Background and career
Richard Mellon Scaife (; July 3, 1932 – July 4, 2014) was an American billionaire, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, and the owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In 2005, Scaife was number 238 on the Forbes 400, with a personal fortune of $1.2 billion. By 2013, Scaife had dropped to number 371 on the listing, with a personal fortune of $1.4 billion. During his life, Scaife provided financial support to conservative public policy organizations over four decades. He provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the United States, mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controlled: the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Carthage Foundation, and Allegheny Foundation, and until 2001, the Scaife Family Foundation, now controlled by son David.
Scaife was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Alan Magee Scaife, the head of an affluent Pittsburgh family, and Sarah Cordelia Mellon, who was a member of the influential Mellon family, one of the most powerful families in the country. Sarah was the niece of former United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon. She and her brother, financier R.K. Mellon, were heirs to the Mellon fortune that included Mellon Bank and major stakes in Gulf Oil and Alcoa aluminum. Scaife attended high school at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts where he almost didn't graduate after getting caught drinking off campus at the age of 14. He was expelled from Yale University in the aftermath of a drunken party in which he launched an empty beer keg down a flight of stairs, injuring a classmate. Yale gave him the opportunity to repeat his freshman year, but he continued to skip class and flunked out. With the help of his father, who was chairman of the board of trustees, he attended the University of Pittsburgh and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1957. 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. Mellon, 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.) He inherited much of the Mellon fortune when his mother died in 1965. A portion of the fortune was placed in trust funds and the rest in foundations. The trusts expired in 1985 and, per tax law, the foundations must give away 5% of their assets per year. Disbursements from each foundation are done through boards of directors. In 1973, he became estranged from his sister Cordelia and he 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, lauding Cordelia for devoting her life and resources to "worthwhile causes".
In 1970, Scaife purchased a small market newspaper, then known as the Tribune-Review. The paper was based in Greensburg, the county seat and center of Westmoreland County, located about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. For a number of years, the paper was published and distributed only in the Westmoreland area. Scaife made headlines in the fall of 1973 when a Tribune-Review reporter was fired for making the remark "one down and one to go" during the Watergate era when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned over corruption charges dating back to his days as governor of Maryland. In the controversy that followed nearly half the paper's 24 person newsroom staff resigned. In 1992, the two main newspapers in Pittsburgh were embroiled in a lengthy labor dispute that ultimately led the larger paper, the Pittsburgh Press, to cease operations, and for the remaining paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, to suspend publication for nearly six months until the Post-Gazette acquired the Press late that year. During this time, Scaife expanded operations of his newspaper into Pittsburgh. He essentially created a newspaper from the ground up and named it the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review while maintaining the Greensburg operation separately. He moved the Pittsburgh headquarters to the D. L. Clark building on Martindale Street on Pittsburgh's North Side.
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. Unlike Scaife, the owners of the Post-Gazette, the Block family, were unwilling to sustain major losses year after year. According to the Scaife divorce papers, Richard Scaife has consistently spent between $20 and $30 million per year to cover the Tribune-Review's losses. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Tribune-Review has a combined 221,000 regional circulation, about 7,000 subscribers fewer than its competitor. In 2005, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review announced that operations of its suburban editions would be consolidated, with "staff reductions" in the newsrooms, business, and circulation departments. Two managers were laid off immediately along with several other staff members later in 2005. With Scaife as publisher, the small circulation newspaper was the chief packager of editorials and news columns claiming that then United States President Bill Clinton or his wife, then First Lady Hillary Clinton were responsible for the death of Deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. Scaife paid freelancer Christopher Ruddy to write about the Foster case for the Tribune-Review and other right-leaning media. Special Prosecutor Ken Starr, appointed to investigate Clinton, concluded Foster had, in fact, committed suicide. In 2004, Scaife was reported to own 7.2 percent of Newsmax Media, a news-based Web site with conservative political content founded by Ruddy in 1998. In 2009, Scaife reportedly controlled 42% of NewsMax, with Ruddy the 58% majority owner, CEO and editor. Scaife owned a majority interest in Pittsburgh-based all-news radio station KQV. From 1977 to 1989 Scaife owned the Sacramento Union newspaper in the state capital of Sacramento, California.
According to his unpublished memoir, Scaife was motivated by concerns that the general trend towards liberalism in America would lead not just to inferior public policy but to the annihilation of American civilization. While Scaife was not known for describing to others the motives or aims of his many contributions, in his book he tells of how he and a network of other influential conservatives called themselves "The League to Save Carthage", the name chosen because they believed the threat of political progressivism was so dire it could not even be compared to the decline of Rome in the face of barbarians. Rather the situation was closer to Ancient Carthage, which had been totally obliterated by Rome, a defeat Scaife and his fellow conservatives attributed to the passivity of its elites in the face of the enemy.
As early as 1968, Scaife was actively involved at the highest levels of the Nixon campaign. He was appointed to lead the United Citizens for Nixon-Agnew during the fall of 1968. Scaife gained notoriety for evading weak campaign finance laws to donate US$990,000 to the 1972 re-election campaign of U.S. President Richard M. 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 Robert Duggan's suicide and then Watergate, he shifted his political giving from politicians' campaigns to anti-communist research groups, legal defense funds, and publications. During the scandal, John Ehrlichman suggested having Scaife buy out The Washington Post in a hostile takeover from Katharine Graham in order to halt Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting.
