Gloria Steinem Dead at 92
Gloria Steinem, the most recognizable face of American second-wave feminism and founder of Ms. magazine, died Wednesday at 92. Tributes poured in from across the political establishment. Largely absent from most is the most damning chapter of her notorious career.
CIA Involvement
From 1958 until 1962, Steinem worked for the Independent Research Service, an organization exposed in 1967 by Ramparts magazine as a front funded by the CIA’s International Organization Division. (She also served on its board in 1968 and 1969.)
While employed, she organizing American students to attend Soviet-aligned World Youth Festivals, reported on foreign attendees, and distributed literature. When The New York Times confronted her in 1967, Steinem defended herself, telling the paper: “In my experience, the Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.” She added, “Far from being shocked by this involvement, I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the Festival.”
Steinem later went on to found the Ms. Foundation, which received substantial funding from the Ford Foundation, an organization run by former National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
McGeorge Bundy
Under Bundy’s direction, the Ford Foundation pursued a divide-and-conquer policy in postwar America by pitting different groups against each other. Bundy personally directed the financing of left-wing university courses to radicalize students via racial, homosexual, and women’s studies.
Bundy stood at the intersection of America’s foreign-policy, intelligence, and NGO establishments. He attended famous CIA recruiting ground Yale University. After World War II, he joined the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as a political analyst, serving there in the late 1940s. His work on European affairs placed him in a circle that included prominent foreign-policy figures and future intelligence officials. The Ford Foundation’s archival biography confirms his CFR position before his rise at Harvard University and subsequent tenure as national security advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
In the White House, he dealt directly with CIA leadership and participated in the administration of covert operations. His position made him one of the principal civilian officials supervising the national security apparatus.
In 1966, Bundy left the White House to become president of the Ford Foundation, a position he held until 1979. Significantly, he negotiated an arrangement allowing him to remain available for special assignments from President Johnson.
Contributing to Identity Politics
Thus, Bundy’s career illustrates the close movement of personnel among the CFR, academia, government, intelligence, and pseudo-philanthropic foundations that characterized the postwar American establishment. In the book The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy, Edward H. Berman observes, “The conceptualization of these foundation educational ventures coincided with the demise of the colonial empires of Britain, France, and the Netherlands after 1945.”
The upshot is that Gloria Steinem spent her formative organizing years on the CIA’s payroll, never denied it, and later built an institution funded by the same foundation network that financed the “identity politics” academic programs that have been dividing the country for decades.
Born March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, she married late in life to David Bale, a British-born businessman, environmentalist, and animal-rights activist, and the father of actor Christian Bale. After spending most of her life in the upper reaches of power and celebrity, she passed away September 2, at her home in New York City.
