When David Brock, author of “Blinded by the Right,” stepped into the Crossfire, bullets zinged between him and host Tucker Carlson over comments in Brock’s book, including those about the bow-tied conservative Carlson himself.
CARLSON: I read your book, every page. I could give you my take on it. But let me quote Tim Noah from “Slate” magazine. Tim is hardly a member of the right-wing conspiracy. He say, I’m quoting now, “This book is terrible, whiny, histrionic, and so factually unreliable that I gave practically gave myself a migraine trying to figure out which parts of Brock’s lurid story were true and which parts were false.”
Thomas is not just a member of the conservative block of Supreme Court justices. He is, without doubt, the most conservative justice, willing to regularly strike down long-accepted case law that has been in place for decades, in some cases for as much as a century.
He is the only justice willing to allow states to establish an official religion; the only justice who believes teenagers have no free speech rights at all; the only justice who believes that it is unconstitutional to require campaign funders to disclose their identity; the only justice who believes that truthful tobacco advertising and other commercial speech may not be regulated, even when it is aimed at minors; the only justice who voted to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act; the only justice to say that the court should invalidate a wide range of laws regulating business; and he is the only justice who voted to allow the president to hold American citizens in prison indefinitely without charge and without review by the courts.
“Slumdog Millionaire” took home eight Oscars on Sunday night, a surprising achievement for a film once thought to be straight-to-DVD fodder.
The colorful story, which mixes the gritty life of Mumbai’s poor with the shiny aspirations of the new India, features no stars recognizable to Western audiences, but it may have made one of its native country.
So, is it time for Bollywood — as India’s huge Mumbai-based film industry is called — to come to America?
“International cinema comes in cycles in the United States,” said Frank Lovece, a film critic with Film Journal International. “Now, it’s Bollywood’s time.”
British actress Indira Varma has landed the starring role in the ABC drama project, from writer Richard E. Robbins and executive producer Shonda Rhimes.
Meanwhile, Gina Torres has joined CBS’ drama pilot “Washington Field,” and David Giuntoli has joined CBS’ U.S. Attorney drama pilot.
“Box” is set at a Washington network news bureau and revolves around Catherine (Varma), an ambitious news producer, and her colleagues, who pursue the story at all costs, juggling personal animosities and crises of conscience along with the daily deadlines of a nightly news show.
Catherine is fast-talking, whip-smart and wound a little too tight for her own good. She runs the news bureau and thinks she finally is getting a promotion, but she is passed over.
Mark Tinker is directing the pilot, which is being executive produced by Robbins, Rhimes and Betsy Beers.
Varma is best known for her role as Niobe on the HBO/BBC drama series “Rome.”
The actress, who also co-starred on the CBS miniseries “Comanche Moon,” is repped by Affirmative and U.K.’s Gordon and French.
“Washington Field,” from CBS Par, revolves around an FBI squad made up of experts who travel the world responding to crises that concern U.S. national interests. Torres (“Don’t Let Me Drown”) will play the rapid-deployment team coordinator and tactical pilot. She is with Domain and Framework.
David Brock, the reformed conservative noise-maker, on how the Right has sabotaged journalism, democracy, and truth.
Mother Jones 9/1/2004 By Bradford Plumer
As a young journalist in the 1990s, David Brock was a key cog the Republican noise machine. Writing for the American Spectator, a conservative magazine funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, Brock gained fame for his attack pieces on Anita Hill and President Bill Clinton. Then, in 2002, Brock came clean. In his memoir, Blinded by the Right, Brock admitted that his work was based on lies and distortion, and part of a coordinated smear campaign funded by wealthy right wing groups to discredit Clinton and confuse the public.
Since then, Brock has continued to expose the conservative media onslaught. In his newest book, The Republican Noise Machine, Brock documents how right-wing groups pressure the media and spread misinformation to the public. It’s easy to see how this is done. Fringe conspiracies and stories will be kept alive by outlets like Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, and the Drudge Report, until they finally break into the mainstream media. Well-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation overwhelm news reporters with distorted statistics and conservative spin. Mainstream cable news channels employ staunchly rightwing pundits — like Pat Buchanan and Sean Hannity — to twist facts and echo Republican talking points, all under the rubric of “balance.” Meanwhile, media groups like Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center have spent 30 years convincing the public that the media is, in fact, liberal. As Brock says, it’s all a sham: “I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.”
Not content to merely complain, Brock launched Media Matters for America in May, a media watchdog organization devoted to exposing rightwing distortions in the news, and to chart undue conservative influence in the media.
Brock recently chatted with MotherJones.com about Media Matters, Swift Boat Vets, convention coverage, and the conservative stranglehold on the media.
MotherJones.com: What’s your impression of the campaign coverage so far?
David Brock: I’ve been interested in watching the level of conservative misinformation that circulates through the media. Now before Media Matters launched, I talked for quite some time in my book about the last election, where certain messages and themes would start in the Republican Party and then get into the media. The Republicans knew they couldn’t win on the issues in 2000, so they developed an explicit strategy to attack Gore’s character — and that ultimately seemed to have worked. If you looked at the exit polls from 2000 you see that on all the issues — even on taxes — voters preferred Gore and his policies, but the election was lost on the issues of trust and integrity. So it has always been my working theory that the same thing would happen this year, no matter who the candidate was.
MJ.com: So when did the “Republican noise machine” start attacking John Kerry?
DB: Well, it seemed to me that, in the first few months leading up to the Democratic National Convention, the conservative attack machine was very busy trying to shore up President Bush and hadn’t really turned its guns on John Kerry. Then during the spring, after it was clear that Kerry would be the nominee, I think they were still throwing various things at him and kind of hoping that something would stick and didn’t really find anything.
MJ.com: And with the Swift Boat story, they’ve finally found something.
DB: Right. I think the dynamic that has unfolded for the last three weeks is one that is very familiar to me, resembling the worst of the anti-Clinton activities that I was involved in. Back then, we were able to create a so-called story that had a lot of political motivation behind it, had partisan money behind it, and we were able to take that and get a lot of attention for it in explicitly conservative media — on radio talk shows, on internet sites like the Drudge Report. Eventually the story would spill over into the regular media.
I think the exact same thing has happened in the last three weeks, whereby a supposedly outside group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had been working as early as the spring, through a rather small ad buy and book published by Regnery –a publisher, note, that has the worst record in terms of putting out books filled with falsehoods. Then the group was able to get a lot of free media time for it — first starting on the internet and radio, then moving to cable shows like Fox, and finally getting into the New York Times and NBC News. And so you have something that has very little basis in fact spreading like a virus, and it’s creating doubt about Kerry’s character that didn’t seem to be there in the polls until very recently.
MJ.com: Now to me, it seems like some of the newspapers — the New York Times, the Washington Post — have actually been dissecting some of these claims. Does it seem like the mainstream media is no longer willing to follow conservative talking points quite so blindly?
DB: Well more so in this case than in the case of Gore, when there were either quotes made up and put in his mouth that he never said or quotes taken out of context like his Internet remarks. And it’s nothing like the coverage in the mainstream media of Whitewater. So it does seem in this case that the regular media has been trying to play the role of adjudicator of fact. Unfortunately, that didn’t really come about until the Swift Boat Vets had the conservative media echo chamber to themselves for about 10 days.
So when the newspapers finally got around to it, they found that by and large the charges don’t check out. But it seems like a losing battle in the sense that there’s so much noise about all this. You get to a point where the factual adjudication doesn’t matter because there are all these other outlets that are far less responsible, all talking about the ad, some of which have a political reason for promoting it.
MJ.com: So it’s no longer about who’s right, but who can scream the loudest?
