There are pointless empty shells like Bush but there are true radical fanatics with very deep pockets. Elected officials running your life?
PSHAW. It's little tinpot tyrants like this who are really running your life....into the ground.
washingtonpost.com
========Scaife: Funding Father of the Right
Richard Mellon Scaife
Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (AP)
By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1
First of two articles
One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."
Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.
Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."
But people who know him well say that although Scaife is fond of conspiracy theories of many kinds, he is incapable of managing any sort of grand conspiracy himself. And months of reporting produced no evidence of his orchestrating any effort to "get" Clinton beyond his financial support. Indeed, focusing on his role in the crusade against Clinton can obscure the 66-year-old philanthropist's real importance, which is not based on his opposition or support for any individual politicians (though he once gave Richard M. Nixon $1 million). His biggest contribution has been to help fund the creation of the modern conservative movement in America.
By compiling a computerized record of nearly all his contributions over the last four decades, The Washington Post found that Scaife and his family's charitable entities have given at least $340 million to conservative causes and institutions – about $620 million in current dollars, adjusted for inflation. The total of Scaife's giving – to conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries – exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much more than any previous estimate.
In the world of big-time philanthropy, there are many bigger givers. The Ford Foundation gave away $491 million in 1998 alone. But by concentrating his giving on a specific ideological objective for nearly 40 years, and making most of his grants with no strings attached, Scaife's philanthropy has had a disproportionate impact on the rise of the right, perhaps the biggest story in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.
His money has established or sustained activist think tanks that have created and marketed conservative ideas from welfare reform to enhanced missile defense; public interest law firms that have won important court cases on affirmative action, property rights and how to conduct the national census; organizations and publications that have nurtured conservatism on American campuses; academic institutions that have employed and promoted the work of conservative intellectuals; watchdog groups that have critiqued and harassed media organizations, and many more.
Together these groups constitute a conservative intellectual infrastructure that provided ideas and human talent that helped Ronald Reagan initiate a new Republican era in 1980, and helped Newt Gingrich initiate another one in 1994. Conservative ideas once dismissed as flaky or extreme moved into the mainstream, and as the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy concluded in a recent report, "The long-standing conservative crusade to discredit government as a vehicle for societal progress has come to fruition as never before."
The ideas behind this success did not come from Scaife. Even the conservative activists who know him best say he rarely offers his own ideas or opinions, and most of those who get money from him have no personal relations with him or don't know him at all.
"I don't see anything resembling a grand strategy about the man," said James Whelan, who was editor of the Sacramento Union when Scaife owned it and later became editor of the Washington Times. "In general he sees certain villains in American life and society and thinks he should do everything he can to attack them and bring them down."
Scaife declined to be interviewed for this story, but in written answers to questions about his motivation, he said: "Our funding is based on our support of ideas like limited government, individual rights and a strong defense."
As for himself, he added: "I am not a politician, although like most Americans I have some political views. Basically I am a private individual who has concerns about his country and who has resources that give me the privilege – and responsibility – to do something to help my country if I can."
If Scaife's explanations seem vague, his achievement is not. Besides acting on his own visceral reactions, Scaife has backed people he admired and institutions he favored with lots of money, without ever telling them what to do. He has done this consistently, patiently, over four decades.
Frank Shakespeare, director of the U.S. Information Agency in the first Nixon administration and Scaife's colleague for years on the board of the Heritage Foundation, summarized the accomplishment: "Dick Scaife has made a real difference in his country – and has had an impact on the larger world."
A Philanthropic Heir Embraces 'the War of Ideas'
To make his mark on history, Scaife had to overcome long odds. In his youth he seemed star-crossed, even to many of his friends. He grew up in a household dominated by his mother's alcoholism, in a family whose members specialized in "making each other totally miserable," in the rueful words of his sister, Cordelia Scaife May.
At 9 he spent a year in bed after his skull was fractured by a horse. Yale University suspended him for drunken pranks, then kicked him out entirely before he could complete his freshman year. At 22 he caused a car accident that almost killed him and injured five members of one family, who won a large legal settlement. He had a drinking problem most of his adult life, finally getting on the wagon in the early 1990s. He has feuded bitterly with friends, employees and relatives. He has no relations with his daughter, and hasn't spoken to his sister for 25 years.
Scaife inherited his philanthropic role from his mother. She had established trusts and foundations whose earnings, under the tax law, had to be given away. She began encouraging her son to participate in family philanthropy after his father died suddenly in 1958.
