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Master of a vast and intricate
Empire of the Left, the mature
Tides Network, product of a talented, intelligent, and
cunning financial wizard. He has created, mentored, guided, or presided
over more tax exempt organizations than anyone else in the world.
Tides Center
Working Assets,
Inc
- board member
President
2002
Salary $8,500, benefits $1,445
Drummond Pike is mapped on Muckety.
Drummond Pike's
connections to George Soros are mapped on
Muckety.
Drummond's power connections as of 2009:
Drummond MacGavin Pike Drummond Pike was born in San Rafael, California in
1948, the third of four brothers. His father, Peter Pike, was an
investment banker. His mother, Catherine Cline Pike, was Marin County’s
first female pediatrician. Although Drummond Pike came from a
well-off family, he was not the heir of a great fortune, as were so many
other leftist philanthropists of his generation, such as Joshua Mailman
and his secretive "Doughnuts" group of wealthy heirs,
which included Jeffrey Bronfman of the Seagram's whiskey fortune, and
Harriett McKnight Crosby from two fortunes, the McKnight timber, real
estate and skyscraper money and the Crosby General Mills money. The
Doughnuts took over the U.K.-based Threshold Foundation in 1981 and in
1984 made it a project of Tides
Foundation to pool their inherited wealth and fund leftist groups that
could do a lot with a little. Pike remained a Director of Threshold
Foundation when it incorporated independently in 1986, and remains
today. He is now a millionaire himself. Pike's leadership talent showed
early. He majored in political science at the University of
California at Santa Cruz and gained note as an anti-Viet Nam War
protester. He was selected as campus representative to the Board of
Regents during his senior year in 1969, where he was known as an
aggressive student-power advocate. In 1970, activists from the Ford Foundation-created
Center for Community Change set up The Youth Project in Washington,
D.C. with Pike as associate director. It was a pass-through
funding group (which would
plant the seeds of later tactics in Pike's
mind) of rich young heirs who financed poor young activists
in anti-business community organizing. The Center for Community Change
itself was funded by early progressive
foundations: the Stern Family Fund, Needmor Fund, Abelard Foundation,
DJB Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund, Helen Lehman Buttenwieser’s Joint
Foundation Support, and Stewart R. Mott Charitable Trust, giving Pike
his first big-money connections. Pike earned a master’s degree in political science at
Rutgers University while with the Project, then returned West to open
its San Francisco office, but was soon hired away by Youth Project
funder Alan Stephen Davis, son of insurance mogul (and AARP co-founder)
Leonard Davis, to lead his Shalan Foundation, which was incorporated in
New York (in 1969, In 1976, when Pike had just joined Shalan (or so the official story goes), a young couple from New Mexico approached him with a problem: they wanted to donate anonymously and needed a public foundation to handle their grants. Shalan couldn’t accommodate them, so Pike and Jane Bagley Lehman, Reynolds tobacco heiress and president of Arca Foundation (1970-1980), co-founded the Tides Foundation as a public charity to help them. That may be true, but it hardly seems a credible reason for a savvy and seasoned person of exceptional wealth such as Jane Bagley Lehman to fund and lead a substantial startup foundation. The more likely story is that Lehman, who had just moved to California from New York, thought up the foundation idea herself after meeting Pike and seeing his talent in action. The Tides name evidently came from Pike, for a Sausalito bookstore where leftist readers and writers mixed. Lehman completely controlled the Tides Foundation, serving as its board chair until her death in 1988. Her daughter Susan Lehman Carmichael served as a member of the board of directors of both the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center until 2000. Other donors came, and Pike ran Tides "out of his desk drawer at Shalan" for several years - another unlikely story. If it was run out of anybody's desk drawer, it was more likely Lehman's nearby facilities. Pike's first big coup was helping Norman Lear create People for the American Way in 1980, when he also helped establish the National Network of Grantmakers, today the premier self-described "progressive" donor association for the far left. In 1981 Davis gave Pike a year to separate. At year end, Pike and Tides went independent and rented offices with Lyman Casey’s Bothin Helping Fund. Pike's empire has grown into what is being called the "Tides Family of Organizations," run by the Tides Network, a sort of tax-exempt holding company that rules many non-profit subsidiaries. Wade Rathke, controversial ACORN co-founder, has been a Tides director from the start and chairs Tides, Inc.. Pike married Elizabeth "Liza" Cohen in 1982, a Berkeley grad who helped create Resource Media for environmental group outreach. They have two children, Rachel Catherine (1984), a Gates Scholar at Cambridge in chemistry (she spent her junior year in Tanzania), and Maxwell MacGavin (1987), who graduated from Marin Academy prep school in 2005 and volunteered with ACORN Relief’s Hurricane Katrina project in Houston, Texas. Pike and his wife live in an ocean-view home in Mill Valley, an upscale suburb north of San Francisco, just across the Golden Gate. They also own a million-dollar chalet near Donner Summit in Truckee, California. |
Drummond Pike: