PERSON PROFILE

Richard Viguerie

Still Thundering After all These Years

By Bill Berkowitz
For MediaTransparency.org

POSTED FEBRUARY 19, 2005

The King of direct mail fundraising has co-authored a new book taking readers inside the new alternative media of the conservative movement

Legend has it that he got his start by going to Capitol Hill and hand-copying a list of 12,000 individual contributors a year after Senator Barry Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign. He has raised money for operations run by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, organizations supporting the contras in Nicaragua and the World Anti-Communist League. In 1979, Time magazine named him one of 50 future leaders of America, and in 1981, People magazine named him one of the 25 most intriguing people of the year. Back in the heyday of snail mail, having two or three fundraising letters from his clients in your mail box wasn't all that unusual. Richard Viguerie, who the Washington Post called the "conservatives' Voice of America" and is often referred to as the "funding father" of the New Right, was present at the creation of the modern conservative movement.

Viguerie -- a pioneer of direct mail who teamed ideology with fundraising, and now runs the Virginia-based American Target Advertising, Inc. -- has sent out over 2 billion letters over the past 40 years, according to the publisher of his latest book. That's a lot of trees and a lot of checks via return mail.

America's Right Turn: How The Conservatives Used New And Alternative Media To Take Power, released last summer by Bonus Books, is a new work by Viguerie and co-author David Franke, another veteran of the political wars. Their book focuses on how conservatives developed and used new and alternative media during their several decades march toward control over all branches of the government. Necessity drove "conservatives to learn to communicate with each other below the radar of the liberal establishment, first through direct mail, then later through talk radio and cable TV and other forms of media," Viguerie and Franke write.

(Franke, is also considered "one of the founders of the conservative movement," according to the bio sent out by Bonus Books. In 1958 he co-founded a "youth group which led to formation of Youth for Goldwater and then "Young Americans for Freedom" (website). He worked on the editorials staffs of Human Events (website), a far right weekly, and William F. Buckley's National Review (website). As Senior Editor of Arlington House Publishers, a right wing publishing outfit, and the Conservative Book Club (website, Franke has played a significant role in the growth of conservative publishing. He was also the founding director of the LibertyPress and LibertyClassics book imprints and edited John Naisbitt's Trend Letter "the nation's foremost futurist newsletter." Since 1997, he has been editorial director of the New Media News Corp, working with Viguerie on newsletter and Internet projects.)

For some, the book will read as a gotcha tome that taunts Democrats. Despite liberal control over the mainstream media (a ridiculous claim as Eric Alterman pointed out in his book What Liberal Media? -- The Truth About Bias and the News), Viguerie and Franke maintain that Democrats are losing to a more agile and more politically savvy conservative movement. Media savvy conservatives have by-passed the mainstream media and created their own entities. Through consistent and substantial use of Viguerie's direct mail expertise and significant support from a small coterie of conservative foundations, over the past 40 years these media outfits begat new, audacious and feisty new media outlets: Direct mail solicitations, conservative newsletters, magazines and newspapers, the rise of religious radio and televangelism, talk radio, cable news networks and the Internet, all became venues for the right wing political and social agenda. (In other times, this was known as the "vast right wing conspiracy.)

If you think Viguerie and Franke are overstating their case, take a look around. Today, Viguerie's legacy is played out in the nation's capitol, and in state legislatures in both so-called red and blues states. If this sounds grim, that's because it is. Is there hope on the horizon? There is. Viguerie and Franke claim that liberals can learn to master the new media. The authors assure their readers that they won't because they are too busy whining to seriously get in on the action.

The rise of Richard Viguerie, the rise of the right

"Perhaps more than any of the New Right figures, Richard Viguerie has made a career -- and a fortune -- on the politics of resentment. With help from his colleagues Paul Weyrich and Howard Philips [two other founding fathers of the right], Viguerie was the political technician who turned abortion into an issue that made the Christian Right a mass movement," writes Sara Diamond in Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right, (South End Press, 1989), her groundbreaking work examining the rise of the Religious Right.

