Hoover Institution

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NO MERRI

TAG

before i thought stuffy old warhawks, but miller big in gmo, sugar/soda etc, also stanford cachet (good on tv?)

1 25 newsmax host Rob Finnerty spoke with right-wing Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson

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10 26 NZMX WIRES?

Justice Department heard arguments that prosecutors in the Watergate investigation mistreated defendants connected to former President Richard Nixon, though the department says the review has not become a formal investigation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide and Watergate historian, recently made his case in a two-hour presentation titled "Watergate as Lawfare" to the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal watchdog, at Justice Department headquarters, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

A Justice Department spokeswoman said Shepard was invited because of his expertise and scholarship on Watergate but stressed that his "presentation does not constitute an investigation" and added that the office remains focused on ensuring department attorneys meet professional standards.

The review is preliminary, and it is unclear whether it will lead to a formal inquiry, according to people familiar with the matter.

In 2022, the department under then-President Joe Biden declined Shepard's request for an investigation, citing the time that had passed since the events.

Shepard argues that special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski violated Watergate defendants' due process rights by meeting secretly with judges overseeing their trials and withholding evidence from the defense.

Cox led the prosecution before Nixon ordered him fired in 1973 in what became known as the "Saturday Night Massacre." Jaworski succeeded him.

The department's Office of Professional Responsibility was established in 1975 after revelations of ethical abuses and misconduct by senior officials during the Watergate scandal.

Shepard has for years advanced a revisionist account of the prosecution, using internal documents he says show Nixon and his associates were treated unfairly.

His claims differ from the prevailing historical account, which holds that Watergate was a constitutional crisis driven by abuses of presidential power. Nixon resigned in 1974 as impeachment proceedings advanced.

The review comes as President Donald Trump and some of his allies have drawn parallels between Nixon's experience and investigations into Trump.

Vice President JD Vance made that comparison during remarks this summer at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California.

"If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration," Vance said, according to The Washington Post. "There is a parallel."

Trump has asked former Nixon aides why the former president resigned rather than fight to remain in office and has moved to roll back some post-Watergate limits on presidential authority, including restrictions on removing inspectors general and career civil servants.

Separately, the Hoover Institution announced Wednesday that it will launch a project combining AI-assisted audio processing with manual checks of original materials to transcribe and annotate more than 3,000 hours of Nixon White House recordings held by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The tapes were secretly recorded from February 1971 to July 1973 in locations including the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, Camp David, the Executive Office Building, and the Lincoln Sitting Room.

Luke A. Nichter, a Hoover Griffin Fellow and presidential historian at Chapman University, will lead the project.

The Hoover Institution said early results have reached 98% accuracy on clean audio.

"Our goal is to give historians, and eventually the public, documentation they can trust down to the sentence," Nichter said.

The Hoover Institution said the work has already surfaced material it describes as previously undisclosed surveillance of a sitting congressman, Nixon's management of the opening to China, and his role in a Wall Street messaging campaign.

The project focuses on documenting the tapes and is separate from the Justice Department's preliminary review of Shepard's allegations.

Related Stories:

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2025

https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=lawreview

Uncharitable Think Tanks 207

Institution—also led in the earlier one, with only slight shifts otherwise.229 • From 2010 on, the top funders were Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations. The Devos family foundations rose to join the ranks of the top ten. • Grants channeled through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund accounted for 13.7% of the total. • 74% of all contributions came from completely unidentified sources. • }:}:

After AEI, Heritage and Hoover, the largest recipients were Cato, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Acton Institute, the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, Heartland, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. From 2003 to 2018, Brulle and his co-authors tallied total gifts to this cohort of $9.77 billion 230—a sum that refutes the mistaken notion that charitable giving is small dollars, and influential only at the margin. Now for the thought experiment.

democ cont ed class pal of mcfaul

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Diamond

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mma 1 25

Right-wing media blamed the wildfires on environmentalists and failure to clear brush, flattening the issue}:

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty spoke with right-wing Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson}:, who falsely claimed that there has been “no forest management” and the California leaders “don’t believe in cleaning the forest or they don’t believe in calculated and measured timber industry to clean it up.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [1/9/25

aha: ideol entre/flak/think tankers on call 24/7 to mouth useful BS to admin and corps; they have to preserve rep b/c it's their revenue stream, so will attack critics:

420

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/meet-the-expert-whose-scientific-study-informed-trumps-do-nothing-pandemic-response/

no lnx

Meet the ‘expert’ whose ‘scientific study’ informed Trump’s do-nothing pandemic response

Written by Daily Kos March 31, 2020

It seems like years, but it was only one week ago that Donald Trump, impatient at the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic was taking up so much of his precious time, declared he was considering steps to cut back on attempts to prevent the virus from spreading.

After viewing an uninformed rant on Fox News, and pounding out a hysterical Tweet, declaring that “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Trump held a news conference in which he reiterated what was apparently passing for the “common wisdom” at the White House that morning. “America will again — and soon — be open for business,” he said. “Very soon, a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

The very same day, the Washington Post also reported on a scientific article that was being circulated back and forth in emails between “numerous administration officials” at this time (no doubt with subject headings like: “Read this now!”):

Conservatives close to Trump and numerous administration officials have been circulating an article by Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, titled “Coronavirus Perspective,” that plays down the extent of the spread and the threat.

