Ferrytale: The Career of W. H. “Ping” Ferry 9781503619432

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FERRYTALE The Career ofW. H. "Ping" Ferry

Ferrytale THE CAREE R OF W. H . "p IN G" FERRY

lamesA. Ward

STANFORD UNIVERSIT Y PRESS STANFORD , CALIFORNI A

2001

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, James Arthur Ferrytale: the career ofW. H. "Ping" Ferry I James A. Ward. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-4157-3 (alk. paper) 1. Ferry, W. H. (Wilbur Hugh). 2. Public relations consultants-United States-Biography. 3. PhilanthropistsUnited States-Biography. 4· Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions-Officials and employees-Biography. I. Title. CT275.F4845 W37 2001 973.92'092-dc21 [Bj

Original printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 10 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03 02 01 Typeset in 10/12.5 Minion

2001031194

For Carol Bernstein Ferry

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The difficulty with acknowledgments is that the only people who really notice them are those whose names were inadvertently omitted. This is the most dangerous chapter of the book to write. But I would be remiss ifi did not thank the Faculty Research Committee at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for two generous grants that funded two extended trips to Dartmouth to wade through Ping's lifetime accumulation of paper, and two visits with the Ferrys in which I had the opportunity to extensively interview both and watch them go about their daily routines. I am not much inclined toward praise of deans, but I do want to thank the former dean of Arts and Sciences, Timothy Summerlin, who awarded me a sabbatical leave for the fall of 1999 to enable me to finish this book. And Neal Coulter, UTC reference librarian, as usual did yeoman work, tracking down information, looking up citations, and finding all manner of material I did not know we had. For seven years he has asked why I was wasting my time on Ping, but he made my task easier-he always does, and someday I am going to make him smile. The most overworked and overlooked folks in the world are those who preserve papers and primary materials for historians to mangle. Philip Cronenwett, director of the Baker Library Archives in Hanover, is a professional, well organized, and helpful. He made our stay in his precincts as enjoyable as eight hours a day of reading Ping's mail could be. He and his staff referred to us, behind our backs until I overheard them, as "the Ping people." Good natured, kind, and helpful, they toted boxes of material to the reading room, photocopied thousands of pages, and made us comfortable. I also appreciate the archivists at Princeton and Santa Barbara who furnished heaps of photocopied Ping material for my perusal. I have to thank Ping even though he got me into this. Thanks to him I have met, talked to, and corresponded with hundreds of interesting people I would not have otherwise met. He opened whole new worlds to me and introduced me to political types who are fairly rare in Tennessee environs. Likewise, my thanks to Carol, who provided many insights into her husband, tips on "must" books to read, a succession of postcards decorated with Iowa barnyard animals, answers to innumerable questions, and many evenings of conversation. Always open, frank, and like Ping, outspoken, she is fun, yet serious about her own political, social, and philanthropic interests.

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Acknowledgments

I am not even going to try to list all the people who talked to me about Ping, not b·ecause I do not appreciate their insights and efforts, but because I will surely omit a few. Many gave liberally of their time and patiently replied to my followup questions. The most memorable was Win Nathanson, who was ninety-two when I talked to him and getting ready to go back to his archaeological dig at Troy. Throughout our conversations he kept calling me a "young buck'' and "sonny," which made this middle-aged interviewer's day. Ping was still alive when I interviewed them, and, as might be expected, they were reluctant to discuss his faults. A few did, and they generally perceived the same flaws, but would rather have discussed his more gentle and kind side. They gave me a great deal of information, however, and illustrated that Ping manifested similar traits toward them all. The origins of those traits, many of them contradictory, were much harder to discern. I also have to thank H. L. Ingle, George Fox's biographer, who is one of the toughest critics around. Not only did he have to listen to Ping stories at the Chattanooga Lookouts baseball games, but in addition he read the entire manuscript and told me exactly what was wrong with it. It is a much better work for his efforts, and although he would want me to add a disclaimer that he is not responsible for anything between these covers-he is. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Roberta, who spent part of two summers sequestered with me in archives, but who also got to meet Ping and Carol, transc:ribed everything Ping said, swam in their pool, and listened to me prate on about the book's progress. She read the entire manuscript and with her usual candor and skill suggested many improvements. She is an invaluable helpmeet in more ways than are obvious herein. J.A.W.

March 3, 2000

CONTEN TS

Preface Foreword by Victor Navasky 1.

The Primal Ping

2. Figuring Father

Xl

xvn 1 9 16

3· Stubbornly Different 4· In Search of Ping

26

5· The Organization Man 6. The Awakening

43

7· Fumigating the Republic 8. A Full Sack of Concerns 9· Peacenik 10. Caught on the Horn of Plenty 11.

A Political Hoax

35 54 64 76 87 101

12. Father Louis and Doctor Ferry

115

13. Troubles on Olympus

131

14. Separations

142

15. Getting Rid oflt

152

16. Censoric Boobery

163

17. Gentlemen You Must Be Mad

170

18. Peacethinking

179

19. Peace

191

Notes

201

Selected Bibliography

229

Index

233

(8 pages of photographs follow page 100)

PREFACE Behind the Ferrytale

The title is Ping's; the book is mine. In his inimitable manner he came up with "Ferrytale" as a shorthand way of referring to the project. When he was really in a hurry, he resorted to BPF, Biography of Ping Ferry. Not only is his title a play on his name but it also implies the pratfalls that can bedevil the biographer, especially when his subject is alive and looking over his shoulder. Biographies all have elements of the fairy tale in them; that is what makes them so alluring. Ping contended that luck was the grand theme of his life, a thin reed upon which to construct a biography. He was lucky, endowed with good health, brains, ambition, and drive. At many turning points in his life, Lady Luck intervened to yank him from his difficulties. He, however, often forced the Lady to decide in his favor. His personality, activities, and proclivities went far to determine his destiny. The least passive man on the planet, he made the choice to serve as the nation's conscience or, as he preferred, America's scold. We discussed the question of whether a scold was worth a biography. Again and again Ping said, "No," while he peppered me with almost daily letters, fed me information, suggested folks who might have something worthwhile to say, and reminded me ifl did not get hopping, he would be dead before it appeared. It was an obvious capstone for his distinguished career; it was his "grand project," as his wife Carol explained. My motivations were less clear, even to me. I have made a career of writing biographies of humorless, rather dull, nineteenth-century entrepreneurial types who fashioned corporate empires, built things, and left physical legacies-railroads, imposing structures, bridges, traffic thoroughfares, huge industries, and foundations. They fabricated the nation's industrial infrastructure; they" did" things and could quantify their successes. For seven years, when I told people of whom I was writing, they invariably replied, "Who? What did he do?" My stock answer was he scolded Americans about preconceptions that led to policies that discriminated against women and minorities, threatened nuclear annihilation, undermined the liberal arts, and doused the essential human spirit. Somehow, it never seemed adequate. One day at faculty lunch, where education occurs in academe, someone

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posed the question, and an economist friend at the table, Fritz Efaw, exclaimed, "I knew him." Efaw, nominated for the vice presidency at the 1976 Democratic Party convention, had been jailed in Oklahoma City a few years earlier for burning his draft card. He had had one phone call, no money, and only the fuzziest notion that someone named Ferry in Scarsdale, New York, would go bail for people like him. He called Ping and Carol, and they sent him the money. "Fine people," he recalled. That is what Ping "did"; he made a difference to thousands of people who, like him, dared challenge authorities to end undemocratic and inane policies to bring about a fairer world. At Ping's eightieth birthday celebration, Robert Borosage called him an "American Original," and for a long time that was the book's working title. But it was not strictly true; Ping was a descendant of the American Original archetype, thoughtful doubters and critics who called upon their generations' consciences to reform or revolutionize national life. They were men and women uncomfortable with prevailing ideas and nostrums that yielded political, social, and cultural forms. Always principled and fervid, usually very bright, and heedless of their own security, they boldly spoke from their fears and hopes to persuade contemporaries to see the hypocrisies and ironies of their times. The contours of American history are littered with their efforts, for they helped create its very profiles. At the end of their lives, most, like Ping, doubted they had accomplished much, but each planted seeds in the national consciousness that eventually matured to alter national thoughts and conduct. Ping Ferry stood with good company, men such as Roger Williams, who, like Ping, kept his faith and was ostracized, not because he did not believe in the Puritans' God but because he had the temerity to stand among them and declaim that God had no need for their merger of church and state. Williams was banished from his colony; Ping was only run out of Connecticut and Seattle. Notably, both men fought for just treatment of Indians. There was an element in Ping of Cassius Clay, the abolitionist not the pugilist, who from deep within the enemy's camp hurled his moral thunderbolts against slavery. Ping too liked to attack from within, ravaging politicians at their conventions, editors in their newspapers, educators at their meetings, even advocating black colonies in the United States in front ofblack audiences. Likewise there were strains of Thorstein Veblen, the late-nineteenth-century economic thinker, in Ping. Both iconoclasts looked at their world through a different lens, and Veblen too attacked from inside. In his case, he thrashed the Rockefellers while he taught at their University of Chicago, and Leland Stanford and his ilk while perched in junior's memorial university. Other originals, such as John Peter Altgeld, preceded Ping. A German immigrant, Altgeld became Illinois governor in 1893; he defied public opinion by

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pardoning the three Haymarket anarchists still in jail, confronted President Grover Cleveland and opposed sending federal troops to break the Pullman strike, and became a William Jennings Bryan free-silver advocate. He too probably thought he was not worth a biography, for his voters turned him out, but he struck blows for political freedom, the rights of workingmen, and economic fairness. Ping fought for the same causes half a century later. The list of American Originals is almost endless, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who struggled her entire life for woman's rights, and Mark Twain who, with biting satire in everything he wrote, but especially his Letters from the Earth, pointed up the absurdities of American beliefs and customs. Ping stood beside Emma Goldman, a remarkable individualist and revolutionary, who fought for human decency and for her efforts was deported. Ping might have even applauded her lover, Alexander Berkman, who shot Henry Frick during the Homestead strike. Although Ping abhorred violence, he would have at least agreed that Berkman aimed at the right man. Ping preferred to advise younger revolutionaries on how to destroy the system peacefully. The generation that spawned Ping was one full of his kind, people like Mary E. Lease, the Populist Party legend, whose famous admonition, "Raise less corn and more hell," Ping took to heart. He even for a time called himself an "American Populist." Progressive Robert M. La Follette ofWisconsin, who believed that governments advised by experts would rule wisely for the benefit of all, and Clarence Darrow, who fought to stretch the legal system to protect everyone, not just the plutocratic lawmakers, had a loyal disciple in Ping. Like many "Originals," Ping was a second-echelon figure in his own time, scolding from the fringes, often far removed from the action. But like his forebears, he was always passionate and outspoken; they all endured ridicule and savage opposition and thrived on it. More important, however, time showed they were right far more often than not. They did not always live long enough to witness their victories, but, like Ping, they embodied the spirit ofloyal opposition, pointed out the hypocrisies inherent in the "conventional wisdom," stood as personal examples of what compassionate, fearless persons could be, helped thousands of others visualize the possibilities for a better world, and invigorated many to keep up the good fight. That was what Ping "did"; that was why I decided he was worth a biography. Elsewhere I discuss how Ping came to anoint me his biographer. My side of the story is more prosaic. I initially had no intention to write this; Ping was a sidebar to a book I was finishing in 1992, The Fall of the Packard Motor Car Company, whose penultimate president was Hugh Ferry, Ping's father. Hugh left no known papers, and when I wrote a short piece on Hugh's administration for The Packard Cormorant, I gleaned most of my information from secondary

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sources. Ping's neighbor gave him a copy of my article. As was his wont, Ping fired off a letter to the journal's editor complaining, and the editor passed it on to me. Sensing an opportunity to ferret out Hugh's Packard papers, I replied. It was a grave mistake. Not only did Ping have none of his father's business papers, but he collected friends and correspondents as others collect baseball cards and railroad timetables. I was soon hooked; the man wrote letters that sizzled. He was interested in and had forceful opinions about everything. More astonishing, he knew or at least had met almost everyone who was anyone in the mid-twentieth century. I played the game of "Have you met?" with him, sending him names from the Popes to a Maine hermit. He had, every one. Ping was quite unlike any man I'd ever known. On the one hand he was a walking historical artifact: he had taught John F. Kennedy and hobnobbed with the likes of Lewis Mumford, E. F. Schumacher, E. P. Thompson, and Henry Ford II. On the other, he was Sidney Hook's (how he would have winced at the mention) man of thought and action. Ping was a man who read books and instead of regurgitating them for dozing college sophomores, spread their ideas to the nation and the world. I don't honestly know how he conned me into writing this, but the sequence of events went something as follows: I suggested to him, as had dozens of others, that he write his autobiography. Ping demurred, saying he "lacked the voice." Reams of correspondence followed in which he somehow convinced me it was my idea to write his biography. When I agreed to do it in September 1992, I warned him that he chanced becoming "Ward's P. F." Ping understood, but he had an advantage in that he was still afoot, he could influence me. I was frank with him on my trepidations about "doing" a live subject, sticking my nose into his personal life, and importuning his relatives and friends for information and opinions. He was not fazed in the least and wrote letters to many people asking them to "tell all they knew." They did not, of course; he was still alive. Despite Ping's help, this is not an authorized biography. Our contractual relationship, based on a handshake, was simple; he asked not to be shown or told anything, and I complied. I did not tell him with whom I talked or to whom I wrote, although many interviewees told him themselves; I certainly did not tell him what they told me. Nor did I tell him who refused to talk to me. Ping made all his Scarsdale papers available and cleared the way for me to look at those he had donated to Dartmouth College Library, even those few under time locks. He also identified other smaller Ferry deposits at Wisconsin, Princeton, and Santa Barbara. Our financial arrangements were equally simple. Ping did not pay any of the costs of this book; both of us insisted on that, to leave me free to write what I

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pleased. The only contributions Ping and Carol made were some wonderful meals at their house while my wife and I stayed there to interview them, books he sent-it was impossible to stop him from sending books-and photocopying costs for documents he mailed to Tennessee from time to time. The most disturbing problem I faced, however, was whether I could maintain the necessary detachment from him to retain perspective and objectivity. I shall confess I liked Ping, almost everyone who met him did. Even those few not listed among his friends, admitted to liking the man. He was a well-read curmudgeon with a twinkle in his eye, a razor-sharp wit, and always, a cause on his tongue. I think our proximity did not dazzle me; I recognized he had the usual quota of human flaws and failings. I told him I would not write a hagiography; I did not know how, and he certainly did not want one. My "PF," or what Ping more cleverly called the man in the "Ferrytale," would be showcased, warts and all. After pondering the complexities of writing about a living person, I concluded it is not so different from writing about a dead one. I had always developed strong feelings toward the long-dead subjects of my prior biographical attempts, and those feelings colored the books; it was no different with Ping. The biggest advantage was that I could pick up the phone to ask him a question. I also had the chance to take his measure; I watched his mannerisms, talked to him, smelled him, listened to him play his piano, and observed him about his daily tasks, all small things, but useful tidbits indispensable to defining who and what he was. Ping died before I finished the book, so I missed the sublime pleasure of hearing him say something like, "O.K., chum, let's start with page two where you wrote ... " I am sure he would have had specific quarrels about my interpretation, especially his father's importance in his life, which we argued about interminably, and sometimes my descriptions of people and events. His was an inordinately complex personality, the stuff of interesting biography, but I would like to think that I "caught" him, or the major part of him, divined his motivations, and put him in a context. If the book contains some of the flavor of his life, spirit, wit, passions, and accomplishments, my Ferrytale may not be a fairy tale.

FOREWORD by Victor Navasky

In the tradition of the Brits, whom W. H. "Ping" Ferry appreciated more than most Americans, let me at the outset declare my interest. Ferry was a friend of mine. The DJB Foundation, over which he presided with his wife, Carol Bernstein Ferry, made a grant or two to projects I recommended. In fact, were it not for Ferry, I might never have become editor of The Nation, a job that changed my life; and as James Ward, in whose debt we are for so artfully putting Ping between hard covers, mentions on page 192, because I had once written a profile of him (for the Atlantic Monthly), Ping regarded me as his Boswell and expected me to write his biography. Otherwise, what follows is an objective, unbiased account of why this relatively anonymous man's life is a story worth telling. In my piece for the Atlantic I had quoted the words ofJohn Stuart Mill: "The mere example of nonconformity is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric." But here I want to argue that Ping's example is important for reasons beyond eccentricity, even though his charm and ability to be heard above the din came first and foremost from the fact that he was an original. Let me begin at the beginning, or rather what for me was the beginning. I had first seen Ping in action at a Washington-based Conference on the American Character convened by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which he had helped birth. He stood out not only because of his pink shirt and yellow polka dot bow tie but because of the theme of his impromptu remarks-how Americans as a tribe were suckers for happy endings and how our leaders exploited this obsession. "There isn't any happy ending to any of the present situations," he said, "because most of the endings will call for vast changes in the status quo and Americans simply don't want to change the status quo." Ping wanted to change the status quo. Not long thereafter I saw an item in the New York Times about one W. H. Ferry, vice president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, having resigned frorri the Democratic Party in protest against whatever it was.

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This struck me as an interesting thing to do less because of the issue that prompted his protest (frankly, I can't remember what it was) than the form his protest took. I had never heard of a citizen taking the trouble to resign from one of the two major parties before, and I was intrigued. And then I read a column by John Crosby, who covered politics-as-culture for the old Herald Tribune. He wrote about how Mr. Ferry had attacked America's last and most sacred cow, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau oflnvestigation. I will quote rather than summarize Ferry because one of the keys to his ability to make enemies and influence people was his gift of barb: Mr. Hoover warns against Soviet espionage in the U.S. This is an old line of the FBI chief, and its success, year after year, is a tribute to the trance into which his sermons throw Americans, not excepting Congressmen. Mr. Hoover is, after all, our official spy-swatter. In these persistent reports about espionage and sabotage, is he delicately telling us that he isn't up to the job, that Red spies are running loose despite his best efforts? That's when I got the idea that there was a piece to be done on this happy heretic, The Man Who Attacked J. Edgar Hoover. I quickly discovered that there was more to Ping Ferry than PR man-he liked to describe himself as "a PR man who had lucked into the best job in the world." He had persuaded Henry Ford II to set up the Fund for the Republic, whose studies of communism might serve as an antidote to the political hysteria that traveled under the banner ofMcCarthyism. He then helped persuade Robert Hutchins, who had come to national attention when he banned football from the University of Chicago, to head up the Fund (and Hutchins in turn invited Ferry along for the ride). When the Fund transformed itself into the Santa Barbara-based Center with a daily dialogue at its core, Ferry had protested that he didn't belong, he was no intellectual. Hutchins, I now learn from Ward's researches, dubbed him one in the course of an elevator ride. Which is not to say that Ferry was not a supremely gifted PR practitioner. Until I met him I had naively supposed that to be in PR was to be a press agent, whose talent is measured in column inches--getting the client's name in the papers. As Ping patiently explained to me, at the top (and the blue ribbon PR firm for which he toiled before he joined the Fund/Center represented CBS and Campbell Soup, among other corporate behemoths), your job was not to get your client mentioned in the columns but rather to keep the client's name out of the papers. Corporate PR, he explained, schmoozes things over: The aim of most corporate public relations is invisibility, giving the corporation so much protective coloration it will be hard to pick out from the surrounding scenery, a

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contemporary search for the "there's nobody here but us chickens" effect. It operates on the principle of quietism. A vast oil company tries to represent itself as essentially like the corner drug store only bigger. Corporate PR has gone a few thousand light years beyond where it should go. A second misconception I had, on which Ping quickly straightened me out, was that the skillful PR man would achieve his goal by manipulating the press through the strategic release of selected information. Ping's method was quite the opposite. As far as I could see, his practice was to overwhelm his target with a flood of unselected information. At least that's what Ping did to me when he invited me into his voluminous files including his seemingly endless correspondence with the low and the mighty to which he granted me unfettered access. Eventually I was to enter the unselect ranks of his correspondees, but at the time I merely envied them. It was not only that he was on a first-name basis with such as Tom (Merton, the Trappist monk), Walter (Lippmann), and James (Storrow, The Nation's publisher, whom he later helped persuade to grant an option to the group that eventually installed me as editor), but it seemed as if every letter or certainly every letter-to-the-editor was calculated to put the editor of a political satire magazine (which I happened to be at the time) to shame. Thus he wrote the editor of the local Santa Barbara paper proposing that executions be televised in high schools: "Surely the capital punishers must regard television, with its immediacy and technical virtuosity, as a model means for getting across its fearsome lesson." It was Ferry, Ward reminds us, who came up with the idea for a pact committing the president of the United States and the premier of the Soviet Union to the personal slaughter of fifty children (who would be exchanged annually) before giving the order to fire the first thermonuclear weapon. ("It is a way of buying time for negotiations," he would explain, "by calling on the abhorrence and deep compunctions of the individual man against murder by his own hand.") At the time I thought Ferry was merely an ingenious gadfly, an ad hoc provocateur, a hypocrisy-exposer with a happy gift for disguising social criticism as satire. Vide his proposal to abolish the New York Stock Exchange because "the destiny of nations should not rest on an institution whose ultimate irrationality is everywhere acknowledged." According to Ferry's theory it performed only two functions: (1) It satisfied man's urge to speculate; and (2) it was a means of arranging for credit. Converting the major investment houses into high class gambling parlors, said Ferry, could take care of the former, and "yankee ingenuity" the latter. But over time I came to understand that Ping was more than a satirist even

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as he was more than an eccentric. He was among other things a unilateralist. He saw Star Wars as beyond Jonathan Swift's wildest imagination. He saw the arms race between the United States and the USSR as insane. He had no illusions about either the United States or the USSR, but he had a bead on the Cold War and he invented his own program for dealing with it. I am not a philosopher and I have no idea what Ping thought oflmmanuel Kant, or indeed whether he even read him. But he led his life on the Kantian principle of the categorical imperative, which I take to be: Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become a universal law. Thus the peace movement for Ping was more than a matter of moral protest. Along with E. P. Thompson, the great English social historian and founder of European Nuclear Disarmament, whose work he supported (with money, friendship, introductions, connections, clippings, fellowships which he arranged behind the scenes, etc.), he rejected the theology of deterrence theory and the vocabulary of Mutual Assured Destruction. In Ping's argot there was no room for "perhaps" or "if-they-will-we-will." He was in the business of writing and proposing his own historical agenda, creating a new kind of peace consciousness, one willing to take the risks of peace, a rejection of worst -case thinking. His politics were confusing to Cold War mainstreamers because he was not a communist, a procommunist, or an anticommunist. He believed in starting from the world where it is or was. But in the tradition of I. F. Stone, A. J. Muste, E. P. Thompson, and our mutual good friend Archie Singham, who brought the message of the nonaligned to the overaligned, he was in the business of holding open alternative space, space that rejected Cold War assumptions, formulations, and vocabulary. Never having been a communist or even, so far as I know, a Marxist, he had none of the bitterness toward communism harbored by so many former reds. And given the Feel Free motto he invented for the Fund but which Ward rightly tells us was also his own, this free-wheeler was incapable of being attracted to totalitarian societies in the first place. Keeping open alternative space was also a key to many of the grants he and Carol dispensed. Whether to Sandy Close and her alternative Pacific News Service,, or Bob Borosage, who presided over the relatively radical Institute for Policy Studies, the Ferrys placed their bets on outsiders, folks who occupied new and often unfamiliar territory. I never talked to him in a systematic way about his theory of philanthropy, although he once told me that too much money is poison. I think he had an almost Aristotelian sense of it. You give it away to help restore balance in the world: balance between the rich and the poor, between the races, between the past (Native Americans) and the future (the technology that was part of the triple revolution he prophesied). He believed that foundations-or at least those with which he was associ-

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ated-should spend themselves out. And in his and Carol's case they did it without forms, pretensions, or illusion. Once, an executive from one of the Rockefeller-sized foundations pondering a DJB grant to an esoteric Native American project, asked him how he and Carol managed to find so many innovative, radical, unknown-to-the-general-foundation-community projects to fund, and more important how did they check them out? Ping explained DJB's procedure, which was to say that they had no procedures, no forms, no bureaucracy (which tends to be in the self-perpetuation business). Only a vast network of friends (who tipped them off to possible candidates), and letters from strangers. "Aren't you afraid you'll be taken?" asked the shocked executive. "Oh," Ping replied, "we fully expect that the normal percentage of our grantees will take the money and run. Our batting average is probably only slightly better than Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie." W. H. Ping Ferry's ultimate importance to me, then, given his iconoclastic philanthropy, his clarity of purpose and prose, his politics of peace (or is it merely sanity?), his antibureaucratic common sense, is the impossible example he set for the rest of us.

FERRYTALE The Career of W. H. "Ping" Ferry

1

THE PRIMAL PING

Just before Christmas 1988, the baggage claim area at the Cleveland, Ohio, airport was eerily empty, except for a lone woman, about eighty years old, who sat quietly waiting. Presently, a "little man came along" clad in a "cotton golf hat and a raincoat Colombo himself would have discarded." "Ping?" she ventured. "Helen!" There was an awkward pause until Ping suggested, "Let's do this right," and the two "hugged heartily." Wilbur Hugh "Ping" Ferry had flown from his home in Scarsdale, New York, to meet his old college sweetheart, Helen WeHmeier, for the first time in over fifty years. WeHmeier, long widowed, had earlier sent Ping a thick folder of their college correspondence, and Ping's wife, Carol Bernstein Ferry, urged Ping to renew his old acquaintance. 1 The reunion was vintage Ferry. The "little man," a former Michigan high school all-American football player and varsity center for Dartmouth's Green, dressed in his favorite battered hat and disreputable trench coat was now, as Ping admitted, "very, very wealthy" and noted in leftist political circles for his generosity. Since he had last seen W ellmeier in 1933, he had become a public person working to redefine the public relations business in the 1950s and then helping relieve the Ford Foundation of some of its millions. From his perch at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions ( CSDI) at Santa Barbara, California, Ping burst upon the national consciousness when he scolded Americans about their fears of communism, technological missteps, racial policies, bleak future prospects, and imminent nuclear doom. Even as he flew out to the Midwest to rekindle old memories, he was still in the thick of fights for unilateral and world nuclear disarmament. Ping "reacts with people on their ground." 2

Ping was an enigmatic personality even to those who had been close to him for decades. As a careful observer of people, he had a knack for remembering what books friends bought, what hobbies they enjoyed, and what intellectual passions moved them. This trait surfaced in the "clipping service" he ran for

2

The Primal Ping

decades, in which he cut out newspaper and periodical articles he thought his friends would be interested in reading and stuffed them in "Miscellany" bags. At some chronological tick known only to himself, he sealed and posted them. He thus compartmentalized his friends; once convicted of an interest, one was marked for life.' Others who knew him well were in marked agreement about some aspects of his personality. "Offbeat character" and "oddball" competed with the more careful "unusual individual" and the invidious "interesting" as acquaintances struggled to describe the primal Ping. And Ping wore his eccentricities for everyone to see. His frayed tweed sport coats, baggy pants, battered hats, shaggy sideburns, and bow ties were together his coat of arms, recognized and noted by all. His sartorial oddments were often topped off with a lapel button that happily announced, "Feel Free. "4 Ping may have looked a bit odd, but acquaintances all agreed that his strong sense of personal integrity explained many of his peculiar traits. A veteran with him in CSDI's battles thought that Ping's integrity gave him the "courage for speaking out on many issues." A former colleague who worked for Ping at the OPA during World War II opined that Ping's integrity and ideals led him to shun compromises and left him with "no tolerance for political rhetoric." A classmate at Dartmouth explained that Ping did "not easily suffer fools" and was on a personal search for "truth and honesty." His youthful traits became more manifest as he aged, especially his impatience with cant and hypocrisy. 5 An offbeat character with a strong sense of integrity and idealism was a perfect prescription for a monumental bore, exactly what Ping was not. He was saved by his "Feel Free" button, sense of humor, and obvious intelligence. He loved ideas, books, authors, novels, newspapers, bookstores, and the literary world. On first blush, Ping could have easily passed for the archetypal, absentminded, out-at-the-elbows professor. Everyone remarked on his keen intellect. A public relations man for whom Ping worked thought him "very bright." A New Hampshire newspaper man, no slouch with a pen and paper himself, stood "in awe of Ping's intellect." Another Dartmouth friend, who made his reputation in New Hampshire legal circles, thought, with typical New England reserve,. that Ping "had academic talent" and was a "fairly able" soul. 6 The "fairly able" soul had a restless intellect that did not always make him an easy man to be around. To be near Ping was to be engaged. He constantly sought ideas and opinions while bouncing his own thoughts off his conversationalist. When uninterested, Ping would mentally drift off and would often physically wander away without comment. Small talk was not his forte, nor were conversational niceties; he could be intellectually exhausting.

