MacArthur's Millions

...In addition, the lists of peace research grant recipients containeding countries [will] feel the need to arm themselves further in response to the U.S...

...In view of the fate of socialism, it seems hard to believe that an imperishable faith in socialism is a mark of genius...

...To be sure, most of the selectees have no political coloration...

...There was no accurate way to value his holdings then, but after a decade in which his lands and businesses were sold off for more prosaic investments and during which a billion dollars was given away, the foundation's assets cost out in excess of three billion...

...We have succumbed to . . . 'the military-industrial complex.' " Rick's political proclivities can be observed in the program of the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, which was endowed with the fortune that Rod made in the collectors' the latter's offshoot, the Center for Constitutional Rights, described by Rick as one of "our favorite charities...

...Although the identities of the hundred "nominators" (who serve only for one year) are kept secret, the foundation has let it be known it has assured that half of them are female...

...During the Cold War era, two schools of thought, broadly speaking, contended about how best to avert World War Three...

...He writes magazine articles himself for such publications as the Progressive and In These Times, where he disgorges such observations as: "With the encouragement of both major political parties, the country has by and large absorbed—or been absorbed by—the national security state...

...and Sydney Drell, a physicist leader of the arms control movement...

...Bridges was one of the last unrepentant Stalinists of American labor excluded from the AFL-CIO...

...Cutting edge" is a term she also used about her mission at Hampshire...

...At Hampshire, Mrs...

...In addition to the four editors (Howe, Meyer Schapiro, Deborah Meier, and Paul Berman), at least four other MacArthur geniuses are drawn from the only slightly wider Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America's Destiny (AEI Press...

...The American Spectator January 1992 39 ical argument can be proved that the former school was right and the latter wrong...

...We're mostly a bunch of Midwestern businessmen devoted to free enterprise and opposed to more government controls," said one...

...But there can be little doubt that the magazine's greater hospitality to the radical left is congenial to Rick, for that is where his own politics lie...

...Late in 1991, the foundation awarded $100,000 to a juvenile justice reform project run by Bernardine Dohrn...

...Simmons introduced what is called the "Third World Expectation...

...Still a third was for The Woman Next Door, "about human rights conditions in the Israeli-occupied territories...

...Paul Ehrlich, famed for his erroneous doomsday predictions about population growth and resource exhaustion...

...When you start engaging in [activities] overseas, you can get involved in right-wing groups without knowing it .. . and you can end up backing left-wing groups...

...This impulse might well carry MacArthur further toward politicization and leftish causes...

...Shortly before his death in 1984, the American Civil Liberties Union bestowed on him its Roger Baldwin Award, given only five times in sixty-odd years...

...As against dozens of notably liberal or leftist grantees, only two of the 350 are identifiably conservative: Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (who does not call himself a conservative, but may be thought of as one since much of his work has been dedicated to the refutation of Marxism) and Robert Woodson, a leading promoter of black enterprise...

...Outnumbered four to one, Rod countered by threatening lawsuits against the other members, alleging misuse of the foundation's assets...

...Food and Farming in the New Nicaragua and (by the same outfit) Alternative Paths to Food Security—Cuba: A Realistic Assessment...

...The inescapable implication is that the goal of peace studies is to generate people who think correctly...

...We've needed something like this ever since the Renaissance," he declaimed...

...He made most of it in insurance, largely as a pioneer in the sale of cut-rate policies by mail to customers of modest means...

...This project seems to reflect misgivings about the Persian Gulf war on the part of MacArthur president Adele Simmons...

...Yes, there are...

...He saw himself as an aristocratic patron, and spoke bombastically of discovering new Michelangelos and Einsteins...

...With these moves, the board's center of gravity shifted to the left...

...Salk and GellMann are also members...

...Other grants were given to Economists Against the Arms Race, SANE/Freeze,dozens of other entries whose names I do not recognize but whose project titles suggested they are of a similar turn of mind, for example "Rocky Flats: The Arms Race Bill Comes Due" or "The Oppenheimer Hearings and the Origins of the National Security Mentality" or "A Biography of Leonard Boudin...