As any lawyer will tell you, it is not difficult to find an “expert” willing to spout out the most far-fetched “scientific-based” balderdash imaginable. It’s often simply a matter of cloaking that balderdash in calculated, impressive-sounding terminology, designed to hide the fact that it is written to achieve whatever desired result a particular client wants. As reported by Isaac Chotiner for the New Yorker, this particular article authored by Richard Epstein for the conservative Hoover Institution think-tank, fit the administration’s political needs to a tee.

Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law, published the article on the Web site of the Hoover Institution, on March 16th. In it, he questioned the World Health Organization’s decision to declare the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, said that “public officials have gone overboard,” and suggested that about five hundred people would die from COVID-19 in the U.S. Epstein later updated his estimate to five thousand, saying that the previous number had been an error.

(emphasis supplied)

When you have to “update” your conclusions to reflect an error you made by tenfold, that’s what we would call a “red flag” (the current death toll in the U.S. from COVID is already over 2000, with credible sources estimating we may be looking at 100-200,000 dead, or possibly many more). In fact, had Epstein stopped there he could have retreated into his think tank in relative obscurity, deleted the paper from the public memory and lived out a happy life as only a vaguely remembered fool with respect to the worst pandemic to strike the planet in over a century.

But like many people with oversized, prickly egos, unaccustomed to having their work revealed as faulty and error-filled, Epstein, who Chotiner describes as a “one of the most cited legal scholars in the country,” and notable for his “libertarian-minded reading of the Constitution,” just couldn’t leave well enough alone. He just had to set the record straight.

So he compounded his error by making an even more colossal blunder: he granted an interview to the New Yorker. What followed is one of the most devastating portrayals of a purveyor of “junk science” that can be imagined.

After apologizing for his “stupid” error in projecting the number of U.S. fatalities, which he characterizes as “the single worst public-relations gaffe I’ve made in my entire life,” Epstein then proceeds to mount an arrogant, pompous and error-filled defense of his methodology (“the question to ask, Isaac, is not whether I chose the right number but whether I had the right model.”)

After acknowledging the glaring, fundamental errors in his fatality estimates, Epstein revealed some of the glaring, fundamental errors underlying his assumptions. Helpfully, the New Yorker article adds brackets which identify Epstein’s errors, and provide correct information.

First, we realize that Epstein doesn’t even have a basic understanding of the nature of COVID-19:

[Epstein]: And so you take a population like in Kirkland, which is fragile and old, you get somebody in who has a strong version of the virus, and the thing will just absolutely rip through the population and kill everybody in it within a very short period of time. [Daniel Kuritzkes, the chief of the infectious-diseases division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, said, after being read this passage, “There’s no evidence that there are strong and weak variations of the coronavirus circulating. There may be minor variations person to person or location to location in the actual genetic sequence, but there is no evidence that they have different virulence or that a less virulent version is overtaking a more virulent version.”]

Next, Epstein reveals he lacks a basic understanding of how the virus is transmitted. For example, he attributes the high death toll in Washington State to the fact that people in that state “probably” received “large doses” of the virus through “hugging and kissing” the residents of the Kirkland Life Care facility, where COVID-19 was first identified in that state:

[Epstein]: And Washington State had a very high peak early on. And, probably, most of the deaths that we have today, if you went through and chased them down, were either people who are in the facility or people who have family members who hugged and kissed people in the facility. So they got large doses of intense viruses. [Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology and medicine and the department chair at the Yale School of Public Health, responded, “There is no evidence that you have a higher risk of dying from contact from someone in the facility than if you had contact from some other source.”]

(emphasis supplied)

Epstein, who is neither a virologist, an epidemiologist, nor a physician, then opines that a “change in genetic viral behavior” along with changes in human behavior would lead to an “adaptation,” altering the course of the virus. In his view, the failure to consider such “adaptation” led to overreaction among state governors to the potential impact of the virus:

[Chotiner]:You wrote, “The adaptive responses should reduce the exposures in the high-risk groups, given the tendency for the coronavirus to weaken over time.” What tendency are you talking about, and how do we know it will weaken over time?

[Epstein]: Well, what happens is it’s an evolutionary tendency. [“There is absolutely no evidence for that,” Ko told me. According to Kuritzkes, “There is no proof that this is the case. To the extent we see that evolution taking place it is usually over a much vaster timescale.”]

He then repeats that he assumed the coronavirus would weaken over time: “This tendency takes time. It could be a week. It could be a month. It could be longer. But, in the end, you should expect something of this particular sort to take place.”

In fact, Epstein says he knows of “no exception” to the rule that such viruses weaken over time. Unfortunately, he’s wrong here as well:

[Epstein]: Over time, yes. And is this a hundred-per-cent tendency? No. Is there any known exception to it? No. [“We did not see SARS or Ebola weaken over time,” Kuritzkes said. “It is only appropriate public-health measures or vaccines that have helped to control those epidemics.”]

So up to this point, we’ve determined that Epstein doesn’t understand the nature of the virus, doesn’t understand what happened in Washington State (which he relied on in his model of the virus’ transmission), and doesn’t understand that the virus will not necessarily “weaken over time.” In short, his conclusions and the methodology underlying them are sheer garbage.

But it is the exchange at the end of the interview between Chotiner and Epstein that is the most revealing:

[Chotiner]: I know, but these are scientific issues here.

[Epstein]: You know nothing about the subject but are so confident that you’re going to say that I’m a crackpot.

