Washington Times Assails Communism : Moon Goal for Paper Seen as Politics, Not Preaching

James Whelan, ousted in 1984 after two years as the founding editor and publisher of the Washington Times, says anyone who wants to know why members and officials of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church have poured more than $200 million into the paper have only to read Moon’s writings.

The church, Whelan says, wants “to establish a worldwide theocracy headed by Moon.”

Whelan concedes that this may sound “pretty wacko,” but a congressional subcommittee that investigated Korean-American relations in the aftermath of the Korean influence-buying scandal of the mid-1970s made much the same analysis:

“Among the goals of the Moon Organization is the establishment of a worldwide government in which the separation of church and state would be abolished and which would be governed by Moon and his followers.”

A careful reading of many of Moon’s writings and speeches makes it clear that Moon does indeed regard himself as the son of God--a Messiah with both earthly and heavenly ambitions. But Hempstone Smith, who succeeded Whelan as editor of the Times (and was replaced less than a year later by Arnaud de Borchgrave), used to say, “I’ve worked for a lot of publishers who thought they were God,” and Moon doesn’t really seem any more likely than any other publisher to wind up ruling the world.

In fact, politics--conservative politics, anti-communism--seems a far more probable explanation than religion for Moon’s interest in the Washington Times.

When Bo Hi Pak, president of News World Communications, the holding company that owns the paper, was asked recently, “What is your goal?” he responded:

“Rev. Moon has a goal--one that might seem crazy for some. His goal is the liberation of Moscow by the year 2000.”

There has been no direct or indirect proselytizing for the Unification Church in the pages of the Washington Times. But there has been much indirect proselytizing for anti-communism in the paper.

‘Implacable Animosity’

Both Moon and Pak come from South Korea, and associates of the two men are fond of pointing out that the 38th Parallel is about as close to Seoul as Dulles Airport is to the White House; Moon, Pak and their Unification Church colleagues all have what Ron Godwin, senior vice president of the Washington Times Corp., calls “an implacable animosity toward communism” and an abiding fear of communism as a deadly threat, first to their South Korean homeland and then to the rest of the world.

Church officials see communism as the antithesis of everything they stand for. To them, it is a satanic force, the Antichrist; they regard their opposition to communism as a divine mission that combines their spiritual and political objectives.

Pak founded the most active of the church’s political action agencies--Causa International--to battle communism by offering people throughout the world the alternative of “God-ism;” Causa has spent millions of dollars organizing seminars for journalists, opinion makers and local government officials, especially in Central and South America, since its founding in 1980.

NSC Memo

Causa was in the news most recently when its name--and that of Pak--were found scribbled at the bottom of a National Security Council memo on assistance for the contras in Nicaragua. The memo was printed in the Tower Commission report.

“It’s my sense that they (church officials) have written North America off as a religious target,” says one high-ranking Times executive. “If you want to get one of these (church) guys in animated conversation, don’t talk to him about his religion; ask about fighting communism. . . . Their eyes light up.”

What has all this to do with the Washington Times?

Pak is convinced that the war against communism is primarily “a war of ideas,” and toward that end, church members and officials have already founded scores of political, academic and scientific forums throughout the world; a daily newspaper is another weapon--in Washington, a potentially powerful weapon--in this war.

Hope Against Communism

Top church leaders think the United States is the world’s last, best hope against communism, and they seem convinced that only by keeping the United States government--and the American people--resolute in this struggle can communism be defeated.

“I lived under . . . communist tyranny . . . totalitarianism to my bones,” Pak said in a rare interview Friday, by telephone from Seoul. “We must defend our democracy . . . I believe that without having a strong America, we would not preserve our freedoms. And in America, media . . . is very important.

“Media is to the liberal side, especially in . . . Washington, D.C., which is probably the most important single city in the entire world,” Pak said.

Church leaders and their affiliates think a strong, conservative, anti-communist newspaper in Washington can serve three functions:

--Apply steady pressure to the White House and Congress to fight communism by maintaining American troops in South Korea, funding the contras in Nicaragua and protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (among many other objectives).

