Open in TheBrain

Scaife Notes

scaife  MAIN NOTES LOST?

 see also tag

SEE SCAIFE $

see sarah fdn for later

see carthage fdn

much of this is bak of main?

CARTHAGE LOST?

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/richard-mellon-scaife-the-original-koch-brother-108729/

long before the Koch brothers, there was Richard Mellon Scaife. Like the Koch brothers, who have poured money into groups that helped spawn the tea party movement, Scaife, who died recently at 82, funded an earlier array of organizations that provided the underpinning of the political movement known as the New Right. Indeed Scaife, far more than the Kochs, can fairly be said to have been the architect of the anti-Washington, media-savvy, take-no-prisoners politics that prevail today.

Ironically, it was their liberal opponents who showed them the way, at least tactically. Back in the 1970s, the Republican Party was in disarray, fighting off not just the embarrassment of Richard Nixon’s impeachment but also the cascade of ideas and activism coming from New Left organizations like Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen. “We took a look” at what liberals had been doing through public interest law firms, direct mail campaigns and media-focused activities “and we used their road map,” a close associate of Scaife told me in the mid-1990s.

“We created a little network starting with the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute and through them we met other sources.>zzz  Thus were born think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, that supplied experts to design and testify in favor of conservative legislation on Capitol Hill and to serve as pundits for Reagan-era talk shows; lobbies like the Committee on the Present Danger that helped beat the drum for more military spending; and unglamorous but highly efficient groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council that worked with state legislators to shape conservative agendas.

The Koch brothers and Scaife were alike in more ways than just their politics. For one thing, they all started life on third base. (The Koch brothers, however, built the firm founded by their father into a behemoth with more than $100 billion in annual revenues. Scaife, whose inheritance resulted in a net worth recently pegged at over $1 billion, only dabbled in Mellon family businesses before becoming the publisher of a small Pennsylvania newspaper, the <">Greensburg Tribune-Review, that he ran at a loss for years. Scaife also showed how one could be enormously influential while staying largely out of the public eye. After initial forays into the political arena—in the case of Scaife, early efforts to seek Republican Party appointments, and in the case of the Koch brothers, an unsuccessful vice-presidential run by David Koch on the Libertarian ticket—all of them preferred to let their money speak for them. What one Republican campaign consultant told Jane Mayer when she was reporting a 2010 profile of the Koch brothers for the New Yorker could equally have applied to Scaife: “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!”

In the Koch brothers’ case, this may be because their business interests so neatly dovetail with their charitable giving that it might raise suspicions about their motivations if the connections were widely known. For example, as Mayer reports, Koch Industries has been identified as a major air polluter while the brothers heavily fund groups opposing legislation on climate change.

For Scaife, the decision to exercise influence behind the scenes was almost certainly a matter of his personality as well as the advice of his friends. As one Republican official told me, “He did seriously want to be a player in the community and in the Republican Party. But one of the problems with Dick is that everything is either black or white; there aren’t many gray areas. And he did have a drinking problem. When you’re in that condition your judgment isn’t so red hot and your performance isn’t so good. So people don’t reach out to do things like give you appointments.”

Scaife himself was far from an intellectual—rather the opposite, according to people who knew him. He was also so nasty, including to many one-time friends—even after he stopped drinking late in life—that his only sibling, a sister, refused to talk to him for years. But he surrounded himself with ideas people like Edwin Feulner Jr. and Paul Weyrich, who saw in him the means to achieve their goal of rolling back the judicial, legislative and cultural gains of previous decades. Or, as Grover Norquist, a recipient of some of Scaife’s largesse, so famously put it, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Scaife’s views came not from his family, who were part of the traditional Republican elite of Pittsburgh, but rather from a series of friends and mentors, among them J. Edgar Hoover. In time, his fascination with military and intelligence matters led him to become acquainted with the leading figures in a movement whose combination of fierce anti-communism and small-government populism helped sweep Ronald Reagan into the White House and later led to the GOP takeover of the House under Newt Gingrich. In 1994, Feulner, then president of Heritage, told a group of supporters just after the Republican takeover of the House that the victories they were celebrating had started with Scaife’s commitment to funding a new set of organizations more than 20 years before. “These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives,” Feulner said.

I met Scaife only once myself, while I was working on a profile of him more than 30 years ago. I’d come across his name in connection with the sponsorship of a formerly CIA-funded news organization in Europe, and decided to look into his other activities. After failing repeatedly to get him to talk to me, I approached him after the annual meeting of a company on whose board he sat. He was unquestionably handsome—beefy frame, blond hair and astonishingly blue eyes—but his manners were not the best. When I asked him why he funded so many New Right organizations, his response was to call me a “fucking communist cunt.”

That, of course, was when there still were communists. Once the Soviet Union had fallen, Scaife turned his attention to America’s perceived cultural demise, exemplified in his mind by Bill and Hillary Clinton. For years he heavily funded the  American Spectator, which published a series of attacks including “Hillary, the CIA and the Iraq Cover-up” and “Is Clinton on Coke?” He also underwrote lengthy efforts to tie the Clintons to the death of White House counsel Vince Foster. (Three official investigations concluded it had been a suicide.)

Yet stranger things were yet to come. Curiously—or perhaps not, given Scaife’s unpredictable personality and the Clintons’ supreme focus on expediency—a decade after Hillary Clinton decried the “vast right-wing conspiracy” of which Scaife was the perceived leader, Scaife was enthusiastically endorsing her for president after she’d made nice to him on at least two occasions, including an invitation to the White House and a sit-down exchange at his newspaper.

Perhaps what it showed was that all Scaife had ever really wanted was to be a political player. And if the same applies to the Koch brothers, maybe President Obama could get them off his back by inviting them to serve on some high-level panel where their right-wing views could do no harm to his agenda.

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The rise of Scaife as a political impresario, and that of his ideological heirs, the Kochs, also says a lot about the weakening of the liberal agenda. Just why liberals lost their way so dramatically in the 1970s, after a string of successes that included voting rights, Medicare and the rise of the corporate accountability movement, remains a subject for historians to ponder. Some of it probably had to do with a new set of economic concerns, stagflation and decreasing U.S. competitiveness among them, that were beyond the beyond the scope of liberals’ traditional agenda—and which reflected unhappiness with a federal government that many Americans thought had grown too large.

But whatever the reasons, the fact is that the New Right movement, brilliantly orchestrated and lavishly funded, captured hearts and minds in a way that paved the way for the Tea Party and their deep-pocketed backers that has yet to be challenged by any similar initiative on the left, as witnessed by the short-lived nature of the Occupy movement.

The secret and massive contributions of the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife certainly don’t represent an ideal approach to conducting our national politics. But their systematic and disciplined focus has much to recommend it. If their opponents want to mount a successful challenge, they would do well to study, as Scaife’s advisers did, the habits of those who came before.

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Follow the money

And that's what seems to unite these seemingly disparate groups -- money. Every black conservative group I've mentioned – without exception – receives a significant portion of their funding (in some cases all of their funding) from at least three of four ultra-conservative foundations (the Lincoln Institute gets its share funneled indirectly through the conservative Hoover Institution). 

The four are the usual suspects of the Right's political ATM: Richard Scaife's family foundations, Adolph Coors' Castle Rock Foundation, The John M. Olin Foundation, and the Linde and Harry Bradley Foundation. What's striking about these groups' underwriting of "minority organizations" is that some of them have at times displayed what many would consider a frankly racist agenda.

Scaifehas gained notoriety as one of the great funders of the "New Conservative" movement. While he is best known for his anti-Clinton activities, including paying for the American Spectator's "Arkansas Project," he has plenty of unsavory grantees; the Charlotte Observer reported that he provided funding for Children Requiring A Caring Community, a scary fringe group that pays poor women to be surgically sterilized or to undergo long-term birth control. 

According to People For The American Way (PFAW), William Coors gave a speech In 1984 in which he reportedly told a largely African American audience that "one of the best things they [slave traders] did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains." Later in the speech, he asserted that weakness in the Zimbabwe economy was due to black Africans' "lack of intellectual capacity."

The speech drew controversy and a boycott by African American and Hispanic groups. In response, Coors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to African American and Hispanic organizations. Apparently, black conservative groups run by white Republicans count.

:{:{The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is a particularly interesting case. According to PFAW, Bradley, whose recipients list "reads like a Who's Who of the U.S. Right," is a major funding source for the Center for Individual Rights, which brought the Hopwood v. Texas case that ended affirmative action at the University of Texas law school. Bradley played a major role in financing Pete Wilson and Ward Connerly's Prop 209, and, through the Pacific Legal Foundation, Bradley "provided pro bono representation to ...Wilson in his challenge to five state statutes dealing with affirmative action ..."}:

Clint Bolick, vice president of the Institute for Justice, another recipient of Bradley money, "played a pivotal role in attacks on Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Bolick's Wall Street Journal opinion piece headlined 'Clinton's Quota Queen' dredged up the worst racist and sexist stereotypes and helped throw the Guinier nomination on the defensive."}:

Even more striking is that Bradley grants supported Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein while they wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. According to PFAW, "the book was widely seen as a piece of profoundly racist and classist pseudo-science, and was denounced by the American Psychological Association. It had relied heavily on studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi organization that promoted eugenicist research. Immediately after its publication, Bradley raised Murray's annual grant to $163,000."

The boards of these foundations aren't exactly "multicultural," if you know what I mean. But they have a message to get out: they're coming after affirmative action, the minimum wage, social welfare programs, pre- and after-school programs and, indeed, multiculturalism itself. And when that's the message, it's good to have it delivered by an African-American. 

So there you have it, the leading lights of the black conservative movement. If you believe that the most pressing problems facing the African-American community today are the minimum wage, too many regulations on energy companies and too many people trying to get kids to quit smoking, then maybe you should join the black conservative movement yourself. You don't have to be black, or even know anyone who is. And heck, if you are black and you leave the house early enough, they may even put you on TV to "rebut" the NAACP.

Joshua Holland is a student at the University of Southern California and Editor-in-Chief of the Trojan Horse, USC's "fiercely Progressive voice of reason." julian bomd cited in naacp speech

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Paying Drug-Addicted Women To Get Sterilized: Choice or Coercion?

by Amie Newman

November 3, 2010

Barbara Harris is in the news once again.

The founder of a controversial program that pays drug-addicted women to get sterilized or use a long-term method of birth control, is the subject of a recent New York Post article, with the TV talk-show title, “Why I took $300 to be sterilized.”

Her organization, Project Prevention (formerly called C.R.A.C.K. – Children Requiring A Caring Kommunity) has been extensively covered in the media, analyzed, and discounted by maternal health policy experts and groups including Lynn Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) and the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment (CWPE).

However, as the New York Post reports this weekend, Harris continues her quest to ensure that women who are addicted to drugs become permanently unable to procreate, with plans to extend her program to Africa to pay HIV positive women in Kenya $40 to have an IUD implanted.

Many wonder, lacking appropriate and accessible public health remedies, is this the best we can do?

First some background from my personal experience. In 2003, C.R.A.C.K. began “advertising” via photocopied flyers stapled to telephone poles in the area of Seattle where I worked, at the time. As an employee of a women’s health center, located next to a methadone clinic, C.R.A.C.K. clearly honed in on a location they knew low-income, drug-addicted women congregated.

Their sheets of paper, printed with graying ink, sometimes wet from the ongoing light rain that falls during our Seattle winters, told women they’d be eligible to receive $300 for agreeing to be sterilized or a bit less money for accepting a longer term form of contraception such as Depo-Provera (at the time). A web site for the project (no longer live), noted in the “Do’s and Don’t of Pamphleteering” section, that AA and NA meeting places were appropriate sites for hanging pamphlets. C.R.A.C.K. (aka Project Prevention) obviously also targeted recovering addicts for their “project.” When I first noticed the flyers, I brought the issue to my employer since some of our abortion clients were known to also be clients of the methadone clinic next door. The challenge, of course, was that some of these women were certain to visit us for Depo-Provera, after accepting the cash from C.R.A.C.K. or Project Prevention. What were we to do?

Ultimately, after an in-depth discussion, many meetings with fellow race-based organizations and a  report written about the group, by an employee of a group called CARA (Communities Against Rape and Abuse), we decided that our options, in this scenario, were to simply continue to offer these clients support or referrals for other assistance if they wanted to get help for their addiction or wanted more information about their health care and, as is the case with any woman’s decision to access safe and legal health care including contraception, offer access as well.

The larger issue, of course, is what sort of “help” paying low-income, drug-addicted women to get sterilized truly constitutes. And, Paltrow and others argue, Project Prevention may be more than just ineffectual on a larger scale, it’s harmful as well.

Project Prevention was founded back in 1997, notes Judith Scully in “Cracking Open C.R.A.C.K.: Unethical Sterilization Movement Gains Momentum,” writing for the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College, when it used billboards (“Don’t Let a Pregnancy Ruin Your Drug Habit” and “If You Are Addicted to Drugs – Get Birth Control – Get $200 Cash”) to reel women in. But the group advertised (and still advertises) in low-income neighborhoods, bringing in proportionally many more African-American women than Caucasian women. Though the New York Post article (and the organization’s own web site) attempts to counter critics’ claim that the group is racist, with statistics – since its inception, 1,822 Caucasians and 944 African-Americans have “used Project Prevention’s services” – considering the fact that African Americans make up only 13.5% of the total U.S. population, this hardly seems like a color-blind program.

The article paints Harris as a concerned, compassionate woman who says she adopted four children all from the same, drug-addicted mother, years ago. It’s hard to argue that Harris is not concerned or passionate about her cause – and motherhood, especially when it comes to the children she’s raised. As well, given the realities of a public health system where drug and alcohol abusers find it to difficult to access help when they need it; a national foster care system in need of greater attention; and child abuse costs rising to over $100 billion/year, some argue that Harris is making a positive impact, for very little investment.

However, as Paltrow argues, this program which has garnered immense media attention over the years has also been deemed “a violation of informed consent, exploitative, coercive, racist and a form of eugenic population control.”

In a New York Times article about the group, in 1999, Steve Trombley, the CEO of Chicago Planned Parenthood said, “It’s simply a bribe for sterilization…” It’s hardly a leap to consider, Paltrow notes, “dangling” $200 or $300 in front of a drug-addicted, poor woman to get sterilized, coercive.

While the article quotes a couple of women who desperately express gratitude to Harris and her program for keeping them from having any more children, while addicted to drugs, the women don’t seem certain about much else. In fact, one woman in the story – Kelly – credits the program with ensuring that she doesn’t give birth while drug-addicted ever again. She says, “Babies and drugs don’t mix. My kids are the ones who pay for my partying, and I didn’t want to do that to another one. I love them, they are everything to me – I don’t want to smoke their lives away,” Kelly has been reuinted with her two year old daughter and cannot say for certain whether she’ll end up staying off for drugs. Harris’ program does not address her needs – or her daughters’, in this regard, at all.

Paltrow’s examination and analysis of the program including her questions about the lack of the group’s ability to address drug addiction, unwanted pregnancies, child welfare and public health – should throw the overall impact of Harris’ organization into question. As Paltrow notes, “This examination makes clear that “far from providing a useful response to problems associated with drug use and pregnancy, C.R.A.C.K. instead acts as a dangerous vector for medical misinformation and political propaganda that has significant implications for the rights of all Americans.”

The New York Post article quotes an obstetrician who works with drug-addicted, pregnant women in North Carolina who calls the cash incentives “bribery” and urges people to consider that drug-addicted women need treatment – not money for sterilization. As well, he says, this type of a program focuses on control over empowerment, despite the propaganda pushed by the organization.

When Harris first envisioned “helping” drug-addicted women and their future babies, she attempted to take a legislative route. She reached out to an Assemblyman in California (where she lives), Phil Hawkins, who agreed to sponsor legislation making it a crime to give birth to a drug-addicted baby. Titled the “Prenatal Neglect Act,” the bill proposed creating a crime of “prenatal child neglect.” Ultimately, Harris and her organization “revised” the history to note that, after adopting four of her children from one drug-addicted mother, she attempted to get a bill passed “that would have made it mandatory that after giving birth to a drug addicted baby the birth mother use long-term birth control.”

