olin wanted to accomplish.

Some friends have criticized us for spending down, likening it to suicide. We do not see it this way, but even if we did, we have no choice—it’s what our donor required. Actually, the whole institution, trustees and staff, believe we are doing the right thing. Several of our most important accomplishments could only have been achieved through the kind of aggressive spending that our plan made possible. We prefer to think we are simply retiring or stepping aside, with the hope that others will step in where we have left off and continue to sustain the skillful, dedicated scholars, writers, and administrators who have used our funds to develop and communicate the ideas Mr. Olin intended to support.28

An excellent example of the foundation’s success in finding niches that, to achieve its objective, had to be filled is the role that the foundation played in creating The Federalist Society. Steven Schindler, coauthor of Casebook for The Foundation: A Great American Secret,29 describes its history as follows:

The Olin Foundation was particularly concerned with the direction of legal education. The Foundation was fearful that liberals controlled most law schools and directed the brightest students toward careers supporting liberal ideas in public interest law firms. One of the Foundation’s early grantees, the Institute for Educational Affairs, was recruited to help identify high-impact conservative projects; it agreed with this assessment.

Understanding the direct concerns of the Foundation in the field of law, the Institute recognized early promise in a group of conservative law students in the early 1980s. These students were acutely aware of their minority status as conservatives at elite law schools, particularly after realizing that so few of their colleagues had supported Ronald Reagan in 1980. Despite the increasing success of the conservative law and economics movement,… these students felt more could be done to give conservative perspectives on legal and political issues a more prominent platform in law schools. In particular, the group wanted to bring to their law schools leaders of conservative thought to engage in dialogue on conservative issues, which they thought were woefully underrepresented.… The Foundation made grants to sponsor the Society’s first major event, a conference which helped to jump-start the organization’s visibility and recruitment capabilities.

Over the next two decades, the Olin Foundation contributed more than $2 million to the Federalist Society. [As of 2007] the Society now counts among its members more than 5,000 law students at approximately 180 law schools and more than 20,000 practicing attorneys.…

The Federalist Society’s impact has stretched beyond the imagination of its early donors. Some credit the Society with effectively counterbalancing what the Federalist Society calls a shift to the left of the American Bar Association. In particular, many say the Federalist Society enabled the Bush Administration to cease the traditional practice of asking the ABA for evaluations of judicial nominees, a practice many conservatives considered detrimental to the confirmation of conservative judges.… Three of President George W. Bush’s cabinet members in his first term, as well as Bush’s solicitor general and staff members in The White House Counsel’s Office, were members of The Federalist Society. In addition, members of The Federalist Society are reported to have played central roles on President Bush’s committee to propose nominees for judicial appointments. The Federalist Society’s importance in advancing conservative ideas in the law became a matter of common understanding during the confirmation process of Chief Justice John Roberts; the appearance of his name on a leadership roster for the Society was a point of contention between Democratic senators and The White House.30

The Olin Foundation is a textbook example of the potential of philanthropy to achieve significant results. There are several relevant lessons here. The first is the importance of having a good idea whose time has come or of choosing an idea that, through one’s efforts and resources, can enable its time to come. It is important to remember, however, that countless other foundations and philanthropists have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying, in vain, to jump-start and scale ideas whose times had not come or not come yet. What is clear is that John Olin, William Simon, and James Piereson had an uncannily accurate sense of the existence of a huge gap in US socioeconomic and political discourse crying to be filled.

How did they come to this realization? Undoubtedly, the then-prevailing ethos of American foundations and philanthropists was so monochromatic in its liberal slant that, absent an initiative by them, conservative ideas had not been and would not be given a chance to be seeded, take root, and blossom. Feeling excluded, they came to believe that the marginalization of their ideas simply had to be corrected in some way. The monopoly centrist or center-left ideology of most American philanthropy demanded initiatives to try to rebalance public discourse. And as William Simon, then president of the Olin Foundation, wrote, “I felt those of us on the Right needed to learn and then do what McGeorge Bundy [the Ford Foundation President] had been doing for years on the left.”

