This week, Washington Times editor John Solomon became only the latest in a series of editors to make a fiery exit from 3600 New York Ave. NE, after finding it awkward to work for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Seemed appropriate to give you this relevant excerpt from my book on the Rev. Moon and his Times. 

"They asked me how much it would take to get me. . . . I rattled off some crazy figures . . . and they said 'sure.' . . . But I figure I'm worth the price. Before I came, they didn't get invited to anything . . . they were persona non grata. . . . Now they're legit."

--Harry J. Staphos of the New York Daily News, after joining a Moon paper in the 1970s

 

"FREE SEX IS centered on Sayy-tan!" the Rev. Sun Myung Moon rasps. Moon's tongue droops lazily over his lips as he lets this sink in, in their native English.

The Americans shift uncomfortably in their seats. They are the staff and friends of the Washington Times. It is June 16, 1997 and it has been fifteen years since Moon gave D.C. conservatives a newspaper of their own in the name of dismantling the liberal media machine.

Tonight, as the anniversary celebration warmed up, a barbershop quartet sang, and a pianist plunked soft ragtime chords, and plates and wine glasses clinked. Then a hush settled so Senator Orrin Hatch could speak for a few minutes about the "liberal modus operandi" and the spirit of capitalism, and question the liberal impulse to "help the poor, quote-and-quote." And George H.W. Bush delivered a video message giving his thanks to the Times.

Now they've given Moon 45 minutes for his speech. It is titled "True Family and True Universe Centering on True Love."

CSPAN is beaming the event to the world. The videotape has been mailed to me by an indignant conservative, former Times CEO-editor James Whelan, who quit in 1984 over claims of meddling by the church officials upstairs. ("I think you'd have to believe the moon is made of blue cheese," Whelan tells me from his home in Chile, "in order to suppose that with that man on the premises [the church liaison on the third floor], he doesn't, in fact, give the final orders.")

Moon returns to his point.

"World literature and the media have often stimulated free sex," he says, in rickety English. "But from now on, you literary figures and journalists should lead the way to prevent free sex," he says, in a voice suggesting he's losing patience. "Free sex should completely disappear."

During the speech, in which Moon claims to have experienced "enormous persecution," he says he created the paper "to fulfill God's desperate desire to save this world." He also directs Times staff to read a speech of his dozens of times for understanding; he smiles to himself at a private joke about the number seven that the audience seemed to find hard to follow; and he even tells the crowd, "No one can oppose me." As if finding the prospect beyond belief, he ad-libs from the printed text: "Oppose me?!"

 

* * *

JAMES R. WHELAN, the erudite first CEO and editor of the paper, was a UPI Latin America correspondent for years, then editor of the Sacramento Union. He is an outspoken defender of Chile's hated former military ruler, Pinochet, of whom he has written: "Few have benefited more human beings around the world."

A Harvard man and historian, Whelan never dangles a preposition as he tells me the story of the Reverend Moon's obsessive campaign to hire him in 1981. The story ends in 1984 with Whelan holding a press conference to declare himself a man with "blood on my hands" for helping Moon gain legitimacy. 

Alleging that the True Father's disciples trampled the agreement that gave him sovereignty, Whelan said he "could not stand by . . . while a compact of trust was turned to ashes." Moon's right-hand man had replaced Whelan as CEO, he announced, and seized "direct, on-site executive control of all noneditorial functions of the newspaper on behalf of the newspaper's owners."

At 10 p.m. one night, three years earlier, Whelan was lying in bed in Sacramento, recovering from a heart attack at a house that had won architectural awards. The doorbell rang. Even before his first wife told him who it was, he knew that Col. Bo Hi Pak, Moon's bespectacled right-hand man, stood outside.

The courtly ex-South Korean military intelligence officer had been calling on Whelan obsessively, even holing out in a Holiday Inn across the street from the Union, hoping to recruit him. Pak had some sort of scheme to make Reverend Moon the crosstown rival to the Washington Post's Katharine Graham. Whelan had told his wife not to let anyone in.