The Primal Ping

3

Ping's most obvious talent was that he was a consummate wordsmith. A friend remembered Ping as having "a love affair with words," and aPR man associated with Earl Newsom & Company, where Ping worked, praised him as an "extremely fast writer" who had the "wonderful ability to use headline-grabbing leads for his releases," the fruits of his journalism training. WeHmeier recalled that even the undergraduate Ping sometimes "used the biggest words." She could have added that he also loved to coin words. He interspersed his missives with them, Latin phrases, shorthand of his own devising, interlineations, corrections in ink and pencil, and handwritten addendums, all in a letter typed on anything from embossed stationery to a wrinkled scrap of used paper, on a manual typewriter repaired by someone who believed nonlinear sentences an artform. 7 The parlous subversive, habitually clad in his tweeds, disguised as an innocuous college don, could also be rude and insulting, even to his closest friends and family. A CSDI staffer remembered being the butt of Ping's insensitive remarks several times, but she said that those who knew him learned to expect his displays of arrogance and temper. She thought that Ping, who instinctively performed all the usual social amenities flawlessly-sending gifts, thank-you notes, flowers, and the like-occasionally rebelled against such expected gestures by saying something nasty. 8 Ping "had a sadness about him." 9

Yet Ping's philanthropic enthusiasms-from helping friends, struggling artists, the downtrodden, and threatened small bookstores to the millions a year he helped shovel out of the Ford Foundation-sprang from a "softer, more generous side." While he loved fine things and surrounded himself with them, he never coveted them. They were more like keepsakes, little bits and pieces of people he knew and liked. It was enough that something of them was around him. To Ping, art, like ideas, principles, and causes, was important for its contributions to mankind's happiness. His interest in music stemmed from many of the same impulses. A much better than average amateur piano player, he often sought relaxation at the keyboard. Like art, music fulfilled Ping's deep-seated need for calm and beauty. He thought that everyone should share in such beauty, for he had done nothing special to deserve the amenities that ringed him. To some degree he measured his political ideas against the yardstick of how close they came to making such beauty available to those unlucky enough not to enjoy such pleasures.

The Primal Ping

4

The government is us. 10

He believed that matters of scale were at the heart of the human malaise, or, as he in one ofhis more philosophical moments put it, "Everything around us is too damn Big," especially the nation's nuclear weapons systems. He saw plenty of evidence to demonstrate the problems of size. Self-serving corporate policies, focused always on the bottom line and threatening, he thought, enduring American values such as individualism and democracy led him to mount his charger, his banner emblazoned with his favorite aphorism, "Don't Let the Bastards Get Away With It," and gallop into the fray. Ping's Bastards hid mostly in busiiness and government, where they conspired to keep the Cold War alive and profitable. They worked and played in a racially separate world, leeched on workers and the general public, and used government to protect their gains. 11 While Ping distrusted big government, full of bastards who engineered the Vietnam War and segregation and mutually assured destruction, he often demandt~d it be more active to regulate corporations, tame rapacious capitalists, protect citizens from abusive technology, fashion permanent peace, and achieve other of his causes. A child of the Depression, he had faith that governments could do great good as well as evil. The trick, thought Ping, was to use public opinion to expand governments' purview in some quarters while severely limiting it in others. The only way it could work, he believed, was to fashion a true grassroots democracy, bringing decision-making down to the lowest possible social and economic levels to free governments from the rapacious grasp of corporate giants and weapons makers. "His concern for mankind is deep seated." 12

His greatest contribution on the national level was that in the middle of the twentieth century, in some of the country's darkest, most dangerous days, he was a bright light in the tunnel, who was unafraid to ask, argue, dissent, prod, crusade, and yes, scold. He sowed seeds for change that promised a brighter, more secure future for everyone and that made Ping a quintessential American reformer. An amalgam of contradictory impulses, actions, and ideas, he saw the world differently from most and reacted to it in his own inimitable style. And his family, especially his father and the culture of his early-twentiethcentury Detroit, molded much of that behavior, so central to the primal Ping. The origins of his personality and predilections dated from the Irish Ferrys who fled the famine and settled in western Ontario and Michigan. Ping's father, Hugh, was born on December 14, 1884, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of

The Primal Ping

5

four children. Hugh's father, an electrician, moved his family to Detroit when Hugh was three years old and within a year was accidentally electrocuted, leaving his widow with four young kids and limited means. Both of Ping's Ferry grandparents were dead when he was born. 13 On his mother's side, however, his grandmother, Harriet Whiting Rutson, who was something of a pioneer activist in Detroit, made a big impression on her grandson. She agitated for women's rights and stirred up enough other mothers in her eastern Detroit neighborhood to pressure the city to build Eastern High School. She married Wilbur Ransom "Pop" Rutson, who was, Ping recollected, rather simple and slow. 14 Mother was "playful." 15 Their daughter, Fay, grew up with Hugh in the same east-side Detroit neighborhood around Mt. Elliott and Congress streets. Fay was more educated than her husband; she had graduated from high school, gone to Ypsilanti State Normal school for two years, and taught for at least a year before her marriage in 1906. Hugh never finished high school; Ping guessed that he went through fifth or sixth grade. Hugh's obituaries claimed he finished tenth grade." Lack of an education was no bar to an ambitious lad. Hugh landed a job at Packard as an accountant and enrolled in the Detroit Technical Institute to learn how to be one. In 1912, Packard promoted him to paymaster, a position that required him to write four thousand checks a week and deliver them to the workers. He was elevated to secretary and treasurer in 1936; nine years later he was named a vice president, and in 1948 he joined the board of directors. Finally, on January 1, 1950, the board appointed him Packard's president, a job he had never wanted. He quickly found a successor and in 1952 moved up to chairman of the board. It was a fabulous career for the Irish kid from Corktown who was among the handful of Catholics who rose to the top echelon in an automobile company." Ping became Detroit's newest resident on either December 17, 1910, or the day following. His formal records claim December 18, but Ping's mother always insisted it was a day earlier. No matter, Ping was from the first unabashedly a mother's boy. He thought her stern and judgmental but "warm in her own way." After his birth she abandoned the classroom, nursed him for twoand-a-half years until his brother, Robert Rutson, later known as Pong, was born, and devoted the rest of her life to taking care of her three men. Fay was not very outgoing, and Ping remembered that she had only four or five friends, no clubs, and no social life outside her house.''

6

The Primal Ping

Mother was a "firm Episcopalian." "Father always deplored I never became Catholic." 19

Ping's home on Hurlbut Avenue was a reasonably warm and happy place. His parents fought once in a while, but Ping thought their arguments were only pretexts; religion was their unconquerable divide. Every Sunday, Ping and Pong went with their mother to Sunday school at Epiphany Episcopal Church while their father walked six blocks to attend Mass at the Church of the Annunciation. Ping wondered for years why such a religious gulf existed when his father knew almost nothing about the religion he so dogmatically professed. Later, when Hugh was elderly and ailing, Ping bought a history of the papacy for him to read. His father was shocked enough to call Ping long distance, something he rarely did, to tell him he had not realized so many Popes had been "bums."'0 On Friday and Saturday nights, Hugh went out to his clubs and often drank heavily. He was involved in at least two drunken driving accidents: both times he crashed into trolley safety zones where vertical pipes had been sunk near the curb to protect tram riders from drivers like Hugh. He came to Ping's first wedding on crutches after breaking his leg in such a smash-up. Hugh's drinking was not discussed at home, and Ping thought he did not touch alcohol during the week. ' 1 When he was eight years old Ping picked up the nickname that would follow him to the grave. He was a "tubby, very large kid" who loved football and hung around to watch the older kids play. When they finally relented and let him join in, someone promptly kicked him in the head, and the kids had to carry him home. While waiting for the doctor, Ping roused and declaimed, "Pingpong is a very rough game." For that sin he was called Ping-Pong up until his senior year in high school. When brother Robert enrolled as a freshman, he became ''Pong." His parents were not overjoyed by Wilbur's new moniker; his mother called him "Bill baby" for at least forty-five years, while his father sometimes addressed his letters "Dear Pal" but usually called him Bill. Nobody in the family appeared to like either of his given names. 22 Ping was "surprised" when his father told him he was going to attend University of Detroit High School, a Catholic school. He was shocked when he entered "a world of holy pictures and black suits" where he was the only nonCatholic: "separateness from the start," he remembered. It was a different academic world. Jesuits taught most classes, and he was startled at the "rigors of three hour nightly homework, [and the ]lines and pages of Greek and Latin to be got by heart.""

The Primal Ping

7

As the lone Protestant in that Jesuit domain, Ping was marked as different. Even when he went swimming at the Knights of Columbus pool, where the boys wore only their scapular medals, Ping was noticeably nude. His differences from his classmates widened in ensuing years. After he took part in his class's sixtieth reunion, he reported that the "evening [was] devoted to discussion of grandchildren, pacemakers & other survival aids, and close examination of the Only Liberal the class ever produced." 24 "I was a tubby, very large kid who loved football." 25

The Only Liberal looked upon graduation with relief, even though he was an engaged and popular student. His list of activities was longer than most and indicated his catholic interests; he loved writing and sports in which he could knock people and balls around. He was on the debating team-no surprise, given his later career-and was a member of something called the Loyalty Club, a fact he could have used a quarter of a century later to disarm Westbrook Pegler. Ping also played on the golf team for two years and the varsity football eleven for three. As a senior, he was named first team All-City and second team All-State, awards that attracted college recruiters. 26 The 1928 high school graduate was a stocky kid, with a round face, a shock of hair, and fleshy lips, all of which made him look younger than many of his fellow seniors. With a diploma from a prestigious Detroit parochial school, a natural ability in sports, and a father treading Packard's executive corridors, Ping stood at the threshold of maturity in that halcyon year of 1928 in the "New Era," when Americans believed they had faced down poverty and want forever. There were great pockets of need and hunger in the "Roaring Twenties," but Ping never saw them. 27 Hugh wanted Ping to go to a Catholic university, and obediently Ping signed a "books, board and tuition" agreement with Fordham under which he would play football. Early in 1928, however, Packard gave Hugh a raise, and he told Ping he could go to any school he wanted. Ping, taken by photos of Dartmouth's Winter Carnival and skiing, and aware that Bill McCall, Michigan's all-state quarterback from Muskegon, had signed with the Green, canceled his Fordham agreement and applied to Dartmouth, a school he had never seen and knew nothing about. 28 Pong was "a big pain in the neck."' 9

The fall of 1928 marked the first time Ping had been away from home for any extended period, leaving a relationship marked with the rough and tumble of

8

The Primal Ping

brothers only two-and-a-half years apart. They got along "fairly well," even though Bob was very different from his brother. More easy-going, more relaxed, more comfortable in social gatherings, he was the master of informal conversation. Ping was always convinced that Hugh favored his younger son. Like his father, Bob belonged to numerous social clubs and enjoyed them. 30 Pong thought enough ofhis brother to follow him to Dartmouth three years later, when Ping was a senior. Ping, the abstemious, self-professed loner at Dartmouth, was joined by his gregarious, well-met, tippling brother. Ping believed that Pong's heavy drinking began in those years. He talked to his brother about his problem and was told to "mind his own business"; later he talked to their mother about it as well. Dartmouth warned Pong several times about his carousing and drinking, and finally, when he was caught drinking with a woman in his room, "Dartmouth fired him." The college relented, however, as hormones and alcohol were no strangers at the school." By midcentury Ping was convinced his brother was an alcoholic and thought that "Pong knew it" because "he was a bright guy." Bob commuted into New York City, and Ping cryptically commented that "the combination of the Bihmore's bar and the club car was lethal for Pong." The two families did not see much of one another. In 1950 when Ping heard that Pong had died of a heart attack on a Bermuda beach, it came as a shock; "I didn't expect it .... I was tending to my own affairs," Ping recalled sadly. 32 Despite their different lifestyles and interests, each brother was driven in his own way. In a curious turn, each evidenced pronounced traits from his father, and the halves manifested themselves very differently. Pong inherited Hugh's happier, less burdened public half, the weekend Hugh. Ping took away to college contradictory aspects of his father's personality that made him the complex and often enigmatic man he was.

2

FIGURING FATHER

Florence Mischel, the "recording angel" at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, did an audio "profile" on Ping in the 1960s. When moderator Frank Kelly asked, "What was the influence of your father?" Mischel remembered that "Ping started to answer." Then he stopped, "his eyes misted but he was silent." The tape recorder spun its slow circles and they waited. After a long minute, Ping hesitated and almost whispered, "His integrity, I think." Mischel recalled it was a very moving moment.' The origins of Ping's silence stretched back to his Detroit childhood. When he boarded the train for Dartmouth he already evinced many proclivities that marked him all his life as different. The Protestant lad with a Jesuit education had already been made special, set apart, squeezed into a separate mold. Outwardly nothing distinguished him from thousands of other high school graduates in those waning days ofRepublican prosperity, but the ambivalent feelings about his father that he struggled with until long after Hugh died shaped virtually everything Ping did. Ping's second wife, Carol, was sure that "his father had a greater influence on Ping than he [was] willing to admit." Harry Ashmore, Ping's nemesis at CSDI, believed that Ping could be understood only in conjunction with his feelings about his father. Ashmore met Hugh when he flew out to California on a "peace mission" to see his son, and he was struck by their similarities in temperament. Ashmore later told Ping that he had to be against his father, and everyone in the world was his father. Ashmore seemed equally certain that Ping's search for a father figure had led him to Robert Hutchins, the man he most admired. That, Ashmore thought, accounted for the depth of the bitterness Ping felt after Hutchins sent him a letter "separating" Ping from the center. 2 Hugh "was a cold man."' If Ping had disliked or even hated his father, he would have been less haunted by their relationship. Instead, Ping's memories were a garbled melange of acceptance and rejection. In 1982 when Pong's son, Hugh, interviewed him, Ping said that his father had a bit of the "statutory melancholy of the Irish" and was a "testy" man who daydreamed a lot. Ping resented his father's never

10

Figuring Father

confiding in him and lamented that he was not "available" very often. Ping finally confided that he just could not make any "sense of his father."• Hugh represented almost everything Ping distrusted; he was Republican Party state treasurer and "despised Roosevelt & all his works with a sputtering rage that covered all around him. He felt FDR was a new barbarian," although Ping admitted that his father never used the term. Hugh believed that "the U.S. was doomed ifFDR and his ilk remained in office one more week." To his son's further dismay, Hugh was also chief fund-raiser for Catholic charities, "liked front row seats at [the] Tiger games and having [his] picture taken," and worst of all was good friends with conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler.' A fundamental complication in their relationship was that Ping was more like his father than he ever cared to admit. His sister-in-law, Harriet, always thought so, especially in Ping's attitude toward his family. She thought both men "indifferent, proud of their progeny but not necessarily loving or close to them in any way." Harriet characterized Hugh as a "very spoiled man," used to being served and taken care of by his family and underlings at Packard. She concluded that Packard was the only thing Hugh really loved. He was, she observed, "in every way ... self centered"-a noticeable Ping trait as well. 6 Even Ping recognized the similarities between Hugh's approach to fathering and his own. Ping admitted that he was a "lousy father" and scored himself a measly 6.1 out of 100 in the grandfather business. Ping was brutally honest about his failings: "I don't dislike kids; I just don't give [them] much time." After daughter Dennie complained that Ping had never taken his three girls into tht: woods to see the wildlife, Ping ruminated that if he had it to do all over again he would. He was not any better with his stepson: "I thought all boys needed was a baseball bat," he later admitted. He frequently apologized to his adult children for being a "lousy father" and grandfather. While telling me this, howeveT, he stopped a moment and, without prompting, concluded that when "judged against my father I get a passing grade .... I didn't see much of my father, he was busy making money, he played handball with the boys at the K[nights] ofC[olumbus]."' Jo, Ping's first wife, described him as "a good absent father," emotionally rather than physically removed. He was never mean or physically abusive; his mind and interests were just always somewhere else. He talked a good deal when courting Jo about having children, but after their girls were born, she said "he paid no attention to them." His relationship with his stepson, Lu, was even more strained. Jo believed that Ping was jealous ofLu, while Ping assumed he just did not understand the boy. 8 Like Hugh, Ping was often ill at ease in social gatherings; he was not a man for breezy small talk and insincere flattery. Jo avowed that he did not get along

Figuring Father

11

with women in general and recounted that within a year of their marriage her female friends stopped coming to the house when they knew Ping would be there because he insulted them. He did the same to Jo; once as she came downstairs at a party she overheard Ping telling friends, "Just wait a minute, Jo will come up with a double negative." That was vintage Ping; in his earliest surviving letters, dating from his college days, he upbraided friends, mostly female, for their incorrect grammar. 9 Although both Hugh and Ping had difficulties being warm and loving with their families and frequently alienated people socially, Ping was more apt than his father to belittle others. He did not confine it to women; he was an equal opportunity belittler. Everyone who knew him on anything more than a casual level felt the sting ofhis barbs. Frank Kelly even accused him of being "abrasive to visiting scholars" at CSDI. Anyone Ping thought his intellectual inferior or dull or who spouted unexamined views that conflicted with his own, he often insulted or ignored. His inability to take seriously those he considered his intellectual inferiors explained his difficulty in getting along with his father, many contemporaries, and his children. 10 "I was a mother's boy.""

Ping's marriage to Jolyne overtaxed his already ambivalent relations with his father. She was a Canadian divorcee with a child, and her French maiden name, Gillier, convinced the Ferrys that she was a Catholic. News that she was a Protestant simply changed battle lines in Detroit. Either way, as Jo put it, our children became "bastards" in their eyes. Her frayed relationships with her perspective in-laws unraveled more at the wedding. Ping's mother, who could simply not understand why either of her sons would want to leave her, came to Manchester, New Hampshire, where Ping and Jo were to be married, but left early on the day of the wedding. Hugh stayed, but treated Jo "as if I were not there." 1' His close emotional attachment to his mother further complicated Ping's complex psychological and emotional relationship with his father. When talking about his mother, Ping was remarkably consistent; she "was warm in her own way" and always gave Ping "lots of hugs and kisses." On the other hand she was a stern, judgmental woman for whom "things were right or wrong." She had her quirks too; she did not get along with Jo and "was a tyrant to Pong's wife." He once told his niece, Sebern Fisher, that "even Hugh was intimidated" by mother Fay, surmising that he "led a secret life in his clubs to keep friction down." Ping was no different; his "secret life" was that of intellectual and political causes, pursuits that removed him from daily family complications but

12

Figuring Father

also widened the gulf with his father. Ironically, Hugh, Ping, and Pong were in similar positions, forced to mediate among the Ferry women. Ping hated family confrontation and often sought compromise in his private life. ll Among the thousands of letters, manuscripts, speeches, and other literary scraps Ping assiduously saved, only those epistles he sent his father were written in a contrived voice. They lacked the sureness, bluntness, playfulness, and dominating tone of most of his other correspondence. The only other batch of letters remotely similar were those he wrote to another of his father figures, the monk Thomas Merton. "The easy, natural, and generous nature of your various attempts to help I am afraid I disregarded or discounted almost completely."l4 Frequently Ping gently approached subjects of contention with Hugh right after his father proffered financial help. Such was the case on May 4, 1950, when Ping admitted that from his college years he had "held and loudly proclaimed a belief in the need for absolute independence of parents by male off-spring." At forty years of age he looked back and thought "it was an ungracious attitude, to say the least." Now that he was a father himself and still asking for parental help, he concluded that he had "discounted" the "easy, natural, and generous nature of your various attempts to help." And in a rare Ping admission, he said he was "very sorry."ts Four years later, in June 1954, Hugh, then Packard's chairman of the board, and immersed in talks with Studebaker officials that would lead to the fateful merger of the two companies, stopped to see Ping while in New York and left what Ping called "unpleasant sensations." The visit prompted him to write a carefully composed letter to Hugh laying out the divide that separated them. Ping held to "the idea that each man and woman must find his way to a full life by choosing from the infinite variety of courses and actions and beliefs open to him." Sadly, he admitted, other Ferrys did not agree. "Take for example rational discussion," he suggested; "by common consent we refrain from any talk about politics." Worse, the two men "barred ... the whole range of economic and social questions" from their agenda. Ping regretted that they could not discuss Robert Oppenheimer, Red China, taxes, arts in the industrial society, and religion, because his father considered his views "with suspicion from the outset as being some sort of unpleasant leftist slant." For his part, Ping could not "cope with the rigid assertions of right and wrong that you are accustomed to make." Religious discussions were guaranteed to tear the family asunder. Ping had

Figuring Father

13

long ago "solved" the religious divide by disdaining any formal church affiliation. That only made both his parents angry. He complained to Hugh, "Mother seems to have set a certain standard of church-going for my girls as the requirement to be met before she comes in my home again." While he admitted that "we are perhaps slightly unorthodox," he could not resist pointing out that "this is precisely the sort ofbehavior that the Bible warns against." Ping assured his father: "I have thought about this question over many years and have come to my own conclusions," and he asked that Hugh accept his religious convictions.16 Money difficulties also strained father-son relations. Hugh's loans and gifts were usually accompanied by advice to Ping to cut back his posh lifestyle and pay his debts. Ping thought that his father was "extravagantly worried" and admitted: I may not "have been as smart as I should be, that I should save more, spend less, etc." But he reassured his father that the worst that could happen would be "I lose my job, my house, my savings." Afraid that might not comfort Hugh, Ping promised that as long as he had his health and talents he would "somehow carry things through." He did not want his father to worry that "we may fall back and become a charge on you." He did not tell his father to mind his own business, as he would any other creditor. 17 Dad and I "traveled different paths." 18

In the final analysis, however, religion and family relationships were the overt manifestations of Ping's lifelong struggle to come to terms with his father and, by implication, his own nature. Ping disdained the very things his father held dear, his career-long affiliation with Packard that made it mandatory for him to rub shoulders with wealthy customers, dealers, and suppliers. Hugh liked them and unhesitantly accepted their political and social outlooks. Conditioned by his authoritarian Catholicism, Hugh found it easier than the Protestant Ping to accept institutional restraints. Hugh loved to spend a few weeks every winter in Key Biscayne, playing golf and hobnobbing with fellow fortunates. Despite his conservative financial proclivities, he lived quite well, but his affluence came at a cost: "He was [always] busy making money." 19 It was no accident that one of Ping's earliest intellectual interests was in the corporation's role in America; its place in his own life was central to his being. It was no surprise that Ping argued that companies were too large and powerful. He sent Hugh copies ofhis corporate musings and remembered they "inflamed my father." When I asked if he sent them to needle Hugh, Ping replied laconically, "Somewhat." That he reached his anticorporate conclusions even as he worked as an advisor to blue ribbon companies only enraged Hugh more.'"

14

Figuring Father

Harriet believed it was Hugh's money that irked Ping. He "was constantly critical of his father, not as a person, but because he was making so much money," she said. When she pointed out that he would not have a grand piano and other amenities without his father's help and asked, If he "didn't approve of money, why take it?" Ping became annoyed. For others it would have been a short intellectual step to the socialist or communist notions that attracted so many ofthe upper-middle class during the Depression. But Ping was too much his father's son to go that far; he could no more endure collectivists' restraints than he could those of Packard on his father. On a personal level, however, he felt more comfortable with leftists than he did with Hugh's Key Biscayne golfing buddies. 21 Harriet understood the most confounding parts of Ping's financial paradox. She thought that his "railing against the rich for years was maybe a facade," because, she concluded, Ping "loves being rich." Ping agreed that the millions Carol brought to their marriage were quite pleasant. "I have a well-developed taste for comfortable life," he admitted, and "I am spoiled." Initially, however, her money was a problem for him. "I had doubts about marrying Carol," he mused . "I had seen lots of money at work"; he was "partly afraid of being corrupted."'' He might have said he was afraid of becoming more like his father. Instead, Carol's fortune helped make it possible for Ping to come to grips with Hugh. Ping and Carol determined to spend her capital as well as income to use up her foundation's assets within ten years. And they agreed "that money with strings is generally worse than no money at all," and did not follow the example of other foundations-and Ping's father-and make "generous grants tied to demands for behavior, ... [and] attitude" changes." Ping satisfied his own psychological needs by helping people who, like him, thought that they had been victimized by institutional demands. Even the language that Carol and Ping used in writing the DJB Foundation's final report was revealing. They railed against "government vindictiveness or official neglect, sometimes both" and decried the problem that "the basic needs that one might expect a decent government to supply are not met but exacerbated." Substitution of the word "father" for "government" yields a fair statement of Ping's personal grievances against Hugh. Moreover, they viewed the foundation "as a small means of redressing the woeful maldistribution of U.S. wealth," money that had "corrupted" men he had dealt with all his life, including his father, and deep down Ping feared, himself. After rejecting virtually everything Hugh stood for-Catholicism, conventionality, Republicanism, the corporate life, and even his favorite sports, boxing and football-Ping still

Figuring Father

15

sought his father's approbation. The tragedy of their relationship was that Hugh never understood that Ping really needed his love and respect. 24 "Ping became the father to his father.""

By the late 1950s, however, the two men grew closer. By then Hugh was no longer the hard-driving capitalist, his company had failed, the McCarthy era was drawing to a well-deserved end, and the anticommunists had stopped excoriating Ping. Both men were older, and as Hugh's health declined he was less interested in how Ping lived his life. He spent more time playing golf in Florida, where Ping often went to see him. "I was a good son to visit my parents," he later reflected. 26 About a year before his death in 1970, Hugh suffered a stroke and was confined to a Detroit nursing home. Ping was living in California and remembered his father as "pitiable": suffering from dementia, shingles, and strokes. He came East as often as possible to visit and often read the daily stock market report to him. Hugh became excited when his stocks rose and depressed when they did not, so Ping raised his stocks' quotes every day until a doctor in the room also became animated because he owned the same shares and asked to see the newspaper; Ping ceased being the happy ticker. Carol noted the irony that "Ping became the father to his father," the man he had been like for so manyyears. 27 It was too late. Ping's personality and habits were long ingrained; he was a finished creation. That had not been the case back in 1928, however, when he left home for Dartmouth. Then, most of the later outward manifestations of his paradoxical relationship with his father were still latent, but they were surfacing even before he detrained at White River Junction, a few miles from Hanover.