--Serve as a rallying point and public bulletin board for other, like-minded conservatives and anti-communists.

--Give church leaders and their affiliates respectability and access to top government officials and opinion makers in Washington.

Some Success

Although the paper has been largely successful in the latter two objectives, it would be difficult to argue that it has made a significant impact on the government policy-making process. But that may be because the Reagan Administration is already largely in sympathy with the paper’s conservative, anti-communist agenda. In that regard, it will be interesting to see what happens to the paper if Reagan is succeeded by a less conservative President.

Would the paper be even more interesting to read (and more useful to its owners) as a gadfly to liberals in power than it is as a cheerleader for conservatives in power? Or would the diminished access the paper seems likely to have under a less sympathetic Administration significantly diminish its usefulness to Washington insiders who now read it in part because they know President Reagan and other top conservatives read it (and leak stories to its reporters and editors)?

‘Bullhorn’ for Right

“In its columns, in its main editorial personnel and in its ability to get the story out of the people in the Administration who are the hard right, it remains, in effect, if not the Bible, then certainly the bullhorn for the pure right,” says Hodding Carter III, deputy secretary of state for public affairs under President Jimmy Carter and now chief correspondent of public television’s “Inside Story.”

Does the Times’ conservatism color its news presentation? Yes--in terms of story selection and display and, on occasion, in the writing and editing of stories.

Although Editor-in-Chief De Borchgrave denies that the Washington Times has a conservative agenda, he often talks about having worked most of his life in Europe, where the press is more openly partisan--and where, as he says, “People read one paper on the left, one paper on the right and make up their own minds.”

De Borchgrave says he wants the Times to publish stories that the Establishment press ignores or underplays--decisions the Establishment press makes not because of a liberal conspiracy but because of what he calls “a liberal consensus,” a subconscious mutuality of values and views.

Alternative to Liberals

The Washington Times wants to provide an alternative to this “liberal voice” and to provide a conservative perspective on the world, so it routinely gives more Page 1 play than does any other major paper to stories that interest conservatives--stories about the Soviet Union, the contras and Marxist conflicts anywhere in the world; stories about the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), stories about jockeying among various Republican presidential hopefuls, stories about policy debates on abortion and other issues of special interest to conservatives.

“On SDI, the New York Times is more substantive, and the Washington Post has better sources, but if you want to know who’s whispering what in the President’s ear, who’s pressuring the President, you read the Washington Times,” says John Buckley, press secretary to Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.).

When U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an outspoken opponent of abortion, said in March that all pregnant women should be tested for AIDS and that abortion would have to be among the options presented to her if she had AIDS, the Washington Times ran a Page 1 story, 32 paragraphs long, headlined “Koop suggests abortion as option for AIDS carriers.” The Washington Post ran a five-paragraph story on Page 11 on Koop’s remarks and made no reference to his comment on abortion.

A month earlier, there was an even more dramatic difference in the treatment the two Washington papers gave two stories of even clearer ideological interest: When the Conservative Political Action Conference opened its annual meeting in Washington, the Washington Times published two stories on Page 1; the Washington Post published one story--on Page 9. That same day, the Post ran on Page 1 a story that New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo had announced he wouldn’t run for the Democratic presidential nomination; the Washington Times ran the story on Page 10.

Sometimes--not often but on infrequent occasion--stories in the Washington Times are written or (more commonly) edited so that they not only interest conservatives, but are biased in favor of conservatives.

Several reporters told the Los Angeles Times that editors had changed or inserted material in their stories to give them a “conservative spin.” They call this process “having your copy ‘Prudenized’--a reference to Managing Editor Wesley Pruden, who has often edited and rewritten stories and who also writes a thrice-weekly conservative column for the paper.

One former reporter, Bill Outlaw, says he was the co-author of a story in 1985 in which his description of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) as someone who led congressional opposition to financing the contras was changed to “whose sympathies for the Sandinistas are well known.”

Change Defended

This change was not “pejorative,” Pruden says. “You say ‘potato,’ I say ‘potahto.’ ” Besides, Pruden says, “his sympathies for the Sandinistas are well known.”

