II: Columbia University and Recruitment by Zbigniew Brzezinski 71Ford’s influence on other foundations: What the “fat boy in the canoe does,” he said, “makes a
difference to everybody else.” And Ford’s influence was never stronger than after it adopted the
cause of social change. Waldemar Nielsen’s monumental studies of foundations, published in 1972
and 1985, only strengthened the Ford effect, for Nielsen celebrated activist philanthropy and berated
those foundations that had not yet converted to the cause. “As a result,” recalls Richard Larry,
president of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, “a number of foundations said: ‘If this is what the
foundation world is doing and what the experts say is important, we should move in that direction,
too.’” The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for example, funded the National Welfare Rights
Organization—at the same time that the organization was demonstrating against Governor Nelson
Rockefeller of New York. The Carnegie Corporation pumped nearly $20 million into various left-
wing advocacy groups during the 1970s.’ (Heather Mac Donald, “The Billions of Dollars That
Made Things Worse,” City Journal, Autumn 1996)
AGGRESSIVE FOUNDATION ACTIVISM OF THE LATE 1960S
In the second half of the 1960s, the social ferment generated by defeat in Vietnam, the student
movement, the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the gathering economic decline
of the country spurred the foundations into action. With unerring oligarchical class instinct, they
could see the grave danger that might be represented for financier domination by the possible fusion
in a united front of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, and the
student movement. Their answer to this was to promote and fund organizational forms that were so
narrow, so fragmented, and so parochial, that they prevented the necessary cooperation among these
movements, thus blocking them from attaining most of their principal goals. Alan Pifer was the
head of the Carnegie Foundation in 1968; in his annual report for that year, Pifer
exhorts his comrades [sic] in the foundation world to help shake up “sterile institutional forms
and procedures left over from the past” by supporting “aggressive new community
organizations which... the comfortable stratum of American life would consider disturbing
and perhaps even dangerous.” No longer content to provide mainstream knowledge
dispassionately, America’s most prestigious philanthropies now aspired to revolutionize what
they believed to be a deeply flawed American society. [...] Foundation-funded minority
advocates fought for racial separatism and a vast system of quotas—and American society
remains perpetually riven by the issue of race. On most campuses today, a foundation-endowed
multicultural circus has driven out the very idea of a common culture, deriding it as a relic of
American imperialism. Foundation-backed advocates for various “victim” groups use the courts
to bend government policy to their will, thwarting the democratic process. [...] The net effect is
not a more just but a more divided and contentious American society. (Heather Mac Donald,
“The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse,” City Journal, Autumn 1996)
Right-wing commentators like the one just cited are generally incapable of analyzing the real
motivations for what the foundations do; they usually attribute the catastrophic results of foundation
social engineering to some misguided instincts to do good. Nothing could be further from the truth:
the goal of the foundations is to maintain the brutal regime of finance capital, and this presupposes
that there be no national coalition capable of expressing a national interest in contradiction to the
dictates of the Wall Street financiers. The rightwingers are therefore forced to make up fantastic
stories of how Marxists have crept in to the temples of finance capital by the dark of the moon, so as
to advance their work of revolution. In reality incendiary race baiting and pseudo-revolutionary and
hyper-revolutionary rhetoric are most often the stock in trade of the foundation-funded political
operative, who gets paid good money to inflame the mutual animosities and resentments of groups