3

STUBBORNLY DIFFERENT

As the train sped Ping away to college in September 1928, he sat in a coach chatting with Bill McCall, all-state quarterback, who would be his roommate for the next two years. McCall patiently explained that if Ping wanted to be anyone on campus, or hoped to join any of the college's organizations or societies, he had to pledge a fraternity. He decided that night he would not; he would not do what everyone expected ofhim. 1 "I know that I am not a normal person." 2

Ping's rebellion at doing what convention expected was deep-seated and became more pronounced as he matured. He was beginning to recognize a curious duality in his personality that would dog him throughout his life, his need to be someone special who could not be cajoled or forced to follow the herd and his yearning to be accepted and loved; it was the story of his relationship with his father on a larger scale. It manifested itself in his almost obsessive desire to collect and cherish friends while often blatantly insulting them. He confided to his Dartmouth diary: "I have a manner which charms a good many and which causes others an equal amount of repulsion."' His stance on drinking set him apart on campus even more than his antifraternity sentiments. Part of his dryness, he thought, arose from being a "goody-goody," "disgust at [my] slobbering classmates," and the fact that there was "no place to do it easily." That did not stop most fellow Dartmouth students, particularly at Winter Carnival time. Thinking back on it, he decided "it was the decisive way to be different, and this meant I felt superior, the only place in the Hanover scene where I stood out and away." He did not want to be like his father but he did not want to be like his fellow students either. He had no idea of what he did want to be. • Ping "had academic talent."' Strangely, Ping had little concern for his classes. Two years before he died he wrote: "I wasn't much interested in my courses," but "[I was] attracted by

Stubbornly Different

17

Professor Herb West esp. and Prof. Royal Nemiah, the King of TeachersClassical Studies; and by W. B. D. Henderson, a wispy & powerful lecturerShakespeare and Petrarch." At least one classmate thought Professor West, a "well liked and controversial" literature teacher with political attitudes "left of center," exercised great influence over Ping's later views. Ping, however, thought N emiah was "best of all. "6 Not surprisingly, his grade expectations were not high; he graduated with a 2.5 on a4.0 scale, a C average. Ping was hardly a 2.5 intellect. He was a voracious reader, writer, and thinker-except when he was in college. He summed up his intellectual achievements at Dartmouth by wondering "how I got through." He graduated exactly in the middle of his class with a major in Composition, Literature, and Biography.' He seemed perfectly happy with his performance. While he did not look back on his college years with much fondness, his career often turned on his Dartmouth connections, and later he took an active interest in the school's academic matters, firing off letters accusing its presidents of allowing intellectual standards to slip. He took away from Dartmouth a better education than his transcript indicated, however; his command of Latin, his clear and concise writing style, and his easy mastery of classical allusions bespoke a very good liberal arts training somewhere. 8 I "can't seem to get very interested in anyone who is interested

in me."9 Like many of the college men, Ping spent a great deal of time thinking about girls, writing to girls, getting dates, taking weekend jaunts to nearby Smith College in Northampton, and generally wondering why he could not find the perfect girl, whom he defined as one "as good" as his mother. Instead, the hormonal Ping worked off his urges on the gridiron. The much-heralded Michigan all-stater played on Dartmouth's freshman team during the 1928 season and graduated to the varsity the following year when he played second string center. Ping broke his hand toward the end of that season and missed the last few games. In his junior year, despite not being on the first team, he played a great deal and accompanied the team to California, where it opposed Stanford. At practice one afternoon, a couple of games into his senior season, on the "darkest & dankest October" day, he had a revelation "that what I was doing wasn't at all what I wanted to do." He quit the team, and the very next "Saturday when I should [have been] playing football" he was instead in the chapel's organ loft, taking a lesson from Homer Panko Whitford, the college's organist.10

18

Stubbornly Different

Ping's infatuation with music was intimately related to his appreciation for the often simple, finer things. Helen guessed that "there was a sort of awe quietly stirring" within him for beauty, and he saw it everywhere, except perhaps within himself. Even as an undergraduate, he noted the wonderful stars, snow, and wind. He often took long, late walks alone on such nights. Music, good golf, ideas, and people were all beautiful, at least in the abstract, as were single malt scotch, art, freedom, his manual typewriter, birds, love, and life itself. U gliness in the form of the military, nuclear weapons, untamed technology, death penalties, and the like were a negation of Ping's faith. His existence was built on a belief in reason, logic, intelligence, the written word, humankind, and the individual.u In matters of religion Ping deviated from the norm, as with almost everything else. He attended St. Thomas Episcopal Church fairly regularly and held a seat on the student vestry. As graduation neared he was intrigued with the idea of attending divinity school. He had heard Reinhold Niebuhr preach in Detroit and was struck by his passion for social justice. Although Ping was not politically active at Hanover, the notion of a "liberal" religion with its desire to uplift society appealed to him. Over Easter vacation in 1932 he visited Union Theological Seminary for several days but was decidedly not impressed; "nothing [there] seemed contemporary or interesting," and he dropped the idea. 12 Ping repeatedly said, "My faith just leaked away"-at least his faith in institutionallized religion. He continued to attend the Episcopal Church when he taught at Choate, "but by then," he explained, "I had been introduced to the joys of alcohol" and he quit going. Jo, although her mother was a Roman Catholic, hated priests and had nothing to do with the church. Carol proclaimed herself an atheist, although Ping thought she was only" embarrassingly agnostic." A few years before he died, when asked about his religious views, he proffert:~d, "I suppose I would have to characterize myself as an agnostic." Several days before he died, however, the home nurse asked him his religion. Ping pondered a long time and finally answered, "Christian." He had at last reconciled the religious tensions that had buffeted him since his youth. 13 The young Episcopalian, however, harbored a knack for running afoul of the law more than the usual vestryman. He stood near the top of his class in the number of nights spent in jail, some as the result of his protest activities, most due to criminal charges that ranged from disorderly conduct and kidnapping to homicide. Almost all the incidents were due to misunderstandings, but such contret(:mps seemed an integral part of his early life. As a sophomore Ping ended up in the local Hanover "hoosegow" for fighting. He had started analtercation with a former editor of The Dartmouth, and the cops hauled the young warrior off. His opponent, however, offered to bail Ping out. 14

Stubbornly Different

19

Ping faced a more serious charge in West Haven, Connecticut. He was driving a borrowed Model A through the town in late afternoon in early May 1931 when he hit and killed a drunk who lurched into the street in front of him. Hugh hired a local lawyer who got Ping released on one thousand dollars' bond the following morning, and Hugh warned him: "By all means stay out of the State of Connecticut." Eventually the charges were dropped, but sixty years later Ping declared the whole affair "traumatic." 15 The year 1932 was a horrible year in which to graduate. Unemployment hovered around 25 percent, great corporations flirted with bankruptcy, some of the nation's largest banks were in trouble, and the country's mood, exemplified by the Bonus March on Washington that took place as Ping received his diploma, was decidedly sour. The Democrats were running Franklin Roosevelt for president on a platform that promised little more than what Hoover had already tried: cutting government expenses, balancing the federal budget, and preserving states' rights. Ping's prospects that spring did not look much brighter. He ruefully wrote Helen in March that his grandmother was "on the verge ofblindness" and "the whole fam damily [was] on the point of insolvency." Going home to look for a job did not appeal to him. Worse, the Packard Motor Car Company's sales were plummeting, losing an uncomfortable $6,8oo,ooo that year. 16 "The sweet knowledge that the world is there waiting for my conqueror's sword is denied me." 17 Ping won a reprieve from the job market when his father, who was a long way from insolvency, gave him one thousand dollars as a graduation present with which to tour Europe. He had no grand design; he just wanted to poke around. He had taken French at Dartmouth and wanted to try it out. On June 6 he wrote Helen that he had booked passage on the Columbus out of New York on June 25, 1932. Ping's first night at sea was a memorable turning point in his early life: "I had my first alcohol at dinner ... a bottle ofLiebfraumilch, about half of which I got down before [I] was near collapse. The rest is history.... I was a regular feller, drinking witll the rest." 18 After visiting Paris and Switzerland, he continued to Munich to see Dietrich Schoeller, an exchange student at Dartmouth from the University of Cologne. While there he had a singular experience that forever changed his views of homosexuals. He was in a beerball and while in the bathroom urinating, a man sidled up to him and grabbed his penis. Without thought, Ping knocked him down so that he lay stunned with his head in the trough and a trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth. Ping long felt guilty that the fellow was

20

Stubbornly Different

"so much older" it was an unfair fight. The incident made him aware of homosexuals' difficulties, and in his philanthropic years he funded some gay projects.'9 At the end of August he returned to Detroit, where he picked up a car, stopped in Piqua, Ohio, to see Helen, and headed east to Wallingford, Connecticut. In his last semester at Dartmouth, the freshman dean, Earl Bill, recommended Ping to Choate officials who were looking for a Latin teacher and an assistant football coach. Ping never felt any calling to teach, but as he later said, "I hadn't anything better to do." He also felt "comfortable about a job that took me back to football and made use of the 'classical' training brought along from the Jesuits." "But the big thing," he recalled, was that "I had a job! Aminority of my class cd. say that, this I remember as being of some comfort to me."2o

"I think I shall write the great preparatory school satire."''

Among housemaster Ping's charges were the only two Catholics in residence at the Episcopalian school, Joseph and Jack Kennedy. He also had them in class, Jack in Latin and Joe in English. They were hellions, and after they caught Ping sneaking upstairs to check on them, they hung the nickname "creeping Wilbur" on him. It was hard to understand though how Wilbur had much time to creep. He taught four English courses and a Bible class that, he predicted, "won't do their souls a damn bit of good," and corrected an estimated 450 papers a week. 22 Ping hated Choate and teaching. The man who spent his adult years teaching Americans the folly of their ways found he disliked students. He felt he was throwing "fake pearls to real swine" and was a "hypocrite" for "working in this job." He was always surprised to find a check in his pay envelope. By his second semester at Choate, which he called "Blankley," he had been formally warned twice about his weekend drinking escapades to Hanover and New York City. Early one May morning, he parked his car across campus and staggered back to his room. In the process he lost a tennis shoe. After his first class, the headmaster called Ping into his office, where he stood holding the offending shoe. He handed Ping his final check and ordered him off campus at once. While Ping was packing the Kennedy brothers burst in and said, "It is true, you have been fired. You're leaving." They cried, pleading it was their fault; they had gotten Ping into trouble. They promised they would call "daddy," repeating, "Daddy can fix it, daddy can do anything." For the rest of his life, Ping emphatically asserted his firing was" entirely justified."" For the next four years the playboy Ping lived by his wits, journalistic tal-

Stubbornly Different

21

ents, and word of mouth recommendations for jobs. He flitted in and out of Detroit, argued a great deal with his father, and when unemployed, joined former Dartmouth classmates on jaunts, several of which ended in jail cells. He drank heavily and followed his wanderlust. He was attracted to the Caribbean, the American South, and South America to play, and returned to Detroit and New Hampshire to earn a living after he was let out of jails. Over his lifetime Ping held better than a dozen positions, was fired from more than a normal mortal's average, and left others, often without a shred of a prospect, trusting to his luck. With millions out of work he snared jobs everywhere he went. I went "slinking off to Florida. "24

After Choate fired him, he "went home to lick my wounds a bit." The atmosphere at Neff Road was strained and Ping escaped to Miami, where he played the piano "in an arcade, wearing away humiliation." The work soon lost its luster and he trekked back to Detroit, where his father ordered him to stop being a "disgrace" and found him a job as third hand on an open-hearth furnace at the Inland Steel plant in Ecorse, Michigan. A few days' labor in the plant made Ping pine for Choate. "Life was only feeding the God-damned furnace," he recalled, and it was so physically demanding that he could not even make it home the first couple of nights-he was too full ofbeer. The Dartmouth footbailer lasted just six weeks; telling Hugh he had quit must have been more taxing than feeding the open hearth's maws. 2 ' Ping soon found a job on the Detroit Free-Press as a cub reporter, an occupation his father "thought [was] OK." He was posted to the police beat, where he thought he had to act the part of the "big tough newspaperman" who kept late hours and drank heavily. Once, after a long, hard night, he awoke covered in blood; he had chewed up his tongue and made "a hell of a mess." In his short stint on the paper he honed his skills at writing fast and leading his pieces with attention -grabbing, witty, and often acerbic opening lines. 26 After six months' "quarreling with [my] father," the Wall Street Journal providentially asked Ping to come to New York for an interview. On the way he stopped at Dartmouth to see Bob Hosmer, who talked Ping into shipping out to Argentina. The two signed on with the Munson line as able seamen third class to Buenos Aires. On arrival he jumped ship and wangled a job with El Mundo on the copydesk of its Sunday English edition. He soon returned to the States, however, where he and Hosmer hatched a scheme to tour the South. They set out in Ping's yellow Ford roadster for Miami Beach, where Ping found a job teaching piano. As he was instructing a girl, the maid ushered several cops into the room who handcuffed him and led him away. Several hours

22

Stubbornly Different

later Hosmer was thrown into the same windowless cell, both charged with highway robbery. It developed that when the two had stopped and asked directions of a group of blacks at a bus stop, Hosmer had leaned out the door holding his pipe, which they thought was a gun. They filed charges, and the two transients were held for "about 36 hours," during which the chief of detectives promised that if they would confess they would "get off easy with 20 to life." They finally convinced the police they were telling the truth and were released with the promise they would leave town. 27 They made their way to New Orleans, where they arrived broke. They discovered that maids and cooks had Thursdays off and figured "we would sell ourselves as a team, get the grub, cook, serve, and entertain the family" in their stead. Ping had the only clean shirt, so he became the salesman. On St. Charles Avenw: he walked up to "a lovely house" where a butler answered the door. Ping inquired after the lady of the house, and a few minutes later the police arrived, handcuffed and escorted them to jail. The family had recently had kidnapping threats, and the butler assumed that the "nabbers" had finally arrived. Charged with attempted kidnapping, Ping was forced to call his father, who hired a local lawyer who sprang them after two nights behind bars. They left town quickly.'' After this maladventure, Ping's father needed a cooling off period. Ping stopped in New York City where he found a five-week job working the craps tables. Late in 1934 he picked up a short-term position with the Detroit Times, lived at home, and drank heavily. One morning, after a bender, his parents found him covered with blood and thrashing in his bed. Hugh called the Detroit Tiger's physician to the house, where he found Ping "quite unawake." The doctor diagnosed him as epileptic, and the experience so frightened Ping that he cut his alcohol intake and "got drunk only a few more times in his life" and suffered no more seizures. 29 The road, however, beckoned once again. He and Bill Phinney, who had graduated from Dartmouth a year before Ping, decided to drive to South America down the Trans-American Highway. They got only as far as Texas, where Ping worked as a copy editor at the San Antonio Light. It was a memorable stop, for Ping "made the acquaintance in a way of speaking" of a Mrs. Ward Ford, who became "my consort." When the affair waned after a month, Ping headed to Detroit once more to face his father and rejoin the Times.' 0 At the Times, a Hearst paper, Ping worked as a general reporter and covered the sports beat. In 1935 he became the Detroit organizer for the American Newspaper Guild, the newspaper union founded that year. He held no strong pro-labor views, but Walter Reuther's work with the automobile workers impressed him. Congress had passed the Wagner Act that made it possible for

Stubbornly Different

23

workers to choose their unions. Labor organizations were making inroads everywhere as the ambitious and liberal CIO struggled both against employers in basic industries and the conservative, elitist AFL for the right to bargain collectively. That unions were an anathema in his father's world, although the CIO organized Packard without overt incident, may have been an unspoken part of their appeal. "I can't take the broad outlook which accepts Communism and all its goodness and evils." 31

The newspaper guild harbored a communist faction that provoked "problems both open and concealed." The man who would later develop intensely sensitive political antennae thought the ideological bickering was "childish & paid no attention." At least not until the Chicago regional office sent one Myra Komoroff to organize Detroit. "The first night of her mission," she asked Ping at 3:oo A.M., in bed on the ninth floor of the Book Cadillac Hotel, if he were "available" for the party. Ping did not think so, even though her company was perfectly acceptable. He always found ideological rigidity repugnant and later explained, "I don't know the lingo & am impatient with the theoretical mazes they present. "'2 Ping did not, however, remain long with either the Times or the union. World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker had read a color piece he wrote on the Indianapolis 500 and wanted him for a public relations opening at Eastern Airlines. There was also the attraction of living in New York City, away from his family, and a chance to earn his father's approval. Ping signed on with the airline for seventy-five dollars a week as its first public relations man; it was his introduction to the profession. "Eddie's irascibility." 33

Ping spent most of his time "gadding about with Rickenbacker," responsible for "helping with his speeches, bailing him out of spots, and having newsmen ignore his falling on his face while drunk." When not propping up the captain, Ping "flacked for company activities." He came up with the idea for a corporate magazine for passengers and was responsible for its first few issues. He did not like many people at the airline and after six months told the captain he wanted to leave. Years later Ping recounted, I "didn't tell him I left because I couldn't stand the old bugger."'4 In the drab winter of 1935-36 thoughts of sun and sand lured Ping south again, this time to San Juan, Puerto Rico, "mainly because it was far from NY &

Stubbornly Different

24

Rick, b,~cause I had heard of its charms from EAL folks, & because I had nothing better to do." He certainly "didn't want to go back to Detroit, there to encounter HJF's utter disapproval of my quitting Rick's shop." Broke, he fell in with several men who decided to start a weekly English newspaper, called, inexplicably, The Fortnighter. It was typical of Ping's southern ventures: the paper's only advertiser was a rum maker, and they made the "nutty decision" to allow him to pay for his ads with his product. Over half a century later Ping could "still see clearly the three walls of our main office entirely occupied by cases of Ron Q The Premier RUM!" 35 She had "dark hair and dark eyes." 36

One evening while at the English Club, Ping noticed "an exceptionally attractive woman" wearing "a beautiful, white flowing gown." Jolyne Haugwitz had be{:n in Puerto Rico with her husband, Lucian, and their very young son, Lu, for almost two years before she met Ping. Lucian Haugwitz, who had inherited a "healthy amount of money," was the American representative of Planter's Peanuts and was in Puerto Rico exploring for gold. Jo was the daughter of a French doctor who had come to Canada to practice medicine in its northern and western reaches among the Indians and a few whites; he had been killed in a laboratory explosion. Jo became a noted ballerina by the time she was nineteen and soon married Lucian, gave birth to Lu, and moved to Puerto Rico. 37 Ping was smitten by Jo and sensed she was not happily married; the two soon "came to know one another." Jo was having problems with her husband, who she had discovered was bisexual. His interests were elsewhere, and he "did not seem to notice what was going on." Besides, Jo was worried about her son's safety around his father. Jo remembered that Ping appeared in her life at the very moment she was "vulnerable." 38 Jo was guaranteed to raise every hackle on Neff Road. Nevertheless, Ping and Jo laid their plans. She would seek a divorce from Lucian in Puerto Rico, Ping would return to New York to await her return, and afterward they would get married. Ping went home to face his parents, who "yelled and screamed." Ping's mother objected to Jo because she was divorced and therefore a "loose woman" who she feared was a fortune hunter. Hugh's biggest objection was that Jo was not Catholic. 39 Ping had no job, and to get away from his parents he called upon his Dartmouth connections to help him find work in New England. He hung around the Manchester Union Leader's offices for three weeks, asking for a job, and finally on the day before Ping's marriage, Don MacPhail, a former classmate

Stubbornly Different

25

who worked on the paper, persuaded the managing editor to hire Ping as a reporter at twenty-eight dollars a week. Ping and Jo were married in the Manchester Congregational Church on October 23, 1937, and after a short reception, the two enjoyed a one-night honeymoon at a Vermont ski resort. They found "a nice little house in the country, only five minutes from Manchester," and settled in. 40 They were married thirty-two years, but it was never a very congenial union; they were basically "very different people," and Ping was not yet ready to settle down. He craved the limelight, while Jo was a quiet woman who enjoyed the fine arts, working around her home, and knitting. She was more contemplative and slower to vent her opinions than was Ping, who once told his niece that Jo was "made for the solitary life." Long after their divorce, Ping recalled that he "was doing a lot of hell raising" in the first days of their marriage and he very much wanted Jo to admire his work, but "she never loo~ed at the newspaper." They spent little time together, "had no social life to speak of," and did not have much to say to one another. Three years before he died, Ping sadly admitted, "I never really knew how she felt about me. "41 Ping may have sensed their fundamental differences in the early days of their marriage, but he was far too busy trying to act the hard-bitten reporter to pay much attention. His marriage vows and daughters' births did not interrupt his pattern of job hopping. Only his periodic adventures in sunnier climes ended. Even with marriage, he still was not sure what he wanted, but unknowingly he was preparing for his future trade as a scold. He was learning to write forcibly and quickly, meeting people with diverse notions, and slowly beginning to transform his boundless physical energy into an intellectual restiveness that would mark his more mature years.

4

IN SEARCH OF PING

Ping's marriage and return to the newspaper business hardly indicated that he had found a career; from 1937, when he started with the Manchester Union Leader, until September 1945, he held nine different jobs and came dose to accepting several others. Among them were posts at the politically and socially contentious International Labor Organization and the ClOp AC where he met people on the left side of the political spectrum and found he liked them. He became interested in reform groups, contributed to them, and volunteered his time and expertise. Nobody, though, ever bought Ping's full attention, and early in his career he could never quite decide whether to work for organizations that drove his father crazy or to please him by toiling in the corporate vineyards. Ping only dimly perceived that conflict when he began his short -lived career in 1937 as a reporter for the Union Leader. More pressing was his need to earn a living for his new wife and stepson. His salary of thirty-five dollars per week was a princely sum in the Depression, although less than half of what he had made propping Rickenbacker up at Eastern Air Lines. Ping started at the bottom, reading copy, writing a sports column under the pen name of Peter Plummet, and covering Manchester arts events. 1 Charles Owsley to Ping, "Dear Plump One."' As a lukewarm, token Democrat on the Union Leader, which belonged to Frank Knox of Chicago, who, Ping recollected, "owned a piece of a Chicago daily and about half of the UL," Ping luckily "wasn't asked any questions abt ... politics." The newspaper was rock-ribbed, conservative Republican, but Ping then was less socially and politically aware than he would become later.' Instead, he had fun, not taking much seriously. He honed his ability to write eye-catching openings and headlines. He began one memorable piece with: "Skinny's all right in its place, but it doesn't make hockey players." In another he spoofed sports-crazy locals with the observation that "trying to dig the facts out of any of the multifarious legends which populate Granite State sports-lore is like trying to snare a lady-whale in the Merrimack River." At the end of his Peter Plummet columns, he usually had three or four inches to fill. He found some of the strangest stuff, such as the story of Eleonora Sears, who had sent

In Search of Ping

27

"dowagers into flibbertygibbets" when she "climbed aboard a horse in a pair of pants" thirty years earlier.• He was even less serious about his column "Around the Town." It was basically gossip, and Ping made fun of his subjects. On December 31, 1938, for example, he announced that ten local groups were going to "do a neat gelandesprung over local nightclub attractions" and go skiing. He wrote about being invited to a National Nut Club of America party, obviously an inside joke, and using the royal "we," replied "every friend we have in the world just naturally qualifies for it."' "It isn't to be presumed that Tom McGrath, Dartmouth senior and football player, was speaking for his college when he told Laconia Rotarians that 'athletic subsidization isn't so bad, if it isn't carried too far. "'6

Neophyte reporter Ferry also drew some plum chores. He covered the visiting national oyster-shucking champion, who Ping announced "undresses oysters for a living" and "skinned" one hundred of them in less than five minutes. Manchester was a hotbed of speed, for Ping also watched a champion typist rip 125 words a minute off a Union Leader "senile and spavined machine." When torch singer Fifi D'Orsay hit Manchester, Ping headlined her: "Fifi Just 'French Pee-Zoop.' "' Ping had a more serious reportorial side, however, and national aspirations. He tried to get on as a stringer with the Wall Street Journal but was turned down. He succeeded with the Christian Science Monitor, though, and sent it quite a variety of pieces on topics ranging from farmers' problems with groundhogs to the peril of syphilis in kissing games. He also caught the eye of Westbrook Pegler, who suggested he do a local investigative piece to connect with some scandal Pegler had uncovered in Providence, Rhode Island. 8 The Union Leader soured on Ping when he ran afoul of the city's police chief over several serious stories he wrote about the county poor farm. Although he was fair to the farm's director, who had made recent improvements, he wrote that the farm had become synonymous with "the words 'eye-sore."' When he claimed that the cops arrested men whose labor was needed on the farm, the police chief threatened revenge and used his influence with the paper's managing editor, Bob Blood, to quash Ping's followup stories.' Ping was already in trouble for his coverage oflocal musical events. When famous tenor Leonard Warenoff, who later sang under the name of Leonard Warren and dropped dead onstage in 1960 at the Metropolitan Opera, came to town, Ping wrote that he had great presence but had "left his voice on the bu-

28

In Search of Ping

reau at home." When his editor called Ping on the carpet, the music critic defended himself with the arch observation that he "was a musician and knew good music." Blood ordered Ping to apologize to Warenoff, who surprisingly agreed with what Ping had written. Later Ping skipped a concert and pulled out a piece he had written on an earlier event and "simply substituted the artists' names." Blood asked him to leave but allowed his wayward reporter time to find another job. 10 Ping's luck in Depression job-hopping held. James M. Langley, a Dartmouth graduate and owner of the Concord Daily Monitor and New Hampshire Patriot, hired him in the spring of 1938 as a general reporter. In Concord, Peter Plummet was the local book review editor with a rather flip but always stimulating style. Only the most jaded reader could have passed over a Ping review subtitled "ANon -Carnal Grandma and Mass Production. "II Ping thought his three-and-a-half years in Concord the happiest time in his life prior to marrying Carol. "I suspect I was better off financially making $30 or $35 a week, ... we had budget envelopes to put cash in; [we had] a wonderful feeling of cash and security." Only twenty-eight years old, he ran with the young set. He fondly remembered playing golf, candlepins, Pitch, cribbage, poker, and softball. He also recalled that he ran for mayor in 1939 as a protest candidate, an advocate of lower taxes and spending. His proposed platform, though solidly conservative, had populist overtones; he chided local bankers for applauding surpluses in the city treasury and its various departments. Ping's interest was gadflyism at its best, complete with bad poetry: "Providence has here a plan/ And Ping Ferry is the man!" Apparently it was all in fun, for he never filed to make the race.I' "I felt ashamed that I picked on them as much as I did." 13 In Ping's most serious attempt at investigative reporting, he attained a level of ferocity that burdened his conscience for the rest of his life. He unearthed a stock swindle concocted by Charles Jackman, whom Ping characterized "a pinch penny very rich-," who ran the First Investment Company of Concord. The firm, founded in 1916 for the purpose of buying stocks, had been capitalized in 1924 at one million dollars. All went well until the 1929 crash, when many of its stocks became worthless. Jackman continued to appropriate himself a yearly salary of three thousand dollars throughout the 1930s and borrowed money for his two insurance companies from the beleaguered stock fund at no interest. In 1940, Jackman proposed to reduce the par value of the stock from fifty dollars to five dollars, which would have left the fund a surplus of a quarter of a million dollars. Jack-

