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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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Session:         Page of 755

the president -- But Eric Hodgins, who was a very skillful writer and a damned good editor -- For a fee, I asked Eric to visit all of the fellows who had come through the mill and do a report, no holds barred, which I could submit unedited, unreviewed, to the trustees of the Ford Foundation. I was proud of what we had achieved. I wanted to give the Foundation some kind of a report, other than the kind of a report that the director would have written or that I as the chairman would have written. Eric, I think, was gone for about three months, touring these -- by this time -- over a hundred fellows. Now, we didn't try to contact all of them. There was some selection in terms of geography and so forth, and discipline. And Eric went out to interview them. And he came back one day and came in and -- and I knew Eric quite well -- and Eric came in and threw down on my desk a couple of notebooks and said, in very impolite English, “You can take these things, because,” he said, “I can't go on with this project. It's just too perfect. Nobody will believe my report.”

Q:

Really?

Stanton:

“There has to be something wrong with this project, and all I get are glowing reports. You must have talked to them and told them I was coming,” which, of course, I didn't. And he knew that. But he just found it a dull project because it was nothing but good news. He said, “I can't find anything that wasn't a glowing report.”

Q:

Did some of the people who were in the institute together keep in touch with each other? I mean, did they continue to collaborate --

Stanton:

Afterwards?





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