My association with Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., began in 1954 when I was elected to the board of trustees of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and then, soon after, made the chairman of that organization's Committee on Scientific Policy. All major questions concerning the scientific program of the institute (and later, of the center as a whole) were given detailed study by that committee, and its recommendations were then passed on to the board of trustees for formal action. The report of the chairman often involved an explanation of current or contemplated scientific activities in terms understandable to a board that included a majority of nonscientists. Because of Sloan's difficulties in hearing, I usually sat next to him and did my utmost to speak plainly and clearly.
I think he appreciated this, and my previous experience in interpreting scientific matters to a lay board thus, under these special circumstances, brought Mr. Sloan and me into a relationship which developed rapidly over the next two or three years.
Nearly two years before I was due to be retired at the Rockefeller Foundation, Sloan came to my office one day with a surprising proposal. Would I join the staff of the Sloan Foundation?
I felt greatly honored by the suggestion, but the situation was clear and I answered him at once.
I was totally dedicated to my job at the Rockefeller Foundation. I could not conceive of leaving it until my time had run out.
Sloan replied equally promptly: "Good for you, Warren. If any one had ever asked me to leave General Motors I would have told them to go to hell." He then went on, "So let's talk about shifting when you retire." For the Sloan Foundation, as he explained with a chuckle, did not have a formal retirement age. Sloan was himself, at that time, past eighty.
A few days later I explained to Sloan that I had serious doubts about joining his staff, even on a part-time basis. My wife and I had by then built a permanent home in the country, just outside New Milford, Connecticut. We had looked forward to a life there that would involve a lot of gardening, which we both loved. My work in the Rockefeller Foundation had required me to be away from home a great deal, and I wanted to even up the account. I had, moreover, a host of personal projects to which I wanted to devote time.
Sloan swept away every reservation or difficulty with a generous countersuggestion. I was, in short, to work where I pleased, when I pleased, on what I pleased, only provided that I was prepared to interest myself in the problems of his foundation, to continue my activities at Sloan-Kettering, and to consult with him from time to time when mutually convenient. This sounded too good to be true, but Sloan meant precisely what he said. In every detail of our relationship he was extraordinarily thoughtful, always solicitous to protect my freedom of action, generous, and kind. Fantastic as it sounds, when he wanted to see me he did not ask that I come to him—he came to my office.
My candid relationship with him depended heavily on the fact that I had already run my main course.
I had no long future ahead of me that could be seriously affected by my time at the Sloan Foundation. Sloan realized that I had nothing special at stake, to win or lose; and that I would therefore call the shots to him exactly as I saw them. He liked that. As I think about him, a whole set of paradoxical opposites come to mind. He had—and after all, for good reason —a robust confidence in his own judgments; but with a few exceptions it was not a stubborn confidence. He was greatly concerned to get competent advice, and while he did not always follow it, he always weighed it.
One day he came, briskly as always, into my office and asked, "Do you think it too parochial [surprisingly, that was the word he used] of the Sloan Foundation to make grants only within the United States?" I told him that I thought we ought to make an occasional exceptional grant elsewhere. "Well—exceptional. That's just the point. We recently turned down a request from an engineering school in the Belgian Congo. We did right, didn't we?"
"No, I think that was a mistake."
"But Warren, no one here really knew anything about that school."
"Mr. Sloan, excuse me, but I know something about that school.
I have visited it twice.
I have real respect for its head, who has a doctor's degree from Princeton. And let me ask you three questions. First, do you think that the continent of Africa is going to emerge into the modern world during the next quarter century?"
"Well, of course."
"Second, do you think Africa can take its place in the modern world if its own people have no competence in engineering?" "Of course not."
"Third, can you name for me two places in black Africa where a native African can get really good training in engineering? And I will answer that one, for there is at present only one such place—the place we have decided against."
Sloan hesitated only a moment before saying, "When you make a mistake, there's only one sensible thing to do." He walked out, and promptly a notice was sent to the institution in question that the Sloan Foundation had granted them $50,000 for technical and scientific equipment. This, mind you, occurred when Sloan was about eighty-five.
He was capable of being pretty rough, in his language and in his judgments; but he was also a very gentle, thoughtful, and courteous man. For example, I almost never had a talk with him that did not include the remark, "And how is Mrs. Weaver? Please give her my regards."
One of the paradoxes that particularly baffled me was Sloan's great respect for basic research and for the imaginative and pioneering mind, as contrasted with his often really violent condemnation of "professors" and of the "academic mind."
