Right-wing think tanks
Soley, Lawrence
The Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies opened its doors in 1982 with seed money from Richard Dennis, Jr., an iconoclastic Chicago commodities trader and Mondale Democrat. The center...
...Last year, the Roosevelt Center closed its doors...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...But despite its many footnotes it has no scholarly foundation...
...By 1987, the Urban Institute was receiving about $5 million from the U.S...
...Meanwhile, a conservative think tank called the Center of the American Experiment has opened in Minneapolis...
...former U.S...
...That's where the real story is...
...Healy appointed a committee of five highly respected academics from outside the university to review CSIS's work...
...Semerad's credentials were that he served as a White House staff assistant following the Watergate scandal...
...Prior to the 1960s, Brookings was referred to as CBI rather than BI by Washington insiders...
...Civil Rights Commission, is with the Manhattan Institute...
...Department of Education appointee Mitch Pearlstein heads the Center of the American Experiment...
...The American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, CATO Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Council for Social and Economic Studies, National Forum Foundation, and Center for Security Policy are based in Washington, D.C...
...Walters was for several years an economic adviser to Thatcher...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...One praised the emergence of "democracy" in the capitalist East and the second examined security in Asia...
...Heritage escorted congressional staff members to Taiwan, sponsored conferences on U.S.Taiwan free trade to which it invited U.S...
...Corporations, a major source of funding for think tanks, refuse to finance any thinking that even hints at policing corporate practices...
...Once it hired Republican economists and concluded that economic growth, not federal social programs, was the key to narrowing the income gap, funding somehow increased...
...government and an equal amount from sources like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations...
...former national security adviser Robert McFarlane and former State Department staffers Stephen Sestanovich and Leo Reddy went to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS...
...Nor is this criticism of think-tank research expressed just by the political left...
...The verdict of the Georgetown trustees is repeated in almost every academic review of think-tank research...
...Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney, Jr., joined the Center for Security Policy...
...Under his leadership, Brookings developed a reputation for solid research...
...And Brookings's most visible spokesman is Stephen Hess, a former staff assistant to President Eisenhower, deputy assistant for urban affairs to President Nixon, and editor of the 1976 Republican National Platform...
...Since receiving these donations, AEI has sponsored conferences, seminars, and publications that promote Taiwanese positions...
...AEI sponsored two large conferences to which Washington officials were invited...
...The annual budget of any one of the conservative think tanks exceeds the combined budgets of all leftofcenter think tanks...
...10017 (212) 595-3084...
...CBI referred to the Conservative Businessman's Institution, which reflected the institution's outlook and funding between 1916, when Brookings was established, and 1967, when Gordon became president...
...By 1981, the institute was conducting 418 • DISSENT Notebook $12 million of government-sponsored research a year...
...In addition to their tracts promoting capital gains tax cuts, deregulation, and unrestricted capitalism, these think tanks engage in some donor-specific projects...
...Leading the list of contributors were media corporations, which drew heavily on Brookings for "liberal" opinions and sound bites: Capital Cities/ABC, Cox Enterprises, General Electric, New York Times, Time, Inc., Times Mirror, and the Washington Post Company...
...Policy Toward China's Reunification, that promote Taiwan's positions...
...The center called itself a "neoliberal" think tank, advocating free markets and a smaller Washington bureaucracy...
...It is Brookings's reputation that the conservative think tanks feed off...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...During the 1960s and 1970s, this think tank developed a left-of-center label because its president, Democrat Kermit Gordon, was a respected scholar, supporter of the Great Society, and critic of the Vietnam War...
...and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) gave shelter to over two dozen high-level Reagan appointees...
...Although information on the shallowness of think-tank research is available to the mass media, their reporters appear to have turned their backs on it in order to get easy access to a sound bite or quote...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Viewers were informed that they were listening to "experts," "analysts," "political scientists," or think-tank representatives...
...The difference between rightist thought of the past and think-tank output is that the former was presented at American Legion halls on Friday nights with beer, while the latter is sandwiched between very expensive covers and called "research...
...In 1986, Georgetown University president Timothy S. Healy initiated an academic review of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which was then affiliated with, but not under the control of, the university...
...0 A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...CSIS attempted to derail the review by charging that it was politically motivated and, when this was shown to be false, arguing that the review was pointless because "the university is not a top-flight university...
...Reagan administration appointees who have not returned to government are the stars of these think tanks...
...The Asian security conference was held in Taiwan...
...The Center of the American Experiment is one of dozens of conservative think tanks in the United States...
...The CSIS provided "experts" on foreign policy, while the AEI provided "experts" on domestic policy...
...Heritage leaders also travel frequently to Taiwan to consult with government and business leaders...
...After reviewing the committee's report, the Georgetown trustees voted to sever relations with CSIS...
...During the early 1980s, the Reagan administration withheld government grants from think tanks that were left-of-center, forcing them to reduce their activities, go under, or shift rightward...
...Sir Alan Walters, an AEI senior fellow, wrote Britain's Economic Renaissance: Margaret Thatcher's Reforms...
...The problem isn't that their research is highly partisan—one would expect it to be—it's that they try to pass off rhetoric as research...
...The Urban Institute, which was created in 1968 to conduct independent analyses of Great Society programs, offers an example of how the Reagan strategy worked...
...It was unable to raise sufficient funds to continue operation...
...The dissertation was written under the tutelage of CSIS adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick before the think tank was separated from Georgetown...
...With leaders such as these, it is not difficult to understand why 160 corporate donors gave Brookings $2.2 million in 1989...
...Linda Chavez, former staff director for the U.S...
