[plschwartz]

Here is a little background Heinz Kerry's comment which LAN has in his signiture. I will assume it is a political statement rather then a sexual preference
So this is who she said it too - but this editor is just the errand boy of Scaife.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/7017
Teresa Heinz Kerry: Shove It

Kevin Drum calls attention to Teresa Heinz Kerry's latest embarrassing comment:

Teresa Heinz Kerry urged her home-state delegates to the Democratic National Convention to restore a more civil tone to American politics, then minutes later told a newspaperman to "shove it."

"We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics," she told her fellow Pennsylvanians at a Sunday night reception at the Massachusetts Statehouse. Minutes later, Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, questioned her on exactly what she meant by the term "un-American," according to a tape of the encounter recorded by WTAE Channel 4 Action News. Heinz Kerry said "I didn't say that" several times to McNickle. She then turned to confer with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and others. When she faced McNickle again a short time later, he continued to question her, and she replied, "You said something I didn't say. Now shove it."

So, he called her on an outrageous comment, she claims see didn't say it, and pops off in a manner not associated with the idealized model of First Lady.

Kevin notes that there are extenuating circumstances:

The "reporter" in question was Colin McNickle, the editorial page editor of the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. If you want to know why Mrs. Kerry might have a beef with Mr. McNickle, you can read part of the answer here: the Tribune-Review editorial page has been on a disgusting and dishonest jihad against the Heinz Endowments for nearly a year. He's lucky that a fleeting tonguelashing is all he got.

The link goes to an official statement from the Heinz Endowment, which begins:

In recent weeks, The Heinz Endowments has been accused of using its funding of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania to advance a laundry list of partisan causes and fringe political groups. This accusation is simply wrong.

It originated in an opinion column written by a researcher for the conservative, Washington, D.C.-based Capital Research Center. The crux of CRC’s argument is that money directed by the Endowments to Tides is "fungible." By supporting projects through Tides, CRC alleged that Heinz has secretly funneled money to every other organization that has ever received funding through Tides Center and the separate Tides Foundation. Since first being published in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, CRC’s accusation has been picked up and expanded in opinion pieces in a number of newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Washington Times. But not even these publications have leveled this allegation in actual news stories.

First, by legally binding contract, every penny of Heinz’s support to Tides has been explicitly directed to specific projects in Pennsylvania. It cannot legally be redirected and is the exact opposite of fungible. ...

[plschwartz]

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/scaife/scaife.php

Highlights & Quotes

Called by James Carville in 1999 "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against [Clinton]," Scaife has bankrolled the modern conservative movement. According to a 1999 Washington Post investigation, "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." (Washington Post, May 2, 1999)

In his hilarious 2003 book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), Al Franken argues that the abusive tone of rightwing zealots like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter can be traced back to Scaife, and in particular to one episode in 1981 when Scaife verbally assaulted a reporter. When the reporter, Karen Rothmeyer of the Columbia Journalism Review, asked Scaife about his funding of conservative groups, he replied, "You ****ing communist ****, get out of here." Franken writes that Scaife "went on to tell her that she was ugly and that her teeth were 'terrible.' Of Ms. Rothmeyer's mother, who was not present, he said, 'She's ugly, too.' Sensing that it was time to wrap up the interview, Ms. Rothmeyer thanked Scaife for his time. He bade her farewell with a cheery 'Don't look behind you.'" (4)

"That's the funny thing about tone," Franken continues, "It's so subjective. Usually, I find it's enough to call someone a '****ing communist ****,' without having to gild the lily by disparaging her teeth and issuing veiled threats." (4)

Scaife and his foundations have supported some of the key elements of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Committee on the Present Danger, the American Enterprise Institute, Public Interest, and the American Spectator. (6)