Harris told RH Reality Check that she was contacted by a male student in Kenya who “begged her” to come to the country to offer HIV positive women long-term birth control. If Project Prevention expands its reach to target HIV positive women, in Kenya, innumerable questions arise, once again. While there is a risk of transmission of HIV between an infected mother and her fetus, the risk is nearly diminished completely when anti-retroviral treament (ART) is used in pregnancy and labor and the woman does not breastfeed. When there are so many millions infected with HIV, globally, including pregnant women, the focus should be on ensuring that those who need treatment, receive treatment;  and that those who are at greatest risk of being infected, before pregnancy occurs, are able to protect themselves. To pay an HIV positive woman, in Kenya, $40 to be implanted with an IUD is short-sighted at best and retains the focus on the woman as a “broken” vessel rather than on a broken system in need of fixing.

This is not about the woman – in any of these scenarios. This is about the lower-income woman’s body as a vessel. Ignoring a woman’s struggle with drug-addiction; targeting low-income women who use “street” drugs (the organization started out with the name C.R.A.C.K.!) for the impact said drugs may have on a newborn, when in fact the consequences of abusing alcohol while pregnant are much greater in terms of the impact on newborn health; and focusing on preventing HIV positive women in Africa from having children instead of on what we can do, globally, to prevent HIV transmission and infection, do little to actually help mend a system which penalizes women and their children. And lest one think Project Prevention is simply a voluntary, reproductive health service program along the lines of Planned Parenthood, for instance – using an “empowerment” and “free will” model – the coercive and dehumanizing tactics, says Paltrow, do not bear those ideas out. Harris has compared the women she serves to animals saying “They’re having litters. They are literally having litters.”  Paltrow writes,

“Unlike privately funded family planning organizations, C.R.A.C.K. does not focus on the numerous barriers to reproductive health that exist in the U.S., but rather on the harm that women allegedly do to their children and the cost to society of their supposed irresponsibility. It emphasizes the value of controlling their reproduction as a solution to complex public health and economic problems. Instead of providing support for much-needed reproductive health services, outreach, or education, it uses its funds to reward or motivate certain women to be sterilized or use particular forms of birth control, at public expense. As Judith M. Scully argues, “[d]espite its benevolent name, C.R.A.C.K.’s primary goal is to promote population control…”

Indeed, statements by C.R.A.C.K.’s founder and Director Barbara Harris not only provide clear examples of negative stereotyping, they also make clear that control, not empowerment, is in fact C.R.A.C.K.’s primary purpose. As one commentary quoting Ms. Harris observed, “[a]ddict, recovering addict, dirty, clean . . .whatever. The distinction hardly matters to C.R.A.C.K. (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity), the group that gave [the client] the money. ‘As long as they stay on birth control,’ says founder Barbara Harris, ‘[t]hat’s all we care about.’”

Finally, and by no means of least importance, Paltrow reminds us that targeting “narrowly defined segments of the population” for sterilization or long term birth control is frighteningly “reminiscent of several tragic chapters of recent history.”

Like this story? Your $10 tax-deductible contribution helps support our research, reporting, and analysis.

To schedule an interview with Amie Newman contact director of communications Rachel Perrone at rachel@rhrealitycheck.org.

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DUdergd

Scaife Probes Background of Suicide{nl}AP - Monday, March 15, 1999; Page A10{nl}http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/mar...{nl}{nl}PITTSBURGH, March 14—Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife has a private investigator digging into the background of ... Steven R. Kangas, 37, ... died of a gunshot wound to the head on the 39th floor of One Oxford Center on Feb. 8. Scaife did not run into Kangas on the day of his death.{nl}{nl}For the last month, private investigator Rex Armistead of Mississippi has been traveling the country to investigate Kangas ... Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, where Scaife is publisher, reported that Kangas posted a message on the Internet six days before his death blaming Scaife for all of Clinton's troubles.{nl}{nl}"... it is only the insanity of Richard Mellon Scaife that is causing them to go after this man," Kangas wrote{nl}{nl}... building engineer Don Adams checked a men's room down the hall from Scaife's office and found Kangas alive and lying on the floor ... Adams went for help, and when he returned he found Kangas seated on a toilet with a gunshot wound to the head{nl}{nl}Kangas's mother, Jan Lankheet, said One Oxford Center officials showed her a videotape indicating her son was in the building nearly nine hours ...{nl} {nl}http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1029113&mesg_id=1097838|

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scaife kicked out of yale mid50's for partying?; car accident almost killed him and injured 5 family 78; mom gave to poor, birth control and art; he fought w/ sis but won 73, 900K to heritage; in 76, 1/2 of its $. Wa post said since 60s 620m in current $ 78 rwhist2

9/11

By 1999, the Washington Post reported that Scaife's foundations had given $340 million to conservative causes and institutions.[6] By 2002, they held more than $320 million in assets, and in that year alone they gave away more than $22 million.[7][8][9] Grant recipients included:

from SW

11/15/2010

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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."

...

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.

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NETWORKING: 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.

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scaife bio 106- backed goldwater then nixon (wrote 354 checks to avoid gift taxes in 71. Nixon staff tried to get him to buy Wa Post!

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hmmn: 

Of singular importance is the position Dickie was given in early 1973, when he was allowed to take over ownership of Forum World Features, a joint British intelligence-CIA news media operation based in London. This is probably the most important career advancement for Dickie, for it defines the track he has pursued since: the use and the manipulation of the news media to promote favored causes, and to attack and defame adversaries. There is a direct path from Forum World Features, to the Bush secret government's'' Public Diplomacy operation created in 1983, which in turn spawned the Get LaRouche'' task force, all the way through to the anti-Clinton propaganda machine which Scaife directs and finances today.

The background of Forum World Features (FWF) is instructive. Although accounts of its creation vary, it appears that it was a division of Kern House Enterprises, created by Kermit Roosevelt in the 1960s; one account says that Kermit ``was entrusted with creating the CIA's publishing empire.'' Kern House was set up by Roosevelt with Mellon money; in turn, it set up a London subsidiary, Kern House Enterprises, Ltd. Kern House begat Forum World Features, financed with funds from the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), based in New York. FWF's major purpose was to supply feature material to newspapers around the world, including at least 30 in the United States. It also commissioned a number of books.

One of the premier private intelligence think-tanks, NSIC was formed in 1962, primarily with Mellon family money; on the board was Prescott Bush (of the Harriman-linked Bush family, and George's brother), John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia (one of the authors of Bush's EO 12333), and various representatives of the corporate and intelligence world, as well as personnel associated directly with Scaife.

From 1966 to 1973, FWF was headed by John Hay Whitney, a raving Anglophile who had been U.S. ambassador to Britain, and who was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1973, Dickie Scaife purchased Kern/FWF, and headed it until its demise in 1975-76, following its exposure as a ``CIA'' front. At the time of its dissolution in 1976, its three directors were Scaife, Scaife's top operative Daniel McMichael (former president of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council), and Lewis Preston, the chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust (and later head of the World Bank).

In 1975, a British weekly, Time Out, and the Washington Post, published a 1968 memorandum from the CIA station chief in London to then-director Richard Helms, describing FWF as an agency-sponsored operation providing a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.'' The memorandum portrayed FWF as a CIA proprietary, which was run with the knowledge and cooperation of British intelligence.'' The overseer of FWF in the United States was Cord Meyer.

fronted for CIA 107-8 Forum World Features, gave credentials to agents also spread propaganda (cf secret govt website

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife

[ andrew member of hunt club Johnstown flood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_W._Mellon

Scaife owns and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. With $1.2 billion, Scaife, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, is No. 283 on the 2005 Forbes 400.

Scaife is particularly well known for his financial support of conservative and right-wing public policy organizations over the past two decades. He has provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the U.S., mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controls: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and until 2001, the Scaife Family Foundation, now controlled by his daughter Jennie and son David.[1][2] Scaife also helped fund the Arkansas Project, which ultimately led to the impeachment proceedings of President Bill Clinton.

...

Business

[edit] Purchase of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

In 1970, Scaife purchased a small market newspaper, then known as the Tribune-Review. The paper was based in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a county seat of about 15,000 people located about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. For a number of years, the paper was published and distributed in the small Greensburg market.[7]

Scaife made headlines in the fall of 1973, when a Tribune-Review reporter was fired for making the remark "one down and one to go" during the Watergate era when Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned over corruption charges dating back to his days as Governor of Maryland. When the reporter's fellow staffers demanded an explanation at a meeting with Scaife, his defiant response led a number of them to quit (a few later returned). The paper was frequently accused of bias, especially toward the overwhelmingly Democratic political officeholders in Westmoreland County.

In 1992, the two main newspapers in Pittsburgh were embroiled in a lengthy labor dispute that ultimately led the larger paper, the Pittsburgh Press, to cease operations, and for the remaining paper, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, to suspend publication for nearly six months until the Post-Gazette acquired the Press late that year.[8] During this time frame, Scaife expanded operations of the newspaper into Pittsburgh and renamed the paper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Though the name changed, and there are several satellite offices in and around Pittsburgh, the newspaper's headquarters remain in Greensburg, about 35 miles east of Pittsburgh near Scaife's home.

[edit] Leadership and media interests

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review continues to challenge the Post-Gazette in the Pittsburgh media market. Twelve years after Scaife's newspaper began publishing, the Post-Gazette reported major financial losses, and the unions representing its employees agreed to wage concessions to keep it afloat. Unlike Scaife, the owners of the Post-Gazette, the Block family, were unwilling to sustain major losses year after year. According to the Scaife divorce papers, Richard Scaife has consistently spent between $20 and $30 million per year to cover the Tribune-Review's losses.[9] According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Trib has a combined 221,000 regional circulation, about 7,000 subscribers fewer than its competitor.

In 2005, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review announced that operations of its suburban editions would be consolidated, with "staff reductions" in the newsrooms, business, and circulation departments.[10] Two managers were laid off immediately along with several other staff members later in 2005.

With Scaife as publisher, the small circulation newspaper was the chief packager of editorials and news columns claiming that then United States President Bill Clinton or his wife, then First Lady Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of Deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Scaife paid freelancer Christopher W. Ruddy to write about the Foster case for the Tribune-Review and other right-leaning media.[11] Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, appointed to investigate Clinton, concluded that Foster committed suicide.[12]

In 2004, Scaife was reported to own 7.2% of NewsMax Media, a news-based website with conservative political content founded by Ruddy in 1998.[13] In 2009, Scaife reportedly "controlled" 42% of NewsMax, with Ruddy the 58% majority owner, CEO and editor.[14

] Politics and philanthropy

This article reads more like a story than an encyclopedia entry. To meet Wikipedia's quality standards and conform with our Neutral Point of View policy, please help to introduce a more formal style and remove any personally invested tone. (December 2007)

Scaife's interest in politics was influenced by several factors.

   * He was fond of newspapers he read during his childhood.

   * His father served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and the family lived in Washington, D.C. for a time. (The various functional units of the OSS were reconstituted in 1947 as the Central Intelligence Agency; see How the OSS became the CIA in the OSS article.)

   * He was influenced by Robert Duggan, his sister Cordelia's fiance who later became her husband. Scaife worked on Duggan's political campaigns and Duggan was twice elected Allegheny County District Attorney. Duggan helped Scaife become a committeeman in the Allegheny County Republican Party in 1956. In 1974, however, Duggan killed himself with a shotgun, hours before he was indicted by a grand jury for income tax evasion and racketeering.

   * Scaife involved himself in the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, with whom his mother was acquainted.

The inherited Mellon fortune allowed Scaife to pursue his political activism. In 1965, when Sarah Scaife died, Scaife inherited not only financial increase but also a new influence over the family foundations.

[edit] Support for Richard Nixon

Scaife gained notoriety for making an end-run around weak campaign finance laws to donate US$ $990,000 to the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon. Scaife was not charged with a crime, but about $45,000 went to a fund linked to the Watergate scandal. Scaife later said he was repulsed by the scandal and refused to speak with Nixon after 1973. Following Duggan's suicide and then Watergate, Scaife shifted his political giving from politicians' campaigns to anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications.

[edit] Opposition to Bill Clinton

Scaife's publications were substantially involved in coverage against then-President Bill Clinton.

   * Scaife was the major backer of The American Spectator, whose Arkansas Project set out to find facts about Clinton and in which Paula Jones' accusations of sexual harassment against Clinton were first widely publicized.

   * In a 1999 series of articles on Scaife and foundations that support conservative causes, the Washington Post named a close Scaife associate, Richard Larry, and not Scaife himself as the man who drove the Arkansas Project[15][16]

Regardless of his role, the project not only accused Clinton of financial and sexual indiscretions (some later verified, others not), but also gave root to conspiracist notions that the Clintons collaborated with the CIA to run a drug smuggling operation out of the town of Mena, Arkansas and that Clinton had arranged for the murder of White House aide Vince Foster as part of a coverup of the Whitewater scandal. The possibility that money from the project had been given to former Clinton associate David Hale, a witness in the Whitewater investigation, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen as a special investigator. Shaheen subpoenaed Scaife, who testified before a federal grand jury in the matter.

In the fall of 2007, however, Ruddy published a positive interview with former President Clinton on Newsmax.com, followed by a positive cover story in the magazine. The New York Times noted with reference to the event that politics had made "strange bedfellows".[17] Newsweek reported that Ruddy praised Clinton for his Foundation's global work, and explained that the interview, as well as a private lunch he and Scaife had had with Clinton (which Ruddy says was orchestrated by Ed Koch), were due to his shared view, with Scaife, that Clinton was doing important work representing the U.S. globally while America was the target of criticism. He also said that he and Scaife had never suggested Clinton was involved in Foster's death, nor had they spread allegations about Bill Clinton's sex scandals, although their work may have encouraged others.[18]

[edit] Endorsement of Hillary Clinton

On April 20, 2008, two days before Pennsylvania's presidential primary, Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.[19]

[edit] Political donations

According to campaignmoney.com, from 1999 through 2006, Scaife has, under the name "R. Scaife," made 10 contributions of over $200 to political campaigns, for a total of $19,000. Under the name "R.M. Scaife" he made 4 donations, for a total of $22,000. Under the name Richard Scaife, he made 23 donations over this period, for a total of $142,904. Besides donations to the Republican National Committee and various political campaigns such as Santorum 2000 and the Santorum Victory Committee for Rick Santorum, he has also supported Political Action Committees such as the Pro-Growth Action Team, the Free Congress PAC (formerly: Committee For the Survival Of a Free Congress), and the Club For Growth Inc. PAC. Scaife also funded the Western Journalism Center, headed by Joseph Farah. He was named to the PoliticsPA list of "Pennsylvania's Top Political Activists."[20]

[edit] Management of the Scaife family foundations

When Scaife refocused his political giving away from individuals and toward anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications, the first among these was the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

Through contacts made at Hoover and elsewhere, Scaife became a major, early supporter of the Heritage Foundation, which has since become one of Washington's most influential public policy research institutes. He currently serves as vice-chairman of the Heritage Foundation board of trustees.[21]

Later, he supported such varied conservative and libertarian organizations as:

   * American Enterprise Institute

   * Atlas Economic Research Foundation

   * David Horowitz Freedom Center

   * Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues and dissent on anthropogenic global warming [22]

   * Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives - a Harrisburg-based libertarian think tank [23]

   * Federalist Society

   * Foundation for Economic Education

   * Free Congress Foundation (headed by Paul Weyrich)

   * Freedom House

   * GOPAC (headed by Newt Gingrich)

   * Independent Women's Forum

   * Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which operates the Collegiate Network)

   * Judicial Watch

   * Landmark Legal Foundation

   * Media Research Center (headed by Brent Bozell)

   * Pacific Legal Foundation

   * World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh

   * Reason Foundation

By 1998 his foundations were listed among donors to over 100 such groups, to which he had disbursed some $340 million by 2002.[24]

[edit] Pepperdine University

Scaife also endowed a new school of public policy at Pepperdine University. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was named the first dean of this school, although Pepperdine denies any connection between Scaife and the selection of Starr. Starr accepted the post in 1996, but in the ensuing controversy, he gave up the appointment in 1998 before ever having started at Pepperdine. However, once the investigation was behind him, Starr was appointed to head Pepperdine's law school in 2004 and became president of Baylor University in 2010.[25]

[edit] Other philanthropic support

Scaife is identified with his contributions to conservative and libertarian causes. The Washington Post dubbed him "funding father of the Right" in 1999.