No. Richard—

That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That’s what you’re saying?

I’m not saying anything of the sort.

Admit to it. You’re saying I’m a crackpot.

I’m not saying anything of the—

Well, what am I then? I’m an amateur? You’re the great scholar on this?

No, no. I’m not a great scholar on this.

Tell me what you think about the quality of the work!

O.K. I’m going to tell you. I think the fact that I am not a great scholar on this and I’m able to find these flaws or these holes in what you wrote is a sign that maybe you should’ve thought harder before writing it.

What it shows is that you are a complete intellectual amateur. Period.

O.K. Can I ask you one more question?

You just don’t know anything about anything. You’re a journalist. Would you like to compare your résumé to mine?

No, actually, I would not.

Then good. Then maybe what you want to do is to say, “Gee, I’m not quite sure that this is right. I’m going to check with somebody else.” But, you want to come at me hard, I am going to come back harder at you. And then if I can’t jam my fingers down your throat, then I am not worth it. But you have basically gone over the line. If you want to ask questions, ask questions. I put forward a model. But a little bit of respect.

O.K. Let me ask you this question. All my questions are asked with respect.

That’s not the way I hear it.

At this point, Epstein finally gets something right: this is the ranting of an egotistical crackpot who has been caught flat-footed and is attempting to defend his own incompetence, by attacking his interlocutor as “an intellectual amateur,” whose resume cannot possibly compete with his own.

This would be comical if lives weren’t at stake. But by relying on this incompetent charlatan to inform public policy (policy which has been followed by at least some Republican governors in creating their own state’s response to the pandemic), the Trump administration may have caused hundreds if not thousands of additional deaths.

punked?

FoxNews.com op-ed attacking former Attorney General Eric Holder uncritically relied on, and linked to, a piece by white supremacist Jared Taylor that accused Democrats of subjecting “whites to outright racial plunder.” Fox News changed the link after Media Matters contacted the network.

Jeremy Carl, a research fellow at theHoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote a May 23 FoxNews.com op-ed complaining about a Starbucks policy allowing “anyone to spend time in its stores and use restrooms regardless of whether they make a purchase.” He also criticized the company for having engaged "Eric Holder as an adviser on diversity issues,” claiming he “has a long history of making accusations of racial discrimination, often unjustified.”

As one piece of evidence against Holder, Carl linked to a January 2015 opinion piece by Jared Taylor on the white supremacist website American Renaissance. Media Matters found the May op-ed while examining media outlets that have uncritically promoted or cited research by white supremacist media.

The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that American Renaissance “has been one of the vilest white nationalist publications, often promoting eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. In 2005 for example, after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Taylor wrote, ‘When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.’” The Anti-Defamation League wrote that Taylor “upholds racial homogeneity as the key to fostering peaceful coexistence.”

Taylor’s piece was a review of conservative commentators John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky’s book Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department. The review began by attacking Holder as “a devious, power-hungry, racial zealot” who is “probably the most racially committed black ever to hold a cabinet job” and concluded that while the Republican and Democratic parties are similar, Republicans “are less likely to subject whites to outright racial plunder.”

[scrensht]

Media Matters contacted Fox News about the op-ed and asked if the network thought the research citation was appropriate. The company did not reply but changed the link so it now directs to the Amazon page for Obama’s Enforcer. The site has not noted the change or posted an editor’s note (the op-ed’s timestamp reflects the update).

Media Matterslater contacted Carl, who stated: “Obviously I would not have intentionally cited American Renaissance in any article I wrote — I wrote this article on a very fast same-day deadline at Fox News’ request and simply missed the sourcing. I suspect I missed it because the article was discussing work by Hans Von Spakovsky from Heritage, whom I do know and whose work I trust. I likely simply erred in assuming it was by Von Spakovsky.”

Carl, who agreed with Fox's decision to change the citation, also claimed “Holder has a history of numerous racist statements and actions is beyond doubt. I don’t apologize for saying that — then or now. One doesn’t need to link to American Renaissance to make that point, and obviously I would not have intentionally done so.” He additionally suggested that because Media Matters chose to contact Fox directly first rather than the author, it was evidence we are engaging in the “harassment of a critic of leftism" instead of a "pursuit of truth.”

http://www.alternet.org/environment/exxon-using-tobaccos-failed-free-speech-defense-decades-deception-climate-change

The past week has seen a barrage of opinion pieces carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, defending against the ongoing fraud investigations. The Washington Post had two pieces, Newsweek had one and the Financial Times had an editorial, in addition to op-eds in a couple of other conservative outlets. Of those six, half were penned by groups funded at least in part by fossil fuel companies.

The arguments are all by and large the same, claiming that the investigations infringe on fossil fuels companies’ right to free speech while steadfastly ignoring the fact that ExxonMobil funded climate denial to protect their business model.Only the Financial Times editorial actually acknowledges the “misleading claims from fossil fuel interests and their allies” but concludes that it is “because the stakes [of the debate] are so high that all arguments must be heard.” While that sounds fair at first Glantz, it quickly sounds silly when applied to a recent example: the tobacco industry’s denial of the fact that its carcinogenic product is addictive.

All but one of the pieces similarly ignored the tobacco industry precedent and the only person who mentioned it was one of the few voices not plugged into the professional denial apparatus.