According to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, "In the final days of the 2000 presidential campaign, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime conservative activist, ordered all photographs and prominent mentions of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore removed from the front page of the paper. As a result, the paper's pre-election Sunday edition had a front page featuring George W. Bush in every campaign-related headline and photograph. A story about a Gore rally held in Pittsburgh, originally slated to run alongside a Bush piece on the front page, was moved to the inside of the paper. According to an account in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (11/8/00). Tribune-Review managing editor Robert Fryer 'tried to dissuade Scaife but was overruled.'"

ast updated: 11/20/2003

Institutional Affiliations
# Hoover Institution: Board member
# Heritage Foundation: Trustee
# Scaife Foundations: Chairman
# Tribune-Review Publishing Co., Inc.: Owner
# Hoover Institution: Member of the Board of Directors (1)
# Heritage Foundation: Trustee (1985-current) (1)
# Committee on the Present Danger: Funder (1985-1989) (2)
# Sarah Scaife Foundation: Chairman (1973-current) (1)
# The Allegheny Foundation: Chairman (1973-current) (1)
# Carthage Foundation: Chairman (1973-current) (1)
# Pittsburgh World Affairs Council: Member of the Board of Directors (1)
# Pepperdine University: Member of the Board of Directors (1)

Government Posts/Panels/Commissions
# U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy: Former Member (Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations) (1)

Corporate Connections/Business Interests
# Tribune-Review Publishing Co., Inc.: Vice-Chairman, Publisher and Owner (1)
# Tribune-Review: Owner and Chairman of the Board (1)

Education
# Yale University (3)

[plschwartz]

Conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. (AP)
By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1

First of two articles

One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in [a] heavily funded war against the president."

But people who know him well say that although Scaife is fond of conspiracy theories of many kinds, he is incapable of managing any sort of grand conspiracy himself. And months of reporting produced no evidence of his orchestrating any effort to "get" Clinton beyond his financial support. Indeed, focusing on his role in the crusade against Clinton can obscure the 66-year-old philanthropist's real importance, which is not based on his opposition or support for any individual politicians (though he once gave Richard M. Nixon $1 million). His biggest contribution has been to help fund the creation of the modern conservative movement in America.

By compiling a computerized record of nearly all his contributions over the last four decades, The Washington Post found that Scaife and his family's charitable entities have given at least $340 million to conservative causes and institutions – about $620 million in current dollars, adjusted for inflation. The total of Scaife's giving – to conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries – exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much more than any previous estimate.

In the world of big-time philanthropy, there are many bigger givers. The Ford Foundation gave away $491 million in 1998 alone. But by concentrating his giving on a specific ideological objective for nearly 40 years, and making most of his grants with no strings attached, Scaife's philanthropy has had a disproportionate impact on the rise of the right, perhaps the biggest story in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.

His money has established or sustained activist think tanks that have created and marketed conservative ideas from welfare reform to enhanced missile defense; public interest law firms that have won important court cases on affirmative action, property rights and how to conduct the national census; organizations and publications that have nurtured conservatism on American campuses; academic institutions that have employed and promoted the work of conservative intellectuals; watchdog groups that have critiqued and harassed media organizations, and many more.

Together these groups constitute a conservative intellectual infrastructure that provided ideas and human talent that helped Ronald Reagan initiate a new Republican era in 1980, and helped Newt Gingrich initiate another one in 1994. Conservative ideas once dismissed as flaky or extreme moved into the mainstream, and as the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy concluded in a recent report, "The long-standing conservative crusade to discredit government as a vehicle for societal progress has come to fruition as never before."

The ideas behind this success did not come from Scaife. Even the conservative activists who know him best say he rarely offers his own ideas or opinions, and most of those who get money from him have no personal relations with him or don't know him at all.

"I don't see anything resembling a grand strategy about the man," said James Whelan, who was editor of the Sacramento Union when Scaife owned it and later became editor of the Washington Times. "In general he sees certain villains in American life and society and thinks he should do everything he can to attack them and bring them down."

Scaife declined to be interviewed for this story, but in written answers to questions about his motivation, he said: "Our funding is based on our support of ideas like limited government, individual rights and a strong defense."