...Little Mac's choice of charities reflects an agenda as deeply ideological as that of any foundation in America...

...Some of the other board members proposed to include former Treasury Secretary William Simon to provide conservative ballast, and after some horse-trading seven new trustees were added...

...to the American Friends Service Committee for legal assistance for Palestinians...

...Since then Harper's format has changed, and so have its politics...

...An answer to Kinsley might be that in some fields, like the performing arts, there is too little connection between quality of endeavor and financial reward: there are more bucks in rock 'n' roll than classical music...

...While the awards account for only ten percent of the foundation's largesse, they are the program for which it is best known...

...He lived his last decade in a dilapidated hotel he owned in Palm Beach (he owned much of Palm Beach) and conducted his business from a table in the corner of its coffee shop...

...What seems more important to her than any particular issue or idea is, as she put it to the Chicago Tribune last year, "to be sure that what we're doing is always on the cutting edge...

...Randall Forsberg, leader of the nuclear freeze movement...

...The American Spectator January 1992 35 he established Chicago "Republicans for McGovern," although friends doubt that he actually was a Republican...

...The other school held that the danger inhered in man himself and that the key to peace lay in all of us learning how better to resolve our differences...

...But as Tom Wolfe illustrated so devastatingly two decades ago in Radical Chic, patricians like Simmons (who is the scion of one of Chicago's leading families) often seem plagued by a thirst for authenticity...

...Nor was his wealth dedicated to the welfare of his posterity...

...The MacArthur program was rooted in the latter school...

...that he cut his own salary at age 65 in order to collect Social Security...

...She debunks Howe in her magnum opus, the Encyclopedia of the American Left: "He appeared prominently identified with [the] extreme rightward edge of liberalism in the pro-contra, Cold War hard-line position of the New Republic...

...He apparently did contribute to some of his son's expenses in adulthood, and perhaps to his daughter's, but he is reported to have told an interviewer that the one time his daughter approached him for financial help he turned her down...

...Issues of interest include the diversion of non-dangerous offenders from the penal system and other criminal justice reforms...

...The American Spectator January 1992 41...

...and Susan Sontag...

...Whereas the magazine once reflected a spectrum of opinion that ranged from its liberal New York editor, Lewis Lapham, to its conservative Washington editor, Tom Bethell, it now reflects a spectrum that ranges from Lapham, who is still a liberal, leftward to its current Washington editor, Christopher Hitchens, a socialist of the Rosa Luxemburg school...

...According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, she raised the question during the war whether "developthe American Friends Service Committee, the National Security Archive, the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control, the World Policy Institute, the Center on Budget Priorities, the Council for a Livable World, the Middle East Research and Information Project, and the Friends of New Outlook...

...This is great...

...By 1990 the peace program had become Mac-Arthur's largest,2 and it was described in the Chronicle of Philanthropy as the "largest grant program on peace and international security operated by any private foundation in the United States...

...Beneficiaries include the Alliance for Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Children's Peace Foundation, and the Union of Concerned Scientists...

...In his fifties, Rod launched his own business—a collectors' exchange for commemorative ceramic plates—with a loan, reportedly of $70,000, from John...

...What subject provides greater opportunity to teach students to put aside emotions at times and explore a subject coolly from all points of view...

...Given that John D. MacArthur's clearest political philosophy seems to have been his antipathy to big government, it might be said that Miss Dohrn had the courage of his convictions, and that the foundation has finally found a way to express fidelity to its benefactor...

...In hiring Michael Klare, prostrating herself at the feet of Hampshire's building-occupiers, and imposing a "Third World Expectation," Simmons revealed a weakness for quenching her thirst in the radical tonics of the sixties and seventies...

...The paper reported that when it interviewed the elder MacArthur about the case, "he couldn't recall the youth's first name, 'because I have so many grandchildren.' "(He had seven...

...The merits of others, like Paul Berman and Mary Jo Buhle, are not visible to the naked eye...

...The main project he recommended to the MacArthur Foundation was to combat government waste, and he reportedly supported Goldwater...