DB: Sure. You can’t fault some of the reporting in the major papers. But there are so many sources and information, particularly with the internet, that stories like the Swift Boat ads take on a life of their own. The New York Times has much less authority nowadays when they say we don’t find the charges valid. So that’s the effect of what the conservatives have built up in terms of their ability to communicate a message that they want out there.
Part of it comes from this phony notion of balance — that we need to hear all sides of a story, and that everyone’s entitled to express their opinion. Conservatives have tried to write all this off by saying who can be against their right to say what they want to say? Of course, nobody’s against their right to say they don’t think John Kerry would be fit to command. But to make specific allegations and then have no records to back them up is a significant problem. And the viewer and casual radio listener may not be reading the 7000-word dissection in the Washington Post. So you’ve got two medias going on. And I know from my involvement in the anti-Clinton stuff that often the goal is just to confuse people, and to take the political opponent off his or her game, and to not let them talk about what they want to talk about. All those things seemed to have been achieved here. Even if at the end of the day the whole thing is viewed as a hoax, by the time we get there, the election may be over.
MJ.com: Turning to the Republican convention, what will Media Matters be paying attention to?
DB: We’re tracking TV coverage, for one. We did a study of cable coverage of the Democratic Convention and found that CNN and MSNBC made close to the same decisions about how much time they would devote to the speeches, while Fox decided to hold less live coverage. We’re eager to see whether Fox will allot the same time for Republicans, or whether they decide to devote more time because of the ideological composition of their audience.
MJ.com: I noticed Media Matters was wondering whether CNN would have a Democratic operative to speak on TV after each Republican speaker.
DB: Right, during the Democratic Convention, after Senator Edwards spoke, they switched to Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. And right after John Kerry spoke, they went to Ed Gillespie, [chairman of the Republican National Committee]. So we’re looking to see whether CNN will give time to Terry McAuliffe or another Democratic operative to come on and rebut Bush after he speaks.
MJ.com: Do you think that the Kerry campaign might not be as adept at using the media to its advantage?
DB: I do think you have to hand it to the Republicans in terms of their ability to work the media and to get the media to do what they want it to do. That ranges from having a more disciplined delivery system to actually voicing complaints about the media. As you may have noticed, former president Bush was bashing the New York Times in an interview on Monday, and Rudy Giuliani disparaged the media in his speech.
The Democrats seem to shy away from taking on the media in that way. If the Republicans were in Kerry’s position, facing a smear ad being given free airtime and uncritical coverage, they would be kicking and screaming about holding the media accountable. That doesn’t go on with the Democrats, I think partly because they have subconsciously accepted this critique that the media’s liberal. So maybe they feel that they’re going to get a fair shake. But in reality, there are a lot of biases in the media that trump whatever ideology reporters may hold. In the Swift Boat Case, the media is biased towards airing a dramatic story — and in this case, you’ve got a bunch of angry veterans, some dramatic accusations. It makes for good TV.
MJ.com: In addition to the Republican party, you’ve talked about a lot of well-financed conservative groups — think-tanks, media advocacy firms — that can influence media coverage. What role are they going to play in this election?
DB: Well, the conservative Media Research Center is planning to spend $2.8 million in an advertising campaign before the election, basically to attack the so-called liberal media. Their goal is to bully and intimidate the media, and it’s been very effective, because in a lot of newsrooms there’s concern shading into fear of being seen as liberal, and these reporters end up accommodating conservatism. It was particularly noticeable after 9/11 when the Media Research Center had a direct mail campaign promising to target network anchors and producers who were deemed insufficiently supportive of Bush’s aims in the war on terror. Those kinds of activities do end up coloring the coverage, and partly explains why questions about the war in Iraq weren’t asked at the time. There was a symposium of network anchors at Harvard back in July, and a panel was discussing rightwing pressure on the media, and how it causes people to think twice or not be as aggressive as their journalistic integrity would otherwise lead them to be.
So part of the idea behind Media Matters was to try to balance that criticism and pressure from the progressive side. You simply can’t have 90 percent of email and phone and fax traffic coming into a newspaper ombudsman from just one ideological perspective. That will inevitably change the culture of the institutions over time. So if we could empower progressives to voice their own concerns about what they’re seeing, over time you might get a 50-50 balance in terms of pressure, and that would give us a better product.
MJ.com: What sort of impact do you expect Media Matters will have on the media?
DB: I’ll tell you about one short-term effect we’ve had. One of the central ideas behind the organization was to capture the content of the top talk radio show hosts in the country. Radio content is never captured and catalogued in a systematic way, so there’s no way to hold radio show hosts accountable for their words. But on the week we launched, the Abu Ghraib prison photos were released, and we had our system in place to record and professionally transcribe Rush Limbaugh’s reaction. So we were able to catch a whole string of comments in which he said that torture was a brilliant maneuver and compared the abuse to a college fraternity prank. It was offensive across the board, and showed how out of the mainstream Limbaugh is. That got a lot of attention, Limbaugh spent time defending himself, and in the end, there was legislation introduced in the Senate because of it. Basically, Limbaugh broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio and Television Services — which is a taxpayer funded service — and he’s the only partisan host to get a full hour of time. So we started a position to get him pulled off the air and stop propagandizing our troops, and the new legislation that passed in the Senate will at least force the broadcasts to offer opposing points of view.
We have other goals that might be harder to measure. One of the things that conservatives have successfully done over the years is to anesthetize people to the fact that they are extreme. Limbaugh has engaged in a process of mainstreaming himself, to the point where during the November 2002 election, NBC News had Limbaugh on as an election night analyst. But when we monitor his show, we find that he’s the same old Limbaugh, making racist and sexist comments on his program every day. It’s possible that NBC doesn’t even know what goes on in his show, so by hiring him, everybody just accepts the fact that he’s a leading conservative and he should be on mainstream television. We want to reverse that mainstreaming process and let people understand exactly who these conservative pundits really are.
Also, when we correct misinformation that’s out there, we make an effort to deliver these corrections to people debating on TV. For example, we did some original research on the co-author of the Swift Boat book, Jerome Corsi, and we found that he had made all these bigoted postings to a rightwing website. So we try to deliver that to people, let people know that’s out there, and in this case we saw a lot of pundits who were debating the book and saying maybe that’s something we should consider when we’re weighing the credibility of the book. So that has an impact.
In the longer term, we want to ask whether its possible for those people we’re monitoring to be more responsible. Take the case of Bill O’Reilly, who probably has the highest rate of false statements of anybody that we monitor in the media. O’Reilly was on Tim Russert’s show with Paul Krugman a few weeks ago. Krugman was able to go to our website, get transcripts of O’Reilly’s radio show, and hold O’Reilly accountable for things he had previously said. O’Reilly knew exactly where those transcripts came from, because we’re the only ones who are doing that, and he blew his top. Now the question is, if O’Reilly knows he’s being monitored, will that induce him to be more careful? Right now, we’re too young to really know. Our role is to let his listeners know that they’re getting information that is incorrect. Over time we’re trying to reduce the impact of the false information on people who are making decisions about what policies and candidates they support.
MJ.com: What do you think viewers of the convention should be watching out for?
DB: The main thing is to look for the susceptibility of the mainstream media to adapt storylines that are advancing the agenda of the conservatives. For example, one of the emerging themes from the Republican camp seems to be that, because Kerry talked about his Vietnam record at his convention, somehow he induced or invited people to make up lies about him. Over time this is how conventional wisdom gels in the media, and before you know it, it will have been Kerry’s fault that he was the subject of a vicious and false attack. Those are the kinds of things people should be looking for and be very careful and concerned about.
In typical “liberal press” style, publications like “Salon” and the “Washington Post” have taken potshots at David Brock’s new book, “Blinded by the Right,” and questioned the motives of the author. It’s all too typical of the flaccid, overwrought efforts of the allegedly “liberal media” to bend over backwards to eat their own.
