hardcover
200 pages
ISBN: 1594031177
$25.95 List price
Buy from Amazon.com:
Buy from Barnes and Noble:
Order with Encounter and receive a signed copy while supplies last!
Security was unusually tight at the St. Louis Club on the evening of April 16, 1981. More than 160 academic and business leaders from around the country were gathering to celebrate the life and work of John M. Olin, and much of the small talk before dinner focused on a mystery guest who had not yet arrived. Although many people figured out his identity—several men at the club looked suspiciously like Secret Service agents—only a few of them knew for certain and they were keeping it to themselves. The eighty-eight-year-old Olin seemed happily unaware that there would be a mystery guest at all.
Curiosity heightened as people took their seats and noticed an empty chair at the head table. Was that where the mystery guest would be sitting?
Finally the master of ceremonies directed everyone’s attention to the back of the room. In bounded Richard M. Nixon. Everyone stood and applauded the former president. Olin beamed as the two men embraced. “You boys pulled one this time!” he declared. They certainly had. Some weeks earlier Nixon had told William E. Simon, his former Treasury secretary and a close associate of Olin’s, that he would like to attend the dinner. They decided to keep their plans under wraps until the moment Nixon entered the room. Tricky Dick had even written a letter to Olin apologizing for his absence from the dinner: “I only wish that my schedule had been such that I could attend in person.”
Olin was thrilled to see a man he had known, admired and supported for decades. After sitting down, he and Nixon discussed families and fishing. But Olin had larger questions on his mind. It was a time of economic and political turmoil. A new president had come into office only a few months earlier—and had been shot by a deranged gunman less than three weeks before the dinner. Inflation seemed out of control and Cold War relations were tense. In the seven years since Nixon’s resignation, Olin’s hair had turned white; the aging industrialist must have known he did not have much time in front of him. And yet he peppered his longtime friend with earnest questions about the future. “Tell me honestly,” he asked Nixon, “how do you think everything is going to turn out?”
Nixon shared his thoughts with Olin and later, when it was his turn to speak to the audience, announced them for all to hear. He provided a short analysis of U.S.-Soviet relations and offered a cautious prediction for the 1980s: “We may see a major breakthrough in dealing with those who may oppose us.” Yet Nixon had not flown to St. Louis to talk foreign policy. Like everybody in the room, the former president wanted to honor a remarkable man. “It all really comes back to what John Olin stood for, what he’s contributed to, and what his foundation still stands for: the strength of the American economy, the strength of the American spirit,” said Nixon. “We have been fortunate to know this man,” he continued. “The country has been fortunate to have him.”
Then Nixon raised a wine glass in his right hand and offered a toast noteworthy as much for its obvious sincerity as for its high praise:
Due to the offices I have held and only because of that, I have toasted virtually everybody you can imagine: presidents, kings, prime ministers, dukes, queens, you name it. But I can assure you that as I look back over the years—thirty-five years that I have done it in Washington and virtually every major capital of the free world and the Communist world—there is none that gives me more pleasure than this toast tonight. He isn’t a king. He isn’t an emperor. He sure isn’t a queen. [Laughter.] He has been a president, of course, of his company, and a chairman. But I toast him tonight as one of the best and most loyal friends and one of the finest human beings that any of us could know. Gentlemen, ladies: To John Olin.
Olin had received letters from Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and many others—enough to fill the small volume presented to him that evening. Yet Nixon’s words were the high mark of a special night.
“Dick, I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he said. Then Olin rose and addressed the men and women who had come to honor him, speaking briefly about his career, his foundation and his hope for America. In his final words of the night, he issued a challenge: “We have to recover the fundamentals of our country without delay.”
This was the ambitious project to which John M. Olin devoted the final years of his life—as well as the bulk of the fortune he had spent a lifetime amassing. Before he became one of America’s great philanthropists, he was one of its great businessmen. With his father and brother, Olin built a corporate empire that was the envy of many would-be captains of industry. He found himself counted on lists of the country’s wealthiest people. He traveled in its most elite circles. He was a friend of presidents. And as with Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford before him, he eventually turned his sights away from accumulating and maintaining his riches and concentrated on the matter of giving them away. Yet there was almost nothing conventional about the way he chose to do it.
In The Devil’s Dictionary, that biting lexicon of satire and cynicism, Ambrose Bierce defined a “philanthropist” as “A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.” Olin was wealthy, thin on top, and able to flash a nice smile. Yet he had none of the guilt that Bierce believed was behind the robber barons’ making hasty amends for their crimes of success. By opposing this view, Olin was out of step not only with Bierce’s definition but also with the prevailing liberalism of his own times.
