How Tax-Exempt Foundations Subverted America’s Democracy

A transcript is available at the end of this post.

By Juliet Bonnay
6 October 2021, Updated: 12 November 2022

This is perhaps the most important interview I have watched that sheds light on what has gone on behind closed doors for over a century, leading to the current chaos and destruction we see in America today, and the manipulation of the education system to prepare Americans for Communism. Clearly, it not only shows the eating away of democracy from within, but that the open heart of American society was greedily devoured, leaving the bare bones of fear that were never buried.

G. Edward Griffin’s interview with Norman Dodd, head of research for the 1953 Reece Commission investigating the political activities of tax exempt foundations, gives essential background to understanding how subversive forces work quietly behind the scenes to destroy America. The interview begins with Mr. Dodd’s disturbing experience in the banking industry during the 1929 crash, the cause of which he was asked to investigate, and then leads into his work with the 1953 Reece Commission, what was uncovered, and how the Commission fell apart.

The following quote by Dale Carnegie gives a disturbing visual of what has happened to America:

A forest giant that had stood on the slope of Longs Peak in Colorado for four hundred years surviving numerous storms, lightning strikes, and avalanches, was finally leveled to the ground by an army of beetles so small that “a man could crush them between a forefinger and his thumb.” They did this by eating their way through the bark “to gradually destroy the inner strength of the tree by their tiny but incessant attacks.” [1]

You may be shocked by this. I hear you say indignantly, “But Foundations have done so much good for America!” And I will say that we are about to get a huge wake-up call because what we think is true is often propaganda concocted by those who deliberately set out to deceive us.

What is revealed is that the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are not the philanthropic organizations we believe them to be, for even though they required that “a portion of their assets be dispersed under the appearance of charity or philanthropy,” they designed most of their “gifts to benefit themselves, their business enterprises, or to further their political objectives.” [2]

The truth is that for the past one hundred years or so, the very heart of American democracy, beginning with its political and education system, has been systematically weakened by ‘incessant attacks’ through meticulously calculated design far surpassing what an external military attack could ever hope to achieve.

China unexpectedly falling to the Communists in 1949 was perhaps the first chilling sign that something was seriously wrong, for Congress had approved arms sales to the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-sheck, who had driven the Communists into Northern China and were poised for victory. The New York Times initially saw China’s fall to communism as a “vast tragedy of unforeseeable consequences for the Western World,” but later concluded that “the developments in China represent a startling defeat for the traditional Far-Eastern policy of the United States and an equally startling victory for Soviet Russia.” [3]

Unknown at the time was that the American State Department itself played a decisive hand in China falling to the Communists by holding up arms supplies to Chiang Kai-sheck, and committing other acts of sabotage. This enabled a small well-armed Chinese Communist force to defeat Chiang Kai Sheck’s massive army.

But how did the Communists become so well armed?  And who had a vested interest in a communist takeover of China?

When it was discovered that the Rockefeller Foundation had financed the Institute of Pacific Relations to produce propaganda portraying Mao and Zhou Enlai simply as agrarian reformers rather than communists, alarm bells rang in Congress. In 1952 they authorized a select committee to investigate whether tax-exempt foundations and other tax-exempt organizations in America were being used to support communism. However, the investigation quickly came to a grinding halt with the sudden death of its chairman, Edward E. Cox. Then in 1953 another select committee was formed to carry on this work, chaired by B. Carroll Reece, known as the Reece Committee. Norman Dodd, the Commission’s Director of Research, made the shocking discovery that a prolonged attack against the American Government, its Constitution, institutions, leaders, and its people began with a question in 1908 during a meeting of trustees at the inception of the tax-exempt Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in America:

Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?
The conclusion: no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.

Then another question was asked in 1909, and answered in a similarly alarming way:

How do we involve the United States in a war?
We must control the State Department.
How do we do that?
We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.