The right-wing Republican media pundits march in lock step behind books that bolster their political goals. The average so-called “liberal press” book reviewers usually run around trying to eat their own tails in a misguided attempt to prove that they are being “fair.”
What results, of course, is just the opposite. In the case of David Brock’s new book, the criticisms from the so-called “liberal media” (with the exception of a few publications, such as the “New Yorker”) are a grave injustice to the book and to Brock.
“Blinded by the Right” provides an insider’s account into the right-wing conspiracy that attempted to entrap and impeach a democratically elected President of the United States. The seminal book “Hunting of the President,” by Jon Conason and Gene Lyons, provides the definitive account of the strategy that the right-wing used, beginning before Clinton was even elected, to stalk and entrap a President. “Blinded by the Right” fills in and confirms the details, as Brock explains his own personal transformation from eager journalistic “hit man” to repentant confessor. In the process, we learn that even federal judges at the highest level were willing participants in the Clinton character assassination and entrapment strategy.
July 2, 2001 — Journalist David Brock, whose 1993 book attacked the credibility of law professor Anita Hill, now says he printed lies about Hill following her testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. In an exclusive interview, NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg talks to Brock about the confession, detailed in a forthcoming book.
Brock now says that, when he was writing for the conservative magazine The American Spectator and researching his book The Real Anita Hill, he was a tool of right wing activists who fed him false information about Hill. At the time, Brock tells Totenberg, he accepted the truthfulness of the information without checking. But he since has learned he helped spread lies, he says, and is trying to set the record straight in a memoir due out next month. Brock tells Totenberg he even tried to contact Hill in 1998 to apologize, but ultimately “didn’t have the guts” to talk to her.
From the time he arrived in Washington in 1986, David Brock sought refuge in the bosom of the conservative movement. Smart, ambitious and tightly wound, he struggled to balance his life as a closeted gay man with the friendships of political and media warriors — some of whom, he says, would make anti-gay remarks.
When his career imploded and the right abandoned him, Brock lost more than his professional footing. The social life he had constructed for himself unraveled
In his new book, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” Brock writes about his seduction and eventual excommunication by the conservative movement.
Brock was online to discuss his book, his career and today’s Washington Post article Right and Wrong(Post, Feb. 26, 2002).
A transcript follows.
Editor’s Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Alexandria, Va.: I’m a big believer that the “vast right wing conspiracy” is a lame defense used by Hillary Clinton and her left wing, liberal friends to excuse the deplorable behavior of her husband. Do you have any “inside” info on this supposed “conspiracy?”
David Brock: Hillary Clinton was right that there was well-organized, heavily financed right-wing conspiracy that was determined to drive Clinton from office. In the book, I write quite a bit about how the conspiracy worked from the inside, because I was recruited into it by a financier of Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC during the 1992 presidential campaign. The conspiracy came to center on the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit; her key legal adviser admitted to me in a private conversation that he did not believe Jones but wanted to use her allegations as a way of setting a perjury trap for Clinton. I think if you read the book you’ll see that the right-wing conspiracy is laid out in such detail that it is hard to deny.
Dupont, Washington, D.C.: The word in the glbt community is that you were “pushed” out of the right when they found out you were gay — not really a change in philosophy at all as much as the end of a marriage of convenience. If you hadn’t been “outed,” wouldn’t you still be there?
David Brock: Actually, the conservatives found out that I was gay when I outed myself in the Washington Post in early 1994 just after publishing the Troopergate article. There were no negative repercussions for my career in the right-wing; in fact, many prominent conservatives came to my defense. They were willing to tolerate the fact that I was gay because I was forwarding their agenda. Only when I deviated ideologically later in 1996, as I was breaking with them politically, did I begin to hear anti-gay remarks that must have reflected their true sentiments all along.
Washington, D.C.: Admittedly, there are undoubtably “excesses” on the conservative side of politics. But isn’t the liberal side just as bad? Why favor one over the other? They are both pretty scummy.
David Brock: My book is about more than the excesses of politics as usual. The campaign of character assassination waged by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the internet & Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left.
Macon, Ga.: What is your opinion of Ann Coulter?
David Brock: Ann is an illustration of how a certain kind of virulent right-wing politics is based on emotion, not reason. Almost to a one, I found that the most hateful voices on the right were venting their own deep-seated problems and frustrations.
Ethical query: Interesting topic. According to the article, you made quite a bit of money from your previous right-wing work, which you’ve now repudiated. Do you have any plans to atone for profiting from your previous falsehoods? It’s not like you can give the money back, but I can’t see another book as the answer, since — and I make a good living as a writer, so I’m sympathetic — the new book is both a way of publicly recanting your former position and making more royalties.
I hope you take this, as I’m really interested in the answer.
David Brock: Well, since I am a writer, and I found myself in the middle of an amazing story, I don’t know how else I could tell it without writing it down in book form. If this was about making money, I would have stayed in the right-wing & given them the hatchet job book they wanted on Hillary Clinton. I anticipate giving as much of the royalties on this current book as I can to charities or causes that reflect my beliefs and values.
Vienna, Va.: You say now you were lying then. How do we know you’re not lying now?
David Brock: My book is truthful and I think that any fair-minded reader will reach that conclusion. But I acknowledge that it is a difficult issue. I had two choices. One was to keep quiet about the problems in my past work and move on. The other was to admit what I did & correct the record. I think the second path is the more credible.
Burke, Va.: I’m still intrigued by what motivated Paula Jones. Was it politics, money, or sincerity?
From your vantage point, do you think she was sincere in her allegations?
David Brock: I can’t really speak to Paula Jones’ motivations, but I document in the book exactly how she was manipulated by conservative advisers into suing Clinton. So the case was politically motivated. As to the merits of her allegations, I think the court that threw out her case was definitive.
Pacific, Wash.: I understand that you have stated an apology to him, but in your view, what, specifically, in your reporting on former President Clinton still stands as being true and what do you believe stands as not being true?
David Brock: I can’t stand by the piece that I apologized for, Troopergate, as being accurate. The troopers were later paid off for having talked to me and two of them recanted what they told me when put under oath in the Jones case. Your question prompts me to raise a wider point: It is not only my own writing on Clinton that was deeply flawed. Much of what the right put out about Clinton in the 90s was flatly untrue. The Spectator published fabrications under several by lines, not just mine. There are a lot of people who owe apologies and need to come clean.
Kensington, Md.: I just wanted to say “Thank You.” I myself once used to be a tool of the evil right wing (not that the left is much better). I am happy to see that there are others who finally decided enough is enough. Thank you David, don’t let anyone bring you down. You courage is an example for others.
David Brock: Thanks for your encouragement. I wonder how many other ex-conservatives there are out there?
Arlington, Va.: “Nothing like it exists on the left?” Come now, Mr. Brock, I think the late John Tower would disagree with you quite a bit as would Bob Packwood. Do not attribute the motives of those who opposed Bill Clinton as being motivated by hatred, bigotry, etc. That is the usual canard hoisted by the PC police of the left when they want to discredit their opponents without resorting to serious argument. I could have cared less what Clinton did in his private life but when one is sworn in court to tell the truth one must do so regardless of what one thinks are the merits of the suit.
David Brock: John Tower was brought down by Paul Weyrich, a leader of the New Right & a pioneer in the sexual McCarthyism of the right. Packwood, of course, was undone by his own actions, which were exposed in the mainstream press. I lived among the Clinton-haters for years, and I can assure you that my portrait of them is not a canard. The major Clinton-haters in Arkansas were segregationists & hated Clinton for his progressive record on race.