"Like many of the New Right leaders, Viguerie got his activist feet wet while working with Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960's and with Marvin Liebman of the Committee for the Monroe Doctrine, formed in 1963 to agitate against U.S. 'accommodation' with Cuba," an argument still going strong within conservative ranks. Viguerie, like Phyllis Schlafly, the grand dame of the movement, and Weyrich got their start in the Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.

In 1965, Viguerie got "the bright idea to start a direct mail business." Finding out that those who had contributed $50 or more to electoral campaigns had their names registered with the clerk of the House of Representatives, he went down to Capitol Hill and got his hands on a list of 12,000 individual contributors to the Goldwater campaign. (Years later, Pat Robertson was able to turn the list of his contributors and supporters during his 1988 run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination into the data base that would launch the Christian Coalition.)

According to Diamond, Viguerie made $100,000 in his first year in business, and in the next four years mailed out more than 20 million letters.

Playing the abortion issue for all it was worth, Viguerie was building an empire. But abortion wasn't the only issue he was selling and homegrown organizations weren't the only ones buying his services. He was becoming one of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's trusted business partners.

In his 1997 book, Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, (Common Courage Press, 1997), author Frederick Clarkson describes the relationship between Viguerie and Moon's Unification Church (website):

"...one of his first clients -- in 1965 -- was the Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation (KCFF) -- a front for the UC [Unification Church] and the KCIA...[KCFF's] ostensible purpose was to promote anti-communism...

"Viguerie handled one of KCFF's most sensitive projects, Radio of Free Asia, an explicitly KCIA operation that broadcast propaganda programs from studios in South Korea into North Korea, China and North Vietnam....

"This was not Viguerie's only Koreagate connection. He was also an original investor and director of the Washington, DC-based Diplomat National Bank, which investigators for the Securities and Exchange Commission discovered was secretly and illegally controlled by the KCIA and the Unification Church."

Viguerie also did pro bono work for the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) during the 1970s. WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei, Taiwan. According to a profile posted at Right Web, WACL "was conceived as an expansion of the Asian People's Anti-Communist League, a regional alliance against communism formed at the request of Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the Korean War." According to Sara Diamond, Viguerie's "ties to WACL may have had something to do with his winning the lucrative fundraising contract for the "Children's Relief Fund," sponsored by the Moonies'...KCFF. That was in 1977 -- precisely the period when Viguerie was starting to organize the New Right resentment against the Carter administration. New York State charity auditors found that less than 6.3 percent of the $1,508,256 Viguerie raised actually went to needy Korean children. The "charity" went to...Viguerie, who netted a fee of more than $920,000."

Flush with dough, Viguerie founded the Conservative Digest magazine in 1974, an attempt says Sara Diamond, to build bridges "between the Old and New Right and "between 'popular' social conservatives in the south and more establishment Republicans." In 1980, Viguerie raised somewhere between $35 million and $40 million for his clients. Side-stepping the liberal media even back then, Viguerie felt that every fundraising solicitation served two purposes: to raise money, and to raise awareness of front-burner conservative issues.

Financial problems forced Viguerie to sell Conservative Digest in 1985. Viguerie's friendship with Moon's operation paid off a year later when the Church "came to his aid financially," Diamond writes. Viguerie landed the lucrative distribution account of the Unification Church-sponsored weekly news magazine called Insight. Then, in 1987, U.S. Property Development Corporation, a Moon-controlled entity bought Viguerie's office building for $10.06 million.

Maverick with ideological blinders

Over the years, Viguerie has been a maverick of sorts. He opposed President Ronald Reagan's tax hikes, organizing an ad hoc committee of "Conservatives Opposed to the Tax Increase." Shortly before Reagan's re-election campaign, Viguerie wrote a book entitled The Establishment versus the People, writes Sara Diamond in her book Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (The Guilford Press, 1995). Viguerie's book "took aim at 'Big Business, Big Banks, Big Media, Big Unions, Big Government, and their allies." He wanted a more muscular conservatism from the Reagan Administration -- a harder hitting anti-Communism, bolder efforts to eliminate welfare spending and federal deficits and he wanted an end to funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Flash forward 20 years to an October 29, 2004 interview with Viguerie on Now, the PBS program with Bill Moyers as co-host (he has since left the program). Talking about the prospects of a second Bush presidency, Viguerie told Moyers: "...somewhere around there the morning after the election, November 3rd, the war starts for the heart and soul. It's gonna be a war."

