00:00:00RICHARD RUSK: We had one interview already that was not on tape. If you need
to know what the contents of that interview involved, you will find it in my
notes dealing with the Rockefeller Foundation years. I don't see any point in
repeating what has already been said for the benefit of the tape. Basically,
what my dad talked about then was just an overview of the Foundation, some of
its guiding principles, his appointment to the presidency, a little bit of
information of the Cox Committee and Reece Committee hearings in 1952 regarding
the assault upon the tax exempt status of philanthropic foundations. But I will
have a synopsis of all of that in written note form if you want to see it. My
00:01:00first question is about John D. [Davison Rockefeller], Sr. He has a reputation
in the public mind as being a rather ruthless fellow and yet he was obviously,
as you heard of him and as has been stated in the books, a very humane fellow
who did many great things as well with his foundations. How do you explain this
apparent contradiction in these two themes of his life?
DEAN RUSK: He was a man of his own age, which some people call the age of the
"robber barons." He was very vigorous in his organization of the Standard Oil
Company and moved in many ways to make money. He once said that a man should
make all he can, and spend all he can, and give all he can but he should not get
the two mixed up. So he, as a businessman, pursued his business with energy. And
00:02:00he had a great capacity for bringing around him people of talent to help him out
in his business activities. He used some methods which would not be possible
today, would not be accepted today; would not be lawful today, some of them. And
he was among those who developed the big, so-called "trusts," an expression that
was used in those days, which stimulated an anti-trust movement and gave rise to
anti-trust legislation by the government. But from his earliest days, from his
childhood, he had had a practice of tithing, of giving something of whatever he
earned to the church. And as he made more and more money, he gave more and more
money. And his earnings got to a point where they would almost suffocate him, so
00:03:00he turned to major philanthropies rather quickly and rather naturally. It was a
simple thing for him to do. He started out with work on public health: some of
the Rockefeller boards got involved in the hookworm problems here in the South.
He established a General Education Board before he established the Rockefeller
Foundation, as a stimulus to the improvement of education in the United States.
And that was a major contribution in those early days of education, particularly
here in the South.
RICHARD RUSK: Was it a contradiction that ever bothered members of the
Rockefeller family to the extent that you came to know them--John D. [Davison
00:04:00Rockefeller], Jr., for example--this business about tainted money?
DEAN RUSK: I don't think so. I think there was the feeling that philanthropic
money lost its taint. I never encountered anyone who was reluctant to receive
any grants from the Rockefeller Foundation because of some of Mr. Rockefeller
Sr.'s business practices. By the way, he organized the General Education Board
and the Rockefeller Foundation before there was any income tax, so there was not
a strong tax incentive for him to give all this money away. He simply had other
motivations for that. It was during the teens when the amendment to the
00:05:00Constitution was passed permitting the Congress to impose income taxes. But that
came after the establishment of the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: You made reference to the problem of hookworm in the South. You
lived in the South at the time when that was still a problem. It was one area
that the Foundation went into with great success according to [Raymond Blaine]
Fosdick's book. Would you care to think back and comment upon hookworm and what
you remember of the Foundation's work?
DEAN RUSK: When I was a small boy in Cherokee County, things like worms,
seven-year itch, typhoid fever, pellagra, things of that sort were looked upon
more or less as part of the environment in which the good Lord had put us. And
so I can remember some of those earlier efforts at hookworm. The principal
00:06:00answer to hookworm was fifty cents worth of medicine and then wearing shoes. I
remember when I went into the sixth grade our teacher told us that we now had
gotten old enough to wear shoes; we shouldn't come to school barefooted any
more. There is no doubt in my mind as I look back on it that that was a part of
the hookworm campaign. And so I went home and reported that to my mother. And my
mother wouldn't accept that, so she sent me to school the next day barefooted,
which was a little embarrassing. But when some of those teams first came into
the South to start the hookworm campaign, they were driven out of some towns and
00:07:00areas with sticks and stones. These Yankees coming in here to get rid of what
they call our "lazy worm."
RICHARD RUSK: I read an editorial comment in Fosdick's book to the extent that
the editor had asked, "What about this lazy disease in view of the fact that it
took five Yankees to defeat one Confederate soldier?"
DEAN RUSK: Well anyhow, there was a little cultural lag there. But you see,
when various efforts were made in the field of public health in those early
days, they soon learned that you could not get very far with public health
without improving education, because people had to understand what the problem
was. And so they did a good deal of work. No, that was the only incident that I
person ally ran across. One heard about them in other places. But you see when
00:08:00they started to work on public health problems in the South, they soon learned
that you couldn't get very far with that without improving education. Then when
they got into the business of improving education, they soon discovered that you
couldn't do much about education unless there was a steady increase in economic
life so that you could pay for education. Well, that powerful combination of
education, public health and steadily increasing productivity just transformed
the life of Cherokee County in my lifetime. As a matter of fact, many years
later when 1 was talking to the foreign ministers of the Western Hemisphere
about some of the development problems, I took a little time off and talked
about my earliest boyhood and this combination of these three major elements.
RICHARD RUSK: Was that at Punta del Este?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And many of them remarked to me about that. Then in the
00:09:00sixties we, out of a reflection upon our own experience in development in this
country, turned away from the glittering kind of aid projects that were stylish
in some developing countries, like steel mills and football stadiums and things
like that. And we began to concentrate more and more on these three fundamental
things: education, public health, and increased productivity. Of course, the
United States had a lucky accident--I suppose you can call it an accident--when
in the [Abraham] Lincoln administration they invented the land grant college
system in this country. And there, manpower, teaching, research were mobilized
00:10:00to address themselves to those things which were critically important to
economic development: for example, agriculture and engineering. They used to
call a lot of those colleges A&M colleges: agriculture and mechanical colleges.
And that had an enormous impact upon the economic growth of the United States.
Among other things it taught us at a very early stage that it was dignified for
an educated person to get his or her hands dirty, to get out and work. This
aristocratic view toward work has held back a good many of these developing
countries simply as a social factor, directly related to development. When the
Rockefeller Foundation would send top scientists, especially south, to
developing countries to work, one of the first things that they would do would
be to get out in the fields and get their feet and hands dirty and let people
see them getting themselves dirty to set an example to their own edcated
00:11:00people. And that has been a very important element which is still a problem in a
good many places.
RICHARD RUSK: As a general rule, the Foundation tried to work through
third-party agencies and existing governments to go ahead with this work. Were
there cases where the Rockefeller Foundation itself staffed and provided the
organization and the agency to conduct some of these projects?
DEAN RUSK: Well we had key staff in the early days in public health programs in
various countries: for example, during the battle against yellow fever. But when
we went into a serious agriculture program, say in Mexico or Colombia, we put a
number of our staff in there but we also associated with them, from the very
beginning, local people. And we tried to get the local people trained into the
00:12:00job so that if we ever left that effort there would be something left behind. We
never completely staffed any particular project of that sort overseas, but the
staff that we did send out was generally a very talented staff. The trustees of
the Rockefeller Foundation generally took the view that unless you could find
really top people to do this work you had better just stay at home.
RICHARD RUSK: Getting back to hookworm for a minute: Were you folks aware of
the fact that the Rockefeller Foundation was behind that campaign?
DEAN RUSK: Well, there were various Rockefeller boards that were, at the very
beginning, involved with it. I don't recall that we were conscious of the
origins of some of this work.
RICHARD RUSK: They tried to keep their name out of the headlines.
DEAN RUSK: That's right. The Rockefeller Foundation has pretty much taken the
00:13:00view that as philanthropy they themselves should not claim credit simply because
they put money in behind the brains and capabilities of other people. And so we
weren't looking for public applause and things of that sort. As a matter of
fact, during my years as president of the Foundation there were various and
sundry people who wanted us to go in for much more of a public relations effort,
particularly as a result of these congressional investigations. But I took the
view that philanthropic money should not be used to generate a public
appreciation of the work that we were doing.
RICHARD RUSK: True. Yet it remains a shame that when I go to this local library
at the University and try to find material on the Rockefeller Foundation, there
is a lot of material written by the Rockefeller Foundation, but only Fosdick's
book on the Foundation itself. And isn't it, in retrospect, something of a shame
00:14:00that there hasn't been at least a little bit more public awareness, if not
appreciation, for the work the foundations have done?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I suppose we have been moving more and more into periods when
everybody seems to think you ought to have a pat on the back. But we made public
every dollar we spent so that anybody who wanted to inspect what we were doing
had an annual report which reflected everything we spent. And I think it is
important that foundations are completely public in how they handle this tax
exempt money. But that is quite different from promoting yourself, trying to win
a public position, because I think it is much better for foundations to work
00:15:00quietly behind the scenes and get quiet satisfaction from good jobs done by
other people with the money you were able to supply. Now I must confess it isn't
easy to give away money in a fertile fashion. And as a matter of fact, it is a
very difficult thing to know how fairly limited foundation funds can be used to
the best advantage in the midst of all of the other resources that are now going
into such things as education, public health, and things of that sort.