Second, they clearly understood that a carefully chiseled strategy of creating a solid intellectual foundation that would grow its own thinkers, scholars, professionals, activists, journalists, and candidates was indispensable. Simon appears to have learned very well what Bundy and other centrist or center-left leaders had been doing in focusing their leadership development initiatives on professors, students, internships, and mentorships and on the building of organizations to champion the cause. If you start with scholars who do research, publish, and teach students, then create journals to publish articles and books that disseminate the supported professors’ writings, and then foster like-minded institutions (such as think tanks and conservative-leaning public interest law firms) as well as university-based conservative academic centers with jobs to fill with the graduates, then you have built a structure similar to what the Ford Foundation and other centrist foundations had been creating and supporting for several decades.

As James Piereson said, “Our strategy was to locate the best universities and think tanks to express thoughtful conservative views. Now the political climate has changed, and we think we played an important role in that change.”31

Third, they knew that to make a lasting difference in the long run, they had to achieve scale of discourse in the short run and, by spending capital now rather than only the income on capital over the long run, they were able to build the necessary on-ramp to gain entrance and achieve scale within the “respectable center of public discourse.”

Admittedly, the Olin Foundation had not been alone in pursuing this agenda. Other conservative foundations, such as those created by Richard Mellon Scaife’s family and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, were working alongside and coordinating their efforts with Olin, with Olin often the leader. The Scaife family foundations and the Bradley Foundation, however, are not spend-down foundations but at this point presumably are perpetual. The fact that the Olin Foundation, working in concert with them, could achieve such impressive results definitely does not mean that other spend-down foundations can easily emulate its success. The nature of a problem to be tackled is the most important determinant of how long it will take a foundation with a well-designed strategy to achieve even modest success. The problem chosen by the Olin Foundation was the substantial absence of conservative thinking in the public policy realm. The lack of something is much easier to correct than if there had been people already working in a field whose opposition had to be overcome or who had to be persuaded to try new methods. Most of the intransigent social problems, such as poverty, social inequity, global warming, and stubborn illnesses, that have defied understanding and the development of cures or successful medical treatment are radically different in character and magnitude and require a different approach to solve.

THE MYTH TAKES HOLD

We have seen how Henry Ford II’s resignation became widely, even if erroneously, portrayed as the paradigm example of a foundation’s flagrant departure from the founding donor’s intent. Permit me to say a few more words on that subject.

While it was Henry Ford, automobile manufacturer, who created the family fortune, he was never significantly involved in the Ford Foundation or the large gifts to it of Ford Motor Company stock. Besides, I think it unlikely that even the conservative critics of the foundation’s actions would have liked the Ford Foundation to mirror the publicly stated anti-Jewish, antidemocratic, and generally xenophobic views of the Ford Motor Company founder.

However, it was not Henry Ford but his son, Edsel, then president of the Ford Motor Company, who founded, funded, and originally presided over the Ford Foundation until his death, and it was his views, as well as those of his son that decisively set the foundation on the course it pursued. The biographers of Henry Ford père and Edsel Ford make clear that, while the relationship between father and son was cordial, they had many vigorous differences of opinion on both company and public affairs. In view of Edsel Ford’s presidency of the Ford Foundation from its beginning in 1936 to his death in 1943, it is safe to say that those years saw no departures from donor intent. When Edsel Ford died, his father was still alive, and it is striking to note that at that time he was not selected to become president of the foundation. Instead, that role fell to Edsel’s son. It was Henry II who, from 1943 until his resignation in 1976, represented the Ford family on the foundation board—and played the critical role in selecting the officers and trustees of the foundation and in shaping the program that the board adopted and implemented.

It is clear, therefore, that the Ford Foundation’s actions through 1976, when Henry Ford II resigned as a trustee, cannot accurately be described as any kind of departure from donor intent because, as we saw earlier, no donor intent had been embodied in the legal instruments that created the Ford Foundation. Moreover, Henry Ford II, while not the donor, was his son and representative on the foundation board. While his father might be tarred with the charge of neglecting to specify any founding intent in its governing documents, Henry Ford II was the de facto family representative in person on the Ford Foundation board throughout all the years that it was allegedly “departing” from his father’s nonspecified intent.