As for himself, he added: "I am not a politician, although like most Americans I have some political views. Basically I am a private individual who has concerns about his country and who has resources that give me the privilege – and responsibility – to do something to help my country if I can."

If Scaife's explanations seem vague, his achievement is not. Besides acting on his own visceral reactions, Scaife has backed people he admired and institutions he favored with lots of money, without ever telling them what to do. He has done this consistently, patiently, over four decades.

Frank Shakespeare, director of the U.S. Information Agency in the first Nixon administration and Scaife's colleague for years on the board of the Heritage Foundation, summarized the accomplishment: "Dick Scaife has made a real difference in his country – and has had an impact on the larger world."

A Philanthropic Heir Embraces 'the War of Ideas'
To make his mark on history, Scaife had to overcome long odds. In his youth he seemed star-crossed, even to many of his friends. He grew up in a household dominated by his mother's alcoholism, in a family whose members specialized in "making each other totally miserable," in the rueful words of his sister, Cordelia Scaife May.

At 9 he spent a year in bed after his skull was fractured by a horse. Yale University suspended him for drunken pranks, then kicked him out entirely before he could complete his freshman year. At 22 he caused a car accident that almost killed him and injured five members of one family, who won a large legal settlement. He had a drinking problem most of his adult life, finally getting on the wagon in the early 1990s. He has feuded bitterly with friends, employees and relatives. He has no relations with his daughter, and hasn't spoken to his sister for 25 years.

Scaife inherited his philanthropic role from his mother. She had established trusts and foundations whose earnings, under the tax law, had to be given away. She began encouraging her son to participate in family philanthropy after his father died suddenly in 1958.

Sarah Scaife's causes were family planning, the poor and the disabled, hospitals, environmental causes and various good works in and around Pittsburgh. Her most famous gifts, in the late 1940s, were to the University of Pittsburgh – $35,000 to equip a virus research lab. In that lab, Jonas Salk discovered his polio vaccine.

The available recorded history of Scaife's donations to conservative causes in the database assembled by The Post begins in 1962 with small grants of $25,000 or less to groups with educational missions on conservative themes – the American Bar Association's Fund for Public Education for "education against communism," for example.

Over the next two years he ventured a little further into the conservative world, making donations to the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University and the brand-new Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 1963 he began supporting the American Enterprise Institute.

The events of 1964 were a turning point for Scaife, and for American conservatives. Scaife was an alternate to the Republican Convention that chose Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater as the party's presidential nominee, and he became an active contributor and supporter. He escorted Goldwater on the Scaife family airplane to California in July 1964 to attend the Bohemian Grove retreat, a boozy and confidential gathering of conservative, mostly wealthy men.

Confounded by Goldwater's devastating defeat that November, many conservatives concluded that they could only win an election in the future by matching their enemy's firepower. It was time, as a Scaife associate of that era put it, to wage "the war of ideas." Scaife enthusiastically adopted this view.

"We saw what the Democrats were doing and decided to do the mirror image, but do it better," this Scaife associate said. "In those days [the early 1970s] you had the American Civil Liberties Union, the government-supported legal corporations [neighborhood legal services programs], a strong Democratic Party with strong labor support, the Brookings Institution, the New York Times and Washington Post and all these other people on the left – and nobody on the right." The idea was to correct that imbalance. "And the first idea was to copy what works."

This sort of thinking went far beyond Scaife's office in Pittsburgh. He was riding a wave at the same time he contributed to it. Former congressman Vin Weber, an early and active member of the "movement conservative" Republican faction on Capitol Hill, recalled that "people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy" that had to be mimicked and countered with new conservative organizations that were "philosophically sound, technologically proficient and movement-oriented." This became a mantra for the new conservative activists.

Sarah Scaife died in 1965, and her son then had a freer hand to reorient the family giving. By 1976, the year Jimmy Carter was elected president, Scaife's conservative interests had come to dominate the foundations' giving. Just more than half of the $18 million in grants that year went to conservative recipients. By 1980, the year Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, conservative groups were awarded $13 million of about $18 million in Scaife grants. Conservative interests have continued to predominate in Scaife's philanthropy ever since.

