Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (12 page)

Before long, Coors became the first donor to the fledgling conservative think tank that Weyrich and Feulner were launching, the forerunner of the Heritage Foundation, then called the Analysis and Research Association. On top of his initial contribution of $250,000, Coors promised $300,000 more for a headquarters building. Soon he was reveling in his new status as a national figure and jetting back and forth from Golden, Colorado, to Washington. Backed by the first of many multimillionaire political ideologues, the Heritage Foundation opened for business in 1973.

Scaife’s money soon followed, on an even bigger scale. A popular saying at the time was “
Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases.”

I
ndependent research institutes had existed since at least the turn of the century in the United States, but as John Judis writes in
The Paradox of American Democracy
, the earlier think tanks strove to promote the general public interest, not narrow private or partisan ones. In the tradition of the Progressive movement, they professed to be driven by social science, not ideology. Among the best known was the Brookings Institution, founded in 1916 by the St. Louis businessman Robert Brookings, who defined its mission as “
free from any political or pecuniary interest.” To assure an ethic of “disinterestedness,” Brookings, who was himself a Republican, mandated that scholars of many viewpoints populate its board.

The same ideals animated the Rockefeller, Ford, and Russell Sage Foundations, as well as most of academia and the elite news organizations of the era, like
The New York Times
, which strove to deliver the facts free from partisan bias. Because the self-perception of these institutions was that they were engaged in a modern, even scientific pursuit of the truth, they did not regard themselves as liberal, although frequently the answers they brought to social problems involved government solutions.

In the 1970s, with funding from a handful of hugely wealthy donors like Scaife, as well as some major corporate support, a whole new form of “think tank” emerged that was more engaged in selling predetermined ideology to politicians and the public than undertaking scholarly research. Eric Wanner, the former president of the Russell Sage Foundation, summed it up, saying, “
The AEIs and the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the progressive faith that social science should shape social policy.”

According to one account, it was Hayek who spawned the idea of the think tank as disguised political weapon. As Adam Curtis, a documentary filmmaker with the BBC, tells the story, around 1950, after reading the
Reader’s Digest
version of Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
, an eccentric British libertarian named Antony Fisher, an Eton and Cambridge graduate who believed socialism and Communism were overtaking the democratic West, sought Hayek’s advice about what could be done. Should he run for office? Hayek, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics, told him that for people of their beliefs getting into politics was futile. Politicians were prisoners of conventional wisdom, in Hayek’s view. They would have to change how politicians thought if they wanted to implement what were then considered outlandish free-market ideas. To do that would require an ambitious and somewhat disingenuous public relations campaign. The best way to do this, Hayek told Fisher, who took notes, was to start “
a scholarly institute” that would wage a “battle of ideas.” If Fisher succeeded, Hayek told him, he would change the course of history.

To succeed, however, required some deception about the think tank’s true aims. Fisher’s partner in the venture, Oliver Smedley, wrote to Fisher saying that they needed to be “cagey” and disguise their organization as neutral and nonpartisan. Choosing a suitably anodyne name, they founded the grandfather of libertarian think tanks in London, calling it the Institute of Economic Affairs. Smedley wrote that it was “imperative that we should give no indication in our literature that we are working to educate the public along certain lines which might be interpreted as having a political bias. In other words, if we said openly that we were re-teaching the economics of the free market, it might enable our enemies to question the charitableness of our motives.”

Fisher would go on to found another 150 or so free-market think tanks around the world, including the Manhattan Institute in New York, to which both Scaife and other conservative philanthropists would become major contributors.
The Sarah Scaife Foundation in fact for many years was the Manhattan Institute’s single largest contributor. The donations paid off, from Scaife’s viewpoint, when they helped launch the careers of the conservative social critic Murray and the supply-side economics guru George Gilder, whose arguments against welfare programs and taxes had huge impacts on ordinary Americans.

