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Committee or those members who could go out with me, and we had another inspection of the site, confirmed our judgement that it was what we wanted.

I arranged to meet with the chairman of the board or town council or whatever it was called to express our interest and see whether there was any problem, and was encouraged by the individual to pursue it. He told me that under their rules we would have to have a proposal in writing presented to the council. They would read it and then that was putting the thing on record. There would be a second reading and then there'd be a third reading at which time the council would vote, and that that might take a span of two or three months. My recollection is that this was around Thanksgiving time, but I could be wrong. I know that I came back to New York full of optimism about the site and thinking in terms of an architect who could modify the building, and I had someone in mind who could do the interior work, from a design point of view. I wasn't home very long until I got a telephone call from the head of the city council saying that he didn't think that he could go forward with the commitment because he had run into severe opposition on the part of members of the council. The bottom line was that they didn't want the Ford Foundation on their premises.

Why was that?

The Ford Foundation had sponsored a project that located itself in Santa Barbara, called the Fund for the Republic, which had some very liberal programs, and California at that time was very anti-liberal, very anti-communist, as was another center that we had examined. We had run into this question elsewhere. No matter how much I tried to plead for consideration, he simply said, “I think I should tell you that it won't be productive. And there'll be embarrassment” and so forth. So we had to withdraw. I found this very