The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(T-Z)/Whitney family.md at 706d8820a2df7ee175df7395cfabc7c1916e51ae - disinfozone/The_Info_Web

vault backup: 2026-10-27 00:25:03

2026-10-27 00:25:03 -04:00

52 KiB

Raw Blame History

William Collins Whitney

William Collins Whitney was born in Conway, Massachusetts on July 5, 1841, the son of James Scollay Whitney, a Democratic leader in Massachusetts and superintendent of the United States Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts. He entered Yale in the class of 1863, took a course at Harvard Law School, read law in the office of Abraham R. Lawrence and began practice in New York City in 1865 with his classmate Henry Farnam Dimock, who married his sister. In 1871 he helped organize the Young Men's Democratic Club, which took part in the movement that overthrew the Tweed Ring. He was appointed Counsel to the Corporation of the City of New York on August 9, 1875, was twice reappointed and resigned on November 6, 1882. At the 1884 Democratic convention in Chicago he exerted what the Yale record calls a powerful influence for Cleveland.³

Secretary of the Navy

Whitney practiced law until March 1885, when he became Secretary of the Navy, and he held the post until the close of Cleveland's administration in 1889. Yale University gave him an LL.D. in 1888.³ His first annual report, dated December 1885, argues that the department's bureau system left no one with a duty to deliberate: the Secretary was a civilian with a staff of one stenographer, one clerk and three messengers, and the department's decisions, among them the rebuilding of the USS Omaha for $572,000, had no identifiable author. He recommended a board of naval officers and experts to advise the Secretary, as the French and German navies had, and an Assistant Secretary of the Navy.⁴

The report for 1887, dated December 6, 1887, states that the country lacked factories for steel gun forgings, for armor and for secondary batteries, and that all three were then being built under contracts with the department. It says that "it was a fatal mistake for this country to be dependent upon any other nation for its implements of war."⁵ The department had advertised in the summer of 1886 for armor and gun steel of domestic manufacture, allowed about seven months for bids and opened them on March 22, 1887. The result was a contract with the Bethlehem Iron Company, under which a plant for armor and gun steel was being erected at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.⁵ The report for 1888 gives June 1, 1887 as the date of the contracts and describes them as the first important step toward a navy modern in character.⁶

The Yale record credits his tenure with improvements in steel manufacture that made it possible for the first time to equip American war vessels fully with an armament produced at home.³

The street railways and the Whitney Group

After 1889 Whitney turned to finance. The Yale record says he developed the Metropolitan Street Railway from a single company through reorganization and consolidation, that it bought out its only rival and that it was in turn merged into the Interurban Street Railway Company. It adds that for several years he held no visible office or connection with the system, yet controlled its operations and secured the results he sought through others, and that his judgment in selecting men to carry out his plans was unerring. He retired from active business in 1902. He was a trustee of the Consolidated Gas Company and a director of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, the Metropolitan Steamship Company, the New York Loan and Investment Company, the Manufacturing Investment Company, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, the Guggenheim Exploration Company and the Cuba Company, and he held shares in several local banks. He died at his New York home on February 2, 1904.³ Sutton wrote that a cluster of capitalists known as "the Whitney Group" were heavily criticized in several books, and that the group's New York street railway franchises generated enormous profits.⁷

The railway system went into receivership three and a half years after his death. The New-York Tribune of September 26, 1907 reported that Adrian H. Joline and Douglas Robinson had been named receivers of the New York City Railway Company, the lessee of the Metropolitan Street Railway, which had guaranteed a 7 percent dividend to Metropolitan stockholders. The paper called the receivership a "friendly proceeding" and wrote that a receivership might otherwise have been precipitated by interests "distinctly unfriendly to the Ryan-Belmont control." It adds that Judge Emile Henry Lacombe, who appointed the receivers, had been an assistant corporation counsel while Whitney was Corporation Counsel, and had been named a federal judge during Whitney's term in Cleveland's cabinet.⁸

On October 13, 1869, Whitney married Flora Payne, daughter of Henry B. Payne, a United States senator from Ohio, and sister of his classmate Oliver Hazard Payne. They had two sons, who graduated from Yale in 1894 and 1898, and three daughters.³

The Supreme Court's 1911 opinion in the government's suit against the American Tobacco Company states that before the merger the Consolidated Tobacco Company had a share capital of $40,000,000, a majority of which was "held by J. B. Duke, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, Anthony N. Brady, Peter A. B. Widener, and Oliver H. Payne."⁹

Oliver Hazard Payne and the Standard Oil treasurership

Oliver Hazard Payne was born in Cleveland, Ohio on July 21, 1839, the son of Henry B. Payne, who served in the Ohio Senate, in the United States Congress and as a United States senator from 1885 to 1891. He left the Yale class of 1863 in October 1861 to accept a commission in the 124th Ohio Infantry, rose to colonel and was brevetted brigadier general on March 13, 1865. The Yale Corporation voted him a B.A. in 1878, and he was enrolled in the class of 1863 from that date. After the war he entered the oil refining business in Cleveland with James B. Clark and John Huntington. The business was absorbed by the Standard Oil Company, and Payne served as its treasurer until 1884, when he moved to New York City and joined its board.¹⁰