The nightmare had started when two friendly visitors had walked without an appointment into the offices of the Union, a paper with 19th century roots, refashioned by the billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife into a right-wing foil to the Sacramento Bee. The visitors passed the bust of a pre-Scaife employee, Mark Twain, entered Whelan's office as he was preparing the next edition of the paper, and asked if he could spare a half hour. One of them, Larry Moffitt, was a Unification Church youth leader who reminded Whelan of Dennis Day, the boyish, singing sidekick from "The Jack Benny Show."

The pitch was that Washington needed a paper to replace the Washington Star. Three months ago, after groaning under debt for years, the Star had died after 129 years, despite a last-minute investment of $85 million by Time. "This is going to be an antidote to the Washington Post," Moffitt told him. "Don't you owe this to your country?"

"I don't remember to what extent the name 'Moonie' came up in the conversation," Whelan says of that first meeting. "But it came up sufficiently that I asked our librarian to do a search and produce for me some clips on these people. And so he produced a batch of clips which were disquieting. But not alarming at that point. They were disquieting."

Whelan flew to New York City to talk it over. Then he got in touch with the diplomat Douglas MacArthur III, nephew of the Korean War general who had received an adoring portrayal in that year's Reverend Moon-produced war movie Inchon. MacArthur was among a number of insiders who vouched for the Unification Church. "I wouldn't join their religion," one person told Whelan, "but I find them to be very purposeful, very decent people."

Canceling a planned holiday in San Diego with California politician Pete Wilson, Mr. and Mrs. Whelan flew to talk to Pak. Whelan came away from a four-hour meeting impressed but not persuaded. "Bo Hi Pak was a very charming fellow, very gregarious and very persuasive," says Whelan. Later, Whelan was describing his courtship to other pro-Reagan types at the Council For National Policy, the new conservative leadership group. "And almost unanimously, they said, 'Jim, you have to do this,'" he remembers. "'This is our chance to have our voice heard where it matters most.'" He agreed but returned to Sacramento to think it over.

The eagles of the right might love the idea of the Times, but would they stand with Whelan if it became a fiasco? He phoned the churchmen to decline the offer.

The love-bombing didn't stop. By this time Richard Mellon Scaife, his boss, had caught wind of their persistence. And in the conservative world, the last thing you wanted was for Scaife to be disappointed in you. Scaife, a forty-nine-year-old Pittsburgh banking blueblood, had for years been handing out slabs of his own fortune (today worth $1.2 billion) to conservatives hoping to control the debate in Washington. This would mean not just a newspaper of their own to fight the liberal Establishment. It would mean their own Establishment--their own experts, think tanks, law societies, magazines, councils, committees, centers, studies, position papers, and training grounds. Scaife paid for plenty of them, from the Heritage Foundation to the Federalist Society.

Scaife grew uneasy. Would his editor in California leave, and so soon after Scaife had paid dearly for his stake in the Union? "Dick is a man of, how shall we put it, decisive temperament," Whelan says. ("Mr. Scaife," Wall Street Journal reporter Karen Rothmyer asked him on the street in 1981, "could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?" Replied Scaife, "You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here!")  Scaife phoned Whelan from a publishers' association and reminded him of the expensive 1977 buyout. "And I did that counting on you, my friend," Scaife said. "And I would look upon you very unkindly if you were to let me down by walking off."

Though media-shy, Scaife had earned a reputation among his allies for wrath and long memory. "I have some influence with conservative organizations across the country," Whelan remembers being told. "And I can assure you that you will be supported by none of them."

"Dick, I have no intention of doing this," Whelan told him. But after he hung up, the pressure on him was tightening and tightening, and he needed to get free of it. So he told the Union he'd be unavailable for a few days. With the family, he drove south down the coast of California, under the black cloud of a Scaife genie loosed from the bottle.

He made it five hours south to Santa Maria, which was choked with fog, and then pain cut suddenly into his chest. Whelan checked into an emergency room, was released, and told to go to a hospital. But he decided the heart problem wasn't as grave as he'd feared. So he drove back to Sacramento.