Arlington, Va.: I haven’t noticed the LA Times publishing any retractions to their story on Troopergate which closely followed yours. And how would you characterize Christopher Hitchens — another right-wing hit man? As to the allegation that the left has no similar “attack” structure, exactly what was Sid Blumenthal’s job in the White House except as to function in exactly that role?
David Brock: Most journalists never admit they were wrong. The Los Angeles Times made many of the mistakes that I did.
I don’t know what Sidney’s job was at the White House, but if it involved disseminating the truth about the right-wing’s operations, I don’t think that is the kind of “attack structure” I’m referring to. The “attack structure” of the right has no regard for the truth of an allegation so long as it is politically useful.
As for Hitchens, I have a section on him in the book that is too long to summarize here.
Massanutten, Va.: David — My personal background is much like yours in that I was adopted, long-closeted, and drawn at one time to the homophobic ideology of the right-wing political movement. Do you think your involvement with the right was in some way an effort to deny or repress your homosexuality, or perhaps to “atone” for it? Good luck with the book — I’ll have to read it soon.
David Brock: Yes, in my own personal experience as well as those of others I knew, one of the things that drove my extremism was as compensation for the fact that I was gay in a movement that was hostile to gays. I was openly gay in college then reverted to the closet as I rose through conservative ranks. At a certain point, I even began to resent being gay because I saw it as an impediment to career success on the right. That anger came through in my work I’m afraid.
Fundamental question: Why did you do it? I couldn’t complete a piece if I knew I was lying. Certainly not if I had to put my name on it.
David Brock: Most of my work I did from conviction as I was doing it and only later realized how flawed it was. The one conscious lie I told in print was in a review I wrote of Jill Abramson’s and Jane Mayer’s about the Thomas-Hill hearings called “Strange Justice.” They reported on Thomas’s penchant for pornography. Even though I knew this was true, I covered it up in the review to protect Thomas, and the conservative cause. Also, I was so wrapped up in my identity as Thomas’s chief defender doing anything else (such as revealing the truth about him) would have caused me to come apart.
College Park, Md.: I have yet to read your book, but at least from the article today and from various reports of your exploits over the years, a few obvious questions leap out:
– Assuming we are all works-in-progress, how do you feel about where you are in your evolution as a person, and how much have you been able to integrate facets of your personality — intellectual, political, spiritual, sexual, etc. — that were previously compartmentalized?
– What have you learned about yourself in terms of your morals and ambitions? (i.e. what price is too high to get what you want?)
– What do you ultimately hope to accomplish as a person? (And I’m not speaking professionally, I’m speaking in terms of the sum total of your being.)
P.S. I wish you peace and happiness (finally)!
David Brock: I think I’m running out of time here so I’ll give a brief answer to a long & very thoughtful question. It’s only since coming out of the right wing that I’ve been able to see beyond partisan politics and careerism to what’s really important in life. I was living in a mutual use society and as a result never learned what true friendship is, or how to give rather than take. As you say, self-discovery is something that happens every day if we are open to it. With the blinders off and the anger gone, now I am. As for future accomplishments, I’ve struggled for a long time to find a complete sense of self and to find my values. If I can live them every day, I’ll be happy.
David Brock: There were so many great questions I went several minutes over my time limit. Thanks to everyone for participating.
Richard Mellon Scaife, billionaire bankroller of conservative crusades, spent heavily to expose Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” misbehavior. Now Scaife’s divorce from his second wife, Ritchie, is providing another unsavory saga—adultery! addiction! assault! dognapping!?!—as both parties let loose to V.F.
Vanity Fair February 2008 by Michael Joseph Gross
Over many years, in the five households the couple shared, the wife hired scores of servants to help take care of her rich husband. Then, in 2005, she hired someone to tail him. Margaret Ritchie Rhea Battle Scaife (whose friends call her Ritchie) suspected Richard Mellon Scaife (whose friends call him Dick) of committing adultery, so she enlisted the services of an investigator. It was a private act that would have very public consequences. Richard Mellon Scaife is the best-known living member of Pittsburgh’s storied Mellon clan, whose eponymous bank made the family a 19th-century fortune, which grew steadily with diversified investments, including major coal, steel, and real-estate interests, and Gulf Oil Corporation. Scaife, who owns several newspapers, is a major backer of conservative causes; his political donations fueled the rise of the New Right and its moral crusade against Bill Clinton, making Scaife the central figure in Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.” In the 1990s, his gift of $1.8 million to The American Spectator funded investigations into Whitewater and Bill Clinton’s personal life, including David Brock’s notorious “Troopergate” exposé, which led to Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against the president.
Ritchie and Richard Mellon Scaife’s 2005 Christmas card. Even as the holiday greetings went out, a private detective was confirming Ritchie’s suspicions.
In December of 2005, the private detective proved Ritchie’s fears to have been well founded: he took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug’s Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.
Dick and Ritchie’s relationship, which began when they were married to other people, was always unconventional. During their decade-long courtship, Dick bought Ritchie a house in Pittsburgh’s wealthy Shadyside neighborhood, a few blocks from his own—a domestic arrangement that didn’t change when they were married, in 1991. Yet they moved easily back and forth between the homes until, the week after Ritchie discovered Dick’s betrayal, a servant refused to let Ritchie enter her husband’s Georgian mansion—and Ritchie saw Vasco’s Jeep parked in the garage. Ritchie demanded to be let in, banging on windows and doors. Dick called the police, who told Ritchie she was trespassing and had to leave.
She got in her car, drove to a neighbor’s driveway, then crept back to Dick’s dining-room window (inside, the table was set with candelabras for a “romantic dinner”), hoping to document her husband’s dalliance by using the camera on her cell phone. But when she set off the security lights in the yard, the police handcuffed her and charged her with “defiant trespass.” The 60-year-old socialite spent that night—three days before Christmas—in a holding cell at the Allegheny County Jail, where her fellow prisoners passed the time by petting the fur collar of her coat.
Ritchie was released the next morning, and the defiant-trespass charge was eventually dismissed. But as her lawyer announced several months later in a divorce filing, “The marriage was over!”
Some details of the Scaifes’ split were reported in local newspapers (the first account appeared in Richard Scaife’s own paper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), but the legal filings were sealed by the court. Then, last August, owing to an apparent clerical error, the filings were posted on a court Web page. Poring over them, Dennis Roddy, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—the city’s oldest newspaper, and the liberal rival to Scaife’s conservative Tribune-Review—disclosed previously unknown financial details about Richard Scaife’s $1.4 billion fortune and about Ritchie’s jaw-dropping, court-ordered interim support payments of $725,000 a month. (This stream of income, Scaife’s lawyers noted, “produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5%, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States.” Unconfirmed reports suggest that Ritchie’s interim monthly payments have since increased, to more than $1 million.) The Post-Gazette posted the court documents on its own Web site; locals took rooting interest in the story’s many subplots (alleged hair-pulling fights with the help, dognapping, and battles royal over a 94-page itemized list of art and objets, from a million-dollar Magritte to an $1,800 set of asparagus tongs), which almost make one pray for Aaron Spelling’s resurrection from the dead.
What, exactly, is at stake in the war of Scaife versus Scaife? Money, to be sure. Astonishingly, the Scaifes were married without a pre-nuptial agreement, so Pennsylvania statutes automatically entitle Ritchie to 40 percent of Dick’s net monthly income, but only until the divorce is final. Ritchie won’t have any legal claim on the core of Dick’s inherited wealth—but she is entitled to claim part of the appreciation in value of most of the assets he held during their marriage. According to Pennsylvania law, “marital misconduct” does not affect the equitable division of property in a divorce. Instead, settlements are determined by factors such as length of marriage, income disparity between spouses, employability, and “liabilities and needs of each of the parties.” Ritchie, who spent the better part of 14 years running Dick’s households, has a comparatively minuscule income of her own (and, as a 60-year-old, has less than stellar employment prospects), which might incline a judge to give her a hefty settlement. State guidelines for distribution of assets in a divorce are so broad, though, as to make it impossible to predict such decisions. Albert Momjian, a leading Philadelphia divorce lawyer, says that out-of-court settlements are usually preferable where fortunes are in play. In a case like Dick and Ritchie’s, he says, “so much depends on the reasonableness of the parties.”