Sarah Scaife's causes were family planning, the poor and the disabled, hospitals, environmental causes and various good works in and around Pittsburgh. Her most famous gifts, in the late 1940s, were to the University of Pittsburgh – $35,000 to equip a virus research lab. In that lab, Jonas Salk discovered his polio vaccine.
The available recorded history of Scaife's donations to conservative causes in the database assembled by The Post begins in 1962 with small grants of $25,000 or less to groups with educational missions on conservative themes – the American Bar Association's Fund for Public Education for "education against communism," for example.
Over the next two years he ventured a little further into the conservative world, making donations to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and the brand-new Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1963 he began supporting the American Enterprise Institute.
The events of 1964 were a turning point for Scaife, and for American conservatives. Scaife was an alternate to the Republican Convention that chose Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater as the party's presidential nominee, and he became an active contributor and supporter. He escorted Goldwater on the Scaife family airplane to California in July 1964 to attend the Bohemian Grove retreat, a boozy and confidential gathering of conservative, mostly wealthy men.
Confounded by Goldwater's devastating defeat that November, many conservatives concluded that they could only win an election in the future by matching their enemy's firepower. It was time, as a Scaife associate of that era put it, to wage "the war of ideas." Scaife enthusiastically adopted this view.
"We saw what the Democrats were doing and decided to do the mirror image, but do it better," this Scaife associate said. "In those days [the early 1970s] you had the American Civil Liberties Union, the government-supported legal corporations [neighborhood legal services programs], a strong Democratic Party with strong labor support, the Brookings Institution, the New York Times and Washington Post and all these other people on the left – and nobody on the right." The idea was to correct that imbalance. "And the first idea was to copy what works."
This sort of thinking went far beyond Scaife's office in Pittsburgh. He was riding a wave at the same time he contributed to it. Former congressman Vin Weber, an early and active member of the "movement conservative" Republican faction on Capitol Hill, recalled that "people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy" that had to be mimicked and countered with new conservative organizations that were "philosophically sound, technologically proficient and movement-oriented." This became a mantra for the new conservative activists.
Sarah Scaife died in 1965, and her son then had a freer hand to reorient the family giving. By 1976, the year Jimmy Carter was elected president, Scaife's conservative interests had come to dominate the foundations' giving. Just more than half of the $18 million in grants that year went to conservative recipients. By 1980, the year Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, conservative groups were awarded $13 million of about $18 million in Scaife grants. Conservative interests have continued to predominate in Scaife's philanthropy ever since.
While Scaife's money supported individual institutions, his office in Pittsburgh encouraged the evolution of a new community of activists on the right. One longtime recipient of Scaife's support recalled a meeting convened in California in 1973 by Richard M. Larry, Scaife's longtime chief aide, where his beneficiaries could meet one another. A person who attended the California meeting said he was delighted to find people there he'd never heard of – a new peer group on the right.
The Heritage Foundation became an important part of the right's community-building efforts. Scaife first contributed to Heritage in 1974. Soon afterward, using money from Scaife, Heritage established its resource bank, a compilation of conservative organizations, which from 1982 was published in the Directory of Public Policy Organizations, a guide to the new right-wing establishment. The current edition lists 300 groups; 111 have received grants from Scaife, 76 of them in 1998.
Heritage, organized by former staff assistants to Republican lawmakers whose goal was to influence both Congress and the news media with a stream of brief, meaty position papers on issues of the day, became Scaife's favorite beneficiary. When it began to make a mark in the mid-1970s, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was commonly credited as its chief financial patron. Coors did put up the first $250,000. But within two years, according to Heritage officials, Scaife had given more than twice as much, and he has kept on giving ever since – more than $23 million in all, or about $34 million in inflation-adjusted, current dollars. At Heritage the joke was, "Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases."
With Scaife's early contributions, Heritage could thrive. In 1976, Heritage's third year of operation, Scaife gave $420,000, or 42 percent of the foundation's total income of $1,008,557. This early support was "absolutely critical," said the president of the foundation, Edwin J. Feulner Jr.
Scaife continues to give generously to Heritage – $1.3 million in 1998. But Heritage took in $43 million last year, so his gift represented just 3 percent of its income.
Scaife's money was probably most important to the cause in the '70s and '80s, when conservatives enjoyed the exhilarating reversal of what they had seen as their traditional, inconsequential status in American life. Scaife gave about $200 million to conservative causes from 1974 (his first gift to the Heritage Foundation) through the end of the Bush administration in 1992.
As soul mates in what they considered a war over American values, the groups to which he gave shared a core set of conservative beliefs evident in the way they described their missions.