As for the pros, Newsweek ran a blog post from the Hoover Institution, which rambled on about climate science that’s supposedly still uncertain, lamenting that fair debate is impossible if one side can bring the other to court. Not mentioned is how a fair debate can be possible if one side launches multi-million dollar PR campaigns to mislead the public about the science.

Feds Refer Exxon #Climate Investigation to FBI: https://t.co/MS5BfY7PNp via @EcoWatch pic.twitter.com/mBWybUPmVb

— DeSmogBlog (@DeSmogBlog) March 7, 2016

Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky’s piece in the Washington Times misses the tobacco precedent, but went all the way back to the Spanish Inquisition for his First Amendment fear mongering. George Will used his column in the Washington Post to offer a lesson on how this campaign is part of a larger progressive strategy to shut down debate. But apparently it’s Will that needs a history lesson, as he uses as evidence a story about a 2013 IRS investigation accusing the agency of targeting conservatives. But that investigation “found no evidence” that the IRS actions were politically motivated. No doubt his column is similarly bereft of evidence.

The Washington Post also gave space to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)to defend itself by pretending it is being investigated for political dissent, not its years of Exxon funding for climate denial. Worth noting CEI’s careful phrasing about its relationship with Exxon, which CEI says “publicly ended its support for us after 2005.” With Donors Trust and others making it possible to anonymize giving, the key word is “publicly.”

Ironically, despite the admission that its Exxon funding is a perfectly legitimate reason to look into its communications, CEI considers its subpoena to be a fishing expedition. Meanwhile, CEI’s own coal-funded Chris Horner continues to engage in nuisance FOIAs for climate scientists.

Exxon’s defense is a hot topic in denierland, as it advances the narrative that the fossil fuel industry is an embattled population facing government persecution. But here’s a reality check: Before Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was murdered on March 2, she reported receiving 33 death threats after years of intimidation. Instead of investigating a man who had previously bragged about his plans to murder her, authorities claim the prime suspects are two of her fellow activists.

Heartbreaking Activist Berta Cáceres Murdered in Honduras https://t.co/Zj97cmwQi3 @FoEint @greenpeace pic.twitter.com/tAujvEGtMR

— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) March 3, 2016

Looks like the fossil fuel industry isn’t the one facing persecution after all.

has an energy pgm

rww:

Hoover fellows have also been influential for their right-wing stances on environmental issues. Fellow Thomas Gale Moore is a leading climate change skeptic, having authored the 1998 book Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming. Fellow Bruce Berkowitz is the author of the 2001 Hoover Digest article "The Pseudoscience of Global Warming." And Gale Norton, who as George W. Bush's first secretary of the interior took a notably laissez-faire attitude toward environmental issues, is also a Hoover alum. Norton, a lawyer and lobbyist with ties to the energy industry, was a fellow from 1984-1985.[[11]](https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45;jsessionid=BD64B811B6E5F2CF0A13CF7F5D58CFA1#_edn11)

http://books.google.com/books?id=w4X6MwZpBIQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

cato publ 1998, 2000

Brulle 2003-10

1) aei 16%, 2) heritage 14,3) hoover 8% 45 mil$, 4) Manh 6%, 5) cato 5, 6) hudson 5, 7) atlas 4, afp 4, locke 3, heartl 3, reason 3, mrc 3, mercatus 3, ncpa 3, cei 2, spn2, pacif res 2, iwf 1, landmark 1, freedomwork 1 5.3m$

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution

Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a public policy think tank and library founded in 1919 by U.S. President Herbert Hoover located at, and part of, Stanford University, his alma mater. Over time the Institution has amassed a large archive of documentation related to President Hoover, World War I, and World War II, specifically focusing on theories about the root causes of these wars.

The Hoover Institution mission statement [2] expresses the basic tenets for which it stands: representative government, private enterprise, peace, personal freedom, and the safeguards of the American system.

The Hoover Institution is influential in the American conservative and libertarian movements, and the Institution has long been a place of scholarship for high profile conservatives with government experience. A number of fellows have connections to or positions in the Bush administration, and other Republican administrations. A non-political figure who played a key role in the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, Retired Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, former commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), recently joined the Hoover Institution (as the first Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow) [3]. Other fellows of the Institution include such high profile conservatives as Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Edwin Meese.

Contents [hide]

Mission Statement

Now more than four decades old, Herbert Hoover's 1959 statement to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University on the purpose and scope of the Hoover Institution continues to guide and define its mission in the twenty-first century:

"This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity.... Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves.... The overall mission of this Institution is, from its records, to recall the voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study of these records and their publication, to recall man's endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life. This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library. But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system."

The principles of individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government were fundamental to the vision of the Institution's founder. By collecting knowledge, generating ideas, and disseminating both, the Institution seeks to secure and safeguard peace, improve the human condition, and limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals. [4]

History

[In 1956 former President Hoover, under the auspices of the Institution and Library, launched a major fundraising campaign that allowed the Institution to realize its current form as a think tank and archive. In 1957, the Hoover Institution and Library was renamed the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace—the name it holds today.^[8]

In 1960, W. Glenn Campbell was appointed director and substantial budget increases soon led to corresponding increases in acquisitions and related research projects. In particular, the Chinese and Russian collections grew considerably. Despite student unrest in the 1960s, the institution continued to thrive and develop closer relations with Stanford.^[9] ^obit: ^{http://www.hoover.org/research/w-glenn-campbell-1924-2001}

^lat: W. Glenn Campbell, a conservative economist in the national Republican brain trust who was director of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford for 29 years, a UC regent for 32 years, and an advisor to presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, has died. He was 77.