While Scaife's money supported individual institutions, his office in Pittsburgh encouraged the evolution of a new community of activists on the right. One longtime recipient of Scaife's support recalled a meeting convened in California in 1973 by Richard M. Larry, Scaife's longtime chief aide, where his beneficiaries could meet one another. A person who attended the California meeting said he was delighted to find people there he'd never heard of – a new peer group on the right.

The Heritage Foundation became an important part of the right's community-building efforts. Scaife first contributed to Heritage in 1974. Soon afterward, using money from Scaife, Heritage established its resource bank, a compilation of conservative organizations, which from 1982 was published in the Directory of Public Policy Organizations, a guide to the new right-wing establishment. The current edition lists 300 groups; 111 have received grants from Scaife, 76 of them in 1998.

Heritage, organized by former staff assistants to Republican lawmakers whose goal was to influence both Congress and the news media with a stream of brief, meaty position papers on issues of the day, became Scaife's favorite beneficiary. When it began to make a mark in the mid-1970s, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was commonly credited as its chief financial patron. Coors did put up the first $250,000. But within two years, according to Heritage officials, Scaife had given more than twice as much, and he has kept on giving ever since – more than $23 million in all, or about $34 million in inflation-adjusted, current dollars. At Heritage the joke was, "Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases."

With Scaife's early contributions, Heritage could thrive. In 1976, Heritage's third year of operation, Scaife gave $420,000, or 42 percent of the foundation's total income of $1,008,557. This early support was "absolutely critical," said the president of the foundation, Edwin J. Feulner Jr.

Scaife continues to give generously to Heritage – $1.3 million in 1998. But Heritage took in $43 million last year, so his gift represented just 3 percent of its income.
Scaife's money was probably most important to the cause in the '70s and '80s, when conservatives enjoyed the exhilarating reversal of what they had seen as their traditional, inconsequential status in American life. Scaife gave about $200 million to conservative causes from 1974 (his first gift to the Heritage Foundation) through the end of the Bush administration in 1992.

As soul mates in what they considered a war over American values, the groups to which he gave shared a core set of conservative beliefs evident in the way they described their missions.

For example, the Foundation for Economic Education promotes "individual freedom, private property, limited government, free trade." The Pacific Legal Foundation works "for less government and the preservation of free enterprise, private property rights and individual liberties." The Reason Foundation advocates "public policies based upon individual liberty and responsibility and a free-market approach." Lower taxes and fewer regulations are also part of the broadly shared program.

In the realm of national security, Scaife-supported groups have a similarly shared view of the need for a bristling national defense and vigilance against communism and terrorism.

There are disagreements, of course, particularly on emotional issues such as abortion, free trade and immigration. Scaife has long favored abortion rights, to the chagrin of many of those he has supported. In the first years of his philanthropy he stuck to a pattern set by his mother and sister and gave millions to Planned Parenthood and other population control groups, though most such giving stopped in the 1970s. He also has favored stricter controls on immigration and trade, though many Scaife-supported groups do not.

By concentrating his philanthropy on a relatively small number of beneficiaries, Scaife maximized his impact.

Over four decades he has nurtured enduring institutions, not just short-lived crusades. Nineteen percent of his conservative giving went to Heritage, the Hoover Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), four of the biggest think tanks in America.

This list is revealing for its political coloration. Heritage is the most aggressively conservative of the four, but it is hardly extremist. Hoover and AEI are plainly conservative institutions also, but CSIS, now run by former senator Sam Nunn and Robert Zoellick, a protege of former secretary of state James A. Baker III, is more centrist.

Much of Scaife's philanthropy has gone to recipients that made no lasting mark; many have gone out of business. For example, the Capital Legal Foundation, which represented Gen. William C. Westmoreland in his unsuccessful 1984 libel suit against CBS, was granted at least $1.7 million from Scaife sources between 1977 and 1987, then folded.

