The Man Behind the Curtain
Aizenman, Nurith C.
The Man Behind the Curtain Richard Mellon Scaife-and $200 million of his moneyis the man behind the conservative revolution BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN OIL AND BANKING HEIR RICHARD Mellon Scaife...
...Granduncle Andrew donated his extensive art collection to the American people, and built the National Gallery in Washington to house it...
...Scaife’s lawyer, Yale Gutnick says Scaife’s interest in Foster stems from his “passion for the truth...
...This made him Nixon’s second largest contributor...
...So forget about health care reform and focus on the real goal-winning control of Congress...
...Scaife is particularly obsessed with Vince Foster’s death-which he’s called “the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton administration...
...It was Nixon, after all, who established the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration...
...But despite the hundreds of millions this pedigree has brought him, Scaife, who is reportedly angry at the way his uncle Richard K. Mellon consigned his father to a minor role in the family business, has rejected his Mellon roots...
...A rare spirit of compromise reigned over the Hill...
...And they urged their fellows to get out of the ofice and forge alliances with politicians in Washington...
...For instance, in contrast to the sober academic style often used by their colleagues at the Brookings Institution, writers at the new right-wing think tanks tended to produce jargon-free studies dotted with easy to follow subheads and couriered free of charge to reporters on deadline...
...Among the most influential were Charles Murray, Myron Magnet, Dinesh D’Souza, Marvin Olasky, James Q. Wilson, and William Bennett...
...Many of his acquaintances are equally cagey: Scaife’s reputation for reclusiveness is surpassed only by his reputation for vindictiveness...
...Scaife considered him “like a brother-in-law...
...Although IS media empire is a small potatoes affair, consisting of a few local dailies and a radio station, Scaife has employed it in his Foster crusade to great effect...
...Ruddy’s reporting proved too over-thetop for even the New Ymk Post...
...Nearly ten years after George Crile wrote a piece in this magazine that portrayed Scaife and one of his newspapers in a negative light, Scaife financed the libel suit brought against Crile for a CBS documentary he had produced on General William Westmoreland...
...He declined to be interviewed for this article...
...But when he was confronted with hard evidence of Duggan’s corruption, according to Richard Thornburgh, then the U.S...
...Mother Sarah favored health care and education...
...Scaife, who was treated for alcoholism during a visit to the Betty Ford Center in the mid-1980s, is now “on a more even keel,” maintains Gutnick...
...Nowhere was this more apparent than in the debate over health care reform...
...Authorities ruled it a suicide, but in a striking parallel to the Vince Foster case-which Scaife was to become obsessed with years later-questions about the real cause of Duggan’s death churned through the local gossip mill: Why were there no fingerprints on the shotgun found near Duggan’s body...
...Soon after Clinton’s election, Kristol started the Project for the Republican Future to translate conservative ideas into hard-nosed political tactics...
...It is the sum total of their views and influence which could indeed fatally weaken or destroy the [capitalist] system...
...The nation’s most respected and influential universities, think tanks, publications, legal activists, and, with a few exceptions, political thinkers, were all more or less purveyors of the New Deal philosophy that government can and should intervene to protect individuals from the vagaries of the free market...
...Among Irvine’s theories: Vice Foster was lured into a “sex trap” from which he fled to the park where his body was found...
...The lack of a countervailing structure to challenge the philosophy of the left had a direct impact on national policy...
...But the point is, he didn’t need any...
...I got the sense he felt burnt by Nixon...
...Scaife also promotes conservative thought on college campuses through organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc...
...Even Scaife’s pal Nixon, hardly your average lefty, accepted the New Deal’s central tenet...
...This was hardly the only time Scaife used his newspaper to punish enemies or reward friends...
...Whether or not Nixon was the catalyst, there is no doubt that by the early 1970s, Scaife had embarked on a bold new course of philanthropy...
...By the early OS, a sizable number of congressional Republicans looked to Gingrich as their patron saint, eagerly absorbing his words of wisdom...
...Those who have crossed him say they’ve paid the price...