For example, the Foundation for Economic Education promotes "individual freedom, private property, limited government, free trade." The Pacific Legal Foundation works "for less government and the preservation of free enterprise, private property rights and individual liberties." The Reason Foundation advocates "public policies based upon individual liberty and responsibility and a free-market approach." Lower taxes and fewer regulations are also part of the broadly shared program.
In the realm of national security, Scaife-supported groups have a similarly shared view of the need for a bristling national defense and vigilance against communism and terrorism.
There are disagreements, of course, particularly on emotional issues such as abortion, free trade and immigration. Scaife has long favored abortion rights, to the chagrin of many of those he has supported. In the first years of his philanthropy he stuck to a pattern set by his mother and sister and gave millions to Planned Parenthood and other population control groups, though most such giving stopped in the 1970s. He also has favored stricter controls on immigration and trade, though many Scaife-supported groups do not.
By concentrating his philanthropy on a relatively small number of beneficiaries, Scaife maximized his impact.
Over four decades he has nurtured enduring institutions, not just short-lived crusades. Nineteen percent of his conservative giving went to Heritage, the Hoover Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), four of the biggest think tanks in America.
This list is revealing for its political coloration. Heritage is the most aggressively conservative of the four, but it is hardly extremist. Hoover and AEI are plainly conservative institutions also, but CSIS, now run by former senator Sam Nunn and Robert Zoellick, a protege of former secretary of state James A. Baker III, is more centrist.
Much of Scaife's philanthropy has gone to recipients that made no lasting mark; many have gone out of business. For example, the Capital Legal Foundation, which represented Gen. William C. Westmoreland in his unsuccessful 1984 libel suit against CBS, was granted at least $1.7 million from Scaife sources between 1977 and 1987, then folded.
On some occasions Scaife has given money to an individual project just because it struck his fancy. One was a book project proposed in the early '90s by Elliott Abrams, a Reagan State Department official at the time of the Iran-contra affair and a foreign policy specialist for the Hudson Institute when he decided he wanted to write a book about American Jews.
Leslie Lenkowsky, then the president of Hudson, suggested they ask Scaife to help fund the project. He and Abrams went to Pittsburgh, where they had lunch at the Duquesne Club with Scaife, his son David and Richard Larry. Abrams said he found Scaife fascinated by his subject. "He couldn't figure out the American Jewish community. He wondered why it seemed to be so liberal politically," Abrams recalled.
Scaife gave a $175,000 grant for the project, with one string attached: that it be funded also by some Jewish donor or group. It was. "Faith or Fear" was published in 1997. It argued that "liberal politics" had become for many Jews "the heart of their Jewish identity," often replacing the Jewish religion, and gravely jeopardizing the future of Judaism in America. It sold 6,190 copies.
From Quiet Benefactor to 'the Arkansas Project'
Today it is difficult to find an important organization that depends on Scaife's money. The pattern of his giving hasn't changed much, but more and more individuals, corporations and foundations have become contributors to Scaife's causes. The Olin Foundation (assets of $103 million at the beginning of 1998) and the Bradley Foundation (assets of $545 million) have become particularly important. The success of the conservative movement has made Scaife a less significant player.
In many Scaife-supported organizations, the founders have been supplanted by successors unfamiliar with his role. Robert K. Best, president of the Pacific Legal Foundation, oldest and perhaps most influential of the conservative public interest law firms, was surprised to learn that Scaife contributions had constituted at least half the group's budget in its early years.
It is tempting to speculate that the routinization of Scaife's role might have prompted him – or his key aide, Larry – to get involved in more adventuresome anti-Clinton activities. Their involvement in what became known as "the Arkansas Project" – an aggressive and ultimately fruitless attempt to discredit a sitting president – marked a clear departure from years of relatively anonymous philanthropy, and Scaife could not have foreseen the consequences: He became a celebrity.
The full realization of the trouble he had made for himself probably came one day last September when he appeared, under subpoena, before a federal grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark., that was investigating possible tampering with a federal witness. On that day, Scaife could have felt he was being treated like a suspect – not the status a Mellon from Pittsburgh worth perhaps a billion dollars expects. According to several associates, Scaife was furious.
The Arkansas Project was apparently cooked up largely by Larry, 63, who has worked for Scaife for 30 years. A former Marine with a deeply ideological view of the world, Larry had developed a powerful dislike for Clinton. "I noticed a change in Dick Larry – at the mention of Clinton he became almost hyperthyroid," said one prominent figure in the conservative world who knows Larry well. A second prominent conservative close to him said: "I never saw Dick Larry do anything like this before. The only thing I can figure is that Larry dislikes Clinton intensely."