However, he has also supported policy research groups which are not explicitly conservative, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, among others.

Scaife has also been a major donor to abortion rights advocates, including Planned Parenthood, giving "millions" to the organization, though most such giving stopped in the 1970s., according to The Washington Post.[15]

In the late 1990s, during the height of the Clinton scandals, Scaife nevertheless continued to provide more than $1 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the prime benefactor of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). His donations to restore and beautify the White House led to an invitation by Hillary Clinton for a black-tie celebration. She warmly received him and posed for a photograph on the same day her husband's sex scandal hit the press. Scaife told the New York Post that he appreciated Mrs. Clinton's invitation. "I'm honored," he said. "Lord knows, it's more than I got from George Bush."[26]

Scaife has also supported non-political groups. He is a key benefactor of a number of Pittsburgh-based arts organizaions. Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Sarah Scaife Galleries at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh art museum, the Brandywine Conservancy, the Phipps Conservatory, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as well as Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh. He and his foundations have contributed to Sarah Scaife's favorite causes: population control (e.g. Planned Parenthood), environmental conservation, and hospitals; Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in a Sarah Scaife-funded laboratory. He also supports a variety of educational institutions, notably the University of Chicago, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester, Smith College, and Bowling Green State University.

[edit] Personal life

Scaife's first marriage was to Frances L. Gilmore (born December 2, 1934). The couple had two children, Jennie K. Scaife (born July 8, 1963), and David N. Scaife (born February 5, 1966). The couple subsequently divorced.

In June 1991, he married his longtime companion Margaret “Ritchie” Battle Scaife (born February 15, 1947), who had influenced the giving pattern of the Scaife foundations and made the couple active in the social and cultural life of patrician Pittsburgh.

The couple subsequently separated, and on December 27, 2005, the Pittsburgh Police responded to a call placed by Richard Scaife reporting trespassing at Scaife's residence in the prestigious Shadyside section of Pittsburgh. They arrived to find Ritchie Scaife, his estranged wife, pounding on doors and peeking in windows of the couple's mansion. Mrs. Scaife refused to leave the property, and was arrested and charged with defiant trespass.[27]

On April 8, 2006, the Tribune-Review published an article describing a fight between Scaife's estranged wife and three of his servants over a dog that Scaife told the New York Daily News his wife had given him. Both newspapers reported that Scaife’s servants went to the hospital for scrapes and bruises after the fracas.[28][29] Afterwards, Scaife placed a sign on his lawn: “Wife and dog missing - reward for dog.”[30]

On April 11, 2006 Scaife confided to a gossip columnist that he and Margaret "Ritchie" Battle Scaife, 58, plan to divorce and that their marriage began without a prenuptial agreement. The New York Daily News column estimated his vulnerable assets at half of $1.2 billion.[29]

In September 2007, the Post-Gazette and reporter Dennis Roddy found that the Scaife divorce papers, which had been under seal, were available to the public on the website of the Allegheny County Prothonotary's office. The Post-Gazette has made the divorce papers available in full on its website.[9] The papers include a full list of all of the possessions Mrs. Scaife alleged Richard Scaife had taken and was keeping from her.[31]

He was named to the PoliticsPA list of "Sy Snyder's Power 50" list of influential individuals in Pennsylvania politics in 2002 and 2003.[32][33]

[edit] See also

   * List of billionaires

   * Arkansas Project

==

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Scaife_Foundations

The Carthage Foundation is part of the Scaife Family foundations and is chaired by Richard

Mellon Scaife. It makes public policy grants to a variety of conservative organizations.

Since 1985, it has awarded more than $2 million in grants to the Heritage Foundation.

---

SCAIFE

http://www.namebase.org/main4/Scaife-Foundation.html

---

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html

The man whom Time magazine, in its latest issue, calls "the ultimate patron" of the Clintonhaters has been identified by Salon and the New York Observer as a key funder of the $2.4million Arkansas Project, a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has

also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.

In fact, Scaife's part in the Clinton chronicles represents the second time that he has been

a secretive major player in efforts to profoundly alter the course of politics and public

policy in America. In the 1970s, his money fueled the "New Right" movement that sought to

replace the perceived "liberal establishment" in Washington and the media with a new,

conservative order. ...During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan

Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in

Washington....But it was clear that Scaife, like his father before him, would never be given

any true power within the Mellon banking and industrial empire. So he turned to other

pursuits, acquiring a few newspapers, attempting unsuccessfully to buy his way into politics

(he gave $1 million to Richard Nixon in 1972 but never got more than a minor appointment

from any president) and taking effective control of the trusts and foundations that his

mother had established.

Among Scaife's acquaintances at this time were Glenn Campbell, head of the conservative

Hoover Institution, and Frank Barnett, a shadowy figure with links to the CIA. With their

encouragement, Scaife began directing the vast resources at his disposal -- most

particularly the donations of his family's trusts and foundations -- to fight the "Soviet

menace." Later, joined by a number of younger conservatives, some with ideas, others with

money, Scaife would become the biggest funder of the New Right, spending millions of dollars a year to help establish the Heritage Foundation and a host of other think tanks focused on

marketing conservative ideas both to Congress and to the public.

Other Scaife-funded groups dedicated themselves to watchdogging the media, training federal

judges in conservative economics and litigating on behalf of causes such as opening up federal lands to oil and gas exploration. At the same time, Scaife gave generously to

candidates who believed in these policies, a two-pronged strategy that proved triumphant in

1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, ...

Less than a decade after Reagan's election came the fall of the Berlin Wall -- and with it,

the right's most powerful ideological raison d'être. In short order, however, culture

replaced communism as the great battleground, and Clinton -- the draft-dodging,

skirt-chasing, pot-smoking symbol of all that was wrong with America -- became its new

Satan. It is no surprise that Scaife's contributions to Clinton-bashing have ranged from

underwriting efforts around the conspiracy theories of Vincent Foster's death -- which

Scaife called "the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton administration" -- to supporting the

conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, which advised Paula Jones and helped find her

lawyers at crucial moments. Scaife, whose charitable entities now give away approximately a

half million dollars a week, also underwrote projects that included retaining investigators

to look into Clinton's alleged drug connections. A life regent of Pepperdine University in

Southern California, Scaife donated more than $1 million for a new public policy school

there. The man offered the job as the new school's dean: Kenneth Starr. ...SALON | April 7,

1998

-

The Sarah Scaife Foundation is financed by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune.

At one time, its largest single holding was stock in the Gulf Oil Corporation. The

foundation became active in funding conservative causes in 1973, when Richard Mellon Scaife

became chairman. Forbes magazine has estimated Scaife's personal net worth at $800 million,

making him the 138th richest person in the U.S. He controls the Scaife, Carthage, and

Allegheny foundations. In 1993, Scaife and Carthage reportedly gave more than $17.6 million

to 150 conservative think tanks. As of December 31, 1992, Scaife assets were $212,232,888

--

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html

The man behind the mask

Richard Mellon Scaife

SHY, SECRETIVE AND OF REGAL BEARING, RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE HAS WORKED HARD AND SPENT MILLIONS TO DICTATE THE NATION'S POLITICAL AGENDA.

BY KAREN ROTHMYER

Richard Mellon Scaife's eyes are what you notice first: a startling sky blue, they look almost unreal, so intense is their color. For the rest, a handsome countenance, a large frame and a shock of once-blond hair, now white, make up a classic picture of good breeding. Scaife's father came from one of Pittsburgh's blue blood families, its ancestry traced back to medieval England; his mother was a fabulously wealthy Mellon descendant whom Fortune magazine identified in 1957 as one of the eight richest people in America.

And yet, there is about Richard Mellon Scaife a seeming unease with his own person that even friends have commented on through the years. Almost pathologically shy -- he removed his name from Who's Who more than 15 years ago and has since sat for only a handful of interviews -- he is, at the same time, given to a pattern of unpredictable behavior that has continued despite his having stopped his formerly heavy drinking.

"He has a love-hate relationship with a lot of people, including himself," said a former close acquaintance. "He is at once the most wonderful, generous guy and the most hateful and vindictive one." Added another person who has observed Scaife close-up in Pittsburgh, "Whenever he dislikes someone, it's not enough to fire them; they can never work in this town again."

Either because they fear his power or his temper, or because they want something out of him, almost all those who know Scaife, 65, are unwilling to say anything critical about him publicly -- that is, if they agree to talk about him at all. That reluctance, combined with his own penchant for secrecy, has made him the most shadowy figure in the Clinton scandals, even as evidence of his role as a funder of investigations into the Clintons' activities has grown.

The man whom Time magazine, in its latest issue, calls "the ultimate patron" of the Clinton haters has been identified by Salon and the New York Observer as a key funder of the $2.4 million Arkansas Project, a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.

In fact, Scaife's part in the Clinton chronicles represents the second time that he has been a secretive major player in efforts to profoundly alter the course of politics and public policy in America. In the 1970s, his money fueled the "New Right" movement that sought to replace the perceived "liberal establishment" in Washington and the media with a new, conservative order.

"The victories we're celebrating today didn't begin last Tuesday," Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner Jr. told a meeting of supporters in 1994 just after the Republican sweep of the House of Representatives. "They started more than 20 years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America. These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives."

Gingrich, who was also at the meeting, hailed Scaife as "a good friend and ally for a very long time."

Just where Scaife's political views come from is a mystery to many people, including his only sibling, Cordelia Scaife May, from whom he is estranged. Their mother, Sarah Scaife, was a cold and often sarcastic woman, according to May, but apart from knowing Barry Goldwater, she showed no particular interest in current affairs.

"My father didn't like Roosevelt, but as head of Pittsburgh Coal he sat across from John L. Lewis in labor negotiations and had enormous respect and, I think, liking for him," said May.

Dick Scaife didn't read much while they were growing up, she said, but he did have a great interest in newspapers, especially out-of-town papers, which he collected and displayed on specially made racks at the family's country estate. Reflecting on those years of governesses and formal family dinners, May commented, "I don't remember any laughter in that house."

During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington. Perhaps it was this once-removed brush with intrigue that led to Dick Scaife's growing fascination with conspiracies of all kinds. "He's the kind of person who looks under his bed every night before they go to sleep," said a longtime family acquaintance and prominent Pennsylvania Republican. In the early 1980s, Scaife told a Philadelphia Inquirer interviewer that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of his heroes, and that the most influential book he had read was "The Spike," co-authored by former Newsweek correspondent and Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, in which a young reporter finds himself cast as a pawn in the Soviet Union's master plot to take over the world.

It was also in Washington, according to Mellon family biographer Burton Hersh, that young Dick began to pay attention to the workings of government. Scaife told Hersh that he had "made it a kind of hobby to meet as many senators and congressmen as I could."

Later, there would be boarding school and then Yale, from which he was expelled after a drunken party. He ended up at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father was chairman of the board of trustees. After getting a bachelor's degree in English in 1957, he was put to work first in the Scaife family business and later in Mellon enterprises. Within a few years, both of his parents were dead and Scaife had inherited an enormous fortune whose value is currently estimated by Forbes as about $1 billion (a significant underestimate, according to one reliable source).

Funding the New Right

THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK | PAGE 2 OF 2

But it was clear that Scaife, like his father before him, would never be given any true power within the Mellon banking and industrial empire. So he turned to other pursuits, acquiring a few newspapers, attempting unsuccessfully to buy his way into politics (he gave $1 million to Richard Nixon in 1972 but never got more than a minor appointment from any president) and taking effective control of the trusts and foundations that his mother had established.

Among Scaife's acquaintances at this time were Glenn Campbell, head of the conservative Hoover Institution, and Frank Barnett, a shadowy figure with links to the CIA. With their encouragement, Scaife began directing the vast resources at his disposal -- most particularly the donations of his family's trusts and foundations -- to fight the "Soviet menace." Later, joined by a number of younger conservatives, some with ideas, others with money, Scaife would become the biggest funder of the New Right, spending millions of dollars a year to help establish the Heritage Foundation and a host of other think tanks focused on marketing conservative ideas both to Congress and to the public.

Other Scaife-funded groups dedicated themselves to watchdogging the media, training federal judges in conservative economics and litigating on behalf of causes such as opening up federal lands to oil and gas exploration. At the same time, Scaife gave generously to candidates who believed in these policies, a two-pronged strategy that proved triumphant in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan,

"It seemed to me that he operated very strongly on the strength of passionate impulse," said James Whelan, editor of the now-defunct Scaife-owned newspaper the Sacramento Union. "My sense of Dick is that there was not a depth of conviction about the causes he supported," said Whelan, who went on to edit the Washington Times. "They were rather strongly felt prejudices -- which isn't necessarily something bad, but not the same as conviction."

Whelan said that he tried to get Scaife to buy a major national news organization -- something favored by Nixon aides who wanted someone more friendly at the helm of the Washington Post -- but failed owing to what he regards as Scaife's insecurity. "You know insecure people frequently are bullies with those they can bully, but then [in other situations] they will act a bit meek," Whelan said.

Less than a decade after Reagan's election came the fall of the Berlin Wall -- and with it, the right's most powerful ideological raison d'être. In short order, however, culture replaced communism as the great battleground, and Clinton -- the draft-dodging, skirt-chasing, pot-smoking symbol of all that was wrong with America -- became its new Satan. It is no surprise that Scaife's contributions to Clinton-bashing have ranged from underwriting efforts around the conspiracy theories of Vincent Foster's death -- which Scaife called "the Rosetta Stone of the Clinton administration" -- to supporting the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation, which advised Paula Jones and helped find her lawyers at crucial moments. Scaife, whose charitable entities now give away approximately a half million dollars a week, also underwrote projects that included retaining investigators to look into Clinton's alleged drug connections. A life regent of Pepperdine University in Southern California, Scaife donated more than $1 million for a new public policy school there. The man offered the job as the new school's dean: Kenneth Starr.

Reflecting his continuing obsession that the republic is in mortal danger, if not from one quarter then another, Scaife told the Heritage celebration in 1994 that "the ideological conflicts that have swirled about this nation for half a century now show clear signs of breaking into naked ideological warfare."

Such pronouncements might be dismissed as merely the overheated rhetoric of a man with more money than historical or political sense if it weren't for the fact that Scaife has shown that he has the power to bend the nation's agenda to his will. It is only now, with Attorney General Janet Reno considering an investigation into the alleged payments to Whitewater witness Hale, that there seems to be any possibility that light may finally be shed on Scaife's role in this and perhaps other undertakings.

Some years ago, Pat Minarcin, editor of the defunct Pittsburgher magazine, published by Scaife, mused that while the United States operates on a system of checks and balances, "With inherited wealth the very idea of checks and balances is anathema. People who inherit their wealth have got everything they want all their lives. So they don't know about things like responsibility."

Then, in a comment that may yet prove prescient, Minarcin added, "It's at the heart of what's going to bring Dick down some day."

SALON | April 7, 1998

Karen Rothmyer is a senior editor at the Nation.

---

and Carthage assets were $11,937,862.

Wa Post

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.

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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."

Monday: Burdens of wealth

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

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Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife

Richard Scaife greets President Bill Clinton

Richard Scaife greets President Bill Clinton during a 1997 reception at the White House. (The White House)

By Robert G. Kaiser

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 3, 1999; Page A1

Second of two articles

Richard Mellon Scaife, the most generous donor to conservative causes in American history, is astoundingly rich and has given away more than $600 million, yet is known to people who have worked for him as a cheapskate.