RICHARD RUSK: What about this phenomenon of "Greeks bearing gifts" and people's
natural aversion to that sort of thing? Did you ever encounter that as president
of the Foundation, where recipient countries or peoples might be a little
suspicious of what you were trying to do?
DEAN RUSK: No, that was a fairly simple thing to deal with because we never
00:16:00pressed ourselves in upon anybody. We were always ready to take the next plane
home and everybody knew that. And that relieved us of any sense that somehow we
were trying to exploit them in any way, because if they didn't want it we were
ready to turn somewhere else. I remember that one of my scientific colleagues
was visiting in Europe and he visited a very distinguished scientist over there.
And my colleague asked him if he would like some funds to put in some of the
most modern equipment in the field in which he was working. This man said, "No,
I am not going to become a prisoner of machines. I will just sit here in my
study with my mind and ray slide rule and use my brain. Thank you very much but
00:17:00I don't need your help." And we respected that.
RICHARD RUSK: What about when the Foundation went to a country like England or
France, societies which have existed well longer than we have? Did you encounter
any of this suspicion?
DEAN RUSK: Well, there was in the early days a little tension between what
might be called the Anglo-American clinical approach to medicine and the
classical attitude of the continent in terms of how you teach doctors. On the
continent, traditionally, doctors were trained through purely the lecture
method. There was very little laboratory work. A prospective doctor had very
little chance to work in directly laboratories with materials that he should be
working on. And that established a pattern that we found in many places in the
00:18:00developing world, particularly Latin America. Whereas the British and the
Americans had turned to the clinical side with considerable vigor at an early
stage. So there has been a kind of contest between those two fundamental
approaches to medicine and training of doctors. In one or two cases in Latin
America we helped them to create completely new schools of medicine to take this
clinical approach, thinking it was easier to do that than try to convert some of
the older, traditional medical schools into the new attitude. Ribeirao Preto in
Brazil, for example, was a new medical school which was started off for the
purpose of putting a much larger increment of clinical work into its training.
00:19:00
RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick, in his book, stated that the Foundation had contacts and
relations with 93 countries by 1950. He said for the most part they were good
relations. One country that the Foundation was not able to establish good
relations with, or any relations with really, was Russia. Now, during the next
ten years when you were president, perhaps even in later years as well, has the
Foundation been more successful in establishing contacts and getting underway
some programs? I imagine it would have been a very difficult thing to do right
after the congressional hearings in 1952, in view of the tension that was in the
air at that time.
DEAN RUSK: The Russians were not on the same wavelength in terms of academic
freedom, scientific research, and things of that sort. But even there, there
were times when we made some gestures. For example, at one point during the
00:20:001950s a new wheat rust appeared in about four different places in the North
American continent simultaneously, and that fact alone suggested that these new
varieties of wheat rust had come in from outside the hemisphere because if there
was a mutation in one here locally, it would start there and then it would
spread like an ink blot from there. And so, we guessed that this new wheat rust
had come in by high-altitude, high-velocity winds from the wheat growing areas
of the Soviet Union. [We had] no idea at all that they were doing this
intentionally. That wasn't the point. So we tried to establish some contacts
with the Russians to do some joint work on wheat rust because there is a
00:21:00continuing battle between the wheat breeders and the mutating wheat rust to see
who is going to come out on top. But at that time the Russians were not
interested, and we understood that it was because they thought that somehow
wheat rusts were involved in biological warfare and just didn't want to get into
that with us. I was told also during the fifties by the head of the American Red
Cross that they had tried to establish contact with the Russians about methods
used in preserving blood in blood banks. The Russians, at the beginning, would
not cooperate on that because they thought that that was a military problem and
that we ourselves would not be open with them about what we knew about
preserving blood. It took the head of the American Red Cross quite a while to
convince the Russians that whatever we did know on that subject was in the
00:22:00public domain. But in Mexico during the fifties one of our fellows came up with
a blight-resistant potato. Now Mexico is one of the ancient homes of the potato
and of the potato blight. So if you get a blight resistant potato in Mexico,
you've really got something. Well, the Mexicans, with our knowledge and
understanding gave a bag of these blight-resistant potatoes to some visiting
Russian scientists who happened to be in Mexico. Well, a year or so later one of
our own Foundation colleagues was in the Soviet Union and visited the place to
which this blight resistant potato had been sent. He asked to see what they had
done with it, and he found that they had planted the blight resistant potato
alongside of Russian potatoes in sterile hothouses. Under those conditions, the
Russians potatoes did just as well as the blight-resistant potato. They wouldn't
put them out in the fields where the blights were where they might have gotten a
real test on them because, I suppose, for some reason they didn't want to
acknowledge that maybe this was in some respects a superior--Well, Soviet
agriculture was dominated for many years by a man named [Trofim Denisovich]
Lysenko. He had some views which were simply not accepted generally by world
agricultural scientists: for example, those environmental factors played the
crucial role with the yields of food crops, rather than genetic factors. And so,
under his direction, the Soviet agricultural scientists fell maybe twenty-five
00:23:00years behind world agricultural scientists. But with the departure of Mr.
[Nikita Sergeevich] Khrushchev, this scientist Lysenko also departed and the
Soviet Union since has been catching up very fast with world agricultural science.
RICHARD RUSK: Has there been greater interplay now between the Rockefeller
Foundation and groups in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?
DEAN RUSK: I don't know what the Foundation has done now. I remember when I was
at the Rockefeller Foundation, John Foster Dulles, who was then Secretary of
State, called me on the phone one day and asked if I thought the Foundation
could initiate some scientific exchanges with Poland. He said he thought it
would be a very good thing to do, but it was a little premature for the
government to get involved. So we sent a couple of our scientists off on a trip
to Poland and talked to a number of scientists and tried to locate some of their
brightest and ablest younger people who might enjoy some further training or
00:24:00further experience somewhere. And we extended some invitations for several of
these Polish young scientists to accept Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. Well
when the first group arrived, I myself went out to the airport there in New York
to meet them. I had with me a member of our staff who happened to speak Polish.
When one of these scientists got off the plane he kneeled down and kissed the
runway and broke into tears. He said he never dreamed that such a thing could
happen. It was just a tremendously moving thing for these Polish scientists to
come out and be fully exposed to scientists in Western Europe and the United
States. Of course, we had another activity related to Eastern Europe which was
00:25:00perhaps not politically cooperative. But when the Russians moved their troops
into Hungary in the mid-1950s, there was serious fighting in Budapest. The big
medical center there was practically destroyed because some of the heaviest
fighting went on there. So when the fighting had calmed down, I went to Budapest
myself under the auspices of the International Red Cross to see if the
Rockefeller Foundation could be of any help in restoring such things as this
medical center. Meanwhile, we were giving scholarships and fellowships to many
of these young Hungarian students who had been caught up in this fighting and
then had had to flee the country and pursue their education elsewhere. One of
00:26:00the most moving evenings I ever had in my life was the evening I spent in Vienna
where a group of these Hungarian student refugees who insisted upon meeting with
me to express their appreciation for what the Rockefeller Foundation was doing
to make it possible for them to pick up their lives and keep them going despite
the events in Hungary.
RICHARD RUSK: There is a letter in Fosdick's book from a Hungarian that deals
with that. Is this the same meeting where one Hungarian told you he personally
knocked out five or six Russian tanks in Budapest?
DEAN RUSK: I don't remember that particular point. But there are so many things
in which we and the Russians ought to be cooperating willingly and freely. I
00:27:00have long felt that we and Canada and the Soviet Union ought to be putting in a
lot of time, cooperatively, on the problems of the far north, the frozen tundra,
what could be done with that. How could people adjust themselves to those
circumstances? Can we develop plants that can grow in such areas? All sorts of
things can be done on a cooperative basis, but it isn't easy to get them fully
cooperative in things like that.
RICHARD RUSK: Ideas are dangerous to that society. They are reluctant to bring
people in who are used to freedom of expression.