Fisher’s early collaborator in founding the Manhattan Institute was William Casey, the Wall Street financier and future director of the CIA. The early think tank was not a spy operation, but it was funded by wealthy men who had no objections to using pretexts and disinformation in the service of what they regarded as a noble cause. In fact, Scaife during this period was simultaneously funding a CIA front group. In his memoir, he acknowledges that in the early 1970s he owned a London-based news organization called Forum World Features that was in reality a CIA-run propaganda operation. He had taken it over from Jock Whitney, the publisher of the
New York Herald Tribune
, who was a friend of his father’s in the OSS.

A
n element of subterfuge was also discernible in Weyrich’s early planning. His papers include correspondence that make his political organizations sound like clandestine corporate front groups. One associate writes, “
As you well know, business people have been notoriously apathetic in the political field. This is primarily, I feel, due to the businessman’s fear of his involvement with respect to his business and possible repercussions from the federal government. The organization we propose would screen him and provide him a vehicle which would in effect do his political work for him at a price.”

Earlier attempts by American tycoons to hide behind nonprofit front groups had proven both legally and politically toxic. In the 1930s, Democrats gleefully unmasked the Du Pont family’s funding for the American Liberty League, an ostensibly independent organization that opposed FDR’s New Deal, ridiculing it as the “American Cellophane League” because “it’s a DuPont product and you can see right through it.” In 1950, Congress investigated the group that became AEI, denouncing it as a “
 ‘big business’ pressure organization” that should register as a lobbying shop and get barred from offering its donors tax deductions. In 1965, top AEI personnel took leaves of absence to form the brain trust for Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. The Internal Revenue Service nonetheless threatened the think tank’s tax-exempt status. It was this searing experience that prompted AEI and other conservative groups of this period to avoid the appearance of being too partisan or of acting as corporate shills.

But in the 1970s, such concerns became outmoded.
Powell and others in the newly aggressive corporate vanguard inverted from a negative into a positive the accusation that conservative organizations were slanted by successfully redefining existing establishment organizations like Brookings and
The New York Times
as equally biased but on the liberal side. They argued that a “market” of ideas was necessary that would give equal balance to all views. In effect, they reduced the older organizations that prided themselves on their above-the-fray public-service-oriented neutrality to mere combatants in a polarized war.

Disoriented, Brookings and the
Times
rushed to add conservatives to their ranks in hopes of demonstrating their nonpartisanship. Brookings hurriedly made a Republican its president, while the
Times
in 1973 added Nixon’s former speechwriter Bill Safire to its op-ed page as a columnist. In 1976, after the Scaife-funded Institute for Contemporary Studies issued a report accusing the media of liberal bias, the
Times
forced out the editorial page editor John Oakes for having an antibusiness tone. The Ford Foundation, meanwhile, which had funded much of the early bipartisan environmental movement, as well as the public interest law movement, donated the first installment of $300,000 in grants to AEI in 1972 in an attempt to
fight criticism that it was liberal. “
That was quite the heist you pulled on the Ford Foundation, congratulations!” a friend exclaimed in a note to a top AEI official.

The upshot was that by the end of the 1970s conservative nonprofits had achieved power that was almost unthinkable when the League to Save Carthage first formed. Enormously wealthy right-wing donors had transformed themselves from the ridiculed, self-serving “economic royalists” of FDR’s day into the respected “other side” of a two-sided debate.

The new, hyper-partisan think tanks had impact far beyond Washington. They introduced doubt into areas of settled academic and scientific scholarship, undermined genuinely unbiased experts, and gave politicians a menu of conflicting statistics and arguments from which to choose. The benefit was a far more pluralistic intellectual climate, beyond liberal orthodoxy. The hazard, however, was that partisan shills would create “balance” based on fraudulent research and deceive the public about pressing issues in which their sponsors had financial interests.