...Has anyone ever justified the existence of an alligator...

...To break the stalemate, the others acquiesced in Rod's proposal to expand the board...

...circle of Dissent contributors (Tina Rosenberg, Richard Rorty, Henry Louis Gates, William Julius Wilson...

...Within a few years, the magazine was turned over to the newly created Harper's Magazine Foundation, and Rick became the publisher...

...Within a year, Simon tired of battling Rod at board meetings and resigned, and a couple of years later Levi followed suit...

...Of the 350 Americans from all walks of life who have won MacArthur Fellowships—better known as "genius awards"—no fewer than four are members of the editorial board of Dissent, the small quarterly devoted to what its principal editor, Irving Howe, calls the "steady work" of bearing the torch for democratic socialism...

...The board of Little Mac consists wholly of Rick and his two siblings, thus revealing a classic progression from conservative father to liberal son to radical grandchildren...

...Also, the environment and population programs have each given grants to PACCA (Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America), a creation of the pro-Communist Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), and provided funds to pay speakers' fees for Earth Day...

...40 The American Spectator January 1992 sored public relations tours of revolutionary Nicaragua) and the Union of Concerned Scientists...

...Nicknamed "little Mac," the Roderick MacArthur Foundation is overshadowed by "Big Mac," the John MacArthur Foundation, but still commands assets in the tens of millions and gives away more than $2 million a year...

...Grantees in the hard sciences include Matthew Meselson, best known for his crusade to prove that "yellow rain" was actually bee feces rather than a Soviet chemical weapon...

...For each of the 350 people who have been named fellows since the program began eleven years ago, thousands of their colleagues wonder why they were passed over...

...and activist priest J. Bryan Hehir, architect of the Catholic Bishops' statement challenging nuclear deterrence...

...The widow, Catherine, was also at odds with Rod—they sponsored competing wakes for John—but she became a recluse and never participated in board meetings...

...Reportedly advised by Champion Ward, former vice-president of the Ford Foundation, Rod submitted several names for the new board seats...

...Unfortunately, the FBI is more interested in left-wing groups," he said, as if Little Mac's involvement with the left was at most accidental...

...It was no longer dominated by John MacArthur's associates but by prominent national figures...

...1 Socialists, whether of democratic affinity like Howe or totalitarian affinity like Buhle, may receive another kind of windfall from the MacArthur Foundation in addition to the money, fame, and prestige of its awards...

...Written by Marjorie M. Berte, a sixteen-year veteran of auto insurance issues, this provocative book reveals where your insurance money really goes...

...He was legendary for spurning luxury, dressing shabbily, carrying lunch in a bag, and taking doggy bags out of restaurants...

...This program also encompasses projects in the field of mass media, including grants to the Alternative Media Information Center, the Alternative Television Network, and the Center for New Television...

...It guaranteed that I would be read...

...Political Gridlock...

...With the encouragement of Wiesner, the foundation hired Ruth Adams, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to direct the program...

...The foundation's most ideologically charged program is one in "peace and international security," which began in 1985...

...display of force...

...Those too far from the cutting edge may have trouble recalling that Miss Dohrn, as leader of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, once declared war on the United States...

...An apt criticism was made by Michael Kinsley...

...When the business blossomed into the millions, John claimed that the loan entitled him to a majority share, whereas Rod held that John was due only repayment of the loan...

...Consumer Outrage...

...According to the account of the Weathermen by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, it was Dohrn herself who planted the bomb that destroyed part of the U.S...

...she asked...

...According to the foundation, fellows are chosen on the basis of the quality of their work, their need, and "the benefit of society...

...Another underwrote the Association of Arab American University Graduates' documentary Children of the Intifada...

...Hampshire and MacArthur share similar philosophies and programs," she added recently...

...This] will become a more reliable method of achieving peace and security than the unilateral military measures on which we currently rely...

...The foundation does not explain what it means by this question, but one possible explanation is the thread of Political Correctness woven through the list of choices for the genius awards...

