Ahhmanson, Part Two
Howard Jr. was born in 1950, when his father was 44. By that time, according to Roberta Ahmanson, the elder Ahmanson was "in his palatial stage," feting visiting kings and queens and basking in the opulence of his three-lot mansion on Harbor Island, an exclusive peninsula jutting out into San Diego Bay. Meanwhile, young Ahmanson was tended to by an army of servants and ferried to and from school in a limousine. As he watched the world go by behind darkened windows, he was gripped with a longing to cast off his wealth and disappear into anonymity. He came to burn with resentment toward his father, a remote, towering presence who burdened him with high expectations. "I resented my family background," he told the Register in 1985. "[My father] could never be a role model, whether by habits or his lifestyle, it was never anything I wanted."
His youth was plagued with loneliness and loss. At age 10, his mother served his father with divorce papers. A few years later, she died. Then, when Howard was 18, his father died too, sinking him into spiraling depths of despair and therapy. To escape his background, Ahmanson drifted to the far-off plains of Kansas and enrolled part-time in college classes. "It was like taking the lid off a pressure cooker," Mrs. Ahmanson recalls of her husband's self-imposed exile.
Ahmanson returned to California to attend Occidental College, where he earned generally poor marks as an economics major. After graduating with a bachelor's degree, he spent a year backpacking through Europe and "being grungy," as he told the Register. He might have stayed there, living off his trust fund, if not for a bout with arthritis, an affliction he later would call his "miracle disease." This sent him back to the States, where he earned his master's degree in linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington. Because he suffers from Tourette's syndrome, a disease that makes stringing sentences together a frustrating ordeal -- "like a slow modem," his wife explains -- the degree reflected a major triumph. In his single-minded determination to overcome his handicap, Ahmanson became fluent in Japanese, Spanish and German.
When Ahmanson came back to Orange County driving an old Datsun pickup and dressed in clothing more befitting a Seattle alt-rocker than a trust-fund baby, it was clear he was still struggling with the burden of guilt left to him by his father. With millions at his disposal, he had imposed an allowance of $1,200 a month upon himself. Most of his fraternity brothers from Occidental had become evangelical Christians while he was away and reconnecting with them also sparked a new interest for him. He joined a singles group organized by Mariners Church, a Bible-based, nondenominational church in Newport Beach, which he credits with his spiritual and social salvation. It was there, he told the Register, that he was convinced to take full advantage of his inheritance and to stop "cheating God."
Ahmanson sold his stock in his father's company and invested it in lucrative real estate acquisitions, with a goal of earning returns of 20 to 25 percent per year. That assured that his wealth would grow quickly, but it made him feel vulnerable to people who would manipulate his guilt complex to get a cut of his fortune. These were usually the people closest to him -- girlfriends, family members and friends. In one instance, his former roommate at Occidental asked him to fund his surf shop, explaining that the shop could bring in potential Christian converts off the street. Ahmanson wasn't convinced. "If you don't do this, these kids will go to hell," his roommate threatened. In that very hour, according to his wife, he became a full-fledged Calvinist, giving himself to Calvin's doctrine of predestination, which holds that God "elects" individuals for salvation based on factors beyond their control.
"If someone's eternal goal is dependent on him [Ahmanson] giving a grant, then we're all in trouble," Mrs. Ahmanson explained. "So that made Calvin's approach that God is in charge of all of this quite appealing." Ahmanson's sudden religious turn did not automatically lead him to right-wing political activism, according to his wife. He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and, as Mrs. Ahmanson claims, was not politicized until 1979, when the Orange County Rescue Mission, a Christian homeless shelter where he played piano once a week, was condemned when the city of Santa Ana failed to issue it a conditional use permit. As Mrs. Ahmanson recounts, her husband was outraged by what he considered an act of government tyranny; as he stood on a picket line outside the doomed shelter, he became an ardent believer in God-given property rights and the spirit of capitalism.
But contrary to his wife's account, evidence suggests Ahmanson's political conversion was not exactly the result of a heroic epiphany. According to Sloan, founder of Project Tocsin in Sacramento, Ahmanson became a board member of Rushdoony's Chalcedon in the mid-'70s, so by the time he was picketing outside the Mission, he was fully immersed in the right-wing politics that are part and parcel of Chalcedon.