Perhaps you are now asking why they wanted to “alter the life of an entire people.” Surprisingly, the answer came from Rowan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation in 1953, who said:

Mr. Dodd…we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.

This was not an answer Mr. Dodd was prepared for. Neither was he prepared for what was written in the Carnegie Endowment’s minutes. Talking of war to bring about permanent changes in people was not something anyone would imagine a philanthropic organization set up for international peace would seriously discuss, let alone conspire to involve the United States in a war by taking over the “diplomatic machinery of the country.”

But in effect, that is what they did, altering the whole course of the country to finally bring America to its knees with this ‘pandemic’ and subject it to the mandates of a new ruling class.

The Carnegie Endowment conspired with the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations to take over education, beginning with changing the way history was taught in schools. George Orwell knew the vital importance of history, for he wrote about the need to destroy it in his dystopian novel, 1984. By rewriting history, or sending it down the “memory hole,” not only does it change the perception of the past, it also changes the foundation upon which the present is built, which stands somewhat awkwardly on an illusion built like a house of cards. However, this illusory present feels unfamiliar to those who feel history in their bones, urging them to seek out the truth. For the rest of the population, the greater the lies that have covered up the truth, the harder it is to face, and many people will cling to the created illusion and defend it at all costs because their mind cannot accommodate the radical change the truth would bring to the world view they are rooted in.

Keeping in mind the Carnegie Endowment’s aim to control the State Department (and by extension America’s foreign policy), and noting what Mr. Gaither said about merging the United States with the Soviet Union (before they turned them into an enemy), consider that Alger Hiss, working in the State Department during WWII, took home secret documents for his wife to type up copies for him to send to Russia, that he played an important part in the 1945 conference at Yalta as President Roosevelt’s diplomatic advisor, that he was an architect of the United Nations (the intended foundation of a one world government), and was director of the Carnegie Endowment from 1946 to 1949, when he was accused of being an “agent of Stalinism” by Whittaker Chambers, and ended up in prison.

But why merge the U.S. with Communist Russia? In Mr. Gaither’s words,

“Communism represents a means of developing what we call a monopoly, that is, an organization of, say, a large-scale industry into an administerable unit.”

In other words it is a secret world government pulling the strings behind the scenes. David Rockefeller admitted as much when he chillingly wrote in Memoirs:

For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. [4]

When his father, John D. Rockefeller, interlocked his empire with the German pharmaceutical giant, I. G. Farben in 1928, they created the “largest and most powerful cartel the world has ever known…[which now] plays a major role in the science and politics of cancer therapy.” [5] This occurred after the Carnegie Endowment and Rockefeller Foundation enlisted Abraham Flexner, famous for the 1910 Flexner Report that pointed out the shortcomings in medical education, to lead the crusade for upgrading America’s medical schools, orientating them more towards lucrative drugs and drug research.

Today we are seeing the unfolding of the subversive actions of this “administerable unit” in the form of Big Pharma as one large-scale industry, which now controls people’s health through allopathic medicine after branding natural and homeopathic medicine as quackery. Now they dictate the terms and conditions of our lives under the guise of emergency ‘pandemic’ rules and regulations – supposedly to “keep us safe.” They have achieved this by paying millions of dollars to lobbyists to ‘guide’ the way governments handle the pandemic in a lockstep manner, which now includes enforcing vaccine mandates.

This is the new “managerial society” at work – a totalitarian “oligarchical collectivism” that will manage all resources, all land, and means of production on earth as per UN Agenda 21. The plan is to take over as the new ruling class which, according to James Burnham, is “a new form of exploitative society.” It is easy to see now that a “managerial society” is clearly what Bill Gates, the Rockefellers, and others have been working towards implementing for decades. In David Rockefeller’s words before he died,

“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

With thousands of people now dying and suffering from debilitating injuries and disabilities after being injected with toxic substances, it is chilling to read Thomas Ferguson’s words as a former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs:

There is a single theme behind all our work – we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…

So was the plan all along to create a pandemic to have a “nice clean method” of reducing the world’s population, while at the same time ushering in a New World Order that George H.W. Bush often spoke about in glowing terms? If you doubt this, consider the following page from the 2012 Rockefeller publication entitled Scenarios of the Future of technology and International Development:

To change the tide of world events it is first essential to learn the truth. However this takes courage and a willingness to collapse the worldview we have held for most of our lives. This is pivotal if we want to reestablish our freedom from tyranny, and set the world on a course to establish peace.