On some occasions Scaife has given money to an individual project just because it struck his fancy. One was a book project proposed in the early '90s by Elliott Abrams, a Reagan State Department official at the time of the Iran-contra affair and a foreign policy specialist for the Hudson Institute when he decided he wanted to write a book about American Jews.

Leslie Lenkowsky, then the president of Hudson, suggested they ask Scaife to help fund the project. He and Abrams went to Pittsburgh, where they had lunch at the Duquesne Club with Scaife, his son David and Richard Larry. Abrams said he found Scaife fascinated by his subject. "He couldn't figure out the American Jewish community. He wondered why it seemed to be so liberal politically," Abrams recalled.

Scaife gave a $175,000 grant for the project, with one string attached: that it be funded also by some Jewish donor or group. It was. "Faith or Fear" was published in 1997. It argued that "liberal politics" had become for many Jews "the heart of their Jewish identity," often replacing the Jewish religion, and gravely jeopardizing the future of Judaism in America. It sold 6,190 copies.

From Quiet Benefactor to 'the Arkansas Project'
Today it is difficult to find an important organization that depends on Scaife's money. The pattern of his giving hasn't changed much, but more and more individuals, corporations and foundations have become contributors to Scaife's causes. The Olin Foundation (assets of $103 million at the beginning of 1998) and the Bradley Foundation (assets of $545 million) have become particularly important. The success of the conservative movement has made Scaife a less significant player.

In many Scaife-supported organizations, the founders have been supplanted by successors unfamiliar with his role. Robert K. Best, president of the Pacific Legal Foundation, oldest and perhaps most influential of the conservative public interest law firms, was surprised to learn that Scaife contributions had constituted at least half the group's budget in its early years.

It is tempting to speculate that the routinization of Scaife's role might have prompted him – or his key aide, Larry – to get involved in more adventuresome anti-Clinton activities. Their involvement in what became known as "the Arkansas Project" – an aggressive and ultimately fruitless attempt to discredit a sitting president – marked a clear departure from years of relatively anonymous philanthropy, and Scaife could not have foreseen the consequences: He became a celebrity.

The full realization of the trouble he had made for himself probably came one day last September when he appeared, under subpoena, before a federal grand jury in Fort Smith, Ark., that was investigating possible tampering with a federal witness. On that day, Scaife could have felt he was being treated like a suspect – not the status a Mellon from Pittsburgh worth perhaps a billion dollars expects. According to several associates, Scaife was furious.

The Arkansas Project was apparently cooked up largely by Larry, 63, who has worked for Scaife for 30 years. A former Marine with a deeply ideological view of the world, Larry had developed a powerful dislike for Clinton. "I noticed a change in Dick Larry – at the mention of Clinton he became almost hyperthyroid," said one prominent figure in the conservative world who knows Larry well. A second prominent conservative close to him said: "I never saw Dick Larry do anything like this before. The only thing I can figure is that Larry dislikes Clinton intensely."

As the chief administrative officer of Scaife's philanthropies for many years and the main contact for anyone seeking a grant, Larry has long been a controversial figure among conservatives. They discuss him with the same reluctance to go on the record that many demonstrate when Scaife is the subject. "Sometimes [Larry] makes you wonder if it is the Richard Scaife foundations, or the Richard Larry foundations," said one source who worked with both men.

In his written answers to questions from The Post, Scaife attributed his support for the project to his doubts that "The Washington Post and other major newspapers would fully investigate the disturbing scandals of the Clinton White House." He explained those doubts: "I am not alone in feeling that the press has a bias in favor of Democratic administrations." That is why, he continued, "I provided some money to independent journalists investigating these scandals."

The Arkansas Project itself relied on several private detectives, a former Arkansas state police officer and other unlikely schemers, including a bait shop owner in Hot Springs, Ark. The two men running the project were a lawyer and a public relations man. Scaife's role became the subject of a special federal investigation because of accusations that the money he donated ended up in the pocket of David Hale, a former Clinton associate and convicted defrauder of the Small Business Administration who had become a witness for Starr's investigation of the president.