...But the rise of new liberal groups like Nader’s Raiders caused a sea change...
...Scaife retorted that he had had no say in Starr’s selection for the post...
...After Spiro Agnew stepped down, a Tribune-Review reporter who exulted “one down, one to go” was promptly fired...
...Gingrich‘s message was as cynical as it was blunt: The way to power was through conflict not compromise...
...And if Kristol was taking Wanniski seriously, who could blame Ronald Reagan for following suit...
...Soon afterwards, Buckley founded the National Review...
...Nevertheless, like Duggan, Nixon was ultimately to prove a disappointment to Scaife...
...Scaife is certainly not the only one behind the rise of the conservative movement, but he has been a key figure...
...Scaife backed Barry Goldwater in 1964...
...Initially, Scaife opposed the federal inquiry...
...As a result, the neo-cons lent a new respectability to the conservative movement...
...In the 1950s the conventional wisdom was that if you were intelligent you were for Adlai Stevenson...
...Wealthy right-wing philanthropists were the key to getting this strategy off the ground...
...Scaife is the great-grandson of Judge Thomas Mellon, the founder of the Mellon family’s banking and oil empire...
...He has dropped the “Mellon” in his own name, and even went so far as to order it removed from the titles of both the foundation and the Pittsburgh museum wing named after his mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife...
...Still, Scaife’s newspaper, peppered with personal attacks against his enemies, hardly suggests newfound restraint...
...At the start of Clinton’s first term there was genuine agreement among Republicans and Democrats that health care reform was badly needed...
...As early as the 1940s, Nobel prize-winning economist-and libertarian hero-Friedrich Hayek sent ripples through academia with his conservative manifesto, The Road to Se$dom...
...Scaife also coughed up an additional $47,500 for Nixon’s illegal “Townhouse” slush fund...
...As the welfare issue illustrates, the ideological movement Scaife helped nurture frequently raises reasonable concerns about liberal policies, onty to advocate solutions that veer too far in the opposite direction...
...Instead, from his earliest days growing up just east of Pittsburgh on the expansive grounds of his family’s Westmoreland County estate, Scaife showed a keen interest in politics and media...
...325,000 in 1999, which funds conservative student newspapers...
...Many of the new think tanks were manned with neo-conservatives...
...Scaife’s interest in politics really took off in the late 1 9 5 0~un~d er the tutelage of Robert Duggan, a close childhood friend of Cordelia’s...
...Neo-liberals writing in this magazine have been making some of the same points for years...
...Mainstream political thought was largely the province of the left...
...Scaife has said the reporter was axed for other reasons, but, according to the Cokmbia Journalism Review, the Tribune-Review’s editor and nearly half the news staff resigned in protest...
...In a spate of best-selling books-often funded by the foundations Scaife supported-these thinkers provided a radically new analysis of the welfare system...
...By hand-picking the universities, thinkers, activists, media outlets, and politicians he funds, Scaife can rest assured that an intelligent-and well-financed-army of supporters will do their utmost to carry out his agenda...
...From his spartan offices, Kristol began faxing memo upon memo to Republican lawmakers, urging them to obstruct Clinton’s reform effort in order to win the next election...
...But in 1970, in the first of many breaks with close friends and associates that would characterize Scaife’s life, his relationship with Duggan took a dramatic downward turn...
...for every Arthur Schlesinger he promoted a Milton Friedman...
...Anyone who disagreed was generally assumed to have a low IQ...
...Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Institute for Contemporary Studies-dedicated to stamping out rent control and the minimum wage-relied on Scaife for its primary funding...
...And Scaife is the main backer of the media machine that disseminates videos and articles on Clinton “conspiracies” like the “murder” of Vice Foster...
...And then said, ‘I didn’t used to think so, but the older I get, the more I do...
...Conservatives were alarmed-and intrigued-by the Raiders’ success in rallymg the public and policy makers in favor of increased industry regulation...
...The conservatives took a far more aggressive approach to peddling their philosophy...