...But Kinsley's argument mirrors the views of John MacArthur, who 36 The American Spectator January 1992 justified his stinginess toward his offspring on the ground that it was harmful to people to give them something for nothing...

...Rod was approached by his son, John "Rick" MacArthur, a 26-year-old reporter for UPI who asked if the foundation could rescue the magazine, which had just announced its intention to fold...

...The two men were also poles apart in their political views, although there is no evidence that they quarreled about it...

...The role I want to play is the fierce defender of Harper's independence...

...Conlon Nancarrow, a composer of music for the player piano and a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who resides in Mexico, a refugee from the anti-Communism of the 1950s...

...He did not contest the will...

...When the collapse of Communism resulted in an immediate end to the Cold War, this proved as decisively as any histor2 Technically, the "general program" was slightly larger, but this is only a catch-all label that encompasses a miscellany...

...In 1972, "I figured out how to make money...

...Son Rod, in contrast, was a liberal...

...Large programs in education and population—subjects often freighted with politics—seem in the main to steer clear of ideology, as does some of MacArthur's work on the environment...

...In addition to spawning the MacArthur fellows program, Rod also had a strong hand in the foundation's other principal expenditure in its first years: the 1980 bail-out of Harper's...

...When the geniuses are people at the apex of their fields, like the poet Robert Penn Warren, critics ask what possible further creativity could be expected to ensue...

...When they are people not yet well established, critics ask "Who he...

...Are there any solutions to the auto insurance crisis...

...It is not these peccadillos, however, from which socialists can make hay so much as the glaring absence of any extrinsic purpose to John MacArthur's intense acquisitiveness...

...Thus the hundred-and-some million dollars MacArthur has lavished on its peace program is largely money down the drain...

...The money is not the only reward that comes from a MacArthur fellowship...

...In addition, says the foundation, the selectors often ask: "What statement would we be making if this award were made...

...Father and son had a tempestuous relationship...

...having been granted by Union Institute, a non-accredited, non-resident, largely self-study program that awarded doctorates jointly with the Institute for Policy Studies...

...It was Rod who complained to the press about his father's indifference to his sister's missing son, and Rod was the source of many of the juiciest anecdotes about John's stinginess (e.g., that he sent Rod down to use the lobby payphone to avoid a hotel's ten-cent surcharge...

...Some leftish Skyrocketing Rates...

...It also sponsored a visit to Iraq by some American documentary filmmakers and lawyers exploring whether the United States violated international law in its attack on Iraq...

...It was Rod's grandiloquence that got the MacArthur fellowships labeled "genius awards," although foundation spokesmen ever since have disowned the sobriquet...

...In his later years he created the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a second, smaller one, the Retirement Research Foundation (with assets today over $100 million), but gave them no funds to begin operation until his death...

...We've needed something like this ever since the Renaissance," he declaimed...

...Perhaps it is not surprising that in creative writing and education most of the recipients lean left, but even in fields like law and economics, in which conservatives are better represented, virtually every one of the MacArthur recipients has been identifiably liberal...

...Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are visibly represented among the fellows, although, notwithstanding the inclusion of a few radical feminists, the foundation has acknowledged embarrassment that women make up a lot fewer than half...

...According to one of these, the danger inhered in the aggressive nature of Soviet Communism and the key to peace lay in deterring, containing, and destroying Communism...

...Simmons says, but it needs to be addressed...

...In addition to Simon they were former MIT president Jerome Wiesner, polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk, Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, former Attorney General Edward Levi, businessman Gaylord Freeman, and University of Illinois president John Corbally, who became the president of the foundation...

...and the production of such documentary films as Harry Bridges: A Man and His Union...

...It was an "expectation" because Hampshire was averse to calling anything a "requirement," but it meant, according to the faculty handbook, that "each student [is expected] to present tangible evidence that engagement with issues pertaining to Third World and minority cultures has occurred...

...Little detail is available about how these funds were ultimately used, and much of it may have been unexceptionable, except insofar as the entire concept was a blind alley...

...For Rod, the once abandoned son who had been shorted in his father's will, it seemed to be a matter of claiming his patrimony...