Pruden, De Borchgrave and other Washington Times editors deny making changes in stories to reflect a conservative ideology. They say most such complaints reflect the typical reporter’s objection to having his copy changed in any way; in some cases, they’re right.

‘I’ve tried to get people here to . . . write objective stories,” Pruden says. “I don’t want any ideologically cooked stories in the news pages.”

Nevertheless, when Ferdinand E. Marcos was ousted as president of the Philippines last year, the Washington Times ran an extraordinarily long Page 1 news story strongly sympathetic to Marcos--under the headline “How the American media pushed Marcos out of Malacanang Palace.” The paper’s foreign editor, Holger Jensen, called the story “crap.”

Tell ‘Just by Looking’

But Jensen himself concedes that readers of the paper’s South African news coverage would be able to tell the Times is a conservative paper “just by looking at the kinds of stories and the subjects covered and the way they’re written.”

The paper has sometimes criticized the South African government and has covered the opposition parties there, though, and Jensen says the paper’s coverage of South Africa has generally been balanced--more so than that in some “liberal papers.”

Other top Washington Times editors--Pruden among them--acknowledge that in quoting officials in print, they have a policy of putting quotations from conservatives before those from liberals in any story where a reporter can “justify placing the emphasis either way.”

As “an alternative voice,” there’s nothing wrong with putting the emphasis “consonant with our editorial page point of view,” so long as the story is not distorted, says Woody West, acting editor of the Washington Times editorial page.

Some Employees Liberal

Not that all Times editors (or reporters) are conservatives. Far from it. A significant number are liberal.

Marc Lerner, who is about to become a foreign correspondent for the paper after having served as its national editor and business editor, describes himself as “very, very liberal.”

Although some staff members and many journalists elsewhere object to the paper’s conservative agenda as improper and unethical journalism, not everyone agrees.

Hodding Carter, a liberal, says that, because editors don’t live in a “value-free universe,” many stories are biased in metropolitan daily newspapers throughout the country. That doesn’t offend him in the Washington Times because, he says, “I sure as hell know where they’re coming from.

“I like to see the person who’s shooting at me and recognize from what angle they’re shooting, as opposed to those who pretend they have no angle while they’re shooting.”

Sometimes, however, the Washington Times raises questions of journalistic propriety by what it doesn’t publish, as well as by what it does publish.

North Story Held

Late last year, a Washington Times reporter wrote a story saying that Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, former deputy director of the National Security Council and a central figure in the Iran/contras arms scandal, had been hospitalized for emotional distress in 1974; the paper didn’t run that story until the day after it was published in the Miami Herald.

Was the paper trying to protect North, a darling of the conservatives, by withholding the story from publication?

Absolutely not, says De Borchgrave.

North’s hospitalization was “a private matter,” De Borchgrave says--something that happened 12 years ago. “It had nothing to do with this case.”

But once the Herald published its story, De Borchgrave says, he realized he’d “made a bad call.”

De Borchgrave says that’s the only mistake he’s made since taking over the Times, and while some might disagree with this self-assessment, there seems to be an emerging consensus that the paper has become much livelier under his editorship. Nor is there any question that De Borchgrave’s personal style, combined with the paper’s conservative agenda, has endeared the Times to many in power in Washington.

Dinner With Reagans

President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, went to De Borchgrave’s house for dinner last year. Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, secretary of transportation, had dinner in De Borchgrave’s office at the Times last month. Top government officials now routinely sit at tables with Pak and other top officials of the church and the paper at major political and media events in Washington.

This new-found respectability satisfies what one Times executive calls “an almost wistful vulnerability, a . . . plaintive desire to be accepted . . . (among those at) the highest level of the Unification Church.”

Buckley, Kemp’s press secretary, thinks the Washington Times has helped provide the church with just that kind of acceptability.

“The paper is run by an organization I consider a fringe cult, but to the extent that its objective with the Washington Times is to defuse that criticism, it’s working,” Buckley says. “I don’t think as badly (as I did) about the Unification Church for having dealt with Washington Times people.”