The decree in the government's suit, as set out in the Supreme Court's 1911 opinion, names "Oliver H. Payne" among the seven individual defendants who joined the combination, together with John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, Henry H. Rogers, Henry M. Flagler, John D. Archbold and Charles M. Pratt.¹¹ The opinion places the trust agreement of 1882, which vested the stock of forty corporations in nine trustees, in the second of three periods of the alleged combination, and it lists "O. H. Payne" among the individual holders of stock exchanged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in 1899.¹²

His directorships included the American Tobacco Company, the Virginia and Southeastern Railway Company, the Coal Creek Mining and Manufacturing Company and the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. His largest gifts went to the Cornell Medical School, and in 1887 he endowed the Loomis Laboratory. Payne's will left one million dollars each to Yale, the New York Public Library and Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland. He spent each summer from 1898 to 1914 in Europe on his steam yacht Aphrodite, and he died in New York City on June 27, 1917. The Yale record names his nephews as Harry Payne Whitney, Payne Whitney and Henry Payne Bingham.¹⁰

Sutton wrote that "The Paynes are not in The Order," and that adding the Payne piece of the Standard Oil fortune made Whitney's fortune "that much larger."¹³

Skull and Bones membership

Sutton's index of the Order by class year lists eight Whitneys: Emerson Cogswell Whitney (1851), Edward Payson Whitney (1854), James Lyman Whitney (1855), William Collins Whitney (1863), Edward Baldwin Whitney (1878), Joseph Ernest Whitney (1882), Payne Whitney (1894) and Harry Payne Whitney (1898), the years in reverse of those in Sutton's text and in the Yale records.¹⁴ Sutton's text names W.C. Whitney and his two sons as "the core of Whitney influence" in the society, and he ties that influence to the Harriman family and to intermarriage with the Paynes and the Vanderbilts.¹⁵

Sutton's chart table and his index of members by class year both print Payne Whitney as 1894 and Harry Payne Whitney as 1898, reversing the years given in his text and in the Yale records. His text gives Harry Payne ('94) and Payne Whitney ('98), which matches the Yale records.³¹⁶ The Yale Obituary Record for Payne Whitney lists "Skull and Bones" among his undergraduate activities.²

A June 1907 advertisement of the Knickerbocker Trust Company lists Charles T. Barney, A. H. Barney, Henry F. Dimock and Payne Whitney among its directors.¹⁷ Charles Tracy Barney, the company's deposed president, shot himself at his home on November 14, 1907; he had married Lilly Whitney, a sister of William C. Whitney.¹⁸

Payne Whitney

Payne Whitney was born in New York City on March 20, 1876. He rowed on the Yale crews and captained the Senior crew, took an LL.B. at Harvard Law School in 1901 and was a director and member of the executive board of the Great Northern Paper Company from 1903 to 1927. The Yale record also lists him as director and vice-president of the Northern Finance Corporation from 1911 and of the Whitney Realty Company from 1910, a trustee of the United States Trust Company from 1905 and of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1922, a director of the First National Bank of New York from 1924, a former director of the Northern Pacific Railroad and chairman of the executive committee of the Vanadium Corporation of America from 1923. In 1923 he gave $2,000,000 to the New York Public Library, of which he had been a trustee since 1915.²

On February 6, 1902, in Washington, he married Helen Hay Whitney, daughter of John Hay, then Secretary of State. Their children were Joan, who married Charles S. Payson of the Yale class of 1921, and John Hay Whitney, of the class of 1926, then a student at the University of Oxford. Payne Whitney died in Manhasset, New York, on May 25, 1927. The Yale record lists his surviving siblings as Harry Payne Whitney and a sister, the wife of Leonard Knight Elmhirst of Yorkshire, England.²

Helen Hay's sister Alice Hay (1880-1960), also a daughter of John Hay, married Wadsworth family at Newbury, New Hampshire, on September 30, 1902. Their daughter Evelyn Wadsworth (1903-1972) married the Missouri politician Stuart Symington in 1924, and their son James Jeremiah Wadsworth (1905-1984) served as United States Representative to the United Nations.¹⁹

The Weill Cornell Medicine history of the medical center states that Payne Whitney's will provided $12,400,000 for the New York Hospital, $6,200,000 for the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic and $2,800,000 for the medical college, which was then Cornell University Medical College. The same history records that the college's earlier benefactor was his uncle, Oliver Hazard Payne, who donated $4,000,000 to the college.²⁰

In June 1916 Payne Whitney formed the Yale Aviation Corps. A Yale Obituary Record entry for a member of the corps says it was "formed by Payne Whitney, '98, in June, 1916," and that Aerial Coast Patrol Unit No. 1 was organized by F. Trubee Davison of the class of 1918, a unit afterward known as the Huntington Unit.²¹

Payne Whitney died on May 25, 1927 near the indoor tennis court at his Manhasset home. The Yale record gives the cause as acute indigestion, and the New York Times of May 26, 1927 gave the same cause and added that the physician found the heart badly dilated; the Weill Cornell Medicine history says he "died suddenly of a heart attack in May 1927."²² The Times reported that the Greentree Stable was managed by Mrs. Whitney, that he had recently taken up breeding and had been elected to the Board of Stewards of the Jockey Club, and that in 1924 and 1925 his income tax payments of $2,041,951 and $1,676,626 made him the third and fifth largest individual taxpayers in the country.²²