...At a public meeting before going underground, she celebrated the Charles Manson family's murder of Sharon Tate as a paradigm of revolutionary daring...

...Another supports an array of community institutions in Chicago and Palm Beach, where John and Catherine MacArthur lived...

...is the definitive book on auto insurance reform...

...The recipients, he said, "are already doing whatever it is the MacArthur Foundation admires them for doing, many are doing quite well at it, and presumably they will keep on doing it, unless this windfall encourages them to stop...

...This list includes Morton Halperin, a leader of the ACLU and formerly of the leftist Center for National Security Studies...

...The dispute was resolved only when John sent employees to physically seize the company's assets and Rod countered with a heavier squad that took them back...

...Even in non-political fields, some of the geniuses have distinct ideological identities...

...Mrs...

...Under her aegis a Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies was launched at Hampshire (with the cooperation of neighboring schools, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts...

...Klare is distinguished more as a hard-left polemicist than as a scholar...

...There, in early 1979, when Carter was in the White House and the Soviets were soon to invade Afghanistan, he wrote: "We must avoid adding to the chorus of hysterical anti-Sovietism . . . Congress has gone along with . . . war preparations because it has been inundated with fraudulent accounts of the 'Soviet Threat.— To boot, Klare's academic credentials are questionable, his Ph.D...

...As black literary historian Henry Louis Gates put it, the award "conferred a certain legitimacy on my work...

...In the wake of last winter's Persian Gulf war, the foundation sponsored a Physicians for Human Rights project to "monitor the human consequences of the Gulf War" through "a series of data collection missions...

...To radical historian Mary Jo Buhle, a newly anointed genius, democratic socialism is but a bourgeois subterfuge and the Dissent crowd are sellouts...

...Other grantees are Daniel Ellsberg, former SDS leader Todd Gitlin, Nation contributor Diane Orentlichter, radical feminist Lucy Komisar, "Third Camp" socialist Joanne Landy, Marxist philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein, Korean War revisionist Bruce Cumings, Sandinista booster Lars Schoultz, and Robin Wright and Helena Cobban, sympathetic chroniclers respectively of Islamic militancy and the PLO...

...In several articles advocating peace studies, she argued that it need not be taught in a one-sided or propagandistic way...

...In addition, there are leaders of the homeless movement, of the movements against capital punishment and for prisoners' rights, of the peace movement, and of the campaign for multiculturalism...

...One of its major programs is support for medical research, especially in the fields of mood disorders, parasitic diseases, and aging...

...fined, once, for failing to install sprinklers and fire-doors for the protection of employees...

...The "genius" program generates not only publicity but also controversy...

...The foundation has also supported such old Communist fronts as the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and the National Lawyers Guild as well as Rod saw himself as an aristocratic patron, and spoke bombastically of discovering new Michelangelos and Einsteins...

...Over the next two years, the foundation donated about $19 million to buy the magazine and keep it afloat...

...When it was revealed last year that the FBI had a file on Little Mac, Rick MacArthur displayed the same disingenuousness as in claiming that Harper's reflects no ideology...

...One of the students who sat on the search committee that selected Simmons for Hampshire told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he was seeking someone displaying "a high level of consciousness in regard to sexism, racism, and classism...

...to another group to fight the clos38 The American Spectator January 1992 ing of the PLO's U.N...

...In the arts they include Peter Sellars, producer of the execrable Death of Klinghoffer...

...There are radical historians, avantThe American Spectator January 1992 garde artists, and lots of environmentalists and community organizers...

...You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it...

...Hundreds of thousands were given to IPS, and again to its cognates, the Center for International Policy, the Center for National Security Studies, and PAC-CA...

...Still other grants were given to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations, the Inter-American Dialogue, the Institute for Soviet-American Relations, Bridges to China, and the American Committee on East-West Accord...

...Capitol...

...After nine days she signed an agreement with them, as reported in the New York Times, "that provided minority students with a dean of multicultural affairs, an adviser for the group that occupied the dormitory building, and $4,500 yearly to help promote racial harmony . . . also . . . to take no disciplinary action against the students and to allow them to make up work they missed in their demonstration...

