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NEWSLETTER
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Jon Hagler: A Unique Post-FF Career By Willard J. Hertz
Each program of Frontline begins with an expression of appreciation for the funding of its annual operating expenses by a series of foundations, including Ford. The list then concludes with “major credit” to “Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation” for a one-time grant of $5 million to the Frontline Journalism Fund. Complementing programs made for Frontline by external film makers, the Fund is an endowment vehicle for investigative journalism by Frontline’s own staff.
Older LAFF members will remember Jon Hagler as the financial vice president and treasurer of the Ford Foundation from 1977 through 1981. Since his departure, he has had a unique career as a philanthropist in his own right, building on his Ford experience. In contrast to other LAFF members who have gone on to staff organizations and other foundations, Hagler has created and funded his own grant-making foundation.
Hagler began his career in financial management as a student at Texas A&M University and then at the Harvard Business School. Advising fellow students on their investments, he found that he possessed a gift for managing money. After receiving his MBA degree, he took a job as a research analyst for United Funds, a mutual fund. Four years later he was managing an investment portfolio of $1.3 billion and had founded two investment management firms, in New York and Boston.
Then, at the age of 40, Hagler became the chief investment officer at the Ford Foundation. His five years at the Foundation coincided with a doldrum in the nation’s capital markets. During that period the Dow Jones dropped 12.9 percent, but Ford’s assets, under Hagler’s oversight, grew from $2.1 to $2.7 billion, and its dividend and interest earnings rose from $98 million to $197 million.
In joining Ford, Hagler recalled in an interview, he was attracted as much by its philanthropic activities as by its gigantic financial resources. “My family believed in citizen responsibility,” he stated. “My father did tours of Latin America and Africa with the Agency for International Development (AID) and the University of Illinois. For years I served as a member of the finance committee of the Africa-America Institute and later as a Trustee.
“While my role at the Ford Foundation was largely financial management, I received and read, and sometimes participated in, grant proposals. So it is an article of faith with me that each of us needs to lead a purposeful existence that hopefully leaves behind more than we have taken from society.”
After leaving the Foundation, Hagler helped found the investment management firm of Hagler, Mastrovita & Hewitt in Boston, and before long it was managing about $2 billion. His partners wanted to monetize their interest in the firm, so they sold it to United Asset Management. Hagler continued his management role as chairman for an additional eight years.
In 1996, at the age of 60, he was approached by Grantham, Mayo & van Otterloo (GMO), another Boston investment management firm, to take a senior management position. After declining the role as managing partner, he was named chair of a Governance Committee and a board member. He retired from that firm in 2010.
Hagler’s success as a financial manager was accompanied by his growing involvement in personal philanthropy. Inspired by his experience at the Ford Foundation, in 1984 he founded, with his wife Jo Ann, the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, a “family-oriented” donor organization. The foundation has had no outside trustees, and Jon, working without salary, has been its only professional staff member. Its assets at the end of calendar 2014 were $5.3 million, and its grant-making program, which varies from year to year, averaged $1.365 million per year during the five years ending last December.
In his interview, Hagler said the Ford Foundation has been a major influence on how he and his wife think about grant-making. “Although our assets are vastly smaller, we still look for ways our commitments can have a beneficial or leveraged effect to enhance social progress or social justice,” he said. “As we have become more enlightened about the numerous imperfections of our society, we are glad that our good fortune in life can be used to try to help address some of the problems.”
The program interests of the Hagler Foundation have evolved over time, but are heaviest in education, medical research and a category that he calls “investigative journalism” and includes the foundation’s grant of $5 million last year to Frontline. Other major grants supported the establishment of two chairs and a research fund at the Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, the Lymphoma Center at the hospital, and a series of grants to Texas A&M for its College of Education, minority scholarships and its own fund-raising foundation. In his honor, the university gave Hagler an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, its highest award for a former student, and named the home of its foundation the Jon L. Hagler Center.
Other grantees have included the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, Doctors Without Borders, the Foundation for National Progress (Mother Jones), Planned Parenthood, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Haglers were longtime fans of public radio and television, and Hagler’s experience at the Ford Foundation magnified that interest. “We both loved and admired Fred Friendly,” Hagler recalled, “and I was at the table in many meetings listening to the debate about public television’s funding and effectiveness. As our assets increased, we began to look at ways that we, too, might have a positive impact in public broadcasting.”
Eventually they selected Frontline for their focus in the belief that it was one of PBS’s most useful programs. As Hagler explained:
“As we became more distressed over the workings and inequities of our economy, our enthusiasm for investigative journalism increased and Frontline seemed a wonderful platform to get the word out. Many traditional news sources have become so commercial or excessively sensitive to commercial interests that their ability to find and publish factually based investigating journalism is limited.
“As we believe that a well-informed citizenry is a fundamental requirement of democracy, we thought an increased capacity for Frontline would be an excellent investment.”
The Haglers’ $5 million grant to Frontline, in June 2014, was the largest single grant from one family in the program’s history. The funds came from both personal resources and their foundation, and it is not unusual for them to fulfill a major grant from both sources. Most of the grant went towards building a new endowment for Frontline’s in-house investigative journalism to complement programs made by independent filmmakers.
In announcing the Haglers’ grant, Frontline also announced an $800,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to hire two investigative reporters and a digital specialist to deepen the program’s in-house investigative research. According to Hagler, the two grants, while having a common overall purpose, were made independently. “I don’t think I really knew until after we had made our grant that the Ford Foundation was also considering a grant,” he said.
Frontline’s news release announcing the grants included the following statement from Executive Producer David Fanning:
“These two gifts are a vote of confidence in Frontline’s ambitions for the future. We know that to keep doing significant investigative reporting we have to undertake a major effort to raise additional funds for the time-intensive and costly work of enterprise journalism. The generosity of the Haglers and the support from the Ford Foundation is an expression of optimism about the future of the series and the kind of journalism we practice, and need to keep expanding.”
Willard Hertz, now retired and living in Maine, was a staff writer in the Foundation’s Office of Reports, assistant representative in Pakistan and assistant secretary of the Foundation in its New York City headquarters office.
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