...Together, Kristol and Gingrich succeeded in convincing the Republicans to kill the Clinton health care plan...
...That may be...
...For every Ralph Nader organization, he financed a probusiness legal group...
...The election of Reagan-a personal friend of Scaife’s-ushered in a new era of conservative dominance...
...Then the minority whip, Gingrich had spent much of the previous decade laying the groundwork for a Republican takeover of Congress...
...The neo-cons appeared unperturbed by this usurpation...
...At first his support took the more traditional form of financial contributions to political campaigns...
...He gained notoriety when he had three of the community’s most respected obstetricians arrested for performing abortions at the local hospital, and quickly alienated more moderate Republicans like Scaife’s uncle Richard K. Mellon...
...Four months later, on the same day he was indicted on federal corruption charges, Duggan was found on the grounds of his home-dead of a gunshot wound...
...A crucial element of Gingrich‘s effort was to use his political organization, GOPAC, to identify like-minded candidates and provide them with the ideological and logistical support they needed to win office...
...His plan was to move the GOP away from the moderate conservatism of the BushIDole crowd (which still held sway in Congress), towards a conservative philosophy that would more sharply differentiate Republicans from Democrats...
...Scaife was once again dragged into the public eye when independent counsel Kenneth Starr announced that, upon completing his investigation of Clinton, he would become dean of the Pepperdine school...
...The key to getting people off welfare-and in fact, the only compassionate thing to do-was to change their attitude by holding them more accountable...
...Scaife usually complied...
...Many of them came from organizations generously supported by Scaife...
...Scaife will offer to buy it...
...Not only did government assistance fail to help the poor, the conservatives now argued, it was actually part of the problemfostering a skewed value system which encouraged young girls to have children out of wedlock and eroded their work ethic...
...While less immediate than the pay-off from direct political involvement, the result of Scaife’s funding campaign has been far more profound...
...His main paper, The T~hne-Reviewh,a s published dozens of stories casting doubt on the authorities’ claim that Foster committed suicide...
...The son of neo-conservative godfather -and longtime Scaife beneficiary -Irving Kristol, the junior Kristol had cut his political teeth under the guidance of then-Secretary of Education William Bennett, yet another recipient of Scaife funds...
...He also gave $175,000 to the National Taxpayers Union, which has hired “experts” to dispute the authenticity of Foster’s suicide note and produced a widely circulated video entitled “Unanswered: The Death of Vince Fosterl’ Accuracy in the Media is another Scaife beneficiary, netting $355,000 from Scaife in 1995...
...But the ascent of these Reaganites was merely a harbinger of the rightward shift to come...
...Regardless of the status of Republicans’ political fortunes, the success of Scaife’s effort is clear: When a Democratic president feels compelled to declare in his State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over,” and when the debate focuses not on whether, but on how to dismantle the welfare system, there can be no doubt that conservatives have gained significant ground in the battle over the nation’s agenda...
...In 1981, when journalist Karen Rothmyer tried to interview Scaife for a piece in the ColumbiaJournalim Review, she says she was treated to a foul-mouthed tirade: ‘You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here...
...Over 15 years ago, former Scaife employee Pat Minarcin relayed to the ColumbiaJoumalim Review a conversation he had had with Scaife...
...Duggan became Cordelia’s personal lawyer-as well as her on-and-off boyfriend...
...By the 1980s, the new conservative network was a force to be reckoned with...
...Scaife allegedly shouted...
...And H. R. Haldeman’s diary entries indicate that Richard Nixon counted Scaife among the “fat-cats’’ upon whose generosity he could rely...
...How could he have reached the gun’s trigger...
...Liberals suddenly found themselves out-funded and-just as importantlyoutmaneuvered...
...Cordelia not only refused but, in 1973, foiled prosecutors’ plans to question her about Duggan’s finances by eloping with him to Nevada...
...Republican activist Bill Kristol played a key role in reinforcing this attitude...
...Scaife played an absolutely fundamental role in the development of the New Right,” says Thomas Ferguson, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts who studies the conservative movement...