...The foundation explains that the film portrays his "efforts to preserve a democratic, multiracial union and its defense of the right of freedom of expression...

...John D. MacArthur fled the grasp of his overbearing father as a penniless teenager and died in 1978 as one of the 10f course, this is quite fantastical: Howe never let a pro-contra word pass into the pages of Dissent...

...When he died, his lawyer entered the MacArthurs' bedroom in search of papers relevant to the estate and found on the floor several buckets placed to catch leaks from the roof...

...Little Mac has also sponsored various films on the subject that seems to be its dearest concern—the Middle East, or, to be precise, Israeli oppression of Palestinians...

...instead, he fought for control of the foundation...

...Big Mac's "general grant program" exhibits a stronger political tinge...

...It answers the increasingly important question: How do we make auto insurance affordable again...

...Other grants were awarded to the American-Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace to "bring legal challenges to Israeli laws...

...Several are past or present employees of IPS...

...The senior MacArthur seems not to have been deeply interested in politics...

...Worse than wasting resources, the peace program has also helped to underwrite a variety of advocacy groups—ranging from the woolly-headed to the hard left—whose work, had it been more influential, would only have delayed the end of the Cold War...

...Adele Simmons became MacArthur's second president in 1989 after a dozen years as president of Hampshire College, an experimental school without grades or departments, where students help guide their own learning...

...Schapiro...

...Rod frequently censured his father in public (although never, it seems, for the early abandonment that presumably lay at the heart of his grievance...

...He picked us to run [the foundation] because he knew we mostly feel the same way about things that he did," said Paul Harvey, alluding to John MacArthur's conservatism...

...to a group called American Support for the Advancement of Civil Liberties in Israel to pay the legal expenses of Mordechai Vanunu and to challenge deportation orders...

...She claims credit for pioneering "peace studies," which she says ought to be placed "squarely at the center of the academic institution...

...There are sculptors, composers, mathematicians, and decipherers of Mayan hieroglyphics whose work could hardly be more removed from politics...

...Simmons said that she came to MacArthur because "there is an enormous overlap between the intellectual areas that particularly engaged me at Hampshire and the areas focused on at the foundation...

...According to the Bulletin's brochure, the world grew safer in 1989, because "Democratic movements in Eastern Europe shatter[ed] the myth of monolithic Communism," as if what changed were Western perceptions, not Eastern reality...

...In the mid-1970s, a few years after his daughter's 21-year-old son disappeared in Mexico, MacArthur's son told the Chicago Daily News: "It's a pity, with all his money and agents and contacts, that we can't get my father interested in looking for the boy...

...Simmons, he concluded, was "probably perfect...

...He wrote to one of the trustees: "I figured out how to make the money...

...But the talent scouts of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation appear to believe it...

...In 1990, Adams's colleague at the Bulletin, Victor Rabinowitch, joined the MacArthur staff as vice-president for programs...

...In the meantime, Rod seized on the idea, originally broached by one of the other members, of awarding grants to individuals of outstanding promise or talent, untied to any specific proposal or piece of work...

...One has been awarded to Alejandro Bendana, former secretary general of the Nicaraguan foreign ministry, and another to a consortium of former foreign trade minister Alejandro Martinez, former ambassador Carlos Tunnerman and pro-Sandinista academic Xabier Gorostiaga...

...And the education program supports something called the Network of Progressive Educators...

...Since the 1990 change of government in Nicaragua, out-of-work Sandinistas have been receiving research grants from MacArthur...

...and to the Middle East Research and Information Project, an American group so fanatically pro-PLO that it once extolled the benefits of the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes...

...In addition, the peace program awards research grants, and the list of recipients includes a galaxy of tiresomely familiar names from the left...

...At the time, Rod was quoted as asserting that neither he nor members of his plates business...

...However, the foundation also spent tens of millions of dollars to launch the World Resources Institute, which "strives to build bridges between scholarship and action" in order to foster "a transition in . . . consciousness to a far more profound appreciation of the requirements of global sustainability" and "a new . . . international compact—between North and South...