I put these terms into quotes; he had private definitions! At various times, I pointed out to him as vigorously as I could that the word "academic"
admittedly had in certain circles the weak connotation of "impractical, theoretical, not expected to produce an immediate result," but also had the strong connotation, going back at least as far as Plato's Academy, of "scholarly, showing full and detailed knowledge of the subject" (both sets of terms being taken from Webster). Sloan was convinced that "professors" lacked incentive, and that their profession suffered from having no tangible way in which performance could be measured—no profit-and-loss statement at the end of the year. Indeed, he was convinced that no "professor" ever really worked hard. And since certain foundations were staffed largely with ex-professors, he also had a low opinion of the energy and courage of those foundations. He once remarked to me that foundations hardly needed any retirement regulations, because their officers "might rust out, but would never wear out."
He and I argued this matter of the academic mind and attitude on many occasions.
I insisted that I had been driven, within the small world of my competence and experience, just as relentlessly as he had been in the admittedly vaster world in which he operated.
I told him that professors did not need, did not want, and never could respect the special incentive of "bonuses" and other such "profit-sharing" devices. But I truthfully think that he never really believed this. One day, after he had let loose a particularly vigorous blast against the academic mind, I asked him how he could hold such views yet still give such great support, personally and through his foundation, to the academic institution known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The reply (which might have dismayed the Boston authorities) was, "MIT is not an academic institution! It is a technological institute!"
Sloan's presence was a continuous stimulation to the officers of his foundation. He would storm in and let loose a volley against "complacent mediocrity" and for "dynamic imagination." He had a deep-seated distrust—really a disdain—of small grants. These he considered "handouts." Importance tended to be measured by size, and size tended to be measured by the amount of money voted.
It is also indubitably the case that Sloan was not greatly interested in the ideas that came into the foundation from universities—he was interested in the ideas that were generated within his own organization. And this remark needs two emphatic additions: in most instances these ideas came from Sloan himself, and in practically all instances they were first-rate.
I have here been referring to "his foundation" and there is no doubt that the possessive pronoun is correct. But Sloan's domination did not center in the fact that he had earned and contributed the money; it centered in the fact that he had the brains and the imagination. He ceaselessly and probingly sought new ways to advance the two causes most important to him: basic research and an understanding of the economics of the free-enterprise system. He exerted leadership simply because he had the attributes of a leader.
He had so many ideas that they could not all be tenstrikes. One morning he came in and told me of a plan that had occurred to him. It seemed to me just impossible, but I promised to think about it and write him my conclusions. I did so, and two days later he merely stuck his head in my door, grinned, and said, "Forget it—it was terrible!"
His record is such that it would not be altered by any minor comment that I could make; but I am bound to say that my association with him—a surprisingly intimate one— was continuously stimulating and rewarding, and led to a feeling of affection and deepest respect. He was a truly great man.
My relationship with the Sloan Foundation was quite different from that which I had earlier had with the Rockefeller Foundation. The procedures in the Sloan Foundation when I joined it were, for example, far different from those I had been used to. There were at that time no staff meetings and no general staff discussions; each officer worked directly with Sloan. At trustee meetings Sloan, as the presiding officer, gave extraordinarily clear and complete reports of all financial aspects of the foundation's business, and he himself described—with no notes, in a meticulously accurate way and often with a touch here and there of penetrating humor—the proposals on which the board was to act. The meetings were never long. Sloan always commenced by thanking the trustees for their interest and their presence; and when the business had been briskly concluded—extended discussion was of course handicapped by his deafness—the meetings were promptly terminated.
The actions themselves—at least speaking of areas within which I had had training and experience—seemed to me first-rate and unquestionably in the public interest. But the extent to which all this depended upon the special genius of a man approaching ninety seemed to me worrisome.
Thus a great deal of my effort, especially over the first two or three years, was devoted to getting Mr. Sloan to recognize that it was essential that some less personalized organization be planned and staffed. I told him bluntly that as things then were, his knowledge, his insights, his experience, his vision, and his ideals would end abruptly on that inevitable morning when he failed to show up. (He had no morbid sensitivity whatsoever about death, and often said, half-wryly and half in fun, that he was living on borrowed time.) I suppose I was the only one around the office in a position to urge him to resign as president and bring in someone who could work with him and could thus be able to carry on the fine tradition he had established. After I had brought this up several times he invited me to his apartment for dinner one evening—the only time I was ever there—and in a long talk he said that he had decided to make the move.