MOYERS: Between?

VIGUERIE: Between the traditional conservatives, those who identify with Ronald Reagan, people like myself. And, the big government Republicans. And then also maybe the Neo-cons. But...

MOYERS: And the Neo-Cons are those actually, are those folks who believe in American empire.

VIGUERIE: Exactly.

MOYERS: They are the architects of the Iraqi War.

VIGUERIE: Yeah and the traditional conservatives like myself, we've got a great concern about that. And I want to say very strongly, that almost every conservative that I know is strongly supporting the re-election of President Bush.

MOYERS: You're going to vote for Bush.

VIGUERIE: Oh, absolutely. No question about it. Now I'm doing what I can to help his re-election. But when the voting is done and the ballots are counted, then we're going to choose up sides and fight for the heart and souls of the Republican Party. It would be on our side, the traditional conservatives. The other side, people like Rudy Giuliani, Governor of New York, Pataki, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's going to be an interesting battle. Normally Bill, it wouldn't be a fair fight. Cause we've got the troops, we've got the organization...

MOYERS: Talk Radio

VIGUERIE: We've got the organizations... the resources, the issues. One thing we lack, a horse. We've got no horse. Hopefully, someone will come on the scene soon. But, but we had a lot of advantages when we came along. When Goldwater [was] defeated in '64, Nixon's resignation in '74, Ford's defeat in '76. Swept away most of the older Republican leaders.

MOYERS: Those defeats were cathartic.

VIGUERIE: Absolutely. And it allowed younger ones, people like Newt Gingrich and Ed Feulner and other young conservatives to rise up to positions of leadership that normally would have taken another 20 years to happen.

Over the past few months, in addition to jaw-boning with Moyers and hustling his book, Viguerie joined a conservative coalition attempting to deny Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter his spot as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee after the "liberal" Senator flapped his lips a bit too independently after winning re-election in November. Although the effort ultimately failed, Specter appears to have been efficiently neutralized; promising not to stand in the way of the president's judicial nominees.

In an interview with Salon's Mary Jacoby, Viguerie startled her with his observation that "We [conservatives] have not yet governed."

"...We was told under Reagan we couldn't do this and that because we didn't have the House or a majority of conservative senators. Now, we've got everything. We've got a president reelected based on running a conservative agenda. We're thrilled and pleased. We've got a good comfortable [conservative Republican] majority in both houses. Now's the time to do it."

In talking about the movement's agenda for the Bush Administration's second term, Viguerie practically came full circle back to abortion and the politics of resentment, issues that started it all as Sara Diamond noted in her 1989 book. Throw in victimization of Christians by the culture and that should keep Richard Viguerie busy for years to come. "Christians feel there is a war against Christians out there," Viguerie told Jacoby. "We would like to make sure that the president, and he's inclined to do this, understands how there's an anti-Christian environment in the culture, at the national level, in Hollywood, television, the media generally, a lot of the institutions -- legal institutions, educational institutions. We want to change that. People of traditional values have a role to play in the public arena."

GOP defeat could benefit conservatives, says Richard Viguerie

Viguerie, a New Right founding father and king of conservative direct mail, is angry about the GOP's wayward leadership and he's calling on his troops to stand down

While a host of conservative Christian evangelical leaders were trying to energize the Republican Party's grassroots base at their Value Voters Summit a few weeks back, Richard Viguerie was sending a different message to conservatives. While he isn't advocating a GOP defeat in November, Viguerie, one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement, recently told progressive radio talk show host Laura Flanders, that he has "lived long enough" so that he "no longer fear[s] defeat...Many times, if not most of the times, our best success has come after defeat."

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