In other words, there is a strange illogic in citing the Ford case—regardless of how Henry Ford II’s statements are interpreted—as an argument for creating time-limited foundations that do not long outlive their founders. During the entire period of foundation activity to which Henry Ford II took exception, Ford himself was very much alive and fully present at the board table. Disagreements between Ford and the foundation board, whatever they were, had nothing to do with any absence of Ford family voice and even less to do with the life expectancy of the endowment. Henry Ford II left his family’s namesake foundation by choice, not by death. Until he resigned, his was the voice of a highly influential trustee with the moral authority to prompt serious debate, if not outright changes of direction, had he so chosen. Whatever regrets he may later have felt (if “regrets” is even the right word) surely had more to do with his own failure as a trustee to promote his point of view than with the perpetuity of the Ford Foundation.

It is astonishing to me that many later potential foundation founders have bought into the myth that the Ford Foundation should be regarded as the poster child for departure from donor intent. Unquestionably, this is attributable to a significant degree to the extent to which the Philanthropy Roundtable has kept alive a questionable interpretation of Henry Ford II’s role in, as well as resignation from, the Ford Foundation. Moreover, other conservative foundations and think tanks have joined the chorus in imputing departure from donor intent specifically to liberal foundations. The following is an example involving such a claim by the North Carolina–based Civitas Institute targeting the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation of Winston-Salem, North Carolina:

Like Civitas, the Philanthropy Roundtable has not limited itself to alleged donor drift at the Ford Foundation. In my research for this book, I have come across other examples of the Philanthropy Roundtable’s imputing instances of drift away from donor intent to donors’ successors in other foundations. Another such example of purported donor drift is The Pew Charitable Trusts, which was, until it converted into an operating public charity in 2004, one of the largest foundations in the United States. It is widely admired among foundation professionals, as well as among environmentalists; food safety experts; scholars of religion, public opinion and journalism; educational professionals; and countless others. Of the 13 individuals on the trusts’ board of directors, seven are members of the Pew family, either direct descendants or close relatives of the four founders. In its articles on The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Philanthropy Roundtable often claims that the trusts’ programs are significant departures from the intent or the views of one of the founders, J. Howard Pew. In one of Adam Meyerson’s references to the Pew Trusts, in the Wall Street Journal article “When Philanthropy Goes Wrong,” mentioned earlier, he writes:

Consider oil magnate J. Howard Pew (1882–1971). As Waldemar A. Nielsen noted in The Golden Donors, the charter of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust [one of seven trusts making up The Pew Charitable Trusts] in 1957 spelled out that Pew intended to “acquaint the American people” with “the evils of bureaucracy,” “the values of a free market,” and “the paralyzing effects of government controls on the lives and activities of people.” Pew also wanted to “inform our people of the struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the individual was won.” Admirers and critics alike of Pew’s recent signature initiatives—such as its crusades for campaign finance regulation, universal early childhood education, and recognition of the dangers of global climate change—can agree that in the past two decades—with the exception of its emphasis on religion in public life—J. Howard’s worldview and philanthropic goals have played little role in Pew’s charitable giving. The founding donors themselves are often partly to blame for any departures from their principles, thanks to open-ended statements of their philanthropic intent.33

In response to those words of Adam Meyerson, Rebecca Rimel, CEO of The Pew Charitable Trusts, wrote the following reply to the Wall Street Journal:

To the Editor:

Your recent profile of J. Howard Pew, one of the four founders of the Pew Charitable Trusts, accurately portrayed him as the successful, principled, entrepreneurial, and creative man many knew him to be. Unfortunately, through a series of omissions and a narrow reading of history, your profile went off track in claiming that the institution he helped found does not live up to his ideals. Nothing could be further from the truth.

J. Howard Pew, his brother Joseph N. Pew Jr., and their sisters Mabel Pew Myrin and Mary Ethel Pew, created seven trusts over three decades, which today provide the majority of funding to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Our founders did far more than assure the financial health of our institution—they entrusted those who succeeded them with the values that guided their remarkable lives, values that we work hard every day to honor and uphold.