Campbell died Saturday after suffering a heart attack at his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

The picture of the scholarly professor, Campbell had impeccable academic and career credentials. But his combative manner and archly conservative political opinions kept him constantly in conflict with administrators and trustees of Stanford University and greatly hampered his effectiveness on the University of California Board of Regents.

Campbell was handpicked by former President Herbert Hoover in 1960 to build the small Hoover Institution into a nationally prominent center for conservative political research. He did just that, demonstrating strong skills as a fund-raiser and recruiter of Nobel Prize winners and other scholars.

The institution, established by Hoover in 1919 to house his extensive World War I library at his alma mater, always had an uneasy relationship with the university because Hoover insisted that his library be maintained separately from Stanford's and that his institution remain free from what he called the "left-wing influence" of the Stanford faculty.

John Raisian, the current director, was appointed in 1989.] flak for rumy http://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/october17/invite-101707.html

lat:

CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : STANFORD : New Director for Think Tank

May 15, 1990 | From Times Staff and Wire Reports

John Raisian, acting director of the politically influential Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University since last September, has been given the job permanently, officials announced Monday. The move ends the search for a successor to W. Glenn Campbell, the outspoken conservative who headed Hoover for 29 years. Raisian, 40, has a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA and taught at the University of Washington and the University of Houston.

About Herbert Hoover

In 1919, former president Herbert Hoover founded the Hoover Institution. Since then, the Institution has grown to be one of the most significant think-tanks on the West Coast. Orphaned at the age of ten, at seventeen, Hoover joined four hundred students at Stanford University for inaugural ceremonies that opened the university on October 1, 1891. After graduating in Stanford's pioneer class in 1895, he would go on to become a successful mining engineer, generous benefactor, well-known humanitarian, prominent statesman, and president of the United States.

In 1914, Herbert Hoover was living and working in London, England, when World War I broke out in Europe. He immediately became involved with assisting American travelers who were fleeing the war zone. With the German invasion of the neutral nation of Belgium, Hoover was asked to create a private humanitarian relief agency to assist Belgium's civilian population, which was accustomed to importing 80 percent of its food. The German occupation and the Allied naval blockade threatened famine and death by starvation to this country's citizens.

During this time, Hoover read, and was influenced by, an autobiography of Andrew White, a distinguished historian, diplomat, and the first president of Cornell University. White had assembled a vast collection of documents pertaining to the French Revolution that ultimately contributed to one of the best accounts of this historic event. Hoover then realized that he was in a unique position to collect fugitive information about the Great War that was then unfolding. It was this idea and vision that would lead the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace into becoming the largest private repository of documents on twentieth-century political history.

In 1917, the United States entered the war, and Hoover, by now a famous humanitarian hero, returned stateside and was appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to become head of the newly created U.S. Food Administration. When the war ended in 1918, Hoover returned to Europe for almost a year as director-general of the American Relief Administration to organize the supply and distribution of food and relief materials to more than twenty nations affecting one-third of the population of Europe, thereby facilitating the emergence of stable economies in the war-torn region.

By 1920, Hoover and his family had returned to his alma mater, building a handsome house on the Stanford campus. However, in 1921, President-Elect Warren Harding recruited Hoover to become secretary of commerce. While traditionally a lowly cabinet position, the popular Hoover quickly established himself as one of the most prominent people in American public life. When President Calvin Coolidge succeeded President Harding, Herbert Hoover was asked to continue his service in the same capacity.

In 1928, when President Coolidge declined to run for a second term of office, Herbert Hoover was urged to become the Republican candidate and was eventually elected as the 31st president of the United States. In his first year of office, an economic crisis ensued with the stock market crash of October 1929. The onslaught of the Great Depression led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's successful presidential campaign in 1932. Herbert Hoover and family returned to their Stanford home in 1933.

Hoover War Collection

In 1919, Herbert Hoover pledged $50,000 to Stanford University to support his Hoover War Collection. He was also personally responsible for most of the gifts during the early founding, as well as for decades thereafter. The collection flourished in the early years and in 1922 was renamed the Hoover War Library. While it was physically housed within the Stanford Library, the collection was kept separate. By 1926, it was legitimately described as the largest library in the world dealing with the Great War. By 1929, the library contained 1.4 million items, and physical space became an issue during the troubling times of the Great Depression. Finally, in 1938, a building plan was unveiled for Hoover Tower. The tower, reaching a height of 285 feet, was completed in 1941--the fiftieth anniversary of Stanford University.

By 1946, the agenda of the Hoover War Library had extended significantly to include research activities, and thus the organization was renamed the Hoover Institute and Library on War, Revolution and Peace. Herbert Hoover was now living in New York City and allowing his Stanford residence to be used by Stanford's president. He would later donate his home to the university for such use. Nonetheless, Hoover remained integrally involved in the Hoover Institute and Library as a significant benefactor, fund-raiser, and principal provider of guiding inspiration.

Indeed, in 1956 a major funding campaign was launched, with Herbert Hoover leading the effort. The development of the enterprise was so prominent that in 1957 it was again renamed as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, the name it holds today. [5]

Members

The following is a short list of past or present Hoover Institution fellows and scholars.

