AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS: An Investigative History.

• Author: Johnston, David Cay
• Position: Review

AMERICAN FOUNDATIONS: An Investigative History by Mark Dowie MIT Press, $29.95

AMONG FOUNDATION EXECUTIVES, there is an old saying that once hired you have had your last bad meal and your last honest compliment. Mark Dowie's latest book, American Foundations: An Investigative History, brings the promise of a thoughtful, provocative analysis of the privileged world of private foundations from the point of view of grantseeking nonprofits. Since the only justification for private foundations is the existence of grantseekers, it is an engaging premise.

Dowie begins solidly with a sweeping overview of the foundation world, including its strengths (pioneering medical and agricultural research) and its weaknesses (flitting from issue to issue with all the commitment to anything meaningful of a pack of billionaire playboys).

That is as good as it gets. Despite a list of acknowledgments that indicates that he spoke with informed insiders, Dowie never cracks the world of philanthropy. Instead, he quickly falls into the arms of his leftist ideology, promoting his idea of what foundations should do. He doesn't trust readers to come to their conclusions based on marshalling the facts. And he apparently never talked to people who play key roles in some of the case histories he presents.

Dowie gives us a chapter on the Energy Foundation, which he describes as "the largest of a new breed of grantmaker known as a passthrough foundation." Yet he never explores the significance of passthrough foundations or examines any other examples. And we never find out just why the Energy Foundation seems to have veered away from initial promises to change the world through conservation and renewable energy and became an enforcer of the status quo. Dowie spoke to Hal Harvey, the foundation's executive director, but we never hear Harvey's side of the story.

Dowie asserts that we have never had an "investigative history" of foundations. This is one of the many signs that this is not Dowie's best work. Over the years, there have been two fine books exposing the insular, self-important world of philanthropy written by Waldemar Nielsen, whom Dowie quotes approvingly. Nielsen's The Big Foundations and The Golden Donors are classics of flint-eyed reporting on the shenanigans that occur around too many large pools of nearly unaccountable money. And critics of philanthropy, from the very-knowledgeable-but-out-of-touch organizers on the left to the in-touch-but-know-nothing...