Whatever the case, Ahmanson's Calvinist ideology rapidly crystallized under Rushdoony's tutelage. As Mrs. Ahmanson told me, Rushdoony was like a father figure to her husband when he was young and wayward. "Howard got to know Rushdoony and Rushdoony was very good to him when he was a young man and my husband was very grateful and supported him to his death," she said, adding that they were with Rushdoony at his deathbed.
The Ahmansons today bristle at questions about their past alliance with Rushdoony: "It's like, 'Have you now or ever been?'" remarked Mrs. Ahmanson, comparing journalistic inquiries about her husband's links to Rushdoony to McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics. Yet it is only by understanding this little-known cleric that one can grasp the philosphy behind Ahmanson's politics. "I discovered his works at a time when I had no clear vision for Christian philanthropy and no model that I liked," Ahmanson told me of Rushdoony. "Here was someone responding to questions that in the late '70s no one was even asking."
Rushdoony descended from six generations of Armenian priests, aristocracy in the world's oldest Christian country. His parents narrowly escaped the Armenian genocide, in which over 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by Turks attempting to "Ottomanize" the country. As a young boy growing up in New York, Rushdoony was haunted by tales of the slaughter that persisted despite impassioned pleas from the Armenian clergy for foreign intervention. As Rushdoony made his way through conservative seminaries during the 1940s and '50s, he was gripped by a bitter cynicism about the betrayal that became his driving force.
"His whole life's work was aimed at finding a philosophy that would stand against the kind of tyranny his parents had to flee," Ahmanson explained.
Rushdoony spelled out his philosophy in painstaking detail in his 1973 magnum opus, "Institutes of Biblical Law," which he self-consciously named after John Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion." In the 800-page tome, Rushdoony presents his vision for a new America in which the church subsumes the federal government and society is administered according to biblical law, or at least his interpretation of it. According to biblical law, he writes, segregation is a "basic principle," and slavery is permitted "because some people are by nature slaves and will always be so." Those who don't comply with Rushdoony's rules -- disobedient children, "pagans," adulterers, women who get abortions, repeat criminal offenders and, of course, homosexuals -- would be executed. Mrs. Ahmanson, who described Rushdoony as "quirky in some ways," qualified his extremism: "To impose the death penalty you need two witnesses. So the number of executions goes down pretty quickly."
Though Ahmanson has read "Institutes of Biblical Law," he told me he prefers books by Rushdoony that deal more explicitly with ethical and moral issues. One such book is "The Politics of Guilt and Pity," a polemical suite of caustic riffs on the pathology of liberals. In this book, Rushdoony writes: "The guilty rich will indulge in philanthropy, and the guilty white men will show 'love' and 'concern' for Negroes and other such persons who are in actuality repulsive and intolerable to them ... The Negroes demand more aid, i.e., more slavery and slave-care, and dwell on their sufferings."
There is no indication that Ahmanson shares Rushdoony's bellicose racism, but Rushdoony's scathing critique of "the guilty rich" resonated with the young man constantly beset upon by human parasites seeking a chunk of his money. In possibly his only published piece of work, a 1997 essay for the Acton Institute, a conservative religious think tank, Ahmanson parroted Rushdoony's harsh style and viewpoint: "The argument that we ought not do any particular thing because the poor exist is the argument of Judas, and if you hear it made, know that thieves are about who want to get their piece of the action."
As an avid reader, Ahmanson often explores literature beyond the Bible for insight on his struggle to harness his inheritance. As Mrs. Ahmanson told me, her family is captivated by J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy -- by her count, her husband has read "The Hobbit" six times. "Howard kind of identifies with Frodo," she said, referring to the heroic Hobbit who must destroy a magical ring to save the world.
In my latest conversation with Mrs. Ahmanson, in which she spoke by cellphone while strolling through an Orange County shopping mall on a search for socks and underwear for her teenage son, David, we negotiated my request for an interview with her husband. As she rattled off a litany of engagements he had to make before leaving the following week for a three-month tour of New Zealand, Japan and Australia, I heard a man's voice in the background and realized Ahmanson was there all along. "He'd talk on the phone but he doesn't want to. It just doesn't work well," she explained regretfully, hinting at her husband's Tourette's.