The four founders were optimists who believed in the power of science, research, and practical knowledge. Today, the Pew Charitable Trusts approaches society’s challenges with the same innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. We seek creative solutions that are based on independent, nonpartisan, sound data. We follow the facts where they lead us, never signing up to support a political party, ideology, or point of view.

It is therefore disappointing that by focusing on language applicable to just one of the seven trusts, your article insinuates that we are no longer living up to the goals of our founders. In fact, they personally guided our work during their lifetimes, as did Joseph N. Pew III (son of one founder and nephew to the others), who served on our board for six decades until his passing in 2011. Through his intimate, decades-long conversation with his father, uncle, and aunts about their goals and aspirations, he inculcated their expectations into our work.

Based on his guidance, and under the leadership of other Pew family members on our board, we continue to invest in areas of interest to the founders, including health, religion, and civic life.…

Like any institution in its seventh decade, of course, our day-to-day work has evolved. Pew was once a traditional grantmaking foundation. We are now a public charity, able to put our resources—and those of our partners—directly into projects we operate and which our research shows can inform the public, improve policy, and stimulate civic life.

Joseph N. Pew III, known affectionately as “Joe the Third,” always reminded us that our founders understood that they could not anticipate the challenges our nation and the world would face as time passed. That is why they so wisely designed the institution that bears their name to respond to changing circumstances with flexibility. But with that came the responsibility to hold true to their ideals and to exercise sound judgment. “They gave us the stewardship responsibility to lead this institution as the needs of society change,” he would say, “so let’s exercise it wisely.” We believe we do, ever mindful of those who came before us and those still to come.

Respectfully,

Rebecca W. Rimel

President

Pew Charitable Trusts34

Keep in mind that Howard Pew’s words quoted above were included in only one of the seven trust agreements establishing the Pew Trusts. In an organization with four founders, only one of whom expressed a particular point of view on a matter, why should the six other trusts be required to adhere to the words of the founder of the seventh trust? Moreover, and of far greater import, who, then, can credibly speak of what a donor’s intention was 50 years ago? Which is a more reliable reflection of a donor’s views—statements of one of four trust donors taken out of context at a much earlier point in time or seven descendants or close relatives alive today representing the family of donors who together created a philanthropic institution?

What is also interesting to me is this: just as Ford’s resignation letter indicates that his primary difference with his fellow trustees and the foundation’s president was about initiatives that they refused to undertake, it seems that Meyerson is leveling the same kind of criticism at The Pew Charitable Trusts. This is not, in other words, a case of a foundation taking on causes inimical to the wishes of the founder. It’s simply a complaint that the founder might have preferred other initiatives or would have wished to travel down different programmatic roads that the foundation, for whatever reason, has not taken. Is that a violation of donor intent? Given the presence of the donors’ heirs on both the Ford and Pew boards, and given the heirs’ deep involvement in crucial decisions of both institutions, it seems to me more like two differing interpretations of what the original donor might have done—under circumstances that that donor never actually had the opportunity to confront.

The Philanthropy Roundtable’s growing focus on what it regards as examples of the drift away from donor intent has been troubling me for some time. The more I had read about the growing number of wealth-holders deciding to shift away from presumably perpetual to specifically time-limited philanthropy, the more convinced I became that the Roundtable had strategically chosen such a course as a deliberate strategy to persuade prospective foundation-creators not to establish perpetual foundations. It seemed clear that the Roundtable’s premise was, perhaps still is, this: because presumably perpetual foundations will inevitably outlive their founders, the Roundtable believes that such foundations are particularly vulnerable to drifting away from their founders’ intent when successor trustees take charge, whether they are donors’ descendants, relatives, or unrelated philanthropic professionals. Moreover, it is not just drift-away from donor intent in general but drift-away from donor intent toward left-leaning policies and programs that the Roundtable and many of its affiliated philanthropists fear.

To be fair in my criticism, I feel obliged to clarify that the official Roundtable position is that donors should “strongly consider” a sunset, not that this is the only way of ensuring fidelity to donor intent. Nonetheless, a reasonable reader might find it hard to encounter any defense of perpetuity whatever in the Roundtable’s publications. Still it’s true that the Roundtable’s published material does offer guidance on ways to ensure fidelity to donor intent if he or she creates a perpetual institution—if, despite the warnings of the Roundtable, a donor is nonetheless intent on taking on that “terrible risk.”