Transcript

ED GRIFFIN: Welcome to The Reality Zone. I’m Ed Griffin. The story we are about to hear represents a missing piece in the puzzle of modern history. We are about to hear a man tell us that the major tax-exempt foundations of America since at least 1945 have been operating to promote a hidden agenda, and that agenda has nothing to do with the surface appearance of charity, good works, or philanthropy. This man will tell you that the real objective has been to influence American educational institutions and to control foreign policy of the federal government. The purpose of this control has been to condition Americans to accept the creation of world government. That government is to be based on the principle of collectivism, which is another way of saying socialism, and it is to be ruled from behind the scenes by those same interests which control the tax-exempt foundations.

Is this a believable scenario? Well, the man who tells this story is none other than Mr. Norman Dodd, who in 1954 was the staff director of the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations, sometimes referred to as the Reece Committee, in recognition of its chairman, Congressman Carol Reece. The interview we are about to hear was conducted by me in 1982. I had no immediate use for the material at that time, but I realized that Mr. Dodd’s story was of great importance, and since he was advanced in age and not in good health, I wanted to capture his recollections on videotape while he was still with us. It was a wise decision, because Mr. Dodd did pass away just a short time afterwards.

In later years there was a resurgence of interest in Mr. Dodd’s story, and we released the videotape to the public in 1991. And so what now follows is the soundtrack taken from the full, unedited interview, broken occasionally only for a tape change or to omit the sound of a passing airplane. It stands on its own as an important piece in the puzzle of modern history.

Mr. Dodd, let’s begin this interview with a brief statement. For the record, please tell us who you are, what is your background and your qualifications to speak on this subject.

NORMAN DODD: Well, Mr. Griffin, as to who I am, I am just, as the name implies, an individual born in New Jersey and educated in private schools, eventually in a school called Andover in Massachusetts and then Yale university. Running through my whole period of being brought up and growing up, I have been an indefatigable reader. I have had one major interest, and that was this country as I was lead to believe it was originally founded. I entered the world of business knowing absolutely nothing about how that world operated, and realized that the only way to find out what that world consisted of would be to become part of it. I then acquired some experience in the manufacturing world and then in the world of international communication and finally chose banking as the field I wished to devote my life to. I was fortunate enough to secure a position in one of the important banks in New York and lived there. I lived through the conditions which led up to what is known as the crash of 1929. I witnessed what was tantamount to the collapse of the structure of the United States as a whole.

Much to my surprise, I was confronted by my superiors in the middle of the panic in which they were immersed. I was confronted with the question: “Norm, what do we do now?” I was thirty at the time and I had no more right to have an answer to that question than the man in the moon. However, I did manage to say to my superiors: “Gentlemen, you take this experience as proof that there’s something you do not know about banking, and you’d better go find out what that something is and act accordingly.” Four days later I was confronted by the same superiors with a statement to the effect that, “Norm, you go find out.” And I really was fool enough to accept that assignment, because it meant that you were going out to search for something, and nobody could tell you what you were looking for, but I felt so strongly on the subject that I consented.

I was relieved of all normal duties inside the bank and two-and-half years later I felt that it was possible to report back to those who had given me this assignment. And so, I rendered such a report; and, as a result of the report I rendered. I was told the following: “Norm, what you’re saying is we should return to sound banking,” and I said, “Yes, in essence, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Whereupon I got my first shock, which was a statement from them to this effect: “We will never see sound banking in the United States again.” They cited chapter and verse to support that statement, and what they cited was as follows: “Since the end of world war one we have been responsible for what they call the institutionalizing of conflicting interests, and they are so prevalent inside this country that they can never be resolved.”