Senior research fellows

John H. Bunzel, Political Scientist and Sociologist

Research fellows

Peter Berkowitz, political scientist
Robert Conquest, historian
Abbas Milani, political scientist and author
Henry I. Miller, physician
Russell Roberts, professor of economics and author
Peter Schweizer, author

Distinguished visiting fellows

Media Fellows

The William and Barbara Edwards Media Fellows Program at the Hoover Institution.^[1]

Directors

Ehpraim D. Adams (1920-1925)
Ralph H. Lutz (1925-1944)
Harold H. Fisher (1944-1952)
C. Easton Rothwell (1952–1959)^[2]
W. Glenn Campbell (1960–1989)^[3]
John Raisian (1989–)^[3]

Publications

The Hoover Institution produces multiple publications regarding public policy topics, including the quarterly publications Hoover Digest,Education Next, and China Leadership Monitor. In 2001, the Hoover Institution acquired the bimonthly publication Policy Review from theHeritage Foundation. The Hoover Institution Press also publishes books and essays.

Task Forces

As an enterprise steeped in academic tradition, the Hoover Institution seeks to determine how it can provide meaningful information and advice on public policy. By recruiting extraordinary intellectual talent, Hoover is able to convene scholars (both resident and nonresident) who combine their efforts in a task force—or "virtual faculty"—with specific well-defined objectives. These task force strategies are a new way to organize the Institution's research by leveraging Hoover's intellectual assets. The task forces organize Hoover fellows and other scholars into teams working on commonly defined topics and integrated projects rather than individual fellows working independently. The task force strategies emphasize a collective approach that focuses on the Institution's research agenda. The task forces concentrate the Institution's scholarly resources on relatively narrow—although important—policy issues and empower the teams of scholars to participate strategically with the director in defining the ideas to emanate from the task forces. Using its ability to recruit extraordinary intellectual talent, the Hoover Institution organizes this talent in a new way: combining them into task forces to address specific research topics. The task forces emphasize a collective approach (rather than the more traditional individual methodology) to work on commonly defined topics and projects.

Koret Task Force in K-12 Education

National Security and Law

Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity

Virtues of a Free Society

Economic Development

Federal Tax and Budget Policy

Health Care Reform

Ideology and Terror

Energy Policy big, no wackos?http://www.hoover.org/research-teams/energy-policy-task-force

Procedural Reform of Government

A full list of the members of each task force can be found online at: www.hoover.org/taskforces

Funding

The Hoover Institution receives much of its funding from private charitable foundations, including many attached to large corporations. A partial list of its recent donors includes:

:{Sarah :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Scaife :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{Foundation:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:, $9,845,500 from 1985-2008 - more than any other foundation in that period, according to Media Matters. (Its most recent grant to the Hoover Institution seems to be $850,000 in 2007.)^[4]
Archer Daniels Midland Foundation
ARCO Foundation
Boeing-McDonnell Foundation
Chrysler Corporation Fund
Dean Witter Foundation
ExxonEducational Foundation [6]
Ford Motor Company Fund
General Motors Foundation
J.P. Morgan Charitable Trust
Merrill Lynch& Company Foundation
Procter & Gamble Fund
Rockwell International Corporation Trust
Transamerica Foundation

Between 2001 and 2010, the Hoover Institution received $3.37 million from the conservative Bradley Foundation^[5].

References

↑ Hoover Institution. The William and Barbara Edwards Media Fellows Program (html). hoover.org. “The Edwards Media Fellows Program allows print and broadcast media professionals to spend time in residence at the Hoover Institution. Media fellows have the opportunity to exchange information and perspectives with Hoover scholars through seminars and informal meetings and with the Hoover and Stanford communities in public lectures. As fellows, they have access to the full range of research tools that Hoover offers.”
↑ "Yacht club to host celebration of Virginia Rothwell", Stanford Report (September 1, 2004). Retrieved on 2008-03-25.
↑ ^3.0 ^3.1 Trei, Lisa (November 28, 2001). "Glenn Campbell, former Hoover director, dead at 77", Stanford Report. Retrieved on 2008-03-25.
↑ [1] accessed 2011-08-04
↑ Daniel Bice, Bill Glauber, Ben Poston. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. November 28, 2011.

External links

Categories:

Peter Berkowitz is a Hoover Institution Research Fellow, a law professor and an author. He was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Prize by Harvard University Press for the best book by a new author for "Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist".

[hide]

Giuliani foreign policy team

On July 10, 2007, Giuliani announced the "line-up" of his foreign policy team, which included Berkowitz, Ed Lasky wrote in the American Thinker.^[1]

Berkowitz will serve as Senior Statecraft, Human Rights, and Freedom Advisor.^[2]

Education

Swarthmore College, B.A., English literature*
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, M.A., philosophy
Yale, Ph.D., political science and a J.D.