Reputations are also at stake, and Ritchie, Dick, and their respective defenders are squaring off with rival narratives. In the first interviews he has given in eight years, Richard Scaife spoke with Vanity Fair about the divorce saga, depicting his estranged wife as conniving, greedy, and abusive. Through one of her attorneys, William Pietragallo II, Ritchie Scaife at first declined to be interviewed. On her behalf the lawyer told a simple story of “a woman scorned,” a “very supportive and caring” wife who saved a husband from his “demons,” only to be thrown over for a harlot.
Later, Ritchie changed her mind and agreed to what turned out to be a long and highly animated interview. Seated between Pietragallo and another of her attorneys, Eddie Hayes (the model for the scrappy defense lawyer in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities), Ritchie described a marriage that swung between emotional extremes, from the days when “I always called him ‘my snuggle bunny’ … and he called me his ‘precious’ ” to the public embarrassments brought on by their breakup, which she compares to “the tortures of the damned.”
The estranged couple and their intimates aren’t the only ones with an interest in this divorce. Richard Mellon Scaife is the man who funded the movement that made “family values” a watchword of the right and badly damaged the Clinton presidency. Many would now dearly love to hang him in the gallery of hypocrites whose Dickensian comeuppance exposes the moral bankruptcy of the culture wars.
The Angora Sweater
Richard Mellon Scaife is an uncommonly boyish 75-year-old, with riveting pale-blue eyes and a sharp, lopsided grin that brings to mind Jack Nicholson’s wily poise and Paul Lynde’s smirking bitterness. An enthusiastic conversationalist, he comes across as more intuitive than intellectual, and he can be candid about his own blind spots. Asked whether a book has ever changed his life, he thinks a moment, shrugs, and, with a disarming smile, answers, “I guess the quick answer to that question is ‘No!’ ”
Two hours later, in the course of the same interview, without a hint of guile or self-awareness, he abruptly names John O’Hara as his favorite writer, and Appointment in Samarra as his favorite book. Appointment in Samarra is the story of a rich young man who yields to the temptation of his most self-sabotaging urges—but whose private fear of judgment and retribution for his rashness drives him to a self-destruction that neither he nor anyone who knows him ever fully understands. (And the rich young man is from Pennsylvania.)
Scaife’s charm has an odd sweetness to it (he recalls a period of unhappiness when his favorite TV show, The Simpsons, began running at the same time as Lou Dobbs, who took precedence), but he also takes petty swipes (his favorite characters on The Simpsons, he says, are Marge’s cynical and trashy sisters, Patty and Selma, “because they remind me of Ritchie”). A curvature of the spine gives Scaife a shuffling gait, and since undergoing cochlear-implant surgery he has worn two bulky, high-tech hearing aids. But he remains a courtly presence in bespoke suits and with impeccably groomed snow-white hair.
Dick and his sister, Cordelia, spent most of their formative years in the gilded cage of Penguin Court, a family estate in Ligonier that was designed by an architect better known for building prisons. The gloom of the mansion was compounded by the family’s isolation from Pittsburgh’s larger Mellon clan: Sarah Mellon’s decision to marry Alan Scaife, the scion of a Pittsburgh steel family, was never fully embraced by the Mellons. Her father, Richard Beatty Mellon, is said to have quietly answered “No” when Alan asked for Sarah’s hand, and her brother, Richard King Mellon, the man who led Pittsburgh’s renaissance in the 1940s, treated Alan with disdain, and seems never to have been close to Dick.
Alan joined the O.S.S., the precursor of the C.I.A., when Dick was young, and returned from his travels with gifts for the boy: newspapers from around the world, which Dick organized on racks of wooden poles in the family library. At the age of nine Dick was severely injured when his horse, Newsgirl, fell on him, and he spent his fourth-grade year in bed, reading newspapers. Another childhood enthusiasm was politics: he told the Mellon-family biographer, Burton Hersh, that, when the family lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, “I made it a kind of hobby to meet as many senators and congressmen as I could.”
Dick caught what he calls “the Irish disease” of alcoholism early. (Both his mother and his sister also had drinking problems.) After it got him kicked out of Yale, he returned, flunked out, spent six months pumping gas, and eventually took his degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1956 he married Frances Gilmore, and they had two children (David, 41, now a Pittsburgh Porsche dealer, and Jennie, 44, who lives in Palm Beach). But he kept drinking, and his name and fortune alone were not enough to win Pittsburgh’s respect. Kicked off the board of the Carnegie Museum of Art, he patronized small regional museums such as the Brandywine, in Chadds Ford. Marginalized within the family banking and oil businesses, Dick started buying small newspapers, and made one of them, the Tribune-Review, in Greensburg, into a conservative alternative to Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette.
With Franny, as his first wife is known, Dick became involved in Republican politics during Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Later disillusioned by Watergate (after he’d given more than $1 million to Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign), he focused his donations on conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (an incubator of Reagan’s foreign policy, supply-side economics, and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America”) and later the Federalist Society (a legal network formed to combat what its members see as a liberal bias in elite law schools and the legal establishment). The aim was to provide intellectual infrastructure and train policymakers for the contemporary conservative movement.
Around the time that these investments started bearing fruit, he met Ritchie Battle, the charming, gorgeous southern wife of a young lawyer named Turner Westray Battle II, at a 1979 Pittsburgh dinner party for Jack Heinz II, the father of the late senator John Heinz.
Ritchie’s friends, and even many of her enemies, describe her as fiery, fun, brash, and resourceful—comparisons to Scarlett O’Hara are common. In high school, the young beauty and her boyfriend were voted “Most Attractive Couple” by her senior class; she remains exceptionally alluring today, dressed for an interview in a green cashmere turtleneck and plaid Oscar de la Renta suit, with brown suede Manolo Blahniks. Her manner, like her dress, embraces the earthy and the immaculate. Her face is elegant but elastic, often stretching into imitations of the people she talks about. Her anecdotes are peppered with cinematic allusions. “She’s Mrs. Danvers,” Ritchie says of a hyper-officious servant; “Think of ‘Rosebud,’ ” she explains after suggesting that Dick sold most of his parents’ furniture from Penguin Court—“but kept all the maple furniture that was the help’s.” (Dick says he kept a lot of his parents’ furniture.) To her lawyers’ consternation, she seems to take pleasure in speaking about the forbidden. “It’s a man’s world, darling,” she purrs, after being chastised by one attorney for off-the-record remarks about jewelry and divorce law.
Ritchie’s father was a Georgetown, South Carolina, bank examiner who died of a heart attack during a family day at the beach, when Ritchie was 10 years old. After his death, Ritchie’s mother worked as a secretary to support her three children; she committed suicide when Ritchie was 21. In high school, Ritchie worked at a department store selling Avon products. Later she studied at Queens University of Charlotte, where she met and married Battle, then a Davidson undergraduate. (Their son, Turner Westray Battle III, 33, is a navy lieutenant who has twice been deployed to the Persian Gulf.)
