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Dick Scaife was a man of many parts

By Richard Robbins 4 min read

Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives on a Saturday morning in 1998. That afternoon I picked up a ringing telephone in the Tribune-Review newsroom, where I was working.

From the other end came a female voice. She introduced herself, as a person with close ties to the newspaper’s owner-publisher, Richard Mellon Scaife. It was a short, to-the-point, one-sided discussion. She wanted to convey, on behalf of the publisher, the headline for Sunday’s lead story. It should read, she said, “It’s About Time.”

Later that day, when I told my immediate boss about the call, he blanched. Outside the world of tabloid journalism, the headline was wildly inappropriate, even for Dick Scaife, who to an important extent led the charge against both Bill Clinton and the first lady, Hillary Clinton.

It was Scaife, after all, who funded a dubious investigation into the Clintons’ Arkansas land deal that came to be known as the Whitewater Affair. It was Scaife who peddled the story that the Clintons had murdered a close friend and aide, Vince Foster, spiriting the poor man’s body from the White House to a park in suburban Washington where it was discovered.

In truth, Foster committed suicide.

I was not privy to the conversation that took place between the paper’s editors and Scaife (or his representatives) that caused the Clinton impeachment story headline to be changed to something less flamboyant. The conversation couldn’t have been easy. I suspect, for the editors, it was gut wrenching.

The heir to the Mellon fortune could be difficult. One editor, fired by Scaife following years of valuable service, commented afterward that his dismissal was akin to being stabbed in the heart.

Richard Scaife died July 4, of inoperable cancer. He was 82.

In a graceful essay that appeared several weeks earlier, Scaife said that he was sure his impending demise was music to the ears of some people. More than ready to bring out the knives himself, he frequently brought out the ugly side in others.

Many people found Scaife’s spiteful brand of conspiracy-themed conservatism pretty bizarre. A large part of the time its primary goal seemed to be to sew distrust, even hatred, of the federal government.

Scaife served up a large dose of hate with his politics. He was famous for accusing Katharine Graham of the Washington Post of killing her own husband. He did so following her death, which made the accusation even uglier.

Still, he was an important fixture in the conservative firmament. He launched and underwrote the most influential of the conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation.

On a personal level, Dick Scaife could be shy, even diffident. Once, assigned to write a story about his late mother’s support for the Pittsburgh Children’s Zoo, I ventured down to his office in Pittsburgh. He apologized for having nothing particular to say about his mother and the zoo. He asked how I was getting along. He wanted to know what was happening in Uniontown. He knew I lived there. He ended the interview by writing a large check for Marshall Plaza. I got the feeling it was his way of saying he was sorry he could offer so little help with the story.

On another occasion, we spent a day touring public housing projects in Pittsburgh. Afterward, we had dinner at Station Square. He was thoroughly charming. A very nice man.

Dick Scaife was that way. Hating liberalism, he became friends with John F. Kennedy Jr. Sitting for an interview for Kennedy’s magazine GEORGE, Scaife took to the handsome and famous son of JFK.

He defied easy judgments. In a final essay for the Tribune-Review, Scaife wrote about the power of art and the work of great artists like iconoclastic Andy Warhol. Scaife and Warhol would hardly seem like soulmates, but there it was, admiration on Scaife’ s part for the wildly un-conservative Warhol.

He even reconciled with the Clintons. During Hillary’s run for the White House in 2008, he embraced the former first lady in ways that would have hardly seemed imaginable back in the day when he was smearing the Clintons as murderers and thieves.

He was a jigsaw puzzle, a man of many part, and he was hard to figure. Many critics and admirers saw him in striking tones of either black or white, a hero or a villain. Like most of us, he was both, only much richer.

Richard Robbins is the author of two books of local history – Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He lives in Uniontown and can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.

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