The New York appraisal of his estate was reported in November 1928. The Washington Daily News headed its account "Payne Whitney Left Biggest Estate Ever Appraised in U.S.," gave the appraised net value as $178,893,655 and the expected death tax as about $20,000,000, of which about $15,600,000 would go to New York State. The larger part of the estate was a half interest in the Northern Finance Corporation, a holding company for securities, which the paper said grew from a fund set aside by "his uncle, Col. Oliver H. Payne."²³ The New York Times of the same date wrote that the fund of many millions was set aside for Payne Whitney and others by Colonel Payne, "long a director of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey," when he wished to be relieved of the care of Standard Oil subsidiaries and other stocks, that Whitney's half interest of 50,000 shares was appraised at $125,521,612, and that the corporation's holdings included $34,533,358 of Standard Oil of New Jersey and $23,961,575 of British-American Tobacco.²⁴

The Times gave the gross estate as $194,328,514 and called it "the largest estate ever appraised in this country, the appraisal being nearly twice that of the highest previously recorded."²⁴ An accounting filed in the Surrogate's Court in August 1931 gave a net estate of $200,973,154.41 and a total distributed to legatees of $239,301,017.04. Of the residuary estate of $197,681,235.19, Helen Hay Whitney received $63,102,816, and Joan Whitney Payson and John Hay Whitney received equal shares.²⁵

Harry Payne Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the Whitney Museum

Harry Payne Whitney, Yale 1894, was born in New York on April 29, 1872. He married the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1896, according to Sutton, who wrote that the Whitney-Payne fortune then "joined some Vanderbilt money," which he says was channeled into the Guaranty Trust Company and the J. P. Morgan & Co. and Guggenheim interests.²⁶ He kept a racing stable whose horses won the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby and were the leading money winners of 1924, and he was a member of the American polo team that brought the international cup back from England in 1909. He died of pneumonia at his Fifth Avenue home on October 26, 1930, at 58. The United Press reported that he was the son of the Secretary of the Navy in Cleveland's cabinet and that he had inherited from his father a fortune estimated at $200,000,000.²⁷

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became the leading patron of American art from 1907 until her death in 1942, established the Whitney Studio Club in Greenwich Village in 1914, and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art declined the gift of her collection of more than five hundred works. The museum opened in 1931 on West Eighth Street.²⁸

Their son Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Yale 1922, is listed in the 1927 Yale record as a nephew of Payne Whitney.² Sutton writes that Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney married Marie Norton, and that after their divorce she married W. Averell Harriman.²⁶ The Library of Congress finding aid for the Harriman papers lists the marriage in 1930 to Marie Norton Whitney, who died in 1970.²⁹

Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney in the Truman administration

The Harry S. Truman Library photograph record for a meeting of the National Security Council on August 19, 1948 names Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, among those at the table: he sits with Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall, Executive Secretary Sidney Souers, National Security Resources Board Chairman Arthur M. Hill, Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Secretary of State George Marshall, President Truman and Under Secretary of the Navy W. John Kenney.³⁰ The State Department's volume of Foreign Relations documents on intelligence for 1945 to 1950 lists "Whitney, C. V., Assistant Secretary of the Air Force."³¹ A second Truman Library record, dated March 5, 1950, captions him as Acting Secretary of Commerce at the swearing-in of the director of the Census Bureau, and the library's other photographs describe him as Under Secretary of Commerce.³²

Frances Stonor Saunders wrote in Who Paid the Piper? that "as a trustee, Cornelius allowed the Whitney Trust to be used as a CIA conduit."³³

Dorothy Payne Whitney and the Straight line

The 1927 Yale record for Payne Whitney lists a sister, the wife of Leonard K. Elmhirst, and that sister is Dorothy Payne Whitney.² She had married Willard Straight in 1911, and the couple founded The New Republic in 1914 with Herbert Croly.³⁴ Sutton wrote that The Nation and the New Republic on the left "were financed by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney (The Order) funds."³⁵ An Federal Bureau of Investigation summary of a 1969 interview with the magazine's publisher, as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page, records that her family's fund had founded the magazine and had been used for its operation until 1954.³⁶

The William C. Whitney Foundation appears in the FBI file on Michael Straight. Milton C. Rose, senior partner of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander, told the FBI that the foundation was "created by Mr. Straight's parents in memory of his grandfather" and that Michael Whitney Straight had been its president "since its inception in 1937." The same summary records that Straight was questioned before a special House committee investigating tax-exempt foundations, as reported by the Washington Times-Herald on December 6, 1952, about $19,000 in grants the foundation had made to organizations "cited as subversive or communist fronts."³⁷

Michael Whitney Straight

Michael Whitney Straight, Dorothy Payne Whitney's son, was a grandson of William Collins Whitney and the president of the William C. Whitney Foundation according to the FBI summary cited above.³⁷ In June 1963 he told FBI agents that Anthony Blunt had recruited him for Soviet intelligence while he was at Cambridge, and that account was followed by Blunt's confession in 1964. The Soviet file, the British and American responses and the rest of the record are on his page.³⁸