Ritchie’s dark doe eyes flit among a disparate swarm of emotions when she describes her “terrible” first marriage and the “torrid love affair” with Dick that swept her out of it. Some in Pittsburgh say that Ritchie was socially ambitious and that the dinner party was a setup. But the party’s hostess, Pamela Bryan, the whispery-voiced ex-wife of Houston department-store magnate Bob Sakowitz, says her intentions were innocent. There were too many men coming to the party, and too few women, “and it was beginning to look like a stag dinner. So I remember speaking to Westray and saying, you know, ‘Would it be all right … ?’ So I put her next to Dick.”
The place card, Ritchie remembers, came with a warning from the hostess: “I’ve got a job for you. I know that if you sit next to him, he won’t leave.” Leaning forward, as if confiding, Ritchie explains, “I think he had a reputation of leaving dinner parties if he was bored.” A beat. “Well!” she sighs. “I didn’t get rid of him for many years after that.” The tone has both rue and triumph in it, as does the slender, red-lipped smile with which she underlines such interjections.
Ritchie says Dick started pursuing her immediately. Dick himself says that he didn’t see Ritchie again for another six months. Then one day she came to his office, soliciting for a charity; he couldn’t take his eyes off her white angora sweater. That afternoon, he adds with a wink, “we did what comes naturally.”
“Never owned an angora sweater,” Ritchie protests, aghast and lilting. “I’m allergic to things like that!”
Ritchie and Westray were divorced in 1981. Her alimony and child support, combined, amounted to a scant $1,200 a month. She didn’t have to worry. Dick bought Ritchie a condominium, and then the house, and their affair grew increasingly public. They started socializing as a couple when he took her to Alcoa heir Alfred Hunt’s Christmas party in 1984, and then to a reception for the Hoover Institution at the White House. “He was forcing the point with Franny,” Bryan explains.
By then, he had been forcing it for a while. The first time Dick’s son, David, laid eyes on Ritchie was in 1982, when, after a night out, he says, Dick tried to drop her off but she refused to get out of his car. Drunk, he drove her home, where 16-year-old David, from inside the house, heard what he remembers as “yelling and screaming and all sorts of noise, and Dad came to the door and said, ‘Get your mother.’ I saw this woman, lying on the ground. I couldn’t even decipher what she was saying. My mother came down. She had always sort of suspected that something was going on, but this was the first time that she had really confronted this person.” David goes on: “I had always seen my mother act ladylike,” but that night, David says, Franny walked out of the house, “kicked her, and called her a guttersnipe.”
When asked about the incident, Ritchie says it “never happened.” Two days later, she calls from one of her lawyers’ offices in Pittsburgh. She wants to say that, in 1981, she did go to the door of Dick’s house on a day when Dick wasn’t home, to speak with Franny face-to-face: “I said, ‘If I have to know about you, you have to know about me.’ I later learned that her daughter was at the top of the stairs. My intention was never, ever—and I had had too much to drink—my intention was never to hurt anybody.”
David says that Ritchie soon won him over: “My grades were so bad at school at that point, I just thought, Well, instead of getting yelled at,” siding with Dick against Franny could be “a new chapter to our friendship. All of a sudden, he and I were drinking buddies.” When Dick and Ritchie visited him at Deerfield Academy, David claims, Ritchie brought pot for them to smoke together, and his father bought him alcohol.
“To take marijuana to a child? To a prep school?,” Ritchie marvels, when asked about the story. “Never,” she declares, her petite hands holding one another in her lap. “And how dare anyone even make a comment like that?”
Dick, who regretfully confirms the details of his son’s story, says that he did not inhale.
Pre-nup? What Pre-nup?
Franny filed for divorce in 1985, but a final settlement (sealed by the court but reliably rumored to be about $35 million) was not reached until 1991. Dick and Ritchie’s relationship remained outrageously volatile; Ritchie once kicked Dick in the crotch, according to a friend, and his testicles swelled to such a size that he had to be taken to the emergency room. Asked about the incident, Dick chuckles and says, almost plaintively, “I’d forgotten.” Ritchie issues another denial: “I don’t remember ever kicking him!”
In 1987, according to Dick, the two went to the Betty Ford Center together. He calls his estranged wife “a total pill popper,” who had to be taken to “the loony bin” after a suicide attempt.
Wearily, deliberately, Ritchie says the only reason she went to Betty Ford was to support Dick in the “family program.” Has she ever had any kind of substance-abuse problem? “Never,” she says, four times.
Dick and Ritchie’s wedding, planned on two days’ notice, took place the same week that Dick’s divorce was finalized. His lawyer Yale Gutnick prepared a pre-nuptial agreement, which Scaife refused to sign. “I was a fool!” Scaife says. “I begged him,” Gutnick adds, explaining that Ritchie threatened to leave Dick if there was a pre-nup.
Ritchie laughs out loud at Gutnick’s suggestion that she threatened to call off the marriage over this issue. She says she actually asked for a pre-nup, after witnessing the bitterness of his split with Franny. “I mean, you think I’m going to kick them both in the you-know-what to make him marry me? It wasn’t very difficult,” she scoffs. “He wanted to marry me.”
And again, a second later, bemused, on velvet: “It wasn’t difficult, darling.”
For the exchange of vows, on the old Penguin Court property (Dick had had the gloomy mansion torn down after his mother died, in 1965), Ritchie wore a short white dress. For the reception, at Ligonier’s Rolling Rock Club, the new wife surprised her husband, a fireworks aficionado, by hiring Zambelli, which is responsible for the July Fourth shows on the Mall in Washington, to create a blazing sign on the lawn that proclaimed, in sparkling letters, ritchie loves dick. Even today, a certain set of Pittsburgh women, including wives of some of the country’s most brass-knuckled industrialists, speak of Ritchie’s flaming double entendre as among the most shocking moments of their lives.
It was not a double entendre, Ritchie says, with tears in her eyes: “My mind doesn’t work that way. Please. His name is Dick. His name is Dick, and I thought of the human being. And how evil of them, because I was saying I loved my husband.”
Many say marriage to Ritchie mellowed Dick. They say that Ritchie was instrumental in reconciling Dick with his sister, though Dick denies this. (Cordelia did not speak to him for more than 25 years after the death of her husband—ruled a suicide—on the day he was indicted for tax fraud, just after a blowup in his friendship with Dick, according to news reports.) They also say that she encouraged his sobriety, though in 1994 he started drinking again. By his own account, Dick has been sober since 2003.
“Ritchie was always ironical about her position” as Dick’s consort-cum-wife, according to Ed Harrell, a close friend of the couple’s and the former president of Dick’s publishing company, Tribune-Review. Playing off her husband’s fabled middle name, Ritchie carried a jeweled Judith Leiber bag in the shape of a melon. She teasingly begged Dick for gifts, according to a friend, calling him “the Prince of Pittsburgh” and pleading, “Daddy, you’re so rich, you can afford it. Daddy, you could buy me anything.” She once told the friend that she was planning to build an extra guest room for her son at the Scaife house on Nantucket; when the friend asked, “What will Dick think?,” she says, Ritchie answered, “He’ll never notice”—and he apparently didn’t.
In happy moments, their hedonism could attain a Zen-like plane: when Ritchie fell in love with a 2,800-square-foot Sol LeWitt mural on exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a friend overheard him tell her, “It’s yours,” and Dick in fact bought the painting (as a gift to the museum) in her honor.
Another of Dick’s gentler interludes, in Ritchie’s account, sounds a bit like the last reel of Citizen Kane. The couple lived at the Hotel Bel-Air while Dick recovered from ear surgery, and at his insistence they watched, again and again, How Green Was My Valley, John Ford’s melodrama, in which a coal-mining family dreams of a better life in a fast-changing world that defeats their traditional ideals. During that time, Ritchie says, her voice distant and soft, Dick also “liked to watch trolley videos … just trolleys …a trolley car, going down the road, for hours.”