This came to me as an extraordinary shock because the men who made this statement were men who were deemed as the most prominent bankers in the country. The bank of which I was a part, which I’ve spoken of, was a Morgan bank and, coming from men of that caliber, a statement of that kind made a tremendous impression on me. The type of impression that it made on me was such that I wondered if I, as an individual and what they call a junior officer of the bank, could with the same enthusiasm foster the progress and policies of the bank. I spent about a year trying to think this out and came to the conclusion that I would have to resign.

I did resign; and, as a consequence of that, had this experience. When my letter of resignation reached the desk of the president of the bank, he sent for me, and I came to visit with him, and he stated to me: “Norm, I have your letter, but I don’t believe you understand what’s happened in the last 10 days.” And I said, “No, Mr. Cochran, I have no idea what’s happened.” “Well,” he said, “the directors have never been able to get your report to them out of their mind; and, as a result, they have decided that you as an individual must begin at once and you must reorganize this bank in keeping with your own ideas.” He then said, “Now, can I tear up your letter?” Inasmuch as what had been said to me was offering me, at the age of by then 33, about as fine an opportunity for service to the country as I could imagine, I said yes. They said they wished me to begin at once, and I did.

Suddenly, in the span of about six weeks, I was not permitted to do another piece of work and, every time I brought the subject up, I was kind of patted on the back and told, “Stop worrying about it, Norm. Pretty soon you’ll be a vice president, and you’ll have quite a handsome salary and ultimately be able to retire on a very worthwhile pension. In the meantime you can play golf and tennis to your heart’s content on weekends.” Well, Mr. Griffin, I found I couldn’t do it. I spent a year figuratively with my feet on the desk doing nothing and I couldn’t adjust to it so I did resign and, this time, my resignation stuck.

Then I got my second shock, which was the discovery that the doors of every bank in the United States were closed to me, and I never could again get a job, as it were, in the banks. I found myself, for the first time since I graduated from college, out of a job.

From there on I followed various branches of the financial world, ranging from investment counsel to membership of the stock exchange and finally ended as an adviser to a few individuals who had capital funds to look after. In the meantime, my major interest became very specific, which was to endeavor by some means of getting the educational world to actually you might say teach the subject of economics realistically and move it away from the support of various speculative activities that characterize our country. I have had that interest, and you know how, as you generate a specific interest, you find yourself gravitating toward persons with similar interests, and ultimately I found myself in the center of the world of dissatisfaction with the directions that this country was headed. I found myself in contact with many individuals who on their own had done a vast amount of studying and research in areas, which were part of the problem.

ED GRIFFIN: At what point in your career did you become connected with the Reece Committee?

NORMAN DODD: 1953.

ED GRIFFIN: And what was that capacity, sir?

NORMAN DODD: That was in the capacity of what they called Director of Research.

ED GRIFFIN: Can you tell us what the Reece Committee was attempting to do?

NORMAN DODD: Yes, I can tell you. It was operating and carrying out instructions embodied in a resolution passed by the House of Representatives, which was to investigate the activities of foundations as to whether or not these activities could justifiably be labeled un-American without, I might say, defining what they meant by “un-American”. That was the resolution, and the committee had then the task of selecting a counsel, and the counsel in turn had the task of selecting a staff, and he had to have somebody who would direct the work of that staff, and that was what they meant by the Director of Research.

ED GRIFFIN: What were some of the details, the specifics that you told the Committee at that time?

NORMAN DODD: Well, Mr. Griffin, in that report I specifically, number one, defined what, to us, was meant by the phrase, “un-American.” We defined that in our way as being a determination to effect changes in the country by unconstitutional means. We have plenty of constitutional procedures, assuming we wish to effect a change in the form of government and that sort of thing; and, therefore, any effort in that direction which did not avail itself of the procedures which were authorized by the Constitution could be justifiably be called un-American. That was the start of educating them up to that particular point. The next thing was to educate them as to the effect on the country as a whole of the activities of large, endowed foundations over the then-past forty years.