John Hay Whitney, the embassy and the Herald Tribune

John Hay Whitney, called Jock, was the son of Payne Whitney and Helen Hay and a member of the Yale class of 1926.² The Department of State's Office of the Historian records his appointment as ambassador to the United Kingdom on February 11, 1957, with credentials presented on February 28, 1957, and his departure from the post on January 14, 1961.³⁹

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on February 25, 1967 that Whitney was the former owner, publisher and editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and that he was a one-third partner in its successor, the World Journal Tribune, and a member of that paper's three-man executive board.⁴⁰ A statement of ownership for United Nations World dated October 1, 1947 lists "J. H. Whitney, 630 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y." among the holders of one percent or more of the magazine's securities, beside Nelson Rockefeller and Max Ascoli.⁴¹

The Editor and Publisher wrote in 1966 that the Herald, founded in 1835 by James Gordon Bennett, and the Tribune, founded in 1841 by Horace Greeley, "were merged in 1924 under the direction of Mr. and Mrs. Ogden M. Reid," and that the paper "then in failing financial health, was taken over by John Hay Whitney in 1958."⁴² Ferdinand Lundberg wrote in 1937 that Munsey sold the Herald to the Reid-Mills family in 1924 for $5,000,000, part cash, that the Reids gave Munsey a personal note which passed on his death to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that the trustees of the museum when Munsey willed his newspapers to it included Payne Whitney.⁴³

Whitney's ownership ended in 1966. His statement of August 15, 1966, read to reporters as chairman of the board of Whitney Communications Inc., said: "For the years of my ownership, despite the hopes, the talents and the enormous effort that were put into it, the paper was never quite able to stand on its own." He added: "I shall continue as publisher of the Herald Tribune in Paris."⁴⁴

On March 26, 1969 Henry A. Kissinger wrote to Peter Flanigan about Whitney's interest in the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Kissinger's memorandum reads: "You should know that this has twice been raised with the President and rejected both times."⁴⁵

J. H. Whitney and Company, William H. Jackson and the CIA

The investment firm J. H. Whitney and Company had its offices at 630 Fifth Avenue in New York, the address given in the 1947 ownership statement.⁴¹ A letter of May 29, 1947, on the firm's letterhead and signed "W. H. Jackson," came from William Harding Jackson and was addressed to Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, then Director of Central Intelligence. It reads: "You need only call upon me and I shall do anything within my power to be of assistance," and it offers to come to Washington "whenever you request it regardless of other appointments."⁴⁶

The writer of that letter is William Harding Jackson (1901 to 1971), the later Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, took a B.A. at Princeton University in 1924 and an LL.B. at Harvard in 1928, worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York, served in the Army from 1942 to 1945 and in 1944 sat on General Omar Bradley's intelligence staff.⁴⁷ A member of the three-man board that reported to the National Security Council on the national intelligence system in January 1949, he was named Deputy Director of Central Intelligence by Walter Bedell Smith and served from October 1950 until August 3, 1951; the CIA's announcement of his resignation that month calls him William H. Jackson "of Princeton, New Jersey" and says he resigned "due to the pressure of private business."⁴⁸⁴⁹ The Eisenhower Library's description of the President's Committee on International Information Activities identifies its chairman, William H. Jackson, as "a managing partner in the investment firm J.H. Whitney and Company, and a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency."⁵⁰ From August 1951 to February 1956 he was a part-time assistant and senior consultant to the Director of Central Intelligence.⁴⁷

The CIA's official history of the Walter Bedell Smith years says that when Smith and Jackson could not recruit "men of great prestige with practical experience" for the Board of National Estimates, they created a group of outside advisers who met in Princeton, known as "the Princeton Consultants." The history lists among the group's original members Vannevar Bush, George Kennan and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and then Alexander Standish, "a partner in J. H. Whitney & Company," Barklie McKee Henry, "a director of various corporations," and Burton Fahs, "director of humanities for the Rockefeller Foundation."⁵¹ Barklie McKee Henry was later a member of the Jackson Committee, appointed by President Eisenhower in January 1953 with Jackson as chairman; its other members were Robert Cutler, C. D. Jackson, Roger Kyes, Sigurd Larmon, Gordon Gray and John C. Hughes, and its report went to the President on June 30, 1953.⁵⁰

A second letter, of October 3, 1952, on the same letterhead and signed by William H. Jackson, was sent to the Central Intelligence Agency about a correspondent who had to interview "a great number of people." Jackson wrote that "if he wants to see Secretary Lovett, General Smith is the person to arrange it."⁵² The letter refers to Robert A. Lovett and to Smith, then the Director of Central Intelligence.