He could also be cruel. Dick lost most of his hearing in the late 1990s, and when Ritchie suggested that they learn sign language together, one friend says, “he told her, ‘I’ll give you sign language’ ”—and raised his middle finger. (“No, that didn’t happen,” Dick says, laughing, “but I wish it did.”)
Yet Ritchie, by many accounts, has the more unpredictable temper. Several associates and friends of the Scaifes shudder when they speak of “Ritchie moments.” These are high-decibel events—such as the afternoon on Nantucket when she allegedly warned the staff that she would walk into the ocean if a misplaced set of winter slipcovers for the summer furniture wasn’t located right now.
“I think this is just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Ritchie says. “Please. Do I look like somebody who’d walk into the ocean over curtains? Please.”
Jewelry, Dick says, reliably restored her equilibrium. After an ultimatum delivered in the kitchen of their Pebble Beach estate, he bought her a ring from Borsheim’s, Warren Buffett’s Omaha jewelry store—a $600,000, 10-carat diamond that, Scaife recalls, was delivered to his office “by a very nice lady from Rhodesia, very pretty, with two armed guards.”
“It was a 55th-birthday present!” Ritchie cries, and produces a handwritten love note from Dick that she says accompanied the gift.
Dick and Ritchie grew increasingly isolated, and, Dick says, Ritchie intentionally drove a wedge between him and his son. A few months after David Scaife married Sara Deutsch, Dick and Ritchie visited them to look at wedding pictures and presents. The couple say Ritchie disapproved of them from the start. On this day, Sara says, Ritchie was drunk and dropped all pretense of discretion when they found themselves alone. “It was literally like I’m showing her, like, a china pattern or something, and then she just turned on me with ‘And, by the way, you’re a nobody from nowhere,’ berating me and yelling at me.”
After Dick and Ritchie separated, Sara says, Dick told her that “ ‘Ritchie would take photographs of you out of a newspaper or a magazine, and she would stick pins in them.’ He said, ‘It was so disturbing, it was so horrible.’ ” Sara adds, “You want to say to him, ‘But, Dick, did you do anything at the time?’ ”
Ritchie denies every detail of this story. There was an altercation, she admits, but she says it was Sara who “went berserk.”
And did she stick those pins in the pictures?
“No, Dick did.”
Her lawyer interrupts: “—Ehh—”
“It’s true!,” Ritchie says.
Pietragallo: “Stop. Stop.”
Sara’s story of their altercation sounds much like the judgment an element of Pittsburgh society passed on Ritchie when she married Dick. During the marriage, they mostly kept their opinions to themselves as Ritchie took her place on the boards of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Opera, and Parks Conservancy (whose director of development calls her “a God’s blessing” to the group, for which she helped launch a version of the New York Central Park Conservancy’s traditional Hat Luncheon). Eventually she was even admitted to the holy of holies, the Carnegie Museum of Art Women’s Committee.
Ritchie says that she was aware of some resistance to her arrival on the scene “in the beginning. But once I was Mrs. Scaife, listen, they were falling all over me.”
Sipping a martini at four p.m., the decorator Louis Talotta, who worked for the Scaifes during Dick’s first marriage, says that when he met Ritchie “I think she cut her own hair. She didn’t have art. She didn’t have anything. She was just a dumb southern girl.” From the tip of his Marlboro, an ash falls toward the pale upholstery of his 18th-century Jacob chair. “She couldn’t even set a table.”
(At this, Ritchie laughs mirthlessly. Setting a table is “one thing a southern girl knows how to do, if she’s lived with her grandmother, and I don’t care how little money you had in the South, you had your silver. I never saw stainless steel till I moved to Pittsburgh with all those rich folks.”)
And there are ladies in bouclé (asking not to be named, because they’d “hate to hurt anybody”) eager to tell their story of how Ritchie never wanted anything but Dick’s money and his name. Pursing their lips, they say, one after another, that “Do you know who I am?” was Ritchie’s signature line.
(Ritchie, bewildered: “Never. Never. If anything, I said, ‘Call me Ritchie,’ because that’s the name I know I’ll always have.”)
Still, for all the stories of Ritchie’s behavior, it seems impossible to separate most of the moral assessments by detractors from their quiet rage over this outsider, this nobody from nowhere, having dared to dream that she could walk among them.
Battle over Beauregard
This same tone, transposed a few octaves bassward, colors William Pietragallo’s voice when, in a conference room in a Pittsburgh skyscraper—coincidentally, directly beneath Richard Mellon Scaife’s office—the lawyer asks, “Have you seen Miss Vasco?,” and, with one eyebrow raised, produces a photocopied enlargement of Tammy Vasco’s driver’s-license photograph, thumping his index finger on the page. In Pietragallo’s account of the marriage, there were no troubles until Dick met Tammy—whose purported arrest history he rattles off in detail (and lards with defensive provisos: “I don’t know this.… I’m not telling you this as a fact”). Quite the contrary. Pietragallo claims that, except for the times when Ritchie nursed Dick back to health from alcoholism (“She slept on the hospital floor, she slept on a chair”), their life was an exercise of shared passions for antiques and travel. “Flowers were a really important part of their life together,” Pietragallo says. He describes Ritchie as “a sensible, grounded individual” who in her life with Dick was “a giver, a non-taker.”
Precisely how Dick became involved with Tammy remains something of a mystery. This was the only personal question that Scaife’s lawyer would not let him answer. Certainly since Ritchie discovered Dick’s relationship with Tammy, she and Dick have been playing the emotional equivalent of Australian Rules football. The whole imbroglio has begun to resemble a Christopher Guest parody.
After Dick had Ritchie arrested and thrown in jail (and stories about it appeared in his newspaper), Ritchie and the Scaife’s three dogs—including Dick’s favorite, a yellow Lab named Beauregard (Dick says Beauregard was a gift from Ritchie; Ritchie says the couple owned the dog together)—moved in with Pietragallo and his wife, Helena, who is one of her oldest friends. Then, in March 2006, Dick arranged for a sign to be made and placed on his front lawn: wife and dog missing—reward for dog.
Beauregard, who is said to be a descendant of a dog that belonged to a King of England, is the only member of his species to have had his portrait painted by Chas Fagan, an artist perhaps best known for the official White House portrait of Barbara Bush. Soon after the missing sign appeared in Dick’s front yard, Beauregard disappeared from the Pietragallos’ backyard—“snatched” by an employee “who was actually a double agent” working for Dick, Pietragallo says. Not long afterward the sign on Dick’s lawn was replaced by a new one that said, welcome home, beauregard.
Then, on April 6, 2006, Ritchie was driving down Dick’s street and saw Sue Patterson, Scaife’s 54-year-old housekeeper, walking the dog. According to court documents, Ritchie stopped the car in the street, got out, and ran toward Beauregard, screaming “He’s taking everything from me; I’m taking his dog.” She then allegedly beat the woman about the head and neck, pulled her hair, pushed her down, and kicked her—leaving a footprint on her white blouse. When Genevieve Still, Dick’s head housekeeper, came to Patterson’s aid, she claims, Ritchie kicked her too. (“And she knows I have cancer,” says Still, who is 79.) Dennis Bradshaw, a former Secret Service officer now in charge of Scaife’s security, attempted to break up the fight. Ritchie allegedly scratched his face and broke his glasses and threw them on the ground.
Assault complaints against Ritchie were eventually dismissed, after a hearing where a bystander testified that Ritchie, while wrestling for the dog, also hollered, “ ‘Keep the prostitute,’ or something like that.” (From a distance, the witness said, the clash over Beauregard “looked like two kids fighting over a toy.”) The ruling magistrate in the case said, “They should’ve given her the dog,” adding, “This is nonsense. I’m not going to participate in this. This is absolute, total nonsense.” With personal-injury lawsuits against Ritchie by all three employees pending, Pietragallo forbade Ritchie to answer questions about the incident.