ED GRIFFIN: What was that effect?

NORMAN DODD: That effect was to orient our educational system away from support of the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and implemented in the Constitution; and the task now was the orientation of education away from these briefly stated principles and self-evident truths. That’s what had been the effect of the wealth, which constituted the endowments of those foundations that had been in existence over the largest portion of this span of 50 years, and holding them responsible for this change. What we were able to bring forward, what we uncovered, was the determination of these large endowed foundations, through their trustees, to actually get control over the content of American education.

ED GRIFFIN: There’s quite a bit of publicity given to your conversation with Rowan Gaither. Would you please tell us who he was and what was that conversation you had with him?

NORMAN DODD: Rowan Gaither was, at that time, president of the Ford Foundation. Mr. Gaither had sent for me when I found it convenient to be in New York, asked me to call upon him at his office, which I did. Upon arrival, after a few amenities, Mr. Gaither said: “Mr. Dodd, we’ve asked you to come up here today because we thought that possibly, off the record, you would tell us why the Congress is interested in the activities of foundations such as ourselves?” Before I could think of how I would reply to that statement, Mr. Gaither then went on voluntarily and said:

“Mr. Dodd, all of us who have a hand in the making of policies here have had experience either with the OSS during the war or the European Economic Administration after the war. We’ve had experience operating under directives, and these directives emanate and did emanate from the White House. Now, we still operate under just such directives. Would you like to know what the substance of these directives is?”

I said, “Mr. Gaither, I’d like very much to know,” whereupon he made this statement to me:

Mr. Dodd, we are here to operate in response to similar directives, the substance of which is that we shall use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.

Well, parenthetically, Mr. Griffin, I nearly fell off the chair. I, of course didn’t, but my response to Mr. Gaither then was:

“Well, Mr. Gaither I can now answer your first question. You’ve forced the Congress of the United States to spend $150,000 to find out what you’ve just told me.” I said: “Of course, legally, you’re entitled to make grants for this purpose, but I don’t think you’re entitled to withhold that information from the people of the country to whom you’re indebted for your tax exemption, so why don’t you tell the people of the country what you just told me?”

And his answer was, “We would not think of doing any such thing.”

So then I said, “Well, Mr. Gaither, obviously you’ve forced the Congress to spend this money in order to find out what you’ve just told me.”

ED GRIFFIN: Mr. Dodd, you have spoken before about some interesting things that were discovered by Katherine Casey at the Carnegie Endowment. Can you tell us that story, please?

NORMAN DODD: Yes, I’d be glad to, Mr. Griffin. This experience that you just referred to came about in response to a letter that I had written to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, asking certain questions and gathering certain information. On the arrival of that letter, Dr. Johnson, who was then president of the Carnegie Endowment, telephoned me and said, did I ever come up to New York. I said yes, I did more or less each weekend, and he said, “Well, when you’re next here, will you drop in and see us?” Which I did.

On arrival at the office of the endowment I found myself in the presence of Dr. Joseph Johnson, the president – who was the successor to Alger Hiss – two vice presidents, and their own counsel, a partner in the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. Dr. Johnson said, after again amenities, Mr. Dodd, we have your letter. We can answer all those questions, but it would be a great deal of trouble, and we have a counter suggestion. Our counter suggestion is: If you can spare a member of your staff for two weeks and send that member up to New York, we will give to that member a room in the library and the minute books of this foundation since its inception, and we think that whatever you want to find out or that Congress wants to find out will be obvious from those minutes.

Well, my first reaction was they’d lost their minds. I had a pretty good idea of what those minutes would contain, but I realized that Dr. Johnson had only been in office two years, and the other vice presidents were relatively young men, and counsel seemed to be also a young man, and I guessed that probably they’d never read the minutes themselves. So I said I had somebody; I would accept their offer.