He has given at least $340 million to fund a "war of ideas" against American liberalism, yet no one interviewed for these articles could remember him discussing a book he had read or recall an original idea that came from him.

In his own small world in Pittsburgh, Scaife is known as a man who wants to be in control, who wants employees who say "yes," who is capable of bearing grudges for years. Once, it is said by knowledgeable sources, he compelled the Mellon Bank to fire a newly hired attorney in the bank's legal department because the lawyer was the son of a former employee Scaife had turned against.

Scaife has broken off relations with numerous friends and associates, waged a bitter, prolonged divorce battle with his first wife, has strained relations with his son and no relations with his daughter. He and his sister haven't spoken for 25 years.

Yet his friends describe the man they call Dick Scaife as charming, warm, easy to be with. He himself said once, "I'm genial and I'm jovial."

Conservatives regularly honor him. He is vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation and has turned down many suggestions that various buildings, schools and professorships be named for him. "The man is a hero," said a young activist in one of the organizations he supports.

Despite his demons and his difficulties, Scaife and the Mellon fortune he inherited have prevailed. The money didn't buy a happy childhood or the personal confidence he has always lacked, but for all the distractions of his complicated life, he has, at 66, established an imposing legacy. With the help of a few longtime aides and of the conservatives who got his money – people who made him feel useful and appreciated – Richard Mellon Scaife became the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.

How did Scaife do this? Why did he do it? And how does he feel about his accomplishment? Those are questions Scaife has never shown any desire to answer. He has never spoken revealingly about himself at any length, and he has rarely given interviews. Though he provided a brief written statement in response to questions from The Washington Post, he refused, over many months, to grant an interview.

So the available evidence will have to do. That evidence begins with his money. Thanks to genealogical good luck, Scaife has a personal fortune of many hundreds of millions. He lives a life thickly insulated from the workaday tribulations of ordinary citizens, with houses in Pittsburgh, the resort of Ligonier, Pa., Nantucket and Pebble Beach. A private DC-9 flies him from one to the other.

The Mellon family money he inherited, both in spendable cash and in trusts and foundations designated for philanthropy, shaped every aspect of his existence. Yet many around him can tell stories about how his anxieties over money disrupted his relations with other people.

One is William J. Gill, who worked for Scaife's charitable foundations 30 years ago. Gill took a trip to Vietnam on foundation business and when he returned submitted an expense account that included charges for laundering his shirts during the trip. Scaife refused to pay for the laundering and wrote a memo that Gill could never throw out:

"I have gone over the expense report that you submitted and I would ask that you remove the laundry and the valet charge. I have noted on previous expense reports as well as this one that a taxi costs $8.00 one way between your house and the [Pittsburgh] airport. I would suggest that in the future you either drive yourself or have your wife deposit you at the airport."

Said James Shuman, who worked for Scaife nearly 20 years ago: "He just assumed that everyone is out to steal every little thing he has."

From His Mother, a Legacy of Riches and Alcoholism

The potential significance of inherited wealth was foreseen, ironically, by Thomas Mellon, founder of the family fortune. In 1885, reflecting on his success, he observed: "The normal condition of man is hard work, self-denial, acquisition and accumulation; as soon as his descendants are freed from the necessity of such exertion they begin to degenerate sooner or later in both body and mind."

This was a pessimistic forecast for what might happen to Mellon's heirs, but many of them lived up to it. Like other American families overwhelmed by great riches, the Mellon line has produced numerous unhappy souls. One of them was Thomas Mellon's granddaughter Sarah, who would pass a fortune on to the son everyone called Dickie.

Sarah Mellon Scaife was "just a gutter drunk," in the words of her daughter, Cordelia. "So was Dick," Cordelia Scaife May added of her brother in an interview. "So was I."

If money was most important in shaping Richard Scaife's life, alcohol may come second. In a household dominated by his mother's drinking, Scaife's childhood was pampered but sad, according to his sister. "I don't remember any laughter in that house," she said. The children were raised by nannies and nurses.

Friends describe Scaife as a hard drinker beginning when he was a high school student at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. Yale expelled Scaife in March of his freshman year after a drunken evening in which Scaife rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs, breaking the legs of a classmate, according to Burton Hersh, biographer of the Mellon family.

As an adult, close friends said, he almost drank himself to death more than once. These people credited both his wives and his longtime aide R. Daniel McMichael for saving him. His second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Battle Scaife – with help from the Betty Ford Clinic – finally got him on the wagon in the early '90s.

Some of his associates speculated that drinking contributed to a mean streak they saw in Scaife. Others weren't sure the drinking was a factor. From the time he was a teenager, Scaife earned the reputation of a bully. His sister recalled one occasion when, home in Ligonier on a vacation from Deerfield, he got caught by the police making prank phone calls. "The police gave him a polite talking-to, but Dick was totally unconcerned," Cordelia May said. "The police didn't frighten him at all."

Another friend remembered the young Scaife using the telephone to order anything he could find that could be delivered to the home of a merchant in Ligonier who had infuriated him. The merchant received numerous deliveries, from pizza to a load of gravel.

Most of the people who agreed to talk about Scaife for these articles insisted on anonymity. Just the mention of Scaife's name seems to put people on their guard.

"There's a bit of fear out there because his reach is extensive," observed Allen G. Kukovich, a Democratic state senator from Westmoreland County, Pa., who has been the target of hostile editorials in Scaife's newspaper.

Scaife is known to many acquaintances as a man who bears grudges. He has cut off old friends who angered him and never acknowledged them again. He has tried to blackball people he fired with other possible employers. "People are really afraid of him," said the director of a charity in Pittsburgh.

Shuman said he saw in Scaife's history "a sort of steady thread of hurting people who don't like him or who he gets at cross [purposes] with."

"When he gets a hate on for somebody, he tends to pursue it to substantial length," said a prominent Pittsburgh lawyer whose firm has had extensive dealings with Scaife.

Scaife has often behaved like a man who expects the world to bend to his wishes. Hersh, author of "The Mellon Family," recounted an example. Nearly 25 years ago Hersh had an extensive interview with Scaife, who told him more than he has told anyone else about his early life, his disputes with members of the Mellon family and his political and business activities. Hersh was at home in New Hampshire writing the book when he received a telephone call from Scaife, who evidently had decided that he told the author too much. Hersh recently recalled:

"He tried to bully me into not using parts of our interview, and he warned me ominously that I could regret it if I didn't do as he asked.

"'No, I won't,' I replied.

"'Why not?' Scaife asked.

"'Because I'm tape recording this conversation,' I said. I never heard from him again."

Hersh concluded that Scaife was "basically just a great big spoiled child."

Several years ago Scaife got angry with the Mellon Bank, which owned the building in Pittsburgh where he had his office, for letting conditions in the building deteriorate. He complained, according to a member of the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, but the bank was not responsive. So he announced that he was moving and got a new office (on the same 39th floor he had been on for years) in a nearby tower. He also took all his and his foundations' money out of the Mellon Bank.

Mellon Family History Left Scaife With Mixed Feelings

Several of Scaife's associates said his complex feelings about the Mellons are a key to the man. Those feelings are the product of two generations of family history.

By all accounts the Mellons were delighted in the mid-1920s when their rather plain and shy Sarah caught the eye of the dashing Alan Scaife, a handsome Yale graduate and fine horseman. Alan Scaife's grandfather, Jeffrey Scaife, had landed in Pittsburgh at the dawn of the 19th century and established a metal fabricating firm that was never fabulously successful but did well enough to establish the family firmly in Pittsburgh's upper crust, where they arrived before the Mellons. Sarah and Alan married in 1927, feted by 1,000 guests in a pavilion built for the occasion. Man-made moons beamed down from four directions.

Alan's dash was not accompanied by business acumen. The Scaife Co. struggled under his command. When war broke out, Alan Scaife joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as an Army major. Richard Helms, Scaife's OSS colleague then and later director of central intelligence, remembers Scaife's flattering, tailor-made major's uniforms. "If you said anything about him, you'd say he was a lightweight," Helms recalled. After the war he returned to Pittsburgh.

William Block, who was editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the postwar years, remembers several letters from Alan Scaife complaining about Block's decision to make the paper's editorial line more moderate in the late 1940s. "Alan Scaife was terribly worried about inherited wealth, apparently feeling that you have to be Republican to stay rich," Block said recently.

Sarah's brother R.K. Mellon, whose successful investments vastly enlarged the family fortune in the post-World War II years, had little confidence in his brother-in-law, and gave Alan Scaife no meaningful authority in Mellon family businesses. "My father – was sucking hind tit," Richard Mellon Scaife told Hersh in the mid-1970s.

After his father died suddenly in 1958, Scaife, who had graduated from college the year before (from the University of Pittsburgh, whose board chairman was Alan Scaife), took his place on various family boards and committees, but rarely had anything substantive to do. He knew where he stood with his uncle R.K., and resented it.

He would put together a life of his own. It would not involve the Scaife Co., which was failing. After his father died Scaife sold it – "for a dollar," he told Hersh.

In 1974, Scaife had an opportunity to express his feelings about the Mellons. In honor of his mother, he had decided to donate a new wing to the Carnegie, Pittsburgh's leading museum, and to fill it with her art collection. In life she had always been Sarah Mellon Scaife, so Pittsburgh society was taken aback when the new wing was opened. At her son's insistence, it was called simply the Sarah Scaife wing. Later, he removed the Mellon from the name of the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation.

Continued on Page Two

Page Two

Burdens of Wealth

Continued from preceding page

Persuaded to Support Ideas Over Individuals

Scaife first became interested in politics as a boy. In the 1950s, his sister Cordelia's boyfriend, Robert Duggan, introduced Scaife to conservative Republican politics, and helped him become a Republican committeeman in Allegheny County in 1956.

He became an enthusiastic supporter of Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater in 1964. His mother was a Goldwater fan, too, and lent the Goldwaters her airplane. Scaife reportedly contributed substantially to the Goldwater presidential effort and met the candidate more than once. His experience with the campaign influenced his philanthropy for years to come.

In 1969, when he was 37 years old, Scaife finally got a role entirely his own. After hearing from a friend that the owners of the Tribune-Review of Greensburg, Pa., wanted to sell the paper, he bought it for about $5 million. Greensburg is the county seat of Westmoreland County, where Ligonier is located, just east of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Scaife became the paper's publisher.

Scaife had one last serious fling with electoral politics in 1972, when he gave 330 $3,000 checks – $990,000 – to 330 different dummy organizations, all of them fronting for the Nixon campaign. The Washington Post disclosed these contributions a fortnight before the election, and Scaife readily acknowledged them. He wrote so many checks to avoid the federal gift tax then in force.

The Nixon White House courted Scaife, but he was appalled by the spectacle of Watergate, and his paper advocated Nixon's impeachment in March 1974. "My country comes first, my party comes second," Scaife explained.

His experience with Nixon, according to several associates, persuaded him to invest his hopes and his money in conservative institutions and ideas, not politicians. Though he has continued to give thousands to political campaigns and political action committees, his interest in electoral politics receded.

For Scaife personally, 1974 was probably more important for the death of his mentor, Duggan, and its consequences for his family. Since 1963, Duggan had been the elected district attorney of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located. Scaife had supported him enthusiastically, served as his campaign treasurer and told friends he wanted to help Duggan become governor of Pennsylvania.

In Duggan's third term as D.A., the Internal Revenue Service and Richard Thornburgh, then the U.S. attorney for Western Pennsylvania (and later governor and U.S. attorney general), opened investigations into Duggan's sources of income and relations with criminal elements.

At first Scaife stood by his friend, even lobbying the Nixon administration to call Thornburgh off. But friends of Scaife's, apparently prodded by Thornburgh's investigators, brought him evidence of Duggan's wrongdoing that convinced him that Duggan was corrupt.

But Cordelia Scaife concluded that the world was unfairly out to get her old friend, and – to the amazement of Pittsburgh's social and political worlds – she decided to marry him secretly in Nevada. Scaife was livid when he heard about the wedding. Weeks after the marriage was announced, Thornburgh tightened the noose around Duggan. With help from a local gangster who finally agreed to testify that he had made payoffs to the D.A., Thornburgh brought a six-count indictment charging Duggan with tax fraud.

On the day the indictment was returned – March 5, 1974 – Duggan was found dead on his farm in Ligonier. His body had a shotgun wound in the chest; a shotgun was found a few feet away. A police investigation concluded that he died by accident or suicide, but many suspicious people doubted this explanation. One was Cordelia, who decided, according to numerous sources, that somehow, her brother was involved. She broke off relations with her brother and has not spoken to him since.

Today, Cordelia Scaife May says she accepts the verdict that Duggan did away with himself. "I don't want that one raked up again," she said in a recent interview.

Silence on Philanthropic Philosophy, Intellectual Beliefs

Most of the $340 million Scaife's trusts and foundations have given to conservative causes has funded some form of intellectual activity. "Our funding is based on our support of ideas like limited government, individual rights and a strong defense," he said in a written response to questions from The Washington Post. But no one has ever accused Scaife of being an intellectual.

Asked about his interest in books, more than a dozen of the conservative intellectuals Scaife has supported could cite none they remembered him discussing. What they remember is his appetite for newspapers, particularly for the gossip columns. The one academic subject friends cited that he seems to know well is geography. His greatest known enthusiasm is for flowers. His penchant for conspiratorial explanations of public events is mentioned often.

Scaife has apparently never given a speech or written an article outlining his personal philosophy, the principles guiding his philanthropy or his ideas. Occasionally, he has dropped tantalizing, if also confusing, clues, as he did at a rally sponsored by the Heritage Foundation after the Republicans gained control of the House and Senate in November 1994.

Invited to speak, Scaife said: "With political victory, the ideological conflicts that have swirled about this nation for half a century now show clear signs of breaking into naked ideological warfare in which the very foundations of our republic are threatened and that we had better take heed."

In his statement to The Post, Scaife said, "My concerns are for the freedom of individuals."

Scaife has regularly attended board meetings at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace and at the Heritage Foundation (where he is vice chairman), but speaks little, and almost never about substantive issues, according to people who attended board meetings.

The only public role Scaife has ever held was as a member of the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, the citizens' advisory panel for the U.S. Information Agency, from 1984 to 1990. (Edwin J. Feulner Jr. of the Heritage Foundation was then the chairman of that panel.) In that capacity he traveled around the world visiting USIA posts. Other prominent citizens who served with him remember Scaife as someone who had little to say, and little to contribute when he did speak.

Had he not inherited a lot of money, said former aide Shuman, "I don't think he had the intellectual capacity to do very much."

While many people who know Scaife give him credit for setting and sticking to his conservative priorities, others attribute the success of his giving largely to the influence of his two longest-serving aides, McMichael and Richard M. Larry. Both developed relationships with the conservative activists who guided Scaife's philanthropy, and brought system and order to the process of giving the money away along with their own strong beliefs.

McMichael has a conspiratorial bent as well. According to one recipient who worked with him, he sometimes avoided phone calls in favor of secretive meetings in airports. He wrote a novel (subsidized by Scaife) imagining a future United States taken over by the Soviet Union after being duped by a successor to the United Nations. He specializes in grants for foreign policy and security issues. Larry, a former Marine who handles grants involving domestic policy, was largely responsible for Scaife's involvement in the "Arkansas Project" that attempted to find dirt on the Clintons.

Perhaps most important, Scaife's philanthropy fed on itself, thanks in large measure to a handful of recipients who cultivated the donor. When Scaife volunteered generous gifts to the Hoover Institution in the 1960s, its director at the time, W. Glenn Campbell, put Scaife on Hoover's board. There he was exposed to many conservative intellectuals who were grateful for the millions he was giving to their enterprise.

Similarly, David Abshire at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and William Baroody Sr. at the American Enterprise Institute exposed Scaife to a world of intellectuals and political activism that he would not have seen without his ties to their organizations. Later Feulner cultivated Scaife assiduously, put him on the Heritage Board in 1985, then accepted a position on the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Scaife has been vice chairman of Heritage's board since 1992.

Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation and a founder of Heritage, organized a dinner at the Old Angler's Inn near Great Falls in Potomac in the early 1990s to honor Scaife for his contributions to victory in the Cold War.

Most of the major recipients declined requests for on-the-record interviews about Scaife. Campbell, now director emeritus at Hoover, did give an interview. "Unlike a lot of people who inherited" money, he said, Scaife "spent it wisely."

The people who run the big organizations Scaife has supported, not surprisingly, are quick to forgive Scaife's idiosyncrasies. Asked about Scaife's predilection for conspiracy theories, for example, the head of one big recipient organization shrugged: "I don't know why he goes off on these toots."

Some of these recipients are nervous now about Scaife's future commitment to their causes because they sense his interests are changing. Several attributed this to his wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Battle Scaife, who was quite openly Scaife's companion for many years before they were married in 1991. She still lives in the house she first occupied as Scaife's companion, just around the corner from Scaife's house in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Ritchie Scaife has philanthropic interests of her own, according to sources connected to the Scaife foundations. She has encouraged recent gifts of at least $570,000 to the education programs of the Archdiocese of Pittsburgh, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington ($2.25 million for a painting acquired in honor of Paul Mellon, Scaife's cousin) and to Mount Vernon for a new audio-visual program for visitors there. She is active now in a new Pittsburgh parks conservancy that received approval last year for $500,000 in grant money from Scaife's Allegheny Foundation.

Scaife is described by old friends as enjoying perhaps the best time of his life, and many attribute this to his wife. Her biggest accomplishment may have been to help Scaife break the spell of alcohol. Since he stopped drinking in the early '90s "the change in his personality is just unbelievable," said H. Yale Gutnick, Scaife's lawyer. At the same time, and to his great frustration, Scaife has been losing his hearing, and now often relies on a crude but effective amplifying device to talk to others – a microphone that brings his interlocutor's words into earphones.

Ritchie Scaife travels in the private DC-9, takes part in the social and cultural life of Pittsburgh's upper crust and seems to enjoy hobnobbing with celebrities. She told friends after her husband was interviewed last fall by John F. Kennedy Jr. that Kennedy was "a friend of ours." (Several months after the interview appeared in George magazine, her son Westray Battle was listed as an intern on the masthead of George. Kennedy invited Scaife to be his guest at Saturday's White House Correspondents Dinner.)

Last June, Ritchie Scaife gave a lavish party to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. The party was held in elaborate tents that were pitched on the site of Penguin Court, the eccentric Cottswolds-style mansion Scaife's mother and father built in Ligonier next to the Rolling Rock Club. When Scaife inherited the old mansion he had it torn down, stone by stone.

The giant party tents were arrayed around a reflecting pool and furnished to look like a grand country house – chandeliers, art work, fine furniture, according to one of the 250 guests. Every guest got an umbrella with a penguin handle, and a dancing penguin was placed on the dashboards of the guests' cars.

Scaife's admirers insist that he's misunderstood. "He's got this incredible modesty that people don't even know about," said George "Frolic" Weymouth, the chairman of the Brandywine Conservancy in Chadds Ford, Pa., where Andrew Wyeth paintings and the landscape he painted are both preserved. Scaife has given more than $6 million to the conservancy since 1979.

Weymouth, a painter and restorer of horse-drawn carriages whose mother was a du Pont, described Scaife as someone "passionate about flowers" who has a refined taste in gardens and paintings. "He's a wonderful person, very good sense of humor," Weymouth added.

Gutnick, Scaife's lawyer, recounted proudly how Scaife had offered a $50,000 contribution to Pittsburgh's United Jewish Federation to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Israeli independence.

"He's a very attractive, very pleasant, very amusing person," said William Boyd, a lifelong friend.

So Scaife is as kind to friends as he can be harsh to perceived enemies. James Whelan, the founding editor of the Washington Times who worked for Scaife when he owned the Sacramento Union, said this was characteristic. Scaife's world, Whelan said, is starkly divided between allies and adversaries. "If you're not my friend, you're my enemy – he lives by that kind of code."

Scaife remains feisty and unpredictable. He told Kennedy last fall that he was glad to see Newt Gingrich leave the House speakership – "we need leadership, and Newt wasn't providing it." He said that although he was "a Republican by birth – in the last several years, particularly after Newt's election, I have become more and more Libertarian – I don't see the Republicans going anywhere."

Maintaining Privacy Under Newfound Notoriety

Throughout his adult life Scaife has worried about his personal security. Shuman, his former aide, recalled Pittsburgh police cars stationed outside his house 20 years ago. This year those fears were realized in a bizarre episode that grew out of Scaife's new notoriety as a bogeyman of the left.

Scaife is the topic of much discussion on the Internet. One of his critics in cyberspace, Steve Kangas, maintained his own Web site where he wrote diatribes against the the "overclass," a combination of the wealthy and the CIA. He considered Scaife an influential member.

On Feb. 8, Kangas was found dead in a men's room on the 39th floor of the Oxford Center office building, where Scaife's Pittsburgh offices are now located. Police ruled it a suicide. Kangas had come from Las Vegas with a gun; Scaife concluded that he was Kangas's target, according to knowledgeable sources.

Kangas's suicide was not publicized for weeks after the event, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette finally got wind of it and wrote several stories. So did Scaife's Tribune-Review. Scaife apparently didn't like the Post-Gazette's coverage, which raised questions about why Scaife had hired a private detective to investigate Kangas (the same Rex Armistead who worked on the Arkansas Project) instead of relying on Pittsburgh police.

Scaife's Tribune-Review ran an angry editorial denouncing the other paper's coverage – an editorial that had to have the owner's personal approval, according to a former editor of the Tribune-Review. The editorial described Dennis B. Roddy, the Post-Gazette reporter who wrote the stories, and John G. Craig Jr., the editor of the paper, as "Scaife haters" who should have realized that "Kangas, an unstable man who became fully unhinged, was pushed over the top by liberals like them who joined the Clinton White House and their friends to demonize Dick Scaife."

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050299.htm 1999

Continued on Page Two

===

salon

http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html

The man behind the mask

Richard Mellon Scaife

SHY, SECRETIVE AND OF REGAL BEARING, RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE HAS WORKED HARD AND SPENT MILLIONS TO DICTATE THE NATION'S POLITICAL AGENDA.

BY KAREN ROTHMYER

Richard Mellon Scaife's eyes are what you notice first: a startling sky blue, they look almost unreal, so intense is their color. For the rest, a handsome countenance, a large frame and a shock of once-blond hair, now white, make up a classic picture of good breeding. Scaife's father came from one of Pittsburgh's blue blood families, its ancestry traced back to medieval England; his mother was a fabulously wealthy Mellon descendant whom Fortune magazine identified in 1957 as one of the eight richest people in America.

And yet, there is about Richard Mellon Scaife a seeming unease with his own person that even friends have commented on through the years. Almost pathologically shy -- he removed his name from Who's Who more than 15 years ago and has since sat for only a handful of interviews -- he is, at the same time, given to a pattern of unpredictable behavior that has continued despite his having stopped his formerly heavy drinking.

"He has a love-hate relationship with a lot of people, including himself," said a former close acquaintance. "He is at once the most wonderful, generous guy and the most hateful and vindictive one." Added another person who has observed Scaife close-up in Pittsburgh, "Whenever he dislikes someone, it's not enough to fire them; they can never work in this town again."

Either because they fear his power or his temper, or because they want something out of him, almost all those who know Scaife, 65, are unwilling to say anything critical about him publicly -- that is, if they agree to talk about him at all. That reluctance, combined with his own penchant for secrecy, has made him the most shadowy figure in the Clinton scandals, even as evidence of his role as a funder of investigations into the Clintons' activities has grown.

The man whom Time magazine, in its latest issue, calls "the ultimate patron" of the Clinton haters has been identified by Salon and the New York Observer as a key funder of the $2.4 million Arkansas Project, a four-year effort organized through the American Spectator magazine to discredit the president. Scaife foundation money, as Salon has reported, has also allegedly been used to pay key Whitewater witness David Hale and to help bankroll Paula Jones' sexual harassment case against Clinton.

In fact, Scaife's part in the Clinton chronicles represents the second time that he has been a secretive major player in efforts to profoundly alter the course of politics and public policy in America. In the 1970s, his money fueled the "New Right" movement that sought to replace the perceived "liberal establishment" in Washington and the media with a new, conservative order.

"The victories we're celebrating today didn't begin last Tuesday," Heritage Foundation president Edwin Feulner Jr. told a meeting of supporters in 1994 just after the Republican sweep of the House of Representatives. "They started more than 20 years ago when Dick Scaife had the vision to see the need for a conservative intellectual movement in America. These organizations built the intellectual case that was necessary before political leaders like Newt Gingrich could translate their ideas into practical political alternatives."

Gingrich, who was also at the meeting, hailed Scaife as "a good friend and ally for a very long time."

Just where Scaife's political views come from is a mystery to many people, including his only sibling, Cordelia Scaife May, from whom he is estranged. Their mother, Sarah Scaife, was a cold and often sarcastic woman, according to May, but apart from knowing Barry Goldwater, she showed no particular interest in current affairs.

"My father didn't like Roosevelt, but as head of Pittsburgh Coal he sat across from John L. Lewis in labor negotiations and had enormous respect and, I think, liking for him," said May.

Dick Scaife didn't read much while they were growing up, she said, but he did have a great interest in newspapers, especially out-of-town papers, which he collected and displayed on specially made racks at the family's country estate. Reflecting on those years of governesses and formal family dinners, May commented, "I don't remember any laughter in that house."

During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington. Perhaps it was this once-removed brush with intrigue that led to Dick Scaife's growing fascination with conspiracies of all kinds. "He's the kind of person who looks under his bed every night before they go to sleep," said a longtime family acquaintance and prominent Pennsylvania Republican. In the early 1980s, Scaife told a Philadelphia Inquirer interviewer that the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was one of his heroes, and that the most influential book he had read was "The Spike," co-authored by former Newsweek correspondent and Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, in which a young reporter finds himself cast as a pawn in the Soviet Union's master plot to take over the world.

It was also in Washington, according to Mellon family biographer Burton Hersh, that young Dick began to pay attention to the workings of government. Scaife told Hersh that he had "made it a kind of hobby to meet as many senators and congressmen as I could."

Later, there would be boarding school and then Yale, from which he was expelled after a drunken party. He ended up at the University of Pittsburgh, where his father was chairman of the board of trustees. After getting a bachelor's degree in English in 1957, he was put to work first in the Scaife family business and later in Mellon enterprises. Within a few years, both of his parents were dead and Scaife had inherited an enormous fortune whose value is currently estimated by Forbes as about $1 billion (a significant underestimate, according to one reliable source).

N E X T+P A G E+| Funding the New Right

=

Richard Mellon Scaife: Who Is He Really?

by Edward Spannaus

Printed in The Executive Intelligence Review -- a Series, Beginning March 21, 1997.

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Contents:

   *

   * Part I

   * Part II

   * Documentation

   * Part III

Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?

Part I

Return to Contents

The following article will be continued in a forthcoming issue.

He's considered the stupidest member of his extended family, and was kicked out of Yale, not once, but twice. He's a (supposedly recovered) alcoholic, as have been most members of the family. The kindest description of his personality is ``dark and mysterious.'' He is known for never looking his own employees straight in the eye.

He has a long history of using the U.S. Justice Department to target his enemies. He got his own sister's fiancé indicted; after his sister married the poor chap, the man ended up dead within a year--some say suicide, some say murder.

He owns a network of newspapers, but he himself refuses to be interviewed by reporters from other publications. On one occasion, when a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review tried to question him, he berated her as a ``f--king Communist c--nt.''

He gave a million dollars to Richard Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), and he is the biggest funder of right-wing think-tanks in the United States today.

Meet ... Richard Mellon Scaife.

His name is hardly a household word, but in the past quarter-century, Dickie'' Scaife has been one the most powerful behind-the-scenes operators in the United States. His power comes purely from his wealth, and specifically, from the way that he has deployed that wealth at the instruction of the Anglo-American banking families that he represents. Dickie is not known for his brains\--in fact, he was kicked out of college twice, first expelled as the result of a drunken brawl, and flunked out the second time. His family made him go local,'' to Pittsburgh University, which he tried to make up for, by majoring in British history.

Only recently has Richard Mellon Scaife come into public prominence, as a result of the disclosure that he is the bankroller of a cushy ``retirement'' position for Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr at Pepperdine University. This raised eyebrows, to put it mildly, because Scaife is the principal funder of a news media propaganda campaign aimed at defaming and discrediting Starr's main target, President William Clinton. Scaife has also bankrolled a nationwide crusade charging that White House aide Vincent Foster did not commit suicide, but was murdered; something which is also the subject of official investigation by the recipient of Scaife's largesse, Kenneth Starr.

In the 1980s, Scaife also coordinated and financed a similar campaign of media defamation against Lyndon LaRouche, a Presidential candidate and founder of EIR, and Scaife has a long history of using his own newspapers to smear others who have drawn his ire.

But this is nothing new for Scaife. What he is now doing to President Clinton, and what he did to Lyndon LaRouche, is what he was trained and deployed to do. Scaife is not simply a ``multimillionaire supporter of conservative groups,'' as he is portrayed in the news media; nor is he simply an eccentric rich man who has an obsession against President Clinton.

To understand what is being done to President Clinton today, and to understand what lies behind the campaigns of defamation run by the news media against figures such as Clinton or LaRouche, it is necessary to know who and what, someone like Richard Mellon Scaife actually is.

That story, naturally enough, starts in London.

The Anglo-American OSS

Dickie Scaife is what one might call a second-generation ``OSS brat.'' During World War II, Dickie's father, as well as a number of his father's close business and familial associates, occupied high positions in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--America's wartime intelligence service. Alan Scaife, his father, was a lieutenant colonel in the OSS. A number of cousins of Dickie's mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, also had very high positions in the OSS.

For example: Paul Mellon (a cousin of Dickie's mother and a rabid Anglophile) was recruited in London to the OSS by his brother-in-law, David Bruce. Paul trained with British troops, became a major in the OSS, worked under Allen Dulles in Berne, Switzerland, and commanded a unit responsible for conducting propaganda operations behind disintegrating German lines.

David Bruce, husband of Paul Mellon's sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce, was designated by OSS head William Donovan to oversee all OSS operations in Europe from his base in London. (Although some say, with justification, that it was Bruce who was designated by the U.S. banking-establishment families to oversee Donovan.) Another OSS cousin was Larimer Mellon, who likewise worked on Allen Dulles's staff in Berne.

David Bruce (a direct descendant of the Scottish Bruce dynasty) later divorced Ailsa and married his second wife, Evangeline, an OSS secretary whose father had been a special liaison to British intelligence from the U.S. State Department.

It is reliably reported that these Anglophilic OSS circles around Scaife's father were the crucial influence on steering Dickie into intelligence-related philanthropy''-\-i.e., the private funding of joint British-U.S. intelligence projects which were commonly mis-identified as CIA'' projects or fronts.

It is more accurate to describe the CIA as a front'' for these Anglo-American banking families. But even that would be too simple. The CIA is an agency of government, and is thus subject to the institutional and bureaucratic pressures to which any agency of government must respond. The families'' attempt to control the CIA, as they do with the State Department and other agencies. The principal means of control is through the private financing of think-tanks, conferences, publications, etc., which attempt to train the personnel, and set the agenda, for the institutions of government. This is precisely what Dickie Scaife and his family money did when the Reagan-Bush administration came into office in 1981.

The "Focal Point" and First Boston

Another element of this bankers-intelligence apparatus is what is called the Focal Point system. The public may misconceive of this apparatus as CIA''-\-but the CIA is simply a secondary component of this operation, which encompasses the old families, military intelligence capabilities, and private intelligence operations. One intelligence source, familiar with this system, said recently that CIA'' is simply a ``cover story'' for activities that the banking families and other institutions and agencies carry out in the name of the CIA.