Hillenkoetter, the addressee of the 1947 letter, was at the same National Security Council table as Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney on August 19, 1948.³⁰

The Granary Fund and the John Hay Whitney Trust

On February 25, 1967 the San Francisco Chronicle reported from a schedule of contributions filed with the Massachusetts attorney general that the Granary Fund of Boston received $300,000 in 1964 from the John G. Thornton Trust, $150,000 from the James Carlisle Trust and $500 in miscellaneous contributions. Officials who asked not to be named called the Thornton and Carlisle trusts CIA fronts, and the paper described the Granary Fund as a fund used by the CIA to channel money to organizations at home and abroad.⁴⁰ The same report says the Granary Fund gave a John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes $225,000 in 1964 and $100,000 in 1965.⁴⁰

The Chronicle reported that the Whitney trust was a charitable trust established by Whitney on December 29, 1958, during his term as ambassador to the United Kingdom. Walter N. Thayer, head of the Whitney communications corporation, made a statement on Whitney's behalf that the trust had operated since that date and that its pledges and contributions to tax-exempt organizations had all been properly reported.³⁹⁴⁰ A Los Angeles Times report of February 26, 1967 said that Representative Wright Patman had named eight funds in 1964 in connection with the J. M. Kaplan Fund, among them the Gotham Foundation, and that the Internal Revenue Service had not yet produced records for four more, among them the Granary Fund.⁵³ A February 21, 1967 newspaper item in the CIA reading room, "Foundations Fail to File Tax Report," also lists the Granary Fund, Boston, among foundations under question.⁵⁴

The 1967 reports followed the disclosure of CIA funding for the National Student Association. The Ramparts article by Sol Stern on the association and the CIA appeared in March 1967, and the The New York Times reported the magazine's account on February 16, 1967.⁵⁵⁵⁶ The Church Committee's 1976 report on foreign and military intelligence states: "Until 1967 the Agency also maintained covert ties to American foundations in order to pass funds secretly to private groups whose work the CIA supported."⁵⁷ The report says that most of the fiscal 1967 funds for youth and student programs and for labor "were transmitted through legitimate or 'devised' foundations, that is, fictitious entities established by the CIA," and that at least 108 of the 700 grants over $10,000 made by 164 foundations other than the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations in 1963 to 1966 involved partial or complete CIA funding.⁵⁸

Time of March 3, 1967 listed the recipients of "CIA-suspect largesse" as "an encyclopedic grab bag of organizations ranging from the now defunct Institute of International Labor Research Inc. ... to the Billy Graham Spanish-American crusade, from the North American Secretariat of Pax Romana and the John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes to the International Food and Drink Workers Federation and the Friends of India Committee."⁵⁹ In their book of 1967, David Wise and Thomas B. Ross wrote: "John Hay Whitney, former ambassador to Great Britain and owner of the New York Herald Tribune, was founder of the Whitney Trust, a philanthropic organization financed in part by the Granary Fund, the CIA conduit."⁶⁰ The anthropologist David H. Price lists the trust in his table of foundations named in 1967 as CIA conduits, citing the press reports of that year.⁶¹

The CIA's own paper on the subject is a memorandum of November 1968 from Charles Katek, Chief of the Central Cover Staff, to the Deputy Director for Plans, on the scope and possible damage of new allegations by Ramparts magazine. It records that early in April 1968 the Office of the General Counsel gave the Central Cover Staff a copy of an April 5, 1968 letter to the Internal Revenue Service from Ramparts, with a list of 145 tax-exempt organizations that the magazine said were suspected of having been funded by or of having cooperated with the CIA. The memorandum's annex of terminated covert funding conduits and project organizations that the press had named lists the Granary Fund of Boston as a Central Cover Staff proprietary (designator LPSIPHON/7), and lists the Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes, John Hay, as a "Funding conduit under Project QKOPERA (LPCORSET/68)." It gives two entries for the trust, under the Ramparts list numbers 141 and 142, with the instrument dated December 29, 1959 in one and December 29, 1958 in the other. QKOPERA is the project designation the same memorandum gives for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Farfield Foundation appears in the annex as a "Funding conduit for CCF." Another entry, on the Institute of International Education, records that the Institute received legitimate grants from six foundations that the CIA used as cooperating covert funding mechanisms, among them the McGregor Fund, the John Hay Whitney Charitable Trust (items 141 and 142), the Aaron Norman Fund, the Cleveland Dodge Foundation, the William Benton Foundation and the Brown Foundation of Houston.⁶²

The CIA answered a Freedom of Information Act request of January 11, 1980 for information on "the John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes and the Granary Fund" with a letter of May 28, 1985. The Agency located two responsive documents, dated December 10, 1968 and January 23, 1969, and withheld both in their entirety under exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3) of the Act.⁶³

Bernard D. Nossiter reported in the Washington Post of July 3, 1975 on the news service Forum World Features, based in London. "When it began selling articles in 1966, the service's owner of record, according to the officials, was John Hay Whitney," the article states, and "Early in 1973, Whitney was replaced by Richard Mellon Scaife." The officials were quoted as saying that the service was financed by the CIA. A spokesman for Whitney said he had "no comment on the subject." The article also quotes an apparent internal CIA memorandum of about 1968, published by the magazine Time Out, which described the service as "located in London and incorporated in Delaware" and as begun as a commercial entity in January 1966 from the residue of Forum Service, an activity of the Congress for Cultural Freedom from which the CIA withdrew its support in 1966. Brian Crozier, the service's president, denied a CIA link.⁶⁴

Crozier replied in the Guardian of December 1, 1976 and printed correspondence. He wrote that in the spring of 1965 John Hunt told him that Whitney had agreed to take over the services. A letter from Hunt of June 10, 1965 gave a starting date of July 1, 1965 and said that Whitney "tentatively plans to put about $100,000 a year into Forum Features," with Crozier as president. A letter of January 24, 1973 from Samuel C. Park to Crozier recorded Scaife's election as director of Kern House Enterprises Ltd to succeed Whitney. On September 23, 1969 Whitney wrote to Crozier declining an investment in the Current Affairs Research Services Centre. Crozier wrote that Whitney gave his library to the Institute for the Study of Conflict. The Guardian's accompanying glossary describes Park as "Financial aide to Whitney, and a trustee of his Charitable Trust."⁶⁵