...The review examined the scholarship of CSIS's fellows, who, like most think-tank denizens, spent more time doing sound bites than serious thinking...
...The largest share of Heritage's contributions came from conservative fat cats like Adolph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, Union Pacific chairman Drew Lewis, Amway chairman Jay Van Andel, investment banker Shelby Cullom Davis, and Lewis Lehrman...
...All of these contributions are used as tax write-offs because the think tanks are nonprofit and tax exempt...
...Since 1977, Brookings's president has been Bruce MacLaury, a deputy Undersecretary of the Treasury' during the Nixon administration...
...The center projects an income of $1.5 million annually, most of it to be raised from corporations and conservative individual donors...
...They inundate the media with press releases, send thousands of op-ed pieces to newspapers, volunteer speakers for talk shows, and provide sound bites for television programs...
...One third of CSIS's $9 million budget came from corporate coffers, as did $2.5 million of the Heritage Foundation's $14.6 million budget...
...The Media Elite, a book coauthored by AEI "scholar" S. Robert Lichter, was panned in the Journal of Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Journalism Quarterly, and other academic journals...
...Not one was identified as a political partisan...
...They do little genuine research...
...But unlike its conservative counterparts, the Roosevelt Center trusted government rather than private enterprise to address the ecological crisis and the increasing income gap between the many poor and the wealthy few...
...CSIS representatives made over a hundred appearances on network newscasts during this same period...
...These regional think tanks attempt to do on a local level what the conservative Washington think tanks have done on the national level—monopolize political discourse in the mass media...
...420 • DISSENT...
...Chong-Pin Lin, AEI's associate director for China studies, who is a Taiwan national, wrote a book that "focused attention on the People's Republic of China's arms buildup," according to AEI promotional literature...
...The gifts came from such firms as Exxon, Lockheed, RJR Nabisco, General Motors, Seagrams, and Dow Chemical...
...Fifty-four percent of AEI's $10 million 1988 budget came from corporations...
...In 1981 MacLaury hired Roger Semerad as an executive vice president...
...Two of the Taiwanese corporations that donate to the Heritage Foundation also give large sums to the American Enterprise Institute...
...Edwin Feulner, Jr., president of the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation, describes the Urban Institute's current outlook as "Republican centrist...
...Conservative think tanks received substantial assistance from the Reagan and Bush administrations, corporations, and the mass media in their bid to become the dominant discussants of public policy...
...Another example of a rightward shift is the Brookings Institution...
...Former and current AEI spokesmen William Schneider, David Gergen, Norman Ornstein, and Richard Perle appeared 138 times on the network evening news during 1987-88...
...Political Science Quarterly, the only academic journal of note to review the book, described it as an "exercise in self-justification" containing "misrepresentation...
...According to a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, an organization that monitors the news media, two of these conservative think tanks provided a disproportionate number of speakers for the "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour...
...Beyond the Beltway are the Manhattan Institute (New York), National Center for Policy Analysis (Dallas), Hudson Institute (Indiana), Institute for Contemporary Studies (California), National Institute for Public Policy (Virginia), Pacific Institute (California), Shavano Institute (Michigan), and Rocky Mountain Institute (Colorado...
...President Johnson provided the Urban Institute with $6 million in federal housing funds to get it off the ground...
...Semerad became Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Labor in 1985...
...it is constantly voiced by everyone who conducts legitimate research...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Muravchik is reduced to a few interviews and to quoting Elizabeth Drew, Ben Wattenberg and Stanley Hoffman...
...Despite their apparent interest in Taiwan, AEI "scholars" have been silent about that country's political prisoners and rigged National Assembly elections...
...Richard Allen, T. Kenneth Cribb, and Ed Meese joined the Heritage Foundation...
...With so many resources, the right-wing think tanks should be able to conduct very serious research, but they don't...
...AEI also held four seminars about Taiwan issues...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...For example, AEI "resident scholar" Joshua Muravchik's dissertation, which is distribSUMMER • 1991 • 419 Notebook uted by AEI as a book entitled The Uncertain Crusade: Jimmy Carter and the Dilemmas of Human Rights Policy, was described by the Journal of American History as perplexing, "not so much its use as a doctoral dissertation but its acceptance as a piece of scholarship by the Georgetown faculty...
...Three that are even farther to the right received more...
...In 1982, the Reagan administration cut government funding to the Urban Institute by $9 million, forcing the Institute to change its focus...
...The committee concluded that the center was not committed to traditional academic scholarship...
...Although the research of conservative think tanks often is not serious, their lobbying efforts on behalf of corporate contributors are...
...Not surprisingly, the book echoes Kirkpatrick's discredited theory about the reformability of right-wing dictatorships and the intractability of Stalinism...
...The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Institute for Contemporary Studies, and others pretend to do the quality research that Brookings once did...
...It publishes pamphlets, such as U.S...
...Brookings's left-of-center stance under Gordon, however, was an aberration in the history of the think tank...
...Rather than, or at least in addition to, asking think-tank representatives for opinions, they ought to be asking these "scholars" about think-tank funding and lobbying...
...A University of Minnesota study released last year found that these think tanks also supply the network news programs with a large percentage of their "political analysts...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Brookings wasn't the largest recipient of corporate aid among think tanks...
...policymakers and the media, and promoted the idea of a "Free Trade Area Agreement" with Taiwan, similar to that which the United States has with Canada...
...The Heritage Foundation, which received more than $3 million of its $18 million endowment from Taiwanese corporations, has been active in promoting issues of concern to Taiwan businesses...
...The book can stand on its own as an essay on a first-rate subject...
Vol. 38 • July 1991 • No. 3