DEAN RUSK: There are those who think, and I am inclined to be one of them, that
on this kind of point the Russians face a real dilemma. Because if they are
going to be successful in their sciences, they have got to free people's minds
from party control. And if you free people's minds in one field, they are
00:28:00inevitably going to be having thoughts about other matters. Now, in general, I
think it is true that they have pretty much liberated their nuclear physicists
and their space scientists, and now their agricultural scientists, from close
party supervision. I hope that steadily expands because that is all to the good
if they will bring themselves to do that.
RICHARD RUSK: You made the point earlier that the Rockefeller Foundation often
had better relations with some of these third world countries than our own
government did, and you used as an example Dulles 'attempt to get at the
memoranda of conversation of the Rockefeller Foundation staffers going
overseas'. There has been a shift in attitude between our country and some of
these Third World countries since then. Has that affected the work of the
00:29:00Rockefeller Foundation? Some of this might have been going on during the years
you were president, but it has probably continued since you left that position.
Does the foundation still have these close ties?
DEAN RUSK: I dont know how it is now. You would have to get that from the
people at the Foundation now. But throughout my period there at the Foundation
we were pretty well accepted for what we were: a private philanthropy with no
political fish to fry, with no direction from our government, no reporting back
to our own government. And that opened up intimate relations of a sort that
sometimes appeared to be more intimate than, say, an American ambassador could
achieve. Now, I must say that American ambassadors in these countries welcomed
anything that the Rockefeller Foundation would do in their particular countries
because there is inevitably a by-product of good will for the United States out
00:30:00of that kind of work of an American foundation. But we tried to protect that
relationship by not saying or doing things that might be embarrassing to those
with whom we were dealing. We just did not look upon politics as our business.
We tried to stay out of it as much a possible.
RICHARD RUSK: When you first took the job as president of the Foundation, John
D. Rockefeller, Jr. advised you to head to the wilderness, more or less, and
take a fe weeks off and just think about the question of what you could do and
what the Foundation could do to best utilize all this money and this potential
for the betterment of mankind. You had to immediately jump into this Reece and
00:31:00Cox Committee testimony in Congress, and never had the chance to take that time
off and address those questions. Had you had your six or eight weeks in the
wilderness and had a chance to think that one over--
DEAN RUSK: Mr. Rockefeller suggested three or four months.
RICHARD RUSK: Would you and the Foundation have done anything different than,
in fact, what you ended up doing in the fifties? I suppose a related question to
that would be, did the trustees themselves and the executive staff of the
Foundation at various times just sit down and ask those big basic questions as
to direction and the ultimate goals?
DEAN RUSK: Mr. Rockefeller did not want the Foundation always to be tied to its
00:32:00own past. He did not want it to fall into a rut. He wanted always the
possibility of new and fresh ideas to come in. His suggestion on that, I think,
was very useful. But the trouble was that because of the Congress and its
investigating committees, t had to do just the opposite and go back and become
intimately familiar with everything the Rockefeller Foundation had done in the
past. But the trustees during that period would occasionally have trustee review
committees to give thought to the direction of the Foundation. I also made a
point of trying to visit each trustee at his home base about once a year just to
talk over that kind of question. Now in the process, we began to pull back from
medicine and public health because such enormous resources on a national and
international basis were coming into that field that it would seem that the
00:33:00marginal contributions of the Foundation would be relatively slight. On the
other hand, as my president's reports will indicate, we became increasingly
concerned about what was going to happen in the third world countries. So we
stepped up our interest in the third world, particularly in agricultural
programs and in education. You see, if you look around the world, in all of
Latin America, Africa, Asia, you probably would not find a single university
that would be qualified to be admitted to, say, the American Association of
Universities, this group of, say, top fifty universities in this country. Now
you can well understand that for historical reasons. But my view was that if
00:34:00that should be true in another thirty or forty years that that would be a great
shame. And so we tried to encourage the development of first- class capability
in some key universities here and there. So that was a rather different swing.
RICHARD RUSK: Incidentally, what happened to Peking U.?
DEAN RUSK: The Peking Union Medical College was set up separately after a time
with its own endowment, The China Medical Board.
RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick left the story in 1950. Now I am not sure that what was
done by the Foundation with the Peking Union Medical College was quite the way
00:35:00to do it, because it was done on such a lavish scale and such an almost
luxurious standard that it was not easily reproducible in other places in China
or in Asia. We probably should have concentrated more on building high quality
into something which would be more accessible to others. But anyhow, when the
communists came in, they took that over and used that as a part of their attempt
to erase all traces of friendly attitudes between the Chinese and the America
people when they first came to power in China. They seemed to take the United
States as enemy number one in those days. I remember that they charged that the
Peking Union Medical College had been established simply to let Americans
practice vivisection on the Chinese and things like that. But even during the
time that I was president of the Foundation we would occasionally get messages
00:36:00from some of the doctors at the Peking Union Medical College, very indirectly
and very discreetly, saying to us, "Don't worry, we are still here. We are going
to go ahead with this work."
RICHARD RUSK: They continued to function as a medical college?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, and now they are a very important medical college in Peking.
But the Foundation had made contributions to Yale's effort in China, Harvard's
effort in China. There had been a lot of interest in China in the early days of
the Rockefeller Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: John D. Rockefeller, Sr., looking back as an old man upon the
00:37:00Foundation, seemed to be rather pleased with what had happened. Fosdick quoted
him as saying to [Frederick Taylor] Gates at one point: "We built better than we
knew." He was also of the point of view that this was not something that should
last forever and that probably by the third generation of Rockefellers it would
be well for the thing to go out of existence. My question is, what's going to
happen to the Foundation? The third generation of Rockefellers apparently don't
express a whole lot of interest in getting in there with that family fortune and
making it work.
DEAN RUSK: The third generation are the five Rockefeller brothers. It's the
fourth generation which has not pressed itself.
RICHARD RUSK: You're right, with the possible exception of Jay [John Davison
Rockefeller ].
DEAN RUSK: You see, it has been traditional for only one member of the
Rockefeller Foundation to be a member of the Board of Trustees
RICHARD RUSK: Do they need the personal involvement of the Rockefeller family
00:38:00to continue to make that a going concern?
DEAN RUSK: Well, Grandfather Rockefeller and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. did
not want the Foundation to become a purely bureaucratic organization without any
sense of the motivations that had led them to set it up in the first place. And
so, they sort of passed along the thought that maybe the Foundation ought to be
liquidated at the end of the third generation. Well, our trustees dis- cussed
that and came to the conclusion that we should not liquidate just to liquidate,
that if something came along where the resources of the Rockefeller Foundation
could make a crucial difference to achieve a major purpose, then of course they
00:39:00would throw everything they had into it, such as something that would produce
peace in the world. However, the General Education Board, of which I was also
president, did in fact liquidate during my period. You see the General Education
Board had, in supporting education in the United States, made a considerable
number of endowment grants to capital funds of colleges and universities. But
when you get in the business of making capital grants you are in a very
expensive business. And so the General Education Board decided that rather than
just peter out over a period of years with fewer and fewer funds, that we would
just go ahead and spend ourselves out of existence. And we did this during my
period. But the Rockefeller Foundation has not liquidated. There was first, in
00:40:00terms of active trustees, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; then John D. [Davison]
Rockefeller, III; and now Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. And it has
sort of been assumed that there would be one member of the Rockefeller family on
the Board of Trustees.
RICHARD RUSK: Do they spend funds out of principal as well as income?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, we started that during my period.
RICHARD RUSK: They had not been doing that prior to your years in office?
DEAN RUSK: Very rarely. But we thought the needs were so urgent that if we
found good opportunities for using these funds, that we ought to be willing to
supplement the annual income with some capital expenditures.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you personally get involved in the investment decisions that
were made?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, I was an ex officio member of the Finance Committee. It was an
absolutely brilliant Finance Committee in handling the portfolio. It was a
00:41:00committee of trustees and it had on it people like Robert [Abercrombie] Lovett,
John Jay McCloy, Lewis [Williams] Douglas, and people like that who any
President would be glad to have as his Secretary of the Treasury. I learned a
lot as a member ofthe Finance Committee. But again, the Finance Committee took
the view that its responsibility as trustees was to invest the funds of the
Foundation to the best advantage from an economic point of view. So, they
invested primarily in stocks on the big board of the New York Stock Exchange and
in government securities. But we never mixed up the business of earning money on
the one hand and giving it away on the other. For example, we never made loans
for philanthropic purposes. Among other things, we never wanted to have a
00:42:00trustee responsibility for suing anybody to recover loans. So, we would not lend
money. If we thought well of something we would give money to it, but we did not
lend money. Nor would we accept any gifts from anybody else with any strings
tied to it. We took the view that the funds of the Foundation should be fully at
the disposal of the Board of Trustees, and so we would not accept any
conditional gifts. One very touching thing happened during my tenure there as
president. Apparently, during the worst of the [Adolf] Hilter period, there was
a German scientist who looked out of his window in Germany, and he saw a group
of storm troopers approaching his apartment house. And he hastily scribbled on a
little piece of paper, "I bequeath all of my assets to the Rockefeller
00:43:00Foundation." Then the fellow went down and turned himself in. As it turned out,
apparently the storm troopers were looking for somebody else. But anyhow he was
lost in the concentration camp. And then some years later, his bequest was
delivered to the Rockefeller Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: That's quite a story. I was real impressed with Fosdick's book.