Saunders wrote that Forum World Features "was a classic CIA undercover operation, with John Hay Whitney once again acting as a front, registering the company under his name as a Delaware corporation with offices in London."⁶⁶

Footnotes

Antony C. Sutton, America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (1983), chart "Hypothesis Number One: A Secret Society Dominated By Old Line American Families And New Wealth Has Existed From 1833 To The Present Day," with the spokes WHITNEY FAMILY (1635, Watertown, Mass.) and PAYNE FAMILY (Standard Oil). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
Yale University, Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1927, entry for Payne Whitney, B.A. 1898, pp. 171 to 172 (birth, death, descent from John Whitney of Watertown, Yale relatives, crews, the listing "member Hé Boulé, Delta Kappa Epsilon, and Skull and Bones," directorships, gifts, marriage to Helen Hay, children and survivors). https://archive.org/details/obituaryrecordof00yale_4. ↩︎
Yale University, Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1900 to 1910, entry for William Collins Whitney, class of 1863, pp. 350 to 352. https://archive.org/details/1900t10obituary00yaleuoft. ↩︎
William C. Whitney, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, December 1885, in Annual Reports of the Navy Department (Government Printing Office, 1885), pp. xxxviii to xli (the Secretary's staff, the rebuilding of the Omaha at $572,000, the proposed advisory board and Assistant Secretary). https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna00deptgoog. ↩︎
William C. Whitney, Report of the Secretary of the Navy, Navy Department, Washington, December 6, 1887, in Annual Reports of the Navy Department (Government Printing Office, 1887), passages on the armor, gun-steel and secondary-battery factories and the Bethlehem Iron Company contract. https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna06deptgoog. ↩︎
Report of the Secretary of the Navy for 1888, in Annual Reports of the Navy Department (Government Printing Office, 1888), passage on the contracts of June 1, 1887 with the Bethlehem Iron Company and the department's 1886 report on armor and gun production. https://archive.org/details/annualreportsna02deptgoog. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), section "The Whitney Family" and the Whitney table, passage on "the Whitney Group" and the New York street railway franchises. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
New-York Tribune, September 26, 1907, p. 1 (Joline and Robinson as receivers of the New York City Railway Company; the guaranteed dividend; "friendly proceeding"; the Ryan-Belmont control; Judge Lacombe and William C. Whitney as Corporation Counsel). https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1907-09-26/ed-1/?sp=1. ↩︎
United States v. American Tobacco Co., 221 U.S. 106 (1911), opinion of White, C.J., statement of the Consolidated Tobacco Company's share holdings before the merger. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/106 ↩︎
Yale University, Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1915 to 1920, entry for Oliver Hazard Payne, B.A. 1863, pp. 295 to 296. https://archive.org/details/1915t20obituary00yaleuoft. ↩︎
Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), Section 2 of the decree as set out in the opinion, naming "the seven individual defendants" and including "Oliver H. Payne." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1. ↩︎
Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911), the opinion's description of the trust agreement of 1882 and its nine trustees, and the list of individual stockholders including "O. H. Payne." https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/221/1. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), the passage on the Paynes and Standard Oil. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), index of members by class year: the Whitney entries under 1851, 1854, 1855, 1863, 1878, 1882, 1894 and 1898, and the list for the class of 1863, which does not include Payne. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), the section "The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy-Acheson Chain of Influence," point 1 ("the core of Whitney influence"). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), Whitney table and index of members by class year, which print "1894 Payne Whitney" and "1898 Harry Payne Whitney"; text, which gives "Harry Payne ('94) and Payne Whitney ('98)." https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
Advertisement of the Knickerbocker Trust Co., Trusts and Estates, vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1907). https://archive.org/details/sim_trusts-estates_1907-06_4_6 ↩︎
"Charles Tracy Barney, Deposed President of Knickerbocker Trust Co., Unbalanced by His Misfortunes," The Morning Star (New York), November 15, 1907, p. 1. https://archive.org/details/per_star-news_the-morning-star_1907-11-15_81_46 ↩︎
Cuyler Reynolds, ed., Genealogical and Family History of Southern New York and the Hudson River Valley, vol. 2 (New York, 1914), p. 855 (Alice Hay, born Cleveland, January 6, 1880, daughter of John Hay; marriage of September 30, 1902), https://archive.org/details/genealogicalfami02reyn ; Who's Who in America, vol. 14, 1926-1927, entry "Wadsworth, Alice Hay" (children Evelyn (Mrs. Stuart Symington), James Jeremiah, Reverdy), https://archive.org/details/whoswho141926 ; Livingston County Historian's Office, "Wadsworth Family: A Subject Finding Aid" (2019, rev. 2022), section II. ↩︎
Weill Cornell Medicine, "History of the Medical Center" (undated PDF), passages on the will of Payne Whitney and on the gift of Oliver Hazard Payne. https://library.weill.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/history_of_the_medical_center.pdf ↩︎
Yale University, Obituary Record of the Graduates of the Undergraduate Schools, Deceased 1915 to 1920, entry for Albert Dillon Sturtevant, Ph.B. 1916, Sheffield Scientific School, stating that the Yale Aviation Corps was "formed by Payne Whitney, '98, in June, 1916," and that Aerial Coast Patrol Unit No. 1 was organized by F. Trubee Davison (B.A. 1918). https://archive.org/details/1915t20obituary00yaleuoft. ↩︎