In Search of Ping

29

man had also sold undistributed shares in the company to his wife at belowmarket price and declared a dividend. Jackman's wife, on advice of her attorney, returned the dividend after Jackman heard that Ping was writing his expose. Ping always thought it was "a good story," and after he left Concord, Charles Jackman went to jail. Ping "felt bad about how I treated these men .... I probably ruined their lives," but he rationalized: "The chase was on, and they were duplicitous too." They were also dangerous; one of them held a seat on the local draft board. 14 "About time I came out of this bucolic fog." 15 After three years in Concord, Ping was getting antsy and was receptive to offers to move on. One of his friends, John Clark, the owner of the Claremont Eagle, was a close friend of former New Hampshire governor J. Gil Winant, whom he introduced to Ping. When President Roosevelt named the former governor to replace Joseph P. Kennedy as ambassador to the Court of St. James in November 1940, Winant asked Ping to join his press affairs staff. He gave Ping only three days to make up his mind. Ping was ready, but when he took the ambassador to Boston to catch his ship, Winant told him that he had to withdraw his offer because he had fewer positions available than he had thought. 16 Winant instead arranged a temporary job for him with the International Labor Office in Montreal. The former governor had been an ILO director in Geneva and had been instrumental in relocating this last agency of the League ofNations to Montreal. John Clark and Ping had worked with the ILO on publicity matters earlier, and in the fall of 1941 Ping was asked to help with publicity arrangements for an ILO international meeting in New York. On October 22, 1941, the ILO hired Ping as an information officer through November 7 at seventy-five dollars per week plus expenses, and Langley reluctantly allowed him a leave of absence. Part of his interest in the short-term job may have been piqued by his father's reaction to Ping's new employer: "It's a Commie outfit isn't it?" he asked. 17 While Ping was "flacking" for the ILO and holding down his Concord job, Hitler ravaged Europe, and Ping was of draft age. He "was essentially against the war" and "told my mother I had no intention of going." He recalled "crying after Pearl Harbor [with a] profound sadness that we were going to war. ... The· flags were out, ... [and] the reality of war hit me." A decade earlier, Helen W ellmeier had argued the pacifist position and Ping had belittled her. But by 1941 "things had changed"; he was married and had a daughter. 18

30

In Search of Ping

The Selective Service was his "reality of war," and he took steps to avoid its clutches. He heard that the Jackmans were determined to see him drafted, and he went to see "a very friendly doctor" who diagnosed him with a bad back and, after hearing about his earlier mouth-biting-alcoholic episodes, epilepsy. Ping was therefore classified 3A on December 22, 1941, which was later changed to 4F on February 5, 1944. 19 Not long after Ping's visit to his draft board, a "Dartmouth friend," Russell R. "Cotty" Larmon, head of the New Hampshire Office of Price Administration (OPA), a federal bureau responsible for fixing price ceilings on all commodities except farm products, preventing black marketeering, and controlling rents around defense industries, hired him as chief state enforcement officer. By the end ofJanuary 1942, Ping employed his own "operatives," trained them, and wrote the bureau's procedural manuals. Automobile tire rationing began the week the OPA was formed and soon spread to sugar, gasoline, shoes, fats, oils, coffee, butter, meat, and several other commodities. Ping was New Hampshire's chief rationing cop. 20 "I gathered that some of [Ping's] neighbors thought he was a bit too liberal. "' 1

As the enforcer, Ping commanded a salary of twenty-four hundred dollars per year and was briefed in Boston, where he met economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whom he called the "price supremo in D.C." As with everything Ping did, he embraced his new position with enthusiasm; on Christmas eve of his first year with the OPA, Ping went up to Milford and offered fellow Greenie William B. Rotch, an editor on his father's newspaper, the Milford Cabinet, a job in OPA public relations. Rotch recollected that Ping welded together a team, "a high minded group, motivated by ideals, believing in the importance of rationing and price controls." It took its cue from Ping, who, Rotch thought, "was perhaps the most idealistic." Ping later described himself as "stern, selfrighteous, a hard stick to price and rationing sinners." "If not Camelot, [it was] at least a holy crusade," Rotch recalled. 22 His new public relations officer was impressed with Ping's knowledge and thoroughness. He took his green hires, "trained them, scolded them, praised them, invited them to play poker once a week in his basement, and welded them into a competent team." If they were investigating meat rationing infractions, Ping took everyone to a meat-packing plant to explain just how meats were butchered, packaged, and distributed. "He never sent them on an assignment," Rotch remembered, "without trying out the procedures himself." Ping imbued Rotch with his notion that PR was more than writing news re-

In Search of Ping

31

leases; it was a position based on trust that flowed from being blunt and truthful, the classic Ferry approach. "Not for Ferry were cautious evasions," Rotch promised. "We tried to put words ... pungent, hard-hitting phrases, ... in people's mouths," especially in Larmon's, whose "labored explanations of the rationale of rationing" were embarrassing. The problem was that "Larmon believed in compromise; Ferry did not."' 3 The OPA reinforced Ping's belief that government could work for everyone's benefit; like Galbraith, he never completely lost this essential New Deal affinity for calling upon the government to redress national wrongs. He also took from his OPA experience a low opinion of the FBI, an anger that would fester for two more decades before he publicly confronted J. Edgar Hoover. "When I saw how the FBI handled [OPA] cases [it] firmly fixed in my mind that I would never want to work" with these people, he recalled. "They [were] hogs, wanted all the credit." Moreover, they were "very secretive; none of my men could remember anything the FBI had done they approved of. "24 As was his wont, however, Ping did not stay with the OPA long. He was ready for a career zig by January 1944, when Sidney Hillman, head of the CIOPAC supporting Roosevelt in his re-election bid against Republican Thomas Dewey, called him. Hillman, a Lithuanian native, had made his reputation as founder and president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in 1914 and had broken with the AF ofL in 1935 to cofound the CIO, of which he was vice president until1940. In 1944 the CIO organized a PAC headed by Hillman, who needed an experienced PR man. After a half-hour interview, Ping accepted the job to head the publicity department of sixteen people at a salary of $583 per month. He did not consult Jo, and the results, he remembered, were "loneliness in Concord, solitude and tumult in N.Y.," where he moved for the year. 25 Forty-one years later Ping recalled that taking the CIO job also caused "consternation and anger on Neff Road," where his father berated him for selling out to the communists. Ironically, Ping realized that "I was where I was [CIO-PAC] because of my father's connections with corporations." Although he recalled "I was thought to be a flaming liberal because I worked with the CIO PAC ... I never saw myself that way." But his stirrings about racial injustice helped him rationalize taking his new post. "I found myself talking to Henry Allen Moore, the token black in the CIO," he remembered, and "I saw myself as enlightened to belong to an organization which had a black. "26 The artist Ben Shahn, a man with whom Ping remained close until Shahn's death in 1969, was in his department. Ping credited the artist, a socialist, veteran of the WPA Federal Arts Project, and leading member of the "Ash Can School" of social criticism, with awakening his interest in national social and political

32

In Search of Ping

inequities; "as much as anyone, [he] got me turned around on these things," Ping recalled. He also became friendly with Palmer Weber, PAC's research director, who went on in 1948 to become a member of Henry Wallace's "cabinet" in that former Democrat's unsuccessful presidential run on the Progressive Party ticket." The new CIO man's responsibilities included presenting the PAC to the press and getting out what he later estimated to be "84 million leaflets and pamphlets." He reported directly to Hillman, whom he initially liked, perhaps because he "was remote from anything I had ever known .... He was shrewd and played his own game." Later Ping broke with his boss over his duplicity. Hillman was an influential Roosevelt advisor, who in the vice presidential nomination fight, along with other labor leaders, backed Henry Wallace. After they £1iled, rumors throughout the hall whispered that Hillman had secured Harry S Truman's nomination instead. This backstage maneuvering became Ping's headache after the press featured a story that quoted Roosevelt as saying to his aides during the vice-presidential struggles: "Clear everything with Sid-

ney."'" The "Clear it with Sidney" epigram dogged the election campaign, and Ping took pains to deny it. He thought Roosevelt probably did say it, because a "thing like this [presidential access and influence over the vice-presidential selection] was easy to arrange given NYC politics; Tammany Hall came in handy." Nevertheless, the good soldier Ping tried to refute the charge with a flamboyant public gesture. He suggested to Hillman they put a hogshead filled with ten thousand dollars' cash in the Republican Party headquarters and offer the money to anyone who could prove that Roosevelt made the comment. Hillman was not taken with the idea. 29 After Roosevelt won the election with 54 percent of the vote to Dewey's 46 percent, the CIO-PAC lost its immediate raison d'etre. Two weeks later Ping wrote Shahn, "No-one on PAC seems to be doing much except attacking the local supplies ofbourbon with zeal." Rumors were flying that Hillman wanted to turn the PAC into the American Labor Party (ALP) with himself at its helm. He assured Ping that the rumors were bunk and ordered him to tell the reporters. Ping did and "killed the story." Soon after the election, however, Hillman announced he would merge the ALP and PAC. Ping was furious. He bearded Hillman in his office and accused him of lying. Hillman's responded with an incredulous look. "You didn't believe that, did you?"; he calmly assured Ping that everything would soon be forgotten. 30 Ping did not forget; he resigned. He later mused, "I think I used this as an excusE: to get out.... I was not interested in New York City politics"; and, as he said dozens of times, "I wasn't a union man." But there were other important

In Search of Ping

33

reasons why he left. His father's irritation, his absences from Jo and daughters Denny, Fay, and Robin, and his lifelong reluctance to work for large, bureaucratic institutions all soured him on his budding union career. After a half-hearted failed attempt to promote himself as an expert in labormanagement affairs, he decided to go to war. He applied for a position as an analyst in the office of the Chief of Management Control, Operations Analyst Division, under the Army Air Force's command. The Air Force was organizing a strategic bombing appraisal group to investigate allied bombing effectiveness in the Pacific Theater, similar to a group in Europe. Ping was approached early in 1945 to join, but he was still "having a great deal of trouble about the war." On the other hand, he remembered, "I had had an easy time of it and this was something that seemed to me to be worth doing." Besides, he had nothing else beckoning. 31 Ping was accepted for a position after "they went over my vagrant record very closely." With his typical enthusiasm, he wrote Shahn, who must have winced, "This operations analyst business is really exciting." He signed up for a six-month to two-year hitch and was told only that he would be sent south for basic training, then to the Far East, and would be paid twenty-five dollars per diem plus travel expenses. This time he talked to Jo first and reported to his artist-friend, "I am more than happy to say that my wife, on whom I have heaped all kinds of unhappy decisions in the seven years we've been married, smiled and said: 'Go ahead a man has his work to do.' "'2 "I feel like a man again," the newly assimilated Lt. Col. Ferry wrote the day he signed his contract. He was off to a desolate spot near Orlando for what he thought were ten days of Florida training; it turned out to be six weeks of painfully "hard work." He learned such things as "which grass you could eat and what you could not eat," which meant he endured "two or three days of near starvation." About mid-April, the night before the flight out, the operation was scrubbed. Ping and Stephen Duggan, Jr., the unit's commander, went to Washington, D.C., to help its other members find jobs. Ping did not have one either and knew only that he did not want to return to the CIO. Yet ironically, his contacts there drew him back into the public relations business. 33 "Ben, blow a bird at PAC for me the next time you're in." 34 While with the CIO, Ping had met Win Nathanson, a partner in the PR firm of Thomas Fizdale, Inc., when Nathanson was organizing "Businessmen for Roosevelt and Truman" for the 1944 campaign. His polling discovered that Roosevelt had a 70 percent approval rating, making getting voters to the polls the key factor in the campaign. Nathanson teamed up with Ping at the CIO-

34

In Search of Ping

PAC, created a get-out-the-vote organization, and convinced Henry Kaiser to head it. Nathanson thought that Ping "was very bright," and when he heard that Ping was looking for employment after his Air Force duty, he hired him at the rather princely salary of one thousand dollars a month. 35 Nathanson was a publicist whose job was to get his clients' names in the newspapers. Among them were the soprano Grace Moore, Switzerland watchmakers, Philco, the Coffee Growers Association, and the American Thread Company. Ping was to think up gimmicks, such as showing famous actresses sewing to promote thread, and write public relations blurbs. Nathanson quickly learned that Ping was "frustrated" and "not very happy," but recalled he was "a very good writer." Nathanson's avowed goal of raking in as much money as possible in the shortest period of time also bothered Ping. Nathanson hated businessmen, even the ones he worked for, and said frankly that he wanted to "exploit them." Exactly a half-century later Nathanson remembered that Ping did not like the emphasis he put on "profits," even though he had "the feeling that Ping was always on the edge financially." Nathanson made scads of money and later closed the company and went to college to pursue his real interests in history and archaeology. In his nineties, he was still a major financial backer of the archaeological dig at Troy and regularly traveled the globe. 36 Ping remained with Nathanson just three months. While he could get excited about newspapers, the ILO, the CIO, and even military "strategic analysis," he chilled at the thought ofboosterism simply for the sake of money. He had to find underlying worth in his enthusiasms; he liked the bigger pictures and associating with curious colleagues who bristled with ideas and ideals. To thirty-five-year-old Ping, publicity was a hustle in which cleverness was allimportant; it was as corrupting as Pong's advertising work. Ping was still unsure of a career, but he was certain that was not it. As was often the case, luck intervened. Earl Newsom, who had a new slant on public relations and was forming a partnership that would become a leader in the field, phoned; Ping was ripe for the plucking.

5

THE ORGANIZATION MAN

Ping took with him a briefcase full of assets when he left Nathanson. His Ivy League education enfolded him within a network of important and influential Greenie friends. He had honed an incisive mind that intuitively pared away irrelevancies, he amazed everyone with the speed with which he could write, and prose flowed from his typewriter in close to final draft form. Moreover, Ping knew something about wildly diverse subjects, from early integration attempts and birds to twentieth-century literature and union grievance procedures. He was a driven man, not sure to what end, but he was hell-bent to get there. A workaholic with a high energy level, he roamed capitalists' halls for the next eight years dispensing his sometimes iconoclastic brand of advice and wisdom, the last step on his way to becoming the nation's scold. In 1945 he found a career that melded the contradictory aspects of his personality, his opposition to his father's world that had sometimes prompted him to make self-destructive choices, and his need to prove his worth to Hugh. With Earl Newsom & Company (ENCO) he began to channel his destructive tendencies into increasingly leftist humanitarian causes. Furthermore, while enjoying his labors, Ping made money, lots of it, over fifteen times the average postwar salary. He took Jo and their daughters to sunny climes for winter vacations, lived the opulent life in New York's suburbs, and enjoyed the largesse that bought him books, art, and a grand piano. Earl Newsom melded the discordant elements of Ping's personality. Like Ping, Newsom was not a typical public relations man; he believed that "bad" corporations had to be reformed to better serve the public before they could earn the public's respect. He offered Ping the chance to transform his father's world to make it more humane and responsible, and Hugh applauded his efforts. Newsom hired Ping precisely because he had a reputation for being something of a leftist, or, as some whispered behind his back, "pink." He also had union experience and connections through his father to the upper echelons of the corporate world. Ping was under no illusions about his value to Newsom; he told Studs Terkel, "I think one of the reasons Newsom hired me was that my father was a friend of Edsel Ford." Ford was a major Newsom client, and Ping's "job was primarily dealing with the public conduct of the Ford Motor Company." New-

The Organization Man som was always a bit apprehensive about just how "left" Ping was, and Ping enjoyed exacerbating his trepidations. In his ten years at Newsom, Ping became more interested in liberal/left wing causes and donated his time and money liberally. Moreover, Newsom gave him the opportunity to move into the Ford Foundation, where he found piles of real money he could direct to causes that interested him. 1 "Working for Earl Newsom & Company gave Ping's ego a big boost., Newsom's career was almost as checkered as Ping's. A native Iowan, he had graduated from Oberlin where he was in the same class as Robert Hutchins and Erwin Griswold, later a Harvard dean, men who would influence Ping's life at the Ford Foundation. Newsom taught high school, almost got a Ph.D. in English at Columbia, worked for the ill-fated Literary Digest, the Oil Heating Institute, and the John Day Publishing Company, became a partner in an architectural firm, and finally in 1935 went into the public relations business with Fred Palmer.' An early coworker recalled that Earl "placed great emphasis on the policies and actions ofhis clients, rather than on attempts on 'spin control' or publicity for publicity's sake." Newsom demanded that he work with corporate CEOs so "he could persuade them about the wisdom of activities which the companies might not view as in their short-term best interest." Like Ping he had "an optimistic faith that human institutions can be made to work, can be improved upon, and can enlarge and enrich human life." Ping put it more succinctly when he said Newsom, "Told [companies] what you say and what you do, have to match." Newsom was also a believer in public polling and statistical analysis, and he retained Elmo Roper to do his opinion research! Toward the end of the war Newsom took a survey of which organizations "were doing the best job at that time in capturing support by the general public." Unions, he concluded, were becoming masters of the art, and he looked for someone to hire from the union side. He kept coming up with "this guy named Ping Ferry" at the CIO and invited him for an interview. Ping walked into Newsom's Madison Avenue and 57th Street office "without the foggiest notion of the company." Newsom recalled that he "showed up in an open necked shirt and sweater, with a substantial chip on his shoulder." Ping thought Newsom "impressive appearing," especially seated at his desk in front of a large portrait of his look-alike, the unbearded Abraham Lincoln, one of Newsom's heroes. Newsom had lost an eye to glaucoma, and his glass eye, Ping noted, "went out offocus occasionally." Ping found Newsom "a solemn man"

The Organization Man

37

without "much humor" who "was very conservative," just the sort of fellow Ping found off-putting.5 "It was a dreamy job and I made lots of money." 6

Newsom was persuasive, however, and worked his magic on Ping. He did not pull his punches; he told Ping he was impressed with his work but disagreed with most of it. He asked Ping why he should fight corporations from the union side when, as President Teddy Roosevelt had proposed almost fifty years earlier, "it would be more interesting and productive ... to reform companies from within, to get them to do the right thing for society because it was in their own long-run interest." Ping "went to work the next day" and was surprised to find that the entire company consisted of Newsom, two other men, and two or three secretaries. Newsom & Company was never a big operation; at its height it employed only twenty-three people. 7 Ping discovered that Newsom was "a very intelligent man." James Newmyer, whose public relations firm handled many Newsom clients in Washington, D.C., attributed the two men's friendship to Newsom's proclivities "to surround himself with partners of widely varying viewpoints." One of his pet techniques was to put his clients in a room with his diverse partners to "let them hear their problems dissected from every possible viewpoint." Afterward, Newmyer said, "the client sometimes felt like a ping-pong ball," but Earl had a wonderful ability to point out areas of consensus. Newsom kept his client list small-and elite. In ten years Ping worked only with Standard Oil of New Jersey, Colonial Williamsburg, American Locomotive Company, and Ford. 8 "The Big Time."'

Newsom appreciated Ping's strengths and moved quickly to make him a partner. A year after Ping joined ENCO its principals signed new articles of copartnership that gave Ping 13 percent of the business. Newsom held 44, Fred L. Palmer 28, and A. K. Mills 15 percent. Only Newsom put much money into the partnership; in 1948 he owned 97 percent of the firm. In 1953, Ping wrote his father that he had only $6,ooo invested in Newsom when his proportionate share should be about $16,ooo. He told Hugh that "there is no hurry in getting to this figure," but "it is an obligation I ought to fulfill as soon as I can. " 10 ENCO was profitable throughout Ping's tenure, although its net was not as high as many thought. In its best year, 1951, it netted a little over $285,000, and in its worst, 1953, that sum fell to about $189,000. Ping earned just over $16,ooo in 1946 and almost $29,000 in 1949. He made his first "big" money, $45,855, the

The Organization Man next year. They were unheard-of riches for most mid-century families, whose annual salaries hovered around $3,390.'' "[I) assure you your unbusinesslike eldest son is not in extremis.""

The headiness of it all was important to Ping, and his standard ofliving reflected his exuberance; he lived well-well beyond his means. He took regular oversf~as trips, to the Bahamas or Jamaica in the winter and to England or the Continent in the summer. In 1951 he took two separate summer vacations to England, seasonal jaunts he would continue until his death." Ping upgraded his housing as well. In October 1945 he sold his Concord house and bought a much bigger one in Bronxville, New York. In late June 1950, he bought a "small farm" "six miles from Millbrook, complete with apple trees" and joined the Duchess Country Club. The farm left Ping financially stretched, and his father had to help him with the mortgage.'• The purchase that left him burdened with major debts, however, was a mock-Tudor house in Briarcliff, New York-Ping later called it a "foolish decision"--he bought in late 1952, that had, depending on who counted, anywhere from thirty-one to thirty-four rooms. It was monstrously large, and cost fortyfive thousand dollars. But he still had all his other properties and what he liked to call "a large family payroll" and needed to sell the Bronxville house. By 1953 he was in a muddle, and despite his protestations that he needed "advice more than cash," his father sent what Ping called "lovely pre-payments of your Christmas present" that helped make Briarcliff affordable." Despite his financial pinch, Ping maintained a lively social schedule at his various clubs, played a great deal of golf, often with Newsom, was most generous at Christmas with gifts for a wide circle of family and friends, bought blizzards of books, and in a small way started an art collection. He also donated sums to a long list of charities. In 1948 he gave $675; the largest amounts went to "mainstream" organizations, but peeking through were portents of the more politically active and liberal Ping. He sent checks to the Highlander Folk School, reputed by many to be a communist front organization, the Urban Leagu.~ Service Fund, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, Berkshire Industrial Farm, Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and the ACLU. Ping's gifts illustrated his incipient interest in racial issues, the proliferation of atomic weapons, and world peace. Years later his donations increased from a few hundred dollars to millions a year from foundations and his and Carol's own pockets. '6

The Organization Man

39

"[At war's end] Ford ended up on cold gravel; disorganized, not broke, but not making any money,-unprofitable, without direction. "17 Many of those millions came from the Ford Foundation, the result of his efforts at Newsom to help Henry Ford II set his corporate house in order. When World War II erupted, the founder's son, Edsel, was Ford's nominal president, but the old man still ruled with an iron hand. Henry was a better tinkerer than a corporate manager; his firm was beset with archaic accounting practices, and he had no idea if it was making money. He deferred to his old crony Harry Bennett, who ruled with an iron fist through gangs of thugs. Ford was so undependable a government war contractor that the War Department proposed turning it over to Studebaker to manage until war's end. After Edsel died in 1943, the Navy released Henry II, only twenty-six years old and well known as a playboy, to bring some order from the chaos in his family's firm. 18 Elmo Roper suggested to Henry that he hire ENCO to advise him. Newsom refused to sign a contract until after Henry assumed real power on September 15, 1945, when Ford's board elected him president and Henry fired the guntoting Harry Bennett. Ping believed that he was hired soon thereafter as a direct result ofNewsom's acquiring the new client. 19 "[Henry] didn't think it was ever necessary to write anything longer than a page about any subject. You could have incorporated the history of Christianity ... in a paragraph or two; that's all he cared to know about it." 20 Ping, who "knew ... Edsel pretty well," was appointed to service the Ford account. He remembered that "Henry and I got along pretty well," but he described him as a "difficult and spoiled little boy-a large man." Ping, who could be pretty salty himself, was struck by the "strong language" Henry habitually used. At their first meeting they "talked a bit about the auto business"; [Ping] told him "I wasn't much interested although I had been raised in it," not exactly the most politic start to their relationship. Henry knew about Ping's union connections and made it clear to Ping "he disliked everything about unions." Ping responded that there was "no reason to fight in public with the UAW.... If you have something to say, write a letter. Don't make any deals."' 1 Even though they stood at opposite philosophical poles, they got along because, Ping thought, "he needed somebody to talk to." They were also close to the same age: Henry was only seven years younger, and both considered themselves young Turks. Henry was isolated at Ford, for after he got rid of Bennett

40

The Organization Man

and "the half-backs and old quarterbacks who were littering the aisles of the place," not much of a management structure remained. Moreover, as Ping recalled, "he was getting bad advice from all over from people who didn't realize that 1945 wasn't 1935."22 Ping and Newsom tried to mold Henry's general views and present him to the public as a young industrial statesman. It was difficult, for Henry was anything but; he was afflicted with a quick temper, a limited ability to concentrate, and a lifelong reputation as a boozing philanderer. Yet Ping and his partners crafted a program of appearances at which Henry read well-vetted ENCO speeches about the state of the industry. His coming out was before four thousand people at the Society of Automotive Engineers on January 9, 1946, where Henry offered up "The Challenge of Human Engineering," a Pinglike title. Henry agreed that unions were permanent additions to the industrial scene and proposed that union and management advocates meet together rationally to hammer out working agreements. The newspapers loved it. 23 "I didn't have many convictions such as that of race in 1945 .... I did have [an] interest. m• At the same time, Ping tried to help Henry overcome his grandfather's legacy of anti-Semitism. From 1919 to 1927 he had published the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper with a circulation of one million, that was little more than an anti-Semitic rag. Old Henry, convinced that Jews were plotting to overthrow Christian civilization, even resurrected the old forgery The Protocols ofthe Wise Men ofZion, so-called proof that the Jews sought world domination. Henry II recognized his company's "Jewish problem" as early as 1944 and hired a Jewish friend, Alfred A. May, as an advisor. When Ping arrived as an "account executive," May had ambitious plans. He wante'd Henry to sponsor a mercy ship to Europe to help displaced persons, especially Jews. He also proposed a memo to all Ford dealers denying that either Henry was responsible for anti-Semitic statements. Ping was appalled. He and his partners suggested that anti-Semitism could not be dealt with overnight and that there should be no overt program; rather the company should, in its everyday policies, show the public that anti-Semitism was not in its character. Thus Ford should avail itself only of usual opportunities to show its impartiality.zs Henry spoke in behalf of the United Jewish Appeal, became a highly visible supporter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), called for improved human relations among all believers, and in 1951, as chairman of NCCJ's gifts campaign, donated one million dollars to the organization. EN-

The Organization Man

41

CO's policy of reforming company behavior paid off. Whatever Henry's personal tendencies, his consistent attention to ethnic and later racial problems proved good corporate public relations. 26 "I was thought to be a flaming liberal because I worked with CIO PAC though I never saw myself that way. "27 Ping and ENCO earned every dollar of their fees in 1949 and 1950, when Ford became embroiled in almost constant labor strife. Ping spent much time in Dearborn with Henry, company vice presidents, legal counsel, and government mediators. Ford's CIO-UAW contract was up for renegotiation in 1949, and Reuther was determined to win a company pension plan for his workers. No automobile company had such a program, and Henry was dead-set against the idea. In March 1949, Ping wrote his partners that such a benefit was inevitable with or without a strike and asked, Why take the strike? Earl swung to his position, and Ford's officers at a March 8 meeting supported Ping after he pointed out that major oil companies, G.E., and Eastman Kodak already offered such pensions and that the auto industry could not be far behind. In the midst of the standoff, the CIO walked out in May over the question of a speedup in Ford's plants, especially its Lincoln factory. Ping hurried to Detroit and moved into the Dearborn Inn, where he combined socializing with Ford's executives with endless strategy meetings. ' 8 The strike provided insights into Ping's influence at the highest corporate levels. Earl gave him a great deal ofleeway, and Ping, sometimes with Newsom and sometimes not, defined the issues on the table and outlined the company's negotiating stance. Equally as important, ENCO chastised company officials for allowing the confrontation to reach the strike stage. Because top Ford managers had little knowledge of what took place in their factories, their tendency was to deny any breaches of contract; Ping believed otherwise and confronted Ford executives with facts gleaned from their factory floors to prompt their future compliance with labor agreements. Ford's officers listened to Ping; he had Henry's ear.' 9 "I was almost sorry [the union got its pensions]." 30 The contract with the CIO of September 28, 1949, did not include workers' pensions, but a week earlier, in light of the steel settlement that promised such benefits, Ford admitted publicly it was "prepared to discuss a pension plan for our employees." Contract modifications the following year gave employees a

42

The Organization Man

raise and a retirement plan that guaranteed eligible workers $125 per month. Ping should have been pleased, but he was not. He had convinced Earnest Breech, Ford's executive vice president, that it made more sense to be the first with pensions in the auto industry rather than to follow the lead of the other major auto builders. But Ping long rued the fact that "the union was so eager to get the pension plan they gave away the store. I was ashamed" for the union. Breech told him, "Earl and I could count on Ford as a customer," for "if you do nothing else [for us] for the next 20 years, we have already saved $24 million." 31 That was not the way to Ping's heart, but he had been losing interest in Dearborn's problems for some time in proportion to his growing involvement in the company's attempt to preserve its founders' fortunes through the newly rich Ford Foundation. Ping helped with its rebirth and realized that while he enjoyed trying to reform the corporate world from within, he loved using the Ford millions to reform the nation-and maybe the world. He stood at the threshold of his most productive years, in which he became a nationally known figure who had his say about issues that interested him. The corporate reformer was transmogrified into the country's scold.

