Roger Hertog

Roger Hertog is a director and vice chairman of the board of Alliance Capital Management Corporation, "which was valued in 2002 at about $100 billion", and formerly president and CEO of Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, which was acquired by Alliance in 2000.

Hertog was described by Mark Gerson, "president of the investor-relations company the Gerson Lehrman Group and editor of The Neoconservative Reader", as the "one man who has, far more than anyone else, financially enabled this movement to exist", "this movement" being the "intertwined world of the neoconservatives".

In 2002, "ex-Canadian media mogel" Hertog , New York moneyman Bruce Kovner, chairman of the Caxton Corporation, and Conrad Black, "helped fund a new newspaper, The New York Sun, now [2003] fighting its anti-liberal battle with its New York Times–counterprogrammed slogan, 'A Different Point of View.'"

In February 2003, the Sun's "most memorable contribution to American letters [was] its statement that Iraq War protesters were guilty of 'treason'."

Hertog and Kovner "also chipped in to join" neoliberal Martin Peretz as co-owners of The New Republic (TNR), which was completely bought out in February 2007 by CanWest.

Hertog and Kovner are also on the board of the Manhattan Institute, where "Gerson and William Kristol are also trustees, as well as the Washington, D.C.–based American Enterprise Institute. The A.E.I., a favored neoconservative think tank, has recently [2003] served as a kind of human-resource office" for the Bush administration. The A.E.I. also served as "the venue" on February 26, 2003, that President George W. Bush "chose to step up to explain his intentions toward Iraq."

Hertog is an executive committee member at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a member of the U.S. board of trustees of The Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress (ICSEP), a member of the board of trustees at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, and a member of the board of directors of The Jerusalem Post's America's Voices in Israel. The Post was owned by New York Sun partner Conrad Black.

Hertog is "a primary financial backer behind" and serves on the board of the Shalem Center, a "think tank known as the A.E.I. of Israel. In December 2005, Hertog was the Center's president. According to William Kristol, who also serves on the board, the Center was "founded as Israel's first 'neoconservative think-tank,' ... in an effort to give the Israeli right a better foundation in history, economics, archaeology and other topics."

Hertog contributed $100,000 to the Convention Host Committee for the 2004 Republican National Convention held in New York City.

In March 2002, Hertog was a "member of the staunchly conservative Club for Growth, a group of self-described 'supply side Reaganites' run by TNR nemesis Stephen Moore."

In January 2007, Hertog became chairman of the board of trustees of the New York Historical Society. He is also a member of the advisory board of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, serves on the board of the New York Public Library, and is the founder of the School Choice Scholarships Foundation.

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Controversy

Alliance Capital

In March 2002, Hertog was "in hot water for Alliance's handling of Florida's state pension fund, which lost $335 million during Enron's collapse, prompting racketeering subpoenas from Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth."

In November 2003, Alliance Capital was "being investigated by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for improper trading moves and [had] put aside $190 million to cover restitution and legal costs relating to the case." It was "also being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for payments to Morgan Stanley to obtain preferred status with investors.

"Some of the allegations at Alliance Capital surround suspicious trading activity at mutual funds it purchased from the company of the late Jewish philanthropist Zalman Bernstein, where Hertog was formerly president and CEO."

Neoconservative philosophy / philanthropy

"'You get huge leverage for your dollars,' Roger Hertog told fellow wealthy donors at a recent national conference for right-wing think tanks including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato, Manhattan, and American Enterprise institutes. Hertog pointed out that a mere $70 million in donations has helped conservatives reframe the national debate on topics including antitrust law, Social Security privatization, welfare and affirmative action."

Hertog is "the epitome of the conservative benefactor who bases his politics on conservative intellectualism and moves patiently and strategically to create, support and distribute his ideas. ... [He] cautions that patience is a necessary trait when funding policy revolutions. He never asks how long an idea will take to gain traction, but rather how robust is the idea. He studies the quality of the concepts, how well they hold up under attack and how well they can be communicated to a larger audience. 'After you do that, it still doesn’t ensure success, because then these ideas get thrown out in the political arena,' he explains. 'It may not be expedient for this idea, or some politician may not want to embrace it for his own short-term political reasons. It may take more time. That’s the nature of this stuff; that’s been the whole history of almost all ideas'," Elizabeth Harris wrote May 1, 2006, in Worth.

When asked in a November 2003 interview "When you make judgments about institutions you want to support, what goes through your mind?", Hertog answered:

"I'm interested in leverage. Philanthropy typically is attracted to great museums, great opera companies, great academic institutions. But with less glamorous institutions, a dollar of philanthropy can impact a very large number of people."

