Founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, based on
the campus of Stanford University, 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 conservative figures involved in Republican
administrations, including the George W. Bush administration, which employed several Hoover scholars.
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 (Associated Press,
September 8, 2007).
Another major figure of the Iraq War, former U.S. Central Command chief John Abizaid, has also found
a home at Hoover. Past Hoover fellows, including notably Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, who were tagged to serve in the Bush administration, include Stephen Krasner at the State
Department and John B. Taylor at 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.
Hoover became an ideas factory for George W. Bush before he was 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. But a few analysts looked beyond the rhetoric to take a closer look at
the advisers who provided the intellectual foundation of his campaign, and in the process saw signs
that Bush was not the post-ideological moderate he appeared to be. The Christian Science Monitor noted
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."
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" (Christian Science Monitor, July 2, 1999).
Hoover is particularly influential in its advocacy of free-market economics and a hawkish foreign
policy. 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 author 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 (University of Denver press release, December 29, 2000).
On foreign policy issues, 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. At the beginning of the
Iraq War in 2003, eight Hoover fellows (including Becker, Gingrich, Allen, Pete Wilson, and Martin Anderson)
sat on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Department think tank that was once chaired by Richard
Perle (The Nation, March 28, 2003). In addition to policymakers like Shultz, Rice, and
Rumsfeld, Hoover fellows also include such hawkish intellectuals as historian Niall Ferguson, classicist
Victor Davis Hanson, and historian and staunch Cold Warrior Robert Conquest. There is no sign that
the think tank's foreign policy influence is waning, as any future Republican administration would
likely be well-stocked with Hoover alumni; Rudy Giuliani's chief foreign policy adviser, for instance,
is the Hoover fellow and Iraq hawk Charles Hill (Harper's,
August 27, 2007).
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 (National Review, November 30, 2004).
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 (Policy Review website).
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, but it still had not become a think tank in its
present sense (see the Hoover Institution website).
The think tank began to assume its present form in the late 1950s. In 1959, Herbert Hoover gave the
institution a mission statement, which it keeps to this day:
"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" (Hoover
Institution website, emphasis in original).
In 1960, Herbert Hoover picked a young right-wing economist named W. Glenn Campbell to serve as director,
a position he kept until 1989. Campbell built the institution into a major player, increasing its endowment
from $2 million to $125 million and luring high-profile scholars like Friedman after they had retired
from other institutions. The Hoover Institution also gained influence because of Campbell's close relationship
with California governor and future president Ronald Reagan. "When [Reagan] became president,
we had a bonanza," said fellow Melvyn Krauss, and the Reagan administration was quickly stocked
with Hoover fellows (Stanford Report, November 28, 2001).
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" (Nation, March
28, 2003).
Hoover's ties to the George W. Bush administration have led to renewed strife with the university.
In 2003, a group of students drafted 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 (Nation, March 28, 2003). 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 (Stanford Daily, April 21, 2006).
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 (Nation, March 28, 2003). 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.
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 (ExxonSecrets.org). 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" (MediaTransparency.org).
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Contact Information
Hoover Institution
434 Galvez Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Phone: (650) 723-1754
Fax: (650) 723-1687
Email: horaney@hoover.stanford.edu
Web: www.hoover.org
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