6

THE AWAKENING

The Ford Motor Company was most unusual among the Big Three in that it was a privately held corporation, owned by just eight family members. Henry, born in 1863, was physically and mentally deteriorating by the end ofWorld War II, and the family could feel the IRS hovering, waiting for the old man to die. To forestall a massive tax bite, Ford lawyers worked fast to safeguard the old man's holdings in the Ford Foundation, a small philanthropic entity that already held some of Edsel's and old Henry's money. 1 As advisor to the company, ENCO took the lead in helping Henry II set up a more active foundation to handle the hundreds of millions of dollars it was soon to receive. Ping was in the thick of the plans to rejuvenate the Foundation, which opened his eyes to an immense arena of new possibilities. He later recalled, "I was interested in the Foundation because [it] ... was the biggest opportunity in the world to do some reforming on an organized basis, and here I was sitting close by."' During his first forty years, Ping's reform impulses had manifested themselves in rebellion against accepted beliefs, conduct, institutions, and his father. The Ford Foundation's treasure presented him an opportunity to channel his drives in more positive directions to rectify the problems his father's corporate world had created and to atone for his own generation's mistakes. For a long moment at midcentury, Ping was certain that he and his fellow travelers could improve the world, preserve individual freedom in a complex institutionalized and technological society, lift blacks and the poor out of their despond, and restrain the warlike impulses that begot the Korean War and the nuclear standoff. He was excited by the vision of what the power of ideas backed by huge financial resources and the right people could accomplish. And practically speaking, the foundation offered him freedom to choose his own crusades, targets, and tactics; all he had to do was help organize it and nudge it in the right directions. These possibilities redirected his interests and energy to drive him within a decade to become America's premier scold; in the process, he also drove Hugh crazy. Ping was dazzled to rub elbows inside the foundation with some of the twentieth century's leading intellectuals, men who, like him, believed that with enough money they could eradicate the world's evils. Only later did he realize that most of them had their own private agendas for Ford's funds. Among these

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thinkers, however, he found two who became his heroes and mentors. Robert Hutchins, of University of Chicago fame, was a college president who had the audacity to drop football at Chicago. He long fascinated Ping, and even after their wrenching 1969 break, Ping still lauded Hutchins for his strengths, although by then he had also recognized the man's manifold weaknesses. Ping also periodically worked with Grenville Clark, a prestigious New York City lawyer with important political connections who, from his Dublin, New Hampshire, home became a voice for world peace, disarmament, and law, and hoped the Ford Foundation would spread his proposals worldwide. Their world views and enthusiasm induced Ping to reorder the often aimless and destructive impulses that had marked his life for almost forty years. He eagerly joined the reformers' ranks. The Foundation, however, also embroiled Ping in prototypical academic infighting, exacerbated by undreamt of monetary rewards that dangled ever so tantalizingly. He held his own in the disputes for more than twenty years. Moreover, the arguments within the Foundation engendered conflicts of interest and splits within ENCO serious enough to force Ping out. Underlying Ping's strengths in his early Foundation struggles was his close relationship with Henry II; Ping convinced him to be more daring with his family money than he otherwise might have been. For Ping, the Ford Foundation, especially its Fund for the Republic (FFR), gave him legitimacy, financial backing, and a stage on which to enter the intellectual ring. He initially worked in Hutchins's shadow, but Ping never remaim:d in anyone's shade for long; by the mid-1950s he launched himself into the national consciousness with numerous speaking engagements and publications, functioning as a lightning rod for FFR's opponents and later the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (CSDI). Ping loved the role; he thrived on the clash of ideologies and ideas, he became a master of hyperbole and satire, he egged the nation's conscience, he tried to make a difference. And he had fun. "When I came in, man! the flutter."' Events that changed Ping's life started innocuously enough in early 1946, when Henry asked him what he knew about the Ford Foundation. Ping knew only that it was a small outfit that supported the Ford Hospital, Greenfield Village, Edison Institute, and the like. Ford admitted, "Well, I don't know a hell of a lot more about it myself," and he asked Ping to look into it. "One of the starchliest old bastards in the place," Burton Craig, secretary-treasurer of Ford, called the foundation people, and when Ping showed up it was like "a bear en-

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tering a colony of doves .... It was almost as if an atom bomb dropped on the place." The Foundation had a total of three employees, and they "all went up in flutters." Ping gathered the needed information and "introduced Henry Ford II to the Ford Foundation" in a one-page summary.< For the next couple of years the Newsom partners kept discussing the family's financial problems. Earl was worried because "very shortly [the Foundation] was going to be immensely rich and ... it had absolutely no focus or idea." He was afraid it could be detrimental to the company, but thought if organized correctly, it could help sell Ford products, not exactly what Ping had in mind. With Henry's estate, the Foundation would own nearly 84 percent of Ford; the yearly profits from its holdings were mind-boggling.' In 1949, Henry authorized a committee chaired by Rowan Gaither, chairman of the board of the Rand Corporation, to plot his foundation's future. The committee returned a twenty-one volume report that Ping, Earl, and several others spent almost six months distilling down to a half-dozen major points to serve as the Foundation's charter. Speed was of the essence; old Henry had died in 1947, and unless the new Foundation unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars quickly the IRS would take them. Furthermore, the Internal Revenue Act of 1950 ordered all foundations to spend at least 70 percent of their earnings; the Ford Motor Company's dividends that year were eighty-seven million dollars. 6 Henry II and the Foundation's trustees hastened their search for a president. By the end of 1949, Henry had settled on Paul G. Hoffman, another auto maker. The essence of the Horatio Alger myth, a college dropout, Hoffman rose from car salesman to take over the bankrupt Studebaker Corporation in 1933 and bring it back to solvency. A millionaire at thirty-five, he belonged to all the "right" organizations: the Rotary, Masons, Republican Party, National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and ten exclusive clubs; by 1950 he had gathered twenty-seven honorary doctorates. He became a public figure when he ran the Marshall Plan that spent over ten billion dollars to reconstruct war-torn Europe. Furthermore, he had impeccable anticommunist credentials, a real asset after the Iron Curtain fell and just before McCarthy began his tirades. 7 "Hoffman really could not demand a hell of a lot because he wasn't around enough to."'

The former Studebaker executive was one of the few auto men Ping had not met, but they got along well-for a time. Because Ping "was full of whizbangery about the Foundation," Hoffman asked him to become one of its associate directors. Ping refused. Hoffman then asked Ping if he and Newsom

The Awakening would become public relations counsel for the Foundation, a request that led to much soul searching at ENCO because of the inherent conflicts of interest in working for the Ford Motor Company and its Foundation. Earl, however, took on the task. Ping found his new relationship "bizarre." He pointed out that "my father was President of Packard" while I "was working as an intimate friend of Henry's" and "for the immediate ex-president of Studebaker Corporation."' Ping's notions of what the Ford Foundation ought to do with its millions were at variance with those of Hoffman, and Henry. Ping did not mince his words; he had the "feeling that what foundations ought to do is kick the shit out of those in seats of power, fix up the supine press and the supine church, and so on." The Foundation should "take up areas that had been disregarded" by other philanthropies. Ping was most interested in point II in the Foundation's charter, concerning "the protection of rights, civil liberties, [and] free speech," largely because "I had written most of that stuff." He also admitted, "I didn't give a shit about the social sciences, and business administration." He later averred, "Even education was secondary." Ping foresaw the public relations problems inherent in working with civil liberties: "I was very conscious of McCarthy and other things," he noted. 10 To push for the Foundation's involvement in his favorite areas, Ping had to fight not only Hoffman but also his partner. Earl "kept thinking that the works of the Ford Foundation could ennoble the Ford name, the whole Ford enterprise." Thus he kept asking, when there were "so many things in the world that needed doing, why do things that would generate bad feeling?" 11 "There was very little small talk around Hutchins. So we always had ideas, large, medium, and small hovering around."" Hoffman and Hutchins (whom he had lured to become the associate director with the promise that Ford had "the biggest blank check in history") found it difficult to run a New York foundation from Pasadena where they lived. Hutchins was everything Hoffman was not. With a mordant, cutting wit, urbane, very tall, and always dignified, Hutchins was intent on changing the world through education. As dean ofYale's law school while in his twenties, he had attempted to reform legal education and failed. As president at Chicago at age thirty, he had discovered the inertia of custom and the faculty and left there a discouraged man. Prone to depressions and with a sharp temper, he was something of a cold fish, and few people penetrated his reserve. But he saw in Ford's Foundation a chance to educate the world. A progressive, Hutchins

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swam against the tide of anticommunism that often bordered on hysteria and was known for speaking frankly and sticking to his public positions. 13 Ping knew Hutchins only by reputation, but when he finally met the educator he was smitten. He liked Hutchins's "good ideas" and "precise language," and Hutchins worked his renowned magic on Ping as well. The "first time I saw him," Ping recalled, he "said to me 'you are the renowned Dr. Ferry."' When Ping assured him he was not a doctor, Hutchins replied, "Everyone is a doctor as far as I am concerned." Hutchins's moniker stuck, and for the rest of his life Ping was often called Doctor Ferry; he always laughed but appeared to like it. 14 Hoffman compounded the Foundation's geographical split by spending much of his time on other matters, many of them overtly political. While his attention was diverted, "lecturing and glad-handing" as Ping said, the Foundation moved to dispense the huge amounts of money it was forced to disgorge. The trustees split the Foundation into separate parts dealing with the social sciences, advancement of education, adult education, international programs, fine arts, and peace, and each worked out plans to give away a portion of the $6o million the Foundation dispensed in its first two years. Board politics in those years were fierce. Don David, Dean of the Harvard Business School, wanted a huge chunk of money for Harvard and was so insistent that trustee John Cowles suggested the Foundation "buy out" David for $8.5 million. Hutchins was always looking for funds for his pet project, the Great Books program. As Ping remembered, there was a "funny constellation of forces" inside the Foundation; each independent fund director had "his own little fiefdom." 15 Henry Ford II said to Ping, "Jesus! you like this stuff, don't you?"l6

The Foundation's operational procedures were also unorthodox. After bureaucrats vetted proposals and decided what to fund, Hoffman thought it necessary to pass their decisions through Henry. Hoffman sent Ping with "huge bundles of staff recommendations" to show to Henry. Ping complained that was Hoffman's job, especially since Ping worked for ENCO and not the Foundation, but he went anyway. He met Henry in a private dining room at the Detroit Club, where Ping handed him the reports. Henry asked, "What the hell is this?" When Ping said he had to read them, the auto maker retorted, "Are you crazy? ... Just tell me what's in them." He gave Ping three hours to explain forty-five million dollars in awards. Henry had a couple of drinks before lunch, and after an hour and a half Ping realized "he was pretty drunk." 17 While he had Henry's attention, Ping suggested he should resign from the Ford Foundation

The Awakening board, break the Foundation down into smaller entities, and take the Ford name off it. Ping suggested something patriotic, such as E Plurbis Unum. Henry loved the notion, exclaiming, "Christ! ifl could just make automobiles and get rid of alll this crap." When Henry broached Ping's ideas with the Foundation board, it "went into a terrible tailspin." 18 Ping's suggestions, however, took root in a different form. The connection between the Ford name and the Foundation quickly became a problem for the company. While most of the Foundation's grants were not controversial, those that touched on race and civil liberties, when many people saw connections between communism and racial accommodation, brought the wrath of the public and Ford's dealers down on Henry. By April1951 it was clear that the Foundation's board was leery of moving into civil liberties and rights without long-term planning. 19 "Hutchins ... has always introduced me as the inventor of the Fund .... It's one of those attributions that isn't on the mark." 20 ENCO worried whether the Foundation could handle such hot topics without causing serious public relations problems for its other client, Ford. Ping broached spinning off Foundation funds into separate entities with Hoffman, who asked him to figure out how it ought to be done. Ping wrote up several memoranda and presented them to the Foundation under the "authority" of Newsom & Company. They were eventually combined into one plan that Ping took to California and presented to Hutchins. Over a period of three days of what Ping remembered were perpetual lunches, he explained his proposal to "try to move the onus of all this unpopularity from Pasadena, from the Ford name, to some other place." Sometime during their discussions Hutchins "began referring to this aborning thing as the Fund for the Republic" (FFR). 21 In October 1951, Foundation trustees authorized the FFR and appropriated a million dollars for it. Later they approved a separate FFR board and promised when it presented "a program that commended itself to the [Ford] Trustees" that the Foundation would weigh "a considerable additional grant to the Fund, perhaps on a lump-sum or long-term basis." 22 FFR Trustee: "Can't we soft-pedal it?"" Hutchins quipped that the FFR was "a wholly disowned subsidiary of the Ford Foundation." Ping's baby was established to deal with Area IIA in the Foundation's charter, namely "activities directed toward the elimination of restrictions on freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression in the United States,

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and the development of policies and procedures best adapted to protect these rights in the face of persistent international tension." The FFR's charge was to ensure "that society must accord all men equal rights and equal opportunity, ... tolerance and respect for the individual, ... freedom of speech, ... press, ... worship, ... association." All the above promised to be controversial, but the trustees agreed that "this should offer no deterrent." 24 The FFR was given a grant of$15 million in 1952 with the clear understanding that that was all the Ford Foundation was going to give it. The FFR dispensed only $1,25o,ooo in its first two years because its board could not find a prominent Republican who was an ardent defender of civil liberties to run it. While it searched, however, it did make its first grant of $25,000 to the American Bar Association to "study the uses and abuses of Congressional investigating committees." The award quickly drew a hostile political reaction. A young New Jersey Republican congressman, Clifford Case, was finally persuaded to take the FFR's presidency after Congress adjourned in August 1953, but he had the senatorial itch. He resigned the job in March 1954 to successfully campaign for theN ew Jersey Republican senatorial nomination. 25 "It would take a strong man to figure out what to do in the first place, and do it." 26

Ping was less than enthralled with Case. The "obvious enemies ofthe Fund," as Ping called them, "the American Legion, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and McCarthy, the Hearst papers, and [Westbrook) Pegler, and Fulton Lewis [Jr.) all these ... were all ranged up there on the horizon, waiting for us to come out." Case's reaction was to commission "a hundred memoranda telling him what to do." To give Case his due, Ping noted he "wanted to be fair," but recalled "it seemed to me the most idiotic stuff in the world." Moreover, "Case had been warned" against Ping, who still worked for ENCO. Although he was not in the FFR's inner circle, he attended many of its meetings, where he argued, "For God's sake let's get something started." 2 ' The FFR's board split over taking immediate action because, Ping believed, "all these pillars of the community set out to prove to the community they were not communists." When Case and the board finally did move, it seemed to Ping to be in the wrong direction. They appropriated a million dollars to study communism's effect in the United States, a project that resulted in fourteen volumes Ping said were "sure to be among the most disregarded books," written by authors who would ensure that "the Communists would be portrayed as bad bastards and therefore vindicate their approach." Another quarter of a million dollars went for a bibliography of American writings about U.S.

so

The Awakening

communism. Leftist critics immediately complained that the projects were "done by people who didn't know their business" and called the study "academically punk." The bibliography was so flawed that the FFR authorized a second edition that "didn't satisfy anybody either."" "Henry went out to run the place in Pasadena. He didn't like the way Hoffman did things." 29

While the FFR was struggling to find its focus, the Ford Foundation was having serious problems that affected the FFR's future. Hoffman bore responsibility for many of them. Ping explained that the chief executive was talented but "had this besetting sin as an administrator; not paying attention." The Foundation's first two years brought many problems that its president "could have handled ... if he had spent a hundred percent of his time at it." Ping was sure he "enjoyed being President of the Ford Foundation a hell of a lot .... He had control of all this dough; pretty heady stuff, you know. "30 Hoffman compounded his absences by taking a long trip in early 1953, during which "he started sounding off about management of the stock inside the Foundation." He made comments about Henry's efforts to take his company public that "enraged Breech," who told Ping to "get hold of that dumb son of a bitch and tell him to take back everything he said yesterday." Hoffman also took heat for spending Ford money outside the country, especially in places such as India. Some Foundation board members attacked Hutchins for blocking funds for their favorite projects, and his stock fell along with Hoffman's. 31 Hutchins also did his part to queer relations between Henry and his foundations. Henry and Ann were featured guests at a big Foundation party in Pasadena. Ann, a devout Catholic, arrived convinced that Hutchins was a communist sympathizer, despite Ping's attempts to persuade her otherwise. Ping warned Hutchins she was touchy and suggested that "it wouldn't do a damn bit of harm if he should go over and shed on her a little of his renowned charm." Ann did her best by observing that it was nice to have an education expert on the Foundation board who would give some attention to her pet interest, Detroit's Catholic schools. Hutchins icily replied, "That is precisely the sort of thing the Foundation should never touch," and he launched into a forty-five second bantering lecture. His irony was lost on Ann, who walked away adding an anti-Catholic bias to Hutchins's shortcomings. When Henry and Ann later came out to run the Foundation while Hoffman was away, Hutchins compounded his original error by lecturing Ann on the necessity for birth control. 32 The gathering storm of right-wing journalists, many of them on the Hearst papers' payrolls, who attacked the Foundation, Hoffman, and especially

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Hutchins for their leftward slants overlay the FFR's internal problems. They even excoriated Hoffman's Marshall Plan, called by Westbrook Pegler, "the fabulous Roosevelt-Truman overseas squanderbund." Ford dealers were afraid that customers would be frightened away, congressmen threatened to investigate the Foundation, and whispers circulated of a boycott against Dearborn products.'' Finally, in late January 1953, the Foundation trustees voted to fire Hoffman, although they allowed him to publicly resign and named him chairman of the FFR's board. The Ford Foundation's headquarters were moved back to New York, and a succession of presidents steered the Foundation into safer waters with awards guaranteed not to antagonize anyone. The Ford Foundation became indistinguishable from other large, establishment philanthropies, such as Rockefeller's and Carnegie's. 34 "I've seen ... the corruption [the Foundation] has brought in universities and to individuals." 35 Ping saw this too, and he believed it a huge waste of philanthropic resources. When the Foundation interviewed him in 1972, he, in characteristic fashion, blasted it. "This place is crotch-bound, constipated, intellectually menacing, and it's a great question ... [whether] it does any good," he began gently. ''I've been in this business a long, long while and God! it turns good men into tame animals." Two minutes later he cleared his throat again: "Jesus! ... I hate to come into this joint. It's intimidating, it's condescending, the manners of the help are awful. ... It's an awkward, unfriendly presence. It screws up the best of people."'6 Ping dated the Foundation's decline from Hoffman's firing and Hutchins's temporary isolation. With the new president in New York, Associate Director Hutchins sat in Pasadena drawing his salary with nothing to do. With his usual ironic humor, he explained, ''I'm the associate who doesn't associate with anybody and the director who doesn't direct anything." 37 The split in the Foundation between the Hutchins-Ping group, which pushed to venture into uncharted philanthropic waters, and Henry's supporters, who wanted to make grants safe for the Ford Motor Company, inevitably drew ENCO into its disputes. Ping knew exactly where he stood: "I was on the side of Hoffman, Hutchins, and those woolly-heads," on the side of the "administration as against the ideas of the majority of the Board." The conflicts also "widened a gulf' between Ping and Henry. "Henry and I were always candid. He'd say, 'I used to like that guy Hutchins, but he's really a shit ass, isn't he?' No, he's the same man," Ping would retort. 38

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"[Earl] told me to clean out my desk." 39

The Foundation's problems caused a serious rift inside ENCO as Earl argued against the FFR, which he thought was "a needless roiling of the waters." The conflict of interest between representing Ford and its Foundation came to a head when Earl advised the Foundation's board while Ping claimed he was Hutchins's "loyal slave." In late 1953 or early 1954, Ping talked this over with his partner, Palmer, who agreed with Ping that he was not "welcome here anymore."'0 In a confidential memo, Ping suggested to Earl that he would like to end his partnership and work with ENCO as a consultant 20 percent of his time. For the other So he proposed several options: to find another job; to work out a "consultative or editorial arrangement" with a publishing house or newspaper; to start a journal, The American Economist, modeled on the London Economist or Manchester Guardian; to do public relations work for a "quasi-public" organization of some sort; to help people like Grenville Clark, "who seem to have the right ideas about peace and decent behavior"; or to "somehow get my nose under the tent of academic life again"; and failing in all that, to read and write, as "all semi-creative men promise themselves they will do sometime." Ping assured Earl that "ENCO owes me nothing at all." He promised that if he did leave, "iit will be with the sincerest feelings of regret and continued friendship on both sides." 41 Ping's favored option as late as May 1954 was to start his own consulting firm, and he told friends he was going to try it. But an intriguing possibility emerged early in 1954 to become the political officer for Booker, McConnell, and Company in Georgetown, British Guyana. Booker's chairman, Jock Campbell, later Lord Campbell ofEskan, was a social progressive who "was appalled by what he saw" on his company's sugar plantations in Guyana. After World War II, Jock "improved housing for sugar workers, introduced pension schemes and sickness benefits, [and] raised salaries vastly." Booker employed more than thirtyeight thousand Guyanese, one in thirteen citizens. After a failed attempt at a parliamentary democracy, Campbell wanted to avoid a communist takeover by bringing "into power a radical leftist Bustamante/Nkrumah type of government'' to end "the dichotomy between Booker and British Guyana," because "the interests of the two are inseparable." Ping considered the opportunity and talked it over with Jo, who was less than enthusiastic. The position was a chance to do on a larger scale what he had done at ENCO, but he turned it down and suggested an acquaintance for the job, who retired seventeen years later with an

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OBE. Ping remained close friends with Jock for another forty years, often visiting the Campbells when in England!' The FFR, however, offered Ping his best option for employment. Case resigned and the FFR's trustees sought a new president. After their leading candidates bowed out, they took a closer look at Hutchins, who collected his salary in Pasadena, made no effort to seek another job, and sent endless memos to New York that suggested the Ford Foundation do something noteworthy and stop trying to be safe and quiet. Hutchins's selection brought a man of impeccable liberal credentials to the FFR, where he more properly belonged; the trustees announced his appointment on May 25, 1954, in the middle of the Army-McCarthy hearings. 43 Ping had already cut his ties with ENCO, and his departure was not as friendly as he had hoped. Newmyer thought by then that Ping believed "it wasn't possible to make basic changes in corporate attitudes, and that most company officials were beyond salvation," a sentiment he undoubtedly conveyed to Earl. At the same time, however, Newmyer thought that Ping's leaving "was a blow to Earl's ego," which contributed to the strain between the two men. "In his own mind," Newmyer continued, "Earl had developed something of a father-son relationship with his younger partner," and while he "never heard Earl speak harshly of Ping," their relationship deteriorated badly. 44 The split was wrenching for Ping, perhaps because of that father-son relationship. He had endured more than his desired share of splits with his own father and feared his departure from Newsom would hurt Hugh again. And Ping was right; he had deliberately forsaken Hugh's cherished corporate world and, worse, became the bete noire of Hugh's right-wing friends. Ping admitted that leaving Newsom "was some strain for me." He also "felt some duty to Henry too, I liked the people I worked with." Years later Ping was still hurt that Earl had not given him the "nice watch from Tiffany" he always gave partners when they left. 45 When they again met, "Earl was not cordial," but when he died a few years later, Ping attended his memorial service. Ping also visited ENCO several times to see if he could retrieve his papers. He discovered that Newsom & Company had given them to the University of Wisconsin, where they were under a time lock. He was not eager to pursue the past, however, for Hutchins, the FFR, and the nation's travails all beckoned him like Sirens' calls. 46

7

FUMIGATING THE REPUBLIC

By the mid-1950s, many of Ping's long-held proclivities came to the fore. He was not one to retreat to an ivory tower; he thought best on his feet and in front of others. He became less patient with temporizing, committee meetings, and careful planning. His preferred strategy became verbal and written cannon blasts, the louder the better, often enhanced by hyperbole and sarcasm, to make his truths noticeable and to provoke reaction, even if it was in opposition. When he joined the Fund, he had had an ample arena, as anticommunism, the Korean War, and the supreme court's 1954 desegregation decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka roiled the country's mood. He became a national "player," legitimized by Ford money, Hutchins's reputation, and the host of scholars that revolved around the FFR. For his first two years with Hutchins, Ping was in his element, at the center of a firestorm fed by congressmen and senators, columnists, radio personalities, and intellectuals. Sporting his "Feel Free" button, he held forth on the nation's ailments and shortcomings in the ineffable Ping manner. In the ultimate analysis, however, he and Hutchins ruffled too many feathers and had their wings clipped in 1956, an operation that toned down the Fund and led to its transformation and migration to theW est Coast. "I was terribly affected by Hutchins." 1 Ping's new life began when Hutchins asked him to "come in as executive [vice president of FFR)." Hutchins proposed to stay in California and have Ping "run the thing in New York," the same arrangement that had proved so unwieldy for the Ford Foundation. Ping would have to take a salary cut; the best Hutchins could offer was thirty-five thousand dollars the first year and a five-thousand-dollar raise for the next two. Ping, however, never made more than forty thousand dollars, because of the FFR' s financial difficulties. 2 The geographic bifurcation worked better for FFR than it had for the Foundation because, Ping recalled, "Hutchins ... was an easy man to work with in some respects." Still, he almost ended their cozy relationship at the very first when he ordered Ping to fire Case's left-over employees who were not inter-

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ested in a more active FFR role. Ping ratcheted their severance demands down because, as he later claimed, "I was not as sweet-tempered and judicious in those days as I am now." One of them approached Hutchins, who, without consulting Ping, agreed to higher compensation packages. Ping was livid, but Hutchins calmly pointed out, "It's just money." Such problems occasionally arose because Hutchins hated to fire anyone and had discretionary funds at his disposal.' "There was hell raised." 4 The national mood was sour, McCarthy and his fellow hate-mongers were in full cry, conservatives were sniffing out those they considered soft on communism, and the Korean War had ended in an ugly and indecisive manner, leaving many columnists to look for scapegoats to blame for America's perceived weakness. They had to look no further than the FFR, harping on constitutional guarantees and whose major-domo in New York City took delight in tweaking his political enemies. Ping had waded into what Hutchins called the "roil" and loved it. Hutchins wanted the FFR to mobilize public opinion against McCarthyism. He and Ping saw parallels between the United States in the 1950s and Nazi Germany twenty years earlier, when opposition to Adolf Hitler was quickly muzzled. Hutchins told Ping, "Let's get in there and raise hell and show people how absurd all these attitudes are, how absurd all these charges are." He wanted to get the FFR "on the front pages" to save Americans from repeating the Germans' mistakes. The FFR was necessary, Ping decided, to disclose the truth, to stir up "the people in a decent republic [to] rise and throw out the bastards and get good people in."' "Research is used as a substitute for action." 6 Ping and Hutchins wanted action, and even the former university president looked askance at the usual academic fact-finding exercises. Before they hadarrived, the Fund had allocated the bulk of its awards to these endeavors: roughly a half a million dollars on a Gallup poll to measure public attitudes toward minorities; a volume, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties by Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer; a microfilm of transcripts of important trials that involved communists; a two-volume compendium "of abstracts of decisions, laws, ordinances, hearings, reports and other public documents" bearing on the trials; and three hundred thousand dollars for a study by Clinton Rossiter at Cornell of communist influence in major segments of U.S. society.'