He is obviously a real enthusiast and a believer in the Foundation.
DEAN RUSK: Well he had been a great president of the Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: Obviously there had to have been a pretty strong sense of pride,
of common purpose of the esprit de corps among the staff people themselves. Can
you give some examples of that?
DEAN RUSK: We had some extraordinarily able staff people during my day. Warren
Weaver, head of the scientific program; [Jacob] George Harrar, working under him
in the agriculture program; a man named [Joseph H.] Willits, head of the social
00:44:00sciences; and some very experienced doctors like Alan Gregg, who were genuine
statesmen in the field of medicine and public health: very competent group. And
they were dedicated. Now, I did, in my time, move the Foundation to more
interest in the arts. We had been very short in the arts field. There we
encountered a not-too-easy question: that is, what can money do to stimulated
creative arts? What is the relationship between money and creativity in the
arts? That is not as simple a question as it might sound at the beginning. But
we got more and more into the arts field, I think with some interesting results.
00:45:00For example, we were told by a good many people we consulted that young artists
need to see their product; they need to see their pictures exhibited to the
critics; they need to see their dramas performed; they need to hear their
musical pieces played. And so we made grants, for example, to the Louisville
Symphony Orchestra to allow them to lay on a program of new compositions every
year. We did the same thing in the drama field, and that, I think, was quite
stimulating and interesting. But we gave a lot of fellowships in the arts, too,
just to give artists some time to work at their business. And then we made major
grants to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts when that came along.
00:46:00
RICHARD RUSK: In comparison with other bureaucracies that you have been
involved A with there was a strong feeling of mutual purpose and unity among
staffers, I would presume.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, we had regular docket conferences among the officers where we
would talk over together on an interdisciplinary basis which proposals we would
in fact make to the trustees. Of course there were some little jealousies here
and there about how many funds would go into particular fields. I think [there
was] a certain amount of tension from some of the medical people when we began
to draw back on our expenditures in medicine. And so we retired a number of our
medical staff during my period.
RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick points out an incident in which the esprit de corps
00:47:00probably suffered and it happened before you got there. But apparently the U.S.
government asked the Rockefeller Foundation to put more money, several sizable
appropriations, into the cyclotron out at the University of California. And it
was a military secret as to what some of the purposes of that thing were for.
DEAN RUSK: Well, during the thirties the Rockefeller Foundation had supported a
good deal of work in nuclear physics. Of course, this was a field right on the
cutting edge of science. Simply as science, it seemed to be an attractive field
to support. And among other things we had put some money into the cyclotron at
Berkeley. Then along about 1941, the Foundation was called by the director of
the laboratory at Berkeley and told that they needed something like a quarter of
a million dollars urgently and that they could not tell us why. And the then
00:48:00trustees of the Foundation decided to go ahead and give them that money. They
were somewhat abashed a little bit later, after the war, to discover that what
they had done had been an integral part of launching the Manhattan Project.
RICHARD RUSK: Apparently Truman himself wrote a letter to the trustees thanking
them for their support and the trustees on the one had were real glad they were
able to help furnish the war in the fashion that it happened, but on the other
hand were a little bit sorry to get caught up in this great dilemma. Do you
remember it? Was it discussed when you were there?
DEAN RUSK: No, it wasn't really discussed. By the time I got there it was sort
of all forgotten. But it was something the trustees were caught by surprise with
and caused a good many of them to think things over. But there is another part
00:49:00of the relationship between a particularly larger private foundation and the
government. Government has to operate on budgets it gets from Congress. But
people in government frequently come up with things they want very much to do
but haven't got the money for, and so they attempted to turn to foundations to
get foundations to do what they themselves would like to do but can't pay for.
Well, in effect, those are the crumbs that fall off the tables of government.
And the Foundation's view is that, as a matter of priority, if these are so low
priority in government, not to be worth government financing, then it is not the
job of a private foundation to come in and pick up these crumbs. So there have
00:50:00always been some problems on that. President [Dwight David ] Eisenhower, during
my period, launched what he called the "Peoples to Peoples Program." And when he
launched it, he did so with the idea that private foundations would pay for it,
that this would not be a tax supported activity. Well, heck, since 1913 the
Foundation had been involved in a "peoples to peoples program" and we did not
want to divert our Foundation funds into that particular program because we were
already in the business up to our necks. President [John Fitzgerald] Kennedy was
somewhat disappointed because major foundations did not come in with larger and
quicker money for the performing arts center there in Washington D.C., which was
later named after him. It's too easy for people in government to think that they
can somehow supplement appropriations by calling on private foundations to pick
00:51:00up the tab on these things. Foundations are generally rather resistant to that
kind of thing. We could be swallowed up by government if we went down that trail.
RICHARD RUSK: Just looking at a list of projects that the Foundation had
funded, I see where the Rockefeller Foundation got behind [Alfred C.] Kinsey in
his studies of sexual behavior. Did the general public ever figure that one out
or did it ever become a controversial grant?
DEAN RUSK: We made those grants through a committee of the National Academy of
Sciences, and we thought it was important that this field be subject to
research. That was one of the issues which came up before the Reece Committee
for investigation. But when Kinsey published his book on the male and was
ginning up for his book on the female, we submitted the Kinsey work to a group
00:52:00of statisticians to have them take a look at it. And they came back with a very,
very negative report on the abuse of statistical method by Kinsey because he
would take various captive groups, like prisoners and people like that, and get
interviews from them. It was not in any sense a scientific sample. Then he would
derive from that what the entire population was thinking and doing in this
field. So, we pulled back from the Kinsey work and were charged by some people
as having pulled back because of the congressional investigation. But it really
00:53:00was because of the very poor statistical methods which Dr. Kinsey had been
using. Almost every year we would make a grant or two that we called our
"frolic" for the year. We thought we ought to just keep our hand in in making
unusual grants just so that we would not become completely in a rut. For
example, we supported Dr. [Joseph Banks] Rhine's work for a time in extrasensory
perception, at Duke, not on the grounds that anybody could prove that it was
correct, but it was very, very difficult to prove that it was incorrect. So, we
put some money into that. So that we tried to be a little frolicsome
occasionally in some of the grants.
RICHARD RUSK: Can you think of any other weird types of grants that you might
have made?
DEAN RUSK: I can think of some we didn't make. We were asked at one point
00:54:00during my period by some people out in the Midwest to provide funds to give them
a chance to study the sociology of juries. One of things they were going to do
would be to tape-record jury sessions without the knowledge of the jurors. We
simply rejected this out of hand as a matter of public policy. Then, I remember
one grant that bothered me. I forget now what we did about it. But some group of
sociologists and psychologists wanted to study hostility among children. They
were proposing to induce hostility into groups of children in order to make
these studies, and we didn't care much for that. So, you have public policy
00:55:00considerations coming into the business of philanthropy very often. Now there
was one field in which we did move somewhat contrary to official public policy
during the fifties and that was to begin to take an active interest in the
population problem: family planning. You see, up through the early sixties,
family planning was contrary to the public policy of the United States. You
could not send contraceptives through the mail in this country, for example. So
we did some experimental work in the villages of India on family planning
techniques as to what sorts of things might be acceptable in that kind of
culture. And we were a little nervous that we might get caught at it by people
in Washington and they would raise a hue and cry about it. But then, during the
00:56:00decade of the sixties public policy on this turned right around 180 degrees with
the help of a lot of work in the executive branch and private people like John
Rockefeller III, who had organized the Population Council in the private field,
and people like Senator [James William] Fulbright in the Congress, and others.
It became possible then for President [Richard Milhous] Nixon to sign a family
planning bill for the United States with about $350 million in it to encourage
family planning in the United States.
RICHARD RUSK: When you tried to shift the focus of the Rockefeller Foundation
in a broad way, from domestic concerns to international concerns such as
population, hunger, disease, food production, did you encounter serious
resistance from the Foundation or trustees in this new shift of emphasis?
