Richard Mellon Scaife

According to a 1999 Washington Post report, Scaife’s funding work has been central to the success of the conservative agenda in recent years:

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.

The Post credits Robert Duggan with getting Scaife interested in politics while he was a student at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s. Duggan, who was then dating Scaife’s sister Cordelia, apparently convinced Scaife to run for the post of committeeman in Allegheny County. Relations between the two soured when, as the county’s third-term district attorney, Duggan was accused of making deals with “criminal elements” and accepting bribes. Duggan was eventually indicted on tax fraud in 1974. The day the ruling against Duggan came out, he was found dead from a shotgun wound. Cordelia initially suspected that her brother was involved in the death and permanently severed relations with him. (4)

According to the Post, Scaife’s funding activities began in 1962, when he gave several grants to various organizations, including the American Bar Association’s Fund for Public Education for “education against communism.” Scaife soon developed funding relations with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Scaife began funding the Heritage Foundation in 1974, the year the organization was created. He has served as a member of the board of trustees since 1985 and is currently vice chairman. Scaife was pivotal in providing the seed money for this think tank. He gave at least twice as much as beer magnate Joseph Coors (who donated $250,000) during Heritage’s first two years. (1) (3) (6)

Initially interested in buying media outlets and funding political campaigns, Scaife early on shifted to funding the leading organizations of the “New Right.” According to some observers, this shift may have been due to Scaife’s lack of success in the publishing world. (6) Scaife bought a variety of newspapers in the 1960s and early 1970s, most of which were in Pennsylvania. His first media purchase was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which he bought in 1969 for $5 million, when he was 37. According to the Post, however, it was Scaife’s disillusionment with Richard Nixon that convinced him to devote his energies (and wealth) to organizations. (4)

Reports the Post:

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. (4)

The organizations and publications Scaife has funded include the American Enterprise Institute, the American Spectator, the Center for Immigration Studies, the Center for Security Policy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Committee for the Free World, the Committee on the Present Danger, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Federalist Society, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Jamestown Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Institute for Public Policy, The National Interest, and the Philanthropy Roundtable. (7)

Scaife, like Olin, has also funded law and economics programs in colleges around the country. (8)

Scaife reportedly supports abortion rights and is protectionist when it comes to immigration and trade issues. However, many of the organizations he has supported have promoted opposing views on these subjects, including the Institute on Religion and Public Life and the Manhattan Institute. (3)

Some observers have argued that Scaife is prone to conspiracy theories, which might account in part for his support of the Arkansas Project, the right-wing campaign to “uncover” the covert activities of Bill Clinton while he was governor and president. Scaife told John F. Kennedy Jr., former owner and publisher of George magazine:

Listen, [Clinton] can order people done away with at his will. He’s got the entire federal government behind him. … God, there must be 60 people [associated with Bill Clinton] who have died mysteriously. (3)

Scaife has traditionally shunned the media and typically declines to be interviewed. His few run-ins with the media have been ugly, like for example his notorious interview with Karen Rothmeyer in 1981. When she asked Scaife about his conservative funding practices, he called Rothmeyer a “fucking Communist cunt.” (6)

Reporting on this episode in his 2003 book Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), liberal comedian Al Franken writes:

[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.’ (9)

Scaife has not been shy to use his minor media empire for political ends. 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, Tribune-Review managing editor Robert Fryer ‘tried to dissuade Scaife but was overruled.’ (10) (11)

Government Posts/Panels/Commissions

Corporate Connections/Business Interests

Education

(2) Media Transparency: Committee on the Present Danger http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?recipientID=1779

(3) Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy, “Scaife: Funding Father of the Right,” The Washington Post, May 2, 1999
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050299.htm

(4) Robert G. Kaiser, “Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife,” The Washington Post, May 3, 1999 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050399.htm

(5) Iver Peterson, “In a Battle of Newspapers, a Conservative Spends Liberally,” The New York Times, December 8, 1997

(6) Karen Rothmeyer, “Citizen Scaife,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1981 http://archives.cjr.org/year/81/4/scaife.asp

(7) Mediatransparency: Aggregated Scaife Grants
http://www.mediatransparency.org/scaifeaggregate.php

(8) Sally Covington, Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations, The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, July 1997

(9) Al Franken, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) (New York: Dutton, 2003) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947647/qid=1070375663/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-1853879-8145446

(10) Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: Fear & Favor 2000: How Power Shapes the News http://www.fair.org/ff2000.html

(11) Dennis B. Roddy, “Tribune-Review’s Election Coverage Gores Vice President’s Campaign,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 8, 2000

(12) Robert B. Gunnison, “Sacramento Union Says It Will Stop Publishing Historic paper closing down after 142 years,” The San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 1994

(13) From the Feeding Trough, cited on Mediatransparency.org http://www.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=3

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