Fumigating the Republic None of this excited the new regime. Its leaders wanted to educate the public to protect its own civil liberties. As Ping later explained, they planned to "show up the McCarthyites," but "we did not tell anyone how we planned to get rid of the money." That was just as well, for their "hope was to use television'' to bring their side of the story to the public's attention. They hired cartoonist AI Capp to create a show using a comic-strip character Ping called Toejam to make fun ofFFR's detractors, including Fulton Lewis, Jr., and congressmen "who were flying the banner of righteousness." They spent thirty-five thousand dollars on the project, but their board was "disgusted" by the film and killed it. Ping admitted that "it was bad judgment"; even worse, he recalled that ''within a year Capp became a free enterprise devotee. "8 "We were in difficulty with the Board almost from the outset."9 Ironically, it was the Fund's less grandiose activities that raised pundits' blood pressure and led to conflict between Hutchins and Ping and their board. Ping,, for example, hired Amos Landman for six weeks to help out with public relations. Landman had taken the Fifth Amendment when called before the Senate Internal Security Committee and asked about his prior membership in the Communist Party. Ping thought the hire was safe, at least within the Fund, because earlier the FFR had bought thirty thousand copies of Erwin Griswold's book The Fifth Amendment Today, which supported the use of the nonincrimination plea. Griswold, dean of the Harvard Law School, sat on the FFR' s board and had hated Hutchins since they had been Oberlin classmates. He attacked Ping for the hire to embarrass the FFR' s president. Ping later noted that he could not tell his board, "You dumb bastards you voted for it," meaning a subsidy for the book that argued that the Fifth "didn't indicate guilt"; instead, he had to "remind them sort of gently." Hutchins was on his side, however, and Ping dug in. "I couldn't let him go," he explained later, even though he would have "under normal circumstances." Instead, Ping kept him for six or eight months until he landed another job. 10 Ping and Hutchins also came under fire after Rossiter hired Earl Browder, head of the Communist Party USA, who was under a federal perjury indictment, as a consultant on his research into communist infiltration of American institutions. No matter that Browder brought insights and records otherwise unavailable to the project or that Browder was in no position to influence FFR policy. His hiring was a public relations disaster and added ammunition to the Fund's legions of attackers. 11 The FFR's board was not always able to stand above the fray. Ping had "invented an award for one who had done the most for civil rights in the country,"

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and the board awarded a five-thousand-dollar stipend to Quakers who had refused to fire their librarian, Mary Knowles, who had once taken the Fifth. Knowles ran the William Jeanes Memorial Library in suburban Philadelphia, and her employers knew that she had previously worked for a Boston school on the attorney general's suspect list and had taken the Fifth before the Senate Internal Security Committee. Moreover, as a practicing Quaker she had refused to sign the state's loyalty oath as a matter of conscience. FFR's board voted her the award unanimously, but Ping remembered that "you'd have thought that Hutchins and I had just contrived this project to embarrass them. They backed and filled and got themselves in totally contradictory positions." 12 He "just raised absolute hell." 13

These three causes celebres set the FFR's opponents howling, and Hutchins and Ferry were easy targets. Fulton Lewis, Jr., one of their loudest detractors, was in full cry against the FFR by the summer of 1955. On August 24, he ventured into Ping's precincts at 6o East 42nd Street for an interview; Ping sat behind his desk with both feet up, as Lewis reported, "staring me in the face at about 20 inches." Ping was in no humor to conciliate the radio commentator. Lewis complained that "on several occasions" he "impugned the integrity of my reporting and, in fact, the honesty of my intentions." 14 Suddenly, no Fund activity was too small to escape Lewis's notice. He scored the FFR for its "so-called study" at Stanford University of several former communists' testimony; he criticized the Fund for waiting two and a half years to release its annual report, despite Ping's assertion that it was issued exactly one year after Hutchins took over as president; he flayed its banned books program, which distributed a whole 275 tomes to various librarians; and he censured its circulation of a special issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which, according to Lewis, was "a harangue against the loyalty-security program," insinuating that "all of this stuff is the straight political party line of the CIO Political Action Committee for which Mr. W. H. Ferry" worked. 15 Lewis charged that Herbert Philbrick's popular book I Led Three Lives exposed Knowles as a member of"the underground cell" of the Communist Party with Philbrick in Malden, Massachusetts. A few weeks later Lewis tarred theN obel Prize-winning American Friends Service Committee with the same brush after the FFR awarded it a grant of$150,000 "to strengthen the right to freedom of conscience." Lewis noted that FFR employee Hallock Hoffman, Paul Hoffman's son, and his wife, were major figures in the American Friends Service Committee. While Lewis professed respect for Quaker beliefs, he whispered, "Sometimes these organizations get imposed upon without their knowledge." 16

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Landman came in for his share of radio grief as well. As a man who "had pleaded the fifth amendment on about 20 occasions," his employment was proof positive to Lewis that Ping was "arrogant and defiant." Earl Browder was a tougher albatross to hang around Ping's neck, however, because Rossiter had hired him. Ever the master at innuendo, Lewis asserted that Browder was "now working for the Hutchins-Ferry Fund for the Republic." Lewis did opine, however, that Browder might not be objective, and the $450,000 study of American communism might therefore be biased. 17 "All this hullaballoo.""

Many newspapers also worked over Ping and the FFR. The New York Daily News noted that the FFR had spent $2,50o,ooo by the summer of 1955 to defend civil liberties, "particularly the liberties of Reds, Pinks, and the kind of bums who last week defied the House Un-American Activities Committee." The New York World-Telegram and Sun hewed to the American Legion's line and printed the diatribes of its commander, Seaborn P. Collins, against the Fund. Collins, who was as blunt as Ping, charged that the "Ford Foundation is threatening to cripple the nation's security." Ping's response to Collins was, "Baloney." Collins was especially upset over the Fund's fifty-thousand-dollar award to the American Heritage Council for a two-year program on the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in cooperation with the Legion's Illinois Department. Most of the FFR committees studying communism were composed, Collins sniffed, of college professors. 19 Some newspapers, however, were more dispassionate. The Chicago SunTimes, for example, agreed with the FFR's findings that the government's federalloyalty-security program "has developed serious shortcomings" and published several personal stories of people who had been grievously wronged. Even the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune could occasionally find something complimentary to say about the FFR. It admitted "that the loyalty process is sadly abused" even while attacking the Fund for trying to "make the whole loyalty program look ridiculous."'" Ping was really surprised, however, by the opposition "from the ranks of people you'd think would be [our] natural supporters." He and the Fund had waded into the factional discord on the political left, especially among a group of intellectuals on the anti-communist left, many of whom had been Party members or had flirted with its dogmas and were often "vigorous critics" of capitalism. Led by Sidney Hook, a former Marxist in the Philosophy Department at New York University, they included such luminaries as Norman Thomas, frequent Socialist Party presidential candidate; Daniel Bell, the able

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sociologist; and Max Ascoli, an Italian-born writer on the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research, men Ping lumped together as the "New Leader crowd." They argued that Party members should not be afforded Constitutional protections or be hired for government and academic positions. They united under the aegis of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which frequently assumed the McCarthyites' intellectual posture and techniques, although the two groups never worked together. 21 "I am having a lot of fun.""

Ping reveled in these disputes; he asked a former client in April1955, how "did I manage to remain a sobersided, judicious, comparsing public relations man for so long?" Ping tllought that "it speaks well for Earl's patience," this from a man who no longer talked to Earl. In the midst of the Fund's pummeling, Ping wrote another friend, "We go our serene way doing what we think ought to be done and relying on tlle judgment of history, not on the judgment of men like ... that superb jackass Seaborn Collins." So much for sobersidedness.23 To some others, however, he was too judicious. Dwight MacDonald, who was working on a book on tlle FFR and whom Ping much later characterized as "friendly but clearly unsympathetic with what Hutchins and I are doing," told Ping, "You and Hutchins are exactly the wrong people to be running the Fund." When Ping asked, "Why?" MacDonald stunned him with, "Because you've never been members of the Party." Ping repeated this story dozens of times in a self-deprecatory manner, to indicate that MacDonald sensed just how naive he and Hutchins were. Party membership, however, would have made the Fund even more vulnerable to the cold warriors. 24 In November 1956 the Treasury Department, under intense pressure from Fund opponents, announced that it was "actively reviewing" the FFR's tax exemption. Not to be outdone, Congressman Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, proclaimed a new investigation of FFR, telling the press, "We're not going into the Fund for the Republic. We're going into Dr. Hutchins." 25 "We had no support."'6

The Fund's trustees were upset by their executives' public actions and comments; some thought they were needlessly provocative. They were led by Griswold, who, on November 17,1955, abstained from voting for Hutchins's reelection as president and voted against Ping's continuance as vice president.

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Both were re-elected. On December 6, however, Fulton Lewis, Jr., launched a blast that struck home. He read a letter from Henry Ford II in which the automaker appeared to disavow his connection with the FFR. He questioned "the manner in which the Fund has attempted to achieve its stated objectives" and revealed that some of its actions, "I feel, have been dubious in character and inevitably have led to charges of poor judgment." Henry was trying to put distance between himself, his company, the Ford Foundation, and the Fund. 27 Griswold wrote Hoffman and his fellow trustees on December 19 to suggest it was time for Hutchins to step aside. Griswold charged that Hutchins's "approach to the problems of civil liberties is too absolute." Worse, he did not "see the problem as one of adjusting the competing claims of liberty and freedom on the one hand with those of security on the other." Furthermore, he continued, the president "is too often not what I would regard as educational"; he "tends to be combative, belligerent, provocative, [and] dramatic," which resulted in "poor human relations."" Hutchins countered at year's end with a proposal to restructure the FFR. At an all-day board meeting on January 6, 1956, the trustees adopted a resolution that forbade the Fund from hiring or awarding grants to Communist Party members, those who had taken the Fifth Amendment, and former Party members. Hutchins also reduced the heat on himself by diminishing Ping's authority. His responsibilities were split among three men; he retained charge of programs and planning, but relinquished control of the New York office and public relations duties. 29 The man Hutchins tapped for the touchy job of keeping Ping away from the press was Frank Kelly, a vice president of Stephen Fitzgerald & Company, a New York public relations agency. A Harvard man, Kelly had experience on newspapers and Capitol Hill, and had grappled with censorship problems. But he had never tackled anything quite like Ping; in his history of Hutchins and the Fund he admitted that he was concerned about Ping because "I knew that he was intelligent, hard-working, impatient with people who disagreed with him, and more experienced in public relations than I was." Kelly also understood that Ping "was close to Hutchins," and "some members of the board ... wanted a public information officer who could keep Hutchins and Ferry from engaging in imprudent actions." Hutchins told Kelly that Ping "realized the necessity for a reorganization."'0 Hutchins had engaged in a bit of hyperbole. Ping understood the political necessity behind the reorganization but took his removal from public relations personally, although he liked Kelly; "I was glad to see him come in," he later reminisced. But Ping thought that the "mess" at the Fund was "inevitable" because it "tried to do something about McCarthyism." Kelly's notion of good

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public relations was the absence of controversy, and he worked hard, Ping related, "disclaiming what we said" and telling press folks that "Mr. Ferry feels free, get along with him more or less. He is amiable." Later, Ping showed less enthusiasm for Kelly. Ping did not "really mind appearing to be the town rascal," but he said, "I hate to be presented as merely a mischief maker." He resented the depiction of Kelly as "the man who brings his magical wand in and waves it around and great PR effects are thereby achieved." 31 By 1956, McCarthyism was on the wane; McCarthy died in May the following year, although loyalty disputes were far from over. The Supreme Court was three full years into its desegregation order, and racial tensions and the attendant white supremacists' backlash were vying for space with national security issues on every newspaper's front page. Overall, however, national tensions were easing just as Hutchins and Ping were forced to become less confrontational and more mainstream. "We had raised hell [but] there was still blacklisting."32 The FFR still had one bombshell left in its arsenal, and it threatened to explode just when Hutchins and Ping were most vulnerable. The Fund had awarded John Cogley a grant of two hundred thousand dollars to study Hollywood blacklisting, and he submitted his report when the Fund's trustees were asserting their authority. Cogley was Ping's old friend who had been active in Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement and later editor of Commonweal. When he first met Cogley he thought, "He should have been a priest," and forty years later whenever he thought of "Father" Cogley he remembered "how many toes could be seen through his holey socks. "33 Cogley's report promised to tear holes in everyone's hose. Ping asked Newsom & Company to look at it and make recommendations. Newsom's advice was that the Fund should not publish it because it would "revive widespread public controversy and confusion about a complex problem to which no wise solution has yet been found." That was exactly why Ping thought it should be published: facts, when aired, would call forth solutions. Hundreds of writers, playwrights, actors, and other Hollywood notables had had their careers destroyed by nameless witnesses who charged that they were Red or Pink; Ping thought the Fund had the assets and talents to help them regain their former reputations. The board reluctantly authorized that ten thousand copies be printed. Public response was not as angry as it might have been earlier, but Collins weighed in, called Cogley's revelations "ridiculous," and suggested that Hutchins "seems impervious to any understanding of the Communist menace."34

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"The question is what do you do with all of these [McCarthyite] reverberations which were still loud in the land?" 35

The Fund reached high tide early in 1956, and thereafter it became less daring and provocative. By 1957, Ping was having less fun. Hutchins broke the Fund up into six segments, slowed down new grants, and drew back unexpended funds from old awards to harbor dwindling financial resources. He instituted a Basic Issues Program, something that Ping claimed they had "monkeyed around with" for several years; it brought together notable intellectuals to discuss issues. He held meetings in Princeton and London, but the basic issues discussions did not work well, the invitees were busy men, many were old :md ill, and Hutchins had trouble getting them together. When he did, they did not accomplish much; Elmo Roper read the transcripts of one such meeting and wrote Hutchins: "Collectively, the result is almost zero." 36 Ping too was less than thrilled with his mentor's new enthusiasm; he thought the program was "justification for turning our staff from activists to monks." But the discussions did get Ping interested in the corporate world again, and, guided by Adolph A. Berle, a former member of Franklin Roosevelt's kitchen cabinet and coauthor of The Modern Corporation and Private Property, he spent the next half-dozen years refining his thoughts on his father's world. "I was discouraged." 37

Ping wanted to stir up ideas and action. He liked the limelight, but he also wanted to make progressive social changes with Ford's money. But as the Fund settled into a routine and became more respectable, he reminisced with a certain sadness, "I could see and Hutchins could see-that we had raised hell, there was no question about that-but we couldn't see that we'd had any appreciable effect." He began to doubt his approach to reform, wondering if there were not something about the way people were taught "that we don't understand." He feared that "we'd just been dealing with the symptoms up here and now ought to get to the basic issues. "'8 "So," he concluded, "by '58 I was feeling not beaten down, but willing to try something new." And Hutchins had long known what he wanted. As early as 1952 he had talked to the Ford Foundation trustees and later FFR's board members about creating a place where the world's leading thinkers could come to contemplate and discuss the great problems facing mankind. He sent his trustees a lengthy memo in 1956 that broached his idea for what he called an In-

Fumigating the Republic stitute for the Study of the Theory and Practice of Freedom. It would be like a university except that it would have no students, would confer no degrees, and would not require them of its members. It would organize seminars, conferences, debates, and discussions. His trustees were less than overwhelmed but grudgingly permitted his Basic Issues Program to go forward instead. When that failed, he drifted back to his original notion of a permanent "campus" where such men could convene for lengthier periods. There were important personal considerations as well. Hutchins had moved to New York in 1954 and hated it; he moved to Darien, Connecticut, and despised his commute into the city even more. Moreover, by 1959 the FFR's lease on its offices was up, and it seemed a good time to move to more congenial climes, such as Santa Barbara, where Hutchins found a forty-two-acre estate that overlooked the city available for $25o,ooo. 39 On May 20, 1959, the board voted unanimously for the move. Hutchins argued that the Basic Issues Program ought to be renamed the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Clearly, he did not expect CSDI to be a temporary expedient for spending the FFR's remaining four million dollars. He asked his trustees to form a national organization "to consider refinancing the Fund, in order to extend its life." The board agreed!" Ping remembered that "the academy was a persistent theme" in Hutchins's thinking, "and the Center was a version of it." But Ping thought Hutchins had made a mistake "by not getting rid of virtually all the staff; all of us who were with the Fund for the Republic." Instead, Hutchins "suddenly tried to reform us into eggheads, into experts on trade unions, or mass media, or whatever." Ping told Hutchins that only two or three staff members ought to be retained: Cogley, because of his religious expertise, and Walter Millis, because he had "as complete a grasp as any man in the country ... of relations between the military and the people on one side and the government on the other." Hutchins sarcastically observed, "Most of us [were] ... semi-employable"; he told Ping he needed him because he was an expert on the study of corporations. Ping pleaded that he could name a dozen men who could do a better job. 41 "So we all went out," Ping recounted, "and the Center began, from my point of view, at a low intellectual level; not what Bob had in mind when he had talked about the academy before." Hutchins made a valiant effort to raise intellectual standards, however. In the elevator between the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of the Lincoln Building, he placed his hand on Ping's shoulder and intoned, "As former Chancellor of a great university, I declare you henceforth an intellectual."42

8

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Hutchins's magic worked; Ping went home and announced they were going to move to California in one month. Jo protested that she did not want to go where there was no theater or opera and besides, she was preparing for her niece's wedding. At midnight, after the nuptials, she and Ping caught the "red-eye" to California to house-hunt. Jo found just what she was looking for, a house with a library large enough to hold Ping's six thousand volumes. A French provincial "manor house," it was designed by George Washington Smith, built in 1926, and overlooked a bird sanctuary and the Pacific Ocean. Its formal gardens, laid out by Lockwood de Forest, featured specimen trees and plants. With three master bedroom suites, each with a fireplace, plus two additional bedrooms and servants' quarters, Ping was in no danger of becoming claustrophobic. Moreover, it was only a mile from the Center. Ping recalled that he "walked up to work and watched the birds and counted my blessings on the way back down." Ping remembered that the winter sunsets were "beyond belief [with a] great diffusion of color," and quoted Aldous Huxley, who once remarked that the profusion of colors in the spectacular evening display from Ping's porch was in" dreadfully bad taste. " 1 Ping lived the life of a sybarite in California. Every weekday morning about 9:ooA.M. he left his palatial home and ambled up the hill to the Center, housed in what Milton Mayer, a Hutchins biographer, called "an expensively remodeled (and, of course, spacious) mansion of Greco-Hispanic pretensions" that Hutchins called El Parthenon, located at the edge of wealthy Montecito. The front doors opened into a huge marble lobby, offices ran down both arms of the building, and across the back was the dialogue room overlooking the swimming pool, the city, and the Pacific Ocean.' Jo remarked, "Ping was taken with the intellectual thing at the Center."'

There Ping spent thousands of hours taking part in the conversations that were the very heart of Hutchins's scheme. The world's great minds debated problems that beset mankind and occasionally made suggestions for dealing

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with them. It was a permanent faculty club luncheon, located far from daily distractions and suffused with beauty and ease. The Center was always less than its ideal, however. Mayer explained that Hutchins was unable to lure the caliber of "consultants" he wanted to the Hill, and the staff he imported from the East, which included the initially reluctant Ping, became the resident "Fellows" who carried the dialogue. Experts came to the mountaintop if they had papers they wanted to read, or to escape inclement weather elsewhere. Eventually he attracted some notable scholars on a semipermanent basis, men such as Harvey Wheeler, a political scientist, Rexford Tugwell, the Chicago economist and former member of Roosevelt's kitchen cabinet, philosophers John Wilkinson and William Gorman, economist Stanley Sheinbaum, and sociologist John Seeley. Mayer thought that none of these men measured up to Hutchins's anticipated standards; they were good, but not great! In one of his dreamier moments, Ping jotted a list of famous painters and likened their personalities and styles to the men around the conference table. He compared Hutchins to Mondrian, who Ping claimed was "abstract, composed, sharp, clear, [and] logical," and to Gainsborough, who, he said, was "noble, austere, elegant, Anglo-Saxon, [and] sophisticated." Ping did not spare himself; he thought he was of Van Gogh's stripe, "forceful, prolific, visceral, colorful, expressive, [and] imaginative." He likened Wheeler to Jackson Pollock, "splashy, spotty, [and] pointless." Kelly, he thought, was like Frans Hals, but was uncertain why. Gorman was Picasso, "involuted, diverse, imaginative, playful, humane, [and] uninhibited." For Harry Ashmore, Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern journalist, he reserved his harshest assessment, comparing him to Hogarth's "Rake's Progress."' Others around the baize-covered table in the conference room, Ping thought, were of a higher caliber, people such as Scott Buchanan, a particular favorite of Jo's, whom Ping likened to Dali, "surrealistic, grandiose, bizarre, [and] determined"; the former Rhodes Scholar and historian of modern Europe at Princeton, Stringfellow Barr; the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling; Episcopal bishop James Pike; and Elizabeth Mann Borgese, daughter ofThomas Mann. Of undeniable ability, they were exceptionally busy and were infrequently found at the table when the n:oo A.M. bell for discourse rang.6 The regulars-Ping; Kelly; Ashmore; Hallock Hoffman; John Cogley; DonaldMcDonald, former dean of Marquette University's journalism school; John L. Perry, once a Florida newspaper reporter; and Edward Reed, who had been editor of Theater Arts magazine and oversaw the Center's publications, staff, visitors, potential donors, and sometimes virtually anyone who wandered in the door-along with Hutchins, composed the regular dialogue group. Mayer

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recalled they were articulate and often lively, but he complained that their conversationallevels did not soar, nor were they profound. Dialogue was by its very nature inconclusive; it prompted thinking, connections, and ideas, not consensus and planning. Buchanan put it wonderfully when he observed that "the questions that can be answered are not worth asking."' Hutchins did little to raise the level of discourse. He sat at the head of the table and fiddled with his pipes, smoked an occasional cigarette, and kept a list of participants who wanted to speak and called on them in order. He infrequently asked a question and rarely pursued it after he did. Mayer thought that he was bored and quoted him as once saying, "We have had two hundred visiting speakers this past year, and I don't want to have to listen to any of them again." Later in life, Ping was less enthusiastic about the result of such conversations, but he remained committed to the process; in the 1980s he organized Expro, a group to investigate the conditions necessary for world peace, along the lines of the Center. He often sat listening in the conference room, alternately gazing out at the vista and drawing amazingly intricate doodles on his note pad. 8 The Center's location and pace lulled many of the fellows into a lifestyle antithetica1 to thought and work. Most, Mayer recounted, wandered in by 9:30 A.M., caught up on their mail, attended the discussions at n:oo A.M., enjoyed a leisurely lunch on the terrace outside the great room, complete with several glasses of wine, and then repaired to their offices for a short siesta before completing their chores. At 4:00P.M. they trickled out, headed to their homes scattered all over town, a dispersal that negated the sense of community Hutchins so cherished! The Center's very nature prompted jealousies, cliques, spats, and divisions. After years of arguing issues they began to grate on one another's nerves. Most were forceful personalities with ingrained ideas, points of view, and biases, apparent to all. On any given topic, Ping could predict where most of his colleagues stood, and they had even less trouble divining his positions. The verbal jousting around the table often concealed private layers of conflict. 10 Jo thought Hutchins liked Ping because "Ping was a go-getter and Hutchins liked to have his admirers around him." 11 None of these conflicts were evident, however, when Ping moved to California in 1959; his proverbial luck had landed him the perfect job. He was a leading participant in analyzing and solving the world's problems, sat at the right hand of a man Jo said he "loved," and relished the resources, legitimacy, and freedom he had to attend to his own public concerns and interests. The Center was a

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place with intellectual pretensions to resolve the principal conflicts of the times; it was an ivory tower with sliding glass doors, academe in action. 12 Years later Ping admitted, I "wanted to do something about, [and] to think about," such things as "economic order, communication systems in the country, ... [and] the war." He was interested in the Center for the changes it could bring. It was a very personal place, and Ping "felt free to do my own thing on my own topics." He never felt constrained to limit his crusades to issues under discussion around the conference table, and he never claimed that he spoke for the Center. His position as vice president of both the Fund for the Republic and CSDI gave him the platform from which to espouse his ideas and have them taken seriously. Hutchins was the Center's linchpin, and as long as Ping enjoyed his support he was free to pursue his private interests. And Hutchins allowed him a free hand. Ping traveled the country, especially to college campuses, speaking on his pet themes, garnered a great deal of press comment, riled conservative and some liberal columnists, and Hutchins stood quietly behind him. Hutchins liked the "roil," and Ping was just the man to stir one up. 13 Ping matured intellectually at the Center. Since college he had evinced passionate interest in numerous issues, read widely, and frequently written about them. Chief among them was the corporation's role in American society, a topic that excited him on two levels: it went to the heart of what he thought was unfair in the social and political order, and it helped him to understand his own strained relationship with his father. Ping was also avid about war and peace issues, his interest fired by the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, and the policy of mutually assured destruction. His concern about education dated from his high school years when he was a bright minority of one at his Jesuit school and his Dartmouth experiences, which became proportionally more important to him as he aged, much to the dismay of successive Dartmouth presidents. The more he fretted about the baleful effects of technology on democracy, the economy, and the nation's psychology, the more he criticized educators for training youths for narrow technical fields and worried about the future of the liberal arts. As civil rights violence engulfed the country, Ping championed the nation's underdogs, racial minorities, poor, disfranchised, people he wanted to bring into the mainstream to counter the nonsensical and suicidal economic and military policies that threatened all with extermination. Finally, Ping hoped that the Center would move the public to see that democracy, real democracy, practiced at the local level and drifting up toW ashington, would produce a more equitable society in which tolerance, fairness, and appreciation for beauty and the arts would substitute for short-sighted policies that squandered the nation's wealth on mili-

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tary weapons, kept millions in second-class legal status, and required governmental agencies to snoop into private lives in the name of national security and ideological conformity. These issues swelled the "sack of concerns" Ping lugged to the Center. His generous dollops of free time enabled him to acquaint himself with new perspectives and test them on colleagues around the conference table. His outlook widened, took on international tints, became more theoretical and eclectic, and evinced varying philosophical bents. Ideas were never his ends; they were weapons he used on the battlefronts for justice, peace, and fairness. The Center armed Ping with the most modern intellectual armaments and served as his springboard into the national arena. In the Center's hothouse intellectual atmosphere, Ping discerned connections among his varied interests and tentatively began to draw patterns of cause and effect that suggested specific reform proposals. Hutchins ordered him to "write it down," and Ping, for whom writing was as natural as roiling, did not have to be prodded. During the 1960s, his most prolific decade, he wrote a series of provocative articles and speeches that drew him and the Center to national attention. 14 The present economic arrangements are not part of a divinely ordained scheme. 15

Hutchins anointed Ping the Center's resident corporate expert, despite his protestations that others, such as Adolph Berle, were far more knowledgeable. During his first couple of years on the Hill, Ping concentrated on the inner workings of corporations and their relationship with the body politic. He publisht:d three papers in as many years that outlined his thoughts on the world that shaped his father and, indirectly, himself. 16 Ping started from Berle and his coauthor, Gardiner Means, who emphasized a national consensus, "the conscience of society," that spoke through an informed elite within and outside of government, which shaped national economic policy dominated by large business interests. Ping understood this in the context of Detroit auto makers but was convinced that this traditional means of maintaining economic and political balance was dangerously outmoded. Instead, he believed that while corporations are "an indispensable means for helping society to achieve its ends, ... [they are] still a means and not an end." He worried that "private business tends more and more to be public business," and :thus "the corporation has deep effects on liberty and justice in the lives of those it touches." Ping researched democracy's ambivalence about corporate power and its early attempts in the nineteenth century to limit such authority.