Organizations

Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Research Fellow
George Mason University Law School, associate professor of law at
Jerusalem Program on Constitutional Government, founding codirector
President's Council on Bioethics, senior consultant
Harvard University , past Government teacher (9 years)
New Republic, contributing editor
Steering Committee, Strategic Public Diplomacy Project ^[3]

Stated Expertise and Focus of Research

Classical and contemporary liberalism
American constitutionalism
Middle-East
interplay of law, ethics, and politics in modern society
current research
relationship between classic and modern liberal principles
the role of virtue in democratic self-government

Authorship

Books

Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, (1999)
Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, (1995)
Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic,(2003), editor
Varieties of Conservatism in American, (2004), editor
Varieties of Progressivism in America,(fall, 2004), editor
editing several Hoover Institution collections due in 2005

Periodical Publications

Resources and articles

References

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Ed Lasky, "Rudy Giuliani's New Foreign Policy Team," American Thinker, July 11, 2007.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ "Giuliani campaign: Fmr. U.S. Sen. Kasten named as foreign policy advisor," WisPolitics.com, July 10, 2007.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Steering Committee, Bipartisan Policy Center, accessed February 22, 2011.

External articles

Web site: http://www.peterberkowitz.com
Hoover Institution bio

Categories:

8 current hoover fellows on b2 def policy bd (stein)

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hoover_Institution_on_War,_Revolution_and_Peace

Archer Daniels Midland Foundation
ARCO Foundation
Boeing-McDonnell Foundation
Chrysler Corporation Fund
Dean Witter Foundation
Exxon Educational Foundation [6]
Ford Motor Company Fund
General Motors Foundation
J.P. Morgan Charitable Trust
Merrill Lynch & Company Foundation
Procter & Gamble Fund
Rockwell International Corporation Trust
Transamerica Foundation

= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Hoover_Institution

...

Conservative philanthropic foundations have contributed vast amounts of money to Hoover in recent decades—nearly $24 million from 1985 to 2005, according to MediaTransparency.org. Donors that have given more than $1 million to Hoover include such right-wing stalwarts as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation (MediaTransparency.org). Richard Mellon Scaife of the Scaife Foundations and Shelby M.C. Davis of the Davis Foundation also sit on Hoover's Board of Overseers.

IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.

Founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, the Stanford University-based Hoover Institution is one of the oldest research institutes in the United States. Funded largely by right-wing foundations and corporate donors, Hoover has been a mainstay of the Republican Party for decades, serving as a virtual revolving door for high-level GOP figures and appartchiks, including many who served in the George W. Bush administration. Case in point was the September 2007 announcement that the institution would hire Donald Rumsfeld as a visiting scholar; the former secretary of defense was widely excoriated for his oversight of the Iraq War and left the administration shortly into Bush's second term.[1] Condoleezza Rice, a Hoover fellow who served as National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State in the George W. Bush administration, rejoined the institute following Barack Obama’s inauguration as president.[2]

Other figures from the Bush administration who later found a home at Hoover include former U.S. Central Command chief John Abizaid, State Department advisor Stephen Krasner, and John B. Taylor from the Treasury Department. The think tank's ties with the Reagan administration were similarly strong. Reagan advisers associated with Hoover included Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Edwin Meese, and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. Margaret Thatcher and Newt Gingrich have also been Hoover fellows.

Additionally, Hoover serves as a perch for various writers and ideologues whose views veer sharply toward the neoconservative right on foreign affairs. Senior fellows Fouad Ajami and Victor Davis Hanson have been vocal critics of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Ajami, a fervent Iraq War backer and former adviser to the Bush administration, has accused the Obama administration of giving the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad “a diplomatic lifeline,” and leaving embattled protesters there “waiting for Godot.”[3] Ajami has also partially credited the Iraq war with spurring subsequent democratic revolutions in the Arab world, telling an interviewer, “there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what's happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”[4]

Hanson, a controversial classicist and historian, has warned against underestimating the “schizophrenia” of the Iranian regime, paying homage to the right-wing axiom that “irrational” regimes must be dealt with by force. Declaring that “the saber rattling of lunatic regimes should be taken seriously,” Hanson has written that “the Obama administration’s exit from Iraq, its current negotiations with the Taliban, and its failed serial efforts at reset diplomacy with Tehran” could be seen by Tehran as “a sort of weakness that might presage a tepid U.S. response” to Iranian provocation in the Persian Gulf—essentially advocating a more hawkish U.S. foreign policy across the board as an implement of U.S. policy toward Iran.[5]

Hanson has also used the issue of proposed U.S. military spending cuts as an opportunity to launch a generic Republican critique of Obama’s supposedly “non-exceptionalist” foreign policy worldview. “Fairly or not,” he wrote, “the cuts will only cement a now familiar stereotype of Obama's desire to retrench on the world scene. They follow symbolic apologies for purported past American sins, bowing to foreign royals, and outreach to the likes of Iran and Syria. Abroad, such perceptions can matter as much as reality, as our rivals begin hoping that Obama is as dubious about America's historically exceptional world role as are they.”[6]

On foreign policy issues more generally, Hoover includes a mix of traditional realists and neoconservatives, but its fellows tend to be united around the goal of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy and have been a driving force behind military action in Latin America and the Middle East. During the lead up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, eight Hoover fellows (including Becker, Gingrich, Allen, Pete Wilson, and Martin Anderson) sat on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Department think tank which at the time was chaired by Richard Perle.[7] In addition to policymakers like Shultz, Rice, and Rumsfeld, Hoover fellows have also included generally hawkish intellectuals like historian Niall Ferguson, international relations scholar Charles Hill, and historian Robert Conquest.[8]