The Focal Point system, within the official government apparatus, was originally created in the mid-1950s by then-CIA Director Allen Dulles. It functioned as a capability extending into other agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, for conducting covert operations and paramilitary special operations.'' A particular emphasis was counterinsurgency and civil affairs'' (as taken over from the British); an included feature of this was psychological warfare and propaganda.

Within the military, the Focal Point system was centered in the Joint Chiefs of Staff--and remnants of this system still exist to this day, in the Support Activities Branch of the J-3 Special Operations Division.

There was also a substantial ``private'' component to the Focal Point system, the precursor of the privatized intelligence operations authorized under the Reagan-Bush Executive Order 12333. But this privatized intelligence system was already active in the 1950s, according to knowledgeable sources, with the First Boston Corp., the First National Bank of Boston (now Bank of Boston), and other banking houses playing a leading financial role.

Of particular interest here, among the many families which played key roles in this Anglo-American bankers' intelligence network (such as the Astors, Rockefellers, and the du Ponts), are three families: the Roosevelts, the Mellons, and the Welds.

Mellon Securities had merged into First Boston in 1946, and as of about 1980, the Scaife family held about 6% of First Boston, and the combined Mellon and Scaife families about 13%. First Boston's principal law firm was Sullivan and Cromwell, out of which Allen Dulles ran U.S. intelligence after the termination of the OSS and until the creation of the CIA. This is also Paul Mellon's law firm; his and much of the Mellon family's financial affairs were run by Stoddard Stevens of Sullivan and Cromwell, who has been described as Paul's ``father figure.''

Dickie Scaife was brought into this system by his OSS relatives no later than 1973, and in 1979 he was placed on the board of directors of First Boston, where he remained until 1987. At that time, 40% of First Boston was owned by Crédit Suisse-White Weld (of the dope-running family of former Justice Department official William Weld). In 1988, First Boston became CS First Boston, and the size of the board was apparently considerably reduced.

Already in 1929, a White Weld banker, John A. Gade, had proposed the creation of an American central intelligence agency, to be modelled explicitly on British intelligence. The current, most public, standard-bearer of the Weld family, is William Weld, who organized the judicial frameup of Lyndon LaRouche from his positions as U.S. Attorney in Boston and, then, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. William Weld is married to a Roosevelt, Susan, the daughter of another OSS veteran, Quentin Roosevelt.

The Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family is deeply enmeshed in this OSS-Wall Street intelligence apparatus, and they are especially close to Cord Meyer, a key operative of this network who shows up again and again as a top operative with responsibility for handling CIA'' front organizations. It was Teddy Roosevelt's grandson Kermit (Kim'') Roosevelt, who had proposed the creation of a propaganda and intelligence agency'' to Wall Street lawyer William Donovan during World War II. Kermit subsequently worked with British intelligence to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953, an action which worked to the financial benefit of not only British Petroleum, but also of Gulf Oil, a Mellon family enterprise which was closely tied to First Boston after the 1946 Mellon Securities merger. In 1958, Kermit retired'' to take the strategic position of vice president for government relations with Gulf Oil.

Dickie gets his assignment

When he was 40 years old, having been trained and disciplined through some particularly nasty operations to be described in our next installment, Dickie Scaife was formally inducted into the top levels of the Anglo-American bankers' intelligence apparatus. In 1973, he took control of the Scaife family foundations, which he had previously run jointly with his sister Cordelia. He dramatically changed the focus of foundation grants, to emphasize British-intelligence-oriented ``right-wing'' think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, or the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. This was not something totally new; funding from the Scaife family foundations for some of these institutions, such as the National Strategy Information Center, goes back into the early 1960s.

Of singular importance is the position Dickie was given in early 1973, when he was allowed to take over ownership of Forum World Features, a joint British intelligence-CIA news media operation based in London. This is probably the most important career advancement for Dickie, for it defines the track he has pursued since: the use and the manipulation of the news media to promote favored causes, and to attack and defame adversaries. There is a direct path from Forum World Features, to the Bush secret government's'' Public Diplomacy operation created in 1983, which in turn spawned the Get LaRouche'' task force, all the way through to the anti-Clinton propaganda machine which Scaife directs and finances today.

The background of Forum World Features (FWF) is instructive. Although accounts of its creation vary, it appears that it was a division of Kern House Enterprises, created by Kermit Roosevelt in the 1960s; one account says that Kermit ``was entrusted with creating the CIA's publishing empire.'' Kern House was set up by Roosevelt with Mellon money; in turn, it set up a London subsidiary, Kern House Enterprises, Ltd. Kern House begat Forum World Features, financed with funds from the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), based in New York. FWF's major purpose was to supply feature material to newspapers around the world, including at least 30 in the United States. It also commissioned a number of books.

One of the premier private intelligence think-tanks, NSIC was formed in 1962, primarily with Mellon family money; on the board was Prescott Bush (of the Harriman-linked Bush family, and George's brother), John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia (one of the authors of Bush's EO 12333), and various representatives of the corporate and intelligence world, as well as personnel associated directly with Scaife.

From 1966 to 1973, FWF was headed by John Hay Whitney, a raving Anglophile who had been U.S. ambassador to Britain, and who was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. In 1973, Dickie Scaife purchased Kern/FWF, and headed it until its demise in 1975-76, following its exposure as a ``CIA'' front. At the time of its dissolution in 1976, its three directors were Scaife, Scaife's top operative Daniel McMichael (former president of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council), and Lewis Preston, the chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust (and later head of the World Bank).

In 1975, a British weekly, Time Out, and the Washington Post, published a 1968 memorandum from the CIA station chief in London to then-director Richard Helms, describing FWF as an agency-sponsored operation providing a significant means to counter Communist propaganda.'' The memorandum portrayed FWF as a CIA proprietary, which was run with the knowledge and cooperation of British intelligence.'' The overseer of FWF in the United States was Cord Meyer.

(Cord Meyer, incidentally, not only promoted the publication of material favorable to the Anglo-American banking-intelligence establishment, but attempted to block publication of disfavored material. Author and former CIA officer Victor Marchetti reports that in 1972, Meyer, whom he describes as the number-two man in the CIA Clandestine Services, visited the New York offices of Harper and Row to attempt to stop the publication of Alfred McCoy's first edition of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. As a result, the publisher insisted that McCoy submit the manuscript to the CIA before it would be published.)

Although FWF was dissolved, its operations were not. Its day-to-day operations in London were managed by Brian Crozier, a British writer long associated with both U.K. and U.S. intelligence. In 1970, Crozier had also become the head of another FWF-created organization in London, which was renamed the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC). Between 1973 and 1979 alone, Dickie Scaife's private trusts gave over a million dollars to Crozier's ISC.

In a 1980 proposal, Scaife's aide Daniel McMichael described ISC as doing a first-rate job in conducting research on `low-level conflict,' i.e., political and psychological warfare, revolutionary activities, insurgency operations and terrorism.'' McDaniel boasted that ISC work is consistently used by the Thatcher government,'' and that the ISC had ``solid working relationships with the Heritage Foundation, the National Strategy Information Center, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis [associated with Tufts University and its Fletcher School] and a number of other Scaife-supported organizations.'' On ISC's board of directors at that time were a number of top, easily identified British intelligence and counterinsurgency officials.

After FWF was dumped, its book publishing operations were taken over by Rossiter Publications, later renamed Craven House. Crozier was also its managing director. Among authors published by Crozier's shop was Robert Moss, a British intelligence operative who floats between the ISC, the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, and the Heritage Foundation in the United States.

Promoting his British "Heritage"

Scaife is also one of the biggest financiers of British-linked think-tanks in the United States promoting conservative'' social and economic policies\--prototypical of which is the Heritage Foundation. Although beer magnate Joseph Coors is more publicly identified with Heritage, the fact is, that Scaife has provided more funding for Heritage than has Coors. From 1974 up through the end of the 1970s, Scaife provided about $200,000 a year to Heritage; after a shakeup in the late 1970s\--which transformed it into what one Heritage staff member termed an outpost for British intelligence in the United States''--Scaife's support jumped to the range of $1 million a year.

(In November 1994, just after the commencement of the short-lived Gingrich revolution'' of the 1994 elections, Newt opened a speech at the Heritage Foundation President's Club by praising two people who have really created modern conservativism--Dick Scaife and Ed Feulner.'' Gingrich went on: ``Dick Scaife is a remarkable citizen who has spent many years as a key force in sustaining conservative ideas and who has played a major, major role on the Heritage Foundation's board, and he's been a good friend and a good ally for a very long time, and I remember working with him starting in the late '70s.'')

In fact, Scaife's role at Heritage increased after the 1976-77 shakeup, when he personally brought in Edwin Feulner to head it up. Feulner (a board member of the Sarah Scaife Foundation) placed many Brits into key policy positions at Heritage, among whom was Stuart Butler, a member of the British Fabian Society. A socialist at the conservative'' Heritage Foundation? Not so strange. Both are motivated by a deep-seated, bitter hatred of industrial capitalism. It was, after all, the Fabian'' London School of Economics to which Friedrich von Hayek, later the founder and head of the Mont Pelerin Society, had moved his ``Austrian School'' of economics in the 1930s.

In a 1981 interview with EIR, Butler explained it as follows: ``In the case of the Reagan government, we are using a conservative government to impose a quite radical, left-wing program--all based upon solid, liberal economic principles. There really isn't so much difference between the people in the Fabian Society, people like myself, and Milton Friedman. We really overlap in the middle of things on such ideas as local control.''

What Butler said then, goes many-fold for Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America.

But that gets ahead of the story. First came the so-called Reagan Revolution,'' which on virtually every level was run by operatives associated and financed by Mellon Scaife, along with four other foundations which make up the Philanthropic Roundtable.'' The Roundtable includes the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (these four are known as the ``Four Sisters'' because they finance almost all of their projects in common), plus the J.M. Foundation.

Even more important, was the reorganization of intelligence operations in the Reagan administration, and the creation of what became known as the secret government'' run under the personal direction of Vice President George Bush in the 1980s. This secret and parallel government'' was simply the Scaife Mellon network of think-tanks and and academic retainers, brought into the government, and made ``official.''

Who is Richard Mellon Scaife?

Part II

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Part 2 of our exposé on the moneybags behind the media campaign against the President. Edward Spannaus reports on Scaife and the Bush ``secret government.''

   Richard Mellon Scaife has recently come into prominence as the bankroller of a news-media campaign aimed at President Clinton, while he is sponsoring a cushy retirement'' position for Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. In Part 1 (EIR, March 21), we showed that Dickie'' Scaife has been deployed for almost 25 years by the old Office of Strategic Services Anglo-American financier-intelligence circles, to do exactly this sort of thing.

Since Dickie Scaife was allowed to take over the Scaife family foundations and trusts in 1973, he has been a principal funder of that network of nominally ``conservative'' foreign policy think-tanks which operates as a training ground and as the agenda-setter for the foreign service and intelligence communities. During the Reagan-Bush administrations, this cluster of conservative think-tanks virtually became the government.

In reality there were two governments in the Reagan-Bush administration--the official, public government, and the secret government'' run by Vice President George Bush. The official government, particularly the National Security Council, the State Department, and the intelligence community, were riddled with Scaife's grantees and beneficiaries. But behind the official government lay what became known as the secret government''--and Scaife's network of think-tanks and foundations provided the intellectual rationalization which justified its creation, including the infamous Executive Order 12333. As far as is known, most of Scaife's hirelings didn't dirty their hands with actual drug-running or assassinations, but they did provide key funding and staff for the entire so-called Project Democracy'' apparatus, and also for the semi-official public diplomacy'' propaganda machine which ran cover for Bush's Contra drug-runners and Afghansi terrorists. [fn1]

Then and now, Scaife does not limit his largesse to strategic and foreign policy matters, but he is also a primary funder of a burgeoning network of think-tanks and propaganda mills promoting the feudal economic policies coming out of the Mont Pelerin Society. Under the guise of Thatcherism,'' these groups provided the social and economic policies, and much of the staffing, for the so-called Reagan Revolution,'' and more recently, for the Gingrich-Gramm gang in the wake of the Republican Party takeover of Congress in the 1994 elections. One could say that the earnest money for the ``Contract with America'' was paid by Dickie Scaife.

A third distinctive cluster of organizations funded by Scaife are the right-wing legal foundations and litigation groups; originally founded to counter civil libertarians and environmentalists, they have increasingly become pro-environmentalist and libertarian in their outlook--as well as financing legal attacks on President Clinton and the Clinton administration.

Here, we will look more closely at the intelligence and foreign policy think-tanks which virtually took over the Reagan administration in 1981, and which provided the underpinning for Bush's ``secret government'' built up in 1981-86.

Origins of the secret government

As the Iran-Contra scandals played out in televised Congressional hearings in 1987, many Americans began to get a glimpse of what some Congressmen called the parallel'' government, and others simply called the secret government.'' What most Americans didn't know, is the intellectual foundations were developed by Richard Mellon Scaife's hirelings.

Two Scaife-funded operations played central roles in preparing the way for the creation of this secret government'' machinery. The first was a series of national security seminars held during 1973-79 by the International Security Studies Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University\--organized by Prof. Uri Ra'anan. The second was a series of seven conferences held during 1979-84 by the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence,'' organized by Roy Godson.

Both Godson and Ra'anan were subsequently deeply involved in what became known as the ``Iran-Contra'' scandals; and--not surprisingly--both were personally and heavily involved in dirty operations against Lyndon LaRouche.

Ra'anan and the Fletcher School

The Fletcher School is the oldest graduate school of diplomacy in the United States. Its students are tracked into careers in the foreign service, the CIA, and the military. From its founding, the International Security Studies Program within the Fletcher School was financed almost exclusively through grants from the Scaife family foundations and trusts. On its Advisory Council in the 1980s were R. Daniel McMichael and Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, both trustees of Scaife family foundations.

After the arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in November 1985, Ra'anan, the chairman of Fletcher's International Security Studies Program, was quoted praising his former student Pollard in the New York Times as bright and articulate.'' Upon Pollard's graduation from the Fletcher School in 1978, he had gone to work for U.S. Naval Intelligence. One of his classmates, Mira Lansky Boland, went to work for the CIA for two years, and then for the Pentagon; in 1984, Boland transferred to the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), where she soon became devoted full-time to the Get LaRouche'' task force.

Pollard was no accident, nor was Boland. Ra'anan (born Heinz Felix Frischwasser in Central Europe in 1926) spent the war years in London, and then emigrated to Israel. He came to the United States in the early 1960s, and, working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, set up an Israeli spy-recruiting unit. In 1967, he joined the faculty at the Fletcher School.

In 1973, the International Security Studies Program initiated a series of annual conferences, funded by Scaife, on a wide range of strategic topics. Dozens of senior figures in the U.S. military-intelligence community were brought in to participate. The last seminar, in April 1979, was on ``Intelligence Policy and National Security.'' Ra'anan himself was named to an advisory committee in 1980 to help shape Reagan's foreign policy and defense platform.

Godson and the Consortium

Roy Godson, a wholly-owned asset of Scaife, Inc., is the son of a longtime Lovestonite State Department official, Joe Godson, who served principally in London and Belgrade, Yugoslavia after the war, and who founded the London branch of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Roy Godson, after getting his master's degree at Columbia University (where he was already known as a ``CIA watcher of left-wing groups''), was immediately sent to Pittsburgh, where he was given his first teaching post at Carnegie-Mellon University (1967-69), and where he was also hired as a program director of the Pittsburgh World Affairs Council (where Scaife's aide R. Daniel McMichael was president). Godson's first book, American Labor and European Politics (1976), was financed by a grant that McMichael arranged; his next book was published by the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC).