Although exceedingly generous about many things, and not averse to spending money—a dinner given to some group was always at the Waldorf, with everything just right —he took a very close look at the administrative budget of the Sloan Foundation itself. He did this, I have reason to know, for wholly unselfish and fine motives: he told me once he wanted every dollar possible to go in grants. I countered with the sort of argument I knew would appeal to him: that if $10,000 spent in the office would improve by one per cent the efficiency with which $10 million of grants were distributed, then was not this a bargain? When I came in, there was a very small staff, no office manager, the secretary-treasurer had to order routine office supplies, the assistant treasurer was supposed to keep an eye on the secretaries and clerical persons, and if you wanted a ticket bought or a book wrapped up for mailing you had your secretary do it, or did it yourself. This was, actually, not nearly as bad as it sounds. The great national genius on creating and managing a huge organization wanted to keep this operation simple; and he succeeded in this, as he did in practically everything else.
What troubled me more was the tradition of the front desk that a foundation officer was tending to business when he was in the office; but if he was out wandering around universities and elsewhere, gathering ideas and listening to wants and needs, this was viewed somewhat skeptically. Sloan was used to generating ideas and plans—he was superb at it—and I think it fair to say that if someone came to him with a fully developed scheme, one which did not require his collaboration except in terms of money, that person might be a very game fish but he was certainly swimming upstream.
Well before Sloan's death on February 17, 1966, at the age of nearly ninety-one, the organization and procedures of the Sloan Foundation had been materially changed. Significant additions had been made to both the professional and the service staff. Most important of all, Everett Case, previously the president of Colgate University, became the new president of the Sloan Foundation. With great skill he served internally as the leader of the staff of officers, he worked excellently with and for Sloan, and with marked success he collaborated with the board of trustees. Saddened as we all were by Sloan's death, it was a great satisfaction to us that his foundation could sustain this loss and rededicate itself to the ideals he had established.
After five years as a vice-president of the Sloan Foundation I felt that I had doubtless made what minor contribution I could, and I asked to have the commitments between myself and the foundation mutually reduced. Accordingly in 1964 I was shifted from the vice-presidency and made consultant for scientific affairs. At about the same time retirement rules were adopted, so that presently I no longer was a trustee. These moves, and a new schedule of coming into New York about twice a month, gave me still more freedom for other interests.
One of these was a growing involvement in the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. I first met Jonas Salk in April 1960, when he came into my office and told me something of the plans for the new research institute of which he was to be the director. On this initial meeting I questioned him probingly on certain aspects of his plans, and when he left I had a hunch that I was unlikely to see him again. But soon he was back, expressing his appreciation for the frankness of our first talk, and wanting to go on with the discussion.
Before long I became really captivated both by Jonas himself and by the idea of the institute. It was to be small and flexible. It was to have no "departments" in the classical sense of university structure. It was to deal with the biological sciences on their most modern and growing frontiers. It might eventually develop other educational activities, but for the near future at least its temporary personnel would chiefly be postdoctoral persons. Its regular staff would consist of a relatively small number of outstanding individuals, each of whom would develop a program centered around his own interests. These full-time "fellows" were to be supplemented by a roughly equal number of "nonresident fellows," each of whom would spend a period every year at the institute. The initial strength was to be in molecular biology, virology, immunology, and similar interrelated disciplines, with probable expansion into some areas of behavioral biology.
All this sounds good; but why did I think the Salk Institute promised to be something so special? For one thing, several full-time and nonresident fellows were already chosen, and the level of these appointments was extraordinarily high. The group of nonresident fellows included Francis Crick from Cambridge, England, and Jacques Monod of the Pasteur Institute in Paris—two world leaders, both of whom were presently to receive Nobel Prizes. In general, the nonresident fellows were to establish a mode of communication between the Salk Institute and a number of important universities and institutes spread over the United States and elsewhere. The location at La Jolla was superb, and impressive and beautiful laboratories were already designed by a distinguished architect. The National Foundation, doubtless at least in part to express their great admiration of and continuing confidence in the man who had developed a successful polio vaccine under their auspices,* had pledged a substantial amount of money toward the initial capital costs and also toward yearly expenses.
