"The Ford Foundation," Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1956, "is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some." Established in Michigan in 1936 by Edsel Ford, the foundation formally separated itself from Ford family control in 1950. (Over the past year, Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, has waged a bare-knuckled offensive to pressure Ford to increase its spending in the state where it was chartered.) In 1955 the foundation made a decision to sell 10 million shares of auto company stock, for which it received $641 million, the bulk of which it promptly distributed to 600 colleges and universities, 3,500 nonprofit hospitals and 44 medical schools. In the 1950s and early '60s Ford provided substantial funding for burgeoning area studies research at leading universities and for ambitious international projects involving population control and agricultural production in the developing world. Ford had close ties to the government in those years; according to The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, Ford collaborated with the CIA.

Amid the political turbulence of the 1960s and '70s, Ford, under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, deepened its commitment to human rights, poverty reduction and racial justice. It gave major grants to the NAACP and helped to establish the Public Broadcasting Service, the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Urban Institute, the Native American Rights Fund and public-interest law centers in the United States, to name just a few of its grantees from that heady era. Today, from its headquarters on East 43rd Street, which rises from a lush atrium and is decorated with works by Picasso and Chagall, Ford, the second-largest foundation in the United States, with assets of $11.6 billion, remains ambitious in its grant-making: In 2004 it gave away nearly $500 million to 2,000 grantees, ranging from the Steve Biko Foundation of South Africa ($150,000 for activities commemorating the life and work of Biko) to the Navsarjan Trust of India ($200,000 to support the human rights of Dalits in the violence-prone state of Gujarat) and the Apollo Theater Foundation of Harlem ($250,000 to help restore the historic theater).

Right-wing assaults have been a recurring motif in Ford's history. Westbrook Pegler, the midcentury syndicated columnist, dubbed Ford a "front for dangerous communists," and in the early 1950s Ford was the subject of two separate Congressional investigations into subversive and Communist-influenced activity among foundations.

In 1969 critics of the foundation sector exacted their revenge. In the tumultuous days after Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Bundy had arranged fellowships totaling $131,000 for eight members of Kennedy's staff. The following year, the House Ways and Means Committee opened hearings on the activities of American foundations, and Bundy was a star witness. He vigorously defended Ford and the entire foundation sector, but his arrogance infuriated his Congressional antagonists, who went on to enact legislation forcing all private foundations to pay a 4 percent excise tax on net annual investment income and to distribute 6 percent of their assets each year. The 1969 legislation was viewed as draconian by a foundation sector that--then as now--opposed any type of government oversight. Indeed, many foundation leaders held Bundy personally responsible for what they saw as a debacle; but other observers viewed the 1969 legislation as an essential step toward public accountability.

Ford watchers insist that the trauma of 1969 remains, to this day, embedded in the DNA of top Ford executives. (Berresford began her career at Ford in 1970, when she was 27, and worked her way to the top.) "Ford lives with the legacy that Bundy's arrogance cost the field," says Emmett Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation and a leading figure in the philanthropic sector. Meanwhile, prominent conservatives maintained a keen interest in the foundation. "The Ford Foundation," presidential aide Patrick Buchanan wrote in a memo to Richard Nixon in 1972, "has become the Exchequer and Command Post for the entire American Left." Buchanan had fantasies of his own. Attempts to expose Ford's ties to liberal organizations might well, he suggested to Nixon, "produce a cornucopia of Ford funds for Republican and Conservative causes--to spare Ford from being taken apart by the Congress at some future tax reform hearings."

Historically, criticism of foundations has not been the exclusive province of the right. The principal critic of the sector in the 1960s, Representative Wright Patman of Texas, was a Democrat. Likewise, in 2003 Ford's primary antagonist was Jerrold Nadler, a stalwart progressive who is also a powerful supporter of Israel. In a recent interview Nadler noted that antifoundation sentiment was rising within the Senate Finance Committee in 2003, and especially among Grassley and Santorum. To some extent, that sentiment flowed from newspaper reports about lavish salaries and perks for foundation executives. Black's series thrust the foundation sector under a harsh glare once again. In Nadler's words, a "well-orchestrated campaign to destroy the sector...a Republican jihad" was gathering force, and it became his duty to discipline the Ford Foundation in order to save it. "My principal concern," Nadler says, "was with the anti-Semitism that was being tolerated by some of these nonprofits on the left. And I didn't want this to be used as a weapon with which to destroy very essential institutions like the Ford Foundation." (Nadler boasts that his maneuvering was successful: Santorum and Grassley never held the promised hearings because "we cut the ground out from under them.") Some foundation experts contend that Nadler overstates the extent to which the sector was under siege by Republicans in 2003 and that he conflates "destruction" with regulation. Says Pablo Eisenberg, "I never heard anything about any 'jihad,' or that they had a vengeance against foundations."

Nadler's office worked closely with Ford to draft the new grant language. Berresford declined to elaborate on the specific ways the new language was formulated, and the full extent to which outside parties contributed to the final text. But it was clearly a collaborative effort. Says Nadler: "It was a back-and-forth negotiation between my office and Ford and some of the Jewish groups." In late 2003 the Forward named the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League as groups that were deeply involved in the Ford negotiations. Berresford insists that the grant language was "not forced on us in any way, shape, or form."

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