...Mellon Man Despite his tremendous power, most Americans would have a hard time picking Scaife out of a lineup, let alone describing his views...
...Scaife was naturally a big backer-donating $60,000 to GOPAC between 1989 and 1995...
...The report cast Scaife in a starring role as the “wizard behind the curtain” of the Foster conspiracy machine...
...but Scaife was more than eager to snap him up when the Post let him go...
...Scaife’s lawyer, Yale Gutnick, calls the woman’s accusation “hogwash...
...But if Scaife abandoned Duggan, he did not give up on Republican politics...
...Scaife was upped off by a fellow businessman that Duggan was under investigation for taking mob payoffs...
...In 1995 alone Scaife gave out a total of about $20 million to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation (over $1.5 million), the American Enterprise Institute ($465,000), the CAT0 Institute ($lOO,OOO), the Manhattan Institute ($125,000), and the Center for Strategrc and International Studies ($485,000...
...The first was the rise of a new class of conservative thinkers...
...The strategy paid off...
...A decade and a half later, the term “conservative intellectual” was still widely regarded as an oxymoron...
...And by the time Clinton was elected on a promise to “end welfare as we know it,” a national consensus about the need for welfare reform had emerged...
...If I went out of town, I’d always bring him back an outofstate paper...
...Poisoned Pen While Scaife’s role in the broad realm of national policy has necessarily been more diffuse, there’s one area in which his impact has been direct: his campaign to keep the Clinton conspiracy rumors alive...
...With each recychg, a rumor gams credibility, until it is picked up by Republican politicians or foreign papers, and eventually makes its way into the mainstream press...
...The articles themselves often originate in The TribuneRariew, a newspaper Scaife publishes in his hometown of Pittsburgh and neighboring Greensburg...
...In 1963, after Duggan was elected District Attorney of Pittsburgh-an area not known for its affection toward the GOP-he quickly emerged as a promising young star of Pennsylvania politics, with Scaife as his top advisor...
...Scaife’s largesse bought him direct access to those in power...
...In a widely circulated memo, attorney Lewis F. Powell (who later became a Supreme Court Justice), expressed the concern of many on the right that, beyond radicalizing the young, Nader’s groups had fomented “the hostility of respectable liberals and social reformers...
...One former Tribune-Review reporter who was friendly with Scaife recalls chatting with him about the Nixon years...
...Scaife’s management style was received more favorably in political circles...
...Several months before Nixon stepped down, when the evidence of his malfeasance became too great for even Scaife to ignore, the Tribune-Review called for his resignation...
...for every Kennedy School at Harvard, he funded a Hoover Institution at Stanford...
...Several acquaintances speculate that the experience marked a turning point: “After Nixon, Scaife made a point of investing in the [conservative] ideology rather than individual candidates,” says the former TribuneReview reporter...
...There is, to be sure, some truth in this assertion...
...When Nixon ran for re-election, Scaife made the TribuneReview’s staff destroy any pictures of the president in which he was not smiling...
...Enter Republican Representative Newt Gingrich and conservative activist Bill Kristol...
...Along with other big players like the Adolph Coors Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Scaife provided the money to build nothing less than a parallel network which could match the liberal Establishment tit for tat...
...Scaife was equally cool toward the banking trade favored by many of his relatives...
...Writes Graham: “The evidence [discovered by reporter Nicholas Lemann] in the Nixon Archives was uohn] Erhlichmann’s notes on a December 1,1972, meeting he had with Nixon: ‘Post...
...She sued Scaife and the matter was finally settled out of court, with Scaife paying an undisclosed sum to her favorite charity...
...And it is not much of of an exaggeration to say that the story of their rise is the story of Scaife’s funding strategy...
...If you cooperate with Clinton, you hand him a political victory...
...Attorney handling the case, “Scaife turned on [Duggan] with a vengeance...
...When Hillary Clinton presented her health care proposals to congressional committees, they p e t - ed her with standing ovations...
...He recently gave over $1 million to Pepperdine University toward the establishment of a “School of Social Policy,” intended to be another right-wing answer to Harvard’s Kennedy School...