Other Conservative Causes

Hoover became an ideas factory for George W. Bush before he was even elected president. In the summer of 1999, Bush, then the governor of Texas and in the early stages of his presidential campaign, paid his first visit to California as a candidate. At the time, Bush's campaign was at pains to portray him as a moderate, "compassionate" conservative who would soften the hard edges of Republican economic and social policy. Observers who looked beyond the rhetoric and assessed the campaigns advisers, however, realized that Bush was not the post-ideological moderate he appeared to be. The Christian Science Monitornoted that one of the biggest tipoffs was Bush's close association with the Hoover Institution, which had already "emerged as the early core of Mr. Bush's brain trust."[9]

The Monitor reported that there were "many interesting aspects of this relationship, not least of which is the juxtaposition of the think tank's staunchly conservative heritage and the candidate's moderate political persona. But whatever the attraction, the relationship has blossomed fully, with no end in sight."[10]

On economic issues, the think tank has served as a home to some of the most important right-wing economists of recent years, including the late Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winner Gary Becker, Nixon and Reagan adviser Martin Anderson, and libertarian writer Thomas Sowell. W. Glenn Campbell, Hoover's influential former director, was a free-market economist, as is its current director, John Raisian.

Hoover fellows have also been influential for their right-wing stances on environmental issues. Fellow Thomas Gale Moore is a leading climate change skeptic, having authored the 1998 book Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry About Global Warming. Fellow Bruce Berkowitz is the author of the 2001 Hoover Digest article "The Pseudoscience of Global Warming." And Gale Norton, who as George W. Bush's first secretary of the interior took a notably laissez-faire attitude toward environmental issues, is also a Hoover alum. Norton, a lawyer and lobbyist with ties to the energy industry, was a fellow from 1984-1985.[11]

Although Hoover is best known for its right-wing stances on economics and foreign policy, it also hosts a number of well-known social conservatives. One of the most prominent is Dinesh D'Souza, who was been harshly criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for his 2007 book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, which blames U.S. social liberals for causing Muslim radical anger. Another prominent socially conservative fellow is Mary Eberstadt, author of anti-feminist tracts like Home-Alone America(2004), which blames the rise of working motherhood for all manner of social ills.[12]

In addition to subsidizing the research of its many fellows, Hoover also serves as an idea factory through the publication of two journals: Hoover Digest, a quarterly journal edited by former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, and Policy Review, a well-known right-wing journal of ideas edited by Hoover fellow Tod Lindberg that was long associated with the Heritage Foundation but was acquired by Hoover in 2001.

The Hoover Institution's wide-ranging political influence over the last few decades is in contrast to its relatively humble origins. When it was founded in 1919 by future president Herbert Hoover, it served mainly as a collection of scholarly documents related to World War I. By the 1940s, the institution had begun recruiting scholars to use the documents. It only began to assume its present form in the late 1950s. In 1959, Herbert Hoover gave the institution the mission statement that it has kept to this day.

Funding and Stanford Relationship

Although Hoover is hosted and partially funded by Stanford University, its right-wing politics have led to a fair amount of strife with the broader university community. The Nation reported that "during the Reagan presidency, close links between the administration and Hoover prompted Stanford faculty to draft a petition demanding investigation into the relationship between the university and the think tank. ... Faculty also battled the planned construction of the Hoover-backed Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Reagan Center for Public Policy on campus. In 1985 Stanford's trustees, led by chairman Warren Christopher, agreed that the library and a small museum could be built in the foothills overlooking campus but that the Hoover-run policy center would have to go elsewhere."[13]

In 2003, a group of studentsdrafted a petition alleging that the Hoover Institution's mission statement was improperly politically motivated and calling on the institution to reform the mission statement or lose its university funding.[14] And in April 2006, a group of more than 1,000 protestors forced a meeting between Bush and Hoover fellows to be moved to the home of fellow and former secretary of defense George Shultz.[15]

Although Stanford donates about $1 million to Hoover's library and archive annually, the bulk of the institution's funding comes from returns on its endowment and from individual, corporate, and foundational donations. Conservative philanthropic foundations have contributed enormous amounts of money to Hoover in recent decades—nearly $24 million from 1985 to 2005, according to MediaTransparency.org. Donors who have given more than $1 million to Hoover include such right-wing stalwarts as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Lynne and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.[16] Richard Mellon Scaife of the Scaife Foundations and Shelby M.C. Davis of the Davis Foundation also sit on Hoover's Board of Overseers.

Corporations have also been quite generous in their donations to Hoover. ExxonMobil has been a notable contributor, giving $295,000 to the institution between 1998 and 2005.[17] Hoover-based climate changed skeptics like Moore and Berkowitz have been helpful to ExxonMobil and the rest of the energy industry. And the major conservative foundations, many of which were founded by captains of industry aiming to promote free enterprise and keep their fortunes out of government hands, have funded Hoover fellows such as Friedman who were responsible for increasing the influence of free-market economics. One source calls Hoover "one of four leading policy institutions that pulled the nation's economic policy to the right in the early 1980s."[18]

Hoover Institution

Mission Statement

History

CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : STANFORD : New Director for Think Tank

About Herbert Hoover

Hoover War Collection

Members

Honorary fellows

Distinguished fellows

Senior fellows

Senior research fellows

Research fellows

Distinguished visiting fellows

Media Fellows

Directors

Publications

Task Forces

Funding

References

External links

Contents

Giuliani foreign policy team

Education

Organizations

Stated Expertise and Focus of Research

Authorship

Books

Periodical Publications

Resources and articles

References

External articles

Attachments