A Full Sack of Concerns Over a century and a half, however, businesses had become ever more powerful-his father's influence in Detroit was a testament to that-and had become "in effect ... the fourth branch of government." Agreeing with Berle's and Mean's assertion that big business had rendered Adam Smith's invisible hand truly invisible, Ping concluded that corporations had responsibilities that transcended making a profit. They had community and public welfare interests, a stake in educational standards, and their employees' needs to worry about. 17 Large corporations were not democratic. Ping knew firsthand that they were private governments with almost unlimited internal sovereignty over their minions. Minorities, those of differing religious beliefs, and people who might engage in unpopular political causes had no protection within the corporations. Taking a page from William H. Whyte's popular book The Organization Man, Ping agreed that companies sought what Aldous Huxley called "dynamic conformity"-a "delicious phrase," Ping noted-from employees and their families. Hugh's constant pressure on him to conform to a more traditional corporate lifestyle had rankled Ping for decades. He suspected that company managers endangered all "the old American virtues and ideas" taught by good liberal arts schools: to think, reason, and act responsibly upon conclusions. The corporation had grown so fast, he observed, that the United States needed to completely rethink the relationships between the body politic and the corporateworld.18 Ping believed that corporate forces had become too powerful and too important for some dimly perceived and widely scattered "elite" to control. A child of the Depression, he still had faith in a caring government and did not necessarily fear and mistrust those in political power. Echoing strains of Teddy Roosevelt's "New Nationalism," he went further than Berle and Means and declared that "we have come to the point where the economy can be purposefully ordered to serve the common good." 19 As always, Ping managed to put some zip into his corporate analysis. He averred, for example, that "an outstanding and novel characteristic of American life today is generalized irresponsibility," in which Americans left decisions to "experts" and retired to their "home workshops or television sets." All they demanded in return was the status quo, because they feared Russia, which, he proclaimed, had become a "surrogate for national purpose." The upshot was that "an epidemic of alienation spreads as people feel their own destinies slipping out of their control." The self-regulating economy, which he described as "the creed of the affluent, the satisfied," was a form of fatalism that led to Americans' pervasive sense of guilt over their well-being in a world of want.'" Unlike most critics, Ping had a basket full of panaceas for his crate of problems. Starting from the premise that political rather than private decisions

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ought to shape a democratic economy, he pointed out that the Constitution gave the people the power to define and shape "policies and institutions that touch the entire community." To put federal intervention into a comforting context, he reminded his audience that the government already controlled the nation's banking system and promised it would likewise ensure corporate accountability. He wanted to go beyond Roosevelt's Progressive ideal ofbringing the loutish corporations to bay through regulation, however; drawing upon Woodrow Wilson's ideas, he wanted true "rationalization" of the corporate world, a new structural organization to make it responsive to the public will. 21 Constitutionalizing the Economy."

He had several novel ideas on how to achieve this venerable goal and began with the most shocking. To domesticate corporations, he suggested, Congress should create, through Constitutional amendment, a fourth branch of government to deal only with economic questions. Doubting he would find a ready constituency for that notion, he followed with a proposal to issue federal charters to corporations to endow firms with legitimate powers that they already exercised "with doubt and discomfort." Such charters, he thought, would give companies "more economic responsibility" but fewer "ungainly social burdens." These changes, he was sure, would free corporate leaders to think on a national scale, where they would see that "the resources of the nation were not ine)(haustible, and the general welfare includes that of future generations." 23 If that option did not suit, Ping had a couple more. He suggested "a more modest vision" in which the government would extend the Council of Economic Advisers' authority to allow it to plan for corporations. An even less dramatic solution, Ping argued, was to use Cold War institutions as a model for corporate rationalization. Organizations such as the National Security Council or the Operations Coordinating Board, in cooperation with a strengthened Council of Economic Advisors and a new Central Statistics Bureau, "could serve as the center of a great range of planning efforts stretched across the nation at every level and operating both publicly and privately. "24 Centralization of political power over economic planning was well within mainstream American thought and custom. Ping understood that corporations, like governments, were perpetual entities that dominated the lives of millions of citizens, possessed the power to tax and make political decisions, and were supposed to be devoted "to the welfare of constituents and that of the society [they] serve." If that were so, he believed, then companies were "in essence ... unowned" and should be brought under the aegis of the body politic. 25 Piing conscientiously sent copies of his musings to his father, who must have

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been profoundly puzzled by his son's ideas and pronouncements. Ping's analysis of corporations was a direct attack on everything he stood for: unthinking corporate loyalty, conformity, profits, a low public profile, and enjoyment of corporate perks. Like Packard, though, Ping was a master at attracting public notice, sending his comments, papers, and speeches, often with only minor revisions, to newspapers and magazines. 26 Corporations in the Fair Society. 27

His writings turned up in strange places. Barely a year after his initial1960 demand for public control of corporations, he wrote a foreword for a collection of symposium papers on the corporation published in the University ofDetroit Law Journal entitled "Corporations in the Fair Society." Much of it was reiteration of his earlier thoughts, but he exercised his penchant for anthropomorphism to a greater degree. He asserted that corporations had personalities, were legal persons, and exuded differing characters, all of which made them reformable. He introduced the law journal's readership to the idea that corporations were the "principal curiosity" of modern industrial society, because in them "dwell the rites and history of monasteries, guilds, universities, and privateering armadas." The corporation was also as "soulless and heartless as any fictive legality must be," yet, he claimed, it "boasts of conscience and humanity." It was "educator, philanthropist, politician, philosopher, social mechanic" yet was uncomfortable with all its personae. It never knew who it was, nor did it "understand its duties or its role in society. "28 Government and corporations, Ping argued, could never figure out "which is the host and which is parasite." A nation without a sound economic theory encompassing huge companies with identity crises, he cautioned, was a prescription for a drastic reconstruction of all economic theory and practice. Most important, he ruminated, the corporation had "no sufficient vision of itself to warrant, without revolutionary changes in method and outlook, a place in the Fair Society."29 The more deeply Ping delved into corporate matters the more he began to discern their connection with his other interests. His investigation into the place of the corporation in a fair society led him to the nation's need for an allencompassing economic theory and the question of what constituted a fair society, both of which pointed to the importance of education. Early in 1962 he delivered a paper at a Princeton University conference on "The Individual in a Corporate Society" that was subsequently published in the Princeton Magazine as "Irresponsibilities in Metrocorporate America." Ping defined "metrocorporate" as "an instrumentality of many interests with a multiplicity of purposes,

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becoming as it were a society in microcosm, a lesser society circumscribed by a greater, and no longer an organizational means of achieving the single goal of profitable return to its original owners." Corporations, he warned his audience, "had stumbled into leadership of American society," yet were adrift and insecure. Blame for the lack of"any theory adequate to explain today's economic universe" rested squarely upon his hosts, the universities, "for if they would devote a little less time to serving the business community and the Cold War and a trifle more" to explaining the complex modern economy, they would do mankind a much greater service. Ping saw few signs that universities understood the radical economic changes "from the allocation of scarce resources to the allocation of surplus capacity and surplus resources." Theirs, he told them, was the "grossest form of irresponsibility" in a world where "we continue to build Himalayas of surplus food while sending millions of our own citizens to bed hungry."'" Political problems, Ping said, sent corporate managers straight "to the storm cellars, whence they send forth bulletins announcing that it is not business's business to take part in distasteful political discussions." He saw hopeful portents, however, in business contributions to political campaigns, which forced them into the political arena. But he saw dangers too, particularly companies' "inveterate conception of government as machinery to be manipulated to the ends of the corporation"-presumably when it was not cowering in the cellar. 31 Corporate separation from the state, Ping explained, harbored fatal consequences. Increasing automation put people out of work, portending huge social and political problems, while within companies automation led to "more centraliz(:d decisionmaking." Corporate isolation also had disastrous results overseas; Ping agreed with Nobelist Gunnar Myrdal's assertion that global American capitalism "thus far has almost uniformly had the result of making the rich richer and the poor poorer." Political unrest in poorer nations was, Ping asserted, "a spectacular record of political irresponsibility on a global scale." 32 Corporations were equally sinful, he thought, for promoting war. He avowed, "I have not seen a single constructive suggestion from Metrocorporation for hastening disarmament, nor indeed any enthusiasm for the general idea." He wondered if they were "content to know that they are working out, surely to the pleasure of the Kremlin's propagandists, the war-dominated economic pattern prescribed for capitalism by Marx." Ping cautioned that "the present mode of corporate government is a potent teacher of political apathy and irresponsibility." 33 He proffered his solutions with tongue firmly in cheek. He declared that companies needed vice presidents "in charge of reading and thinking" or "of heresy," not to ferret it out, but for "the discovering and promotion of." The

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chiefheretic should "remind his colleagues daily about the illusion of corporate perfectionism." Further, he should convince them that the "organization is not a permanently desirable woman to be protected at all costs from critics." Instead, the heretical VP should preach to the firm that it was to further human good under an economic system that was far from perfect. Since companies were "prone to snappy mottoes," Ping proposed that the new vice president adopt his: "Feel Free. " 34 Feedback on Ping's oratorical and published efforts was not long in coming. The next issue of Princeton Magazine featured three replies. One thought he "was a real pleasure to read" while another called his an "ill-conceived paper" that named businessmen "war Mongers." Ping really pulled the threads on the third alum, who opined that the article was" extremely repulsive-trash as far as literature or matters of importance or even of good composition are concerned." He wondered if the editor "and Mr. Ferry think [they] can be big shots in the Bolshevik revolution, when in a few years it takes place here." 35 Criticism of corporations is regarded by most managers as an attack on the American way. 36 The "big shot," in a paper published later in 1962 in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, broadened his attacks on corporations by accusing them of blacklisting movie and TV stars who held political views unpopular with advertisers. He was especially aggrieved that companies targeted their ads at teenagers, creating a split "between those who would sell and those who would train, between the manipulators in one phalanx, and school, church, and mother in the other," a predicament any father of three teenage daughters could understand. 37 The automobile executive's son also attacked companies for using planned obsolescence as a marketing tool, calling it "a triumph of irresponsibility to elevate waste to a principle in a society which, ... is yet far from providing a minimum decent life for all its citizens." In the few instances where corporate managers made mistakes, especially in bringing the wrong new product to market, such as the recent Edsel debacle, he charged, the misjudgment "does not result in firing the managers who made the judgment but in laying off the employees who were not involved in it." He claimed that he was not impugning "moral turpitude in managers" but rather condemning the corporation's "reliance on the belief that what it was trying to do a half-century ago is its manifest duty in Year 17 of the Atom Age.""

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A life devoted to selling shares or underwear or automobiles [is] lacking in savor-in a word, merely dull. 39

After 1962, Ping's interests turned elsewhere, but he never lost his concern for corporate matters. Four years later the American landscape had changed radically: Kennedy was dead, the civil rights movement competed for headlines with Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, youth were restless, and so was Ping. The tectonic political changes transformed him; he became less scholarly and more emotional, more angry. In October 1966, Ping strode to a St. John's College podium in Santa Fe and announced that he had some good news; a recent survey indicated that only 30 percent of undergraduates intended to look for work in business and industry. He was pleased students were turned off on corporate America by the war, civil rights conflicts, poverty, and their growing "disenchantment with greed." They knew something of"life along Mahogany Row" and did not like what they saw: corporate smugness, the "collective confinement," and "the ceaseless competition with machines-with cybernation." "The corporate prospect ... offers no vision," he intoned, and undergraduates were no longer lured by promises of job security; they had learned that "tomorrow's workers must change their occupations many times to keep pace with new techniques. "40 The root of corporate problems, Ping argued, in opposition to what he had believed almost five years earlier, was not a flawed system but company executives. He told the students, "Men, including managers, cannot escape moral reflection" and must be "roused" to do their moral duty. Corporate managers were no more amoral or immoral than other institutional leaders, he reflected, in an age when "the church is trying to determine whether the proprietor is dead or alive" and universities were as adrift as Christians. Company executives, he said, needed to act upon their personal moral scruples and use their vast resources "to help to recover human beings from aimlessness and emptiness-to restore a lost quality oflife. "41 They could start by doing "something about saving our language from ruin." Citing George Steiner, Ping explained that the German language was the chief casualty of two world wars because it was debased by propaganda, so that in the end everything was unbelievable. It was happening apace in the United States too, he warned, the "over-use and mis-use are draining precious words of their meaning." Most of the "degradation oflanguage results from the efforts of sellers of goods and services," he complained, although he admitted that the "glossolalia of the political salesmen" and the mass media was nearly as bad. The "bastardization of words," he explained, really meant the bastardization of

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ideas. The result was "the steep increase of unbelievers, especially among the young," who no longer believed what they saw on TV or heard on their radios, foretelling the "credibility gap" that drove Johnson from office in 1968. "Words are turned inside out when war is described as peace" or "broiling-by-napalm of human beings is justified as an exercise in freedom and justice," he said. Professors who resorted to academic jargon to obfuscate what they were trying to say were not much better, Ping thought. And he was among the first to warn of a new language, "computerese," that he feared might displace English if it continued its drift toward meaninglessness. 42 Corporations, he told them, also did little to advance civil rights. He explained that "along Mahogany Row ... apartheid has been the prevailing style," and not only in the South, where "industrial giants with sluggish moral sensibilities have quivered, caviled, nattered and shirked"; those in the North had done little better, he charged. Corporations had a moral obligation, he averred, to "bring the Negro into fully equal corporate citizenship," and he thought it ought to be easy because "Negroes are in fashion" and integration is "no longer regarded as whimsical do-goodery or worse." 43 By 1966, Ping was anxious about the "general community disintegration" and believed that insensitive corporate managers had "a hand in creating these conditions ... [and) should have a strong hand in fixing them up." All he was proposing, he said, was that corporations "become interested in the general welfare." He talked about this for years, but not much changed because, he thought, "a meagerness of spirit ... keeps the corporation from the bracing tasks." 44 By mid-decade he had discarded his belief that government should force firms to operate for the public good, because he doubted the government's will to make and carry out any moral policies. Its war in Southeast Asia, lukewarm support of equal rights, failure to alleviate want in America, and policy of nuclear brinkmanship, not to mention its lesser sin of spying on its own citizens, appalled and angered Ping. He thought he had a better chance of persuading his father's ilk to reform than he did the Johnson administration.

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Ping assumed that businessmen might be persuaded to work for reform because he found it so natural to do so. Even as he sought to reveal the fundamental weaknesses of the powerful organizations that undergirded America's capitalist system, he scolded the public about internal and external threats to its well-being. He tried to disabuse his fellow citizens and national leaders of their comforting idea that they could win-or even survive-a nuclear war. The very idea scared Ping to death; in January 1960 he wrote his local newspaper to suggest that the only path to peace was through unilateral nuclear disarmament, an article offaith for Ping throughout the Cold War. He expected to draw a torrent of abuse and he did, but it only emboldened him to step up his efforts to persuade the electorate that he had the only rational approach to end the nuclear standoff. My proposal ... [of] peace ... was in general greeted with the outrage usually accorded ideas on their first appearance. 1

He presented an intellectual defense for his position later that year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he admitted that unilateral disarmament was startling and unthinkable to many people. He emphasized, however, that "the aim of my proposal is peace." He disagreed with Herman Kahn's mutterings that nuclear war was not madness but "both possible and under certain circumstances manageable." Ping characterized the Rand Corporation futurist's writings as "brilliant and wrongheaded." All Ping wanted to do was "to change the atmosphere so that calm discussion of unilateral disarmament may become possible." He knew the political climate was unfavorable; any president who proposed such a policy "out of the blue" would be instantly impeached.' The biggest stumbling block to easing the Cold War, Ping believed, was the world's "inability to visualize the politics of peace." If Americans could not envisage a world without an atomic standoff, he argued, they would never pressure their elected leaders to take them to that promised land. His was a lonely voice, pleading that unilateral disarmament was "more practical and more moral than the alternative, thermonuclear war."'

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The most drastic consequence seen is that the Reds would take over. 4 A disarmed United States, Ping allowed, might become a Soviet takeover target, a "fiercely disagreeable prospect." But it was not likely to happen, he insisted, for domestic cold warriors confused possibility with probability. Estimates made in 1959 predicted that in a "moderate attack" the United States would lose sixty million dead, twenty million injured, half its homes, and 35 percent of its industry, plus all of Great Britain and "large parts" of France, West Germany, and Turkey. Ping riposted, "When the words 'Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death' are spoken, this is what is meant." Only unilateral disarmament made sense. As he put it, "I believe peace to be better than war, survival better than suicide, civilization better than barbarism, compassion better than vengeance."' His colleagues at the Center did not agree: Kelly hastened to assure newspaper editors that Mr. Ferry did not speak for the Center. The denial amused Ping, and, to further irritate Kelly and some of his dialogue table mates, he resorted to satire. Ping loved to seize on minor points to make larger, more profound statements. He found a tempting target when federal and state civil defense officials proposed everyone have a bomb shelter in his backyard. National magazines carried plans for such hideouts, complete with lists of the provisions necessary to keep a family well fed and happy for six months or a year underground. It may yet turn out that the moles and gophers we fight in our lawns will be our best teachers for the next stage in our development.6

Ping used the shelter policy to parody nuclear standoff. In a short memo to sympathetic Center colleagues, he declared that such shelters were "foolhardy," distracted everyone from thinking about peace, and were symbols of hate and distrust. Moreover, the weapons makers could easily invent a weapon to destroy the cave dwellers. Even Ping could design one; "just equip each nuclear bomb with a skillful assortment of bacterial and chemical agents," he suggested, and "presto, what the blast and radiation don't get, the bugs and poison will." 7 To catch the public's eye he wanted something more catchy, and his fertile mind concocted the idea "for a shelter program for things." He told the Los Angeles Times that the United States had to save its "irreplaceable treasure of civili-

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zation," the jewels of the great galleries and museums, the canon ofWestern literature, and, he hoped, the "equations for hydrogen bombs and germ and chemical warfare, assuring the survivors ofWorld War Three of the knowledge of how to get World War Four under way promptly." With an almost straight face he promised this "would eliminate the vexing problems of tax-exemption and automatic discrimination in favor of the rich who are able to afford shelters," and, since no people would have access, all classes would die equally. He proposed that all precious objects be removed at once from galleries to an underground shelter. Americans, he wrote, can show the Soviets we mean business with "empty bookshelves and blank museum walls," and librarians and curators, left with no work to perform, safely ensconced on the public's payroll.' Ping put together a companion piece to parody President John F. Kennedy's Civil Defense program. He pointed out that the "do-it-yourself' administration plan that every family have a shelter was wildly impractical. "Unless an enemy attack were conveniently launched at, say six o'clock Sunday morning," when everyone would likely be at home, the shelters, he thought, would be "useful only as an oversized underground pantry." What the country needed, he mused, was an effort based on "democratic theory" that would treat all citizens equiltably. It would be more cost effective, he suggested, to use public moneys to build a common shelter big enough to hold 5 percent of Santa Barbara's citizens, or three thousand people. The city would stock the shelter, and three thousand people would be required to live in it at all times, for at least a week, with the population rotated each week by drawing lots or some such random process. Citizens would spend one week out of twenty underground, probably during their annual vacation. As Ping explained, we have a choice: "a world of human moles crouched in shelters ... [or] of human beings living decent and dignified lives."' Ping opted for living above ground and wielding his satirical pen as a weapon. In 1963 he conceived of what he called "Another Modest Proposal," which he published as "To the Two K's [Khrushchev and Kennedy]: A Brief Preface to Pushbuttoning." He harked back to the ancient practice of taking hostages to ensure peace because he was confident that world leaders were "far more capable of putting the impersonal machinery of mass slaughter into motion than they are of committing cold-blooded murder." His proposal was simple: the Soviets and Americans would annually exchange fifty children, and before either leader could order thermonuclear weapons fired, he would have to personally murder all fifty hostages. "The children," he declared, would stand "as proxies for the profoundest hopes of Humanity." Even if the plan failed, Ping noted, the deaths of only fifty children would pale before the slaughter of millions. 10

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Our leaders are not Tamburlaines.u His fund of novel ideas to end the Cold War was almost inexhaustible. In 1966, to halt the Vietnam War, he proposed new conscription rules to bring the draft "more firmly into the service of peace and justice." It was unfair, he wrote, to exempt men who had lived two-thirds of their lives and requisition those who had lived barely a third of theirs. When America killed off its youth, it lost "its budding Beethovens, Salks and Einsteins." The interests of peace required the selective service to conscript middle-aged men who "would lack the efficiency at murder displayed by firm-muscled 21-year olds." The U.N. should resolve, he proposed, that only men over forty-five could be drafted, which "would finally compel the warrior class of all nations-those who by custom stay home and utter the cries ofbattle-to bear the costs of their own decisions for carnage, mutilation, and death."" The effort to bring U.S. achievements in Vietnam home to Americans has been less than imaginative. 13 Almost two years later Ping combined his abiding interest in technology with his public relations experience to propose that the Pentagon publicly test its new weapons' technology to bolster the nation's sagging war morale in a program Ping dubbed "PATRIOTIC EFFORT PAYS" (PEP). He suggested the military rent the Los Angeles Coliseum or Yankee Stadium to stage performances of their new toys. The Defense Department could demonstrate its chemical and bacteriological arms, part of "humane warfare," which meant "these weapons either kill more slowly than nuclear bombs or machine gun bullets," Ping explained, "or do not kill at all but only disable, leaving those affected merely a little sick, numb, or scarred." 14 Do not bother with conventional weapons, he advised; stress the new and novel, such as Napalm B, which sticks to people and burns them to death: "a better burn for the buck," Ping suggested as a slogan. The new fragmentation bombs that threw bomblets about the distance from home plate to the center field wall in Yankee stadium would be a stunning show, he promised. 15 To make the display more exciting, he recommended that the Pentagon use animals as actors. He envisioned the spectators' thrill as "throngs of dogs and monkeys rush hilariously around in a cloud of tear gas" and "calves and horses by the hundreds react[ed] to vomiting gas," cats, goats, and dogs are "neatly killed or mutilated by the new pellet bombs," and, for a finale, "the amusing

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antics and near human screams ofhundreds, perhaps thousands of monkeys as they vainly try to scrape off flaming Napalm B. "' 6 If Ping could not excite revulsion with his proposals to bury Americans, send old men to war, and fry goats publicly, he tried a more cerebral tack by arguing that peace was too costly to be considered. In a speech before the West Sidt:~ Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, less than a week after the Cuban missile crisis, he declared that "the price of peace is too high for either this country or Russia to pay." Amity would force Russians and Americans "to abandon their ideological baggage," despite the fact that "both sides are embarked on a course of high idiocy." The price of peace, he warned, "calls for the triumph of imagination never in history achieved, the imagination of how a warless world would be organized and conducted." He told his listeners that the United States would have to give up its sovereignty and share its "wealth and productive capacity and ideas and food with the rest of the world." He confounded them by asserting that they had to come "to terms with revolutions and revolutionaries, and making welfare, not warfare, the guiding principle of common endeavor."" That would be difficult, he knew, because America had "already institutionalized the arms race" into "what looks like a permanent arms economy." With 9 percent of the GNP derived from the military, the sudden onset of peace would send the domestic economy into chaos. "The tendency therefore," he pointed out, "is to regard present arrangements as profitable and lifelong," but they were also "perilous and precarious." Ping expostulated that he could "not see a fair distinction between Jewicide of the kind practiced by Hitler and genocide of the kind contemplated by this country." Nor could he distinguish between the sadistic fourteenth-century Tartar conqueror Tamburlaine, who ordered the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of souls, and American Cold War policies that contemplated the massacre of hundreds of millions of innocent people. 18 "1 am a peacenik," he averred, even as he moaned that he and his fellow believers "look more and more like prayer wheels whirling in front of a bursting dam." All their whirling, however, could not chase away the devils who beset those who worked for a peaceful world, because, Ping said, "this country has seemed recently to need a devil"; Russia was a good one, big and strong. What bothered him most about such devils as Russia, Red China, and Cuba was that "they come equipped with a virus that causes constipation of the political imagination."" Ideology, devils, profits, and slack imaginations, Ping admitted, were far from the only origins of the perilous state of the world. "Some part of the cause is fatty degeneration brought on by the cholesterol of affluence," he posited,

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and "some of the malaise is a constant dizziness produced by the accelerations of technology," which "presents us with dazzling new means of reducing drudgery" and "unprecedented structural unemployment." All that, combined with the devilish fevers that spring from "hatred and distrust," he speculated, has made Americans "so desensitized ... that we are not horrified but pleased at news of ever more destructive and inhumane instruments of war."'" Ping was anything but desensitized; his mounting frustrations and anger at his inability to make political leaders reconsider their inane Vietnam policies prompted him, in impulsive and futile public political gestures, to cut several of his political ties. His first target was an old friend, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Ping recalled that when the "whiz kid" arrived at Ford, "I liked him at once, he didn't miss any fact or shading of an idea." He also attracted Ping "because he's never worn anybody' s initial. He was always his own man. There was never a big F for Ford on his sweater." Moreover, Ping also liked that McNamara refused to live in Detroit and become part of his father's chummy automobile crowd; he preferred to live in Ann Arbor, the nearby college town." When Kennedy was staffing his cabinet, Chester Bowles asked Ping for recommendations, and Ping told him that McNamara was the "brightest person I knew." About ten days later, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith asked for names, and Ping again mentioned McNamara. Ping thought they were interested in the Ford executive for secretary of commerce and was most surprised when he was named the new secretary of defense. And in an odd twist of fate, McNamara asked Ping if he would be his information or press officer. Ping told him that he favored unilateral disarmament and was "dedicated to putting you out of business as fast as possible." He added: "''m sorry you're in there; you're too damned efficient for anybody's good." McNamara thanked him for coming to the interview. 22 Soon after the Cuban missile crisis, MeN amara invited Ping to dinner along with economist Robert Heilbroner, Hutchins, and a half a dozen couples. After they had eaten, McNamara sat tossing "something a little larger than a couple of matchboxes up and down." Ping asked what it was, and he showed him that it was a small calendar Kennedy had given White House veterans of the Cuban crisis. Ping asked if the newspapers had been correct when they asserted the United States was on "Orange Alert" during the missile crisis. McNamara said, "Yes." Ping pushed a little harder; "and do I also understand that Orange Alert is the last before military action-in this case the launching of an atomic weapon?" McNamara again said, "Yes." Whereupon, Ping recalled, "I left the table, went to the bathroom & cried for a bit, and left the house & never went back."' 3 He never saw McNamara again, but he occasionally tried to puzzle out how

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such a bright fellow could serve up such stupid policies. He finally rationalized that MeN amara believed that war between the United States and China was inevitable:, and his Vietnam scheme was an attempt to position the United States favorably in Asia. Ping thought that helped explain why McNamara, who was "too smart a man, ... too generous and decent a man ... to persist in this awful inhumanity," did so. It took the former secretary until1995 to admit his errors publicly. 24 McNamara kept the pressure on Vietnam, and by early 1965 the United States had more than twenty-three thousand troops there. As casualties rose, President Lyndon Johnson ordered a sustained bombing of the North. In April he allowed U.S. ground troops to take an active part in combat, a policy change he kept secret for over two months. He also began a relentless buildup of American forces that increased troops numbers by more than 900 percent that year. By early June, American forces were taking part in well-publicized "search and destroy missions" that became a hallmark of the ill-fated conflict. 25 I resigned from the Democratic Party with a "clatter."'6

Ping watched the escalation with growing dismay. Helpless to do anything except rant, he decided to make a symbolic gesture and resign from the Democratic Party. He wrote to the president in mid-June: "I am so ashamed and dismayed by the actions announced by you in the past several days that I am today withdrawing from the Democratic Party." Ping explained that he thought "neither our honor nor security are involved in Vietnam. But your policies there have become more abhorrent and inhumane; and it is clear now that you intend not to diminish our reliance on violence, but to increase it indefinitely." Poignantly, he continued: "Two world conflicts under Democratic leadership are enough for me, and should be enough for many other Democrats." Ping admitted to Johnson that "this is a weak way of expressing my total disagreement with programs that call themselves peace but are war," but it seemed the only way open to emphasize his "disgust and apprehension" with Johnson's policies. 27 Two years later Ping said, "I should have done it a lot earlier," but he protested, "I didn't intend this to get a lot of publicity." If so, he went about it in a strange manner. He sent a copy of his letter to "a friend" who just happened to be a Sanlta Barbara newspaper reporter who published it as an open letter to Johnson. Ping explained, "It sort of went out the back door and through the shrubbery and ended up in lots of publications" where it gleaned a great deal of unfavorable publicity. Three decades later he admitted he "had released the letter" and "enjoyed my 15 minutes offame.""

