Richard Scaife: A ‘Savior’ of Right, a Scourge of Left

If there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” at work in America, the man at its center likely is Richard Mellon Scaife, the 65-year-old reclusive Pittsburgh billionaire whose money has funded both mainstream conservative think tanks and underground attack campaigns against President Clinton.

An heir to the vast Mellon fortune from banking, oil and aluminum, Scaife has shown no interest in making money himself or even in the family name. Apparently upset with another branch of the clan, Scaife has dropped “Mellon” in recent years.

Instead, he has established his own name by sprinkling seed money, an estimated $200 million in all, among dozens of conservative groups.

“The liberal slant to American society needs to be counteracted,” he once said.

When the counteraction campaign has borne fruit, jubilant conservatives have praised Scaife and called him the architect of their success.

“Dick Scaife is a remarkable citizen . . . [who] really created modern conservatism,” said incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) at a victory party when the GOP wrested control of Congress from the Democrats in 1994.

Scaife’s money helped to build the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and other influential right-leaning think tanks. He also has supported such academic centers as Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Pepperdine University’s new Public Policy School.

However, since Bill Clinton moved into the White House five years ago, Scaife has seemed less interested in supporting conservative thought than in digging up dirt on the former Arkansas governor, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and their many friends.

Among Clinton allies, Scaife is known as the “Goldfinger of the conservative conspiracy” or “Daddy Warbucks of the right.” In the words of all-purpose presidential defender James Carville, Scaife is the godfather of the “anti-Clinton crazies.” Few doubt that the first lady had the Pennsylvania billionaire in mind when she referred to the money man behind the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that she said has targeted her husband.

Among Scaife’s obsessions is the 1993 death of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel who was a close and longtime friend of the Clintons. Several investigations, including that of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, have concluded that Foster committed suicide because he was depressed by the relentless attacks on the Clintons and himself.

Scaife, however, has refused to accept that explanation. Instead, he has fomented the theory of a darker conspiracy, perhaps of murder. In one interview, he called the Foster death the “Rosetta Stone” of the Clinton administration, which, if translated, could reveal the truth about all of the Clintons’ activities.

Foster continues to be a major figure in the pages of the suburban Pennsylvania newspaper owned by Scaife, formerly the Tribune-Review of Greensburg, recently renamed the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. There, reporter Christopher Ruddy has doggedly pursued the Foster conspiracy theory. Aided by Scaife’s money, the Western Journalism Center in Sacramento has taken out full-page advertisements in several newspapers to reprint Ruddy’s stories.

Scaife’s money also has poured into the rabidly anti-Clinton American Spectator magazine. Editor R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. relentlessly derided the new president in 1993, a vilification campaign that won Scaife’s support. In the last four years, the billionaire has given the monthly magazine $2.4 million for what became known as the “Arkansas Project.”

Begun as an investigative effort to dig up damaging information on the Clintons’ past, some of the magazine’s money may have ended up in the hands of David Hale, a key witness against Clinton in the Whitewater controversy.

That possibility set off alarm bells in Washington. The Justice Department says that it wants an investigation of the possibility that a witness had been paid off. Even the Spectator’s board of directors is concerned and brought in an outside team to learn what happened to the money.

“So far, I haven’t found any evidence that money from the American Spectator was paid or given to David Hale, either directly or by any third party,” Terry H. Eastland, the newly named publisher, said Thursday.

Though his money seems to be everywhere on the right, Scaife himself is little seen.

“I have never met him. I have never talked to him,” Starr said Thursday when asked about his possible links to Scaife through Pepperdine. “I have had no arrangement--implicit, explicit, direct or indirect--with him.”

Like Starr, Eastland is a veteran of the Reagan administration. He is also a conservative writer and scholar.

“I have never met him either,” the publisher said. “It’s apparently true what is said. He is a very reclusive person.”