...Simmons met the "expectation" herself when a few dozen minority students occupied a campus building in 1988...

...and sued successfully for evicting a 79-year-old widow from a dwelling he owned after she showed that a leaking roof he had refused to repair had damaged her last negotiable possessions...

...Roughly one out of every million Americans is a MacArthur genius...

...office under the Anti-terrorism Act...

...In comparison, the number of editors of TAS, National Review, and Foreign Affairs who are MacArthur fellows is zero...

...Let's stuff a few and put them in a museum and get rid of the rest...

...to the extent that he was, he was known as a conservative with a jaundiced view of taxes and government spending...

...Little Mac counts among its "primary aims" "eliminating political, economic, social, religious and cultural oppression...

...You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it...

...While MacArthur did not care to spend his money on himself or his progeny, neither did he, with rare exception,give any to charity...

...Donald W. Segraves, Insurance Research Council To Order Call: 1-800-326-0263 (8-5 PST) IMPRESS/ INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY STUDIES 243 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA 94108 37 recipients are individuals of genuine distinction, such as the Dissent editors Howe and Meyer...

...In the 1960s, he is said to have been active in Businessmen Against the [Vietnam] War...

...But Rod wanted the foundation to be the government's "social conscience...

...family would be involved in running the magazine...

...In a foreword she contributed to a Guide to Careers and Graduate Education in Peace Studies published by Hampshire, she spoke of "our common interest in peace, social justice, and an environmentally-secure planet...

...While the Retirement Foundation had a defined, if vague, purpose, the larger foundation had almost none...

...Today he is sometimes made out to have been an environmentalist, but when he was developing land in Florida in the 1970s, he denounced "bearded jerks and little old ladies who call me a despoiler of the environment...

...The ideas she proposes will empower citizens and insurance agents with the knowledge to demand real reform...

...Some grants have been made in Israel as well, but only to New Outlook magazine, the New Israel Fund, and other groups on the left that are devoted to criticizing the Israeli government...

...Some of these men, notably Wiesner and Salk, had distinctly liberal politics, and although the board remained a mixed bag, its character shifted...

...I think the occupation strengthened the institution," said Simmons gratefully...

...When he died, he bequeathed one percent of his estate to his family, half that amount to his widow (his second wife, by whom he had no children), and a quarter to each of his children in the form of trusts from which they were allowed the proceeds but not the principle, which upon their death reverted to his estate...

...Alarge part of this money has been given to "multidisciplinary" programs at various leading universities aiming "to confront the problems posed by the threat of nuclear annihilation," especially by "reexamin[ing] Soviet-American relations, so dangerously misunderstood on both sides...

...Notwithstanding its strong attraction to Dissent, the foundation recently conferred a MacArthur fellowship upon a fierce critic of Dissent—from the left...

...HIT ME—I NEED THE MONEY...

...There is also the prestige...

...The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation began to function in 1978, soon after John's death, and immediately the board became embroiled in a dispute between Rod and the four men who had been his father's associates...

...The little told story of the man whose wealth endowed the foundation holds great heuristic value for the indictment of capitalism...

...MacArthur lived, you could say, by a variant of the golden rule, doing unto himself what he had done unto his widow tenant...

...Many scholars and policy makers will be afraid of that issue, Mrs...

...We need committed people who share this perspective to enter careers in education, journalism, law, government and business...

...The spat went much deeper than politics...

...It has sponsored publication of such books as What Difference Could a Revolution Make...

...But her own record at Hampshire is not reassuring in this respect...

...Is it not fitting that his son, Rod, proposed that the old man's entire estate be devoted to dispensing unrestricted awards...

...Its beneficiaries, other than Harper's, which has received over $2 million, include the Institute for Policy Studies, CISPES (whose proclaimed purpose is "to support the legitimate struggle" of the Salvadoran guerrillas), the North American Congress on Latin America (unabashed cheerleaders for Communist guerrillas throughout the hemisphere), Witness for Peace, the Washington Office on Latin America, Noam Chomsky, the Nation, the Progressive, Clergy and Laity Concerned, and the Christie Institute—including grants earmarked for the Christics' viciously frivolous suit alleging an American plot behind the bombing attempt against Eden Pastora, a suit which ended in a punitive award against the institute...