‘Amnesia’ About Sponsor

In some quarters, Buckley says, the paper’s performance has even “succeeded in engendering amnesia about the (its) . . . sponsor.”

Church and Washington Times officials have insisted repeatedly that the paper is independent of the church, that the men who founded it are businessmen who just happen to be followers of Moon, that the church plays no role in the paper.

A Catholic newspaper in San Salvador and a Christian magazine in the United States have reported in separate cases that officials of Causa have made similar claims--that Causa has no connection with the church. But the congressional subcommittee that investigated Korean-American relations concluded:

“There is essentially one ‘Moon organization’ worldwide, rather than a number of separate organizations ‘founded’ or ‘inspired’ by Moon but otherwise operating as independent entities. . . . Moon exercises substantial control over his organization. . . .

“Even the crudest analysis of the structure of Moon’s business shows that, as with his non-business organizations, there is a pattern of interlocking directors, officers and stockholders.”

Officials of Church, Paper

This finding was made before the Washington Times began publication, but Moon’s aides have used almost identical words about his role in the paper--he “inspired” its founding, they say--and, as with other church-related enterprises, top people at the paper are also top people in the church (in this case, Pak and Sang Kook Han, two of Moon’s earliest followers).

One need only look at the nomenclature of various church enterprises to understand the linkage among them: The Unification Church. One World Crusade. One Way Productions. One Up Enterprises (the company that owns News World Communications, which owns the Washington Times Corp).

Tong Il--the name of the church’s South Korean manufacturing plant--means “unification” in Korean.

Thus, reading the Washington Times can be “like going into a forest to gather mushrooms,” says Lars Nelson, Washington bureau chief for the New York Daily News. “If one mushroom is poison, you’re not going to know which one, so you don’t eat any mushrooms. . . . You just stay away from the Washington Times on the grounds that . . . something in there is a poison mushroom and you’re not sure what it’s going to be”--which story might be tainted by Unification Church influence.

Occasional Suspicion

In fact, the paper’s news and editorial columns seem free of any such direct church influence. But there is the occasional suspicious-looking mushroom.

On March 27, for example, both the New York Times and the Washington Post published substantial, Page 1 stories on Robert B. Anderson, Treasury secretary under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, pleading guilty to two felony counts of federal income tax evasion. Both papers mentioned prominently that almost $80,000 of the $127,500 income Anderson had not reported came from his work as “a paid consultant” for the Unification Church.

The Washington Times devoted only three paragraphs on Page 4 to that story and made no mention of the Unification Church.

Pruden said he has “no problem” with the play his paper gave the story, and he said the failure to mention the church was inadvertent--”a minor sin of omission.”

Pruden and every other ranking editor at the paper insists the church has absolutely no influence over the copy. De Borchgrave says his contract guarantees him absolute authority over the paper’s news and editorial content.

Guarantees Not Absolute

James Whelan made the same claim before he was ousted in 1984. But an examination of both contracts shows those guarantees, as written, to be considerably less than absolute.

Whelan’s contract, for example, gave him the various assurances he asked for but also gave Pak “the owner’s right to make all final decisions when it is necessary to do so.”

Woody West, former executive editor of the Washington Times, says people who think the church plays a role in the editorial and news operation of the paper would find out how wrong they are if they’d “just read the damn paper.” But West came back from what amounted to semi-retirement as associate editor and occasional contributor to become editorial page editor two weeks ago only because William Cheshire (and four members of Cheshire’s staff) quit to protest what they saw as an abrogation of the owners’ promise of editorial freedom from the church (a charge Han and De Borchgrave denied).

This was the second such charge levied against the paper by one of its own top-ranking executives; Whelan said he was ousted in July, 1984, because he refused to quietly accede to a seizure of power at the paper by “senior members of the Unification Church”--specifically, the installation of Han as de facto publisher of the paper.

Other top editors at the paper denied those charges, and no other staff members quit with Whelan. In fact, six top officials at the paper--including Whelan’s four top editors--signed a petition asking that he be replaced. None of the six was a member of the Unification Church.

In recent interviews, these editors and others at the Washington Times attributed Whelan’s dismissal to his imperial style, his demands for a new, more lucrative contract, his alienation of his subordinates and his peremptory treatment of News World officials--charges Whelan emphatically denies.