In October 2006, 1965 alumnus Roger Hertog donated $1 million "over the next four years to expand the number of undergraduate honors scholars" at Baruch College, The City University of New York. The largest gift "in the history of the College's Honors program", it "will fund a group of students within the Honors program who will be known as Hertog Scholars in recognition of the donor’s generosity."

The "Roger and Susan Hertog Charitable Fund gave $3 million to the University’s Honors College program prior to his generous donation to Baruch College."

On January 17, 2006, the New York Public Library opened its new $50 million Bronx Library Center to the public. Hertog had "contributed the lead private gift for the project."

In 2005, the Columbia University campus journal The Current was founded to deal "with current politics, culture and Jewish affairs." The journal, "part of an ambitious project undertaken by the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem-based think tank, to foster the creation and support of serious journals dealing with Israel and Jewish life at campuses across North America", was funded in "the form of grants of up to $2,500 per journal, [which] came from a $100,000 gift" from Roger and Susan Hertog.

Backing Vets for Freedom

On August 28, 2006, Roger Hertog, listed as an investment banker with AllianceBernstein of New York City, contributed $25,000.00 to Vets for Freedom Action Fund.

Funding BESA Center in Israel

It was reported in January 2007 that "U.S. philanthropist Roger Hertog" had given a three-year grant for PROJECT 1948, "a project on early Israeli history" that will focus on "Arab-Jewish relations and the collapse and dispersal of Palestinian Arab society in the wake of Israel’s War of Independance. The project will be led and conducted by Prof. Efraim Karsh, director of the Mediterranean Studies Program at Kings' College London and a BESA Center Academic Advisory Board member."

"Lincoln Cabinet"

"Planners of the bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009 want to raise $100 million for what they hope will be an unforgettable commemoration of the nation's 16th president that will go far beyond fireworks at the Lincoln Memorial. ...

Hertog is a member of the "Lincoln Cabinet", which is "being pulled together with well-known figures such as former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who authored Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever, to reach out to civic-minded donors with deep pockets."

Resources

Related SourceWatch articles

• Michael J. Gerson, Roger Hertog Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations
• Project for the New American Century

External articles

• Eric Alterman, "Idiocy Watch: The New Republic," The Nation, posted December 20, 2001; January 7, 2002 (issue).
• David Carr, "The Birth of the Sun," The Atlantic, March 2002. Subscription required.
• Cynthia Cotts, "'Sun' Rise, 'Sun' Set. Conservative Paper Sings to the Masses," Village Voice, April 17-23, 2002.
• Daniel McCarthy, "Nothing New Under 'The Sun'," LewRockwell.com, April 26, 2002.
• Michael Tomasky, "Who Is Roger Hertog?" The American Prospect, May 6, 2002.
• Like Father, Like Sun Blog for May 22, 2002.
• Robert Kuttner, "Philanthropy and Movements," The American Prospect, July 14, 2002.
• Quentin, "Disclosure," Like Father, Like Sun Blogspot, December 19, 2003.
• kos, "Why Dean can win without the South," The Daily Kos, December 31, 2003.
• kos, "More on TNR and why it's not on our side," The Daily Kos, January 1, 2004.
• Jack Shafer, "The New Vanity Press Moguls. Welcome, Philip Anschutz! Bruce Wasserstein! Roger Hertog!" Slate, February 27, 2004.
• Michael Massing, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby," The Shalom Center, May 11, 2006; New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006.
• waterdancer, "Keeping track of some of the major neocon players and their connections - who's on first?" The Daily Kos, June 18, 2006.
• Chris Bowers, "Who Owns the New Republic?" MyDD, June 22, 2006.
• Justin Raimondo, "Et tu, Cato?" Antiwar.com Blog, September 27, 2006.
• Leo Casey, "New York Charter School Association, Completely Bought and Paid For," Edwize/UFT Blog, December 17, 2006.
• Katharine Q. Seelye, "New Republic's editor in chief sells his share of magazine," International Herald Tribune, February 28, 2007.
• Scott Sherman, "Sun-rise in New York," The Nation, posted April 18, 2007; April 30, 2007 (issue).

External resources

• Alliance Capital Management Corporation, Roger Hertog,, undated; accessed 2004.
• Info: Roger Hertog, Forbes.com, undated; accessed 2004.
• Profile: Roger Hertog, Media Transparency.
• Campaign Contribution Search: Roger Hertog, NewsMeat: On June 14, 2007, Hertog contributed $2,300 for the primary and $2,300 for the general election for Rudy Giuliani.
• Steve Horn and Allen Ruff, How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities, Truthout, 28 November 2011.