From Pittsburgh, Godson went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and by the late 1970s, was regarded as an ``expert'' on Soviet methods. In 1979, Scaife money enabled Godson to launch the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI), a direct extension of the 1970s Fletcher conference series, reflecting the expectation that the Republicans would be victorious in the 1980 elections, which would present an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of re-organizing U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.

The Scaife-funded effort by the American Tories to take over and subvert the country's intelligence reorganization had an important, if unwitting, ally in the new Director of Central Intelligence

And although Casey was not a great fan of George Bush, he was an enthusiast of ``off-the-books'' covert operations, and he often preferred using non-CIA personnel to run such operations--usually drawing on Pentagon personnel requisitioned through the NSC--which effectively put Vice President Bush in charge of such operations.

The charter'' of the secret government and privatized intelligence operations was Executive Order 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan on Dec. 4, 1981, along with EO 12331 (signed Oct. 20, 1981, which reconstituted the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, or PFIAB), and EO 12334 (also signed Dec. 4, 1981, which created the three-member Intelligence Oversight Board). The relationship between the three orders, was that PFIAB would identify areas where intelligence active measures'' or covert operations were desired; the Oversight Board then reviewed covert actions and provided the legal justification for them.

EO 12333 and its sister orders were the product of the Godson CSI Consortium process, along with a workshop on ``Law, Intelligence and National Security'' sponsored by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security held in Washington in December 1979. All of this was funded by Scaife, and naturally, almost everyone who played a major role in the creation of EO 12333 was involved with the Sciafe-funded think-tank network. It was reportedly drafted by two regulars at the Godson Consortium--Angelo Codevilla, from the Hoover Institution and a senior staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Kenneth deGraffenreid, also a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and a Reagan-Bush NSC official--and then run through the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

Others reportedly involved in the drafting were Paul Seabury and Anne Armstrong of PFIAB, and Prof. John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia, who became the chief legal consultant to the Intelligence Oversight Board.

EO 12333 was touted as ``unleashing'' the intelligence agencies from the restrictions of the Carter years, much of which stemmed from the post-Watergate Congressional investigations of the intelligence agencies in 1975-76.

Among significant changes from the previous 1978 Executive Order 12036, was that the President could designate agencies other than the CIA to conduct special activities'' (covert operations), and that CIA was permitted to conduct special activities'' inside the United States. Although private contracting had been permitted under the earlier EO, it could only be done covertly with the approval of the Attorney General; EO 12333 allowed concealment of private contracting without any approval by the U.S. Attorney General. According to one source who was involved in the process, deGraffenreid had sought an even broader privatization charter; this was beaten back, but the loophole was still big enough to permit almost anything that the dirty deGraffenreid faction wanted. This also opened the door even wider for the Bush networks to bring British and Israeli intelligence operatives into official U.S. intelligence operations.

EO 12333 also designated the NSC as the highest Executive branch entity'' for review and guidance of all foreign intelligence, counterintelligence and special activities.'' Under the committee structures being set up within the NSC, Vice President Bush was then effectively put in charge of all intelligence activities.

Theodore Shackley and covert operations

The role of Theodore Shackley requires special mention--for it was critical to the creation of the Bush ``secret government.'' When Bush was CIA director in 1976-77, Shackley was his deputy director for plans (covert operations). Shackley was forced to resign from the CIA in 1978, but he had already built up a vast financial and intelligence network in Asia and the Middle East, which he put at Bush's disposal during the Reagan administration. Vice President Bush's national security adviser, Don Gregg, was a Shackley protégé; it was Gregg who brought his longtime associate Felix Rodriguez on board for the Contra gun- and drug-running operation.

At the December 1980 Consortium event on Intelligence Requirements for the '80s: Covert Action,'' in Washington, Shackley's presentation laid out a detailed proposal for rebuilding'' America's covert paramilitary capabilities. The Shackley speech was a recipe for the subsequent Contra and related efforts, complete with the ``offline'' funding. According to one intelligence source, Shackley gave a similar presentation to the Reagan Presidential transition team on intelligence. Attending the briefing, according to the source, were Casey, Bush, and Max Hugel, Casey's first deputy for covert operations.

Shackley reportedly urged that the rebuilt covert intelligence and paramilitary apparatus be run offline''-\-which meant using the band of intelligence community asteroids'' who had gathered around him from his days as CIA station chief in Miami and later in Laos, such as Felix Rodriguez and the operatives who staffed the Oliver North-Richard Secord Contra supply operation and their international arms ring. Shackley also reportedly urged that the new special teams be run directly out of the White House: What this meant in practice, was through the NSC staff apparatus that functioned under Vice President Bush's direction under the authority of EO|12333, and National Security Decision Directives 2 and 3.

All of Shackley's proposals were enthusiastically promoted by Godson in the seven-volume proceedings of the CSI. The proceedings were published by the Scaife-funded NSIC, which appointed Roy Godson to head up its expanded Reagan-era Washington office.

Caught!

Scaife's network did not just provide the intellectual'' underpinnings for the secret government'' and offline intelligence operations. In a couple of instances, his operatives were caught directly laundering money for the drug-running Contras, and they almost found themselves indicted as a result of the Iran-Contra investigation. Two of these were Godson and the aptly named Clyde (Terry'') Sleaze, who described himself, during his Iran-Contra deposition in 1987, as having been general counsel for Richard M. Scaife and his family and entities'' during 1974-86. Sleaze testified that he had met Godson while the latter was working for the NSIC, and Sleaze said that he had attended some of the NSIC seminars, as well as having often visited the NSIC to check up on what they were doing with Scaife's money.

Sleaze testified that Godson had asked him for a contribution involving Nicaragua, and that as a result, he had then met personally with Oliver North, then-National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, and Roy Godson in the White House Situation Room, where they asked Sleaze to raise $400,000 for a Contra organization. However, Sleaze testified that he raised only $5,000 from another individual, which he sent to Godson to be deposited with an offshore entity called ``I.C. Inc.'' Sleaze also said that he had arranged a substantial contribution (actually, $60,000) to Godson from a Goldman Sachs stockbroker, and that then there was another $100,000 donated to the Heritage Foundation, arranged through Ed Feulner, for Central America.

The money was laundered through Heritage, then through another non-profit organization controlled by Richard Miller and Frank Gomez, and then into I.C., Inc. The $60,000 contribution ended up in one of the North-Secord ``Enterprise'' bank accounts (that of Lake Resources) in Switzerland.

Miller was subsequently indicted and pled guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States by using tax-exempt organizations for improper purposes. Gomez was given immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation with the independent counsel. Godson, Sleaze, and Feulner managed to escape indictment.

Footnote

  1.  

  2. For a thorough description of Bush's secret government'' apparatus and Public Diplomacy, see EIR Special Report George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring,'' October 1996, Chapter 2.

Documentation:

Richard M. Scaife's private government

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   Following is a partial listing of grants from 1973 through about 1993, made by the three Scaife family foundations run by Richard Mellon Scaife that publicly report their grants. The three are the Sarah [Mellon] Scaife Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation. The complete list of grantees is much longer. There are also three private family trusts that do not report their activities publicly; it is reported that some of the most sensitive, intelligence-related grants made by Dick Scaife are handled through the private trusts. These are the Richard Mellon Scaife Family Trust No.|1 and No.|2, and the Trust for the Grandchildren of Sarah Scaife.

Intelligence and foreign policy think-tanks

National Strategy Information Center (NSIC)

Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Georgetown University, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

Stanford University, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace

American Bar Association, Standing Committee on Law and National Security

The Committee for the Free World

Committee on the Present Danger

Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Massachusetts

American Security Council Foundation

U.S. Global Strategy Council

Jamestown Foundation

University of Virginia Law School, Center for Law and National Security

New York University, National Security Education Program of the Graduate School of Public Administration

Freedom House, New York

Prodemca (Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America)

National Endowment for Democracy

Institute for the Study of Conflict, London, U.K.

Center for European and Strategic Studies, London, U.K.

World Affairs Council, Pittsburgh

Social-economic policy think-tanks

Mont Pelerin Society

American Enterprise Institute

Heritage Foundation

Cato Institute

Reason Foundation

Free Congress Foundation

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

American Legislative Exchange Council

National Taxpayers Union

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

Manhattan Institute, New York

Citizens for a Sound Economy

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

National Center for Policy Analysis

Rockford Institute

Institute on Religion and Democracy

Population control

Planned Parenthood

Population Action International

Population Crisis Center

Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)

News media propaganda

Accuracy in Media

American Spectator

American Spectator Educational Foundation

Center for the Study of Popular Culture

Foundation for American Communications, Los Angeles

Foundation for Cultural Review

Media Institute

Western Journalism Center, Sacramento

Legal foundations

National Legal Center for the Public Interest, Washington

Washington Legal Foundation, Washington

Pacific Legal Foundation, Sacramento

Landmark Legal Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri

Atlantic Legal Foundation, New York

Mid-Atlantic Legal Foundation, Philadelphia

Southeastern Legal Foundation, Atlanta

New England Legal Foundation, Boston

Mid-American Legal Foundation, Chicago

Capital Legal Foundation, Washington

The Mountain States Legal Foundation, Denver

The new administration

From the very beginning, the Reagan administration was packed with officials who had come from Scaife-backed and -financed private institutions. Some of these were:

   *

   * Martin Anderson: Assistant to the President for Policy Development; Hoover Institution, Committee on the Present Danger (CPD).

   * Richard Allen: Reagan's first national security adviser; a founder of Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); then senior staffer at Hoover Institution.

   * Richard Pipes: National Security Council (NSC) Soviet specialist; attended five of seven CSI seminars; CPD.

   * Geoffrey Kemp: NSC Middle East specialist; from Fletcher School; CSIS.

   * Roger Fontaine: NSC Latin America specialist; CSIS, American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

   * Roy Godson: NSC consultant; National Strategy Information Center (NSIC); entire career was Scaife-financed and -sponsored.

   * Kenneth deGraffenreid: NSC director of intelligence programs; attended six of seven CSI seminars.

   * David Abshire: head of national security transition team, chairman of President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB); CSIS.

   * Leo Cherne: PFIAB; Freedom House, CSI seminars.

   * Paul Seabury: PFIAB; all seven CSI seminars.

   * Glenn Campbell: transition team; chaired Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB); Hoover Institution.

   * John Norton Moore: chief legal consultant to IOB; University of Virginia Center for Law and National Security.

   * William Casey: Director of Central Intelligence

   * William Van Cleave: Reagan's transition team on defense; financed by Scaife grant at University of Southern California.

   * Jack Marsh: Secretary of the Army; NSIC; worked directly for Scaife.

   * John Lehman: Secretary of the Navy; Foreign Policy Reseach Institute (Philadelphia).

   * Fred Iklé: Undersecretary of Defense; CSIS, CSI seminar.

   * Alexander Haig: Reagan's first Secretary of State; board of Foreign Policy Reseach Institute (Philadelphia).

   * Jeane Kirkpatrick: Ambassador to United Nations; AEI.

   * Edwin Meese: Counsel to President, then Attorney General; Center for Criminal Justice Policy and Management, University of San Diego; Pacific Legal Foundation.

Who is Richard Mellon Scaife?

Part III

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    Part 3 of our exposé on the moneybags behind the media assault against President Clinton and Lyndon LaRouche. Edward Spannaus reports.

A certain irony exists, in the fact of Richard Mellon Scaife's bankrolling of a network of anti-capitalist Mont Pelerin Society think-tanks in the U.S. The Mont Pelerin Society--the modern-day embodiment of the feudal, aristocratic ``Austrian School'' of monetarist economics--bitterly hates industrial capitalism and any form of centralized, dirigist measures through which a nation-state can build up its own industrial-technological base, while restricting access to predatory international financial looters.

The fact of the matter is that the Pittsburgh Scaife family was a pioneering U.S. industrial family, especially in the 19th century. At one time, the family was wont to boast that the Scaife Company (formerly William B. Scaife & Sons) was the oldest manufacturing company west of the Alleghenies.'' It was undoubtedly a beneficiary of the American System'' of economics--national banking, protective tariffs, and internal improvements--as was practiced off-and-on through the 19th century.

The company grew out of a tin-plating enterprise begun in 1802; it produced ordnance for the War of 1812 against the British, and also during the Civil War against the British-sponsored Southern secession. Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the Scaife metal-working company continually invented new products; it built boilers for steamboats and for railroad steam engines; it invented ``range boilers''--the forerunners of today's hot-water heaters for households--and high-pressure vessels, and provided corrugated iron roofing and structural iron for factories and warehouses.

But Dickie's father Alan Scaife preferred the financier-oligarchy milieu of the Mellon family to his own family's industrial tradition. He joined the Mellons for boozing, steeple-chasing, and fox-hunting, and married into the Mellon family in 1927. In 1940, he joined the Mellons' Gulf Oil, and within two years he had been brought into the Oh So Social'' Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which shipped him off to London. After the war, he served as the Mellon family representative on Gulf's executive committee, and was made a Vice President of T. Mellon & Sons\--the newly created non-profit family forum and trust, which was explicitly based upon a British model. Despite all this, Alan Scaife was never treated as a full-fledged Mellon. Dickie would later describe his father as sucking hind tit'' to the Mellons.

As he grew older, young Dickie became resentful of the treatment that his father had gotten at the hands of the Mellons, and he often made his animosity known, particularly toward his uncle, Richard King Mellon. Dickie became known as a ``bull in a china shop.'' Some attributed his impetuousness to his being thrown by a horse at age 9; his skull was partially crushed, and was repaired with an aluminum plate and much plastic surgery.

As soon as his father died in 1952, Dickie sold off the Scaife Company for one dollar.

Politically, Dickie became a Goldwaterite, when the Mellons were mainstream Republicans. In the 1960s, the Pennsylvania GOP split between the Rockefeller and Goldwater wings; Dickie bankrolled many of the right-wingers.

Nevertheless, by 1973, he was tamed and house-broken. The method by which this was accomplished is illustrative, and became the model which Dickie would go on to use against his targetted adversaries and enemies--including Lyndon H. LaRouche and, now, President Clinton. This may also, by the way, shed some light on Scaife's obsession with the death of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, and his fanatical backing of the effort to ``prove'' that Foster did not really commit suicide.

The taming of Dickie

In the 1950s, Scaife began to hang around his sister Cordelia's boyfriend Robert Duggan, who took young Dickie under his wing. In 1963, Dickie helped Duggan get elected as district attorney of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, on the GOP ticket. But Duggan was an Irish Catholic from the wrong side of the tracks, and Dickie's besotted mother, Sarah Mellon Scaife, would never let Cordelia's boyfriend into her house. Duggan's ambitions grew large, and Dickie wanted to make him governor of Pennsylvania, something which the Republican establishment, controlled by the Mellons, George Bush's cousin Elsie Hillman, and U.S. Sen. Hugh Scott, were not going tolerate.

After Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968--with the help of Scaife money--Duggan tried to block the appointment of Rockefeller man Dick Thornburgh as U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania; Duggan lost the fight. The victorious Thornburgh came into office with an agenda for what many regarded as a political vendetta.'' Thornburgh changed the priorities of the federal prosecutor's office to focus on political corruption'' and ``white-collar crime,'' and before long, rumors began circulating about DA Duggan's alleged ties to the mob. The Internal Revenue Service got in on the case, and Scaife and Duggan attempted to use their contacts in the Nixon Justice Department to squelch the investigation--after all, Dickie had chaired the finance committee for Nixon-Agnew in 1968, and would go on to give over $1 million (broken up into 334 separate checks to avoid gift taxes) to Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1971.

But Thornburgh persisted, subpoenaing four detectives from Duggan's district attorney's office, giving them immunity, and forcing them to give evidence against their boss. In the fall of 1971, Dickie was turned'': He crawled to Thornburgh's office to join in the destruction of his erstwhile political mentor and his sister's boyfriend. Dickie began to target Duggan in the newspaper he had purchased, the Greensburg Tribune-Review. As a book about the Mellon family puts it: Shorn of Scaife's influence, Duggan became easy pickings.''

