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Richard Mellon Scaife

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Richard Mellon Scaife (born July 3, 1932, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), a U.S. billionaire and owner–publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He owns 7.2% of NewsMax. With $1.2 billion, Scaife, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, is No. 283 on the 2005 Forbes 400.

Scaife is particularly well known for his generous support of conservative public policy organizations over the past two decades. His generous support of the Heritage Foundation has been an important factor in Heritage's development of one of the world's most influential public policy research institutes. He also has supported other conservative organizations that have supported various conservatie policy themes.

Scaife also helped fund the Arkansas Project which led to the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton. He provides financial support for conservative and libertarian causes in the U.S., mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controls: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and until 2001 the Scaife Family Foundation, now controlled by his daughter Jennie and son David [1] [2].

Early life

Scaife was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Alan Scaife, the head of an affluent Pittsburgh family, and Sarah Mellon, the niece of former United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon. Sarah Mellon and her brother, financier R.K. Mellon, were heirs to the Mellon fortune, a raft of investments that included Mellon Bank and major stakes in Gulf Oil and Alcoa aluminum.

He attended high school at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He was expelled from Yale University in the aftermath of a drunken party, and later attended University of Pittsburgh where his father was chairman of the board of trustees. Scaife graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1957.[3]

Parents and family

Scaife inherited positions on several corporate boards in 1958 when his father Alan died unexpectedly. However his family had become estranged from his uncle, R.K., who retained control of the companies. His mother encouraged him to get involved in the family's philanthropic foundations, and he did so. (See management of Scaife family foundations.)

Scaife's mother was an alcoholic, as were he and his sister Cordelia. Scaife was affected by the family's poor relationship with the Mellon family, and came to despise the Mellon family name. Still, he inherited a good part of the Mellon fortune when his mother died. A portion of the fortune was placed in trust funds and the rest in foundations. Charitable foundations are required to disburse at least 5% of their assets annually, forcing Scaife to become a philanthropist. [4]

The inherited Mellon fortune allowed Scaife to pursue his political activism. In 1965, Sarah Scaife died, giving her son new influence over the family foundations. While his mother preferred to give to the arts, libraries and population control projects, her son gave heavily to anti-communist organizations. After his mother's death, he had the "Sarah Mellon Scaife Galleries" at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh renamed the "Sarah Scaife Galleries" and also removed the Mellon name from the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

In 1973 he became estranged from his sister Cordelia Scaife May, and took control of many of the family foundations while Cordelia supported her own charities, including Planned Parenthood and the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. Shortly before her death, the siblings reconciled and he eulogized her in January 2005, [5] lauding "Cordy" for devoting her life and resources to "worthwhile causes." [6].

He married Frances L. Gilmore (born December 2, 1934), and they had two children, Jennie K. Scaife (born July 8, 1963), and David N. Scaife (born February 5, 1966). The marriage ended acrimoniously after a lengthy divorce.

In 1990 Scaife quit drinking alcohol. In June, 1991 he married his longtime companion, Margaret "Ritchie" Battle Scaife (born February 15, 1947), who had influenced the giving pattern of the Scaife foundations and made the couple active in the social and cultural life of patrician Pittsburgh.

On December 27 2005, the Pittsburgh Police Department responded to a call placed by Richard Scaife reporting trespassing at Scaife's residence in the prestigious Shadyside section of Pittsburgh. They arrived to find Ritchie Scaife, his estranged wife, pounding on doors and peeking in windows of the couple's mansion. Mrs. Scaife refused to leave the property, and was arrested and charged with defiant trespass. "Tribune Publisher's Wife Charged with Trespass"

On April 8, 2006, the Tribune-Review published an article [7] describing a fight between Scaife's estranged wife and three of his servants over a dog that Scaife told the New York Daily News [8] his wife had given him. Both newspapers reported that Scaife's servants went to the hospital for scrapes and bruises after the fracas.

On April 11 2006 Scaife confided to a gossip columnist that he and Margaret "Ritchie" Battle Scaife, 58, plan to divorce and that their marriage began without a prenuptial agreement. The New York Daily News column estimated his vulnerable assets at half of $1.2 billion. [9]

Reporter Marisol Bello depicted his boss in an article celebrating the newspaper's anniversary as affable and kind, with little interest in daily newsroom affairs.

Politics

Scaife's interest in politics was influenced by four factors.