The Roundtable’s assumption is that rich donors’ descendants are very likely, after the death of the donors, to be significantly influenced by the changing times and the socioeconomic and political attitudes of their peers. That’s possible but far from self-evident. So, in order to make its argument persuasive, the Roundtable seems to scour the landscape of philanthropy to showcase bogeymen to frighten donors away from the chance that their philanthropic heirs might become misguided, left-leaning distributors of the philanthropic wealth their right-leaning ancestor had amassed.

The Roundtable could not possibly have found a more perfect specimen on whom to try to pin this preconceived threat—the family board member departing from a founder’s or ancestor’s intention—than Henry Ford II. If the goal of the narrative-creation is to dissuade foundation creators from running the risk of allowing their philanthropic wealth to be deployed by left-leaning philanthropic descendants, it seems that the reality of how Ford viewed the foundation doesn’t necessarily matter at all. It’s the hint of salaciousness in the example that sets the target donors running, rather than the solidity of the case on which the narrative rests. As a mythic figure, Henry Ford II is just about ideal: he was a titan of his age, and the Ford Foundation (at least until the arrival of Bill and Melinda Gates) was the titan of philanthropy.

From the celebrity of Henry Ford II’s example of donor “neglect”—which is the way Adam Meyerson now tends to describe Ford II’s actions (rather than “drift”)—to the utter noncelebrity of most of the other foundation examples that the Roundtable today cites for “drift away from donor intent,” there is a very long drop. None of the other examples has grabbed public attention or, so far as I can tell, has attracted public sympathy for the anti-perpetuity cause. The Roundtable has tried to make its “drift” allegation stick with The Pew Charitable Trusts, but readers can reach their own conclusions on the success of that effort based on the exchange previously cited between Meyerson of the Roundtable and Rimel of Pew.35

On a related issue, it is fascinating to read Meyerson’s criticism of the founders of the MacArthur Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation for not expressing their philanthropic intent for those two foundations more narrowly. He writes:

Of course, founding donors themselves are often partly to blame for departures from their principles. Instructions have frequently been so open-ended that future trustees have very little guidance in setting philanthropic strategy. John MacArthur gave his trustees no instructions at all. “I’ll make [the money],” he told them. “You people, after I’m dead, will have to learn how to spend it.” John D. Rockefeller’s mission for the Rockefeller Foundation was “to improve the well-being of mankind throughout the world,” a charge that could justify about any philanthropic expenditure.36

Meyerson does not explain here why a foundation founder should be obligated to come up with specific instructions to his philanthropic successors. From the perspective of the public good, foundations that are unconstrained as to their expenditure purposes are freer to respond to changing times. I would never criticize donors for not wishing to constrain how their philanthropic wealth is to be deployed. Instead, I would regard their decision as likely to be an intentional act of modesty, a provision for needs on which they themselves are not experts, and for a future whose problems they cannot foresee. Too often, critics who lament this sort of modesty seem to be pleading not really on behalf of the donor but on behalf of some body of ideological predilections of their own—beliefs that they are sure the donors would have endorsed, had they just given the matter more thought.

Really? Neither of the John D.’s—MacArthur nor Rockefeller—was known for shyness or philosophical timidity. Had they wished to create a foundation for something specific, it is hard to imagine what would have stopped them from doing so. However, if donors are concerned about hewing to a specific cause or purpose, I would advise being as precise as possible in words of instruction that bind their successors to abide by such guidance.