Some insiders, like Steve Clemons, a political analyst who worked for the Nixon Center among other think tanks, described the new think tanks as “a Faustian bargain.” He worried that the money corrupted the research. “
Funders increasingly expect policy achievements that contribute to their bottom line,” he admitted in a confessional essay. “
We’ve become money launderers for monies that have real specific policy agendas behind them. No one is willing to say anything about it; it’s one of the big taboo subjects.”

In an effort to prove their intellectual integrity, all of the new think tanks could cite occasional instances where they parted positions with some of their donors, but far more typical was the example of John M. Olin, a chemical and munitions company magnate whose foundation was a top sponsor of the American Enterprise Institute. Letters from Olin show that he grew increasingly agitated over what he regarded as the think tank’s lassitude after he had earmarked a donation demanding that AEI militate against raising the estate tax during the Nixon years. In a note to the think tank’s president, Olin railed about the tax as “
socialism out and out” and complained that if the think tank didn’t speak out soon, “my estate would be practically liquidated upon my death.”

David Brock, a conservative apostate who became a liberal activist, described the Heritage Foundation, where he was a young fellow, as almost completely under the thumb of its wealthy sponsors. In his tell-all book
Blinded by the Right
, he writes, “
I saw how right-wing ideology was manufactured and controlled by a small group of powerful foundations” like Smith Richardson, Adolph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and John M. Olin. Scaife in his estimation was “by far the most important”; indeed, Brock describes him as “the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the political realm.”

How intellectually engaged Scaife personally was—rather than delegating authority to key advisers such as his longtime aides, Richard Larry and Larry’s fellow ex-marine R. Daniel McMichael—remains something of a mystery. The recipients of Scaife’s largesse, such as David Abshire, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s former attorney general and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, invariably praised his acumen. It was Meese who described Scaife as “
the unseen hand” who brought “balance and sound principles back to the public arena” and “quietly helped to lay the brick and mortar for an entire movement.” Yet one former aide to Scaife, James Shuman, told
The Washington Post
that had Scaife not inherited a huge fortune, “
I don’t think he had the intellectual capacity to do very much.”

In his memoir, Scaife recounts his life story with some wit and charm, suggesting he could be quick and entertaining, if lacking in self-awareness. Yet one of the few public speeches he gave, at a Heritage Foundation rally celebrating Republicans’ takeover of the House and Senate in 1994, was less than reassuring about his clarity of mind. Scaife meandered somewhat incoherently as he declared, “
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.”

Scaife’s rambling remarks were made in the same year that he returned to drinking after a life in and out of rehab programs. In 1987, his second wife, Margaret “Ritchie” Battle, took him with her to the Betty Ford Center. He stayed sober, associates said, for several years. His life, however, remained flamboyantly turbulent. After he met Ritchie—who was married, as was he—in 1979, the couple carried on a soap-opera-worthy affair. Scaife claimed he consummated it after Ritchie, a glamorous and memorably feisty southerner, appeared in his office in an irresistible white angora sweater. “
We did what comes naturally,” he told
Vanity Fair
. She retorted, “Never owned an angora sweater. I’m allergic to things like that!” While they were courting, Ritchie reportedly kicked Scaife in the testicles so hard he had to be taken to a hospital emergency room. Meanwhile, he and his first wife wrangled for almost ten years over the divorce settlement as he fought to keep her from taking a share of some Gulf Oil stock he’d belatedly come into. At one point, in order to evade a subpoena, Ritchie was carried out of Scaife’s house rolled in a carpet, like Cleopatra, by his servants.

His family life was in tatters.
According to Scaife’s son, David, Ritchie and Scaife visited him during this period at prep school—Deerfield again—bringing alcohol and marijuana, which Scaife smoked with his son. In 1991, he married Ritchie, who continued to live in her own house around the corner. Their wedding reception scandalized Pittsburgh’s upper crust with its blazing double-entendre lawn sign spelling out “
Ritchie loves Dick.”