Thornburgh was preparing a tax-evasion case against Duggan, and made preparations to interview Cordelia Scaife, to squeeze her for information about Duggan. She and Duggan quickly got married, meaning that she could not be compelled to provide evidence against her husband. Dickie, according to one account, ``was intensely upset. He went into orbit.'' Shortly after that, Dickie and Cordelia stopped speaking with each other; by all accounts, they have not spoken since.

On March 5, 1974, Thornburgh got a federal grand jury to hand down a six-count indictment for tax fraud against Duggan. But, a few hours before the indictment came down, Duggan was found dead, apparently of a blast from a shotgun which was found nearby without any fingerprints on it. Duggan's death was officially ruled a suicide--although, according to a number of sources, Cordelia has always believed Duggan was murdered, as has Duggan's family.

By 1975, Dickie Scaife had publicly reconciled with the mainstream Republicans in Pennsylvania, declaring himself a middle-of-the-roader,'' and proclaiming: I'm now enthusiastic about Rockefeller.'' But by 1974, as we described in Part 1 (see EIR, March 21, 1997), Dickie had been inducted into the old OSS intelligence circles of the Anglo-American bankers, and from that point on, all of his ``philanthropy'' went in whatever direction they dictated. Dickie had learned to follow orders: His betrayal of Robert Duggan was his rite of passage.

Scaife became notorious for using the Tribune-Review to target opponents. Two cases in the 1970s were particularly flagrant: that of Dr. Murdoch Head, and that of Dr. William Mansour. (These two cases were described in detail in an April 1981 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette series on Scaife, which was recently confirmed to the author to have been very accurate, by a knowledgeable source.)

The Murdoch Head case

Dr. Murdoch Head ran the Airlie Foundation near Warrenton, Virginia, which included a conference center and a film-making operation. Scaife was introduced to Airlie officials by executives of the Smith-Richardson Foundation (a CIA- and Bush-linked operation which, to this day, works in tandem with Scaife's foundations). Also involved was then-U.S. Rep. Jack Marsh, who progressed from being a board member of Airlie, to a Scaife staff member, and then secretary of the Army in the Reagan-Bush administration.

Beginning in 1968, money from the Scaife foundations, at that time jointly run by Dickie and sister Cordelia, financed many Airlie conferences and films. By 1972, Dickie Scaife and the Airlie crowd were at odds, with Scaife pushing a heavy anti-Communist theme for Airlie films, which Dr. Head's associates resisted. (During this time, his estranged sister Cordelia continued to maintain close relations with Dr. Head and Airlie.)

Airlie found itself subjected to IRS audits in 1974 and again in 1976, for which it blamed Scaife. In 1978, Airlie tax documents and records were leaked to the Warrenton-based local weekly, Fauquier Democrat, and were also sent to the Virginia State Corporation Counsel and Attorney General. In 1979, Head was indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, on charges of tax evasion, conspiracy, and attempting to bribe Pennsylvania Congressman Daniel Flood and others. Head was not convicted on the substantive tax or bribery charges, but was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the IRS. (The parallels to the LaRouche case, which likewise involved the Alexandria U.S. Attorney's Office, the Virginia Attorney General, leaks to the Loudoun Times-Mirror--a sister paper of the Fauquier Democrat in Northern Virginia's oligarchical Hunt Country--and a tax-conspiracy case, are striking.)

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, Scaife's Tribune-Review was devoting so much coverage to the Airlie case and Dr. Head's trial in Alexandria, that reporters, in both states, were dumbfounded.

The William Mansour case

In reporting on the case of Dr. William Mansour in 1981, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that ``some people believe that once you run afoul of the forces of Scaife, you also run afoul of the forces of the federal government, that he is, in some way, able to get federal agencies like the Justice Department to look closely at those he does not like.''

Mansour was a local physician in Westmoreland County, Pa., who owned a local hospital, as well as a competing newspaper to Scaife's Greensburg Tribune-Review. He also held liberal political views, hence doubly drawing Scaife's intense dislike. Scaife went after Mansour in 1973, and, using the local U.S. Attorney's Office under Dick Thornburgh and the FBI, was able to instigate an FBI investigation. In fact, Scaife was able to arrange to have an FBI agent visit one of Mansour's former sisters-in-law at her Detroit home in September 1973 to interrogate her about Mansour's alleged ties to the Middle East, and whether he had given $500,000 to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Mansour denied.

Scaife himself had long-standing connections into the FBI, and has been described as ``a friend from an early age of J. Edgar Hoover.'' (Perhaps not so coincidentally, the FBI agent who was deployed in Detroit at Scaife's request was a 22-year veteran of the bureau, Phil Mercado, who, during 1974, became the case agent and handler for informant Vernon Higgins. Higgins had been infiltrated the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the philosophical association founded by Lyndon LaRouche, and its 1970s political wing, the U.S. Labor Party. Higgins provided a pretext for armed FBI agents to raid the Detroit offices of the NCLC and USLP in June 1974. When Mercado's deposition was taken by NCLC and USLP's lawyers in 1975, the authorization for his testimony, and the restrictions upon it, was signed by then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.)

In 1977, the Justice Department officially opened an investigation of Mansour. Scaife's lawyer Clyde Sleaze (whom we met in last week's installment) was kept abreast of the grand jury investigation, which resulted in Mansour's indictment in 1980. As with the Airlie/Head case, Scaife's Tribune-Review devoted an inordinate amount of coverage to Mansour--all of it negative--which resulted in a drop in business for Mansour's medical practice. Justifiably, Mansour publicly accused Scaife of being behind his problems with the Justice Department.

"Get LaRouche!"

One of the earliest and most persistent of the ``LaRouche-watchers'' was Roy Godson--who, as we noted in Part 2 last week, went to Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute, and was executive director of the Scaife-financed and -run Pittsburgh World Affairs Council; later, Godson's position at the National Strategy Information Center and his creation of the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence (CSI) was also bankrolled by Scaife.

As early as 1967-68 at Columbia University, in New York City, Godson was already known to be watching the new political movement founded by Lyndon LaRouche, whose activities there were targetted by the FBI. Bureau documents further show that, in January 1976, Godson, accompanied by Tom Kahn of the AFL-CIO, went to FBI headquarters and briefed the head of the FBI's Internal Security Section on his pet theories about LaRouche and the NCLC. Godson was particularly fixated on speculating about the source of funds for the NCLC: According an FBI memorandum, he suggested that the NCLC was getting money from Iraq and from the Soviets, and he offered his intelligence reading on relations between LaRouche and various European communist parties. About two weeks after this, Godson called the FBI to offer his observations about alleged Greek communist influence on the NCLC during 1968-69.

In the course of one of the Godson-organized CSI seminars in the early 1980s, described in our last installment, EIR was explicitly attacked as being a vehicle for Soviet disinformation by former CIA counterintelligence official Donald Jamieson, and by Herbert Romerstein, a consultant to the U.S. Information Agency.

In the Reagan administration, Godson was one of the most vocal against LaRouche. During the early part of the Reagan administration, LaRouche and his associates often met with officials of the NSC and other federal agencies, particularly during the 1982-83 tenure of William Clark as national security adviser. Clark's executive assistant, Richard Morris, a witness for the defense at LaRouche's federal trial in 1988 and in a Virginia state trial of an associate of LaRouche in 1990, testified about a grouping within the NSC staff who were sharply opposed to LaRouche; Morris testified that the most vocal opponents of LaRouche were Kenneth deGraffenreid, Walter Raymond, and Roy Godson. Morris reported that Godson characterized Lyndon LaRouche as ``as a socialist, as a communist, as a member of the KGB, as a fascist, and always he was an extremist,'' adding that Godson insisted that Morris stop meeting with LaRouche and his representatives.

In January 1983, the demand for an investigation of LaRouche was brought into the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by the circle associated with Scaife and Godson--the latter being a consultant to PFIAB at the time. According to an FBI document, a complaint by Henry Kissinger was raised at a PFIAB meeting of Jan. 12, 1983, by fellow PFIAB member David Abshire of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)--a Scaife-funded think-tank. The vice chairman of PFIAB at the time was Leo Cherne, the founder of Freedom House, also a Scaife-funded institution. The PFIAB discussion did succeed in triggering an FBI investigation of LaRouche; the FBI responded with a memorandum repeating the Godson-Jamieson line, that activities of the NCLC and EIR ``dovetail nicely with Soviet propaganda and disinformation objectives.''

However, the FBI stated that, officially, it did not have an investigation of the NCLC going at that time under either domestic security or foreign counterintelligence guidelines. In order to remedy this, a campaign of news media defamation of LaRouche was organized, starting in early 1983 by the Bush-Scaife-Godson crowd. This was a joint public-private effort growing out of the Public Diplomacy'' operation, which we detailed in our October 1996 EIR Special Report on George Bush and the 12333 Serial Murder Ring.''

Public Diplomacy was headed at the NSC by Walter Raymond, a long-time CIA propaganda specialist who worked with Cord Meyer, and who intersected the London-centered Forum World Features operation headed by Dickie Scaife in the 1970s. In mid-1982, Raymond was posted to the NSC at the recommendation of Vice President George Bush's national security adviser Don Gregg. DeGraffenried became a deputy to Raymond. On Jan. 25, 1983--less than two weeks after the PFIAB meeting where the demand to get LaRouche was raised--Raymond drafted a memorandum proposing the creation of a private-donor group to fund Public Diplomacy propaganda programs supporting administration policies in areas such as Afghanistan, Central America, and Western Europe. ``We can not, forever, rely on one or two good souls, such as Smith-Richardson or Mellon-Scaife,'' Raymond wrote. (The Smith-Richardson Foundation, along with the John M. Olin Foundation and Scaife's foundations, comprise a cluster of intelligence-connected foundations which fund almost all the same institutions and programs as those we listed in Documentation last week, on p.|67.)

In March, Raymond sent another memo to National Security Adviser Clark, describing efforts to pull together the private-donors group: ``The group was largely pulled together by Frank Barnett, Dan McMichael (Dick Scaife's man), Mike Joyce (Olin Foundation), Les Lenkowsky (Smith-Richardson Foundation) plus Leonard Sussman and Leo Cherne of Freedom House. A number of others including Roy Godson have also participated.'' Frank Barnett was from the NSIC--funded by Scaife as well as the other cited foundations.

In the spring of 1983, the same group convened a meeting at the New York apartment of Wall Street financier John Train--known as ``the last of the OSS `old boys' on Wall Street.'' Dickie Scaife personally attended that meeting, as did about two dozen news media representatives. There were at least two followup meetings in 1983-84. Mira Lansky Boland, a graduate of Tufts University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy, and the Washington, D.C. Fact-Finding Director for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), later testified that she attended a meeting at Train's residence in 1984, at which Roy Godson was also present.

The Train meetings were devoted to the coordination of planted articles and features hostile to LaRouche in the news media, and they directly resulted in attacks on LaRouche during the 1984-86 period on NBC-TV, in the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Reader's Digest, and thousands of others. It also ultimately resulted in a book-length attack on LaRouche published in 1989 with funding from the Smith-Richardson Foundation.

The campaign of news-media defamation of LaRouche was a precondition for the judicial frame-up of LaRouche and his associates. The first indictment against LaRouche was brought in Boston--where the Weld and Mellon families' First Boston Corp. wielded enormous power. When the Boston federal case against LaRouche flopped, a second indictment was brought in Alexandria, Virginia--the intelligence agencies' favorite U.S. court district--under the overall direction of U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

"Get Clinton!"

As should be clear to the reader by now, Dickie Scaife's current financing and coordination of the news-media attack on President Clinton, is exactly of the same form as what Scaife has been deployed to do since the early 1970s, when he was assigned to take over Forum World Features/Kern House by the Anglophile bankers' intelligence network. Forum World Feature's specific purpose was to finance and circulate selected features and articles for the news media internationally. The ``Public Diplomacy'' operation in the 1980s which Scaife financed did exactly the same thing as FWF, including orchestrating news media attacks on targetted adversaries.

The Columbia Journalism Review put it slightly more politely in a 1981 profile of Scaife: It said that he ``has made the formation of public opinion both his business and his avocation.... Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world.''

Today, almost on a weekly basis, one can pick up a newspaper and find full-page ads on the Vincent Foster death, reprinting articles written by Christopher Ruddy for Scaife's Greensburg (now ``Pittsburgh'') Tribune-Review. The ads are paid for by Scaife, with funds laundered through the Western Journalism Center (WJC). WJC also occasionally reprints articles by the British Intelligence stringer and London Sunday Telegraph Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard--who also writes directly for the Tribune Review.

Other ads promoting theories about the alleged coverup of the Vincent Foster death can also be found, produced by Accuracy in Media (AIM), another group bankrolled by Scaife since the 1970s, and long known for its defense of the CIA against any attacks, not to mention its protection of George Bush's drug-running Contras in the 1980s. Currently, Scaife's foundations are AIM's largest contributors, having given them $630,000 from 1989-93.

The WJC and AIM also produce features on the Foster case for newspapers and television programs. AIM's Reed Irvine has a weekly broadcast on National Empowerment Television (NET), a cable channel founded by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, to which Scaife gives about $1 million a year.

At the end of 1993, the Whitewater scandals against President Clinton, which had been dormant since the 1992 primaries, were revved up again with the publication of the Troopergate'' story in the British-linked American Spectator. Already in the 1970s, Scaife had given over $1 million to the American Spectator's publishers, and this has continued to the present day; between 1989 and 1993, Scaife gave $1.3 million to the American Spectator Educational Fund for research'' and other purposes.

Another top purveyor of Vincent Foster conspiracy theories is Strategic Investment newsletter, run by former Times of London editor Lord William Rees-Mogg, and James Dale Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, also Scaife-funded. Davidson has produced a video jointly with the Western Journalism Center called ``Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.''

What does Scaife himself say about all this? Very little publicly, but, in a rare interview he gave to the New York Times in 1995, he proclaimed, ``The death of Vincent Foster: I think it's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton administration,'' adding that Foster's death had the potential to become the political story of the century.

The other major means by which Scaife finances attacks on the President--apart from his funding of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's GOPAC and right-wing think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation--is through the cluster of right-wing legal foundations and litigation centers. Prominent among these (see Documentation, p.|67 in our previous issue's installment) is the Landmark Legal Foundation, which has offered advice and assistance to Paula Jones in her sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and which has ensconced itself in other Whitewater-related matters.

Another, similar Scaife-financed organization is the Washington Legal Foundation, previously known as the Capital Legal Foundation. On its Legal Policy Advisory Board are Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia Law School, and Massachusetts governor and former LaRouche prosecutor William Weld. On its National Board of Advisers are Senators Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah)--both involved in Senate investigations of the Clintons--and Jesse Helms, who played a role in the dumping of the first Whitewater independent counsel and his replacement with Kenneth Starr.

The work of Scaife's network of conservative legal foundations is overseen by the Washington-based National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI), which he, of course, also funds. One of the directors of NLCPI is David Davenport, president of Pepperdine University; Scaife is on Pepperdine's board of trustees. Davenport and Scaife also sit together on the advisory board of the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto, California.

It is David Davenport who has offered Bush-leaguer Kenneth Starr a cushy position at Pepperdine University, financed in large part by Scaife, when Starr wraps up his investigation and legal assault on President Clinton as the Whitewater independent counsel. Starr may be ``independent'' of the administration, but he is certainly not independent of Dickie Scaife.

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in The Executive Intelligence Review. It is made available here with the permission of The Executive Intelligence Review. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The Executive Intelligence Review.

Hunting Pres JC says help front CIA prop p 108

hated BC

Olson met w/ troopergate guys. indicted?  p 109

scaife funded IWF hunt 261

Starr's law firm contacted the Independent Womens Forum to see if they would sign on a proposed legal brief opposing President Clinton's claim of immunity in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit.145 Those discussions should have been disclosed. The Scaife-funded IWF grew out of the informal "Women for Clarence Thomas" in 1991.146 IWF was founded by by Barabra Olson, wife of Theodore Olson, the former Starr law partner, and a funder of the Federalist Society.