Sources at the American Spectator say it was Larry who played an instrumental role in the project. But there is no doubt that Clinton had gotten under Scaife's skin.

Scaife's penchant for conspiracy theories – a bent of mind he has been drawn to for years, according to many associates – was stimulated by the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., Hillary Clinton's former law partner and a deputy White House counsel. He has repeatedly called Foster's death "the Rosetta stone to the Clinton administration" (a reference to the stone found in Egypt that allowed scholars to decipher ancient hieroglyphics).

Last fall Scaife told John F. Kennedy Jr. of George magazine, "Once you solve that one mystery, you'll know everything that's going on or went on – I think there's been a massive coverup about what Bill Clinton's administration has been doing, and what he was doing when he was governor of Arkansas." And he had ominous specifics in mind: "Listen, [Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He's got the entire federal government behind him." And: "God, there must be 60 people [associated with Bill Clinton] – who have died mysteriously."

Even before the Arkansas Project had gotten underway, Scaife personally hired a former New York Post reporter named Christopher Ruddy to write about Foster's death for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the daily newspaper Scaife has owned since 1969. Ruddy's stories about Foster's death – most of them challenging the suicide theory, without offering an alternative explanation – began to appear in January 1995.

Scaife has funded other Clinton efforts as well: Two zealous and resourceful (and rival) public interest law firms that have pursued Clinton and his administration relentlessly, the Landmark Legal Foundation and Judicial Watch, have received more than $4 million from Scaife. Judicial Watch, which is aggressively suing several branches of the government and has questioned numerous White House officials under oath, has received $1.35 million from Scaife sources in the last two years, a large fraction of its budget.

The Fund for Living American Government (FLAG), a one-man philanthropy run by William Lehrfeld, a Washington tax lawyer who has represented Scaife in the past, gave $59,000 to Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Clinton. FLAG has received at least $160,000 in Scaife donations. And lawyers who belong to the conservative Federalist Society, which has enjoyed Scaife support for 15 years (at least $1.5 million), were members of a secretive group who provided important legal advice to Paula Jones and who may have pulled off the key legal maneuver in the Clinton case by connecting the Jones suit and the Starr investigation.

Officers of the Scaife-supported Independent Women's Forum have appeared on many television programs as Clinton critics. William J. Bennett, author of "Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals," is on the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and has received Scaife support as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation and other enterprises.

One of the most publicized allegations of a tie between Scaife and Clinton's enemies was the suggestion that Scaife was trying to set up independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in a posh deanship at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. Starr briefly toyed with accepting the job early in 1997.

Scaife has been a generous supporter of Pepperdine, donating more than $13 million since 1962 (in personal gifts as well as foundation grants), according to the school. But Scaife and the current president of Pepperdine, David Davenport, both have said that Scaife played no role whatsoever in the offer to Starr. Scaife and Starr have said they don't know each other, and have never met.

Only the Arkansas Project has caused Scaife serious trouble. The possibility that money from the project had tainted Hale, a federal witness, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen, a former senior Justice Department official, as a special investigator. It was Shaheen who summoned Scaife to the Fort Smith grand jury.

Shaheen's investigation apparently is complete. Lawyers involved said they don't expect any indictments.

One result of the enterprise was to strain Scaife's relationship with Larry almost to the breaking point. "He almost fired Larry," said one friend.

The other result has been the emergence of Scaife as a public figure and punching bag for liberals.

"I'm a very private person – I think I'm essentially shy," Scaife told Kennedy last fall. But now, he acknowledged, he is recognized by passersby on the street – "thanks to CNN."

Monday: Burdens of wealth

[plschwartz]

oney, Family Name Shaped Scaife

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
{sorry part one below}
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.

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."

[bassetman]

I am glad you have the time to research this stuff!