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An equally frequent refrain is "the American commitment," as he calls it. "The basic American commitment is not to affluence, not to power, not to all the marvelously cushioned comforts of a well-fed nation, but to the liberation of the human spirit, the release of human potential, the enhancement of individual dignity," he says. "We decided that what we really wanted was a society designed for people." And within that society, there must be room for diverse talents. In his book Excellence, he wrote: "The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
Untapped Riches. California-born Gardner has been pondering those ideas practically all his life. As a boy in Beverly Hills, "he just grew up with a book in his hand," says his mother, Mrs. Marie F. Burns, 76. His father died when John was a year old, and his mother subsequently remarried three times—once to a gold prospector who had been in the Klondike. Gardner recalls listen ing raptly to stories of the Gold Rush. "In each," he says, "the central theme was constant—riches left untapped."
Little attracted by sports until he went off to Stanford, Gardner took up swimming and broke several Pacific Coast free-style records. An English major, he dropped out for a year to try his hand at short-story writing, then returned to Stanford and switched to psychology. Before he garnered his degree he garnered a wife, a petite, dark-eyed Guatemalan girl named Aida Marroquin. When they first met, she knew practically no English and he could say nothing in Spanish but the Gettysburg Address, which he had learned in a class. They corresponded for two years while she was back in Guatemala-and he was improving his Spanish—and then were married.
With his Ph.D. in psychology from Berkeley, Gardner spent four years teaching the subject at women's colleges in the East, found the life too confining and moved to Washington. He worked for the Federal Communications Commission's Foreign Intelligence Broadcast Service—ironically, in the same building that is HEW's headquarters today. It was a radical change, but it was part of Gardner's ripening philosophy of self-renewal by means of change.
Fellow Philanthropoids. Gardner found renewal of another kind in the early days of World War II. He joined the Marines, served in Italy and Austria and, emerging as a captain, returned to Aida and his two daughters: Stephanie, now 28, a TIME researcher and the wife of a Manhattan attorney; and Francesca ("Checka"), 26, a Washington lawyer who is living with her parents while her lawyer husband is in the Army at Pleiku, South Viet Nam.
Gardner was still wearing Marine greens when he dropped in at the Carnegie Corporation—and was offered a job on the spot. With his ranging, inquiring mind, Gardner helped to lead Carnegie, now the fifth-ranking U.S. foundation with annual spending of some $13 million, into some of its most memorable undertakings. He also helped to establish Russian research centers at Harvard, Princeton and