As the chief administrative officer of Scaife's philanthropies for many years and the main contact for anyone seeking a grant, Larry has long been a controversial figure among conservatives. They discuss him with the same reluctance to go on the record that many demonstrate when Scaife is the subject. "Sometimes [Larry] makes you wonder if it is the Richard Scaife foundations, or the Richard Larry foundations," said one source who worked with both men.
In his written answers to questions from The Post, Scaife attributed his support for the project to his doubts that "The Washington Post and other major newspapers would fully investigate the disturbing scandals of the Clinton White House." He explained those doubts: "I am not alone in feeling that the press has a bias in favor of Democratic administrations." That is why, he continued, "I provided some money to independent journalists investigating these scandals."
The Arkansas Project itself relied on several private detectives, a former Arkansas state police officer and other unlikely schemers, including a bait shop owner in Hot Springs, Ark. The two men running the project were a lawyer and a public relations man. Scaife's role became the subject of a special federal investigation because of accusations that the money he donated ended up in the pocket of David Hale, a former Clinton associate and convicted defrauder of the Small Business Administration who had become a witness for Starr's investigation of the president.
Sources at the American Spectator say it was Larry who played an instrumental role in the project. But there is no doubt that Clinton had gotten under Scaife's skin.
Scaife's penchant for conspiracy theories – a bent of mind he has been drawn to for years, according to many associates – was stimulated by the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., Hillary Clinton's former law partner and a deputy White House counsel. He has repeatedly called Foster's death "the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration" (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics).
Last fall Scaife told John F. Kennedy Jr. of George magazine, "Once you solve that one mystery, you'll know everything that's going on or went on – I think there's been a massive coverup about what Bill Clinton's administration has been doing, and what he was doing when he was governor of Arkansas." And he had ominous specifics in mind: "Listen, [Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He's got the entire federal government behind him." And: "God, there must be 60 people [associated with Bill Clinton] – who have died mysteriously."
Even before the Arkansas Project had gotten underway, Scaife personally hired a former New York Post reporter named Christopher Ruddy to write about Foster's death for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the daily newspaper Scaife has owned since 1969. Ruddy's stories about Foster's death – most of them challenging the suicide theory, without offering an alternative explanation – began to appear in January 1995.
Scaife has funded other Clinton efforts as well: Two zealous and resourceful (and rival) public interest law firms that have pursued Clinton and his administration relentlessly, the Landmark Legal Foundation and Judicial Watch, have received more than $4 million from Scaife. Judicial Watch, which is aggressively suing several branches of the government and has questioned numerous White House officials under oath, has received $1.35 million from Scaife sources in the last two years, a large fraction of its budget.
The Fund for Living American Government (FLAG), a one-man philanthropy run by William Lehrfeld, a Washington tax lawyer who has represented Scaife in the past, gave $59,000 to Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Clinton. FLAG has received at least $160,000 in Scaife donations. And lawyers who belong to the conservative Federalist Society, which has enjoyed Scaife support for 15 years (at least $1.5 million), were members of a secretive group who provided important legal advice to Paula Jones and who may have pulled off the key legal maneuver in the Clinton case by connecting the Jones suit and the Starr investigation.
Officers of the Scaife-supported Independent Women's Forum have appeared on many television programs as Clinton critics. William J. Bennett, author of "Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals," is on the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and has received Scaife support as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation and other enterprises.
One of the most publicized allegations of a tie between Scaife and Clinton's enemies was the suggestion that Scaife was trying to set up independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in a posh deanship at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. Starr briefly toyed with accepting the job early in 1997.
Scaife has been a generous supporter of Pepperdine, donating more than $13 million since 1962 (in personal gifts as well as foundation grants), according to the school. But Scaife and the current president of Pepperdine, David Davenport, both have said that Scaife played no role whatsoever in the offer to Starr. Scaife and Starr have said they don't know each other, and have never met.
Only the Arkansas Project has caused Scaife serious trouble. The possibility that money from the project had tainted Hale, a federal witness, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen, a former senior Justice Department official, as a special investigator. It was Shaheen who summoned Scaife to the Fort Smith grand jury.
Shaheen's investigation apparently is complete. Lawyers involved said they don't expect any indictments.
One result of the enterprise was to strain Scaife's relationship with Larry almost to the breaking point. "He almost fired Larry," said one friend.
The other result has been the emergence of Scaife as a public figure and punching bag for liberals.
"I'm a very private person – I think I'm essentially shy," Scaife told Kennedy last fall. But now, he acknowledged, he is recognized by passersby on the street – "thanks to CNN." |
