Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer
Authors: Jane Mayer
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stand. Visitors could be forgiven for mistaking it for the usual Republican mascot, because Scaife’s forebears, who founded the Mellon banking, Alcoa aluminum, and Gulf Oil empire, were a financial mainstay of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania for more than a century. But the elephant in question was instead an homage to Hannibal, the fabled military strategist who daringly scaled the Alps on elephant back to launch a surprise attack on the Roman Empire. It served as the inspiration for a private organization that Scaife founded in 1964. This little-heralded group was just the first small step in what would become an improbably successful effort by one of the richest men in the country, along with a few other extraordinarily wealthy conservative benefactors, to cast themselves as field generals, in Hannibal’s mold, in a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics.
For decades, Scaife was described as a recluse, mysterious even to the recipients of his largesse. Over a fifty-year period, he personally spent what he estimated to be upward of $1 billion from his family fortune on philanthropy, once the sum was adjusted for inflation. Most of it, some $620 million, he reckoned, was aimed at influencing American public affairs. In 1999,
The Washington Post
called him “the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.” When he died on July 4, 2014,
The New York Times
carried a lengthy obituary, along with his photograph. Yet he gave almost no interviews or speeches on his motives and aims. He rarely spoke with those who ran the institutions he funded and was estranged from many former friends and family members, including two former wives and his two grown children. When Karen Rothmyer, a reporter for the
Columbia Journalism Review
, tried to ambush him into an interview in 1981, he warned her, “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here!”In 2009, however, five years before he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Scaife penned a previously private, still-unpublished memoir, “A Richly Conservative Life,” that serves as a secret tell-all about the building of the modern conservative movement.
In his memoir, Scaife describes how he and a handful of other influential conservatives who shared the view that American civilization faced an existential threat from progressivism began meeting during the Cold War years, at first informally, to plot against the country’s liberal drift. At one such session, someone suggested that the threadbare cliché comparing America’s ostensible downfall to that of ancient Rome was inadequate. The group decided that a better analogy was to the fall of Carthage, in North Africa. Carthage ostensibly fell when its wealthy elites failed to adequately back their military leader, Hannibal, as he reached the gates of Rome. The passivity of the ruling class allowed the enemy to triumph, burying the noble Carthaginian culture forever. Out of this discussion was born the League to Save Carthage, an informal network of influential, die-hard American conservatives determined, as Scaife writes, “that America must not go the way of Carthage, that we must win the struggles of our time.”
In 1964, when this group incorporated itself formally as the Carthage Foundation, many conservatives felt like the remnants of a lost civilization. Their standard-bearer, the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, had been badly defeated at the polls. The Democratic victor, Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, was forging ahead with liberal civil rights legislation and ambitious Great Society antipoverty programs, radically expanding the reach of government and challenging the old order. Liberal dominance over arts and letters was so uniform during these postwar years that the cultural critic Lionel Trilling had declared with self-satisfaction, “Nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general
For decades, Scaife was described as a recluse, mysterious even to the recipients of his largesse. Over a fifty-year period, he personally spent what he estimated to be upward of $1 billion from his family fortune on philanthropy, once the sum was adjusted for inflation. Most of it, some $620 million, he reckoned, was aimed at influencing American public affairs. In 1999,
The Washington Post
called him “the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.” When he died on July 4, 2014,
The New York Times
carried a lengthy obituary, along with his photograph. Yet he gave almost no interviews or speeches on his motives and aims. He rarely spoke with those who ran the institutions he funded and was estranged from many former friends and family members, including two former wives and his two grown children. When Karen Rothmyer, a reporter for the
Columbia Journalism Review
, tried to ambush him into an interview in 1981, he warned her, “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here!”In 2009, however, five years before he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Scaife penned a previously private, still-unpublished memoir, “A Richly Conservative Life,” that serves as a secret tell-all about the building of the modern conservative movement.
In his memoir, Scaife describes how he and a handful of other influential conservatives who shared the view that American civilization faced an existential threat from progressivism began meeting during the Cold War years, at first informally, to plot against the country’s liberal drift. At one such session, someone suggested that the threadbare cliché comparing America’s ostensible downfall to that of ancient Rome was inadequate. The group decided that a better analogy was to the fall of Carthage, in North Africa. Carthage ostensibly fell when its wealthy elites failed to adequately back their military leader, Hannibal, as he reached the gates of Rome. The passivity of the ruling class allowed the enemy to triumph, burying the noble Carthaginian culture forever. Out of this discussion was born the League to Save Carthage, an informal network of influential, die-hard American conservatives determined, as Scaife writes, “that America must not go the way of Carthage, that we must win the struggles of our time.”
In 1964, when this group incorporated itself formally as the Carthage Foundation, many conservatives felt like the remnants of a lost civilization. Their standard-bearer, the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, had been badly defeated at the polls. The Democratic victor, Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, was forging ahead with liberal civil rights legislation and ambitious Great Society antipoverty programs, radically expanding the reach of government and challenging the old order. Liberal dominance over arts and letters was so uniform during these postwar years that the cultural critic Lionel Trilling had declared with self-satisfaction, “Nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general
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