A Relationship with the CIA Was Inevitable

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Sesame Street Episode 2956 – Telly sees a giant number 11 – Air date March 2, 1992 – Season Season 23 (1991-1992) – Written by Lou Berger

Lou G. Berger (born August 21, 1950) is a former head writer for Sesame Street. Berger was one of two writers that helped launch Reading Rainbow in the early 1980s… He also wrote for Nickelodeon’s Pinwheel (TV series)…

Sesame Street is an American educational children’s television series that combines live-action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. It is produced by Sesame Workshop (known as the Children’s Television Workshop until June 2000) and was created by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett.

Joan Ganz Cooney (born Joan Ganz; November 30, 1929) is an American television writer and producer. She is one of the founders of Sesame Workshop (formerly Children’s Television Workshop or CTW), the organization famous for the creation of the children’s television show Sesame Street, which was also co-created by her. Cooney grew up in Phoenix and earned a Bachelor of Arts in education from the University of Arizona in 1951. After working for the State Department in Washington, D.C., and as a journalist in Phoenix, she worked as a publicist for television and production companies in New York City. In 1961, she became interested in working for educational television, and became a documentary producer for New York’s first educational TV station WNET (Channel 13). Many of the programs she produced won local Emmys.

In the winter of 1966, Cooney hosted what she called “a little dinner party” at her apartment near Gramercy Park. In attendance was her husband, her boss Lewis Freedman, and Lloyd and Mary Morrisett, whom the Cooneys knew socially. Lloyd Morrisett was a mid-level executive at Carnegie Corporation (who later became its CEO), and was then responsible for funding educational research. The conversation turned to the possibilities of using television to educate young children; Morrisett raised the question, “Do you think television could be used to teach young children?” Cooney replied, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.”

Lloyd Newton Morrisett Jr. (November 2, 1929 – January 15, 2023) was an American experimental psychologist with a career in education, communications, and philanthropy.

He joined the Social Science Research Council in New York as a staff member from 1958 to 1959. While there, he met Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell. Simon and Newell, both faculty members at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon), are “credited with laying much of the groundwork for the emerging field of cognitive psychology, which became Morrisett’s lifelong scholarly passion.”

Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology.

To support its work, the Social Science Research Council turned not to the US government, whose support seemed more appropriate for the natural sciences, but to private foundations. For the first fifty years, well over three-quarters of the SSRC’s funding was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and two Rockefeller philanthropies, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Rockefeller Foundation.

After two years of research, the newly formed Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) received a combined grant of US$8 million ($66 million in 2023 dollars) from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. federal government to create and produce a new children’s television show.

Sesame Street premiered on National Educational Television (NET) as a series run in the United States on November 10, 1969, and moved to NET’s successor, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), in late 1970. The Workshop was formally incorporated in 1970. Gerald S. Lesser and Edward L. Palmer were hired to perform research for the series; they were responsible for developing a system of planning, production, and evaluation, and the interaction between television producers and educators, later termed the “CTW model”.

National Educational Television (NET) was an American educational broadcast television network owned by the Ford Foundation and later co-owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It operated from May 16, 1954, to October 4, 1970, and was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which has memberships with many television stations that were formerly part of NET.

Gerald Samuel Lesser (August 22, 1926 – September 23, 2010) was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. Lesser was one of the chief advisers to the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW, later known as the Sesame Workshop) in the development and content of the educational programming included in the children’s television program Sesame Street.

Horace Rowan Gaither Jr. (1909 – April 7, 1961), was a San Francisco attorney, investment banker, and a powerful administrator at the Ford Foundation. During World War II, he served as assistant director of the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T. In 1948, he helped found the Rand Corporation and served as a trustee until 1959.

The RAND Corporation is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND Corporation engages in research and development (R&D) across multiple fields and industries. Since the 1950s, RAND research has helped inform United States policy decisions on a wide variety of issues, including the space race, the Vietnam War, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms confrontation, the creation of the Great Society social welfare programs, and national health care.

John J. McCloy, the architect of Office of Strategic Services that would later become Central Intelligence Agency served as the chairman of the Ford Foundation. The CIA would channel its funds through Ford Foundation as a part of its covert cultural war. John J. McCloy, serving as the chairman from 1958 to 1965, knowingly employed numerous US intelligence agents and, based on the premise that a relationship with the CIA was inevitable, set up a three-person committee responsible for dealing with its requests. Writer and activist Arundhati Roy connects the foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, with supporting imperialist efforts by the U.S. government during the Cold War.