DEAN RUSK: No. I tried to talk these things out with individual trustees in
00:57:00formulating policies or policy suggestions to put to them as a whole. And I felt
very strongly myself that what was going to happen in the third world was going
to be a ticking time bomb for the entire human race in so many different ways.
RICHARD RUSK: You could sell the argument even from the point of view of the
best interest of the United States.
DEAN RUSK: Well, you didn't really have to with that Board of Trustees because
the charter purpose of the Foundation was to contribute to the wellbeing of
mankind throughout the world. See, we had an international charter. And although
well into the sixties a majority of the funds were spent in the United States,
00:58:00nevertheless we had a worldwide charter. And then a good many of these trustees
had had sufficient experience of their own to realize what was happening out
there where two-thirds of the world's people live was going to be very important
for all of us.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you get everything you wanted? Was there any specific goal or
general direction that you wanted to take the Foundation that was frustrated by
the trustees?
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
DEAN RUSK: He once said, "They must have had a good daddy." And that was true.
Old John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was quite a father. John D. Rockefeller, III was
00:59:00very much involved in the Rockefeller Foundation. David Rockefeller was very
much involved in the Rockefeller Institute which later became the Rockefeller
University over on the East River. Winthrop Rockefeller became Chairman of the
Board of Colonial Williamsburg. So they sort of divided up their philanthropic
interests. And then, of course, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. made major
investments in the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which was a separate philanthropy,
which is organized to give the five Rockefeller brothers a chance to pursue
their own personal philanthropic interests. That was a very important
philanthropy and did a lot of good things. Let me repeat what I have said to you
01:00:00before. In retrospect, I think that the greatest contribution made by the
Rockefeller Foundation was its endless search for talent, demonstrated by its
01:01:00rather remarkable fellowship program. They scoured the world for first class
minds among younger people to see if they could give those people an opportunity
to go flat out to the limit of their ability. Most of their fellowships were
postgraduate, postdoctoral fellowships where the formal education had already
been completed and where an additional experience in Western Europe or the
United States or somewhere might Cop off what was there. Then the Foundation
tried to follow up on these fellows when they went back home to see whether they
might need some books, some laboratory equipment, or some additional
reinforcements so that they could make the best use of what they had learned in
their fellowship years. I think that constant talent search was one of the most
01:02:00important things because institutions mean nothing except for the people who are
in them.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever get into any trouble for robbing talent from
overseas countries?
DEAN RUSK: No, we were very careful about that. We always had an in-depth
interview with a person before we offered them a fellowship. And if there was
any indication that they looked upon a possible fellowship as a cover for
immigrating to the United States, we dropped it straightaway. In contrast with
some of the experiences of other fellowship programs, I think I remember once
seeing some figures indicating that only one out of a thousand of our fellows
failed to go back to the country of origin and continue their work back home.
01:03:00
RICHARD RUSK: Do you believe the figures?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. I believe the figures. That did not come about on the basis of
any contractual agreement that they would go home--we weren't going to sue
anybody--but just on the basis of looking for people who were committed to
working in their own countries to improve things. So I think the Foundation has
a record on that. We were not stealing talent from other countries. The United
States has, and continues to do so in drawing nurses out of the Philippines
where they badly need nurses because they can work in this country at somewhat
less pay than some of our American nurses are willing to do. Interns: there has
been a great abuse of foreign interns in our county hospitals and things of that
sort. As a matter of fact, I was told once in New York that if I were involved
in traffic accident there would be only one chance in five that the intern on
the ambulance could speak English.
01:04:00
RICHARD RUSK: Did you continue the practice, as president of the Foundation, of
giving these little grants-in-aid, smaller type grants averaging two or three
thousand dollars worth, which Fosdick said was a good cure against the problem
of "bigness"?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, we had that capability. As a matter of fact, in my time we had
a lump sum appropriation for fellowships and the officers and I could approve an
actual fellowship without going to the trustees on it. We also had a great
grant-in-aid capability in which I could, under my own signature, give final
approval to a grant-in-aid up to ten thousand dollars. That was later lifted to
fifteen and I think maybe it's twenty now. So, we were able to use that kind of
01:05:00pin money here and there to pretty good effect. Now the thing to watch out for
in something like that is the problem of scatteration: distribute your funds in
such small bits, over such a wide area that you don't get any real impact in any
single area. So one has to watch that a little bit.
RICHARD RUSK: Whoever it was who developed penicillin, or got it to a stage
where it was practical as a drug, had one of these little Foundation grants?
DEAN RUSK: He had a little grant. And I always resisted any effort by anyone in
the Foundation to claim any credit whatever for penicillin because we had made a
very small grant to that fellow. It was his brain, his work.
RICHARD RUSK: Fosdick took the story up through 1950. Can you name the top
achievements, the really big ones that stand out in terms of the Foundation's
01:06:00programs between'50 and '60. Was miracle rice developed during that period?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we established the International Rice Research Institute in
Los Banos during my period, during the fifties, but they did not break through
the hybrid barrier with rice until maybe the early sixties. You see, we get
enormous vigor from hybrid corns and hybrid wheats, but up until the late
fifties hybrid rice was sterile. It wouldn't reproduce itself and that was a
major blockage in breeding superior breeds of rice. So we decided, during my
period, to attack this problem and felt that we ought to do it on a cooperative
basis involving several rice growing countries in Asia. Our officers visited
01:07:00these different countries and they thought it was a great idea, but each one of
these countries insisted, of course, that the institute ought to be in their
particular country. We couldn't get any agreement among these countries as to
where it should be. So we just stopped that consultation and made our own
decision as to where to put it, and we decided to put it in Los Banos in the
Philippines with a close affiliation with the University of the Philippines. And
then we had Asians on the board, and the advisory panels, and on the staff, and
things like that. Well that was, to me, a source of great satisfaction because
it had a lot to do with the "green revolution" which has greatly enhanced the
possibility of producing basic foodstuffs. I think the work done in the
agricultural program in Mexico was of fundamental importance.
RICHARD RUSK: George Harrar's program?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, both in wheat and corn. And that was very satisfying because it
01:08:00does show the way to making full use of available capabilities to grow basic
food in a world in which we are going to need an awful lot of food in the coming decades.
RICHARD RUSK: You have spoken in general terms about how your greatest efforts
remain in leadership training and the search for talent. But as far as the
handful of specific projects that really leap out and stand out in your mind
during your years in office, are there any others in particular?
DEAN RUSK: I think that some of the work we did to improve the quality of
universities in the third world was important. Now our funds were only marginal
in some respects, but it could make the difference in quality in certain key
01:09:00departments here and there. And, of course, the Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts project in which we participated very strongly has been a very
satisfying thing to bring together there the Met, the New York City Ballet, and
the Julliard School, and things like that. That was a major contribution to the
performing arts in this country. But again I would go back and say that as far
as I am concerned the greatest satisfaction came out of these fellowships
because there is nothing to substitute for people.
RICHARD RUSK: When you folks went into the area of public health overseas, on
an international basis--
DEAN RUSK: That began back in the teens.
RICHARD RUSK: Yes, prior to your time. But eradicating and controlling these
diseases and epidemics combined with the revolution of increased techniques in
01:10:00food production. Did you and the trustees of those times foresee the problems
which would occur with overpopulation?
DEAN RUSK: The Rockefeller Foundation never took the view that, in regard to
its work in medicine and public health, it should pull its punches on the
grounds that the result might be too many people. I think there were moral,
humanitarian, as well as what might be called policy considerations working
against that. But I think it is true that as medicine and public health moved
rapidly that it was apparent that there was going to be a demographic problem
right around the world. And so, we got at it by putting a good deal of effort
01:11:00into support of demographic studies as well as family planning, and to get at it
from the other side of the ledger by helping people to produce more food. We
never took the view that the way to limit population is through disease.
RICHARD RUSK: Did it surprise you folks to the extent that the population has
mushroomed in the fashion that it has?
DEAN RUSK: No, I think the--
RICHARD RUSK: That old dilemma again: advances in one field sometimes
discourage progress in another.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, most major problems merge into other major problems. But you
see, with the explosion of communication that has occurred these billions of
people around the world now know that illiteracy, disease, abject poverty are
01:12:00not part of the universe in which God placed us, but that something can be done
about it. And so, these are now matters which relate directly to the possibility
of peace in the world because millions of people are not going to starve
peacefully, as they might have in the old days in places like China and India.
So there is an urgency about these matters that the Rockefeller Foundation took
up seriously in the 1930s and stepped up its work in agriculture, family
planning, things of that sort.
RICHARD RUSK: We've covered a fair amount of ground in these two interviews.
Can you think of anything we haven't covered? I've got some more questions here
and we can go on forever, but I'll ask you at this point: Anything particular
that you'd like to stick in the record that we haven't touched upon? Go ahead.
01:13:00
DEAN RUSK: I was somewhat skeptical about some of the things which were being
done in the so-called behavioral sciences where some people were trying to put
numbers on things that could not be numbered and where they developed esoteric
language of their own that those outside of the trade could not even understand.
Early in ray tour as president of the Rockefeller Foundation I was invited to
meet with a group of top behavioral scientists up at Arden House, the Harriman
home up north of New York City. We spent a day having these behavioral
scientists talking to me about what they were up to, what they were doing. At
the end of the day, they turned to me for any comments and I, perhaps not too
tactfully, said, "Well, one of my comments is that unless you people can tell me
01:14:00what you are doing in terms that I can understand, I am not sure that you
understand what you are doing." So I brought that skepticism into the Foundation
with me. One of these behavioral scientists later remarked that it was a black
day for the behavioral sciences when Dean Rusk became president of the
Rockefeller Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: What about the social sciences in general? I know that the
Foundation had its great successes and very dramatic successes in areas like
public health, hookworm, and stuff like that. But when it got into the field of
the study of man and his behavior--
DEAN RUSK: Well, the social sciences are much more difficult to deal with and
achieve major breakthroughs in.
RICHARD RUSK: They are not really a science compared to some others. There are
so many variables.
DEAN RUSK: I suspect that some people have been led astray by aping the
01:15:00techniques of the natural sciences in the study of man and in the humanities. I
am not sure these same techniques really apply.
RICHARD RUSK: The Foundation has invested a lot of funds in the social
sciences. Did you folks get your mileage worth out of those investments or was
that an area of some disappointment to you and the trustees?
DEAN RUSK: I think we tried to contribute to both research on the one side and
public information on the other and international exchanges in the field. We
gave substantial grants to the Institute of International Education, to the
Council on Foreign Relations in New York, to the Foreign Policy Association, and
comparable activities abroad. We put funds into the building of an international
house in New Delhi, an international house in Tokyo as an encouragement for more
01:16:00exchange among different peoples of different cultures, traditions, and so
forth. We put a lot of money into economics along the way. For example, we
supported very heavily what they call the National Bureau of Economic Research.
RICHARD RUSK: The one that keeps all the statistics on the American economy?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, and the study of economic cycles and things of that sort.
RICHARD RUSK: Make your comment about the tendency of these fellows that if
they think they can get it right on paper, they have got the problem solved.
Would you care to speculate on that bias of social scientists?
DEAN RUSK: Well, there was a little bit of a bias in the Rockefeller Foundation
as far as those studies which would have an impact upon the wellbeing of man
kind. Now we did respect science and scholarship for its own sake, knowledge for
01:17:00its own sake, and we supported a good deal of that kind of research and study.
But on the other hand we tried to stay alert as to what the results might be of
particular studies, particular work. For example, we put some money into the
aesthetics of cities as a whole in case people wanted to give thought to that.
We put a good deal of work into the problem of adequate drinking water. We put
some money into architecture for modest homes for people who had no low-cost
housing to live in.
[break in recording]
01:18:00
DEAN RUSK: --that travel to other countries would involve me in. It turned out
to be an invaluable experience to me when I became Secretary of State. In this
nuclear business there are a good many scientists who gave us the atomic bomb
[and who] have been rather patronizing and scornful of politicians and policy
people. But the fact is that this month we have already put behind us thirty-
01:19:00nine years since one of these things has been used. So on the whole the policy
people have not done too bad a job. One thing we did at the Rockefeller
Foundation that John D. Rockefeller, III, as chairman of the Board, was very
good about: When we invited somebody to become a trustee to the Rockefeller
Foundation, we emphasized that if they became a trustee they were expected to
take it seriously, to attend meetings and work at it; and if they did not feel
that they could do that they should not come onto the Board. And we had
extraordinary attendance at our trustee meetings. John D., III was a quiet and
unassuming kind of man, but he could bring to a project which he was interested
01:20:00in persistence and a determination in his quiet way that really got a lot of
things done. His work in the population field, both here and abroad, has been a
major contribution toward this entire population problem. He himself organized
the Population Council and got it started with his own funds and was a major contribution.
RICHARD RUSK: Was it John D., Jr. or III that we visited at Jackson Hole that
one summer, when you warned me not to ask how much money he had?
DEAN RUSK: I forget which one of the Rockefellers was there at that time. It
was not Jr., no.
01:21:00
RICHARD RUSK: You made the point that the investment wing and the philanthropic
wing of the Foundation were two separate entities and you kept them separate.
DEAN RUSK: That's right.
RICHARD RUSK: And you didn't let one influence the other. Did you run into any
situation where there would be conflict or tension between those two wings? I
bring this up because Jay Rockefeller, apparently when he was running for
governor against the strip mining interests, ran into a situation where the
Rockefeller family itself was involved in the coal industry in West Virginia.
That's one example. There would probably be others given the breadth and depth
01:22:00of Rockefeller investments in industry. Was there overlap?
DEAN RUSK: No, that kind of problem just wasn't present during the fifties. For
example, we were never asked by anybody whether or not we had invested in
companies that were doing business in places like South Africa. We invested in
primarily common stocks and companies that were listed on the New York Stock
Exchange, and we invested in government securities. And those questions of
political inhibitions upon investments on the big board of the New York Stock
Exchange just didn't come up in those years. As trustees we had a responsibility
to do the best we could to conserve and increase the assets of the Foundation,
01:23:00and that was a trustee responsibility which we took seriously. We did our best
to invest our funds to the best advantage from an economic point of view. Then
after we had made the money, we proceeded to give it away for philanthropic
purposes. But we never bought any stock or made any loans for philanthropic
purposes. We made money on the one side and we gave it away on the other. Those
two things simply did not get crossed up with each other.
RICHARD RUSK: Speaking of funding in general, there was a big increase in
funding from '32 to '59, a jump up to $34 million in 1959 in Rockefeller
funding. How did you increase the funds?
DEAN RUSK: Well we had a very able finance committee so that our investments
01:24:00did well in those years. But also during my period, the trustees, on my
recommendation, made a deliberate decision to begin to spend some capital each
year in addition to income, and that increased substantially the level of
spending that we would take on in any given year.
RICHARD RUSK: Have they been able to maintain that since you left?
DEAN RUSK: I think they have been spending capital pretty consistently since
then, yes.
RICHARD RUSK: Do they still have as healthy a source of funding to work from as
they did, or has that been declining?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, as a matter of fact the Rockefeller Foundation began in 1913
with a stake of, I think, something like $150 million from Mr. John D.
Rockefeller, the grandfather. And over the years they have spent, I would think,
a billion and a quarter dollars and have a billion dollars left. Their present
01:25:00portfolio is in the range of a billion dollars. So that's, among other things, a
sign of extraordinary growth in American industry between 1913 and the present.
RICHARD RUSK: Gates made the comment to John, Sr., "Your money is steamrolling
so fast that you better spend it as fast as you can or it will run away with you
and your offspring."
DEAN RUSK: That's right.
RICHARD RUSK: Why is it that the foundations seem to be an American phenomenon?
Now there have been other smaller ones overseas, but both Fosdick and some other
people made the comment that it is pretty much an American development.
Obviously it had something to do with conditions in this country and government
nonintervention in earlier years.
DEAN RUSK: Well, Chat's an interesting question. I am not sure that I have a
complete answer. But when Alexis [Charles Henri Maurice Clerel] de Tocqueville
01:26:00wrote his famous book about America in the early nineteenth century, he
commented on the streak of generosity in the American people and the willingness
of neighbors to help each other out and to band together to accomplish purposes
which were not otherwise being taken care of by government or any other agency.
