Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (16 page)

(Indeed, after years of trial and error, the Olin Foundation funded
Princeton’s Madison Program with $525,000 in start-up grants in 2000. Run by Robert George, an outspoken social and religious conservative, the program serves as the beau ideal of the “beachhead” theory. As a friend of George’s described him to
The Nation
in 2006, he is “
a savvy right-wing operative, boring from within the liberal infrastructure.”)

Piereson warned conservative philanthropists that taking the liberal out of liberal arts education would require patience and cunning. As a former academic himself, he knew how politically charged a frontal assault would be. Rather than openly trying to overhaul academia overnight, he suggested, “
perhaps we should think instead about challenging it by adding new voices.” As he put it, “This may well be the best means of changing the college culture, for a few powerful voices of criticism may at some point bring the entire ideological house of cards crashing down upon itself.”

I
f the Olin Foundation was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central Intelligence Agency. During these eight years,
the CIA laundered $1.95 million through the foundation. Olin, according to Miller, regarded his undercover role as just part of his patriotic duty. Many of the government funds went to anti-Communist intellectuals and publications. But in 1967,
the press exposed the covert propaganda operation, triggering a political furor and causing the CIA to fold the program. The CIA money at the Olin Foundation, which was not publicized at the time, disappeared as quietly as it had arrived. The idea of using the private foundation to fund ideologically aligned intellectuals, however, persisted.

Soon the Olin Foundation was investing in William F. Buckley Jr., whose television show,
Firing Line
, the foundation supported. It was also funding Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling slam from the right at American higher education,
The Closing of the American Mind
(in which Bloom also lashed out at rock music as a “nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy”). The foundation also supported Dinesh D’Souza, author of
Illiberal Education
, which blasted “political correctness,” castigating rules requiring sensitivity to women and minorities as the overreaching of liberal thought police. In addition, the Olin Foundation funded professors at leading schools all over the country, including Harvard’s Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington. It donated $3.3 million to Mansfield’s Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard, which emphasized a conservative interpretation of American government, and the foundation donated $8.4 million to Huntington’s John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, which inculcated a hawkish approach to foreign policy and national security.

Through these carefully curated programs, the foundation trained the next generation of conservatives, whom Joyce likened to “
a wine collection” that would grow more valuable as its members aged, increasing in stature and power. The foundation kept track of those who passed through Huntington’s Olin program, proudly noting that many went into public service and academia. Between 1990 and 2001, fifty-six of the eighty-eight Olin fellows at the Harvard program continued on to teach at the University of Chicago, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Yale. Many others became public figures in government, think tanks, and the media. In all, by the time it closed its doors in 2005, the Olin Foundation had supported eleven separate programs at Harvard, burnishing the foundation’s name and ideas and proving that even the best-endowed American university would allow an outside, ideological group to build “beachheads,” so long as the project was properly packaged and funded.

On top of these programs, the foundation doled out $8 million to more than a hundred John M. Olin faculty fellows. These funds enabled scores of young academics to take the time needed to research and write in order to further their careers. The roster of recipients includes John Yoo, the legal scholar who went on to become the author of the George W. Bush administration’s controversial “torture memo” legalizing the American government’s brutalization of terror suspects.

Without the rigorous peer-reviewed standards required by prestigious academic publications, the Olin Foundation was able to inject into the mainstream a number of works whose scholarship was debatable at best. For example, Olin Foundation funds enabled John R. Lott Jr., then an Olin fellow at the University of Chicago, to write his influential book
More Guns, Less Crime
. In the work, Lott argued that more guns actually reduce crime and that the legalization of concealed weapons would make citizens safer. Politicians advocating weaker gun control laws frequently cited Lott’s findings. But according to Adam Winkler, the author of
Gunfight
, Lott’s scholarship was suspect. Winkler wrote that “
Lott’s claimed source for this information was ‘national surveys,’ ” which under questioning he revised to just one survey that he and research assistants had conducted. When asked to provide the data, Winkler recounts, Lott said he had lost it in a computer crash. Asked for any evidence of the survey, writes Winkler, “Lott said he had no such evidence.” (Proving that the recipients of Olin funds weren’t ideologically monolithic, Winkler, too, had received funds from the foundation.)

Another Olin-funded book that made headlines and ended in accusations of intellectual dishonesty was David Brock’s
Real Anita Hill
, to which the foundation gave a small research stipend. In the book, Brock defended the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by accusing Hill of fabricating her sworn testimony against him during his Senate confirmation hearings. Later, though, Brock recanted, admitting that he had been wrong. He apologized for the book and said that he had been deceived by conservative sources who had misled him.

Still, the combined impact of the Olin grantees was “a triumph,” according to Miller. Writing as a conservative in 2003, he enthused that “a small handful of foundations have essentially provided the conservative movement with its venture capital.” He noted that in contrast to the days when Lionel Trilling had declared conservatism over, “conservative ideas are in broad circulation, and many believe they are now ascendant.” He added, “
If the conservative intellectual movement were a NASCAR race, and if the scholars and organizations who compose it were drivers zipping around a race track, virtually all of their vehicles would sport an Olin bumper sticker.”