I do share Meyerson’s indignation, and in the same intensity, when the express instructions of the donors are ignored or violated, whether those instructions are left leaning or right leaning. The case of Bill Daniels and the Daniels Fund is an excellent example of a donor whose foundation had gone astray but whose legacy of words and example provided a means by which to set the institution aright. Daniels was a thoroughly patriotic American, dedicated to the preservation of freedom, who had served for years as a navy combat pilot. He had made a fortune in cable television investments and used it in part to create a large foundation. Several years after his death, the National Air and Space Museum requested a grant from the Daniels Fund, but a program officer turned down the grant, explaining that it would be inappropriate to provide a grant featuring “instruments of war.” When the museum challenged that decision, the chairman and trustees of the Daniels Fund conducted a review and decided that the fund staff needed to learn what Bill Daniels’s values and interests were. That “triggered a process of recovery and restoration, of rediscovering Bill Daniels’s intent for his foundation and instituting a process by which it would be protected in the future. It is a story of fidelity to a person and a principle.”37

More concerning to me, however, is the fact that the Philanthropy Roundtable does not test its theory that perpetual foundations inevitably depart significantly from their founders’ intent, much less “go left,” after the deaths of their founders. Countless examples, uncited by the Roundtable, exist of perpetual foundations that have not departed from their donors’ intent and have not “gone left” after the deaths of their founders, yet I could find only one of these—The Duke Endowment—widely publicized by the Roundtable.38 Instead, its website and publications insist that egregious departures from donor intent are frequent, despite the fact that most of the high-profile examples highlighted, such as the Ford Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts, simply don’t hold up under scrutiny.

Thousands of foundations that were founded by now-deceased donors do not appear to have wavered to any significant degree in trying to fulfill the intentions of their founders, but virtually all of them are left unheralded in the annals of the Philanthropy Roundtable. What is the reason for that omission? It would do a great deal to establish the objectivity of the Roundtable, assuming it desires to be perceived as objective, if it were to pair with every foundation alleged to have departed from donor intent another foundation that appears to have done the opposite. If the Roundtable were willing to do so, then wealthy individuals and the public could judge whether the donor “drift, neglect, or departure” problem is as real as the Roundtable contends or greatly exaggerated or, I hesitate to say, “invented” for ideological purposes. From the examples of foundations that have adhered to their donors’ values and purposes over several generations, future philanthropists might then learn how simple it is to ensure the faithful use of their own philanthropic wealth in the future. But perhaps the Roundtable is not as eager to foster trust as it is to peddle fear.

Among the well-known foundations that exemplify adherence to expressed donor intent after their founders’ deaths are these: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded in New York City in 1934 by the former CEO of General Motors Corporation; the George Gund Foundation, founded in Cleveland in 1952 by the president of the Cleveland Trust Company; The Kresge Foundation, founded in 1924 in Troy, Michigan, by Sebastian Kresge; The McKnight Foundation, founded in Minneapolis in 1953 by Mr. and Mrs. William McKnight (Mr. McKnight was CEO of 3M Corporation); The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, founded in 1966 in Menlo Park, California, by William Hewlett, cofounder of Hewlett Packard Corporation, and his wife Flora; The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, founded in 1964 in Los Altos, California, by Hewlett-Packard’s other cofounder and his wife; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, founded in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1972, by Robert Wood Johnson II, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, the celebrated health products company; the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, established as the Trebor Foundation in 1937 by the president of The Coca-Cola Company, who died in 1985; the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, founded in 1930 in Battle Creek, Michigan, by the founder of the W.K. Kellogg Company; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, founded in 1969 in New York City in memory of their father by Paul Mellon and his sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, by merging the Avalon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, founded in 1950 in Miami, Florida, by the cofounders of Knight Newspapers; and The Wallace Foundation, founded in 2003 by a merger of four charitable foundations created earlier by Dewitt and Lila Acheson Wallace, cofounders of the Reader’s Digest Association, who died in 1981 and 1984, respectively.

Having expressed the above criticisms of the Philanthropy Roundtable, I feel obliged to say very clearly that I genuinely admire Adam Meyerson for his vision in establishing it and his leadership in taking it to the prominence it rightly enjoys today. The Philanthropy Roundtable is a vibrant, energetic, and indeed now indispensable part of America’s philanthropic sector, which plays a highly effective role in protecting that sector as a whole and not only the right wing of that sector. My differences with Mr. Meyerson and the Roundtable are few compared to their many initiatives, for which I admire them and support what they are doing. I wish only that they could be more evenhanded in acknowledging the benefits that the perpetual foundation sector confers on America and less insistent in urging wealthy individuals automatically to put a spend-down clause in the governing documents of the foundations they establish.