There has been a philanthropic streak in the American scene; but I think also,
beginning with the income tax, philanthropic giving has been encouraged by the
tax laws by providing tax exemption for philanthropic contributions. You see,
the American people today are coming up with something like sixty billion
dollars of philanthropic giving every year. Now, about five percent of that
comes from corporations, about five percent comes from foundations, but the rest
01:27:00of it comes from private citizens. One of the ways to raise really big money is
through the March of Dimes technique: large numbers of small gifts from a lot of
people. And it is just true that that is a part of the American scene. Now when
I was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, I worked with some people in
Europe, including Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, to see what could be done
through tax laws and things like that to encourage that kind of philanthropy in
Western Europe. For example, in England back in the fifties there was no such
tax deduction unless you made a seven-year covenant to make gifts of a certain
amount over a period of seven years. Of course, when you have socialist
governments there is a tendency on the part of socialist governments to think
that this is a function of government and is not a function for private
01:28:00citizens. And indeed a little of that attitude grew up in our own Congress, that
Congress should have more to say about how tax exempt funds should be used. But
in a sense, as far as the Rockefeller Foundation is concerned, the tax exemption
was not all that important. One year, I remember, just for interest I had our
people figure out what federal income tax the Rockefeller Foundation would owe
if it were taxed like any other business corporation. Well, to begin with you
would get something like an eighty-five percent deduction on ninety percent of
your dividend income from other corporations. Then we would presumably have the
01:29:00ordinary corporate five percent contribution capability. And then there were the
administrative costs. The year I figured it out, the Rockefeller Foundation
would only owe about $500,000 in income tax, and we could easily have made that
up simply by not making grants to federal institutions. So there is nothing in
it. The tax exemption didn't really amount to anything from the point of view of
dollars, as far as the Rockefeller Foundation was concerned, if we were taxed
like any other business corporation.
RICHARD RUSK: I have a general idea of what the Rockefeller Foundation is all
about. By comparison, what type of things have the [Henry] Ford Foundation and
the [Andrew] Carnegie Foundation gone into? Similar types of programs or
something quite different?
DEAN RUSK: Well, to begin with, even though we have tens of thousands of
01:30:00foundations in this country, back in the fifties there were only about seven or
eight foundations that had any major activity in the international field. There
was the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation.
RICHARD RUSK: I remember the figure: seven foundations with assets in excess of
a million dollars.
DEAN RUSK: Of a hundred million. But the Carnegie Corporation is pretty much
limited by its charter to members of the British Commonwealth of nations. But
then there was the [Will Keith] Kellogg Foundation that also was fairly active
in certain agricultural activities, and there were two or three others. But
basically there was only a handful of these big foundations that had any
particular international activity. And in those days there were all sorts of
01:31:00quirks in the tax laws. I remember that Texas would not give tax exemption to
foundation expenditures that were made outside of Texas. But to go back to your
question about motivation, somehow it grew up as a part of the American culture,
beginning with the pioneer days when neighbors would get together to raise a
barn, or the husk a crop of corn, or in quilting parties, or whatever it might
be. You just gathered together to do things like that.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you find recipient countries or recipient individuals a
little bit surprised at what this was all about?
DEAN RUSK: A little hard sometimes for people to understand the concept of
philanthropy. In India, for example, I had the impression--I could be
wrong--that you could meet any philanthropic obligation you might have by
01:32:00dropping a few pennies in the cup of a beggar along the street. But the idea of
really doing philanthropy in a big way, even on the part of those who had a lot
of money, was simply culturally more or less unknown to them. Of course, in the
protestant ethic in this country they had for a long time a great pressure
toward tithing, giving ten percent of your income to the Lord. And maybe that
01:33:00got into being a part of our culture. I remember once, though, when I was at the
Foundation, I went down to Texas to talk to a newly rich oil man to see whether
he would give a million dollars to Texas University if the Rockefeller
Foundation would give them a million dollars at the same time for some purpose
we were interested in. And this gentleman heard me out, and when I got through
he said, "Give them a million dollars? I have only had it for two years!" So
apparently, you have to have your money for a while before you develop that kind
of philanthropic instinct. And, of course, it may be that estate taxes have had
quite an influence on this situation.
RICHARD RUSK: Can you think of an instance where other countries or
institutions, because of contact with the Rockefeller Foundation concept of
philanthropy, have adopted that as something that they should be doing themselves?
01:34:00
DEAN RUSK: Well, the Nizambad Hyderabad in India established a big foundation.
But in one case the Rockefeller Foundation was a very specific stimulus for the
organization of a foundation. Mr. Gulbenkian, an Armenian who lived in Portugal,
a man with very large funds, lived to be over a hundred. He died, and in his
will he indicated that he wanted a foundation established, the Gulbenkian
Foundation, modeled on the Rockefeller Foundation. So at the time of his death
the designated trustees of the Gulbenkian Foundation invited me to come to
London to talk with them about the Rockefeller Foundation. But the more I talked
01:35:00about the Rockefeller Foundation; I think the less some of them were interested.
And it turned out to become a Portuguese foundation and it didn't quite develop
on the same basis. The old man had expected to live forever and he had not
really buttoned it up tightly before he died, and so it didn't quite get to be
the kind of foundation the Rockefeller Foundation was.
RICHARD RUSK: What is the general thrust behind the Ford Foundation, and also
the [Daniel and Florence] Guggenheim?
DEAN RUSK: Well, the Guggenheim Foundation concentrated on mid-career
fellowship for interesting, able, and stimulating people. I think almost all of
01:36:00their funds were spent in their famous Guggenheim fellowships. And they did an
excellent job of selecting people that they would back for a year or two's free
time to do what they wanted to do and finish up their work. The Ford Foundation
was established pretty much on the same motivations that led to the
establishment of these other big foundations. But almost all of the funds of the
Ford Foundation at the beginning were in nonvoting Ford Motor Company stock. And
because its name was Ford Foundation and that was the Ford Motor Company, there
was sometimes a little tension between the foundation and the Ford Motor Company
on the public relations aspects of what the Ford Foundation was doing over
01:37:00against the public relations interests of the Ford Motor Company. And the Ford
Foundation over the years has diversified considerably now in its holdings. But
Mr. Henry Ford II became chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation and they
were much larger than the Rockefeller Foundation for a while. But the problems
of the motor industry in this country reduced their relative size considerably.
We kept in touch with the other foundations. There was no antitrust law
affecting foundations. There were times where we and Ford or we and Carnegie
would join in supporting a particular enterprise. As a matter of fact, when we
established the Rice Research Institute in Los Banos in the Philippines, the
01:38:00Ford Foundation put a substantial amount of money into that, but on the
understanding that the expertise of the Rockefeller Foundation in such things
would play the central role in terms of management and direction and things of
that sort. But Carnegie and Ford both made major contributions toward education
in this country and to some extent in other countries. They made endowment
grants and things of that sort. I think both of them have done a very good job.
Of course, my own preference is for the Rockefeller Foundation.
RICHARD RUSK: I know you don't want to engage in gossip. I'm aware of your
reasons for not writing memoirs. But surely you must have gotten to know the
Rockefeller brothers pretty well during this period, or at least some of them.
Have you any general comments to make on them?
DEAN RUSK: Well, 1 got to know them individually, although John D. Rockefeller,
01:39:00III was the only brother who was associated in any way with the Rockefeller
Foundation. But I saw the others from time to time. They were an extraordinary
group of brothers. They were all able, very great abilities, each one of them in
his own different way. But the Rockefeller family from the very beginning,
including the third generation, has had an extraordinary ability to find
talented people to work with them and that is true of the five brothers as well
as Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and the old man, the grandfather. But they were
a very talented group. The five brothers are very different individually. Nelson
01:40:00[Aldrich Rockefeller] was very outgoing. He was the one who became heavily
involved in politics at a very early age and was interested in public service
and that kind of thing. Laurance Rockefeller was very much involved with
environmental questions and restoration, but he was also the principal
businessman for the five brothers. Winthrop Rockefeller went out to the
southwest and organized some of these big supermarket kind of chains and had a
farm out there which he was very proud of. He was also chairman of the Board of
Colonial Williamsburg. David was very public spirited, became chairman of the
Chase Bank. He was also much interested in public life but he did not actually
01:41:00participate in public life. John D. Rockefeller, III was relatively quiet. He
did not reach out for public acclaim. [He was] very quiet and retiring in his
nature, but when he put his mind to something he did so with great energy,
effort, and persistence. He had a lot to do with turning around American public
policy on family planning. If I had to put my finger on any one individual who
had most to do with that it would be John D. Rockefeller, III. As a matter of
fact, I once proposed that he be given a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in that
field, but it didn't turn out.
RICHARD RUSK: In terms of public policy, he helped to turn that around in the mid-seventies?
01:42:00
DEAN RUSK: During the 1960s. You see, when I first took office as Secretary of
State, if a senior official of government got up and started talking about
family planning he would have had his ears boxed, because at that time it was
simply against the public policy of the United States. I think it was still true
that you could not mail contraceptives by mail, for example. You had to send
them by express. Well, with a good deal of work with the government and in the
private sector by people like John Rockefeller, III and in the Congress with the
help of people like Senator Fulbright, the whole thing got turned around in the
decade of the sixties and made is possible for President Nixon to sign a family
planning law for the United States carrying something like $350 million for
family planning in the United States. Now that happened in many other countries
around the world. When I first became Secretary of State and you would poll the
countries of the world on their policy with respect to family planning, there
01:43:00might have been twenty percent of them in favor and eighty percent against.