...But Scaife has gotten the biggest bang for his buck by using his vast personal fortune, estimated at about $870 million, to promote conservative thought...
...Duggan was considerably to the right of other Pittsburgh Republicans...
...Who might Duggan have implicated if he had had a chance to speak to the feds...
...And by funding National Empowerment Television, which broadcasted Gingrich‘s “Renewing American Civilization” course and the Gingrichhosted “Progress Report,’’ Scaife made it possible for Gingrich to reach 11 million American homes...
...Scaife is one of the biggest, and in all likelihood the biggest, financier of right-wing causes in America...
...An equally strong motivation, then, may be his right-wing agenda, combined with an attraction to conspiracies...
...Cordelia May is reportedly one...
...Minarcin had asked Scaife whether he thought money was power...
...The two have not spoken for more than 20 years...
...Last March, Scaife’s promotion of Clinton scandal stones earned him a bout of unwanted media attention when the Clinton administration released a 331-page paper tracing the “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce...
...They had a valid point...
...Then, in the early 1970s, two emerging trends combined to radically alter the landscape...
...The various groups Scaife finds tend to borrow heavily from one another’s “research...
...Over the past 30 years, Scaife has disbursed over $200 million to right wing causes through his three foundations, the Carthage Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation...
...They sent out editorials and commentary tapes to newspapers and radio stations across the country...
...The Rise-and Rise-of the Right Surveying the political scene of the early 1960s, Scaife must have been dismayed at the lack of intellectual support for his right-wing views...
...In 1972 he gave Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President over $1 millionparceled out in 334 checks for about $3,000 each to avoid gift taxes...
...Irving Kristol, for instance, was only too happy to let Jude Wanniski plug his supply-side fantasies in Kristol’s Public Interest-to which Scaife gave about $400,000 between 1977 and 1982...
...As a child, he was an avid collector of newspapers...
...however Scaife’s passion has not extended to probing the ethical dalliances of say, Newt Gingrich...
...The trouble is that the conservative reforms that were subsequently passed completely ignore important concernslike the lack of child care, training, and jobs available to people whose benefits are being cut...
...Its founder, Reed Trvine, produced a series called “The Other Side,” whch focused on Clinton scandals and aired on the Scaife-funded National Empowerment Television...
...Conservatives, proclaimed Lionel Trilling, didn’t have ideas, merely “irritable mental gestures...
...He shuns the public eye and almost never speaks to reporters...
...She never forgave Scaife for deserting her husband, and Scaife never forgave her for going against his orders...
...The Consematzve Mind and William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale...
...And Dennis Casey, a political consultant who works for Scaife, describes him as a “caring” and “humorous” man who served as a pillar of support to Casey’s family when Casey suffered a heart attack...
...To this day, many Pennsylvanians believe Duggan was murdered...
...These “neo-conservatives” warned that the Great Society had promised more than it could deliver and was rife with unintended consequences...
...Slowly but surely, Scaife helped create a new political and intellectual establishment which has, in turn, increasingly shifted American politics toward a repudiation of the New Deal and the Great Society...
...In 1995 Scaife gave $230,000 to the WJC...
...So did the Mountain States Legal Fund from whence Secretary of the Interior James Watt came...
...He’s the man behind groups like the Landmark Legal Foundation ($275,000 in 1995), which files ethics complaints against Democrats in Congress, and helps defend Republicans...
...A 1981 Washington Post article attempting to describe it required a full page to list the 70-odd groups involved...
...But an even more des uctive tendency has been the movement’s focus on e i n g political power even at the expense of national well-being...
...When Reagan entered the White House he brought in more than the New Right’s philosophy, he brought in the philosophes themselves...
...Scaife’s contribution to this victory did not go unacknowledged...
...Until then, the Fords and Carnegies of America had, for the most part, been content to deposit their wealth in large foundations and stand placidly by as executive boards disbursed it to liberal causes...
...A former family friend who testified against Scaife at his divorce hearing charged that Scaife retaliated by pressuring her boss to fire her...