I went back to Washington and I selected a member of my staff who had been a practicing attorney in Washington. She was on my staff to see to it that I didn’t break any congressional procedures or rules, in addition to which she was unsympathetic to the purpose of the investigation. She was level-headed and a very reasonably brilliant, capable lady. Her attitude toward the investigation was: What could possibly be wrong with foundations? They do so much good.

Well, in the face of that sincere conviction of Katherine’s I went out of my way not to prejudice her in any way, but I did explain to her that she couldn’t possibly cover 50 years of written minutes in two weeks, so she would have to do what we call spot reading. I blocked out certain periods of time to concentrate on, and off she went to New York. She came back at the end of two weeks with the following on dictaphone tapes:

We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. In that year, the trustees, meeting for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year in a very learned fashion. The question is: “Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?” And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.

So then, in 1909, they raised the second question and discussed it, namely: “How do we involve the United States in a war?”

Well, I doubt at that time if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. Then, finally, they answered that question as follows:

“We must control the State Department.” That very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? And they answer it by saying: “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.” And, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective.

Then time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I.

At that time they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatched to President Wilson a telegram, cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly.

Finally, of course, the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when World War I broke out.

At that point they came to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, “we must control education in the United States.”

They realize that that’s a pretty big task. It is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that that portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide that the key to success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history.

So they approach four of the then-most prominent teachers of American history in the country – people like Charles and Mary Byrd – and their suggestion to them is: will they alter the manner in which they present their subject? And they got turned down flat. So they then decide that it is necessary for them to do as they say, “build our own stable of historians.”

Then they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say: “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say-so?” And the answer is yes.

So, under that condition, eventually they assembled twenty, and they take this twenty potential teachers of American history to London, and there they’re briefed on what is expected of them when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association.

Toward the end of the 1920’s, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in essence a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is:

The future of this country belongs to collectivism administered with characteristic American efficiency.

That’s the story that ultimately grew out of and, of course, was what could have been presented by the members of this Congressional committee to the congress as a whole for just exactly what it said. They never got to that point. 

ED GRIFFIN: This is the story that emerged from the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment?

NORMAN DODD: That’s right. It was official to that extent.

ED GRIFFIN: Katherine Casey brought all of these back in the form of dictated notes from a verbatim reading of the minutes?

NORMAN DODD: On dictaphone belts.

ED GRIFFIN: Are those in existence today?

NORMAN DODD: I don’t know. If they are, they’re somewhere in the Archives under the control of the Congress, House of Representatives.

ED GRIFFIN: How many people actually heard those, or were they typed up, a transcript made of them?

NORMAN DODD: No.

ED GRIFFIN: How many people actually heard those recordings?

NORMAN DODD: Oh, three maybe. Myself, my top assistant, and Katherine. I might tell you, this experience, as far as its impact on Katherine Casey was concerned, was she never was able to return to her law practice. If it hadn’t been for Carol Reece’s ability to tuck her away into a job in the Federal Trade Commission, I don’t know what would have happened to Katherine. Ultimately, she lost her mind as a result of it. It was a terrible shock. It’s a very rough experience to encounter proof of these kinds.

ED GRIFFIN: Mr. Dodd can you summarize the opposition to the Committee, the Reece Committee and particularly the efforts to sabotaging the Committee?

NORMAN DODD: Well, they began right at the start of the work of an operating staff, Mr. Griffin, and it began on the day in which the Committee met for the purpose of consenting to or confirming my appointment to the position of Director of Research. Thanks to the abstention of the minority members of the committee, that is, the two Democratic members, from voting, technically I was unanimously appointed.

ED GRIFFIN: Wasn’t the White House involved in opposition?