Ritchie’s next reported legal entanglement came when Vasco’s daughter filed a criminal-harassment complaint, which has also been dismissed, after finding a note in her mailbox that said, according to Dick, “God will get you” and “All whores go to hell.”
(Coincidentally, after interviewing Ritchie Scaife, I found an anonymous letter in my mailbox: a Christmas card emblazoned with the greeting “Have a Ho Ho Ho!” In imitation of a child’s scrawl, someone wrote, “Hope you can use this!,” evidently referring to the color snapshot of Dick and Tammy that was included with the card. A printed slip of paper provided the photo’s caption: “Richard Mellon Scaife and Tammy Sue / On the waterfront terrace of Wit’s End / Pebble Beach, California.” Wit’s End is Dick’s estate there.)
For his part, Dick does not believe that any of his efforts to humiliate Ritchie were excessive. Erecting those signs in his front yard, he says, was just plain “fun.” Do the end of the marriage, its escalating vindictiveness, and the ongoing consequences of such anger make him in any way sad? His eyes go blank, and he says, “No, I don’t think about that. I just don’t want her near me. That’s all I think about.”
Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, he refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”
Lunch with Bill
Those are surprising words indeed to hear from a man who spent so lavishly to uncover Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes and to advance the movement fueled by family values. But it would be a mistake to read the saga of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce as simply a story of moral hypocrisy. His treatment of women, especially his first wife, suggests a high regard for his own gratification. His commitment to conservative politics has never been primarily about upholding traditional morality; it has been about promoting policies that help to preserve his own wealth and that of people like himself. On the subject of Clinton his weather vane is now spinning wildly. Scaife speaks of a “very pleasant” two-hour-and-fifteen-minute private lunch with Bill Clinton at the former president’s New York office last summer. “I never met such a charismatic man in my whole life,” Scaife says, glowing with pleasure at the memory. “To show him that I wasn’t a total Republican libertarian, I said that I had a friend named Jack Murtha,” a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. “He said, ‘Oh, Jack Murtha. You’re talking about my golfing partner!’ ” In the midst of these backslapping memories, though, Scaife goes carbuncle-eyed and refuses to answer on the record when asked if he still thinks Vince Foster’s suicide was, as he once told The New York Times, “the Rosetta Stone to the Clinton Administration.”
Scaife left the meeting with an autographed copy of Bill Clinton’s My Life and a head full of thoughts about the “scourge of aids” in Africa, which the two had discussed in detail—though Scaife emphasizes, twice, that Clinton “did most of the talking.” Back in Pittsburgh, Scaife decided to send a $100,000 personal check to the Clinton Global Initiative. That got him thinking about aids locally, he says, and so when he found a direct-mail solicitation for persad, Pittsburgh’s aids service center, in his mailbox, he wrote that group a check, too. Does he think his best gay friends should be able to get married? Scaife throws his hand in the air and exclaims, “Yes, I do!” A moment later he adds, “I haven’t really thought about it. But if they want to get married, that’s their business. I couldn’t care less.”
It is this contradictory bundle of a human being who arrives on a rainy November evening at the mahogany-paneled Duquesne Club, in downtown Pittsburgh, the sanctuary of that city’s upper crust, to be honored with the Speaker Franklin Award at a fund-raising dinner for the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania think tank affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. An invocation praises Scaife as a selfless “servant-leader” who, like Joseph in the book of Genesis, “could have just worried about himself. But like Joseph,” he worried about his country. In a video tribute, former attorney general Edwin Meese calls Richard Mellon Scaife “the unseen hand behind so many important causes,” the man who brought “balance and sound principles back to the public arena” and “quietly helped to lay the brick and mortar for an entire movement.” Scaife’s donations to conservative causes, the crowd seems to agree, are the best measure of his character, because, as another speaker declares, “checkbooks are the most accurate account of a person’s values and priorities.”
The drive from the Duquesne Club to Doug’s Motel (recently renamed the Huntingdon Inn), where Ritchie’s private detective photographed Dick and Tammy, takes about half an hour. Behind the river-stone exterior of Room 5, where the two are said to have dallied, is a small rectangular space containing a queen-size bed with a thin, soft mattress, two lumpy pillows, and a push-button phone on the brown bedside table. To match the brown bedspread, there is brown wood paneling, a brown carpet with its nap rubbed away, a brown dresser, and a chair with little nicks in the veneer. There is despairingly little else to describe.
It’s All About Dignity
The Mellon-family fortune was assembled largely by Andrew Mellon, the banker and industrialist who served as secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Richard Mellon Scaife is Andrew’s great-nephew. “The first time the Mellons have ever been ‘in print,’ ” Andrew Mellon himself once ruefully noted, was in 1910, when his divorce from Nora McMullen (an unsuitable young Englishwoman whom he’d married on a whim) made Pittsburgh “ring with scandal.” For Andrew, divorce brought embarrassing public revelations about his wife’s infidelities and his own foolishness. Yet Mellon controlled the damage to the best of his ability. To ensure that his divorce would not be tried by jury, which would have exposed even more of his private life, he arranged for Pennsylvania’s legislature to outlaw jury trials for divorce.
The story of Andrew Mellon comes to an end in the 1930s, with his gift to the American people of the National Gallery of Art. The final chapter for Ritchie and Dick foretells no such grandeur. Richard Mellon Scaife, who vows he will never be married again (“too many responsibilities,” he says with a sigh), is still dating Tammy Vasco, and in what may be the most emotional moment of a long conversation, he voices distress that she has been publicly drawn into this situation. “Miss Vasco is a very loving individual,” he says with tears in his eyes. Her depiction in the press, he goes on, “really troubles me.”
As for Ritchie, “after the night she was put in jail by her husband, from that day forward she wanted to get on with a new life,” Pietragallo says. Her new life, he adds, will focus on charitable involvements and “starting a foundation” whose goals have yet to be defined. Perhaps that night in the holding cell holds the answer. Ritchie emerged, Pietragallo says, with a passion to “do something to improve conditions for women in prison.”
Ritchie affirms all of this, and, mustering a bright face, adds, “I want you to know I’m not bitter. I’m not an embittered person. You know, it is what it is, and life has to go on, and there are a lot more issues in this world that have relevance, and this really has no relevance on the face of the earth when you think of all the issues that are in the world right now, the problems. I have no bitterness. I just want to go forward. And I hope that he is happy. I don’t wish anything bad to happen to him. And it’s just sad for me that we couldn’t end our marriage in a dignified way.”
Gravely, Pietragallo reminds her: “We still can.”
Ritchie says, “Because dignity’s very important to me.”
WASHINGTON — They are some of the more memorable slip-ups or slights within the news media’s coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.
A Fox News anchor asks whether Senator Barack Obama and his wife had greeted each other with a “terrorist fist jab.” Rush Limbaugh calls military personnel critical of the war in Iraq “phony soldiers.” Mr. Limbaugh and another Fox host repeat an accusation that Mr. Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic school, in Indonesia.
Each of these moments might have slipped into the broadcast ether but for the efforts of Media Matters for America, the nonprofit, highly partisan research organization that was founded four years ago by David Brock, a formerly conservative author who has since gone liberal.
Ripping a page from an old Republican Party playbook, Media Matters has given the Democrats a weapon they have not had in previous campaigns: a rapid-fire, technologically sophisticated means to call out what it considers “conservative misinformation” on air or in print, then feed it to a Rolodex of reporters, cable channels and bloggers hungry for grist.
Producers for both “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central take calls from the organization. James Carville, the Democratic strategist and CNN commentator, has read from its items on the air, not least, he says, because they “just irritate the right to no end.”
