Alexander Heard at the Ford Foundation

by Frank Sutton

When Mac Bundy told in later years how the trustees appointed him in 1966 he liked to say that they made Jay Stratton chairman of the board at the same time to keep an eye on what he might do. When Jay Stratton came to the 70 year limit for trustees in 1971, there was on the board another university head to succeed him as chairman and keep the watch on our lively president. Alexander Heard, chancellor of Vanderbilt University , had been on the board since 1967, not long after Bundy himself came. Like Bundy, he was a political scientist, indeed a very distinguished one, having done classic studies of Southern politics with the legendary V.O. Key, and probed deeply on money in politics. Both were veterans in academic administration , and Heard outlasted Bundy at the Foundation .

Heard and Bundy not only shared much experience of American political life. They had common liberal sympathies and interests at a time when the New Left was emerging among the youth of this country, and indeed across the world, to test the sympathies and flexibiity of older liberals. Alex Heard had the distinction of guiding Vanderbilt safely through years that brought much worse troubles to other universities and he was sought after by the White House for his counsel on controlling the campuses in that time. His sober judgments and managerial talents were evident to anyone who worked under his eye at the Foundation. It wasn't immediately obvious to those of us fully occupied with international matters where Alex's sensitive understanding of the new and refractory generation of youth at home came from. Surely, Fred Friendly , his good friend and regular tennis partner, could better answer this question and one wishes Fred were still available to do so. But clearly one answer is that Alex assiduously studied what the youths of his time were reading, hearing and looking at. He kept up with this hot stuff better than most of us.

Long ago, back in the 1950s, Dwight McDonald found the Ford Foundation a rather stiff organization speaking a language he called "foundationese". But he also heard there a first name familiarity between staff and trustees, something that continued into our more relaxed later years. Alex Heard's time on the board of trustees was certainly a time of much trouble, from the hostility to the Foundation that brought on the 1969 tax act, the turbulent domestic and international changes of the late 1960s going on into the 1970s, with the painful contractions the stagflation of the 1970s forced on us. There is much more to be told about his astute steering of the Foundation through those years than can be ventured here. But there was also a great deal of fun too, when the Heards partied and danced with us, and even went off as far as India and let the chairman's face be painted by exuberant locals. Alex Heard was up for all of this, and we should have come through those years less happily and well without him.