The resurgence of rightwing conservatism in America in the last quarter of the 20th century was attributed to various politicians, writers, economists and clergymen, but there was only one important source of financing: the reclusive billionaire
Richard Mellon Scaife, who has died aged 82.
It was Scaife who financed a coordinated effort to "get" (his word) President Bill Clinton, in a campaign that culminated in Clinton's impeachment and acquittal in 1998-99.
Over the decades, on one estimate, the heir to the oil and banking Mellon fortune gave well over half a billion dollars to rightwing causes and institutions, including a shadowy foray into Britain.
Scaife was also an alcoholic for much of his life, managing to sober up only after his second marriage in 1991. His drinking was said to be the cause of his violent tempers, the long grudges he bore and his obsessive hounding of people he hated. Although Scaife's abusiveness often alienated him from even his rightwing beneficiaries, nobody could deny that his money had been extremely important.
He financed the foundation and support of rightwing thinktanks, sponsored such politicians as Newt Gingrich, who became Republican speaker of the House of Representatives in 1994, and kept an assortment of rightwing campaigns going. He financed lawsuits against the Clintons and their associates that cost the defendants millions of dollars in legal fees.
Scaife had become active in Republican politics in 1956, but in the 1970s he began secretly funding what was then called the New Right, as it began to replace the patrician, country-club set of traditional Republicans. He helped establish the Heritage Foundation, which became an influential rightwing thinktank, and he contributed generously to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Cato Institute and AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.
He formed six legal foundations across the country to mount conservative lawsuits, and funded rightwing economics seminars for judges.
During the Reagan administration, which he supported,
Scaife continued to nurture the right, but was galvanised by the advent of Clinton in 1992. As the scandals proliferated he poured $2.4m into the Arkansas Project, which he launched in 1994 and ran via the rightwing monthly magazine the American Spectator. It carried articles going back to Bill Clinton's governorship of Arkansas, suggested that both Clintons were behind various crimes, including drug smuggling and murder, and suggested that White House assistant counsel Vincent Foster had not killed himself but was murdered.
Scaife funded a legal foundation that took over Paula Jones's sex harassment suit against Bill Clinton, eventually causing his impeachment over lies under oath and alleged interference with evidence. The Western Journalism Centre in California, another Scaife beneficiary, produced the Clinton Chronicles
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-mellon-scaife
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