  1. He was fond of newspapers he read during his childhood.
  2. His father served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and the family lived in Washington, D.C. for a time.
  3. He was influenced by Robert Duggan, his sister Cordelia's fiance who later became her husband. Scaife worked on Duggan's political campaigns and Duggan was twice elected Allegheny County District Attorney. Duggan helped Scaife become a committeeman in the Allegheny County Republican Party in 1956. In 1974, however, Duggan killed himself with a shotgun, hours before he was indicted by a grand jury for income tax evasion and racketeering.
  4. Scaife involved himself in the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, with whom his mother was acquainted.

Support for Richard Nixon

Scaife gained notoriety for making an end-run around weak campaign finance laws to donate US$ $990,000 to the 1972 re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon. Scaife was not charged with a crime but about $45,000 went to a fund linked to the Watergate scandal. Scaife later said he was repulsed by the scandal and refused to speak with Nixon after 1973. Following Duggan's suicide and then Watergate, Scaife shifted his political giving from politicians' campaigns to anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications.

Opposition to Bill Clinton

Scaife, however, was closely involved in his empire's coverage against then-President Bill Clinton. Scaife was the major backer of The American Spectator, whose Arkansas Project set out to find facts about Clinton and in which Paula Jones' accusations of sexual harassment against Clinton were first widely publicized.

In a 1999 series of articles on Scaife and foundations that support conservative causes, the Washington Post named a close Scaife associate, Richard Larry, and not Scaife himself as the man who drove the Arkansas Project.

Regardless of his role, the project not only accused Clinton of financial and sexual indiscretions (some later verified, others not), but also gave root to hyperbolic conspiracist notions that the Clintons collaborated with the CIA to run a drug smuggling operation out of the town of Mena, Arkansas and that Clinton had arranged for the murder of White House aide Vince Foster as part of a coverup of the Whitewater scandal. The possibility that money from the project had been given to former Clinton associate David Hale, a witness in the Whitewater investigation, led to the appointment of Michael J. Shaheen as a special investigator. Shaheen subpoenaed Scaife, who testified before a federal grand jury in the matter.

So involved was Scaife in efforts against Clinton that many Democrats believed Hillary Clinton's statement condemning a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband was a direct reference to Scaife himself. President Clinton later admitted to sexual indiscretions, but the other allegations that came out of the Arkansas Project were never proven.

Coincidental to the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton's impeachment, Scaife endowed a new school of public policy at Pepperdine University. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was named the first dean of this school, although Pepperdine denies any connection. Starr accepted the post in 1996, but in the ensuing controversy, Starr gave up the appointment in 1998.

That same year Scaife's friend and Pittsburgh attorney, E. Yale Gutnick, denied that there was any connection between Scaife and Starr:

I can tell you unequivocally that there is absolutely no linkage between Scaife and Starr in any way, shape or form. Had Ken Starr's picture not been all over the television and newspapers in recent weeks, I don't think Dick Scaife would recognize him at a social event. They have never communicated, they have never seen each other personally, and there's no relationship whatsoever.
Dick Scaife has been involved with Pepperdine I think before Clinton became governor of Arkansas, and clearly long before he was president and before the special prosecutor ever was even a dream in anybody's imagination. His giving to Pepperdine has been consistent over the years and it's been generous. [10]

However, once the investigation was behind him, Starr was appointed to head Pepperdine's law school in 2004.

Political donations

According to campaignmoney.com, from 1999 through 2006, Scaife has, under the name "R. Scaife," made 10 contributions of over $200 to political campaigns, for a total of $19,000. Under the name "R.M. Scaife" he made 4 donations, for a total of $22,000. Under the name Richard Scaife, he made 23 donations over this period, for a total of $142,904. Besides donations to the Republican National Committee and various political campaigns such as Santorum 2000 and the Santorum Victory Committee for Rick Santorum, he has also supported Political Action Committees such as the Pro-Growth Action Team, the Free Congress PAC (formerly: Committee For the Survival Of a Free Congress), and the Club For Growth Inc. PAC.

Business

Purchase of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

He later purchased the Tribune-Review of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, near Ligonier where he lives east of Pittsburgh. With Scaife as publisher, the small circulation newspaper was the chief packager of editorials and news columns claiming that then United States President William J. Clinton or his wife, then First Lady Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of Deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Scaife paid freelancer Christopher Ruddy to write about the Foster case for the Tribune Review and other right-leaning media. Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, appointed to investigate Clinton, concluded that Foster committed suicide.[11],

The late John F. Kennedy, Jr. interviewed him for his magazine George shortly before Kennedy's death in an air crash.