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Unfortunately, Ping had no followup, nowhere to turn politically. Some liberals called for a new party to rally around Ping and his antiwar efforts, and, although he had promised Johnson "I shall do my best to persuade others to do the same thing [quit]," he counseled them to work within the Democratic fold. He did not want to be identified with the "party which was voting for every [war] appropriation" and felt he was "being let down every day" by Johnson, who was writing "a new chapter ofhorrors and self-righteousness."'• The Center's reaction to Ping's resignation was predictable; Kelly rushed out a press release explaining that Ferry did not speak for it. Ashmore, whom Ping described as having "a secure seat in LBJ's back pocket," was openly critical of Ping's precipitous action. Hutchins "didn't say a word," at least not to Ping, who admitted that he "wasn't privy to discussions" inside the Center or with its sponsors. Ping did think, however, that "Bob had some explaining to do," especially to rally his financial supporters. 30 My name has been used so much it's the most tattered piece of paper in the whole U.S.A. It's all right with me. 31

Ping's break with McNamara and noisy resignation from the Democratic Party enhanced his reputation in the mid-196os as a political maverick and got him into trouble at the Center. He had already made a name for himself in national political circles when, three months before the Cuban missile crisis, he had "kicked up some dust" with a luncheon speech in which he attacked one of the age's few living icons. Democrats from thirteen Western states convened in Seattle for a three-day meeting, and, when one of their scheduled speakers, a Los Angeles lawyer, broke his leg, they asked Ping to substitute. Ping prepared a zinger entitled "Myths, Cliches and Stereotypes," which included a personal attack on]. Edgar Hoover. The hobbled lawyer "suggested Ping might want to delete [that] ... part," but Ping did not think so. 32 Even discounting his assault on Hoover, Ping's speech was pretty good. Always chary about praising his own efforts, he once wrote: "It's my best, I can't do better than that." It was classic Ping in that he went after his audience from the outset when he told them that the nation's troubles "reflect a breakdown of politics," which "merits much of the disdain and mistrust in which it is held today." He continued with a litany of ills he had preached against for several years. Individual greed does not add up to the community's welfare, he bluntly told them; the nation is purposeless, lacks a vision, and is dedicated only to self-interest. 33 Their digestion was not improved when Ping referred to one of Hutchins's favorite aphorisms, "The government is best which governs best," after which

Peacenik he proceeded to debunk his favorite myths. What was good for corporations was not always good for the country, he argued. Free enterprise would not solve the problems of the distribution of wealth in a society of abundance, and the poor were not "vampires sucking away honest citizens' tax dollars," as the mayor of Newburgh, New York, had recently asserted. The widely held view that Negroes were "dirty, illiterate, song-loving, unambitious, and improvident ... sexual giants" was another stereotype he advised must be broken. Throwing money at other nations in theWestern Hemisphere would not bring about hemispheric prosperity and amity, he promised, only Planning, "with a large P,"would do that. 34 Communism, he intoned, is "a mischief-making tapestry oflegend and illusion," the fear of which "haunts and cripples us." Communists, he promised "are not nine feet tall, craftier than Satan, [and] the most expert managers the world has ever seen." They could not even manage Yugoslavia, Red China, "or even their own corn and wheat output," he observed. Yet men such as Hoover kef~P "the poltergeist hovering in the national consciousness." Ping then masterfully dissected a Los Angeles Times column written by the "indubitable mandarin of anti-communism in the U.S." Hoover had quoted numerous communists who claimed that although their numbers in the United States were small, they had "great potential strength." Ping charged that Hoover freqw:ntly called all communists liars; he believed them only when "their statements fit into his argument."" Ping then frontally attacked the FBI chief. Noting his constant warnings of Soviet espionage threats in America, Ping asked what the nation's "official spyswatter" had been doing all those years. He wondered if"Red spies are running loose despite his best efforts." He suggested that Hoover "isn't up to the job," and since "he does not produce many flesh and blood spies and saboteurs year after year," "he apparently feels he must keep up the supply of clandestine and unreal ones." He called Hoover's line that communists in America have "the capacity to pervert our thinking and destroy the spiritual supports which form the foundation of our freedom" "sententious poppycock," adding that "it is an insult to the American people to say that they are so weak-minded and spiritually insecure as to be ready to throw down institutions and traditions ... at the blandishments of a small devious band. "36 Nobody at the luncheon remembered anything Ping said before his "sententious poppycock" utterance. Reporters fell over each other to get their stories out; they appeared in every newspaper in the nation, and most of the comments were less than flattering. Robert Kennedy, Hoover's boss, arrived in Seattle that evening and issued a statement strongly defending his man: "I ad-

Peacenik mired him and the FBI before I became attorney general, and my admiration has increased tremendously after seeing his work close at hand."' 7 The timing of Ping's attack was horrible. Instead of weakening Hoover, who had been at loggerheads with both Kennedys, his irruption strengthened Hoover's position. Marilyn Monroe had died just three days earlier, probably a suicide. Robert Kennedy had had "an ugly showdown" with her that day over their affair, which was ending. He may have been with her the night she died, and it was reported that a slip of paper with the White House phone number on it was found on the bed with her body. The following day, the FBI swooped in and cleaned Monroe's house out, the scrap of paper disappeared, her phone records were erased, and all evidence of her affairs with both Kennedys vanished. Anthony Summers, a Hoover biographer, theorized that the mob was out to get Robert Kennedy, and Hoover strengthened his position with the new administration by helping his boss to thwart it. At the very least, he disinfected and hushed up the Kennedys' mess. When Kennedy arrived in Seattle, breathless from his weekend exertions, he could not allow Ping's fulminations to go unanswered. He went after him with a hatchet; Kennedy was more than ever deeply in Hoover's clutches. 38 Ranting Attack on FBI Director Leaves Top Democrats Blushing. 39 Newspaper editors and reporters, however, knew nothing of the Monroe coverup. They were the torch-bearers of the very myths Ping had decried, and they went on the attack. The Miami Herald reported that a returning delegate said, "Can you imagine that Ferry.... That was the best meeting we've had in a long time and the only headline we got was for an attack on Hoover." Senator Barry Goldwater, stirred with presidential aspirations, seized the chance to tar all Democrats with the Ferry hue, telling reporters, "I suggest that Mr. Ferry has certainly done the country a disservice," and it was the Democrats' fault "for affording Mr. Ferry a nation-wide forum for his ill-considered view."•o Richard Nixon, well into his California campaign for governor, professed: "It was a shocking statement," and he called for all Democratic leaders to apologize to Hoover, "a man who has done more effective work in fighting communism in the United States than any other American." Congressman William E. Miller, later the forgotten second man on Goldwater's ticket, as chairman of the Republican National Committee found Ping's attack "incredible" and explained: "I am appalled by the speaker's tasteless, defamatory, and virtually traitorous remarks. "41

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A few writers tried to put Ping's charges in some context. Time informed its readers that others had criticized Hoover, and mentioned that Senator George Norris once called Hoover "the greatest hound for publicity on the American continent." Gerald W. Johnson, contributing editor to the New Republic, wrote a thoughtful piece in which he said that Ping had laid "unhallowed hands upon the Lord's anointed" and admitted that his logic would "be accepted as plain common sense" if applied to any officeholder other than Hoover. He concluded that "what Ferry has done with his apparent blasphemy is what the small boy did when he exclaimed the emperor had no clothes" and stated that it was "no cause for wonder that a country capable of electing Eisenhower its pr,esident should also be eager to make Hoover its moral guardian." 42 Ping received less support from the Center. Kelly assured the New York Times that Ping "spoke as a private citizen" and reminded its readers: "I have made this point before, in connection with other statements by Mr. Ferry." Kelly asserted that the Center's Fellows had "a common devotion to free speech" and that the fund's motto is "Feel Free." Kelly allowed, "Mr. Ferry feels very free." 43

10

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Ping's preoccupation with snatching the public's attention from Cold War nostrums toward something akin to dear-headed analysis brought together various intellectual threads in his mind. As he struggled to understand the corporate role in society and the forces that promised mutual annihilation, he perceived underlying national trends that supported the status quo and portended future disasters. Galbraith's surprising best-seller The Affluent Society influenced him deeply. His friend, whom he had known since their OPA days, described a world that had replaced scarcity with abundance. He pointed out that older economic theories, what he termed "conventional wisdom," were predicated upon solving the problems of scarcity, claimed that reality had outrun Americans' ability to conceptualize it, and called into question John Maynard Keynes's prescriptions for "fine tuning" the national economy.' Weapons, automation, corporate callousness, the bankruptcy of economic theory, out-moded ways oflooking at the domestic and international scenes, the persistence of Cold War attitudes, the prevalence of poverty amid abundance, and the continuing irrelevance of political discourse convinced Ping that things were desperately wrong, jumbled in a way that obscured clear paths to a more humane and just world. He struggled to create a Weltanschauung from which he could draw appropriate answers; mankind could and must create institutions and cultures to bring most people some measure of happiness and security. His chosen avocation was to select the most useful and least deleterious ideas and pressure the public and its policy makers to bring about reform. He did not fear revolution, was amazingly unselfish about maintaining his personal advantages, and believed that nothing was secure or long term. The Center's precarious existence was a perfect example. By the time he agreed to speak at San Francisco State University in October 1961, he had mulled over the corporation's effects on culture, politics, economy, and the prolongation of the Cold War. He looked more deeply to explain the persistence of such mischief and chose that forum to confront his father's world using Galbraith's revelations. The thoughts he brought together in that performance marked a watershed on his intellectual journey.

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The decision to shoot the moon ... can be recognized as a longrange WPA for the electronic and missile industries. 2

He entitled his paper "The Dilemmas of Abundance," and he slapped his audience with his theme at the outset. "The acceleration of technology," he warned, meant "there will not be enough jobs of the conventional kind to go around." That will engender more than economic pain, he promised, and "a social and political crisis will be the result." Furthermore, he avowed, the new technological world will kill off our devotion to individualism and the "old theories of private property." The only way to harness such trends was to revert to national planning for, he affirmed, "law is our only means of assuring ... [that technology] serves the common good."' Americans might be "joyously sopping up affluence," he alleged, but they were not sharing it; they had no idea how to bring about a "just distribution." The national economy was booming, he told his listeners, and produced more than enough goods and services for all, yet five million people were jobless and thirty million Americans lived below the poverty line. 4 America had a problem with its vocabulary, he argued; it "is tuned to yesterday's industrial revolution, not to today's scientific revolution." There was another definition of abundance, he explained: "the growing abundance of unemployment" caused by "radical technological change." This "surplus of labor," as he slipped into the language of Karl Marx, threatened capitalism's existence. While capitalism rewarded work, the denizens of the new "liberated class" will be freed from toil, not because they wanted to, but because "the imperatives of efficiency have sent them to the sidelines." Even as the nation moved !toward the happy condition of greater leisure for all, Ping warned, economic thinkers assumed that shorter hours, higher pay, and constructive use of spare time would be accompanied by "the Full Employment sign."' He did not believe them; he thought that the next three years would tell the tale. He accused his former student's administration of a paucity of new ideas on how to deal with workers permanently unemployed. He suggested that Kennedy's solution was to absorb them into the military-itself a form of unemployment "in the sense that [it is] non-productive," as were employees in the moon shot program. 6 Growing unemployment upset the nation's class structure, too, Ping cautioned. "White collar workers will after a few years comprise most of the growing category of technologically displaced," he predicted, and the usual political stop-gaps-spreading work, shorter hours, retraining workers, early retire-

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ment schemes, and New Deal public works programs-will not suffice to alleviate their suffering.' Ping had an answer, albeit unpalatable: the country should "return to a state of scarcity" that he called "unabundance." This could be achieved, he explained happily, "by the simple act of deciding to share what we have with those who need it elsewhere in the world." He called for an expanded foreign trade predicated, not upon the usual Cold War political aims, but on totally "new premises ... those of need and justice." He recommended the nation develop "government corporations to buy the equipment from manufacturers here, for sale or other disposal in needy areas." The government should pay the difference and chalk the transactions up to "a contribution to extension of justice in the world; or as a subsidy ... ; or as a tribute to full employment."' To continue to depend "upon a whirling dervish economy keyed to compulsive consumption" to pull the economy along at something close to full employment was folly, Ping allowed. But the problem is, he continued, that the consumer "has been raised on the doctrine that his selfish interest is paramount" and that "it is his patriotic duty to buy, buy almost anything," an indication of "the poverty of our political imagination." He reminded his listeners of Arnold Toynbee's remark "that Madison Avenue is a worse threat to our civilization than communism."9 The Age of Abundance can be made into the Age of the General Welfare, and the United States can become in fact the moral commonwealth it has always claimed to be. 10

Citizens needed to identify their private good with the public weal, Ping thought, to create a "cleaner, healthier, handsomer, more cultivated and better educated nation." What he called "planning by inducement" could adapt national planning to that end, but he counseled, the nation would "have to discard attitudes that grew up in the dog-eat-dog phase of capitalism and adopt others suitable to" what he called "modern mercantilism." Plus, he explained, "we shall have to stop automatically regarding the unemployed as lazy, unlucky, indolent, and unworthy" and will have to "find means ... of paying people to do no work." 11 He realized that all this "goes severely against the American grain," but he pointed out that the nation had already moved toward income maintenance with unemployment insurance, supplementary unemployment plans, and union-management negotiations. In a world attuned to technology's explosive growth, some workers may work only half a year, others retire a decade earlier

Caught on the Horn of Plenty than usual, some continue their education at government expense, and some will be paid "from the public treasury for non-productive effort, such as writing novels, painting pictures, [and] composing music." "Abundance may compel social justice as conscience never has," he hoped. These changes will force the "economic machine" from the middle of the social picture off to the edge, where, with the help of automation, it will produce all the goods and services the public required. "Humanity ... and poetry and conversation will then occupy the central place in the landscape." 12 Ping published his remarks as "Caught on the Horn of Plenty" in January 1962 in the Center's Bulletin. By then, however, he was already exploring the ramifications of his ideas on other aspects of society while seeking the political equivalent of a unified field theory that would merge important trends and ideas to enable him to nudge his country toward his ideal of a freer, more humaneworld. The belief seems to be that freedom and justice will be achieved by not aiming at them, preferably by not even thinking about them. 13 He was particularly troubled by the connections between economic policies and democratic theory. At a discussion around Eucalyptus Hill's great table, Ping told his colleagues that "a commitment to democracy means a commitment to justice ... [which] means, among other things, treating equals equally and unequals unequally." Freedom and justice were not central motives of the republic, he thought, rather they were "by-products ... the political and cultural fallout of a nation that depends for its success on private enterprise and limited government." He reasoned that "democratic theory is good for unions, underdeveloped countries, and the school system, but not for the economic order and corporations." The basic impediment to adapting theory to new economic realities was adherence to classical thought that kept "alive the archaic claims of free enterprise, [and a] self-adjusting economy." With the world at "a historical disjuncture," he called for a "fresh reassessment" of technology that was "transforming economic life almost as rapidly as it has transformed military theory. " 14 Measured against the real needs of the country ... the American college is a bad investment. 15 Throughout his musings Ping consistently argued that professorial and academic dereliction was at the root of the failure to create an economic theory

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that encompassed the technological revolution and redressed the glaring inequities manifested in the notion of "free enterprise." In the summer of 1963, armed with a conjunction of ideas, he invaded the National Education Association's annual convention to apprise educators of their faults. He opened with: "Education is in promising shape. It is in a seller's market." That was the sum of his good news; when "measured against the real needs of the country," he told them, it was a disaster. "Judged by its output of practical wisdom and independent criticism, the college is a resounding flop." It was floundering in "a bog of self-doubt, contradictory purposes, public relations, and intellectual inertia." And he was not finished: "Activism has replaced thought," and worse, "anti-communism and other wholesome public relations exercises are surrogates for intellectual leadership." Colleges failed to prepare their students to "take a responsible and self-governing role" in a world "overwhelmed by novelty." Universities were just another element of"free enterprise," he reminded them, and "he who pays the piper can call the tune. " 16 Colleges were doomed because, like their corporate cousins, schools acted like producers and fawned on the consuming public. Thus they had "degraded the situation ofNegroes," he contended, feigning disbelief that highly educated people on the nation's campuses could condone "keeping a considerable percentage of their fellow citizens in ghettoes and economic peonage." He reminded his listeners that colleges exist to advance "the cultivation and dignity and independence of the individual person as the proper object of public policy," a concept that Chicago's mayor Richard Daley popularized when he grandly proclaimed, "It is the duty of the university to raise us to ever-higher platitudes of thought." 17 Ping charged the university to investigate the ramifications of a "workless or semi-workless society" caused by "technology [that] is carrying us rapidly into a twentieth-century version of the half-free, half-slave society of fourth century Athens." "Today's slaves, the machines," he promised, "are creating a new class that democratic theory never wound into its calculus." 1' The campus shall become a major arsenal for the Cold War. 19 An important part of that calculus, he proffered, was the imperative to "think our way out of the Cold War, since we cannot fight our way out." Equally, he observed, "we cannot eliminate technology from our lives by any act of modern Ludditism." "The nation is intellectually under-equipped to tackle the Himalayan issue before us," he warned, mainly because of its obsession with communism. He announced that he would like to see college presidents follow the lead of the University of Chicago and close their military re-

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search laboratories and allocate "university brains and cash on a so-so basis between war and peace research." At the minimum, he confessed, "I would settle for some intellectual leadership against the dismal counsels of anti-communism."'0 He saw little chance "for such an eruption of reason" in other institutions, corporations, mass media, political parties, or unions; it would have to come from the colleges. He had faint hopes for the sit-ins and peace demonstrations, but proclaimed, "I would feel far better about chances for the salvation of higher education if the sit-ins and peace marches were being led by college presidt!nts and trustees."' 1 To invite Ping to address an educational gathering was an act of selfflagellation. In May of 196s he dropped more oratorical boulders on the California Junior College Association when he unfolded a litany of problems associated with a world obsessed with war preparations, colonialism, racism, conflicts between rich and poor nations, and the inadequacies of international law. All was becoming more congested and tangled, leading, Ping advised, to the need for a single international polis. The new world community must be ruled by the old virtues of justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom, he declared. Education must prepare future generations to deal "with these ideas and with the life··and-death issues."" Two years later Ping wrote "The New Technology and Higher Education," in which he emphasized that technology would change the classroom and the repercussions it would have on education's place in society. He was an accurate futurist, warning that student bodies would soon "change markedly" with more adults, that curricula would be revamped when colleges discovered that educating for existent jobs was doing their students a disfavor, and that machines created a "new breed": "Technological Man will differ from his father, Industrial Man, at least as much as Industrial Man differed from his progenitor, Agricultural Man," he predicted. 23 He •:ailed for education "to bring social and political imagination into workable parity with scientific and technological imagination," but he was leery about the chances of success. He worried that the United States was running "an outer space civilization on a farm-based Constitution" in which "politics is far out of step with technology." Technological Man was going to be a stranger, Ping averred; he will be "more leisureful, better informed, physically better off," but on the downside, he will "go to church more and believe less. He will be jittery and restless, a creature of great mobility with no destination." Participation in politics will "dwindle to a matter of form only" because he will trust machines more. Educators, Ping prophesied, must confront these malignant forces because the country's fate hinged on their success. 24

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A major crisis is likely. 25

Ping took a big step toward pulling his disparate ideas together in 1963 when he was invited with Ralph Helstein, president of United Packinghouse, Food, and Allied Workers, and Robert Theobald, an economist whose book, Free Men and Free Markets, had made a splash, to talk to bankers on technological changes in the workplace. They returned convinced that the money-changers "didn't seem to have the foggiest idea what was happening in the country"; they decided to initiate a nationwide discussion. ' 6 In July they drew up an outline listing the fundamental national problems that indicated how much more sophisticated Ping's thinking had become since his arrival at El Parthenon. He saw connections everywhere, even some that did not quite meet, and was thinking in national and international contexts. Their document very nicely pared down those connections to the ones that threatened unwanted transformations if action were not soon taken. They warned of large-scale unemployment, a "Negro revolt" against discrimination and an unfair economic system, the continued existence of poverty in American, a "purposelessness ... reflected in the politics of special interests," and a failure to plan for a world no longer on a perpetual war footing. They called for "six to eight people" to devise "a political program" to deal with the questions "How are wealth, work, and property to be defined in an economy of abundance?" How are we to "effect a more just distribution of goods and services?" and How should we apportion "a just share of society's increasing wealth" to those unemployed "by reason of chronic malfunction or by technological development?"" The Triple Revolution 28

The three men joined with Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin of Students for a Democratic Society and a few others; they met at Robert Oppenheimer's invitation at Princeton University. Ping recalled their talks as a "rough discussion." In the midst of their deliberations Oppenheimer, often called "the father of the atomic bomb," invited them for tea; when he heard what they were thinking of proposing "he was appalled," and he ordered their "phones removed." Ping recalled that "all courtesies disappeared."' 9 Later, Ping modestly claimed he was there only because he had "Xerox and the paper" and agreed to write the initial draft. The document, however, carried Ping's title, the stamp ofhis tone and phrasing, and dealt with issues he had expounded for years. His efforts passed through many hands, perhaps too

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many, as they sent copies to their friends for comment. The final copy bore thirty-five signatures of men such as Nobelists Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal, historians John William Ward and H. Stuart Hughes, socialist Norman Thomas, economist Robert Heilbroner, activists, consultants, and even a retired brigadier general. Ping admitted that the group never reached unanimity; Hayden, for example, argued forcefully that "it didn't go far enough to disband the army and sink the navy and restructure society." Nevertheless, they sent it to President Johnson and released its contents to the public the followingday.'0 Ping wrote the letter to Johnson on March 22, 1964, and sent copies of it and The Triple Revolution to the press just in time for the Monday morning editions. He announced that he would be in a Washington hotel from 1:oo P.M. to 7:00 P . M. on Sunday to talk to anyone interested. He sat alone in the room, surrounded by refreshments and piles of The Triple Revolution, until about 6:oo P.M., when Tom Petit of the Associated Press called and talked for about an hour. Petit put the part of the release that reported that "technology was devouring jobs, that it had broken up the traditional link of income and spending and the thing to do until something better came along, was to inaugurate a guaranteed income" on the AP, and by 1o:oo P.M. Ping was inundated with phone calls. The New York Times ran it on its front page, and papers all over the country picked it up. Ping attributed it all to the "sheerest luck," because there '''was nothing happening in D.C. on a weekend."' His letter to the president was classic Ping, calling for "public measures" to meet the upheavals convulsing the nation. He commended Johnson for his newly announced War on Poverty and his commissions on automation and economic dislocation, but advised, "with deference," that his "tactics seem bound to fall short." Ping closed with a warning that if his suggested proposals were not initiated, "the nation will be thrown into unprecedented economic and social disorder." Two weeks later, "Mr. Ferry" received a polite reply from the president's assistant special counsel, who patiently explained how White House policies were already in place to deal with these tribulations and assured Ping that The Triple Revolution "will be given thoughtful consideration." Ping would rather have been told he was nuts. 32 The Triple Revolution broke little new ground for anyone who had been listening to Ping; it simply brought his grand themes together and supported them with more evidence than usual. Written in a bit of an imperious tone, the document claimed that civilization was at an "historic conjuncture" and identified the three responsible revolutions: cybernation, which had ushered in a "new t::ra of production"; weaponry, "which cannot win wars but which can 1

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obliterate civilization"; and the human rights revolution, which linked a "universal demand for full human rights" to the domestic civil rights movement. 33 Cybernation was cited as the main culprit behind the other two revolutions. Increasing automation, with its concomitant loss in jobs, meant that "the demand of the civil rights movement cannot be fulfilled within the present context of society." It also turned the American work ethic on its head. "Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production," but with automation, Ping predicted, machines "will require little cooperation from human beings." Unemployment will increase, the distribution of goods and wealth will skew even more, the rate of cybernation will increase, and a permanently depressed class larger than the twenty percent of Americans already in poverty will emerge, he promised. 34 The solution was a "new consensus" that accepted cybernation and used it "rationally and humanely" for the "benefit of the individual and the service of the general welfare." The Princeton group called for a "new science of political economy" designed to coexist with the "expansion of cybernation." With it, Ping believed Americans could consciously shape "the society we wish to have," one that allowed every individual a choice of occupations from "a wide range of activities not now fostered by our value system and our accepted modes of'work.' "35 It was the group's "Proposal for Action," however, that caught the public's eye. Taking a cue from economist Thorstein Veblen, Ping asserted that machines, not men, create wealth, and that truth destroyed the theory that men should be rewarded in proportion to their production. In the new technological world, he said, the government should "provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right" and abandon its "patchwork" of welfare and unemployment measures that attempt to guarantee that no American "actually starves.'' A change in national values was necessary, he admitted, because current ones emphasized the "welfare of the productive process" rather than "the welfare of people.'' "Activities such as teaching and learning that relate people to people rather than people to things" must be rewarded, and he called for an expansion of education "to meet the needs of this period of transition.'' 36 There had to be a period of transition, he cautioned, "to give hope to the dispossessed" and "for the rallying of people" behind the needed radical changes. His transitional suggestions originated in his experience with New Deal programs; he asked for the government to provide an additional one hundred thousand teachers to bolster education, massive public works of at least two billion dollars per year, construction of almost one million low-cost housing units a year, design and building of rapid-transit systems, a public

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power system "built on the abundance of coal in distressed areas," rehabilitation of abandoned military bases "for community or educational use," a reinstitution of the excess profits tax, tax subsidies, and credits "to ease human suffering," and the use of unions' resources to help achieve all this. 37 The public response was exactly what Ping wanted: angry, emotional, ad hominem, ideological, and occasionally even thoughtful. He received little overt support from the Center: Kelly rushed out a press release that explained that it had never discussed the matter and was "not involved in The Triple Revolution." Ping thought that others on the Mount had "probably showed paper and drafts" to Hutchins, who Ping suspected "liked the paper." Later he discovered his boss did not. Others, such as Ashmore, "disagreed with the project," and "all disavowed" it, at least, Ping recalled, until after the Center had folded, when they said that "the ideas of The Triple Revolution [had been] discussed." Ping cared little what his brothers at the Center thought; he enjoyed the national ruckus he raised. Almost thirty years later his eyes glinted when he talked of the "commotion" and "hundreds of editorials and columns" his efforts precipitated. He admitted that "most of them [were] con," for the columnists hated the "idea of something for nothing." 38 "Just Roll around Heaven All Day." 39

His clipping service sent him "well over soo editorials and three dozen columns, syndicated and otherwise." Many were "outraged" at his handiwork. Their titles said it all: "The More Abundant Hell"; "Program for a Frightening Future"; "Shiftless in High Gear"; "Funny Money People"; "All Pay and No Work"; and "Giving Status to the Slothful." Only about one in nine "took the view that Gunnar Myrdal, Robert Heilbroner, ... and Ralph Helstein ... might know what they were talking about and that it would do their readers little harm to consider their ideas and recommendations," Ping wrote.