Before going to sleep, he checked in with his subordinates at the Union. They told him Pak had camped out at a Holiday Inn there in downtown Sacramento, from which he was deploying representatives to the Whelan home every few hours to see if he'd returned home.

So it was not surprising when the doorbell rang this latest time. Pak, Moon's sidekick, impressed upon Mrs. Whelan that her husband might never forgive himself if he said no. So, defying Mr. Whelan's orders, she allowed the South Korean in to see him. The two of them stayed up until 2:15 A.M., talking. "And in the deep and dark of evening," Whelan said, "I agreed to do it."

He only asked for $75,000 a year, he said, at a time and place where he might be expected to make $150,000-$300,000, so that "nobody could say I was doing it for money." But first he exacted a firm promise from the Unification Church. "I said, I will not go as editor. I will go with all the power in my hands and that will guarantee our independence. Because the only way you can change it is by firing me. Otherwise, I will control all of the newspaper. In all of its dimensions. Editor, publisher and CEO."

So his wife roused him, saying Pak was making a good case. "I really think you ought to do it," he remembers her telling him. So he said yes.

 

* * *

JUST NINE DAYS after the Washington Star died, Josette Sheeran (today head of the U.N. World Food Program) had asked Pak, her spiritual leader, if he had considered filling the vacuum with a paper run by the True Family. Pak had.

The next month, Pak convened a meeting at the summer getaway of the Sheehan family in Manasquan, New Jersey. Sheehan was back on speaking terms with the family whose patriarch, the former New Jersey insurance commissioner, had made headlines in the 1970s by storming into a Moon dormitory, yelling for his three converted daughters, and scuffling with young disciples. His daughter remained in the church.

The Young Moonie Turks also included Sheeran's Team Mother," Paula Gray Hunker; Ted Agres; and Jonathan Slevin, a figure in the 2009 ouster of John Solomon. In one old photograph, they lean over blueprints for remaking the warehouse of the Frank Parsons Paper Company into the ritzy conservative newspaper.

In 1982, the Washington Star's state-of-the-art mainframe computer hummed back to life in new hands. On the morning of March 1, 1982, promises given, Whelan landed in the light snow of Baltimore-Washington International Airport, having left behind California and Scaife--"who for about six months or so was a very powerful enemy," he says. Two months later, on May 17, a date that has taken on religious import to Moon's followers, the editors put the first edition of the paper to bed.

"Who the hell are you to stand in judgment?" Whelan asked a Post reporter during a 1982 interview in his office. "No, they're not zombies."  Just two years later he was fighting with his former colleagues after a stormy exit. 

The man who took his job was Arnaud de Borchgrave, the flamboyant, acid-tongued child of Belgian nobility. He contended the church leadership had fired Whelan over outrageous salary and benefit demands: a new Cadillac, a better deal on his company-owned house in McLean, Virginia, and membership in country clubs. But Times insiders confirmed to U.S. News & World Report that control was the issue.

Why should anyone care about the Washington Times? Whelan tells me the paper "reverberates" in the halls of power to a degree not reflected in its low circulation. And for Moon, the paper "has given him the high visibility and the clout that he's got. Because almost everybody wants to be either published in the Washington Times. Or they surely don't want to be attacked in the Washington Times. They want the Washington Times on their side. "And so a lot of people might otherwise and maybe do hold their nose while they're endorsing, backing, blessing Moon. They don't want to cross him, because they want the favor of the Washington Times." 

But what about editor Pruden's claim to me that the paper is so independent from the church, even the Washington Post editors envy him? "Well, there's an expression in Spanish that you can say even mass," Whelan says, and then he has to explain: "You can say anything if you're brazen enough, I suppose. You don't have to be a priest to say mass." 

What about the claim by congressmen that they were surprised into attending Moon's pageant as Peace King? "Humbug. Humbug!" he says. "I mean, anyone who has bothered to look at events sponsored by the Moonies, including those sponsored by the Washington Times for the last twenty years or so, knows perfectly well that Moon presides."

* * *

IS THERE A WALL between the Times and its patron, or just a floor? Or is that even the point?