...In 1970 he was one of 16 guests at a stag dinner aboard Nixon’s yacht Sequoia-one of a number of intimate gatherings with the president at which Scaife was urged to open his wallet...
...When the Associated Press revealed his Nixon contributions, Scaife responded by cancelling his newspaper’s account with the service and ordering that its wire machines be removed from the newsroom that very night...
...As for Richard, he has continued the family tradition-with a twist...
...for every Brookings Institution, he gave the seed money for a Heritage Foundation...
...Nor are journalists immune...
...He supported conservative media outlets such as National Empowerment Television, run by Paul Weyrich‘s Free Congress Foundation ($720,000) and The American Spectator ($700,000)- the folks who brought us David Brock‘s attack on Anita Hill and the Troopergate stories...
...By the early 1990s, the conservative network had produced a new generation of thinkers and activists who took the ideas of their intellectual predecessors one step further...
...But the turning point came in the late 1960s, when disillusioned leftists like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Nathan Glazer defected to the conservative side...
...At around the same time, Richard Scaife and other like-minded deep pockets began using their money to advance their anti-government agenda...
...A number of Scaife acquaintances have described his keen interest in cloak-and-dagger tales, and one former Tribune-Revim reporter remembers having long discussions with Scaife about the mob: “He was just fascinated by it.’’ Meanwhile, Scaife continues to add new conservative institutions to his Christmas list...
...As described by Katharine Graham in her recently published memoir, one of the strategies considered by the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded was to muzzle the The Washington Post by convincing Scaife to take it over...
...But the neo-cons’ originally legitimate critique of government intervention was soon parlayed into a justification for laissez-faire policies that clearly favored the rich...
...While Republican politicians regularly lambasted Democrats during elections, once in office they drew from the same pool of ideas as their Democratic counterparts...
...Scaife resigned as Duggan’s campaign finance chair and directed Cordelia to cut him off as well...
...It began with a few lone voices in the wilderness...
...Scaife,” gushed Gingrich in a speech he gave just days after the election, was one of the people “who really...
...The bulk of these articles are written by journalist Christopher Ruddy, who’s credited with such “scoops7a’ s the since-disproved charge that Foster shared a secret apartment in V i a with other administration officials...
...The 1950s saw further rumblings with the publication of Russell Kirk...
...Ironically, their inspiration came from the left...
...He had a little rack in his room where you could stack the papers and see their titles-like a magazine stand,” remembers his older sister Cordelia May...
...Scaife paused three or four seconds and looked at me really hard,” Minarcin recalled...
...And because they were bona fide members of the intellectual elite, their counterparts in the Establishment couldn’t simply dismiss them as right-wing dimwits...
...And Scaife clearly wants to keep it that way...
...Duggan encouraged Scaife to become active in the Republican party and brought him on as campaign treasurer in his own bid for elected office...
...The Man Behind the Curtain Richard Mellon Scaife-and $200 million of his moneyis the man behind the conservative revolution BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN OIL AND BANKING HEIR RICHARD Mellon Scaife comes from a long line of philanthropists...
...All he wants is for the truth to come out...
...Much of the money Scaife inherited from his Mellon ancestors has gone to the campaigns of individual politicians...
...Editorial writers quickly seized on the conflict of interest posed by Scaife’s funding of Starr’s next job...
...That suited Scaife just fine...
...The answer, according to Powell and others, was to appropriate Nader’s tactics and launch a counter-offensive which would oppose the anti-business groups not just in the courts, but in the wider arena of public opinion and political thought...
...In November 1994, the GOP swept into both houses...
...Name a major right-wing institution and the odds are that Scaife is a principal funder...
...Ruddy’s pieces reach an audience well beyond the Tribune-Review’s readership thanks to the Scaife-funded Western Journalism Center (WJC), which reprints his articles in full-page ads it buys in mainstream papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times...
...For years Scaife maintained strong ties to his political mentor...
...created modern conservatism...
Vol. 29 • July 1997 • No. 7