...One grant underwrote "a film documentary based on the autobiography, My Home, My Prison, by Palestinian journalist Raymonda Tawil...

...Nothing explains the auto insurance problem better than this down-to-earth book . . . I want each of my customers to read it...

...Indeed, much of Big Mac's philanthropy is aimed at purposes that are hardly political at all...

...He came to Hampshire from a seven year stint at the Institute for Policy Studies and his most frequent outlet is the Nation...

...William Bailey, Jr., Independent Insurance Agent, Waco, Texas "A very lucid and sensible analysis of the causes and cures for the auto insurance mess...

...When asked whether he has had any influence over the magazine's ideological evolution, Rick MacArthur denies that there has been any evolution or that Harper's has any ideological identity...

...Simmons is active in the Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations (a group chaired by Donald Kendall that promoted amity with the pre-perestroika USSR) and a member of the board of the Nicaraguan Education Project (which sponLittle Mac's choice of charities reflects an agenda as deeply ideological as that of any foundation in America...

...government buildings), David Cortright, William Arkin, and the team of Daniel Siegel and Jenny Yancey...

...But the MacArthur selections are not entirely unbalanced...

...to the American Association for the Advancement of Science to send a "forensic mission" to Israel to help publicize abuses of Palestinian prisoners...

...A self-described "draft-dodger" in World War Two, he ended up serving in the ambulance corps...

...These programs address such issues as literacy, student assessment, preservation of tropical forests, and family planning...

...MacArthur himself was a true genius—at making money...

...He was investigated often for mail fraud...

...Eqbal Ahmad (who once was indicted for plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up U.S...

...34 The American Spectator January 1992 two richest men in America...

...It would have been better given to some of the prosaic charities that MacArthur supported in its early years: the Big Brothers, the United Negro College Fund, even the television program "Captain Kangaroo...

...He left his first wife with a toddler son and an infant daughter, for whom, by one account, he refused to provide support...

...The foundation has given some $7.5 million to Bill Moyers for his television programs and millions to National Public Radio, including the largest private sector grant NPR has ever received...

...Mrs...

...Jerome Wiesner, who has long been active in arms control and peace causes, chairs the board committee that has overseen the program since its inception...

...and one out of every ten members of the Dissent board...

...The foundations, to which he bequeathed 99 percent of his wealth, allowed him to avoid two things: paying estate taxes and leaving his money to his children...

...This impression is strengthened by her choice of Michael Klare as director of the Five College Program...

...to the Physicians for Human Rights for a "medical fact-finding mission" to the occupied territories...

...One grant sponsored a conference on "Thirty Years of the Cuban Revolution: An Assessment," while another supported a study of "the health effects of the war in Nicaragua...

...Such people most sense themselves to be on the cutting edge when they are most "with it," that is, precisely when they are yielding most completely to orthodoxy...

...Fortunately, none of the MacArthur grandchildren sits on the board of "Big Mac," and therefore relatively little of its much more formidable resources (valued over $3 billion, ranking it among the five wealthiest foundations) are devoted to the hard-left causes that so appeal to them...

...MacArthur named six trustees for the foundation that bears his name: his wife, three close business associates, conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey, whose broadcasts MacArthur had sponsored for decades, and, fatefully, his son, J. Roderick MacArthur...

...The New Republic and the Atlantic each have one (a contributing editor), the highest number I'm aware of for any political journal other than Dissent...

...More to the point, the roll of geniuses has a distinct political cast...

...The grants to Chicago organizations support a good deal of community organizing, some of which is bound to be quite political, and they include support for People for the American Way to combat censorship and for the left-fringe group Clergy and Laity Concerned to conduct"anti-racism training...

...But then there is a minority chosen for its work in "public affairs," that is, for its political activism, and these are all from the same side of the spectrum...