NORMAN DODD: Not at this particular point, sir. Mr. Reece ordered counsel and myself to visit Wayne Hayes. Wayne Hayes was the ranking minority member of the Committee as a Democrat, so we came to him, and I had to go down to Mr. Hayes’s office, which I did. Mr. Hayes greeted us with the flat statement directed primarily to me, which was that:

“I am opposed to this investigation. I regard it as nothing but an effort on the part of Carol Reece to gain a little prominence, so I’ll do everything I can to see that it fails.”

Well, I have a strange personality in that a challenge of that nature interests me. Our counsel withdrew. He went over and sat on the couch in Mr. Reece’s office and pouted, but I sort of took up this statement of Hayes as a challenge and set myself the goal of winning him over to our point of view. I started by noticing on his desk that there was a book, and the book was of the type that – there were many in these days – that would be complaining about the spread of Communism in Hungary, that type of book. This meant to me at least he has read a book, and so I brought up the subject of the spread of the influence of the Soviet world. For two hours, I discussed this with Hayes and finally ended up with his rising from his desk and saying:

“Norm, if you will carry this investigation toward the goal as you have outlined to me, I’ll be your biggest supporter.”

I said: “Mr. Hayes, I can assure you that I will not double-cross you.”

Subsequently Mr. Hayes sent word to me that he was in Bethesda Hospital with an attack of ulcers, but would I come and see him, which I did. He then said: “Norm, the only reason I’ve asked you to come out here is I just want to hear you say again you will not double-cross me.” I gave him that assurance, and that was the basis of our relationship.

Meantime, counsel took the attitude expressed in these words: “Norm, if you want to waste your time with this guy,” as he called him, “you go ahead and do it, but don’t ever ask me to say anything to him under any conditions on any subject.” So, in a sense, that created a context for me to operate in relation to Hayes on my own. As time passed, Hayes offered friendship, which I hesitated to accept because of his vulgarity, and I didn’t want to get mixed up with him socially under any conditions.

Well, that was our relationship for about three months, and then, eventually, I had occasion to add to my staff a top-flight intelligence officer. Both the Republican National Committee and the White House were resorted to, to stop me from continuing this investigation in the directions Carol Reece had personally asked me to do, which was to utilize this investigation, Mr. Griffin, to uncover the fact that this country had been the victim of a conspiracy. That was Mr. Reece’s conviction. I eventually agreed to carry it out. I explained to Mr. Reece that Hayes’s own counsel wouldn’t go in that direction. He gave me permission to disregard their counsel, and I had then to set up an aspect of the investigation outside of our office, more or less secret. The Republican National Committee got wind of what I was doing and they did everything they could to stop me. They appealed to counsel to stop me, and finally they resorted to the White House.

ED GRIFFIN: Was their objection because of what you were doing or because of the fact that you were doing it outside of the official auspices of the Committee?

NORMAN DODD: No, their objection was, as they put it, my devotion to what they called anti-semitism. That was a cooked up idea. In other words, it wasn’t true at all, but anyway, that’s the way they expressed it.

ED GRIFFIN: Why did they do that? How could they say that?

NORMAN DODD: Well, they could say it, Mr. Griffin, but they had to have something in the way of a rationalization of their decision to do everything they could to stop the completion of this investigation in the directions that it was moving,

…which would have been an exposure of this Carnegie Endowment story and the Ford Foundation and the Guggenheim and the Rockefeller Foundation, all working in harmony toward the control of education in the United States.

Well, to secure the help of the White House in the picture, they got the White House to cause the liaison personality between the White House and the hill, a Major Person, to go up to Hayes and try to get him to, as it were, actively oppose what the investigation was engaged in. Hayes very kindly then would listen to this visit from Major Person; then he would call me and say, “Norm, come up to my office. I have a good deal to tell you.” I would go up. He would tell me, “I’ve just had a visit from Major Person, and he wants me to break up this investigation.”

I then said, “Well, what did you do? What did you say to him?”