Olin gave away his money for a reason. The political and social tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s had convinced him that the American system of free enterprise was in danger of collapse—not because of any intrinsic weaknesses, but because too many people either did not understand or refused to appreciate the country’s most basic principles. Many of them occupied positions of influence and prestige at colleges and universities, in the government and the media, and, increasingly, among philanthropic foundations and nonprofit organizations. Irving Kristol referred to this group collectively as “the new class” and observed that its members dedicated their professional lives to expanding the size and scope of the welfare state.
Olin aimed to frustrate them—and to recover the fundamentals. He wanted to promote free enterprise, limited government and individual freedom by funding a “counterintelligentsia” of scholars, think tanks and publications. This was no easy task in the 1960s and 1970s, when the conservative movement was still young. Its scholars were few, its think tanks rare, and its publications essentially limited to William F. Buckley’s National Review. Conservatism may have started to emerge from its intellectual ghetto, where it had been stuck for much of the postwar era, but Lionel Trilling’s legendary condemnation remained fresh in many minds: “There are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation,” he had written in 1950, only “irritable mental gestures.”
Conservatives like to cite an old Richard Weaver aphorism: “Ideas have consequences.” Olin probably never read anything Weaver wrote, but he certainly would have agreed with this observation. He also realized that ideas alone, however powerful, are not enough. They must come from somewhere. Once they are hatched, they require testing and refinement. Only then may they begin percolating down into policy. The process takes more than sheer brainpower; it requires financial support, which is why Olin turned the John M. Olin Foundation into a venture capital fund for the conservative movement.
How successful was he? If Trilling were to come back and assess the political and social scene in the first years of the twenty-first century, he certainly would reverse his earlier judgment. Conservative ideas are ascendant; indeed, America may be in the middle of a “conservative moment.” The success of conservatism owes much to the inherent power of its ideas, as well as to the talents of individual men and women who promote them. Yet it is impossible not to see the steady influence of the John M. Olin Foundation in this triumph. 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 at least would sport an Olin bumper sticker. And some of the best drivers would have O L I N splashed across their hoods in big letters.
Some of the foundation’s major accomplishments were already in the works that evening in 1981 and would become even more dramatic in the years to come:
In addition to these accomplishments, the John M. Olin Foundation achieved an influence far greater than the sum of its parts. It was by no means the only source of philanthropic dollars for conservatives. Yet it became a leader among more than a dozen other foundations of varying sizes, and it helped turn a collection of outposts and tendencies into a full-fledged movement. Its partners in this effort included the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation, as well as the W. H. Brady Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch, and Claude R. Lamb charitable foundations, the Philip M. McKenna Foundation, the J. M. Foundation, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, the Randolph Foundation and the Henry Salvatori Foundation. Together, these foundations made sure that conservative ideas really did have consequences, even though their combined assets did not begin to approach the massive endowments of liberal counterparts. Liberal foundations outspent conservative ones on an annual basis by a factor of at least 10 to 1 and, depending on how the political biases of foundations are defined, perhaps by as much as 20 to 1.
The fact that the John M. Olin Foundation was able to do so much with so little is a testimony to the people who ran it. Apart from Olin himself, the foundation’s most significant figure was William E. Simon, whom Olin had recruited to become chairman of the board and president in 1977. Simon was Olin’s junior by thirty-five years, and he provided the foundation with dynamic leadership during its most active period. He professionalized its operations, put it on firm footing to become a major philanthropic force, and oversaw its programs until his death in 2000. All the while, he abided by Olin’s philosophical and organizational principles. His lieutenants were three smart and energetic executive directors who managed the foundation’s day-to-day operations: Frank O’Connell, who shaped much of the foundation’s grantmaking in the 1970s and was preparing to retire as Simon joined; Michael Joyce, who guided the foundation during its most creative phase and helped it become a major supporter of neoconservatism; and James Piereson, who administered the foundation’s activities as they matured over the course of more than two decades.
The story of the John M. Olin Foundation is essentially the story of these men—Olin, Simon, O’Connell, Joyce and Piereson. They are the central characters, but hardly the only ones. Their story is, in turn, the tale of the conservative intellectual movement during the final years of the twentieth century, told from the perspective of venture capitalists. They searched for promising talent and new opportunities. They experienced many successes and endured several failures. Over time, their priorities shifted and their strategies evolved. And they stayed true to Olin’s unusual request that his foundation not outlive him by more than a generation. Most important, however, was their devotion to the foundation’s mission “to recover the fundamentals,” as John M. Olin put it in 1981. At that memorable dinner in St. Louis, when Nixon and all the others had finished their tributes, Olin reflected upon his extraordinary life as a businessman and philanthropist. “That all started with one black powder mill,” he said. “And I point out that is the fundamental of free enterprise in this country, that principle: You grew out of hard work and out of accumulating profits. . . . That’s America.”