‘Personality Change’ Cited

Thomas Brandt, who worked for Whelan at the Miami News in the early 1970s, joined Whelan at the Washington Times in its second week of publication and later began to notice what he called “a significant personality change” in Whelan.

“He seemed to be so full of himself . . . out of touch with the people around him . . . bombastic all the time,” Brandt said in a recent interview.

Although Cheshire, one of the signatories to the petition calling for Whelan’s ouster, said in an interview three weeks before his own resignation that he had “never seen any indication of Unification Church interference at the paper before Whelan’s dismissal,” he also said Whelan was “the best editor the paper ever had.”

Even Whelan’s most severe critics say he was just what the fledgling paper needed to get off the ground--an aggressive, hard-driving promoter, passionately determined to keep the paper independent of the church.

Several Clashes

After De Borchgrave became editor-in-chief, he and Cheshire clashed several times--in part because Cheshire thought De Borchgrave was trying to “ingratiate himself with the owners” by his treatment of Moon in the paper.

De Borchgrave denies that, but four months after taking over at the Times, he did write an open letter to President Reagan, published on the paper’s editorial page, urging a presidential pardon for Moon, who was then imprisoned for tax evasion.

Some of the disputes between De Borchgrave and Cheshire involved the editing of news stories on Moon’s imprisonment.

Washington Times editors have always maintained that, to avoid any suspicion of church influence on their coverage of Moon, the paper would use only wire service stories for such coverage. But a Los Angeles Times examination of several original wire service stories on Moon’s imprisonment shows that Washington Times editors inserted into these stories a defense of Moon--without indicating to the reader that the new material was from a source other than the wire service.

Change in UPI Story

A June 26, 1985, United Press International story said, for example, that Moon was then imprisoned “on tax evasion charges”; as published in the Washington Times--under the UPI logo--the story was edited to say he was imprisoned for “failing to pay taxes on income which he defended as holding in trust for his church.”

Times Managing Editor Pruden says that change was made in the interest of fair play, but Cheshire says such changes compromised the independence and integrity of the paper.

Cheshire had several other criticisms of De Borchgrave--among them that the paper had too many “sacred cows” under his stewardship, that editorials were too often just exercises in “Soviet-bashing” and that De Borchgrave changed his mind so often on other editorials that the paper appeared weak, inconsistent and indecisive.

Cheshire sent De Borchgrave a long memo on Feb. 24, complaining about some of these issues--De Borchgrave denied the charges--and when De Borchgrave changed his mind on another editorial April 14, Cheshire resigned, citing what he saw as “an unambiguous and clear-cut intrusion of the church, at Mr. De Borchgrave’s invitation, into the editorial direction of the newspaper.”

Change in Editorial

Cheshire and four members of his editorial page staff submitted their letters of resignation to De Borchgrave after De Borchgrave said he wanted significant changes made in an editorial he had previously approved for Tuesday’s paper. De Borchgrave wanted the editorial, which originally criticized President Chun Doo Hwan of South Korea, to blame instead Chun’s opponents, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, for the current turmoil in South Korea.

De Borchgrave changed his mind about the editorial after speaking with Han.

Han and De Borchgrave both said De Borchgrave had informally asked Han, as an expert on South Korea, for his assessment of the situation there, without mentioning that the paper had an editorial pending on the subject.

Cheshire protested that it was “nonsensical” for the paper to rely on the opinion of Han, a former South Korean ambassador, to determine its editorial policy on South Korea. The material De Borchgrave wanted in the editorial changed the editorial “180 degrees,” Cheshire said, and it represented “an abrogation of our agreement . . . that the Unification Church and its representative would play no role in the editorial direction of the newspaper.”

Han and De Borchgrave denied Cheshire’s charges on the Chun editorial, though, and De Borchgrave attributed his differences with Cheshire to ideology.

Lengthy interviews with both men would suggest, however, that personality--more specifically, their vastly different personal and journalistic styles--made their clashes and their ultimate rupture all but inevitable.