"Payne Whitney Dies Suddenly at Home," The New York Times, May 26, 1927, p. 1, continued p. 25. https://archive.org/details/sim_new-york-times_the-new-york-times_1927-05-26_76_25324. Yale University, Obituary Record ... Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1927, p. 172. https://archive.org/details/obituaryrecordof00yale_4. Weill Cornell Medicine Library, "History of the Medical Center." https://library.weill.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/history_of_the_medical_center.pdf ↩︎
"Payne Whitney Left Biggest Estate Ever Appraised in U.S.," Washington Daily News, November 23, 1928, p. 6. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82016181/1928-11-23/ed-1/?sp=6. ↩︎
"$178,893,655 Estate, Record for America," The New York Times, November 23, 1928, p. 1, continued p. 12. https://archive.org/details/sim_new-york-times_1928-11-23_78_25871. Also "Payne Whitney Left Biggest Estate Ever Appraised in U.S.," United Press, Brainerd Daily Dispatch, November 23, 1928, p. 1. https://archive.org/details/brainerd-daily-dispatch-1928-11-23. Also "Payne Whitney Estate Appraised," Paper Trade Journal, vol. 87, no. 22, November 29, 1928. https://archive.org/details/sim_paper-trade-journal_1928-11-29_87_22 ↩︎
"200 Millions to Legatees of Payne Whitney," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 1, 1931. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_1931-09-01_90_209 ↩︎
Sutton (1983), the passage on the Harriman family, the Whitney-Payne fortune and the Vanderbilt marriage, and the account of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney's marriage to Marie Norton. https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
"Harry Payne Whitney, Multi-Millionaire, Is Dead," United Press, The Indianapolis Times, October 27, 1930, p. 2. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82015313/1930-10-27/ed-1/?sp=2. ↩︎
Whitney Museum of American Art, "Whitney History: Founding." https://whitney.org/about/history. ↩︎
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, W. Averell Harriman Papers: A Finding Aid to the Collection in the Library of Congress (2016), chronology entry "1930 Married Marie Norton Whitney (died 1970)." https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/2003/ms003012.pdf. ↩︎
Harry S. Truman Library, photograph 73-2702, "Truman with National Security Council," August 19, 1948 (identification of Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney and Director of Central Intelligence Roscoe Hillenkoetter at the table). https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-records/73-2702. ↩︎
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945-1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, "Persons," entry "Whitney, C. V., Assistant Secretary of the Air Force." https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/persons. ↩︎
Harry S. Truman Library, photograph 2017-286, swearing-in of Roy V. Peel as Director of the Bureau of the Census, March 5, 1950 (caption: "Mr. C. V. Whitney, Acting Secretary of Commerce"), and the library's index entry for "Whitney, C. V. (Cornelius Vanderbilt), 1899-1992." https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-records/2017-286. ↩︎
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (1999), pp. 134 to 135 (conduits) and p. 285 (Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney). ↩︎
Tara Mastrelli, "Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst," Histories of The New School, May 25, 2018 (founding of The New Republic with Willard Straight and Herbert Croly; the 1911 marriage), as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page. https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst. ↩︎
Sutton (1983), the section on the press (the Nation and New Republic passage). https://archive.org/details/americas_secret_establishment-skull_and_bones. ↩︎
FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1" (FOI/PA 1179375-1), special inquiry report of September 1969, interview with the publisher of The New Republic, as cited on the Dorothy Payne Whitney page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1. ↩︎
FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," summary memorandum of September 10, 1969, interviews with Milton C. Rose and Harriett K. Evison, the William C. Whitney Foundation passage, the summary of the Washington Times-Herald article of December 6, 1952, and the statement that Straight was president of the foundation, as cited on the Michael Whitney Straight page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1. ↩︎
FBI, "Straight, Michael W., HQ-1," memorandum of June 25, 1963 on the interview of June 18, 1963, as cited on the Michael Whitney Straight page. https://archive.org/details/StraightMichaelW.HQ1. ↩︎
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "John Hay Whitney (1904-1982)," Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission, United Kingdom. https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/whitney-john-hay. ↩︎
San Francisco Chronicle, "CIA Link to Charity Funds," February 25, 1967 (CIA reading room copy). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000800060024-5. ↩︎
United Nations World, December 1947 (Vol. 1, No. 10), statement of ownership, management and circulation for October 1, 1947. https://archive.org/details/united-nations-world_1947-12_1_10. ↩︎
Editor and Publisher, vol. 99, no. 34 (August 20, 1966), historical note on the New York Herald Tribune. https://archive.org/details/sim_editor-publisher_1966-08-20_99_34 ↩︎
Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families (New York: Vanguard Press, 1937), pp. 254 and 269 to 270. https://archive.org/details/lundberg-ferdinand-americas-60-families-1937 ↩︎
"Herald Tribune" historical note and text of John Hay Whitney's statement of August 15, 1966, Editor & Publisher, vol. 99, no. 34 (August 20, 1966), pp. 11 to 12. https://archive.org/details/sim_editor-publisher_1966-08-20_99_34 ↩︎