He said,” I just told him to get the hell out.” He did that three times, and I got pretty proud of him in the sense that he was, as it were, backing me up. We finally embarked upon the hearing at Hayes’s request, because he wanted to get them out of the way before he went abroad for the summer.

ED GRIFFIN: Why were the hearings finally terminated? What happened to the Committee?

NORMAN DODD: What happened to the Committee or the hearings?

ED GRIFFIN: The hearings.

NORMAN DODD: Oh, the hearings were terminated. Carol Reece was up against such a furor with Hayes through the activity of our own counsel. Hayes became convinced that he was being double-crossed and he put on a show in a public hearing room, Mr. Griffin, that was an absolute disgrace. He called Carol Reece publicly every name in the book, and Mr. Reece took this as proof that he couldn’t continue the hearings. He actually invited me to accompany him when he went down to Hayes’s office and, in my presence with tears rolling down his face, Hayes apologized to Carol Reece for what he had done and his conduct, and apologized to me. I thought that would be enough and that Carol would resume, but he never did.

ED GRIFFIN: The charge of anti-semitism is intriguing. What was the basis of that charge? Was there a basis for it at all?

NORMAN DODD: The basis of what the Republican National Committee used was that the intelligence officer I’d taken on my staff when I oriented this investigation to the exposure and proof of a conspiracy was known to have a book, and the book was deemed to be anti-semitic. This was childish, but this was the second in command of the Republican National Committee, and he told me I’d have to dismiss this person from my staff.

ED GRIFFIN: Who was that person?

NORMAN DODD: A Colonel Lee Lelane.

ED GRIFFIN: And what was his book? Do you recall?

NORMAN DODD: The book they referred to was called Waters Flowing Eastward, which was a castigation of the Jewish influence in the world.

ED GRIFFIN: What were some of the other charges made by Mr. Hayes against Mr. Reece?

NORMAN DODD: Just that Mr. Reece was utilizing this investigation for his own prominence inside the House of Representatives. That was the only charge that Hayes could think of.

ED GRIFFIN: How would you describe the motivation of the people who created the foundations, the big foundations, in the very beginning? What was their motivation?

NORMAN DODD: Their motivation? Well, let’s take Mr. Carnegie as an example. He has publicly declared that his steadfast interest was to counteract the departure of the colonies from Great Britain. He was devoted to just putting the pieces back together again.

ED GRIFFIN: Would that have required the collectivism that they were dedicated to?

NORMAN DODD: No, no, no. These policies, the foundations’ allegiance to these un-American concepts, are all traceable to the transfer of the funds into the hands of trustees, Mr. Griffin. It’s not the men who had a hand in the creation of the wealth that led to the endowment for what we would call public purposes.

ED GRIFFIN: It’s a subversion of the original intent, then?

NORMAN DODD: Oh, yes, completely, and that’s how it got into the world traditionally of bankers and lawyers.

ED GRIFFIN: How do you see that the purpose and direction of the major foundations has changed over the years to the present? What is it today?

NORMAN DODD: Oh, it’s a hundred percent behind meeting the cost of education such as it is presented through the schools and colleges of the United States on the subject of our history as proving our original ideas to be no longer practicable. The future belongs to collectivistic concepts, and there’s just no disagreement on that.

ED GRIFFIN: Why do the foundations generously support Communist causes in the United States?

NORMAN DODD: Well, because to them, Communism represents a means of developing what we call a monopoly, that is, an organization of, say, a large-scale industry into an administerable unit.

ED GRIFFIN: Do they think that they will be the ones to benefit?

NORMAN DODD: They will be the beneficiaries of it, yes.

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References

[1] Dale Carnegie, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

[2] G. Edward Griffin, p. 249, World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B17, Third Edition, (2011) Dauphin Publications

[3] Stone, Oliver and Kuznick, Peter, The Untold History of the United States (2013) Ebury Press, UK

[4] David Rockefeller (2002), Memoirs, p. 405

[5] G. Edward Griffin, p. 246, World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B17, Third Edition, (2011) Dauphin Publications

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