Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Around the same time, the Olin Foundation made a key $25,000 investment of its own in an unknown writer named Charles Murray, funding a grant at the Manhattan Institute that would support a book he was writing that attacked liberal welfare policies. The backstory to Losing Ground, Murray’s book, was a primer on the growing and interlocking influence of conservative nonprofits. At thirty-nine, Murray was an unknown academic, toiling thanklessly at a Washington Beltway firm evaluating U.S. government social programs. Frustrated and just scraping by, he was about to try writing a thriller novel in order to make ends meet when his application for a job at the Heritage Foundation caught the eye of the conservative philanthropy world. Soon, he was the beneficiary of its growing network. Heritage placed an antiwelfare piece by Murray on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. This sparked a grant from the Olin Foundation that enabled him to work full-time on what became his pathbreaking 1984 book, Losing Ground, even though he hadn’t previously considered turning his research into a book. “It was a classic case of philanthropic entrepreneurship,” Murray says. The hidden force behind Murray was Joyce, the Olin Foundation’s enfant terrible. “Mike Joyce was one of the most influential obscure people of the last century,” says Murray. Losing Ground, which was written in a tone of sorrow rather than anger, blamed government programs for creating a culture of dependence among the po...