After a few eye-opening early lessons in the 1980s, where several editors quit over interference, church leaders seem to have learned the lesson that controlling the news is of secondary value to access. Without the Times, how could Moon preside over a 1997 event where Ronald Reagan himself weighed in with a video telegram? Which went as follows:

The American people know the truth. And you, my friends at the Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn't always the popular thing to do. But you were a loud and powerful voice.

Like me, you arrived in Washington at the start of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.
 
And--oh yes--we won the Cold War.




At these anniversary parties, the church has always insisted that its pontiff receive greater or equal stage time to the ex-presidents. And so it was, in 2002 that an audience of squirming Washingtonians listened as Moon told them that the paper "will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God," and swung his arm in ax-handle blows to emphasize the need to end the reign of the Christian cross.

By this time some Times journalists had fled to the bar. Earlier in the evening, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the radio moralist, led the Reverend Moon and his staff in a toast "from one survivor to another," saying she and the Times had something in common. They'd both weathered "belittling attacks."

* * *

ONE OF THOSE attacks happened April 14, 1987, when opinion editor Bill Cheshire and four other staffers walked into the office of Arnaud de Borchgrave. They carried identical letters that read: "I hereby resign . . . because of the breach of certain agreements of which you are well-aware . . . " Managing editor Josette Sheeran, the paper's liaison to Moon, turned pale. When the first editor and CEO, Jim Whelan, had quit in 1984, it was easy to explain as personality clash. But five people leaving? "They thought we would be dutiful little conservatives and do what we were told," says editorialist John Seiler, the last to hand in his badge. "Good riddance," he remembers De Borchgrave shouting after him.

Essayist Sam Francis had asked them to reconsider. "I figured all along the Moonies were running the show," Seiler recalls Francis saying, but why not play along, since the church was paying for everything? (Francis would lose his job in 1995 after Dinesh D'Souza, the Heritage Foundation journalist, caught him decrying interracial marriage at a white nationalist get-together.) But Cheshire was tired of the game. The last straw: after they wrote a piece denouncing the dictator of South Korea--whose 1980 crackdown claimed the lives of 207 democracy protesters--the Count said, "Let me check this out upstairs." He dropped in on San Kook Han, a Moon officer and former Korean government man, then returned downstairs convinced they had to spin the op-ed 180 degrees, pro-dictator. De Borchgrave denies this account of events.

After Cheshire quit, managing editor Wesley Pruden called his complaints "fanciful." Pruden substituted a piece empathizing with dictator Chun Doo-hwan, asking readers to imagine life in a country, like South Korea, that had been invaded by Communists. If so, we "might might appreciate more the Damoclean sword under which South Koreans habitually live." (The next year Seoul moved to democracy and Koreans sentenced Chun to death for his crimes. He receved clemency.)

"No one," Cheshire said after an escape to the Heritage Foundation, "appears to care very much that the American political institutions have been subverted by foreign interests." After he left the paper, a journalist named Tony Snow, thirty-two, considered taking his old job. One of the departed writers, John Seiler, suggested that Snow think twice about what it meant to work for Moon. Snow listened, smiled, and became Moon's opinion page editor between 1987 and 1990. He then became George W. Bush's press secretary.

 

* * *

 

THERE IS A story, reprinted in the defunct Washington business magazine Regardie's, about the things Jack Knarr, a Times writer, saw one night at 3600 New York Ave. NE. He had a habit of sleeping in his car in the parking lot as some sort of statement against alimony. And one night it became so cold that he sought shelter in the Reverend Moon's newsroom.

Later he related what he saw there to disbelieving colleagues. At 4:30 a.m., the chanting awoke him. He looked up to the mezzanine balcony where Josette Sheeran, managing editor, was up there, Knarr said, with a group holding candles in a predawn vigil. He watched, speechless, while they ambled down to the basement for prayers and breakfast.

 

* * * 

LARRY MOFFITT, the first to invite James R. Whelan into the Moon world, went on to direct operations at United Press International after the Unification Church acquired control of the venerable wire service. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) Moffitt has published an Internet essay grappling with one of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's more controversial claims of interventions in the Spirit World: to free Hitler from hell.

