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All you have to do is set up a group of non-governmental organizations to begin grooming future leaders like Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock in Germany. You set up something like the World Economic Foundation that appoints leaders like presumably the George Soros Foundation. And you’ll get people that look like they’re very smart but also very corruptible and basically who want a really good greedy life.

In the early 1970s the Catholic Church had sent me around the country. They were one of my first backers, for various reasons. I had gone to New Mexico and had a plan for state and local finances. And a man came up to me afterwards and said, “I’ve never heard a banker talk like that. That’s wonderful. Will you come to the Ford Foundation? I want to meet you next week. Let’s have lunch.”

He explained that he worked with the CIA and the Ford Foundation basically was a front for the CIA to recruit people. So I went and met with him and I found it was quite cool. I found that he was quite cool. I found that his demeanor had suddenly changed.

This was early in the 1970s, before the Carter election by about five years. He began by trying to impress me, and he said, “We’re trying to create future presidents of the United States. When I first met you I thought that you could be material. But we decided that a southern governor is basically the kind of person that fits. Somebody who’s progressive. Somebody who can sort of not be an anti-Black racist, but somebody who, being southern, has all of the ways of thinking that a southerner has.”

Today we would call that neoliberal, basically. Non-socialist.

He said that he had been brought up by Malcolm Moos who had written the part of the (unintelligible) Eisenhower farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex. And so of course that’s what we’re doing, we’re all here [at the Ford Foundation] to support the military-industrial complex.

And I could see that I was not going to have any future with the Ford Foundation and it was obvious to me that he’d gone to the FBI and said, “Look I think I got someone here, could you give me his file?” and then he read the file on me and said, “Uh oh.”

So his advice to me was that if I wanted, since I was at a PhD in economics, that if I wanted to rise in economics I should attach myself to some prize winner — a Nobel Prize winner ideally — it was just beginning to be given — and try to just jump up and find a backer among the prize winners.

I realized that, wait a minute, the Nobel Prize is going to be given to people who — what we know now is neoliberalism, in the Chicago School, the one thing that I don’t want to do is take this guy’s advice, and indeed the only Nobel Prize winner that I ever was friendly with was the Swedish prize winner of the second Nobel Prize who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, [Gunnar Myrdal].

He invited me to come and work in Sweden and be his successor, but it turned out that almost all the Swedes in that group were mainly into disarmament and tended to fall asleep in an alcoholic daze at the end of each meal, so I never did follow him up there.