Henry A. Kissinger to Peter Flanigan, memorandum, March 26, 1969, on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and John Hay Whitney (CIA reading room copy, document LOC-HAK-1-2-69-2). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-loc-hak-1-2-69-2. ↩︎
William H. Jackson to Rear Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, letter of May 29, 1947, on J. H. Whitney & Co. letterhead, 630 Fifth Avenue (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP80B01676R004000040034-9). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80b01676r004000040034-9. ↩︎
Georgetown University Library, William Harding Jackson Papers (GTM-101014), biographical note (born March 25, 1901, Nashville; B.A. Princeton 1924; LL.B. Harvard 1928; lawyer and investment banker in New York; Army 1942 to 1945; Bradley's intelligence staff 1944; Deputy Director of the CIA from August 18, 1950 to August 3, 1951; part-time assistant and senior consultant to the CIA director, August 1951 to February 1956; died September 28, 1971). https://findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories/15/resources/10428. ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, press release of August 23, 1951 announcing Allen W. Dulles as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence to succeed William H. Jackson, "of Princeton, New Jersey," who "resigned that post due to the pressure of private business," and noting that both men were members of the three-man board that reported to the National Security Council in January 1949 (CIA reading room, CIA-RDP57-00384R000100150018-8). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp57-00384r000100150018-8. ↩︎
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950-1955, The Intelligence Community, "Persons," entry "Jackson, William H.," member of the National Security Council Survey Committee in 1948 and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence from October 7, 1950. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/persons. ↩︎
Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, U.S. President's Committee on International Information Activities (Jackson Committee): Records, 1950-53, finding aid, historical note (appointment of William H. Jackson, "a managing partner in the investment firm J.H. Whitney and Company, and a former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency," as chairman; members; report of June 30, 1953). https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/finding-aids/pdf/us-presidents-committee-on-international-information-activities.pdf. ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, "General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950 to February 1953," vol. III (CREST document 00669377), passages on the Board of National Estimates, the Princeton Consultants and their original members, and the references to William Jackson as deputy director. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-00669377. ↩︎
William H. Jackson to the Central Intelligence Agency, letter of October 3, 1952, on J. H. Whitney & Co. letterhead (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP80R01731R000500470007-3). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp80r01731r000500470007-3. ↩︎
Don Irwin and Vincent J. Burke, "21 Foundations, Union Got Money From CIA," Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1967 (CIA reading room copy). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000600210002-4. ↩︎
"Foundations Fail to File Tax Report," February 21, 1967 (CIA reading room copy), list including the Granary Fund, Boston. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp73-00475r000101290002-3. ↩︎
Sol Stern, "A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.," Ramparts, March 1967. https://archive.org/details/nsa-and-the-cia. ↩︎
"Ramparts Says C.I.A. Received Student Report," New York Times, February 16, 1967 (CIA reading room copy), as cited on the Michael Josselson page. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp75-00149r000800100021-3. ↩︎
U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I, S. Rept. 94-755 (1976), p. 182. https://archive.org/details/finalreportofsel01unit. ↩︎
U.S. Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book I, S. Rept. 94-755 (1976), p. 183 (devised foundations; 108 of 700 grants). https://archive.org/details/finalreportofsel01unit. ↩︎
"Pandora's Cashbox," Time, March 3, 1967 (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP70B00338R000200230042-5). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp70b00338r000200230042-5. ↩︎
David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Espionage Establishment (Random House, 1967), p. 144. ↩︎
David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology (Duke University Press, 2016), Table 7.3, p. 172, citing Kenworthy 1967 and Time 1967. ↩︎
Charles Katek, Chief, Central Cover Staff, memorandum for the Deputy Director for Plans, "Indications of the Scope and Possible Damage of New Allegations by Ramparts Magazine," November 1968, with annexes (JFK Assassination Records, 2025 release, 104-10059-10026). https://archive.org/details/JFK-Assassination-Records-2025-Batch01-02. ↩︎
Central Intelligence Agency, Information and Privacy Coordinator, letter of May 28, 1985 responding to the Freedom of Information Act request of January 11, 1980 (CIA reading room copy, CIA-RDP87B00858R000500640014-6). https://archive.org/details/CIA-RDP87B00858R000500640014-6. ↩︎
Bernard D. Nossiter, "CIA News Service," The Washington Post, July 3, 1975, p. A26. https://archive.org/details/nsia-CIAForumWorldFeatures. ↩︎
Brian Crozier, reply to the Guardian, December 1, 1976, with printed correspondence of John Hunt (June 10, 1965), Samuel C. Park (January 24, 1973) and John Hay Whitney (September 23, 1969), and glossary. https://archive.org/details/crozier-replies-to-gaurdian-by-peter-chippendale-martin-walker-the-gaurdian-december-1-1976-pp.-1-9. ↩︎
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? (1999), pp. 311 to 312, on Forum World Features. ↩︎

52 KiB Raw Blame History