Though Ahmanson himself declined to sit down for a face-to-face interview, Roberta Ahmanson's interviews for this story were her first since a two-part L.A. Times story in 1992 on her husband's role in the Allied Business PAC. "They burned me so badly," she said of the Times. "The reporter didn't know anything and wasn't going to be taught." Her suspicion of the media was often apparent. While the premise for my interview was to discuss her and her husband's involvement in the Episcopal Church split, she bristled at the notion that they are involved in any way other than granting money. "They [Anglican Council officials] don't call us up and say, 'What do you want us to do?'" she insisted.
Unlike other Ahmanson-funded campaigns, Mrs. Ahmanson has assumed a personal role in the Episcopal Church split. She and her husband are longtime members of St. James Church in Newport Beach, a leading parish in the Episcopal Church's Los Angeles diocese where their "good friend" and Anglican Council CEO David Anderson served as rector until this year. (Anderson refused my interview request.) Mrs. Ahmanson, moreover, is on the board of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, a right-wing Washington think tank that shares ideas -- and an office in Washington -- with the Anglican Council.
The institute is directed by Diane Knippers, an evangelical Episcopalian and syndicated columnist who also happens to be a founding member of the Anglican Council and its acting executive director. She is the chief architect of the institute's Reforming America's Churches Project, which aims to "restructure the permanent governing structure" of "theologically flawed" mainline churches like the Episcopal Church in order to "discredit and diminish the Religious Left's influence." This has translated into a three-pronged assault on mainline Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopal churches. With a staff of media-savvy research specialists, the institute is able to ply both the religious and mainstream media, exploiting divisive social issues within the churches.
"The larger framework for the challenge to the Episcopal Church is the ongoing right-wing effort to get control of the mainline denominations," says Alfred Ross, president of the Institute for Democratic Studies, a New York think tank that monitors anti-democratic political movements. "As the right looks to consolidate different squares on the chessboard, the mainline churches occupy key positions on that board."
The Institute for Religion and Democracy's project did not come together until 2001, when Knippers and her husband were invited by the Ahmansons for a five-week vacation in Turkey during which Mrs. Ahmanson says the Knippers "inveigled me to go on the [institute] board." Ahmanson then opened up his checkbook. IRS 990 forms show that, to go along with his $1 million to the Anglican Council, he made five anonymous grants totaling $460,000 to the institute in 2001, accounting for a 35 percent spike in its fundraising from the previous year.
The campaign against the Episcopal Church climaxed on Aug. 5 last year, just a day before the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson was scheduled to be elected as the church's first openly gay bishop. In a column titled "The Gay Bishop's Links," Weekly Standard editor and Institute board member Fred Barnes alleged that the Web site of a gay youth group Robinson founded contained links to "a pornographic website." Further, Barnes alleged, Robinson "put his hands on" a Vermont man "inappropriately" during a church meeting "several years ago." The institute shopped the column to various cable news networks but only Fox News broadcast it. Barnes did not return calls seeking comment.
Though Barnes' smear was discredited by a panel of bishops investigating the charges, it helped widen the rift within the Episcopal Church and isolate it from its global affiliates. Since Robinson's Nov. 2 consecration, 13 dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Council have threatened to break with the Episcopal Church and form a renegade network. Though the network has yet to congeal, the momentum for a full-blown split continues to build. And the Nigerian and Southeast Asian churches, which, like the Episcopal Church, belong to the global Anglican Communion, have broken off contact with the Episcopal Church.
The Episcopal Church split is the best evidence yet that Ahmanson's plan to bring America closer to resembling Calvin's elitist "church of the elect," or what Rushdoony has called a "spiritual aristocracy," is working. The split is also the crowning achievement of Ahmanson's nearly 30-year career in the business of radically transforming the country. Though he still remains an unknown quantity to most Americans, he has surpassed his father's accomplishments, and in the process, vanquished -- or at least tamed -- his personal demons.
Reflecting on his prodigious achievements, Ahmanson has every reason to be satisfied. "I may have had 'a plan to change American society' once," he mused. "Now I'm just trying to be faithful with what I have."
About the writer
Max Blumenthal is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.
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