Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 07:47:06 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: AUT: The man behind the mask. (Scaife)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 29 May 1998 00:06:47 +1200
From: janice <janice-AT-icarus.ihug.co.nz>
To: mai-not-AT-flora.org
Subject: The man behind the mask.

After reading this article I felt like some terrible joke has been played on
the lives of countless millions. 
janice

Salon Newsreal | The man behind the mask

A profile of billionaire 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,
conservativeorder. "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).
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'tre. 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."

Karen Rothmyer is a senior editor at the Nation

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