The Man Behind The Curtain
Who is Richard Scaife? He's a 70-year-old billionaire Republican wielding power
from the shadows.
Richard Mellon Scaife is very rich and very partisan.
He was born to great wealth, the great grand-nephew of Andrew Mellon, growing up
in Pittsburgh at the family's opulent home, Penguin Court. Often in the care of
servants, his hobby was reading newspapers.
Burton Hersh, author of "The Mellon Family," said, "Even as a child, he always
saw the correlation between the media and the reputation of politicians. That's
certainly been a sub-theme of his life."
Today he owns a newspaper, Pittsburgh's second largest, the Tribune-Review. But
he has made his main mark not as a media baron, but by financing Republican
politics.
He was the second-largest donor to the Nixon-Agnew campaign in
1972, giving $1 million.
Former President Ronald Reagan appointed many veterans of Scaife-funded think
tanks to his administration.
Later, Scaife gave to GOPAC, the political fund that helped make Newt Gingrich
speaker in 1994. Gingrich says Scaife's money laid the basis for modern
conservatism. And his money still flows:
To the Heritage Foundation alone, nearly $3.5 million from Scaife foundations in
the most recent three years on record.
$1.22 million to the American Enterprise Institute.
$1.40 million to Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
$325,000 to the Cato Institute.
$575,000 to the Citizens for a Sound Economy, among others.
Hollywood's Center for the Study of Public Culture, which sees liberal bias in
the movies, got nearly $1.8 million. Accuracy in Media, a group still promoting
the idea that Clinton aide Vince Foster may have been murdered, got $675,000.
To his detractors, Scaife is spoiled, vindictive, narrow-minded.
A former Scaife employee, Pat Minarcin, said, "He has the emotional maturity of
a very angry 12-year-old, and he has all this money and he can do whatever he
wants with it."
In Pittsburgh, Minarcin edited a magazine for Scaife, but resigned. "He [Scaife]
presented a list of people who he wanted the magazine to attack, a kind of
enemies list," Minarcin said
Scaife's defenders say he's a gentleman, exercising his First Amendment right to
speak out. William Bennett, who sits on the board of one Scaife foundation,
said, "It's a free country; the conservatives can give to conservative causes,
liberals to liberal causes."
And supporters point to his philanthropy. He's given millions to support an art
gallery named for his mother and millions for historic preservation projects
like Pittsburgh's Station Square.
Scaife heightens suspicions by operating in extreme privacy, from the 39th floor
of his Pittsburgh office tower, with no interviews and no cameras.
Former White House counsel Davis said, "I think it's the mystery, the man behind
the scenes pulling the strings and that's the scene we all remember at the end
of the Wizard of Oz."
Is Richard Scaife great and powerful or just the man behind the curtain?
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