This, however, was by no means all. It was an explicit part of the basic plan that the most rigorously experimental and analytical aspects of biology be developed at this new institute in close and continuing association with humanistic studies which, at artistic, philosophical, and moral levels would seek to interpret the scientific advances in terms of man's ideals and needs, and which, by the mere close presence of such concerns, would influence the trend of the scientific studies along lines that would seek to heighten man's potentialities and help him to lead a fuller and richer life.
* More precisely, under the auspices of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which in 1958 was renamed the National Foundation.
As a main expression of this unusual—and to me extremely promising and tempting concept—it had been arranged that one of the full-time resident fellows would be Jacob Bronowski, the almost incredible British mathematician, logician, philosopher, essayist, dramatist, and poet, the author of a number of superb books which interpret to a general audience the nature of science and its relation to other creative enterprises, the practical organizer of a huge postwar research program under the Coal Board in England, and an outstanding authority on the poet William Blake. I am sure that I have left out some of Bruno's qualifications, but perhaps my point has been made. There was no aspect of the most detailed and technical work of the institute that he could not understand, illuminate, interpret, and enrich.
It is pretty embarrassing to offer a full symphonic orchestra, and then a solo on the piccolo. But I must in honesty mention that I could not help being pleased and moved that I was offered a position as a nonresident fellow, the range (though obviously neither the intensity nor the competence) of my interests being a cut-down version of those of Bronowski.
Thus to my surprise, I found myself becoming more and more involved. Since it was wholly consistent with the unorthodox policies of the institute that a person be located on both sides of almost any fence, I was also made a trustee and for a few early years served as the chairman of the board. For three winters I spent a period at the institute. Then health difficulties developed, but as I write this, we plan to go back to La Jolla.
The institute has had some birth pains, as I suppose is natural. It badly needs broader and larger support. In long retrospect, it is now easy to see that certain mistakes were made at the outset. But the plan, I am convinced, is a sound and even noble one. There are at present essentially no difficulties that money would not solve; and I simply cannot believe that this handicap will long persist. I have been privileged to observe the birth of two noteworthy institutions—the California Institute of Technology and the Salk Institute. In both instances the concept was a great one; and I am confident that the second of the two, although destined for a future quite unlike that of the former, will add another great star to the constellation of scientific organizations of our country.
The freedom of the later years provided time for another project which I had been considering for a long time. My experience in the Rockefeller and Sloan foundations, along with overlapping experience in a number of other fund-granting agencies (the General Education Board, the National Science Foundation, the Research Corporation, the council of the National Cancer Institute, the Health Research Council of New York City, the Council on Library Resources), had led me to three conclusions. First, the great private philanthropic foundations serve our society in a most beneficial and significant way. Second, they are not only little understood—they are often badly misunderstood. Third, any social instrument will be allowed to continue only if, in the long run, it is understood and approved by people in general.
In the earlier days of the Rockefeller Foundation the public relations policy was one of overmodest reticence. Do good things, say nothing about them, and eventually the world will find you out and honor you.
This better-mousetrap policy, however, overlooked several important points. As the number of philanthropic foundations greatly increased (there are today more than 6,000 with substantial assets), it was unfortunately true that some were used for selfish and improper purposes. In the days of high personal and corporation taxes, any activity that is untaxed comes under special and sometimes prejudiced scrutiny. And there are always those politicians or the muckraking type of writers who profit from the exaggerated exposure of exceedingly rare errors in a vast record of good deeds.
It therefore seemed important to me to make available the story of the special kind of philanthropy that is practiced by the major and mature foundations in America. Discussion with foundation officials indicated their agreement with this idea. Thus, with initial encouragement from the Rockefeller Foundation, with substantial support to the project from the Sloan Foundation, and under the sponsorship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I undertook the job of preparing a book. I worked on this manuscript for about four years, and it was published in 1967.
Opinions as to the degree of foundation success in various fields would inevitably be suspect when stated by one who had been a philanthropoid for thirty-five years. Accordingly I planned the book to consist of two parts. The first part, dealing primarily with "History, Structure, and Management,"
I wrote myself. The second part, dealing with "Record," consists of eighteen rather short chapters, each of which was written by a world authority in some field (chemistry, medicine, education, law, the visual arts, international affairs, economics, and others). Each author stated, on the basis of his own direct professional experience, the values and also the limitations of the aid his particular field of interest had received from philanthropic foundations.
When the philanthropy book was well along, I became involved in gathering and updating a series of papers I had previously written on a wide variety of topics.
Finally I was invited to write the present work, so that for a time I was in the unexpected position of having three books in preparation at once.