In time, the Olin Foundation’s success in minting right-leaning thinkers drew the envy of the Left. “
On the right, they understood that books matter,” says Steve Wasserman, the head of Yale University Press, who formerly tried but failed to get wealthy liberal donors to match the intellectual investments being made by conservatives. “I remember meeting at a restaurant in California with some of the major Democratic operatives and funders, Margery Tabankin, Stanley Sheinbaum and Gary David Goldberg. I was telling them that they needed to figure out a way to fund books on the left. But books aren’t sexy. They weren’t interested. They didn’t think that in the political culture it mattered. The Democrats were hostage to star personalities and electoral politics.”

T
he Olin Foundation’s most significant beachheads, however, were established in America’s law schools, where it bankrolled a new approach to jurisprudence known as Law and Economics. Powell, in his memo, had argued that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” The Olin Foundation agreed. As the courts expanded consumer, labor, and environmental rights and demanded racial and sexual equality and greater workplace safety, conservatives in business were desperate to find more legal leverage. Law and Economics became their tool.

As a discipline, Law and Economics was seen at first as a fringe theory embraced largely by libertarian mavericks until the Olin Foundation spent $68 million underwriting its growth. Like an academic Johnny Appleseed, the Olin Foundation underwrote 83 percent of the costs for all Law and Economics programs in American law schools between the years of 1985 and 1989. Overall, it scattered more than $10 million to Harvard, $7 million to Yale and Chicago, and over $2 million to Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. Miller writes, “
John Olin, in fact, was prouder of Law and Economics than any other program he supported.”

Following Piereson’s cautious playbook, the program’s title conveyed no ideology. Law and Economics stresses the need to analyze laws, including government regulations, not just for their fairness but also for their economic impact. Its proponents describe it in apolitical terms as bringing “efficiency” and “clarity” to the law, rather than relying on fuzzy, hard-to-quantify concepts like social justice.

Piereson, however, admitted that the beauty of the program was that it was a stealth political attack and that the country’s best law schools didn’t grasp this and therefore didn’t block the ideological punch it packed. “
I saw it as a way into the law schools—I probably shouldn’t confess that,” he told
The New York Times
in 2005. “Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects.” In a later interview with the political scientist Steven M. Teles, he added that he would have preferred to fund a conservative constitutional law program, but had the foundation tried such a direct political challenge, it probably would have been barred entry to America’s best law schools. “
If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said you wanted to support Law and Economics, he would be much more open to the idea,” he confided. “Law and Economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral, but it isn’t in fact.”

The Olin Foundation’s route into the country’s best law schools was circuitous. The foundation began by financially supporting an early leading figure in Law and Economics, the libertarian Henry Manne, an acolyte of the Chicago school of free-market economics. Brilliant, impolitic, and an ideological purist, Manne “
was considered a marginal, even eccentric character in the legal academy,” according to Teles, when the Olin Foundation first started funding him in the early 1970s. To the frustration of the foundation, though, he didn’t teach at high-prestige schools.
In 1985, however, the foundation seized a golden opportunity to establish a beachhead at the pinnacle of legal prestige. That year, Harvard Law School was riven by controversy. Leftist professors were urging students to “sabotage” corporate law firms from within. Conservative professors and alumni were scandalized. The ruckus attracted national press coverage in
The New Yorker
and elsewhere. Among the many outraged Harvard Law School alumni was one of the Olin Foundation’s trustees, George Gillespie. Sensing an opening, he contacted a conservative Harvard Law School professor, Phil Areeda, whom he had been in school with, and offered the foundation’s help. The Olin Foundation took the initiative, and Harvard took the cash. Out of this ideological pact came the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School, on which the foundation ultimately spent $18 million. The donation was the biggest in Olin’s history. Harvard’s president at the time, Derek Bok, was reportedly delighted at the new source of funding and the opportunity to soothe the disgruntled alumni.

After Harvard approved Law and Economics, other schools soon followed. By 1990, nearly eighty law schools taught the subject. Olin fellows in Law and Economics, meanwhile, began to beat a path to the top of the legal profession, winning Supreme Court clerkships at a rate of approximately one each year, starting in 1985. Many of the adherents were outstanding lawyers and not all were conservative, but they were changing the prevailing legal culture. By 1986, Bruce Ackerman, then a professor at Columbia Law School, called Law and Economics “
the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School.” Teles, in his 2008 book,
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
, described Law and Economics as “
the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past thirty years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony.”

As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin Foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed. The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that “a small wealthy group” was trying to “fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society.” It revealed that the Olin Foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School. Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California in Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was “
taking advantage of students’ financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology.”

More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin Foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law in Virginia, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural reeducation camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.