At his Tarrytown headquarters in 1998, Moon tantalized his flock with dishy information. "God sends out special emissaries in [the] spirit world to get information for Father," he said, according to a church account. "Do you want to know all the details, or just the rough summary?" ("The details," they called back.)

What they heard was Moon's Inferno--a vision of how his personal enemies and world tyrants had met fitting fates in the next world. The messages had been relayed to him by Dr. Sun Hun Lee, a dead South Korean church leader whose posthumous career, according to the church, includes entering the Spirit World and bringing back messages from 36 deceased U.S. presidents.

On his mission beyond the grave, Dr. Lee had to search far and wide for Karl Marx, so drastic was the Das Kapital author's exile from God. Marx was found stubbornly preaching communism to the miserable masses of a shanty-town. Two days of arguing, and Lee had made a serious dent in his philosophy. And Marx "felt embarrassed to have all his followers see that he was wrong." (During his lifetime, Lee liked to argue that Marx's dialectical view--that forces clash, then merging into something new--are disproven by the example of the egg, and the harmonious relationship between the struggling chick and the shell it pecks at.)

Then Dr. Lee searched for Stalin. The Soviet monster had barricaded himself in a high-security house surrounded by mud huts. His sentries beat up Dr. Lee. The missionary also located Mussolini, reduced to a pathetic drifter. General Tojo was found living in narcissistic loneliness at a house where he'd erected a Shinto shrine to himself. He cried and recanted after hearing of the True Parents. Reflecting Moon's affinity for Japanese nationalism, the leader of the wartime Empire had gotten off light, considering his war crimes, which included enslaving Koreans as "comfort women."

Faring not nearly so well was Mary Pak, a South Korean women's university chancellor (no relation to Bo Hi Pak.)The church detested her for working with local Christians to jail Moon in 1955 on morals charges after a scandalous affair at Ehwa Women's University that made the Reverend Moon a laughingstock in Seoul. 

Ms. Pak was trapped in a castle for maimed souls: "eyes missing, limbs missing, their head split open . . . deformed, crippled spirit men." Her hands were glued to her mouth, preventing her from eating. The grudge was that Pak had ruined a crucial seven-year phase after the Korean War--between 1954 and 1961--when, like the coming of a comet, conditions had briefly been right for Moon's kingdom, the Third Israel. Instead she slowed his work for decades, and the lord of the Times refused to forgive her until 1998.

Jesus, on the other hand, was in good spirits. Moon had assigned him a wife on Earth, a living, elderly woman. Though Christ was quick to express gratitude, he remained troubled that his torture and death distracted Earth from the feats of the Washington Times publisher. He passed along a "particular thank you for the beautiful apartment for my wife in the physical world. . . . I apologize that my name is so much worshipped in the physical world. It shouldn't be that way, and I am sorry for that."

And then there was Der Füuhrer. "He killed over six million Jews so I thought he would be among evil spirits," said Dr. Lee. "But he was not to be found there." 

The wanderer followed the blood and smoke, the rattle of chains, and the shouting voices. He finally found Hitler tied to a tree in the Spirit World, spread-eagled. 

A sign pinned to Hitler's chest read "KING OF THE NAZIS." Jews, resentful of the Holocaust, lined up to fling bricks at the naked German ruler. That's before the True Father intervenes.

What Moffitt points out is that Moon, by freeing Hitler, also liberated an innocent soul: a virgin female Jew, trapped in Hitler's force field of limbo.

Moffitt considers:

"Maybe there's even a sign as you approach the tree, about five feet tall with a horizontal line drawn on it and the words, "'You must be this tall to smash Hitler's balls."' . . . Hitler, by his evil deeds, not only consigns himself to hell but becomes like a big constipating cork in the colon of spiritual upward mobility. Millions of people are just stuck there in that awful griminess, unable to get past the blockage of Hitler's evil. . . . 

"If that young Jewish woman could have all that sorrowful crap lifted off her shoulders," Moffitt writes, " . . . then it is so well worth forgiving Hitler." 

As of 2009, UPI is a shell of its former self.