Died on the Fourth of July
They say success has many fathers, and that is certainly true for the success the American conservative movement has had in pushing the press and the political conversation rightward over the last half-century. But even a casual survey of the rightwing sperm bank would reveal many vials labeled Richard Mellon Scaife.
Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking fortune, media mogul and billionaire philanthropist, was reported dead today by his own Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, one day after his 82nd birthday.
Scaife was what the New York Times called “a modern day Citizen Kane,” and it is an easy comparison to make. Young Richard was given little to do in his roles on the boards of family-owned companies, but after his father’s death, took $500 million in inherited steel and banking money and plowed some of it into regional publications, like the Tribune-Review, because he thought "it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
Actually, that’s Kane … but Scaife behaved much the same, building an ideological empire that spread to conservative publications like The American Spectator, conservative websites like Newsmax, and conservative organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Cato Institute, Judicial Watch and the Media Research Center.
He was an early backer of Barry Goldwater, and later, a financier of Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, including $45,000 that found its way to a group of men planning a break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in a D.C. office complex called the Watergate.
Though it is reported his tangle with Nixon made him wary of politicians after that, Scaife did not completely disappear from electoral politics, more recently backing the failed presidential run of Rick Santorum.
But it was in his funding of rightwing media and foundations where Scaife had the biggest influence. The Clinton-era Whitewater scandal, unfounded rumors that Clinton aid Vince Foster was murdered, and the Paula Jones/”Trooper-gate” media storm all owe much of their meteoric rise and long-legged currency to Scaife-funded enterprises and operatives.
When, in 1998, Hillary Clinton decried the “vast, rightwing conspiracy” out to take down her husband, the president, she was thinking, first and foremost, of Richard Mellon Scaife.
Yet, less than a decade later, Newsmax published a fluffy and fawning interview with Bill Clinton, and in 2008, Scaife’s Tribune-Review endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary.
Though predominantly a backer of causes associated with the right, Scaife did reportedly give millions to Planned Parenthood early in his career, and a sizable donation to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting later on (though it could easily be said that the donation benefitted Scaife’s objectives). But the issue that most helped bring Scaife to Clinton’s table (along with a persuasive push from former New York City Mayor Ed Koch) was the folly of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, especially the second Iraq war. As he said in his own 2008 Op-ed:
Particularly regarding foreign policy, she [Clinton] identified what we consider to be the most important challenges and dangers that the next president must confront and resolve in order to guarantee our nation’s security. Those include an increasingly hostile Russia, an increasingly powerful China and increasing instability in Pakistan and South America.
Like me, she believes we must pull our troops out of Iraq, because it is time for Iraqis to handle their own destiny — and, more important, because it is past time to end the toll on our soldiers there, to begin rebuilding our military, and to refocus our attention on other threats, starting with Afghanistan.
But before St. Peter starts laying out the blue bunting, keep in mind that while Scaife’s endorsement might have gone to a Democrat that year, over his lifetime, most of his largess did not.
Soon after taking control of his family philanthropies in the mid-1960s, he moved their focus from public institutions, hospitals and health to rightwing think tanks positioned to counter what Scaife called “the liberal slant to American society.”
From Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” to tea-party-turfers FreedomWorks, Scaife was the straw that stirred, ordered and paid for the drink. He was a constant financier of the push to privatize Social Security, and a 2013 Drexel University study [PDF] found that Scaife philanthropies were the second-largest funders of the climate change denial movement, sinking roughly $40 million into anti-science propaganda between 2003 and 2010.
As a result of his PR push, the number of Americans that thought arresting global warming should be priority actually ticked downward in the latter half of the last decade, and the U.S. public still trails much of the industrialized word in feeling a sense of urgency about the growing risk.
It is but one example of the America the Richard Mellon Scaife and his millions helped shape. But his successes represent a failure of the American political system and its ability to inspire public participation over corporate cash. And in his wake, there is a newer generation of privately financed public players driving agenda at least as far to the right as Scaife’s.
Indeed, success has many fathers, but Scaife’s passing does not leave that American failure an orphan.
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