RICHARD RUSK: As a foundation, that was one you pretty much stayed away from?
DEAN RUSK: Well, not completely. But if you took such a poll today the figures
would be reversed: eighty percent of the governments in favor and twenty per
cent against. There were a good many Catholic countries opposed to family
planning in the early sixties. But when it became known generally that the
princes of the church were debating this among themselves, that tended to free
up both Catholic laymen and governments of Catholic countries in this field. And
also the demographic pressures began to be more and more apparent and
governments realized more and more that something was going to have to be done
about this population problem or it would swamp us all. There were some public
01:44:00relations problems with my job as president of the Rockefeller Foundation. It
was a job that created a good deal of press interest and intrigued people. I
remember that I once went on a visit to London, and the airline that I was
traveling on apparently tipped off the press that I was arriving on one of their
planes. So I was met at the London airport by a group of reporters and they were
very itchy and anxious to know what checks I was bringing with me, what money I
was going to give away to England and things like that. I just didn't say
anything. I had nothing to say to them, just wouldn't give them anything. But
then one reporter for one of the more popular London newspapers went off and
wrote a wholly imaginary story about this nice young man who had several hundred
million dollars to give away and didn't know what to do with it. Well, I was
01:45:00staying at the Clarendon Hotel. I was there for a day or so and then I went off
to another part of England but kept my rooms for a couple of days. And when I
came back to the Clarendon I stopped by the front desk to get my key and I said,
"Is there any mail?" And, with a very funny look on his face, the fellow at the
desk said, "Yes, your mail is in your room." I went up there and the bath tub
was filled with mail. The British are great letter writers. And the mail had
come flooding in from all over the place giving me advice about how to spend
this money. So I had to have all that mail boxed up and sent back to New York
and answered because I felt we had an obligation to answer it.
RICHARD RUSK: Any other memorable experience you can recall about advice from
people on how to spend your money?
01:46:00
DEAN RUSK: Well in the foundation world you have to get used to the fact that
you have to say "no" about twenty times for every time you can say "yes" because
you just can't find that kind of money. But, it is not easy to say no to people
when they think they have something really worthwhile going.
RICHARD RUSK: You must have been under a lot of pressure to spend money in ways
that would relieve misery,
DEAN RUSK: Well, we set our faces very strongly against trying to deal with the
problems at the consumer level because your money would disappear in a year's
01:47:00time with no permanent effect. And so, we just did not get into that.
RICHARD RUSK: Although the Foundation did, on rare occasions, during the big
crash for example, during the great depression period of some going out of
windows in New York City, I think the Foundation got involved in funding bread
lines. After World War I and World War II there were efforts to directly use
Foundation funds to help alleviate some of the misery of those times. Did you
ever have to fire people or pull the plug on various projects because of
improper use or uneconomical use, poor utilization of funds? I know it's not the
kind of administrative chore that you would find comfortable, but did it have to
be done?
DEAN RUSK: Well, there might have been some of that, but not during my time
because it is just simply a way to disappear as a foundation. The scale of need
is so great in relation to the rather limited sources of even a large
foundation. And if you go down that trail there's nothing.
01:48:00
RICHARD RUSK: You spend yourself out of existence.
DEAN RUSK: If you can get at the root causes you can help millions of consumers
by getting at the solution of the problem, like yellow fever for example, or
hookworm, or whatever it might be. Now, it is also true that we sometimes
attracted some people with mental problems. We had one of our doctors sort of as
a standby to go out to our reception room to deal with cranks that might come in
for one purpose or another. I remember one occasion when a young man came into
the reception room and insisted upon seeing me. The receptionist thought there
was something odd about him and so this doctor came out to talk with him. And
01:49:00apparently this young man said that Mr. Rockefeller had left his entire fortune
to him on his twenty-fifth birthday and, "Today is my twenty-fifth birthday and
I want to see the president of the Foundation so he can turn it over to me." But
it's usually just some poor people who are unbalanced and just sort of talk them
out of it.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever have to withdraw funding from a project because of
misuse of funds?
01:50:00
DEAN RUSK: Sometimes we made grants that were conditioned upon those funds
being matched by the recipient from other sources. And there were a few times
when they were unable to match those funds and so those funds lapsed. But in my
day there at the Foundation the idea was that we would decide ahead of time what
was a good thing to do, and we would go ahead and give the money and then, in
effect, forget it. We did not try to manage it or tinker with it because the
responsibility belonged to the recipient institution.
RICHARD RUSK: Would it be given in lump sums to these projects, or would there
be criteria set up by which they would receive disbursements?
DEAN RUSK: Well sometimes there would be grants over a period of years, but
basically we tried to do it on a one-time basis. That was our favorite way of
01:51:00doing it. I think now, under the changes in the tax laws, foundations are
expected to, in effect, monitor their grants a little more than we used to. And
that has the complication that it gets foundations into a role which does not,
in my judgment, belong to them, in trying to tell universities and colleges and
places like that how to run their shop. But, no we had very good luck. We never
had to sue anybody to recover any money because they had failed to meet the
requirements. There is another point which may sound a little strange from a
foundation operating so much in the research field and academic field. We tried
to avoid leaving the impression with anyone who received one of our grants that
01:52:00they owed us an article or a book. We took the view that an article or book
ought to be published when the author was really pregnant and just had to
publish it, that we didn't want anybody writing articles or books just to
satisfy a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation because that is the way you get
a lot of junk produced. Now a lot of fascinating books came out of work
supported by the Rockefeller Foundation--many articles. We did not get into the
business of providing funds to assist people to earn a Ph.D., so we didn't get
involved in supporting Ph.D. theses. Most of our grants were postgraduate, post
degree grants of one sort or another. Now there were so many different things we
01:53:00did along the way. We became aware during my time there that a lot of newly
independent countries were arriving on the scene. They not only had a great
shortage of manpower, but a shortage of simple things like libraries. We found
that these newly independent countries were having to establish new foreign
offices without any working library for a foreign officer. So we put together
what might be called a care package of books. [There were] about 600 books in
French and English that we put together in consultation with some key people in
both English-speaking and French-speaking societies. And we gave these
collections of books to the foreign offices of these newly independent
countries. We gave them twenty-five or thirty of these sets, and they were very
01:54:00much welcomed by those who received them because the colonial powers had left
nothing behind for them to even begin to work with: such a simple thing as an
encyclopedia. We found that many of these countries had no trained diplomats and
we arranged with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a similar
institution in Geneva to lay on a training program for young diplomats from
these newly independent countries. And that was very successful. We also found
the same thing was true in their treasury departments and the financial side of
that business. We put some money into the World Bank to assist the World Bank in
getting started with the program to train middle-level financial officers of
these developing countries. That was so wel1-received and the World Bank was so
pleased with it that the World Bank then continued that on its own funds. So,
01:55:00there were all sorts of things that appeared to be good ideas that we could get
started with which nobody else would do. It would be very unlikely that the
United States government, for example, would do these things for these newly
independent countries that I was talking about.
RICHARD RUSK: This is a related question: Of all the colonial powers, you said
that the British seem to do the best job as far as training an indigenous civil
service and some indigenous leadership.
DEAN RUSK: And institutions of higher education.
RICHARD RUSK: Why the British? Why were they that way as contrasted with the
rest? And I've heard this before.
DEAN RUSK: I think the British were looking all along toward a maximum amount,
in effect, self-government on the part of their colonies. They got into that at
01:56:00a very early stage. They relied very heavily upon the Indian members of their
civil service. Although there were some Britishers in the Indian civil service,
most of them were actually Indians and they had a very able staff of top civil
servants to rely on when they became completely independent. The same thing with
colleges. In a number of the colonies they had colleges that were affiliated
with the University of London, were actually related in terms of awarding
degrees with the University of London. But for some reason the French, the
01:57:00Belgian, the Dutch, the Portuguese didn't go down that trail. As a matter of
fact, it is kind of interesting to me that we found that the Rockefeller
Foundation was welcome in the British colonies in Africa, for example, but we
were not particularly welcome in the African colonies of these other colonial
countries. They were rather suspicious as to what our influence might turn out
to be. Now, one can take a broader view and look back and realize that a country
like Britain, which went through several centuries of establishing the great
institutions of freedom, took along with them in their knapsacks the seeds of
the destruction of the British Empire because they could not be free--
01:58:00
END OF SIDE 2