In one 1981 incident, when Karen Rothmyer, a reporter for The Nation, attempted to interview Scaife for a series in the Columbia Journalism Review on his financial support of the "New Right," she wrote that he responded by calling her a "fucking Communist cunt" and telling her to "get out of here." Rothmyer claimed the rest of the five-minute interview transpired at a rapid trot down a city street, during which Scaife tried to hail a taxi. Rothmyer wrote that Scaife said her teeth were "terrible," and after she thanked Scaife for his time, he called her and her mother "ugly" and issued a veiled threat, telling her "Don't look behind you."[12]

Scaife denies the incident.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review leadership

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review continues to challenge the Post-Gazette in the Pittsburgh media market. Twelve years after Scaife's newspaper began publishing, the Post-Gazette reported major financial losses, and the unions representing its employees agreed to wage concessions to keep it afloat. According to the Audit Board of Circulation, the Trib has a combined 221,000 regional circulation, about 7,000 subscribers fewer than its competitor.

In 2005 the paper announced that operations of its suburban editions would be consolidated, with "staff reductions" in the newsrooms, business, and circulation departments. [13] Two managers were laid off immediately along with several other staff members later in 2005.

Philanthropy

Management of the Scaife family foundations

When Scaife refocused his political giving away from individuals and toward anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications, the first among these was the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.

Through contacts made at Hoover and elsewhere, Scaife became a major, early supporter of the Heritage Foundation, which has since become one of Washington's most influential public policy research institutes. Later, he supported such varied conservative and libertarian organizations as:

By 1998 his foundations were listed among donors to over 100 such groups, to which he had disbursed some $340 million by 2002.

Other philanthropic support

Scaife is identified with his contributions to conservative and libertarian causes — The Washington Post dubbed him "funding father of the Right" in 1999. However, he has also supported policy research groups which are not explicitly conservative, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, among others.

Scaife has also been a major donor to abortion rights advocates, including Planned Parenthood, giving "millions" to the organization, according to The Washington Post [14].

In the late 1990s, during the height of the Clinton scandals, Scaife nevertheless continued to provide more than $1 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the prime benefactor of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). His donations to restore and beautify the White House led to an invitation by Hillary Clinton for a black-tie celebration. She warmly received him and posed for a photograph on the same day her husband's sex scandal hit the press [15].

Scaife told the New York Post that he appreciated Mrs. Clinton's invitation. "I'm honored," he said. "Lord knows, it's more than I got from George Bush."[16]

Scaife supports other non-political groups and is a key benefactor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Sarah Scaife Galleries at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh art museum, the Brandywine Conservancy, the Phipps Conservatory, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as well as Goodwill Industries of Pittsburgh. He and his foundations have contributed to Sarah Scaife's favorite causes: population control (e.g. Planned Parenthood), environmental conservation, and hospitals — Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine in a Sarah Scaife-funded laboratory. He also supports a variety of educational institutions, notably the University of Chicago, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Rochester, Smith College, and Bowling Green State University.

References

  • Baer, John M. "Hardly a Right-Wing Cause He Can Refuse," Philadelphia Daily News.
  • Bellant, Russ The Coors Connection: How Coors family philanthropy undermines democratic pluralism, (Boston: South End Press, 1991), covering the related political funding activities of Coors family.
  • Bello, Marisol, "Another Voice in Town," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Dec. 1, 2002.
  • Kaiser, Robert G. "Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife," Washington Post, 3 May 1999.
  • Kaiser, Robert G. and Chinoy, Ira. "Scaife: Funding Father of the Right," Washington Post, May 2, 1999.
  • Kennedy, John F., Jr. and Scaife, Richard Mellon. "Who's Afraid of Richard Mellon Scaife? JFK, Jr. Interviews Richard Mellon Scaife," George magazine, January 1999.
  • Richard Mellon Scaife profile at NNDB.
  • Rothmyer, Karen. "The man behind the mask," Salon.com, April 1998.
  • Rothmyer, Karen. "Citizen Scaife," abridged excerpt from Vetter, Herbert F., ed.Speak Out Against the New Right (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982).
  • Saloma III, John S. Ominous Politics: the new conservative labyrinth, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984).
  • Savage, David G. "Richard Scaife: A 'Savior' of Right, a Scourge of Left," Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1998.
  • http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05361/628424.stm "Tribune-Review publisher's wife charged with trespass," Pittsburgh Post Gazette, December 27, 2005.

See also

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